The siege of Akeley’s farmhouse

The siege of Akeley’s farmhouse is a sustained campaign of isolation and attack that turns Henry Wentworth Akeley’s remote home into a place he can neither safely defend nor bring himself to leave. Related mainly through Akeley’s letters to Albert N. Wilmarth, the episode escalates from obstructed roads and dead telephone lines to gunfire, repeated losses among Akeley’s dogs, and the revelation that his opponents intend to carry him away alive. The siege makes his home simultaneously a refuge, a target, and a barrier to escape.

Escalation on the Roads

The pressure on Akeley first becomes unmistakable in his account of travel near the farmhouse. On August 2, while driving toward the village, he found a tree trunk placed across the highway where it passed through a deep stretch of woods. The barking of the two dogs accompanying him indicated that something was nearby; he did not know what might have happened without them. He thereafter made a point of taking at least two dogs whenever he went out. On August 5 and 6, further incidents included a shot grazing his car and dogs barking at presences in the woods. These encounters extended the danger beyond the house: even the road to the village had become uncertain.

The attacks intensified during the night of August 12–13. Akeley reported bullets outside the farmhouse and found three of his twelve large dogs dead the following morning. Claw-prints and human footprints marked the road, with Walter Brown’s among them. When Akeley tried to telephone Brattleboro for more dogs, the connection failed. He later learned that linemen had found the main telephone cable deliberately cut in the deserted hills north of Newfane. The interruption prevented him from summoning help at a critical moment, although he did manage to drive to Brattleboro and return with four dogs and ammunition for his rifle.

The traces did not disappear after that night. Akeley reported further deaths among the dogs and recurring human footprints, including Brown’s and those of at least one or two other shod figures. The prints appeared on the road and behind the farmyard. Gunfire became a regular feature of moonless nights, while the dogs’ barking repeatedly alerted him to activity beyond the house. In this way, the siege advances through both direct encounters and the persistent evidence left around the property.

Isolation and the Problem of Leaving

The attack on Akeley’s communications was not limited to the cut cable. A telegram received by Wilmarth, apparently answering his offer to come to Vermont, instructed him to take no action and wait for an explanation. Akeley then wrote that he had neither sent the telegram nor received the letter to which it seemed to reply. The Bellows Falls clerk said a strange, sandy-haired man with a thick, droning voice had deposited it; the handwriting did not match Akeley’s, and the signature misspelled his name as AKELY. The correspondence therefore introduced a further uncertainty into the siege: even a message apparently sent by Akeley could not be trusted as his own.

Akeley’s letters show why the prospect of leaving remained difficult despite the danger. He considered going to live with his son in California, and later discussed boarding in Brattleboro, but the farmhouse was the place he regarded as home. He wanted time to put his affairs in order and to depart quietly, without causing a commotion in the countryside or inviting people to dismiss him as irrational. His attachment was not simply a preference for remaining in danger: he was also reluctant to abandon the home he had long cherished and to expose his predicament to a community that already viewed his studies and speculations askance.

For a time, the full moon seemed to offer a reprieve. Akeley suspected that the creatures were holding back during the brighter period and feared that cloudy nights would bring renewed danger. When a densely clouded night arrived, his hope proved short-lived. He described activity on the roof, the dogs rushing toward it, and an exchange of fire outside the house. He used the windows as firing positions and aimed his rifle high to avoid hitting the dogs. In the morning he found that five dogs had been killed, along with pools of blood and an unpleasant green substance in the yard and on the roof. He repaired broken windowpanes and prepared to go to Brattleboro for replacements from the kennels. Even this episode left the plan to move intact, but closer and more urgent.

The Intended Capture

Akeley’s next account changed the meaning of the siege. He said that the creatures had spoken to him in a buzzing voice, with a human voice helping them when the dogs’ barking drowned them out. He reported being told that they would not let him reach California and intended to take him alive, or in a state that he understood as theoretically and mentally alive. Their destination, he believed, was not only Yuggoth but somewhere beyond the galaxy, possibly beyond the furthest limits of space. The purpose of the attacks thus appeared to be more than driving him from the farmhouse: Akeley understood them as part of an effort to seize and transport him.

The threat also seemed to close off the alternatives he had considered. Akeley said he could get to Brattleboro, but felt no freer there, and doubted that he could go much farther even if he abandoned his belongings. He believed something within his own mind held him back. He warned Wilmarth to stay away and said that the creatures might soon approach even by day. Six more dogs had been killed, and on his drive to Brattleboro he sensed presences along the wooded parts of the road. The farmhouse was not the only place under pressure; the expected route out had become part of the same threatening landscape.

Last Measures and Significance

Akeley nevertheless began considering practical measures. He planned to try poison gas against the attackers, had obtained chemicals, and had prepared masks for himself and the dogs. If this failed, he intended to tell the sheriff, though he expected that officials might regard him as insane rather than accept his account. The daily footprints were important to him as potential evidence, but he feared that the police would dismiss them as fabricated. He also considered asking a state policeman to spend a night at the farmhouse; he worried that the creatures might simply stay away while an observer was present. Telephone lines were still being cut whenever he tried to call at night, and he had stopped arranging for their repair.

The siege had also left Akeley unsure whom he could persuade to help. Some local people might testify that the horrors were real, but others laughed at their accounts, and those who had long avoided the farmhouse knew little of the latest events. The mail carrier joked about Akeley’s reputation; Akeley considered drawing his attention to the prints but feared that a footprint preserved beneath a box or pan would look like a prank. His efforts to make the threat publicly legible were therefore constrained by the same isolation that the attacks had produced.

Walter Brown’s disappearance added another unresolved consequence. Akeley had not seen him around the villages and suspected that one of his shots might have struck him, while observing that the creatures seemed to remove their dead and wounded. He did not present this as certain knowledge. In his final plans, Akeley asked Wilmarth not to come to the farmhouse and supplied his son George Good-enough Akeley’s San Diego address in case he disappeared. He meant to attempt his last measures and seek official help, yet the evidence leaves the outcome of those intentions unsettled. The episode’s central tension lies in that narrowing of choices: Akeley can defend the house, travel to town, or contemplate flight, but each apparent route is undermined by severed communications, public disbelief, danger on the roads, or his own sense of confinement.