The following story details my real-life encounter (sort of… maybe… judge for yourself) with a being from the Cthulhu Mythos.

It is written in the form of a letter to Sandy Petersen. Sandy designed the Call Of Cthulhu roleplaying game and, incidentally, also created levels for Doom and other (very) famous games.

As I said, judge for yourself…

Dear Sandy,

Greetings from Australia. You no doubt get more than your share of crackpot messages, so I hope you find the following story amusing.

I can say without hyperbole that this message has been 27 years in the making. I hope you get a laugh out of it.

In 1993, Dragon Magazine published one of your Call of Cthulhu mythos roleplaying adventures. Here’s a scan (from the UK edition) showing the first page.

It’s an interesting adventure where the investigators are acquainted with one Josh Wellmeat – who unbeknownst to them is actually an ancient Serpent Man who communicates via his agents, and who survived into present day in the form of a giant, dragon-like creature that dwells below a house.

The encounter itself is a hook for further adventures, whereby Wellmeat commissions the investigators to retrieve three artifacts (time-capsules). These I have also scanned below.

Note the third one (highlighted), and how it details one of the time-capsules being located in a natural history museum in Trieste, Italy.

Note also that the museum curator is described as a Deep One hybrid.

Here’s the uncanny part.

You see Sandy, I lived in Trieste when this adventure was published. I spent five or so years there.

During that time I visited the Natural History Museum of Trieste on several occasions. It’s an eerie (macabre, even) place that I’d recommend to anyone with an interest in the fascinating and the bizarre.

But here’s where it gets weird: during one childhood visit there I distinctly recall encountering one of the museum’s custodians – and I am convinced that your description of him as a hybrid Deep One is both accurate and correct!

It was during a visit there with my father that we came across a staff member (or at least, a strange gent who gave the impression that he worked there). He was an odd cat who instigated a bizarre conversation where, amongst other things, he shushed us while pointing to a taxidermied zebra, and then handed me a stack of comics as a gift.

After we politely left I remember Dad saying that he had trouble understanding this fellow, and that he thought this chap was either drunk, or from Udine (the next town up, where the dialect is slightly different to local Triestine).

Clearly, the man’s odd speech had a more sinister origin…

By the way, the Civico Museo di Storia Naturale di Trieste, as it’s known, has an extraordinary collection of old and macabre things: a mummy in an open sarcophagus, a coelacanth and numerous embalmed deep-sea creatures in preservation jars, pre-historic artefacts, and a wild assortment of game animals, from another age when shooting and stuffing these great creatures was common.

The place even had an old, mysterious, musty smell. I believe it moved to a new venue in 2010 but in my mind it will always be the closest thing imaginable to a Call of Cthulhu setting.

Over the years I’ve told this story to friends and it usually gets a good laugh. I never wrote it down though. I was reminded about it recently while chatting to a friend about roleplaying, so I decided to finally share it.

So thank you Sandy, for writing an adventure in 1993 that has given me some good laughs over the last 27 years.

All the best,

Tom

Postscript: I showed this post to my dad and he made the following observation. “When the museum was moved from the old building, there was a problem with a stuffed shark: they could not get it down the stairs, and it would not fit through the window. So they got a saw and cut off the fin: it was a scandal that made the first page of Il Piccolo” (the local newspaper).

Original main pic: Antonia Lombardi