H. P. Lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness

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The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. LovecraftThe Whisperer in Darkness

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 24 Feb-26 Sept 1930

Published August 1931 in Weird Tales, Vol. 18, No. 1, p. 32-73

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To

say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred - that last straw which

sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed

hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night - is to ignore the plainest

facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep things I saw and heard,

and the admitted vividness the impression produced on me by these things, I

cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For

after all Akeley's disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss

in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as

though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to

return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those

horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had

mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among

which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands

are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily

account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.

The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and

unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an

instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and

an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the

flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organized relief

which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found

floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on

curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the

subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and

did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an

outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of

education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might

underlie the rumors.

The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings;

though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a

letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was

essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate

instances involved - one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier,

another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third

centering in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course

many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all

seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing

one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that

poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to

connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend

which old people resurrected for the occasion.

What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had

ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the

streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt

quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in

size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind

of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with

crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and

several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid,

covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily

be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources

tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old

legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly

vivid picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the

witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses - in every case

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naive and simple backwoods folk - had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies

of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the

half-remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic

attributes.

The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the

present generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected

the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew it well, though I had never

been in Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which

embraces material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the

state. This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had

personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly

summarized, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked

somewhere among the remoter hills - in the deep woods of the highest peaks, and

the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources. These beings were

seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were reported by those who had

ventured farther than usual up the slopes of certain mountains or into certain

deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves shunned.

There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins and

barren patches, and curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn

away, which did not seem to have been placed or entirely shaped by Nature. There

were, too, certain caves of problematical depth in the sides of the hills; with

mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more than an

average quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away from them - if

indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. And worst of

all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen very rarely in the

twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense perpendicular woods above the

limits of normal hill-climbing.

It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these things had

not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumors had several points in

common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with

many pairs of legs and with two great batlike wings in the middle of the back.

They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair

only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one

occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading

along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined

formation. Once a specimen was seen flying - launching itself from the top of a

bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping

wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon

These things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone; though they

were at times held responsible for the disappearance of venturesome individuals

- especially persons who built houses too close to certain valleys or too high

up on certain mountains. Many localities came to be known as inadvisable to

settle in, the feeling persisting long after the cause was forgotten. People

would look up at some of the neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder,

even when not recalling how many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses

burnt to ashes, on the lower slopes of those grim, green sentinels.

But while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear to have

harmed only those trespassing on their privacy; there were later accounts of

their curiosity respecting men, and of their attempts to establish secret

outposts in the human world. There were tales of the queer claw-prints seen

around farmhouse windows in the morning, and of occasional disappearances in

regions outside the obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices

in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travelers on

roads and cart-paths in the deep woods, and of children frightened out of their

wits by things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their

door-yards. In the final layer of legends - the layer just preceding the decline

of superstition and the abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places -

there are shocked references to hermits and remote farmers who at some period of

life appeared to have undergone a repellent mental change, and who were shunned

and whispered about as mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In

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one of the northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse

eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or representatives of the

abhorred things.

As to what the things were - explanations naturally varied. The common name

applied to them was "those ones," or "the old ones," though other terms had a

local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan settlers set them down

bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of awed theological

speculation. Those with Celtic legendry in their heritage - mainly the

Scotch-Irish element of New Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled in

Vermont on Governor Wentworth's colonial grants - linked them vaguely with the

malign fairies and "little people" of the bogs and raths, and protected

themselves with scraps of incantation handed down through many generations. But

the Indians had the most fantastic theories of all. While different tribal

legends differed, there was a marked consensus of belief in certain vital

particulars; it being unanimously agreed that the creatures were not native to

this earth.

The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque, taught that

the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our

earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other

world. They did not live here, said the myths, but merely maintained outposts

and flew back with vast cargoes of stone to their own stars in the north. They

harmed only those earth-people who got too near them or spied upon them. Animals

shunned them through instinctive hatred, not because of being hunted. They could

not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food from the

stars. It was bad to get near them, and sometimes young hunters who went into

their hills never came back. It was not good, either, to listen to what they

whispered at night in the forest with voices like a bee's that tried to be like

the voices of men. They knew the speech of all kinds of men - Pennacooks,

Hurons, men of the Five Nations - but did not seem to have or need any speech of

their own. They talked with their heads, which changed colour in different ways

to mean different things.

