by Kenneth Hite
Perhaps most notably, isolated fishermen and voodoo practitioners in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana began organizing ecstatic black masses and animal sacrifices in formal worship of Cthulhu. It was not until the bayou cult began offering up human sacrifices, however, that any of this activity received sustained official attention.
Professor of Semitic Languages at Brown University, George Gammell Angell (1857–1926) is shown here with part of his collection of glass bottles, begun during his Tulane University lecturing residency in 1910–11. Professor Angell was the first scholar to assemble evidence of a worldwide Cthulhu cult; his death in December 1926 may well have been no accident. (LOC)
The St. Bernard Parish “Voodoo” Raid
In September 1907, a joint task force formed by the Louisiana State Police and the New Orleans police department traced a woman who had gone missing from a New Orleans slum to nearby St. Bernard Parish, where local law enforcement was already investigating several disturbing reports about the activities of a voodoo cult operating in the swamps. On November 1, a raid led by New Orleans police lieutenant John Raymond Legrasse interrupted one of the cult’s ceremonies: the vivisection of a human victim on an altar topped by a statuette depicting Cthulhu himself. Police fired upon the cultists upon discovering the grisly scene, killing five and arresting 47 of an estimated 100 who had been at the ceremony. The rest escaped into the bayou.
Legrasse ordered the excavation of the ceremonial grounds, revealing more than a dozen previous victims, only four of whom were the subject of open investigations. The cultists denied their role in the murders, blaming “black-winged ones.” One cultist, known as “Old Castro,” described the cult’s faith to interviewers during questioning. The rest focused their evangelism on their fellow prisoners in the St. Bernard lockup. Indeed, one police sergeant would later note:
“The men we had in custody could not have cared less about the charges brought against them. In fact, they seemed almost happy to be in jail, where they could try to convert others to their heathen religion. We had to isolate them within the first few hours to stop them from getting whole cell blocks chanting that ‘clue clue’ nonsense, and to be honest we got real worried that if they spent any time at Angola the whole plantation would be caught up in it! So I guess I’m not too surprised that so many of those old boys died in accidents awaiting trial, or killed themselves, or got caught up with other inmates. No, I’d say it was probably for the best and whoever done it done a public service.”
Records of the suspects’ testimony and studies of the few artifacts found in and around the St. Bernard site would form the bedrock of the government’s awareness and understanding of the Mythos threat for the rest of the 20th century. Legrasse, and other investigators outside Louisiana, traced the larger cult’s connections and even managed some arrests and other disruptions, but the most significant blow would not fall until 20 years later.
Confederate Brigadier General Bushrod Johnson’s advance across the Lafayette Road on the afternoon of September 19, 1863, left many scattered Union companies isolated in the woods as night fell. That first day of the Battle of Chickamauga produced over ten thousand fresh corpses, an irresistible banquet for the local Ghoul population, and for the bands of Ghouls following the armies. It is impossible to estimate what portion of the 6,000 “missing or captured” at Chickamauga were actually devoured, and how many supposed artillery or saber casualties actually suffered those mutilations from inhuman claws and incisors.
The “night fight at Chappell’s Farm” is usually ignored in official histories of the battle. The surviving remnant of Sergeant Thomas Kennedy’s platoon (Company B, 35th Indiana) managed to find a farmhouse to use as a bivouac. Kennedy’s diary, recovered by a Confederate intelligence officer from the empty house on the 21st, calls it “Chappell’s Farm,” but it actually belonged to a schoolteacher named Nobey or Knowby. The Ghoul attack came just after midnight while the men were keeping themselves awake reading a journal they had found in the house. Kennedy wields a saber while Corporal Patrick Molloy (officially listed as a deserter, but mentioned by name in Kennedy’s diary) levels a rifle. The Ghouls feed during combat, as Kennedy says: “they [the Ghouls] seem more inclined to dine than fight, as would we in faith likewise be, had we provisions.” The last page of Kennedy’s diary describes the Union men successfully driving the Ghouls away. A final Ghoul attack likely finished off Kennedy and the other five missing men, although that must remain conjecture. The sole survivor of the action, Private Peter Mulvaney, was captured and sent to Andersonville Prison. He died in the Sultana disaster in 1865, and never gave his account of the Night Fight.
THREAT REPORT: DEEP ONES
“No use balking, for there were millions of them down there. They’d rather not start rising and wiping out humankind, but if they were given away and forced to, they could do a lot toward just that… It’s not what the fish devils have done, but what they’re going to do! They’re bringing things up out of where they come from into the town; they’ve been doing it for years… The houses north of the river between Water and Main streets is full of them, the devils and what they have brought, and when they get ready … ever hear of a shoggoth?”
–Zadok Allen of Innsmouth, as reported by informant Robert M. Olmstead
Analysis of satellite imagery and Cold War-era sonar surveys suggest that there are no fewer than 28 substantial Deep One colonies across the globe, each with an estimated population of over a million, to say nothing of their hundreds of coastal outposts. They have also colonized human myths: as Rusalki in Slavic lore, Adaro on the Solomon Islands, Jiaoren in South China, Heqet to the ancient Egyptians and Kulullû in Babylon. Even in the Saharan kingdom of Mali, a thousand miles inland, they appear as the Nommo. They have even founded human dynasties: the ichthyoid Oannes founded Eridu in southern Mesopotamia, and the earliest Merovingian kings of France were said to descend from a five-horned aquatic Quinotaur.
MAJIC paleontologists posit that Triadobatrachus sapiens appeared approximately 15 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch, and interbred with hominids from that point on. But they could be even older. Captured specimens, some in US government custody since 1928, have demonstrated the ability to survive without food for decades, and broad immunity to diseases and toxins. Mature adults do not age, but grow throughout their lifetimes to an unknown maximum size: Navy personnel filmed two specimens larger than Los Angeles-class submarines in the South Pacific in 1974 during Project Azorian. Deep Ones can be killed, but anything short of a fatal wound heals quickly.
In populations isolated from coastal waters, Deep Ones form mated pairs and typically produce single live young which gestate for 10 to 12 months before birth. In rarer (but far from unknown) cases, Deep One communities near human population centers seek human mates (typically pairing male humans with female Deep Ones), breeding hybrids that appear entirely human at birth.
Deep One hybrids are raised on land, reaching an initial physical maturity after puberty just as true humans do before undergoing a second maturation – possibly due to a mitochondrial retrovirus unique to the Deep Ones’ genetic heritage – typically beginning between ages 38 and 51.
During this second transformation, usually occurring over a period of five to seven years, ears shrink, eyes bulge, and the skull plates shift to create a narrow crest. Skin becomes rough and then begins to slough off as the hybrid develops scales in the lower dermal layers, until the hybrid takes on the full suite of Deep One traits. Isolated attempts to slow or reverse the transformations have been unsuccessful; unless prevented, a fully mature hybrid will slip into the sea to join its “family” once the physiological alterations are complete. Although human hybrids are by far the most numerous (and the most immediately threatening to US security interests), scattered reports suggest that Deep Ones have also developed similar hybrid breeding relationships with marine mammals such as dolphins.
The precise numbers of these hybrids – pre- or post-transformati
on – remain unknown, as Deep One traits breed true for up to four generations beyond initial contact: great-great-grandchildren may carry Deep One traits, and their mysterious agendas, without any knowledge of what they must one day become. Consequently, Deep One hybrids represent an almost perfect “fifth column.” Efforts to develop medical screening or even genetic sequencing protocols to weed out Deep One hybrids before their second transformation have thus far proven fruitless. Indeed, the possibility cannot be discounted that they have already extensively penetrated critical institutions, including MAJIC.
INNSMOUTH AND AFTER (1928–45)
“During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting – under suitable precautions – of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.”
–H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
When the St. Bernard Parish investigations revealed the sinister implications of the growth of a nationwide Cthulhu cult to Louisiana authorities, there was no single agency able or empowered to assess the rising threat posed by hidden pre-human populations and prehistoric doomsday cults. It is probably a coincidence that, only seven months after Legrasse’s raid, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the Justice Department to create a national Bureau of Investigations (the direct forerunner of the FBI) over Congressional objections. On the other hand, Roosevelt was a devoted collector of Western legendry and a former New York City police commissioner: he might well have come across legends of K’n-Yan (Gray Eagle is reported to have survived well into the 20th century), or evidence of Ghoul attacks, or both.
This photograph of Abigail Waite (1853–1928?) taken c. 1890 depicts a typical case of the “Innsmouth Look” in Deep One-human hybrids. (Propnomicon)
Lousiana State Police forwarded their files on the St. Bernard Parish raid to the Bureau of Investigations in 1909, Bureau Chief Stanley Finch had the files classified and compartmented in a special unit he christened Unit 10, sometimes referred to in contemporary documents as “Unit X.” Finch charged Unit 10 first with gathering information on state and local investigations into NRE-related activity, and then with mounting its own inquiries. Unit 10 assisted in several raids over the next two decades, often under cover of, or cooperating with, anti-sedition or anti-terrorism actions against Communists or anarchists, which many nihilist NRE cultists were. Another common cover was Prohibition enforcement against bootleggers and moonshiners, as with the Robert Suydam case at Red Hook in 1925. With almost 15 years’ experience behind it when the Innsmouth cult revealed itself, the Bureau thought it was ready.
