Arkham

Arkham is a fictional town set in the US state of Massachusetts, invented by H. P. Lovecraft. It frequently appears in his horror fiction and in the work of other writers in the Cthulhu Mythos, particularly as the home of Miskatonic University, making it a key location in the Lovecraft Country setting.
Arkham is the namesake of Arkham House, the publishing house that promoted Lovecraft's work after his death. 
==Lovecraft Mythos==
Lovecraft first mentions Arkham in the story "The Picture in the House", written in December 1920; the town remains offstage in this tale. The narrator relates:I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data.... Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows....The strange house's odd resident remarks, "I hain’t seed many folks ’long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage,” and the narrator "replied that I was going to Arkham." One gets the sense in these references that Arkham is a rather remote town in a rural part of "backwoods New England"; the state of Massachusetts is not specified in this first appearance. This is the first of several instances where Lovecraft uses Arkham to establish another location--a role that comes to make the town the central point of Lovecraft Country.
Arkham is fleshed out a bit more in "Herbert West--Re-Animator", written between late 1921 and mid-1922. Here it's established as the home of its most famous institution: "We were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham." The story also mentions Christchurch Cemetery, a hotel or restaurant called the Commercial House, a Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus, and a Meadow Hill on the outskirts of town where Herbert West and his colleague used a deserted farmhouse known as the Chapman house as a laboratory. The story notes that Arkham was devastated by a typhoid outbreak in 1905. 
The story describes Bolton as "a factory town near Arkham", where the "Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley." Bolton is a real town in Massachusetts, located about 30 miles west of Boston--not in Essex County to the northeast of Boston, where Arkham is often thought to be located.
==='Witch-Haunted'===
Lovecraft returns to Arkham in "The Unnameable", a story written in September 1923 that features his recurring character Randolph Carter conversing with his friend Joel Manton, who was "principal of the East High School." Their conversation takes place "on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb...at the old burying-ground in Arkham." This story gives paints the first real picture of Arkham, in terms that would come to be familiar, referring to the "crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that stretched around." It's also the first story that explicitly links Arkham to Massachusetts: Referring to an Arkham legend, Carter remarks, "no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in Massachusetts."
This story also mentions Meadow Hill--site of a long-ago sighting of "a frightful loping, nameless thing"--and introduces St. Mary’s Hospital, where Carter and Manton are taken after their encounter with the Unnamable.
The next month, October 1923, Lovecraft wrote another story that uses Arkham to establish another location--in this case Kingsport, the main setting for "The Festival". But while "The Picture in the House" suggests that Arkham is in "backwoods New England", Kingsport is on the Massachusetts coast, and within walking distance of Arkham. (There is a trolley line between Arkham and Kingsport, but it has a tendency to disappear.) After his unpleasant family reunion in Kingsport, the narrator is taken to "St. Mary’s Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care."
Lovecraft doesn't mention Arkham again until 1926, when he writes "The Silver Key", another story featuring Randolph Carter, which hearkens back to "The Unnamable": Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. Carter later realizes he must return to his hometown to "merge himself with old things": "day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay." Before his disappearance, Carter "had said he was going to visit his old ancestral country around Arkham."
==='White Georgian Steeples'===
In "The Strange High House in the Mist", written in November 1926, Arkham once again serves as a signpost to other places: Kingsport again, and the titular house, which sits on "a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories of New England’s hills." Thomas Olney, the story's main character, surmised that the residents of the house "probably...traded in Arkham, knowing how little Kingsport liked their habitation, or perhaps being unable to climb down the cliff on the Kingsport side." He is unable to reach the house from the Kingsport side, "so only the western side, inland and toward Arkham, remained."
When Olney walks inland to approach the house from the west, it gives readers a new perspective on Arkham: He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper’s Pond and the old brick powder-house to where the pastures slope up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and give a lovely vista of Arkham’s white Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow. Here he found a shady road to Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward direction he wished. The path to the house is so inaccessible that Olney begins to wonder of its residents "whether they came often to market in Arkham" after all.