All the legendry, of course, white and Indian alike, died down during the

nineteenth century, except for occasional atavistical flareups. The ways of the

Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths and dwellings were

established according to a certain fixed plan, they remembered less and less

what fears and avoidances had determined that plan, and even that there had been

any fears or avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly regions were

considered as highly unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally unlucky to live in,

and that the farther one kept from them the better off one usually was. In time

the ruts of custom and economic interest became so deeply cut in approved places

that there was no longer any reason for going outside them, and the haunted

hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design. Save during

infrequent local scares, only wonder-loving grandmothers and retrospective

nonagenarians ever whispered of beings dwelling in those hills; and even such

whispers admitted that there was not much to fear from those things now that

they were used to the presence of houses and settlements, and now that human

beings let their chosen territory severely alone.

All this I had long known from my reading, and from certain folk tales picked up

in New Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours began to appear, I could

easily guess what imaginative background had evolved them. I took great pains to

explain this to my friends, and was correspondingly amused when several

contentious souls continued to insist on a possible element of truth in the

reports. Such persons tried to point out that the early legends had a

significant persistence and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored nature

of the Vermont hills made it unwise to be dogmatic about what might or might not

dwell among them; nor could they be silenced by my assurance that all the myths

were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and determined by early

phases of imaginative experience which always produced the same type of

delusion.

It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths

differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural

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personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs,

suggested the kallikanzarai of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and Ireland

their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and

burrowers. No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief

of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who

lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits. When

I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming that

it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it must argue

the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the

advent and dominance of mankind, which might very conceivably have survived in

reduced numbers to relatively recent times - or even to the present.

The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends asseverated

them; adding that even without the heritage of legend the recent reports were

too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic in manner of telling, to be

completely ignored. Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at

possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a

nonterrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their

claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited the

earth. Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted on trying

to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking "little people" made

popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen.

As was only natural under the circumstances, this piquant debating finally got

into print in the form of letters to the Arkham Advertiser; some of which were

copied in the press of those Vermont regions whence the flood-stories came. The

Rutland Herald gave half a page of extracts from the letters on both sides,

while the Brattleboro Reformer reprinted one of my long historical and

mythological summaries in full, with some accompanying comments in "The

Pendrifter's" thoughtful column which supported and applauded my skeptical

conclusions. By the spring of 1928 I was almost a well-known figure in Vermont,

notwithstanding the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then came the

challenging letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly, and

which took me for the first and last time to that fascinating realm of crowded

green precipices and muttering forest streams.

Most of what I know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by correspondence

with his neighbours, and with his only son in California, after my experience in

his lonely farmhouse. He was, I discovered, the last representative on his home

soil of a long, locally distinguished line of jurists, administrators, and

gentlemen-agriculturists. In him, however, the family mentally had veered away

from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so that he had been a notable

student of mathematics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, and folklore at the

University of Vermont. I had never previously heard of him, and he did not give

many autobiographical details in his communications; but from the first I saw he

was a man of character, education, and intelligence, albeit a recluse with very

little worldly sophistication.

Despite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help at once

taking Akeley more seriously than I had taken any of the other challengers of my

views. For one thing, he was really close to the actual phenomena - visible and

tangible - that he speculated so grotesquely about; and for another thing, he

was amazingly willing to leave his conclusions in a tenative state like a true

man of science. He had no personal preferences to advance, and was always guided

by what he took to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him

mistaken, but gave him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at no time

did I emulate some of his friends in attributing his ideas, and his fear of the

lonely green hills, to insanity. I could see that there was a great deal to the

man, and knew that what he reported must surely come from strange circumstance

deserving investigation, however little it might have to do with the fantastic

causes he assigned. Later on I received from him certain material proofs which

placed the matter on a somewhat different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.

I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the long

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letter in which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed such an important

landmark in my own intellectual history. It is no longer in my possession, but

my memory holds almost every word of its portentous message; and again I affirm

my confidence in the sanity of the man who wrote it. Here is the text - a text

which reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had obviously

not mingled much with the world during his sedate, scholarly life.

