Kennedy Fisher

### Series

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, Who is Aldrich Kemp?, The Haunter of The Dark

### Last Appearance

THotD: "Episode 10"

*"You've seen some weird shit."*

*"Disappearing villages, something nasty in an underground tunnel, maybe a UFO, oh, and my friend vanished into thin air for three years."*

> - **Marcus Byron** and **Kennedy Fisher**
>
>

**Kennedy Fisher** (b. 1985) is an American investigative podcaster based in London, UK. She runs the Pleasant Green website and co-hosts the Mystery Machine podcast with Matthew Heawood and together they have investigated a number of occult events that have put them in contact with various clandestine organisations such as the Department of Works, the Themis Group, the Soldiers of Ipqu-Aya, the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Church of Starry Wisdom. She is a member of the Fisher family.

## Early Life

Fisher was born in 1985. She is a member of the Fisher family but her branch of the family, from Michigan, is quite separate from the more occult-leaning members of her family that were based in Massachusetts. Her mother is still alive and is an active listener of her podcast. It’s unclear at what stage Fisher moved to the United Kingdom.

Fisher has admitted to taking psychedelic drugs in her youth but does not describe herself as any sort of habitual drug user by 2019. She occasionally suffers from migraines and began to suffer from panic attacks as a result of various experiences while investigating the occult.

## Joining Red Hook Stories

In the mid-2010s, Matthew Heawood founded the podcasting company, Red Hook Stories. As the flagship production for this company, Heawood invited Fisher to join him in hosting *The Mystery Machine*, a podcast about unsolved and unexplained events. While Heawood was more comfortable in the recording studio summarising information and doing the post-production work, he recognised that he needed a journalist in the field who could do more of the active investigative work - getting out and about and talking to people - something that, having previously been a newspaper columnist, wasn’t necessarily in Heawood’s wheelhouse. For that reason, he brought Fisher on to be their “investigator extraordinaire”.

Fisher and Heawood quickly developed a good working rapport in this new podcast setting. It was Fisher who first spotted the potential connection between the disappearance of Charles Dexter Ward from a psychiatric facility in Providence, Rhode Island, and the murder of Lucy Hawthorne in London a year later and it was on the strength of this “weird little coincidence” that Fisher didn’t believe was anything of the sort, that the podcast committed to producing a whole season of episodes around this particular mystery.

## Uncovering the Occult

Something that neither Fisher nor Heawood appreciated upon starting The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was that it would open a world of conspiracies and supernatural truths of which they had been completely unaware. At first, both of them were absolute sceptics but when Fisher took the lead in investigating the American side of the story involving Charles Ward’s disappearance, she encountered an increasing number of odd occurrences that quickly increased her level of credulity.

The first occurrence was, when looking around the Ward house on Prospect Street in Providence, she was startled when, in the empty bedroom of Charles Dexter Ward, she saw for a brief moment a man standing behind the door staring at her.

The second occurrence was when Fisher was investigating the old smugglers’ caves underneath Charles Dexter Ward's trailer in the Devil's Reef Trailer Park. She found herself trapped in the tunnels after the ladder and trap door she’d entered through disappeared. This unnerved her but she reasoned that smugglers’ tunnels would likely lead to the coast and provide another means of exit. However, as she progressed through the tunnels she became terrified by a wet and slithering creature that she later struggled to remember clearly but that left her in a state of shock so great that she was hospitalised for a couple of days. She later confided in Heawood that she felt the creature had invaded her mind and that she had experienced a brief moment of total madness that had shaken her confidence in the nature of reality as she had understood it.

However, Fisher showed grit and determination by wanting to return to the tunnels, this time with a witness, Ezra Weeden, keen to verify what she might have seen. It is at this point where her investigations first put her in real danger as she and Weeden walked into a booby trapped tunnel drenched in gasoline. They managed to get out of the tunnels but encountered the murdered body of trailer park owner, Al Treggore, as they escaped the explosion that destroyed both tunnels and trailer.

The final occult occurrence that solidified Fisher’s willingness to believe in the supernatural was when she was abducted by Dr. Allen and Barbara Sayers. In an effort to win her over to their cause, they conduct a ritual that revealed “the world as it really is”. She was rescued from this experience by Ezra Weeden but this experience built on the chaos she’d experienced in the tunnels in Pawtuxet, only this time she experienced a city full of creatures and a "thing" that exuded hate - quite possibly her first experience of the Dreamlands.

