by Kenneth Hite
Worse yet, Ghouls can traverse stable wormholes between the physical universe as we understand it and a harmonically resonant quantum pocket universe referred to in MAJIC documents as the “Dreamlands.” It is unclear if Ghoul biology somehow enables this ability, or if it is instead a hypergeometric or hyperspatial characteristic of the Ghoul tunnels themselves. Regardless, it allows Ghouls effectively unfettered access to virtually any otherwise secure facility on Earth. Shoot-on-sight rules of engagement are thus in place.
A LONELY AND CURIOUS COUNTRY (1804–1927)
“And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of mutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, what has America done for the benefit of mankind?”
–President John Quincy Adams
Before European contact, the North American continent possessed a number of civilizations approaching or surpassing those of classical antiquity in social sophistication and cultural organization. By the second millennium CE, Cahokia on the Mississippi, the Mound Builders in the Ohio valley and Southeast, and the Anasazi in the Southwest had all created vast trade networks and burgeoning towns – only the Northeast coast and Great Plains remained pastoral, possibly due to ongoing Deep One and Mi-Gö depredations, or incursions from the subterranean alien kingdoms of K’n-Yan. The Mandan legend of the Awigaxa band that vanished for three years, after which a remnant returned “talking differently,” may be a record of such a conflict.
Then in the 14th century, even before the plagues and invasions associated with European conquest, everything fell apart. Cahokia’s citizens completely abandoned their city by 1400. The Buzzard Cult spread nihilist chaos through the mound country, leaving only the Yig-worshippers in Ohio and the solar dictatorship of the Natchez behind. In the west, the Anasazi succumbed to cannibalism or Ghoul attacks.
Without the technological base to ride out these shocks, the population density north of the Rio Grande plummeted, as it had several times before. The smallpox epidemics that followed European contact further devastated Native American societies, which had no natural resistance to the disease. Desperate shamans turned to the worship of more dangerous spirits, invoking the Old Ones and usually suffering the inevitable consequences. Whole nations simply disintegrated or vanished. When American explorers entered the West, they entered a quite literally post-apocalyptic landscape.
This 19th-century engraving purportedly depicts Panfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez (1512– 1545?) hunting Indians in Mexico with dogs, an ironic reference to Zamacona’s description of the K’n-Yani hunting and devouring the devolved semi-human “gyaayothn.” Although such atrocities were hardly uncommon among conquistadors such as Pedro de Ávila (1468–1531) there is no evidence of Zamacona having done so. (LOC)
Opening the Frontier
By August 1804, US Army Captain Meriwether Lewis and 2nd Lieutenant William Clark had made camp on the north bank of the Missouri River near present-day Vermillion, South Dakota, and had just concluded negotiations with chieftains of the Lakota Sioux nation to allow them to approach an ancient mound believed by several of the surrounding tribes to be cursed. The so-called Spirit Mound, in particular, had come to Lewis and Clark’s attention because of the potential military threat it represented. According to Clark, the mound was supposed:
“… to be the residence of Deavels. That they are in human form with remarkable large heads … that they are very watchful and are arm’d with Sharp arrows with which they Can Kill at a great distance; they are Said to kill all persons who are So hardy as to attempt to approach the hill; they state that tradition informs them that many Indians have Suffered by these small people. So much do the Maha [Omaha], Soues [Sioux], Ottoes [Otoes] and other neighboring nations believe this fable, that no Consideration is Sufficient to induce them to approach the hill. One evidence which the Inds give for believing this place to be the residence of some unusual Spirits is that they frequently discover a large assemblage of Birds about this mound ….”
Lewis and Clark both remarked in their journals only that the mound offered a clear view of the surrounding territory. They had left St. Louis some three months before on a mission to explore and map the nearly 830,000 square miles of the Louisiana Territory, and their examination of the Spirit Mound “greatly assisted” their surveys. Although neither man mentions any overt supernatural occurrence, Lewis’s original journals were lost following his mysterious death on the Natchez Trace in 1809, and Clark’s show signs of re-copying. Sergeant Charles Floyd, one of the 12 men who accompanied Lewis and Clark to the devil-haunted mound, died of a mysterious affliction only hours after the party returned.