In "The Colour Out of Space", written in March 1927, one gets the sense that Arkham is once again on the edge of the wilderness:West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight.Arkham is described once again as "a very old town full of witch legends", but in this story it serves more as a symbol of civilization and normalcy, with "the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham," in contrast to the nightmare of the Blasted Heath, which "the folk of Arkham would not speak much of". There are found "the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything"; it's from Arkham that experts come to scoff at "superstitious rustics [who] will say and believe anything." But the story leaves Arkham's normalcy under threat: "Arkham tales" of late tell of "fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night", and the narrator vows that with the new reservoir covering the former Gardner farm, "nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham."
The story refers to the "Arkham papers", plural, and mentions the Gazette. It also talks of "the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill", and of "Potter’s general store at Clark’s Corners".
"The Dunwich Horror" (written in the summer of 1928) seems to relocate Arkham again, as Dunwich is said to be "in north central Massachusetts", yet the copy of the Necronomicon at the Miskatonic library is closer to Dunwich than the one at Harvard's Widener Library in Cambridge. The Arkham paper mentioned in this story is the Arkham Advertiser, which prints "flamboyant Sunday stories" about strange goings-on at the Whateleys and a "facetious little item" making fun of Dunwich moonshiners. The Miskatonic professors who confront the horror are repeatedly referred to as "the men from Arkham".
The many references to Arkham in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" serve once more to tie another Lovecraftian location to the map, as Innsmouth is described as being between Arkham and Newburyport, and it's noted that its residents shop either in Newburyport "or in Arkham or Ipswich." Ipswich and Newburyport are both real towns in Essex County, Massachusetts, which fixes Arkham firmly in the same county--awkward as that is for the geography of "The Dunwich Horror".
Arkham also represents here a relatively unshadowed reality. The narrator Olmstead says that Arkham is "whence my mother’s family was derived"; it's also the hometown of the boy who works at the First National store in Innsmouth, whose pastor--"Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham"--warns him not to join any Innsmouth church. Another informant tells Olmstead, “Nobody around [Newburyport] or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with" people from Innsmouth. "Miskatonic University at Arkham" is, however, said to hold specimens of strange Innsmouth jewellery. And the drunkard Zadok Allen tells Olmstead that one of Obed Marsh's daughters was "married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn’t suspect nothin’"--an important hint that Innsmouth's shadow reaches further than first suspected.
It is to Arkham that Olmstead makes his desperate escape from Innsmouth, and where he first "talked long and earnestly with government officials." He also consults with the courteous curator of the Arkham Historical Society, E. Lapham Peabody.
In At the Mountains of Madness, written in early 1931, one of the ships used by the Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica was named Arkham after the town.
==='Legend-Haunted City'===
"The Dreams in the Witch-House", written in January/February 1932, was Lovecraft's first story since 1923's "The Unnamable" to be set mainly in Arkham (explicitly located here in Essex County)--and rather than appearing as a refuge from Mythos horrors, it features as a center of them. It is reintroduced as "the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province." Arkham itself leads Walter Gilman down the path to forbidden knowledge: "Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination." While in previous stories, folks in Arkham whisper furtively about sinister doings in neighboring locales, here the dread rumors are closer to home, centering on but not confined to the titular Witch-House:[H]e heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn....The veneer of normalcy over Arkham is revealed here to be the illusion of a privileged few: May-Eve "was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it." For the first time we get a glimpse of the not-so-fine folks of Arkham: characters like "Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church" and a "superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz" represent what Lovecraft saw as an intrusion into the pure Anglo-Saxon stock of New England, but they are somehow less deluded about the town's dark heritage than residents with far more established pedigrees.
"Witch-House" offers numerous details about Arkham, giving Lovecraft's most elaborate vision of the place. It has many of the features of a regular college town, where one can eat at "a cafeteria in Church Street", get coffee at a soda fountain, or have lunch at the University Spa. But Arkham also has many reminders of its darker side: Lovecraft mentions "the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys," presumably including Orne's Gangway, where a two-year-old immigrant girl is kidnapped; "the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook"; and "the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill," a "dark ravine...where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life." Of particular interest is the "ill-regarded island" in the Miskatonic River "whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly"--once a haunt of Keziah Mason, and later a place that draws Gilman. 
This macabre vision of "crumbling Arkham" persists in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", written (with E. Hoffman Price) from October 1932 to April 1933, and returning to Lovecraft's protagonist Randolph Carter: "Carter lived in Boston, but it was from the wild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-accursed Arkham that all his forbears had come." It's hinted that those forebears may have done some of the accursing: The hills behind Arkham are full of a strange magic—something, perhaps, which the old wizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth when he fled there from Salem in 1692.
