Wingate Peaslee

Wingate Peaslee is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s second son, the one family member who held fast to the possibility that the father who awoke in a changed state in 1908 would return. His steadfastness outlasts that estrangement: after Nathaniel’s recovery, Wingate seeks him out, helps him with his studies, and later accompanies him on the Australian expedition. In 1935, when his father’s fear turns him away from the expedition’s work, Wingate offers practical assistance but does not agree to abandon the expedition with him.

Identity and Family

When Nathaniel underwent his strange change, the altered mind, voice, and expression provoked terror and repulsion in his family. Wingate, then only eight, also felt that his father was a stranger, but unlike Nathaniel’s wife and other children, he continued to believe that his proper self would return. He was the only one of the children who overcame that fear sufficiently to hold on to the relationship.

After Nathaniel returned to normalcy in 1913, Wingate sought him out. The courts gave Nathaniel custody of him, and in the following years Wingate helped his father with the studies to which Nathaniel had been driven. At thirty-five, Wingate is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic University. His intellectual companionship thus grows out of an earlier act of trust: he accepted the possibility of his father’s return when the rest of the family could not.

Companion and Assistant in Australia

Wingate joined Nathaniel on the 1935 expedition to investigate reported ruins in Australia, traveling with the university party and accompanying his father into a landscape that intensified Nathaniel’s disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories. His role became especially important after Nathaniel returned to camp in a panicked, bedraggled state and urged that digging toward the northeast stop. Although Nathaniel’s reasons were weak and the rest of the party did not heed his request, Wingate showed obvious concern for his health.

The following day, Nathaniel took no part in the excavations and asked Wingate to fly him to Perth, a thousand miles to the southwest, as soon as Wingate had surveyed the terrain his father wanted left undisturbed. Wingate made the survey by air that afternoon, covering the ground Nathaniel could have traversed on foot. The shifting sand had erased every trace of what Nathaniel believed he had found, leaving him unable to make the specific warning he had contemplated. Wingate’s actions helped establish what was—and was not—still visible, even though they could not resolve his father’s experience.

Separation and Trust

Wingate took Nathaniel to Perth on July 20 but declined to abandon the expedition and return home with him. He stayed with his father until July 25, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. The decision marks a limit to his assistance: he accompanies and cares for Nathaniel, but remains committed to the expedition rather than making the same journey home.

Alone aboard the ship, Nathaniel decides that Wingate at least must be informed about what happened during his absence from camp, and leaves it to his son whether the account should be circulated more widely. Wingate is therefore not merely a companion in the field but the person Nathaniel chooses to receive his account and decide its further reach. The relationship that began in childhood faith becomes, in adulthood, a channel for a secret Nathaniel cannot yet confidently present to the world.