I myself did not more than a
     Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the
     Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling,
     Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth
     cou'd raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves
     that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock. Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the
text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills
continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to
geologists and physiographers. Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles of
stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at
certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines;
while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard--a bleak,
blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then,
too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills
which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are
psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they
time their eery cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they
instantly flutter away chittering in demoniac laughter; but if they
fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence. These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come
down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old--older by
far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the
village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient
Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill
at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture
to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the Nineteenth Century
factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great
rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more
generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of
skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizable
table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such
spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many
ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory,
persist in believing the remains Caucasian. 2

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited
farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile
and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5
a. m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled
because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe
under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded,
and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout
the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother
was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive
albino woman of 35, living with an aged and half-insane father
about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered
in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according
to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child;
concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might--and
did--speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed
strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a
contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to
mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous
future. Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a
lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and
trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited
through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to
pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was
filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had
taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old
Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by
violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not
helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences,
Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose daydreams and singular
occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a
home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since
disappeared. There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises
and the dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor
or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbors knew nothing of him till
a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow
into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of
loungers at Osborn's general store. There seemed to be a change in the
old man--an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which
subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear--though he
was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all
he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and
what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his
hearers years afterward. "I dun't keer what folks think--ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he
wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks
is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some things
the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a
husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much
abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church weddin' nor
her'n. Let me tell ye suthin'--_some day yew folks'll hear a child o'
Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!_"

The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life
were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl
Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one
of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations;
but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley
had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of
cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only
in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did
the ramshackle Whateley barn seem over-crowded with livestock. There
came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count
the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old
farmhouse, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anemic,
bloodless-looking specimens.