FROM THE DUST, A NEW OPERATION FOR DELTA GREEN

This Delta Green operation concerns an evil that has haunted Brooklyn, New York, since its earliest days, which was cut off at its apex in the summer of 1925, just before it brought something through into our world. With this ruin came the destruction of one of Brooklyn’s most storied, odd, and reclusive residents — Robert Suydam.

Suydam, an aged bachelor of old Dutch money was the last of his line from an ancient family that had landed in New York in 1666 when the young port was still called New Amsterdam. By all accounts, he was a wholly strange man that, excepting 8 years on the continent in search of peculiar books, had only spent 60 secretive years studying the occult in his once opulent, rotting Flatbush mansion. Then, in 1924, came his sudden, unlikely and miraculous transformation into an eligible bachelor. This metamorphosis coincided with Suydam’s new associations with an odd church in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn of questionable providence, whispered and slandered to be linked to dark rituals on nights of the New Moon. Suydam appeared to grow younger, more sane, and more coherent as his involvement with this church deepened. His bride-to-be, Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of the Brooklyn Gerritsens was as wealthy and powerful as could be desired. All felt the match would be a wonderful — if wholly bizarre — union.

Then, in the summer of 1925, both the newlywed Suydams turned up dead on their yacht on the night of their honeymoon, with Suydam’s body disappearing shortly thereafter in the possession of associates from his church. Mrs. Suydam, some said, had been clawed, ravaged, or strangled, but one thing was certain — somehow the blood had been drained from her body. Still, the tale grew stranger, culminating with the Brooklyn police entering Suydam’s apartments at Parker Place, which turned out to be a nest of sorts. The building hid a warren of tunnels, passages, and canals to the river that made possible the secret transit of people (or perhaps bodies) under the noses of the authorities.

The nightmare ended in the summer of 1925 with a police raid, the maddened testimony of a private detective trapped beneath the rotten remains of the elder Suydam, the collapse of three worm-rotten houses at Parker Place, killing untold dozens beneath it engaged — it was reported — in some unholy practice, and the revelation that a cult had been hunting the neighborhoods of eastern Brooklyn for decades, preying on children. The news rose to the headlines and soon was forgotten amidst greater man-made horrors.

With no direct heirs, the property of the Suydam Mansion was left to Cornelia Gerritsen’s father, Gunther Gerritsen, who took possession of it in the summer of 1926 after various disputes by far-flung Suydam relatives attempted to wrest control of it from the courts.

After then there was silence... ...until now.