Fisher continued to pursue investigative leads beyond the end of the Case of Charles Dexter Ward but this led to her being apparently betrayed by Ezra Weeden in Iraq and then going missing for nearly two weeks, much to the concern of Matthew Heawood. When she eventually returned to Britain, she believed she had fallen victim to a simple traffic accident that left her with a fractured skull, wrist and leg (the latter of which required a metal pin) as well as a dislocated shoulder.

While keen to get back to work, this experience led Fisher to become considerably more cautious about pursing further occult stories. She was reluctant when Dr. Eleanor Peck presented the opportunity to investigate Henry Akeley’s disappearance in Rendlesham and this reluctance increased greatly when, to the surprise of both Fisher and Heawood, a connection was made between Akeley and a key figure of the Charles Dexter Ward case, Amelia Fenner. This led Fisher to experience a panic attack as she remembered the mental violations she suffered at the hands of unidentified creatures and the Ipqu-Aya cult. Despite all this, curiosity pushed Fisher forward to wanting to investigate further.

Again, Fisher took the lead as the investigator in the field but it wasn't long before she again found herself in a potentially dangerous situation. While searching around Akeley’s house alone one evening, an apparent intruder started to slam on the front door of the house. This shook her up but the investigator in her at least took comfort that there really did seem to be enough in this mystery to warrant investigation and therefore a podcast. However, this new investigation that Fisher and Heawood named The Whisperer in Darkness exposed Fisher to the very real mental health problems of some of the people she was investigating. She was present at - and through her questioning appeared to prompt - the suicide of Tania Radcliffe who walked off the cliffs at Dunwich right in front of Fisher. A few days later, Walter Brown, who Fisher had recently interviewed, also took his own life with his shotgun. It was also during this investigation that both Fisher and Heawood first met with representatives of The Department of Works.

## Meeting the Department

When Fisher met with Department operative, Parker, in Rendlesham she was surprised to learn that her memories of Iraq and her traffic accident were planted and not real. According to Parker, she had never been in a hospital but had actually been with Dr. Allen, Barbara Sayers and Ezra Weeden, potentially under some form of mind control from all the way back to her abduction in Providence. Parker explained that the group had used the Enochian language to ‘programme’ Fisher’s brain to forget her experiences in Iraq. The Department had managed to remove much of the mind control through its own esoteric skills but did, itself, wipe Fisher’s short term memory.

When Fisher was kidnapped for a second time - on this occasion by April Marston, a member of Henry Akeley’s coven - she was stubborn and active in untying herself and escaping. Fisher successful staved off another panic attack but she was soon recaptured by Akeley. She witnessed a version of the Babalon Working that attempted to summon Babalon to right the wrongs of the world according to the coven. During this event, she encountered an apparent apparition of Black Shuck as well as Henry Akeley himself, having been possessed by cosmic deity Nyarlathotep and having cut off his own face.

Everyone’s memories of Akeley’s Babalon Working was hazy but Fisher had some notion that Reverend Albert Wilmarth, who had supported her during the investigation, had dragged her to safety during the chaos of Akeley’s ritual. However, Fisher’s companion in the field was once again not who he seemed but was instead an undercover agent of the Department. Now understanding how seriously the Department took these occult threats, it was Fisher who spotted yet another undercover agent in their midst - April Marston’s wife.

## “The Mystery of Kennedy Fisher”

During the investigation into the disappearance of Henry Akeley, Heawood had been alerted to evidence that pointed to Kennedy Fisher being involved in the death of Barbara Sayers in Iraq after her body was discovered in a shallow grave on the west bank of the Tigris. Around this same time, Heawood was also warned by a Department operative not to trust Fisher, being presented with evidence that the Fisher family had historical ties to the Tillinghasts.

For the Mystery Machine's next season, it was Kennedy Fisher herself who became the focus of their investigation and the investigative duo separated to cover different aspects of the case: Heawood travelling to Iraq to follow up on the murder of Barbara Sayers, and Fisher travelling to Innsmouth, Massachusetts to follow this lead on a branch of the family with possible connections to the occult.

Fisher’s investigation into her family was aided by a fan of the podcast, Alice, who Fisher had met in Providence a year or so earlier. While Alice identified a number of quirks about Kennedy’s family and Innsmouth in general, the oddness of the town along with meeting Zadok Allen - someone who bore a striking resemblance to Fisher’s previous attacker, Dr. Allen - Fisher decided to cut her losses and leave. However, it would emerge that her visit to Innsmouth had to some extent been planned and Obed Marsh, in the guise of Casey, was working to keep Fisher from leaving. This was helped by the lockdowns instituted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that severely restricted public transport network, but suspiciously convenient heavy fog made even navigating the town on foot difficult.