R.F.D. #2,

Townshend, Windham Co., Vermont.

May 5,1928

Albert N. Wilmarth,Esq.,

118 Saltonstall St.,

Arkham, Mass.

My Dear Sir:

I have read with great interest the Brattleboro Reformer's reprint (Apr. 23,

'28) of your letter on the recent stories of strange bodies seen floating in

our flooded streams last fall, and on the curious folklore they so well agree

with. It is easy to see why an outlander would take the position you take, and

even why "Pendrifter" agrees with you. That is the attitude generally taken by

educated persons both in and out of Vermont, and was my own attitude as a

young man (I am now 57) before my studies, both general and in Davenport's

book, led me to do some exploring in parts of the hills hereabouts not usually

visited.

I was directed toward such studies by the queer old tales I used to hear from

elderly farmers of the more ignorant sort, but now I wish I had let the whole

matter alone. I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of

anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of

it at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as

Tylor, Lubbock, Frazer, Quatrefages, Murray, Osborn, Keith, Boule, G. Elliott

Smith, and so on. It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as

all mankind. I have seen the reprints of letters from you, and those agreeing

with you, in the Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where your controversy

stands at the present time.

What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are nearer

right than yourself, even though all reason seems to be on your side. They are

nearer right than they realise themselves - for of course they go only by

theory, and cannot know what I know. If I knew as little of the matter as

they, I would feel justified in believing as they do. I would be wholly on

your side.

You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point, probably

because I really dread getting to the point; but the upshot of the matter is

that I have certain evidence that monstrous things do indeed live in the woods

on the high hills which nobody visits. I have not seen any of the things

floating in the rivers, as reported, but I have seen things like them under

circumstances I dread to repeat. I have seen footprints, and of late have seen

them nearer my own home (I live in the old Akeley place south of Townshend

Village, on the side of Dark Mountain) than I dare tell you now. And I have

overheard voices in the woods at certain points that I will not even begin to

describe on paper.

At one place I heard them so much that I took a phonograph therewith a

dictaphone attachment and wax blank - and I shall try to arrange to have you

hear the record I got. I have run it on the machine for some of the old people

up here, and one of the voices had nearly scared them paralysed by reason of

its likeness to a certain voice (that buzzing voice in the woods which

Davenport mentions) that their grandmothers have told about and mimicked for

them. I know what most people think of a man who tells about "hearing voices"

- but before you draw conclusions just listen to this record and ask some of

the older backwoods people what they think of it. If you can account for it

normally, very well; but there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil

fit, you know.

Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument but to give you

information which I think a man of your tastes will find deeply interesting.

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This is private. Publicly I am on your side, for certain things show me that

it does not do for people to know too much about these matters. My own studies

are now wholly private, and I would not think of saying anything to attract

people's attention and cause them to visit the places I have explored. It is

true - terribly true - that there are non-human creatures watching us all the

time; with spies among us gathering information. It is from a wretched man

who, if he was sane (as I think he was) was one of those spies, that I got a

large part of my clues to the matter. He later killed himself, but I have

reason to think there are others now.

The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space

and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the

aether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them

about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at

once as a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under

the hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if

we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too curious

about them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony.

That is what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from

outside - any number of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have

not tried so far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave

things as they are to save bother.

I think they mean to get rid of me because of what I have discovered. There is

a great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in

the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything

became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or

take me off the earth to where they come from. They like to take away men of

learning once in a while, to keep informed on the state of things in the human

world.

This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing you - namely, to urge you

to hush up the present debate rather than give it more publicity. People must

be kept away from these hills, and in order to effect this, their curiosity

ought not to be aroused any further. Heaven knows there is peril enough

anyway, with promoters and real estate men flooding Vermont with herds of

summer people to overrun the wild places and cover the hills with cheap

bungalows.

I shall welcome further communication with you, and shall try to send you that

phonograph record and black stone (which is so worn that photographs don't

show much) by express if you are willing. I say "try" because I think those

creatures have a way of tampering with things around here. There is a sullen

furtive fellow named Brown, on a farm near the village, who I think is their

spy. Little by little they are trying to cut me off from our world because I

know too much about their world.