This 1881 engraving imaginatively depicts Lewis and Clark’s expedition descending the Snake River in a raft, emphasizing the artificial-seeming nature of the sandstone geological formations in the area. Certain hints in Lewis’ journals -- the “unaccountable artillery” heard from clear skies near Great Falls, the unidentifiable “white bears” encountered in the same area -- imply that he and Clark may have stumbled on a ruined outpost of Lomar, a K’n-Yani precursor state (ca. 900,000 BC) centered in present-day Alaska. UFO sightings in the Snake River (1947) and Great Falls area (1950 and 1975) indicate a possible Mi-Gö presence, likely exploiting the Lomarian remains. (Prisma Archivo / Alamy)
The Kingdom Below
Lewis and Clark had in fact found a disused northern outpost of the vast underground kingdom of K’n-Yan, a once-advanced but decadent alien civilization first discovered by the Spanish conquistador Panfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez during Coronado’s 1541 expeditions into the North American interior to find the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. In an account discovered in 1928, Zamacona described “Xinian” and its capital, Tsath, accessible through the Alabaster Caverns complex of modern-day Oklahoma. According to Zamacona’s account, the inhabitants of K’n-Yan were pale humanoids who believed themselves a race separate from mankind. They demonstrated at least limited telepathy and psychometry, and were reportedly able to dematerialize at will. Zamacona, a man of his time, identified them as demons; MAJIC believes them to be an evolutionary offshoot of the pre-human race Gigantopithecus lemuriensis, stunted by generations spent underground.
The decadent and isolationist K’n-Yani remained largely aloof from American affairs, though fears that they would ally with Native American tribes above Tsath to acquire fresh slave-stock drove frontier authorities to occasional action. When a Wichita warrior named Gray Eagle brought reports of just such an alliance with the Osage to William Clark, by then Missouri Territory governor, his prior experiences had left him highly sensitive to the threat they represented. Clark reportedly dismissed Gray Eagle’s initial reports, but authorized an attack after Gray Eagle presented him with K’n-Yani artifacts and jewelry he claimed to have taken from an Osage brave. Clark encouraged the Osage’s neighbors, the Cherokee, to remove the threat. Under Cherokee chief Spring Frog, a hastily assembled band of 500 Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and white settlers attacked the Osage settlement of Pasuga near Claremore Mound in October 1817. The Cherokee massacred the Osage while Clark’s picked men collapsed the entrance to K’n-Yan in the mound; K’n-Yan did not retaliate.
THE SORTIE OF JOHN WARREN
During the Second Seminole War in 1837, scouts of the 1st Florida Mounted Militia under Colonel John Warren stumbled upon a previously unmapped necropolis of pre-Columbian construction on the outskirts of the Big Cypress Swamp in southern Florida while engaged in an extensive manhunt for the Seminole chief Yaholooche (“Cloud”). Discovering an extensive network of dry tunnels leading deep below the water table near the center of the graveyard, Warren ordered his men to descend into the passages to search for Yaholooche, who he believed was using them to move raiders throughout the region unseen. Warren emerged from the swamp some eight days later, accompanied by only three of his men. US
Army records of Warren’s service and court-martial were lost during the Civil War, but Warren’s grandson Harley provided family copies of the records to the Miskatonic University library in his will after his own unexpected (and unexplained) death in Florida in 1919.
An Occurrence at Chickamauga
“‘We bury our dead,’ said a gunner, grimly, though doubtless all were afterward dug out, for some were partly alive.”
–Ambrose Bierce, “A Little of Chickamauga”
From a Cherokee word meaning “river of death,” Chickamauga Creek had been the site of numerous NRE incursions and encounters, earning it a reputation among the Native tribes of the area as a place to be avoided at all costs. By the second day of the bloody battle waged there in September 1863, dead and wounded on both sides numbered in the thousands, drawing Ghouls from their forgotten warrens or perhaps from the Dreamlands. The battle lines shifted throughout the skirmish. At dusk on September 19, Confederate forces pushed Union troops from the 9th and 35th Indiana Volunteer regiments back into thick woods east of Lafayette Road, forcing them to retreat over their own dead. As they did so, they stumbled on an entire pack of Ghouls already feeding. The terrified soldiers immediately opened fire, prompting the Ghouls to retaliate.
