The strange creature sightings during the November 3, 1927 Vermont flood are the opening disturbance in Albert N. Wilmarth’s inquiry into the hidden beings of Vermont’s hills. Reports of unfamiliar shapes in the floodwaters seem at first to invite a folklorist’s explanation: Wilmarth dismisses them as ordinary bodies transformed by fear and inherited legend. Their unusual consistency, however, and what he learns from Henry Wentworth Akeley make the reports harder to set aside without ever resolving exactly what the witnesses saw.

The Flood Reports

Wilmarth recalls that he was teaching literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham and studying New England folklore when the unprecedented floods struck on November 3, 1927. News accounts of hardship and relief were soon joined by stories of strange things in the swollen rivers. Friends asked him to explain the reports, and he initially welcomed the attention as a sign that his folkloric expertise was valued. He treated the stories as a likely outgrowth of rustic superstition rather than evidence of an unknown creature. The reports, gathered mostly from newspaper clippings, appeared to reduce to three incidents: one near Montpelier on the Winooski River, one on the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and one on the Passumpsic River in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. In each place, country witnesses described bizarre forms carried in waters rushing down from remote hills. The accounts shared enough features that Wilmarth found the agreement notable, though he also suspected that a common stock of local legends had shaped what people thought they saw. The reported forms were pinkish, roughly five feet long, and unlike any human body or known Vermont animal, according to the witnesses. They were described as crustacean-like, with broad dorsal fins or membranous wings, several sets of articulated limbs, and a convoluted, antenna-covered ellipsoid where a head would ordinarily be. Wilmarth’s first explanation was that the witnesses had glimpsed battered, bloated human beings or farm animals in the currents and read fantastic features into them. The flood’s real human dead made misidentification seem plausible to him; the shared shape of the reports was the fact that explanation had to account for.

The Legends Behind the Sightings

Wilmarth’s interpretation was shaped by the folklore he had studied before ever visiting Vermont. An exceedingly rare monograph by Eli Davenport preserved oral material collected among elderly Vermont residents before 1839, and its traditions resembled stories Wilmarth had heard from older people in the mountains of New Hampshire. They described a hidden race in remote highlands: beings associated with deep woods, shadowed valleys, steep gorges, and the headwaters of little-known streams. The flood reports therefore arrived in a landscape already imagined as inhabited, even though most residents no longer knew the origins of their customary avoidance of certain hills. The older accounts accumulated physical signs as well as stories. They spoke of claw-like prints in mud, circles of stones with the surrounding grass worn away, and caves whose entrances seemed to have been closed deliberately with boulders. Other reports described huge, light-red crab-like creatures with many legs and two bat-like wings rising from their backs. Some allegedly carried objects with their forelimbs, travelled in disciplined groups through woodland water, or launched from a hill and disappeared into the night sky. These details resemble the flood witnesses’ descriptions, but the resemblance could support either Wilmarth’s suspicion that folklore had supplied a template or the possibility that the legends preserved observations of something real. The traditions also changed over time. In the earliest versions, the beings seemed to punish intrusions into their secluded territory; later stories attributed to them an interest in people beyond the most feared locations. Tales described clawprints near farmhouse windows, disappearances, and buzzing voices imitating human speech and making offers to solitary travellers. Some remote farmers and hermits were said to have undergone disturbing mental changes and were accused of serving as allies or representatives of the hidden beings. Such stories kept the hills socially marked as dangerous even after the specific fears behind local settlement patterns had largely faded. Different communities explained the beings in different terms. Some settlers treated them as devils’ familiars; people with Celtic traditions associated them with malign fairies and little people. Pennacook myths, as Wilmarth recounts them, called them the Winged Ones and placed their home among the northern stars. They supposedly maintained earthly outposts to mine a kind of stone unavailable elsewhere, harmed people who approached or spied on them, and spoke in human languages with buzzing voices rather than needing a language of their own. The myths thus supplied a strikingly specific account of remote mines, offworld origins, and dangerous curiosity—ideas Wilmarth initially regarded as familiar products of human imagination.

