Akeley's phonograph recording

Akeley's phonograph recording is a damaged, fragmentary record of voices heard in the Vermont woods, and its importance lies in the gap between what its speech says and what its sound seems to prove. Made by Henry Wentworth Akeley near Dark Mountain, it gives Albert N. Wilmarth a piece of mediated evidence that is at once reproducible and deeply difficult to explain: one voice sounds human, while another speaks intelligible English in a buzzing voice that Wilmarth regards as outside the range of human life.

Recording and Transmission

Akeley made the recording 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, above Lee’s Swamp. The location had been associated with strange voices, and Akeley brought a phonograph, a dictaphone attachment, and a wax blank because he expected the voices to be more frequent on May-Eve. His expectation was informed by earlier experience; the recording captured voices, but he never heard them again at that particular site.

The equipment did not record consistently. The voices were distant and muffled, leaving only fragments of the apparent ritual. Akeley sent Albert N. Wilmarth a transcript of the words as he understood them, along with the record. Its route mattered to Akeley: he drove to Brattleboro to ship it, and later said that the lonely roads frightened him and that he would travel to Townshend only in daylight. His caution around the recording was part of a wider fear that curiosity about the beings in the hills could attract danger.

Wilmarth first played the record on a commercial machine borrowed from a college administration building. Beforehand, he reviewed Akeley’s letters and transcript; during playback, he found that the audible fragments corresponded to the written version. The record was therefore not an isolated sound but one element in a chain of testimony: Akeley’s account, his transcription, the physical recording, and Wilmarth’s own listening.

The Voices on the Record

The first voice was a cultivated male human voice, which Akeley could not identify. It was not Walter Brown’s and seemed to Akeley to belong to a more educated man. When Wilmarth heard it, he thought its mellow, educated sound vaguely Bostonian and unlike the voice of a native of the Vermont hills. Its words invoked a succession of supernatural figures and ended with praise of the Black Goat of the Woods. The recording breaks off during the human voice’s speech.

A second voice responds to the human speaker. Its words are grammatically correct English, but its sound is what makes the record disturbing to Wilmarth. Akeley described it as a buzzing imitation of human speech; Wilmarth likewise understood the words while finding the voice itself inhuman. He could not reduce its timbre, range, and overtones to a human or mammalian voice. The contrast makes the recording’s central uncertainty audible: the speaker can participate in human language without sounding like a human speaker.

The old people to whom Akeley played the record were nearly paralyzed with fright at one voice’s resemblance to the buzzing voice preserved in regional stories. Those traditions had described voices in the woods that imitated human speech, and the record seemed to connect those inherited accounts to a contemporary, captured sound. It did not make the recording complete or self-explanatory; its remote, muffled fragments left gaps even as its recognizable voices sharpened the question of who, or what, had spoken.

Evidence, Interpretation, and Limits

The recording changed Wilmarth’s response to Akeley’s claims. He had already been cautious about the photographs and the black stone, but hearing the cylinder gave him a firsthand impression he could not dismiss as readily as a written report. He played it repeatedly and made extensive attempts to analyze it, comparing notes with Akeley. Their discussions led them to suspect ancient, elaborate alliances between hidden nonhuman beings and some humans, and to connect the rites heard on the record with obscure religious customs. They could not determine how widespread such alliances were, either in the past or in their own time.

The record’s evidentiary force remained inseparable from its limitations. Its fragmentary transmission left portions of the ritual indistinct, and Wilmarth recognized that other listeners might dismiss the sound as imposture or madness. Photographs Akeley sent had offered a different kind of mediation: images that Wilmarth considered suggestive and authentic. In Akeley’s account, a creature’s body could not be made visible on developed film, whereas the voices left a trace that the phonograph could replay. The record thus stood out not as a complete demonstration, but as a mechanical trace whose peculiarities resisted easy explanation.

The recording also became part of the danger surrounding the investigation. Akeley later warned Wilmarth to destroy it, while continuing to report threats and strange activity. Yet the record had already passed from the isolated hillside to Brattleboro and then to Wilmarth’s borrowed machine, carrying the voices into a setting where they could be heard again. Akeley’s letters were eventually lost, leaving Wilmarth’s memory of the playback and the cylinder’s reported contents as parts of an incomplete record of the encounter.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The object gives sound a role that testimony and visual evidence cannot quite perform. Akeley’s written claims can be doubted, and the voices’ words can be transcribed, but neither fully conveys the acoustic difference that unnerves Wilmarth. The record makes that difference repeatable while leaving its source unseen. Its authority comes from mechanical preservation; its uncertainty comes from the same technology’s failure to capture a clear, complete performance.

In this way, Akeley's phonograph recording links local folklore to a concealed present without resolving the boundary between them. The old stories of buzzing voices acquire a material counterpart, but the recording does not identify the human speaker, establish the full meaning of the rite, or prove the larger cosmology Wilmarth and Akeley infer from it. What it preserves is narrower and more unsettling: two voices, one recognizably human and one intelligible yet alien in sound, joined in a ritual that makes the Vermont woods seem connected to something beyond ordinary human society.