Like her previous investigations, Fisher was subjected to at least two very traumatic experiences while in Innsmouth. Firstly, she was visited in her hotel room by the Deep Ones - the physical manifestation of Elder Beings that Obed Marsh had brought from the Empty Quarter in the Middle East. It’s likely that Marsh had planned for the Deep Ones to take custody of Fisher but this plan was foiled by the arrival of Parker. However, the second trauma that Fisher experienced was discovering the horrific remains of her new friend, Alice, who could be identified only by her severed face nailed to the wall of a room in the old Marsh house.

Fisher returned to Britain and tried to hide how she felt under the veil of light-heartedness, but it might be truer to say that she was simply becoming numb to horrors that were becoming all too common in her life. By this point, she had found or watched the death of at least three people, had been abducted twice, had encountered a number of supernatural beings in Pawtuxet, in Rendlesham Forest and now in Innsmouth, and she had been present for at least one attempt to summon Azathoth from the Dreamlands. While regrouping before their final confrontation with Obed Marsh, Fisher told Heawood that she was done with the podcast, not feeling she had the energy to invite any more craziness into her life.

When Matthew Heawood was kidnapped by ‘Jasper’ at the behest of Obed Marsh, despite knowing that he was simply bait for Fisher to follow, she entered the village of Pleasant Green to save her friend. She was surprised to discover that Casey, from the Gilman House Hotel in Innsmouth, had been Obed Marsh all along. Marsh revealed that it was Fisher specifically who needed as the blood sacrifice to successfully summon Azathoth. However, Heawood, who by this point had escaped his detention at the hands of ‘Jasper’, threw Daisy Marsh into the portal to the Dreamlands and, with the wrong sacrifice given, the summoning failed. Unfortunately, along with Daisy, Obed and Melody Cartwright, Matthew Heawood also went missing when the village of Pleasant Green disappeared once again.

## The Search for Matthew Heawood

> *“If it's a waste of time, Eleanor, then it's my time. This is how I want to spend it.”* - **Kennedy Fisher**
>
>

Fisher refused to accept that Heawood might be dead and chose instead to continue investigating the world of ancient cults and secret societies, determined to find a way to get Matthew Heawood back. To this end, Fisher set up a new website - www.pleasantgreen.co.uk - whereby she could keep podcast fans up-to-date about her search for Heawood and, if anyone wanted to come forward, perhaps receive some helpful information.

Fisher quickly latched onto a lead that she chased to Amsterdam - Aldrich Kemp. Having identified infrasound as a possible tool with which to make Pleasant Green reappear, Fisher, with the help of 'Slide', discovered that the Themis Group had been involved in research into this particular technology some 30 years ago. Fisher’s industriousness had gone as far as to identify Kemp as the head of the Themis Group, but at this point her investigation stalled. Over the next year or so, Fisher made a number of trips to Amsterdam as an when various COVID lockdowns would allow. By 2022, she had identified a scientist called De Jong as a possible connection to Kemp but found him too late - De Jong was dead in his home. Fisher was only a few minutes ahead of British intelligence analyst, Clara Page, who was also searching for De Jong but for different purposes.

Fisher was keen to get Page’s help in contacting Kemp but before they could properly earn each other’s trust, Page went missing after going in to explore the black windmill just outside of Schiphol Airport. Fisher had to burn the one opportunity she might have to make contact with Aldrich Kemp not to ask him about infrasound but to instead request help for Page. After the windmill exploded and Kemp redoubled his privacy and security, Fisher decided to cut her losses and return to Britain.

Fisher and Eleanor Peck had remained in contact in Heawood’s absence but were at odds over how long to hold out hope over seeing their friend again. Nonetheless, Peck continued to provide support where she could.

By 2023, after three years, Fisher started to accept that she wouldn’t see Heawood again. She began to allow herself to make plans about what to do next when she was approached by Marcus Byron with an assignment and some bad news - the Department of Works had been shut down.