Shortly after dreaming of an immense, empty city Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) left home to work at a newspaper, to which trade he returned after his military service during the Civil War. He eventually named the city Carcosa in his fiction, and may have returned there in 1913. In his last letter (to the daughter of this portrait’s painter) before his disappearance, he wrote: “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” (LOC)
Ambrose Bierce, a 19-year-old lieutenant commanding a company of the 9th Indiana, ordered a retreat as quickly as possible, leaving the men of the 35th and the pursuing Confederates to fight off the enraged and hungry Ghouls. Bierce was part of an old family of witch-hunters and occultists that traced its lineage to William Bradford, the Puritan governor who had orchestrated the downfall of the Dagon cult at Merrymount in 1626. An infantryman from his unit later wrote that Bierce, regarded as standoffish by his men, had drawn “some sign in the yellow dust of the road when he saw them coming,” calling down “the attentions of some devil or angel to push back the screaming things.”
The 35th Indiana’s Company B found itself in the center of the action, losing almost half its fighting strength. The men lost to the Ghouls were listed as missing by both sides, with the surviving officers barely able to provide a coherent report of the action. Although Bierce had correctly assessed the threat and had successfully withdrawn his unit, he bitterly regretted abandoning the 35th to the monsters, as well as the supernatural attention he had drawn to himself to assure his own escape. Years later, Bierce wrote, “when I ask myself what has happened to Ambrose Bierce the youth, who fought at Chickamauga, I am bound to answer that he is dead.” Bierce disappeared in Mexico in 1913.
In 1837, Colonel John Warren discovered a necropolis hidden in Big Cypress Swamp, pictured here. He may have been drawn there by something found in an immense dry cave (now Warren’s Cave) that he also discovered near Gainesville after the Battle of San Belasco Hammock on September 18, 1836. (PD)
Other Ghoul Skirmishes
Chickamauga was the first significant engagement between American soldiers and Ghouls, but it would not be the last. Though they had coexisted with humans in relative peace for thousands of years, three factors drew Ghouls into human territory and forced men into uncharted realms that had once been the Ghouls’ alone: the skyrocketing human population; mass deaths from epidemics (especially the great influenza of 1918–20) and warfare; and aggressive infrastructure development to support an increasingly industrialized America.
The New York Subway
Beginning as early as 1899, the engineers building subway tunnels beneath New York City had begun to encroach on the city’s Ghoul warren, prompting irregular attacks from the creatures as they lost more and more territory to the roaring trains. By 1916, the Ghouls had massacred at least one trainload of passengers in a deep tunnel between the Battery and 120th Street. Later that year, the NYPD organized a Special Subway Detail to patrol the lower tunnels and drive the Ghouls back. Funded directly from the Mayor’s office by a separate dispensation until at least 1939, the Detail received significantly higher pay than regular-duty units, and suffered significantly higher casualties, including the loss of one of its most decorated commanders to friendly fire in 1922.
Some Civil War commanders developed an almost preternatural sense for Ghoul depredations nearby. According to rumor, Colonel Albert Delapore (1819–66) of the Virginia cavalry (shown here in the casual half-uniform common to Virginia militia officers) even used Ghouls to cut off Union patrols or reinforce his own attacks. Union cavalry burned his plantation at Carfax in the Shenandoah Valley as retribution for his “inhuman methods of war,” and he died shortly after the war’s end, possibly killed by his former slaves avenging previous nameless brutalities. (Osprey Publishing)
No Man’s Land
Throughout the battlefields of World War I, tunnels and trenches intruded on Ghoul warrens, and those that did not soon found hungry Ghouls tunneling into No Man’s Land to meet them. Repeated exposure to the carrion-eating creatures drew some men to join them; several may have become ghouls themselves. In his 1920 memoir The Squadroon, a particularly perceptive British officer named Lieutenant Colonel Ardern Arthur Hulme Beaman wrote that by 1918 the abandoned trenches and No Man’s Lands in northern France were “peopled with wild men … deserters, who lived there underground, like ghouls among the mouldering dead. [They] came out at night to plunder and to kill … [we] often heard inhuman cries and rifle shots coming from that awful wilderness as though the bestial denizens were fighting among themselves.”