They have the most amazing way of finding out what I do. You may not even get

this letter. I think I shall have to leave this part of the country and go

live with my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get any worse, but it is not

easy to give up the place you were born in, and where your family has lived

for six generations. Also, I would hardly dare sell this house to anybody now

that the creatures have taken notice of it. They seem to be trying to get the

black stone back and destroy the phonograph record, but I shall not let them

if I can help it. My great police dogs always hold them back, for there are

very few here as yet, and they are clumsy in getting about. As I have said,

their wings are not much use for short flights on earth. I am on the very

brink of deciphering that stone - in a very terrible way - and with your

knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply the missing links enough to

help me. I suppose you know all about the fearful myths antedating the coming

of man to the earth - the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles - which are hinted at

in the Necronomicon. I had access to a copy of that once, and hear that you

have one in your college library under lock and key.

To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies we can be

very useful to each other. I don't wish to put you in any peril, and suppose I

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ought to warn you that possession of the stone and the record won't be very

safe; but I think you will find any risks worth running for the sake of

knowledge. I will drive down to Newfane or Brattleboro to send whatever you

authorize me to send, for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I

might say that I live quite alone now, since I can't keep hired help any more.

They won't stay because of the things that try to get near the house at night,

and that keep the dogs barking continually. I am glad I didn't get as deep as

this into the business while my wife was alive, for it would have driven her

mad.

Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, and that you will decide to get in

touch with me rather than throw this letter into the waste basket as a

madman's raving, I am

Yrs. very truly,

Henry W. Akeley

P.S. I am making some extra prints of certain photographs taken by me, which I

think will help to prove a number of the points I have touched on. The old

people think they are monstrously true. I shall send you these very soon if

you are interested.

H. W. A.

It would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this strange

document for the first time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to have laughed more

loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder theories which had

previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the tone of the letter made me

take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not that I believed for a moment in the

hidden race from the stars which my correspondent spoke of; but that, after some

grave preliminary doubts, I grew to feel oddly sure of his sanity and sincerity,

and of his confrontation by some genuine though singular and abnormal phenomenon

which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could not be as he

thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand, it could not be otherwise than

worthy of investigation. The man seemed unduly excited and alarmed about

something, but it was hard to think that all cause was lacking. He was so

specific and logical in certain ways - and after all, his yarn did fit in so

perplexingly well with some of the old myths - even the wildest Indian legends.

That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had really

found the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible despite the crazy

inferences he had made - inferences probably suggested by the man who had

claimed to be a spy of the outer beings and had later killed himself. It was

easy to deduce that this man must have been wholly insane, but that he probably

had a streak of perverse outward logic which made the naive Akeley - already

prepared for such things by his folklore studies - believe his tale. As for the

latest developments - it appeared from his inability to keep hired help that

Akeley's humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced as he that his house was

besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked, too.

And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but believe he

had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something; whether animal noises

deceptively like human speech, or the speech of some hidden, night-haunting

human being decayed to a state not much above that of lower animals. From this

my thoughts went back to the black hieroglyphed stone, and to speculations upon

what it might mean. Then, too, what of the photographs which Akeley said he was

about to send, and which the old people had found so convincingly terrible?

As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my credulous

opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded. After all, there

might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those shunned

hills, even though no such race of star-born monsters as folklore claimed. And

if there were, then the presence of strange bodies in the flooded streams would

not be wholly beyond belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose that both the

old legends and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them? But

even as I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a piece of

bizarrerie as Henry Akeley's wild letter had brought them up.

In the end I answered Akeley's letter, adopting a tone of friendly interest and

soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by return mail; and

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file:///G|/rah/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Whisperer%20in%20Darkness.txtTheWhispererinDarknessbyH.P.LovecraftTheWhispererinDarknessbyH.P.LovecraftWritten24Feb-26Sept1930PublishedAugust1931inWeirdTales,Vol.18,No.1,p.32-73IBearinmindcloselythatIdidnotseeanyactualvisualhorrorattheend.Tosaythatame...

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H. P. Lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness.pdf

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H. P. Lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness

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