Albert Wilmarth
Albert N. Wilmarth is the narrator of The Whisperer in Darkness, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University and an amateur investigator of New England folklore. His correspondence with Henry Wentworth Akeley draws him from public skepticism into a private encounter with the beings associated with Yuggoth. The story follows not only what he learns, but how documents, technical evidence and an apparently trustworthy host influence his judgment.
6 min read · 1,241 words
Profession and initial position
Wilmarth identifies himself as a teacher of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham. His interest in folklore gives him a reason to study regional traditions without making him a professional zoologist, physician or astronomer.
Reports following the Vermont floods of November 1927 bring his interests into public discussion. People claim to have seen strange bodies carried down from the hills, and friends ask him to interpret the accounts. He initially treats them as renewed expressions of older local legends.
His skepticism is active and publicly argued. He believes that resemblance between the reports can be explained by shared folklore rather than by a real population of unknown beings. The later encounter is disturbing partly because it undermines an explanation he has already defended.
Why Akeley’s correspondence matters
Akeley approaches him as an educated resident of the affected region. His letter does not simply demand belief in every newspaper rumor. It offers specific observations and asks that public curiosity be discouraged because exploration of the hills may be dangerous.
This combination appeals to Wilmarth. The correspondent appears able to distinguish evidence from sensationalism, and his account promises access to objects and recordings that could be examined separately from the testimony.
Their relationship gradually becomes personal. Wilmarth begins to consider Akeley a friend in distress, although they have not met. That trust later makes the physical appearance of the farmhouse host seem like the confirmation of an established relationship.
Photographs, recordings and the missing stone
The investigation moves through different kinds of media. Photographs show unusual tracks and other features of Akeley’s surroundings. A phonograph record captures a ceremony involving human and unfamiliar voices. A carved black stone is intended as another piece of evidence, but does not reach Wilmarth as planned.
The recording is particularly important because it seems to preserve an event independently of the recorder’s written account. Yet interpretation still requires decisions about speakers, authenticity and context. A technical recording does not automatically explain what it contains.
As correspondence is lost or interfered with, the difficulty of keeping evidence becomes part of the threat. Wilmarth is not accumulating a stable public archive. He is receiving fragments through a route that may already be monitored.
Responding to a siege
Akeley’s later messages describe attacks on his dogs, severed communications and increasing pressure from the beings and their human associates. The reports change the relationship from a scholarly exchange into an apparent emergency.
Wilmarth urges practical escape and considers how to help. His distance limits his ability to judge the situation, while the same distance allows the besieged man to keep communicating with someone outside the immediate area.
The letters also place Wilmarth in an uncomfortable position. Treating them as delusion might abandon a threatened friend; accepting every claim might draw him into the same danger. His eventual failure is not simply an inability to recognize that anything unusual exists, but a misjudgment about the intentions of those who control access to it.
The reassuring reversal
A final, unexpectedly composed letter announces that the conflict arose from misunderstanding. The beings are presented as friendly bearers of extraordinary knowledge. Wilmarth is invited to visit and bring the letters, photographs and phonograph record with him.
The change troubles him, but he finds ways to accept it. A direct response to his telegram seems to authenticate the invitation, even though delivery to Akeley’s address cannot by itself establish who controls the house or the reply.
He does exercise some caution. Instead of arriving late at night on the suggested train, he arranges a daytime arrival in Brattleboro on September 12, 1928. This small adjustment shows that curiosity and unease coexist throughout his decision.
Noyes and the journey to the farmhouse
A man calling himself Noyes meets him at the station and explains that Akeley is too ill to come. Wilmarth notices that the car differs from the older vehicle he expected and that this conveniently available friend seems surprising for so isolated a man.
He nevertheless accepts the explanation and enters the car. The countryside’s appearance deepens his unease, but landscape and intuition provide no decisive reason to reject the visit.
Noyes’s role is practical as well as atmospheric. He controls the visitor’s first route into the hills and supplies an explanation for the host’s absence. Wilmarth’s encounter is therefore mediated before he ever enters the study.
The apparent Akeley
In the darkened room, Wilmarth recognizes the face he has studied in a photograph. The host sits almost motionless, wrapped in clothing and a yellow scarf, and speaks in a difficult whisper. Illness appears to explain the stiffness, immobility and failure to rise.
The conversation offers an enormous expansion of knowledge: Yuggoth, older extraterrestrial civilizations and a method of traveling beyond the limits of the human body. Cylinders and associated instruments appear to demonstrate that the promises rest on workable technology.
Wilmarth is attracted by these possibilities while remaining physically repelled by the room’s atmosphere. The conflicting responses matter. The tale does not present intellectual curiosity as something that disappears once fear begins; it makes curiosity one of the forces that keeps him in the house.
The cylinder demonstration
A container marked B-67 speaks through the apparatus and describes its experience. The supposed host explains that brains can be preserved separately from bodies and connected to devices for sight, hearing and speech.
For Wilmarth, the demonstration turns an abstract proposition into an apparent conversation with a traveler. It also conceals the central problem of control: the person in a cylinder depends on others to connect the instruments and transport the container.
A fresh cylinder carrying Akeley’s name receives a different explanation and is set aside. The later discovery of that same container, with sensory devices attached, is one of the clues that forces Wilmarth to reinterpret the visit.
Night voices and escape
Unable to rest securely, Wilmarth hears a nocturnal discussion involving several voices and unfamiliar movements. He considers the possibility that his friend has been manipulated into bringing him and the evidence to the house.
Downstairs he finds Noyes asleep where he expected Akeley. In the study, the named cylinder has sight and hearing equipment attached but its speech mechanism is disconnected. Wilmarth briefly considers connecting it, then retreats from the experiment.
The chair is empty except for clothing and the objects that complete the story’s revelation: Akeley’s apparent face and hands. Wilmarth flees in the old Ford and reaches Townshend. His failure to activate the cylinder leaves an important question unresolved within his own experience.
A narrator who survives without certainty
Wilmarth later reports that investigators did not recover the crucial objects. His account consequently depends on testimony about evidence that has vanished. He acknowledges periods of doubt and the possibility that others will attribute his experience to disturbed nerves or delusion.
His hope that the face and hands were artificial does not cancel his fear that they were something worse. The ending preserves that distinction instead of presenting a medical examination of the remains or a confirmed statement from Akeley’s brain.
Wilmarth survives, but he cannot restore the confident interpretive position with which he began. He has seen enough to distrust ordinary appearances while lacking enough recoverable evidence to settle all questions of identity. That unstable position is the lasting consequence of his investigation.
References
- The Whisperer in Darkness — original text
The fictional narrative is evidence for what the story says, not proof of events in the real world.
At a glance
Albert N. Wilmarth
The Whisperer in Darkness
Instructor of literature, Miskatonic University
New England folklore
Henry Wentworth Akeley
September 12, 1928
First-person witness and survivor