Lavinia Whateley

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 Pocomtocs, even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.

Part 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 Whatley was born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, 2 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 hill 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 whatleys a somewhat deformed unattractive albino woman of thirty-five 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 amid thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Watley's, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes.

She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that old Watley had taught her.

The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of old Watley's reputation for black magic.

Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around a sizable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial places of the Pocomtocs, even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.

Part 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 Whatley was born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the 2nd 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 hill 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 whatleys a somewhat deformed unattractive albino woman of thirty-five 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 amid thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Watley's, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes.

She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that old Watley had taught her.

The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of old Watley's reputation for black magic.

One need not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyes of Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice.

But it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human elements in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small.

When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odor had nearly disappeared.

Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton, at least in any true or stable sense.

He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.

Part Seven.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror.

Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley.