#but in honor of spooky season i thought i'd post the intro to it here

[trensu]

haunted hawkins: a study of preternatural activity

A Letter of Introduction

Dear Dr. Brenner,

I am reaching out to you in the hopes that you’ll consider taking me on as a student in the near future. I am in my final year of my Bachelor’s degree in psychology, and your work on parapsychology at the Usher Foundation has captivated me. I’m not sure if you know this, but my hometown–Hawkins, Indiana–became a hotspot of potentially preternatural activity during my childhood. It was so prolific that the Usher Foundation actually opened a branch there in what used to be Hawkins National Lab, a pharmaceutical company that went bankrupt in 1973. Most people still call it Hawkins Lab, but it was renamed the Woodhouse Institute after the Usher Foundation took it over.

Your research focuses on the effects of prolonged fear on human behavior, especially if the cause of that fear is not something necessarily based on real concrete events or things. Because of this, I believe further investigation in that time period of Hawkins–roughly 1983 to 1989 is the tentative timeline I’ve put together–would only benefit your research. I am so certain of this that I have already begun my own preliminary investigations. I am including my findings so far as a demonstration of my dedication to the topic. This also showcases my own skills in research that I believe make me an excellent candidate for your graduate program.

Attached is a collation of statements I copied from the Woodhouse Institute’s archives, with the Usher Foundation’s permission. I don’t know for certain how statements are taken at headquarters or other branches across the country, but at the Woodhouse Institute they use a standard document known as Form 33: Report of an Irregular Event, which I’ll hereby abbreviate to Form 33-RIE. This form is given to any witness that presents to the institute. Upon request, witnesses can choose to record their experiences in audio/visual format rather than filling the form by hand in an effort to accommodate witnesses who may have a physical or mental disability that prevents them from writing. The only caveat is that witnesses must disclose whether their disability existed prior to the irregular event or if it was a result of it. As such, some of the statements I’ve included here are actually transcriptions.

I’ve made notes and gathered relevant materials for the statements I’ve found. The statements I collated had multiple potentially supernatural creatures with disparate characteristics. For my preliminary findings, I chose to use the fear model known as Smirke’s Fourteen–which I believe is used by the Usher Foundation’s overseas sister, the Magnus Institute–in an attempt to categorize the different experiences described by witnesses. If you think there is a better fear model to use for this, I would be eager to take it under consideration. I’ve clustered the statements together by the entity the witnesses encountered, and ordered them by the date the statement was given rather than the date the event occurred. Due to the nature of the encounters, witnesses occasionally are unable to provide specific dates for the actual occurrence or their experiences span several days or weeks, so I thought this method would give it more consistency.

If you take me on as a student, I hope to use my research to determine what, if anything, caused this surge of paranormal phenomena and, more importantly to the overarching philosophy of the Usher Foundation, whether the circumstances that caused this could be replicated for use in future research within controlled settings. I believe the latter would be most beneficial to your area of interest, Dr. Brenner.  

Even if you decide I am not a suitable candidate for your graduate program, I would love to hear your thoughts on the information I’ve gathered so far. Thank you for your time; I eagerly await your response.

Sincerely,

Dustin Henderson

this and the second chapter are posted on ao3 here.