## The Church of Starry Wisdom

> *“You and Kennedy Fisher are part of the last line of defence. The Department was smashed to pieces.”* - **Victoria Ness**, to Matthew Heawood
>
>

Fisher initially accepted Bryon’s request to look into Theo Martin’s death on the grounds that it might be connected to Heawood’s disappearance but it’s likely she did this so as to assuage feelings of guilt about focusing on a case for the first time in three years that wasn’t in support of finding Matthew Heawood. However, to her astonishment, the Theo Martin case quickly led to exactly what she was starting to give up on. While in Capel St. Andrew in Suffolk with Marcus Byron, Fisher was searching the abandoned Blake House when, from out of nowhere, a catatonic Matthew Heawood was standing at the gate.

Heawood and Fisher quickly picked up where they left off with Heawood apparently keen to have a case to distract him from the trauma of his time in the Dreamlands, and Fisher keen to help her friend’s recovery in any way possible. However, both Fisher and Peck quickly noticed that Heawood was not alright. His demeanour was fine when recording for the podcast, but outside of those times he exuded anger and frustration. Fisher accepted this in the hopes that he would at some point be ready to talk about it, but she broke down in front of Peck when Heawood stormed out of a recording session after lashing out at his friends. She had not expect that, after the desperation of three years searching for him, it would actually be more upsetting when he returned.

However, both Heawood and Fisher were well aware of how much more dangerous the situation had become in light of the ascendance of The Church of Starry Wisdom and the disbanding of The Department of Works. Fisher’s work with Marcus Byron and Victoria Ness to frustrate the efforts of the Starry Wisdom cult led to her entering two separate ‘breaches’ wherein the barriers between this world and the Dreamlands were weak. At the Blake House, she and Byron had to retrieve Phillip Gibson’s notebook from 1935 while fending off attacks from Mary Marston whereas later, in the physical Church of Starry Wisdom, Fisher and Ness had to retrieve a dark red crystal that was a necessary tool for the wielding control of the Haunter of the Dark.

The extent to which Kennedy Fisher’s understanding of the world has expanded over the last five years is difficult to overstate but she continues to seek out further investigations now Heawood is back by her side. By the end of their Haunter of The Dark season, they were reduced to far more basic recording equipment, the studio having been raided by police on behalf of the Caroline Morse, head of the Starry Wisdom cult. However, this was not upsetting for Fisher as had never been a fan of all the tech and post-production work that went into the making the podcast.

## Appearances

* *The Lovecraft Investigations*
	+ The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
		- All episodes except "Episode 7"
	+ The Whisperer in Darkness
		- All episodes except "Episode 9"
	+ The Shadow over Innsmouth
		- All episodes
	+ The Haunter of The Dark
		- All episodes (including Bulletin 1)
* Who is Aldrich Kemp?
	+ "Chapter Two: Themis House"
	+ "Chapter Three: The Black Windmill"

## Notes and Trivia

* One of the tropes of the series is for an episode to end with Kennedy Fisher to screaming in response to something horrific she's just seen. This occurs in TCoCDW: "Episode 6", TWiD: "Episode 2", TSoI: "Harlequin".

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 THotD: "Episode 6"
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 THotD: "Episode 1"
3. ↑ TSoI: "Apartment 6"
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 TSoI: "Footsteps"
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 TWiD: "Episode 5"
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 TCoCDW: "Episode 10"
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 THotD: "Episode 10"
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 TWiD: "Episode 1"
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 TWiD: "Episode 8"
10. ↑ TCoCDW: "Episode 3"
11. ↑ TCoCDW: "Episode 4"
12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 TCoCDW: "Episode 1"
13. ↑ TCoCDW: "Episode 6"
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 TCoCDW: "Episode 8"
15. ↑ TCoCDW: "Episode 9"
16. ↑ TWiD: "Episode 2"
17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 TWiD: "Episode 3"
18. ↑ TWiD: "Episode 4"
19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 TWiD: "Episode 7"
20. ↑ TSoI: "Heawood and Kennedy"
21. ↑ TCoCDW: "Episode 2"
22. ↑ TSoI: "Melusine"
23. ↑ TSoI: "Harlequin"
24. ↑ TSoI: "Saint Germain"
25. ↑ TSoI: "Rubaiyat"
26. ↑ TSoI: "Pleasant Green"
27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 27.3 WiAK: "The Black Windmill"
28. ↑ Pleasant Green - About
29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 TSoI: "The Somerton Man"
30. ↑ WiAK: "Themis House"
31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 THotD: "Episode 3"
32. ↑ THotD: "Episode 5"
33. ↑ THotD: "Episode 2"
34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 THotD: "Episode 8"