Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved вЂ“ 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.

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. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumors. 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. 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 was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last. 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. 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. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. For after all Akeley's disappearance establishes nothing. 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. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred вЂ“ 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 вЂ“ is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience.

Howard Lovecraft: The Whisperer in Darkness

The whisperer in darkness