So I went to Gildershade to and I got word of a "Dunwich Building." My first thought was, "Lovecraft reference!" I went in expecting to see something resembling the Hackdirt quest from Oblivion, but I was truly astonished at the complexity of the place.

My question is this though: Do the feral ghouls from Fallout actually have an organized religion?

As far as I understand it, the ferals are insane ghouls, people who simply lost it, they are not civilized at a level they do accept anything other than their kind in their terretory. So maybe those dunwich gouls are religous, they sure seem to like the monolith though. But I dont think that feral ghouls do have a religous background and that it an exception

The whole Dunwich Horror quest is a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's story of the same name. That green monolith is a hint at Lovecraft's ideas of "cosmic horror" and incomprehensible alien intelligence. It's really just a "popular reference" in a sense, don't read too much into it.

It is neat though that if you hop onto the monolith (or rather, next to it), you learn it's emitting localized radiation.

How long can ghouls live? There sure seem to be a bunch of 100+ year old ones.

There is no recorded instance of a ghoul dying from old age, as far as I know.

i believe ghouls are nearly immortal, but also are sterile, they can't produce offspring (atleast not on biological ways)

Yeah, ghouls live ridiculously long time. Some, like Harold have been alive since the War, and actually remember what it was like in the old US of A. The same seems to go for the super mutants, although they tend to go increasingly dumb as they age - that's not a necessary rule, though; Marcus in Fallout 2 was over 100 years old if I remember correctly, and quite smart.

Only the Fallout 3 mutants get dumber with age, they also get bigger and stonger, hence the behemoths. They're separate from the west coast mutants who have varying levels of intelligence, are green, and don't seem to change greatly over time.

Also checked out the Dunwich Building yesterday, it was quite a treat, and a nice little change from the usual gameplay. Kind of anticlimactic because I leveled everything in the final area in one shot each, but it was fun. Would have been cool to get the necronomicon though, even if it did nothing, I like having trophies of my journeys to decorate my house.

The end of Dunwitch disappointed me because of my own carelessness... I got caught before getting to watch them worship the idol...

But to answer your question: no. Feral ghouls are crazy mofos who want to eat you... and worship a black monolith... wait... DAMZ!

Well for the person who mentioned Harold, I beleive the lore is that Harold only looks like a ghoul and was mutated by FEV at the same time as the master, the quote from the fallout bible is Harold is Harold. On the other hand ghouls do seem to age much slower than normal humans, and several ghouls met in fallouts 1 and 2 were alive before the bombs dropped, I'm not sure how accurate it is but in Fallout 3 Herbert "Daring" Dashwood mentions that the ghoul he traveled with when he was younger, Argyle I think, was from before the bombs though not sure how accurate that is considering Dashwood says he new Argyle before the war, though I suppose what war may be open for questioning since Dashwood seems to be a normal if very old human.

The Reason that Super Mutants were a Greenish Color and not the Orange/yellow Color like the ones on the east coast is that the ones on west coast were dipped directly into the Vats in Mariposa Military Base and the F.E.V went directly into their skin as the body absorbed it. The ones on the East coast had the F.E.V. Vented directly to their body, there-for retaining the Tanish look to their skins as well as taking in some red color making it the current color they are (taking in a red color from the heat it took to vaporize the F.E.V.) And on Harold, He wasn't Dipped or exposed to Radiation, he was knocked out and inhaled a enormous amount of Mutated F.E.V. therefor taking in the Ghoul AND Super-Mutant quality like monsters in the wasteland And to the Dunwich Horror "Dunwich Building, South of Girdershade" it is just an Easter egg dropped in by the Bethesda Makers and One may assume that their is a Religion Towards the obelisk because it does relate to Cthulhu(Ktulu)-God of Dreams whom sleeps under the sea.