May-Eve

May-Eve is the date Henry Wentworth Akeley selected to investigate reports of voices in the Vermont woods, and it became the occasion for his most unsettling recording. Its importance lies in the meeting of old European folklore and new mechanical evidence: Akeley chose the night because he expected it to be unusually fruitful, then obtained voices that seemed to resist an ordinary explanation.

Date and Folkloric Background

Akeley made the recording at about one o’clock in the morning on May 1, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave on the wooded western slope of Dark Mountain, where it rises from Lee’s Swamp. The location was already known for unusually frequent voices. Drawing on his prior experience, Akeley judged May-Eve—the night associated in underground European legend with a Sabbat—to be more likely than other dates to produce results. The choice was therefore deliberate: folklore supplied a timetable for fieldwork, rather than merely an interpretation imposed after the fact.

The Recording

Akeley brought a phonograph, a dictaphone attachment, and a blank wax cylinder to capture what might be heard. The machines did not work consistently, and the voices were remote and muffled, leaving the recorded speech fragmentary. Even so, Akeley considered the result significant enough to prepare a transcript of what he believed had been said. The recording later reached Albert N. Wilmarth, who listened to it as part of his effort to assess Akeley’s claims.

Voices and Uncertainty

The recorded exchange had a quasi-ritualistic character. One voice sounded palpably human, but Akeley could not identify its speaker; he judged it not to be Walter Brown’s and thought it belonged to a more cultivated man. The second voice was the recording’s central puzzle: it produced human words in grammatical English and a scholarly accent, yet its buzzing quality seemed wholly unlike a human voice. The imperfect recording left room for uncertainty about what had spoken, even as its peculiar contrast gave Akeley grounds to insist that the sound warranted attention.

Significance

May-Eve connects a specific investigation to a much older body of legend. Akeley’s expectation rested on folklore, but the phonograph transformed the night’s sounds into a record that could be circulated and heard by others. That mediation did not settle their origin: the apparatus preserved fragments, not a complete or independently explained account. May-Eve thus marks both the success of Akeley’s attempt to capture the voices and the limit of what the captured evidence could establish.