The decrepit state of Innsmouth even before the 1928 Raid can be seen in this photograph of the Eliot Street Pier, taken in 1925 by Michael Schefter, a factory inspector with the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety. (Propnomicon)
Casus Belli
The ongoing effects of the 1837 depression left most of the businesses in Innsmouth under the control – direct or otherwise – of shipping magnate Obed Marsh, who leveraged his profitable Pacific trade into ownership of the town’s mills and even a gold refinery. His success attracted followers, whom he initiated into a Tahitian cult disguised as a fraternal organization called the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Enemies of the cult disappeared or drowned until 1846, when a citizens’ vigilance committee led by Selectman Herman Mowry arrested Marsh and his acolytes. Two weeks later, half the population of the town (including Selectman Mowry) was dead and Marsh returned to power. Outsiders were told a plague had ravaged the town, and aside from an increasingly sinister reputation and medical reports of deformities among residents in the following generations (blamed on the effects of the “Innsmouth Plague”) the town slipped into relative obscurity after the Civil War.
The basalt Nan Madol complex on the Caroline island of Ponape served as the capital of a Cthulhu cult from approximately 1100 to 1628, when the local workers overthrew the Chau-te-leur dynasty, a clear cognate name to the NRE. Nan Madol means “the spaces between,” a clear reference to alien hyperspace (as the Necronomicon says: “Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal”) and furthermore, the complex rests on the Soun Nan-Leng reef. ONI feared that the German, then the Japanese, occupiers of Ponape would restore the cult and contact the Deep One city of Kahnihmw off the shore of the Nan Madol lagoon. (robertharding / Alamy)
Nevertheless, official interest in Innsmouth slowly renewed. In 1917, Draft officials in the town reported impossible deformities, and during World War I the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) initiated an internal investigation into several sailors from the Innsmouth area who proved unreliable in action: specific charges included smuggling and illicit fraternization, especially on Pacific stations. When confronted with the possibility of an ONI inquiry into the “Pacific ring” in early November of 1920, the Governor of American Samoa, Warren Terhune, shot himself in the heart rather than cooperate with the investigation.
The Case of Earl Hancock Ellis
The case next came to the attention of an eccentric US Marine Corps strategist, Lieutenant Colonel Earl Hancock “Pete” Ellis, who insisted on following up on the odd events in the Pacific personally. He may have first crossed paths with the cult while stationed in New Orleans in 1914, at which point his alcoholism became chronic. In 1921 Ellis brought his concerns to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who gave him permission for an undercover mission to the western Pacific Islands. Ellis submitted an undated letter of resignation to the Marine Corps, and then traveled extensively throughout the Caroline and Marshall islands (including Ponape, New Guinea, and other stops on the Marsh trade routes) investigating the unidentified force or cult that had prompted Terhune’s suicide. Ellis’s mental stability deteriorated rapidly and he died, supposedly from alcohol poisoning, on the Japanese-occupied island of Koror on May 12, 1923.
The Office of Naval Intelligence sent Chief Pharmacist Lawrence Zembsch to collect Ellis’s remains – and his final reports – as soon as they learned of his death. After examining Ellis’s findings, Zembsch asked Japanese authorities to have Ellis’s remains exhumed and burned, and cabled an abbreviated version of Ellis’s terrified observations to the ONI. Zembsch himself then had a nervous breakdown after being “heavily drugged” by an unidentified assailant. Ellis’s complete reports disappeared, and the only other man who had seen them – Zembsch – died when a sudden earthquake smashed into Yokohama where he was recovering.
THE STRATEGY OUT OF TIME
Lieutenant Colonel Ellis also predicted the Japanese attacks that would draw the United States into World War II, authoring a comprehensive study of Japanese war plans in 1921, while attached to the Headquarters Marine Corps staff at Quantico. Entitled Operation Plan 712: Advanced Base Operation in Micronesia, Ellis’s paper correctly predicted both Japanese and American naval strategy in a war more than 20 years in the future.
Ellis had descended into a deep seclusion while writing Plan 712 throughout the previous year, and friends complained that his behavior had changed radically. The previously enthusiastic officer became standof
fish and expressionless, with one friend and colleague complaining that it was as if “he had forgotten, for a time, how to move the muscles of his face.” After publishing the plan, Ellis complained of headaches and hallucinations of strange beings and desert cities. Although Ellis never credited his prophetic strategy to any supernatural insight, his MAJIC dossier, partly inherited from the ONI, speculated that Ellis may have been another target of “… the so-called ‘Great Race from Yith’ so frequently mentioned in connection with the Peaslee case of 1908–1913.”
Operation Ashdod
“And when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the Lord. And they took Dagon, and set him in his place again.
And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him.
Therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any that come into Dagon’s house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this day.”
–1 Samuel 5: 3–5
Over the next four years, the ONI followed Ellis’s leads in desultory fashion, and Unit 10, cooperating with the Coast Guard, expanded its surveillance to cover bootlegging and other smuggling operations run out of Innsmouth by patriarch Barnabas Marsh. On July 16, 1927, a young anthropology student named Robert Olmstead stumbled into the FBI office in Boston raving with breathless tales of bulging-eyed mutants and alien fish-cults. Unit 10 and the ONI both received Olmstead’s report and to their credit recognized the need for joint action: the United States needed to deal with a Deep One threat that had already breached its borders.