I think the opposite is true. Humanity have believed in the supernatural for most of its existence. Even now I would bet that religious people outnumber non-religous people. So I don't think you could justify the masquerade with "people don't want to believe".
Yet this happens
now. People really just don't believe stuff, from reasons that range from skepticism to confirmation bias. There are people who will believe any insane thing they see, and there are people who will deny everything. We have millions thinking they saw Jesus on a cloud, and millions more who know what Pareidolia is.
I mean, there are claims of the supernatural all the time. People who claim to have special powers, people who claim to have seen something. Footage of supposedly supernatural entities and cryptids. My country is overrun with stories of priests doing some insane supernatural shit that you "just gotta go to the church to see".
And what is the result? People simply don't believe it or pay no mind to it. We live on a world where the majority is supersticious -- but only if they agree with their pet superstition. It's surprisingly easy to maintain the masquerade when people's faith in the fantastic is either already not very high, or some faiths contradict each other so much that one side claims the other is lying.
How could you determine what's magical, and thus needs to be hidden, and what isn't magical? For example, why would a "Dark Octopus" be classified as magical and a regular octopus classified as a regular animal?
Because it is "tormented by black magic", unlike ordinary octopuses...?
I get what you're saying. But actual examples of monsters who are functionally just animals (with no apparent bizarre origins, no intent to destroy mankind or no supernatural/physics-defying qualities involved) are
very rare.
I mean... The only one I can think of right now is the Killer Fish. And it doesn't seem like there's much of an effort to hide the it from the world. Hell, there are recipes using Killer Fish!
Someone is bound to remember a golem attacking in broad daylight is what looks like a densly populated Japanese city or that time the tower of Pisa got occupied by a bunch of monsters during WWI.
This is something I wanted to talk about for so long <3
There is one thing we must remember when talking of CV: The history of Earth there is
absolutelly not the same as ours. Though some of the "main beats" of their history is close to ours, we don't have the full context of everything. For example: When you talk about how nobody remembers that time when the tower of Pisa got infested with monsters, you might just be wrong -- we don't KNOW if someone remembers it, because we're not given screentime about that guy who was passing in front of the tower and caught a glimpse of a dude with a spear vaulting through floating platforms around the tower.
The entire history of this fictional Earth is already "wrong" starting with Dracula and the Church. This is basically what gets me utterly mad when someone starts talking of how the Church should be evil "because it killed witches for real back then" but ignores completelly the role of Vlad Tepes on the history of Europe, and is JUST OK with him being a vampire sorcerer trying to annihilate mankind, completelly contradicting what actually happened.
What I'm getting at is this: We're not given the full context of some stuff. Though I agree with you in full that some of this is stuff concerning the masquerade appears to be impossible to overlook, we also do not know the extent of the power of the people charged with maintaining it. I mean- the Church has elemental witches and genius sorcerers working for it. Time-stopping is a thing in this universe, how far are we from "mind-wiping magic" akin to MiB's neuralizer?
But I raise you this: Do you know how Brauner knows of Dracula's entire history apparently out of nowhere? Where do you think he learned of the supernatural? We don't know it, of course, but he WAS THERE during WWI. Is it too inconceivable to think that Brauner is just the type of witness we're looking for, to whom the masquerade fell apart? We know the Church battles the supernatural all around the world. So, how much of it is the result of the actions from someone who has witnessed the supernatural before?