Ghouls are the file the Bureau keeps furthest from the public-facing summary sheets, not because they are the most dangerous entry in the archive — they are not — but because the file requires the reader to accept three things in sequence, and most readers stop at the second. The first: there are corpse-eating humanoids living in tunnel networks beneath every major old city in the Western world. The second: they are not, in any operationally useful sense, hostile. The third: most of them were once human, and several of the ones currently beneath Boston are people whose names the Bureau still has in open missing-persons files from the 1920s.

The three facts are not separable. Taken individually, any one of them could be dismissed. Taken together, they constitute one of the most unsettling documented entities in the archive, and the Bureau's standing policy — observe, do not engage — is less a strategic choice than an admission that nobody has come up with anything better.

Physical Description

Crouched, canine, rubbery. A ghoul at rest in its tunnel resembles a large dog with the proportions slightly wrong — elongated forelimbs, a hunched spine, a dog-like muzzle whose teeth are more numerous than a dog's and set into a jaw structure that is recognizably post-human. The skin is grey-green, texturally closer to a salamander than a mammal. The feet are hooved, a detail every witness comments on because it is the detail that removes any lingering possibility that what they are seeing is a feral human. The eyes are luminous in low light — a pale yellow or green that reflects torchlight in a way ordinary human eyes do not.

They are capable of upright posture, and adopt it when moving between tunnels or when addressing something they consider worth addressing. They are capable of speech. The voice is a wet meeping-gibbering that bears no resemblance to any human language the Bureau has classified, but the ghouls appear to understand English, Latin, and — consistent with Alhazred's notes in the Necronomicon — at least fragmentary Arabic. They prefer not to speak with humans. When they do, it is brief and always in the service of negotiating a boundary.

Behavior and Territory

Ghouls are scavengers. Their food supply is the dead, and their tunnels follow the cemeteries of the cities they inhabit — Boston's Copp's Hill and the Granary, Père Lachaise in Paris, Highgate in London, and the older sections of Green-Wood and Woodlawn in New York. They do not, as a rule, kill for food. They do not need to. The supply is sufficient and the cities have been cooperating, unwittingly, for three centuries.

They are not territorial toward humans who stay out of the tunnels. They are extremely territorial toward humans who enter the tunnels. The distinction matters. Most documented ghoul-related injuries occurred to subjects who went looking for them — amateur occultists, academic expeditions, and in one 1931 case a Boston building inspector who followed a collapsed basement wall further than his assignment required. The ghouls escorted him out. He did not survive the escort, but the post-mortem indicated that the ghouls had moved him through approximately four miles of tunnel without inflicting the injuries that killed him, which the Bureau reads as an attempt at restraint that failed.

The standing policy of the Bureau is to leave the tunnels alone. This policy is not popular with the municipal authorities who have occasionally been briefed on it, and it is periodically challenged by new administrations. It has so far survived every challenge, because every alternative policy the Bureau has modeled ends with ghouls surfacing in larger numbers than the city can explain.

The Transformation

This is the part of the file the Bureau does not discuss in public briefings.

Ghouls were once human. Not all of them — the file's working estimate is that a core population of the species is indigenous to the The Dreamlands and has been there since before the human habitation of the waking world — but a substantial fraction of every modern tunnel population is descended, within living memory, from humans who spent enough time in ghoul company to become one of them. The transformation is gradual, irreversible by the time it is noticed, and apparently not painful. It is a dietary and environmental drift. A human who begins eating what the ghouls eat, sleeping where they sleep, and speaking to them in the tunnels will, over a period of several years, stop being human in ways the Bureau can measure and start being a ghoul in ways the Bureau can also measure. The midpoint of the process is documented and the Bureau has chosen not to publish the photographs.

The canonical case is Richard Upton Pickman. Boston painter. Disappeared in 1926. His studio in the North End, when the police searched it, contained a portfolio of paintings whose subjects — crouched canine figures in tunnels and cemeteries — were photographed for the file and subsequently revealed, when the Bureau compared the photographs to field observations in the Copp's Hill tunnel system, to be portraits. Pickman had been painting his neighbors from life. He had been painting them for years. When he disappeared, the Bureau's working theory was voluntary: he went to join his models, and by the time he went he was already most of the way there.

