Phonograph record

The Phonograph record is a wax recording made by Henry Wentworth Akeley near Dark Mountain and sent to Albert N. Wilmarth as evidence of voices in the Vermont woods. Its fragmentary sounds turn folklore into something that can be replayed and compared: a human voice and an inhuman buzzing voice seem to speak together, and the latter is later recognized in the farmhouse. Yet the record never resolves the question of proof. It is a tangible trace, but one whose source and meaning remain open to dispute.

Recording and Contents

Akeley made the recording with a phonograph, a dictaphone attachment, and a wax blank after hearing repeated voices at a particular woodland site. He played it for local older people; one voice frightened them because it resembled the buzzing sound remembered from stories passed down by their grandmothers. The recording thus linked a recent, repeatable sound to older local accounts rather than relying on Akeley’s description alone.

The record was made at about one in the morning on May 1, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave on the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain, rising out of Lee’s Swamp. Akeley chose May-Eve because his earlier experience suggested that this night would be especially likely to yield results. The voices were never heard again at that particular spot, making the recording a singular capture rather than part of a series of repeatable observations.

Akeley described the sound as a quasi-ritual exchange. One voice was palpably human, cultivated in manner, and unidentified; Akeley said it was not Walter Brown’s. The other was the recording’s decisive anomaly: a buzzing voice unlike a human voice in sound, yet apparently speaking English with grammatical correctness and a scholarly accent. What survives is only fragmentary speech, not a complete or reliably recoverable account of the exchange.

Circulation and Interpretation

Akeley sent the record to Albert N. Wilmarth along with explanatory letters and photographic views. Before playing it on a commercial machine borrowed from the college administration building, Wilmarth reviewed Akeley’s account of how it had been obtained. That sequence matters: the sound reached him already accompanied by a proposed interpretation, but it could also be heard apart from Akeley’s immediate presence and replayed for comparison.

Wilmarth had reasons to hesitate. Akeley’s letters described extraordinary beings and secret activity, while the record itself was muffled and incomplete. The phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well, and their distance from the voices further reduced the amount of speech captured. The medium preserved enough to suggest a startling sound, but not enough to eliminate ordinary explanations or make the exchange fully intelligible.

The record’s circulation nevertheless gave it force beyond Akeley’s private testimony. Akeley had already played it for older local listeners, who connected one of its voices with inherited stories. After Wilmarth’s escape, country people likewise said that the buzzing voice on the record resembled the voice described in ancestral legends. These reactions support the record’s importance as a shared point of reference, while remaining testimony about resemblance rather than independent proof of what produced the sound.

Recognition at the Farmhouse

The record acquires a further significance when a mechanical voice speaking through a speech machine tells Wilmarth that Noyes was one of the voices on it. The speaker identifies Noyes as an ally of the visitors and connects him to the guide who had driven Wilmarth to Akeley’s farmhouse. The recording therefore does more than suggest an inhuman presence: in the speaker’s account, it also carries evidence of a human connection to that presence.

Later, while in the farmhouse, Wilmarth hears several voices from the study below. He identifies two as the same general kind of buzzing sound he had heard on Akeley’s record, though different in pitch, accent, and tempo. He also recognizes a mechanical voice like the one that had spoken to him through the machines the previous evening, and identifies another voice as Noyes’s. The record functions here as an acoustic benchmark: it has prepared Wilmarth to recognize a sound, but recognition does not by itself establish who is speaking or what has happened to Akeley.

Evidence, Failure, and Doubt

After fleeing, Wilmarth considers the possibility that Akeley conspired with eccentric associates to stage a hoax, including the possibility that Noyes made a wax record. He does not accept that explanation as sufficient, but the possibility remains part of the record’s unresolved status. A sheriff’s search finds no cylinders or machines and none of the evidence Wilmarth says he brought away; the farmhouse yields no straightforward confirmation of the voices he reports.

Other traces keep the record from being dismissed easily. During a week of inquiries in Brattleboro, Wilmarth finds that Akeley’s purchases of dogs, ammunition, and chemicals, and his cutting of the telephone wires, are matters of record. Local people also report having seen Akeley’s photographs and black stone and having heard the record. Their accounts align the recording with a wider pattern of suspicious sounds and sights around the farmhouse, though they do not settle whether those accounts are accurate.

The Phonograph record’s central tension is between reproducibility and uncertainty. It can be transported, played again, and compared with voices heard later; unlike a remembered sound, it offers a material object through which listeners can test their impressions. But the recording is technically imperfect, its speech is fragmentary, and its existence cannot alone prove Akeley’s explanation. It makes the uncanny audible without making it conclusive.