Henry Wentworth Akeley’s disappearance is the climax of Albert N. Wilmarth’s visit to the Vermont farmhouse: Akeley is gone, his sickroom clothes remain behind, and the objects left in his chair appear to be perfect copies of his face and hands. The later search finds no machines, cylinders, or other decisive proof. The event converts a mounting investigation into an escape from a mystery whose physical clues point toward substitution but cannot explain what happened to Akeley himself.

Causes and Warning Signs

The disappearance follows a chain of evidence that has made ordinary explanations increasingly difficult to sustain. Earlier accounts of strange beings in the hills describe claw-prints near farmhouse windows, disappearances beyond haunted regions, and buzzing voices that imitate human speech. Some legends also tell of remote people who undergo a disturbing mental change and are then suspected of becoming allies of the beings. The stories do not prove what has happened to Akeley, but they make the possibility of human collaboration part of the surrounding folklore rather than a new idea introduced at the moment of crisis.

Akeley’s own investigations have supplied more immediate warnings. On May-Eve in 1915, near a cave on the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain, he recorded a gathering whose fragmentary speech included a cultivated human voice and a second, buzzing voice. The latter spoke grammatical English, but its sound seemed unmistakably unlike a human voice. The ritual words praised Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, and Shub-Niggurath. When the mechanical speaker later identifies Noyes as one of the voices on that record, the recording becomes a link between the local legends and a network of people allied with the Outside Beings.

The setting also carries the residue of Akeley’s fear. He had written that the lonely roads frightened him and that he would travel to Townshend for supplies only in broad daylight. He was considering leaving Vermont to live with his son in California, though ancestral memories made departure difficult. These details make his eventual absence especially charged: he had contemplated leaving, but the circumstances of his disappearance do not establish that he left by choice.

The Empty Chair and Wilmarth’s Escape

Before the disappearance is confirmed by a search, Wilmarth hears a machine with tubes and a sound-box speak in a loud, metallic, deliberately mechanical voice. The speaker claims to be a human being whose brain is in a cylinder, while his body rests under treatment inside Round Hill. He says he has travelled to thirty-seven celestial bodies, including places beyond the galaxy and beyond the familiar space-time cosmos, and invites Wilmarth to accompany him and Akeley on another journey. He also identifies Noyes as a longtime ally of the visitors. The offer makes Akeley’s apparent cooperation seem plausible, but it comes from a voice whose claims Wilmarth cannot independently verify.

After the speech ends, Wilmarth turns his flashlight toward the corner where he expects Akeley to be and finds the great easy-chair empty. Akeley’s dressing-gown trails from the seat; his yellow scarf and heavy foot-bandages lie on the floor nearby. The strange odour and sense of vibration that Wilmarth had associated with Akeley’s presence have vanished as well. The room offers no body and no visible explanation for the abandoned garments. Wilmarth’s startled cry and Noyes’s continuing snore are the last sounds he hears in the farmhouse.

Wilmarth manages to leave without waking Noyes. He takes his flashlight, valise, and revolver, reaches the old Ford in the shed, and drives through the moonless night until he arrives at Townshend. His escape ends the immediate encounter, not the uncertainty: he has fled without establishing whether Akeley was taken, departed, or replaced.

The Objects in the Chair

On looking back toward the vacant chair, Wilmarth notices three objects partly concealed among the folds of the dressing-gown. Their appearance is not itself horrifying; what unsettles him is what they imply. They are described as skilfully made constructions, equipped with metallic clamps intended to attach them to organic structures. Wilmarth cannot settle whether they are wax works or something more disturbing, and the account does not identify the material or explain how the clamps were meant to be used.

The objects are the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley, reproduced down to minute details that seem almost identical to the originals. This discovery makes the empty clothes more than evidence of a sudden departure: together, the garments and likenesses suggest that Akeley’s appearance may have been copied or shed. Yet the suggestion remains an inference. The objects reveal no destination, no perpetrator, and no account of what became of the living man.

Search and Conflicting Accounts

After Wilmarth reports what happened, a sheriff’s posse searches the farmhouse. Akeley is gone without a trace. His dressing-gown, yellow scarf, and foot-bandages are found near the easy-chair, and investigators note missing dogs and livestock, along with bullet-holes in the exterior and some interior walls. Beyond these signs, the search turns up none of the cylinders or machines, none of the evidence Wilmarth had brought in his valise, no unusual odour or vibration, and no footprints in the road. The objects in the chair are also absent by the time investigators arrive.

Wilmarth remains in Brattleboro for a week and asks people who knew Akeley about him. His inquiries support the reality of Akeley’s unusual preparations: purchases of dogs, ammunition, and chemicals, as well as the cutting of his telephone wires, are matters of record. People who knew Akeley, including his son in California, acknowledge that his occasional remarks about strange studies had a certain consistency. These circumstances do not prove the supernatural explanation, but they make it harder to dismiss the episode as an invention without any basis in Akeley’s life.

The accounts divide along social lines. Respectable townspeople consider Akeley mad and treat the evidence as an elaborate hoax, possibly aided by eccentric associates. Country people who had seen his photographs and black stone or heard the record instead affirm details that resemble the ancestral stories of footprints and buzzing voices. The disagreement preserves the central ambiguity: the search removes the physical evidence, while local testimony and documented preparations keep the disappearance from collapsing into a simple fabrication.

An Unresolved Substitution

The event’s force lies in the mismatch between what is found and what can be known. The abandoned garments and precise face-and-hand likenesses suggest a bodily substitution; the mechanical voice and Noyes’s concealed allegiance make cooperation with the Outside Beings conceivable; and the missing animals and bullet-holes imply disturbance at the farmhouse. None of these clues establishes Akeley’s fate. Even the later search, which confirms his absence and the clothes left behind, finds no object capable of resolving the case.

The story presents that uncertainty through Wilmarth’s compromised evidence: a recording gathered at a remote cave, a machine speaking for an unseen person, a chair emptied during a visit, and crucial objects seen by the escapee but not recovered by investigators. The clues accumulate, then disappear. Akeley’s absence is therefore not a confirmed death or a documented departure, but an unresolved break in identity and presence—one that leaves Wilmarth convinced that human emissaries may be entangled with the beings in the hills while denying him proof that could settle the matter.