The theory was confirmed in 1930, in the Dreamlands, by a witness whose credibility the Bureau does not dispute. Randolph Carter, during the expedition later reconstructed as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, encountered a ghoul army on the peaks of Thok and was addressed, in fluent English, by the creature leading it. The creature identified itself as Pickman and provided details about pre-transformation Boston that no other ghoul could have known. Carter wrote the encounter down, the Bureau acquired the notebook, and the notebook is in the sealed annex.

Dreamlands Citizenship

This is the part of the file that distinguishes the ghouls from every other subterranean entity in the archive. A ghoul who dies in the waking world does not stay dead. It wakes up in the Dreamlands — specifically, at the peaks of Thok or in the vaults of Zin — and resumes its existence there. The reverse is also documented: Dreamlands ghouls can transit to the waking world through the tunnel systems, and the two populations are, in some measurable sense, the same population living in two states simultaneously.

They are on speaking terms with the Night-Gaunts. This is the detail the Bureau finds most interesting and has the least explanation for. Night-gaunts do not communicate with anyone — not with dreamers, not with the Bureau, not with any other Dreamlands entity the file has records of, with the sole exception of their master Nodens. They communicate with ghouls. Carter's Dream-Quest account contains a scene in which the Pickman-ghoul negotiated passage with a flight of night-gaunts on behalf of Carter's expedition, and the night-gaunts — silent in every other recorded encounter in the archive — replied. In meeping. In the ghouls' own language, which the night-gaunts understood and used. The Bureau has no theory that accounts for this. The file flags it as the only recorded instance of night-gaunt vocalization, and leaves the rest open.

The Leng Spiders of the The Plateau of Leng are, per the night-gaunt file, the only thing the night-gaunts fear. The ghouls occupy the opposite category: they are the only thing the night-gaunts talk to. The Bureau does not know what to do with the symmetry. It is noted here because it is one of the few load-bearing pieces of information the archive has about either species, and the two entries should be read together.

The Lovecraft Correspondence

H.P. Lovecraft's documented ghoul sensitivity begins with "The Statement of Randolph Carter" in 1919 — a cemetery encounter in central Florida that Lovecraft claimed was a transcribed dream, and which the Bureau has reason to believe was something closer to a transcribed memory. "The Hound" (1924) concerns a Dutch grave-artifact that had acquired a ghoul attendant, and the story contains three details of ghoul anatomy that were not in general circulation at the time and that Lovecraft had no plausible source for. "Pickman's Model" (1927) is the Bureau's most-cited Lovecraft text, because it is functionally a case report with the names unchanged: Pickman was a real Boston painter, his studio was where Lovecraft said it was, and the paintings existed. The file has one of them. C̳͊͂O̎Z̀I̊̌̋H̰͂Z̨̃͝M̎A͆̕Ö͝Y̡̆̀C̈͊.

The through-line from Lovecraft's childhood night-gaunt dreams to his adult ghoul fixation is not, the Bureau suspects, coincidence. H.P. Lovecraft was sensitive to Dreamlands phenomena across his entire documented life, and the two entities he returned to most persistently in his fiction are the two entities the Dreamlands file says are in conversation with each other. Whatever Lovecraft was listening to, some of it was in meeping, and some of it was in the language the night-gaunts only use with ghouls.

Cthulhu Wars Operational Note

In the Cthulhu Wars board game, Ghouls appear as a unit in the Black Goat faction roster — specifically as the cheapest monster in the faction, summoned for 0 Power when the Thousand Young spellbook is active, and granted post-battle teleportation into any fight anywhere on the map through the Necrophagy spellbook. The in-game depiction captures one real thing about ghouls — their unusual mobility through space relative to other creatures — and flattens the rest into a faction mechanic. The Bureau notes the game's classification of Ghouls as Black Goat servitors is not supported by any entry in the field archive. The ghouls are not aligned with Shub-Niggurath. They are, however, willing to participate in rituals their tunnels happen to adjoin, which from the outside can look identical. The game's version is a reasonable simplification. The file's version is weirder.