"The Thing on the Doorstep", written in August 1933, takes a similar view of its Arkham setting, with narrator Daniel Upton attributing his and Edward Derby's "joint love of shadows and marvels" to 
the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we lived—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.After Derby marries Asenath Waite, they move to a house she has bought in Arkham, "the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of High Street." Upton notes that it was "a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowd of 'sophisticates', that made Asenath settle in Arkham." Upton, meanwhile, lives on Saltonstall Street--Salstonstall and High both noted as being streets where "fine folks" lived in "The Dreams in the Witch-House."
Derby's hints about his wife's strange influence are not believed, despite the town's context: "What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham." Contrariwise, Derby argues, "Arkham history ought to hint at things that back up what I’ve told you—and what I’m going to tell you.""The Thing on the Doorstep" introduces Arkham Sanitarium--an institution that perhaps influenced the choice of Arkham Asylum as the name of Gotham City's leading mental hospital.
In "The Shadow Out of Time", the last of Lovecraft's works to mention Arkham, narrator Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee goes out of his way to downplay the idea that his outre experiences can be explained by the town. "It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows," he acknowledges, but he was "born and reared in Haverhill"—a real town on the other side of Essex—"and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen."
Later a Miskatonic professor, Peaslee gives his Arkham address as 27 Crane Street--a street noted in "Herbert West" as being near the Miskatonic campus.
==Inspiration ==
In a 1934 letter to F. Lee Baldwin, Lovecraft wrote that his "mental picture of Arkham is of a town something like Salem in atmosphere [and] style of houses, but more hilly [and] with a college (which Salem [lacks]).""Arkham", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, S. T. Joshi & David E. Schultz August Derleth concurred: In explaining the name of Arkham House, he noted that "Arkham...was Lovecraft’s own well-known, widely used place-name for legend-haunted Salem, Massachusetts, in his remarkable fiction."ArkhamHouse.com, "About Arkham House" (via Wayback Machine)
Robert D. Marten, while accepting the identification with Salem, suggests that Arkham is named for Arkwright, Rhode Island (which is now part of Fiskville). Will Murray, on the other hand, places Arkham in central Massachusetts, proposing that it is based on the village of Oakham in Worcester County.
==Other Appearances==
Note: dates are the year written.
Arkham has appeared in the Cthulhu Mythos tales of other writers since Lovecraft's death. Among them:
*Robert Bloch. "The Creeper in the Crypt" (1937)
*Joseph Payne Brennan. "Forringer's Fortune" (1975)
*John Brunner. "Concerning the Forthcoming Inexpensive Paperback Translation of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred" (1992)
*Alexandre Callari. A Floresta das Árvores Retorcidas (The Forest of Gnarled Trees) (Brazilian novel published by Pipoca & Nanquim)
*Ramsey Campbell
**"The Tomb Herd" (1986)
**"The Tower from Yuggoth" (1986)
*Jonathan L. Howard. "Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute" (2011)
*Tina L. Jens. "In His Daughter's Darkling Womb" (1997), mentions "Arkham Industries"
*Alberto López Aroca. Necronomicón Z (Spanish novel published by Ediciones Dolmen, 2012)
*Brian Lumley. The Transition of Titus Crow (1975)
*Robert M. Price "Wilbur Whateley Waiting" (1987)
*Michael Shea. The Color out of Time (1984)
* Clark Ashton Smith. "I Am a Witch" (19??)
*C. Hall Thompson. "The Will of Claude Ashur" (1947)
*F. Paul Wilson. "The Barrens" (1990)
==In Popular Culture==
==Gallery==
The Arkham Sanitarium.jpg|The Arkham Sanitaruim
Arkham, Massachusetts.gif
Arkham_(Mcrassus).jpg
Arkham_(Michele_Botticelli).jpg
==References==
===Primary sources ===
*Lovecraft, Howard P.
**At the Mountains of Madness, and Other Novels (7th corrected printing), S. T. Joshi (ed.), Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1985. ISBN 0-87054-038-6. Definitive version.
** Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, S. T. Joshi (ed.), Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1987. ISBN 0-87054-039-4. Definitive version.
**The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing), S. T. Joshi (ed.), Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1984. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
===Secondary sources===
====Books====
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====Web sites====
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