Wilbur Akeley

Wilbur Akeley is a fictional character created by August Derleth for his short story "The Gable Window", one of his "posthumous collaborations" with H. P. Lovecraft. He is depicted as a scholar of occult lore who installs a dimensional portal in his house in Lovecraft Country.
Derleth describes Akeley as "a student of archeology and anthropology". After graduating from Arkham's Miskatonic University, Akeley spends three years in Mongolia, Tibet, and China's Sinkiang (now Xinjiang) province, and another three years in South and Central America and the southwestern United States. Concluding his travels in 1921, he moves to the "old Wharton place", a 200-year-old farmhouse "in a pocket of the hills off the Aylesbury Pike".
Akeley almost entirely rebuilds the old farmhouse, most notably adding a gable with a circular window in which he installs "a most curious clouded glass", which his notes describe as "a work of great antiquity, which he had discovered and acquired in the course of his travels in Asia". He refers to the window as "the glass from Leng" and speculates that it is "possibly Hyadean in origin". Combined with a pentagram-like design and a spoken formula, the window can be used to see into other places and dimensions.
Akeley accumulates an impressive collection of Mythos-related literature at the Wentworth place, including copies of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the R’lyeh Text, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the Book of Eibon, the Dhôl Chants, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Celaeno Fragments, Cultes des Goules, the Book of Dzyan, and "a photostat copy of the Necronomicon". Some of his library came from Henry Akeley, a Vermont relative, apparently the same character who appears in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness".
Akeley lives only three more years after moving to the Wentworth place; in 1924, sometime before April, he is "struck down with a coronary ailment while he was at work in the stacks of Miskatonic University Library". His death is called "untimely"; if he graduated from Miskatonic at a typical age, he would have died in his early 30s. 
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Deceased (In Mythos)
Category:Humans