Small, almost
deserted village in north central
Massachusetts. The town was founded in 1692 by settlers who left
Salem just before the
witch trials started. For a while, the
town prospered on a number of
mills that sprang up, but after one of the
founders suffered a
nervous breakdown and killed several prominent townspeople, things started to go
downhill, starting with most of the mills closing, another few
headline-grabbing
murders, various
scandals, more
economic disasters... soon enough, Dunwich had a reputation as a hopeless
backwater hellhole, complete with people marrying close relations,
weird religious looniness, and a general
degeneracy of
morals and
genetics.
One of the biggest things to ever happen in Dunwich were the strange
disasters and murders that plagued the area in the late
1920s. It all started when a local named
Wilbur Whately -- whose
incest-
scrambled DNA resulted in a
boy in his early teens who was about
eight feet tall, thoroughly
goatish in appearance, and
friggin' huge -- was killed by dogs as he tried to break into the
university library in
a nearby town. Soon, the house that Whately lived in (both his
parents were either
dead or
mysteriously missing) was destroyed in an
explosion. Then
cattle started
disappearing. And then people. Some of them eventually turned up, but never in sufficient quantities to make a full person...
At the time, all the
Dunwichians (Dunwichites? Dunwichivillians?) assumed all these events were connected, and eventually, some
university professors came to town and held an
exorcism -- either seriously believing that they were destroying
evil or putting on a show to try to calm the growing
panic. As it turns out, though there were no more
disappearances, Dunwich didn't fare that well afterwards. Some residents were driven even crazier by all the
hoopla, and state officials, spooked by the
weird occurrences, destroyed all the road signs leading to Dunwich, pushing the town further and further into
obscurity and
hopelessness. Nowadays, Dunwich is almost
dead and almost
forgotten...
"The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft
Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms, pp. 58-59