From Dismissal to Unease

By the nineteenth century, these stories had mostly receded from ordinary conversation. Settlements and habitual routes followed established patterns; people continued to regard certain hills as unhealthy, unprofitable, or unlucky without remembering why. Avoidance had become custom, leaving the remote places deserted as much by habit and economic interest as by conscious fear. Against that background, Wilmarth saw the flood stories as a revival of old material: witnesses encountering ambiguous bodies in a disaster and unconsciously giving them the shapes supplied by inherited tales. He argued that such hidden-race legends were not unique to Vermont. Similar stories of supernatural or prehuman inhabitants appeared in traditions elsewhere, and Wilmarth cited the Himalayan Mi-Go as a particularly close parallel. His skeptical case was that recurring myths could arise from common patterns of human imagination, not that every culture had independently recorded the same actual beings. His opponents answered that the persistence and similarity of the accounts, combined with the little-explored Vermont hills, made certainty premature. Their disagreement established the event’s central tension: the same resemblance between folklore and eyewitness report could be treated as evidence of suggestion or as a reason to take the reports seriously. Akeley’s later letters gradually unsettled Wilmarth’s confidence. Akeley said he had heard voices in the woods near his home on Dark Mountain, found footprints, and recorded one of the voices with a phonograph and dictaphone. The recording, made near a cave on May-Eve in 1915, contained a human voice and a second, buzzing voice that spoke grammatical English. Akeley also sent photographs; one showed a claw-like print in a mud patch, with pebbles and grass blades providing a clear indication of scale. Those objects did not establish that the flood witnesses had seen the same thing, but they made Wilmarth reconsider whether every resemblance could be explained away as folklore. Akeley’s subsequent account brought the uncertainty closer to physical contact. He reported that a dog had killed one of the beings and that he had found its body near the kennel. He tried to preserve it as proof, but it evaporated within hours; his attempt to photograph it yielded an image of the woodshed without the creature. Akeley described a crab-like form with fleshy rings, feelers, and sticky green fluid, and reported that Walter Brown had gone missing. The body’s disappearance and failure to register on film withheld the durable evidence that might have settled the matter. The episode echoed the flood reports’ central difficulty: witnesses claimed to have encountered material forms, yet the expected object of verification vanished or could not be recorded.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The flood sightings matter less as a solved episode than as the point where an academic dispute becomes a chain of investigation. They bring Wilmarth’s professional skepticism into contact with testimony, inherited practices of avoidance, and later forms of evidence—letters, recordings, and photographs. Each medium offers a different kind of support and a different reason for doubt: newspaper accounts repeat witnesses’ descriptions, folklore may shape them, a phonograph preserves a voice without identifying its speaker, and a photograph may show a print while leaving the creature itself unseen. The later disclosure that human brains could be carried in metal cylinders and connected to mechanical instruments for sight, hearing, and speech gives a concrete, if extraordinary, context to Akeley’s claims about beings and human collaborators. A mechanical voice speaking through such equipment reports journeys across celestial bodies, while the book’s broader historical account places humanity among successive dominant races and stretches the scale of natural history far beyond human memory. These revelations do not retrospectively prove what floated in the 1927 rivers. Instead, they enlarge the range of possibilities against which Wilmarth’s original explanation must be judged. The narrative also later juxtaposes the Vermont legends with reports from the Great Sandy Desert: Aboriginal stories about enormous underground stone structures and Buddai, a sleeping giant, accompany a prospector’s account of carved stone blocks. The parallel extends the book’s recurring association between inherited stories and material traces without making the Australian reports direct evidence about the flood. In Vermont, the flood has already performed that unsettling work: it makes old tales newly legible, while leaving the reader—and ultimately Wilmarth—unable to decide whether legend has distorted the evidence or preserved knowledge that ordinary history forgot.