Tempest Mountain
New York Sun reporter Arthur Munroe disappeared in April 1921 near Lefferts Corners, a rural community in the Catskills. Subsequent investigations led the state police to request temporary support from the NYPD’s Special Subway Detail, who quickly located the remains of at least four men, including Munroe, and ordered the Martense mansion on Tempest Mountain demolished. Several nearby hills were also blasted in an effort to collapse a network of tunnels burrowed into the rocky ground below the abandoned estate. The Department of Comparative Anatomy at Miskatonic University acquired the Ghoul remains found in the rubble: Dr Francis Morgan’s resulting papers remain among the only publicly available studies of Ghoul physiology, and may have inspired the last avant-garde works of Boston artist Richard Upton Pickman.
In this photograph of Wichita cavalry scouts serving with the Union forces during the Civil War, Gray Eagle is the second from the right. Although Wichita tradition holds that the Gray Eagle who instigated the 1817 attack on Pasuga is the same Gray Eagle who lived at the Wichita station near the Hydro mound in Oklahoma in 1928, it’s more likely that they were identically named members of the same family of shamans. (LOC)
The R’lyeh Upheaval
Whether because of the rise in cult activity, the dramatic increase in Pacific naval traffic, or both, the sunken city of R’lyeh experienced a paroxysm of tectonic upheavals in 1889, throwing half-billion-year-old border outposts of the star-spawned empire back above the waves. This seismic calamity and its aftershocks caused several earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis around the Pacific Plate that year, including disasters at Kumamato, Suwanosejima, Manam, and Banua Wuhu. Storms and psychic disturbances also hammered the Pacific Rim following the upheaval, perhaps most notably at Apia harbor on the Samoan island of Tutuila, relatively close to the epicenter of the R’lyeh event.
This photograph of magician Harry Houdini (1874–1926) and President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was taken in 1914, shortly after Roosevelt’s return from his secret (and nearly disastrous) expedition into the Brazilian interior. Houdini had done covert work for the US Secret Service as early as 1899, and worked for Roosevelt in Rus
sia in 1903 (and possibly in Egypt in 1910). He also collaborated closely with H. P. Lovecraft, planning a major joint investigation into the witch-cult before his sudden and mysterious death on Halloween 1926. (LOC)
Competing for influence in the Pacific Islands, the United States and Germany had both sent small flotillas to Tutuila to protect their respective commercial interests on the island. Both sides were engaged in a tense standoff inside the harbor on March 13, observed by a single British vessel, when the atmospheric pressure suddenly dropped and the native Samoans began fleeing the port. Despite the fact that the crews on both sides were filled with experienced Pacific sailors, the psychic backlash stunned both sides: neither American nor German sailors were able to secure their vessels for the coming storm or to evacuate the harbor. When a cyclone smashed into the island, it severely damaged vessels on both sides, sinking two German ships and leaving the American craft beached or caught on reefs near the harbor.
The psychic echoes of the 1889 event spurred smaller or dormant cults to greater activity. By 1905, an informal student fraternity at the Rhode Island School of Design had begun using NRE imagery in its initiation rites. The wizard Noah Whateley bred his daughter Lavinia to Yog-Sothoth in 1912; Innsmouth sorceress Asenath Waite conspired with Aleister Crowley during his American sojourn in 1919. The Bohemian Club in San Francisco purchased an isolated redwood grove in 1899 at the prompting of member Ambrose Bierce; they erected a stone idol in the shape of an owl there in 1929. In Brooklyn, the occultist Robert Suydam attempted his magical resurrection in 1925 through a resurgent cult of the owl-goddess Mormo, although the February 28, 1925 aftershock of the 1889 event may have triggered him.