1938: The Pact of Kingsbury Run

Between 1935 and 1938, Cleveland was haunted by an infamous serial killer dubbed The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. The murderer’s victims were decapitated, mutilated, and dumped near the Kingsbury Run ravine and the Cuyahoga River. Despite intensive investigations—most famously by Eliot Ness—the killer was never caught.

To Cleveland’s Kithain, the murders were more than mortal tragedy: they were signs of a Glamour-scarring rupture in the Dreaming. Kingsbury Run, once a liminal space of mystery and mischief, began to sour. Chimerical creatures disappeared. Enchanted mortals went mad. Even the ravens stopped landing there.

At the height of the panic, a coalition of Commoner Changelings, Kinain, and a strange cabal of Prodigals (believed by many to be shapeshifters of some sort) met in secret at the edge of the ravine. There, they performed a binding ritual later known as The Pact of Kingsbury Run. Its aim: to contain the miasma of Banality and dark Glamour the murders had left behind.

One of the central ritual elements was the creation of a mask—a death mask, forged with enchanted clay mixed with river silt and ashes from every victim’s memory flame.
This chimerical mask, called the Face of Forgotten Pain, was hidden somewhere in Cleveland’s vast Dreaming and remains lost to this day.

Legacy

• No freeholds have existed within Kingsbury Run since the Pact was made. Glamour refuses to gather there.
• It is whispered that the mask still exists, and that wearing it would allow someone to see the final dreams of the dead—but at the cost of sanity.
• One Redcap, years later, is said to have tried to use the mask to contact the spirit of the Butcher. They have not been seen since.