Henry Akeley

**Henry Akeley** (born c. 1950) is a resident of the Rendlesham Forest area who went missing in 2019. The investigation into his disappearance remains officially open but not active. Kennedy Fisher, while investigating his disappearance encountered a severely disfigured Akeley involved in an occult ritual within Rendlesham Forest but he subsequently went missing once again.

## Background

Henry Akeley was born around 1950 and grew up in Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. During his childhood, he developed an interest in folk mythology on account of the various local myths and folktales he heard. As an adolescent, Akeley met Amelia Fenner when she moved to Suffolk from Hampshire and it’s possible it was through her that he first developed his lifelong interest in folklore.

When he became a teenager, his interests moved beyond folklore and toward the occult and, along with Fenner, he started to engage in pagan/occult rituals. Along with Thomas Marston and Tania Radcliffe, Akeley and Fenner set up a coven in Suffolk. He later encouraged his friend, Walter Brown, to join the coven as well. It was Akeley’s involvement with this coven that started his long struggle with substance abuse. While he would later refer to himself as a “junkie” in his March 2019 letter to Dr. Eleanor Peck, it’s unclear if this implied continued use or whether he was referring to his historical struggles. Nonetheless, in later life, he became a heavy smoker favouring roll-up cigarettes.

At some point, Akeley had a son but by the time his son was an adult, the two of them were estranged, no doubt at least partially due to Akeley’s continuing substance abuse problems.

In advancing his interests in the occult, he became a caster of protective wards, although the effectiveness of these spells is questionable; and by the 2010s, he had developed an interest in amateur radio, also known as ham radio, which allowed him to pick up radio signals from the Pleasant Green Incident.

## The Rendlesham Forest Incident

In 1980, the Suffolk coven had grown in confidence and on Christmas Day they attempted to conduct the Babalon Working ritual - the same one unsuccessfully attempted by Jack Parsons in 1946. This ritual resulted in the widely publicised Rendlesham Forest Incident and it was this event that ultimately drove the coven apart.

Amelia Fenner left Suffolk soon after and, along with Walter Brown’s refusal to see the incident as anything other than US Air Force personnel shining torches in the forest, Akeley saw his former compatriots abandon him and his cause. Thomas Marston travelled to America dealing with a mental breakdown, and Tania Radcliffe moved away to Dunwich. For at least a while, Akeley remained in Rendlesham holding a heavy sense of guilt that whatever the Suffolk Babalon Working ritual had released, it had still to be dealt with as the group never conducted a banishing ritual. While Brown also remained in Rendlesham, he and Akeley became “virtually strangers” after the incident.

## Contact with Barbara Sayers

Akeley became friends with Barbara Sayers, presumably when her quest to find the Necronomicon brought her to England between 1987 and 1992. Both Radcliffe and Akeley would have been of interest to Sayers as the former was similarly searching for the Necronomicon, and both Radcliffe and Akeley had been close associates of Amelia Fenner, who had had a child with Joseph Curwen and thus had produced a potential new vessel for Ipqu-Aya.

Whatever the nature of the relationship between Akeley and Sayers, it was close enough that years later, in June 2019, he would send the findings of his investigations in Rendlesham to her as someone he trusted.

## Studying at Birkbeck

By 2012, Akeley was still keen to understand the nature of what he had encountered over 30 years earlier and to that end, he took a folklore course at Birkbeck University that was taught by Dr. Eleanor Peck. The relationship between tutor and student was a strained one as Akeley’s approach of perceiving the mythological stories as real very much ran counter to Peck’s strong scepticism around the subject matter.

Akeley did not complete the course and simply stopped attending, but despite their differences, he had grown to respect Dr. Peck as a trustworthy person who at least understood the folklore even if she didn’t believe in it.

## The Whisperer in Darkness

By 2019, Akeley had moved back to his hometown of Rendlesham and had taken up residence in an old 16th-century house on the edge of Rendlesham Forest. While living here, he had a number of Alsatian guard dogs and lived in somewhat squalid, untidy conditions with only a very basic kitchen in which to prepare meals. In March, he contacted his old tutor, Dr. Peck, when his house started to be regularly visited by creatures who wandered the area at night and had begun to attack and kill his dogs.

As the visitations became more frequent and he lost more of his dogs, he became desperate for help; so when his handwritten letter to Dr. Peck went unanswered, he resorted to calling her and leaving a number of voicemails in April and May of that same year. Dr. Peck didn’t reply to any of these but she did get in touch with Akeley’s friend, Albert Wilmarth, who had himself noticed that Akeley was becoming increasingly agitated.

Akeley contacted Peck again by phone on 9th September but this time to apologise for having pestered her earlier in the year - a consequence of what he referred to as “some kind of mental health episode”.

Around 12th September, police did a welfare check on Akeley at the behest of his estranged son, living in Austria, whose wife had just passed away. His concerns when he couldn’t make contact with his father were justified when the police discovered that Akeley’s house and surviving dogs appeared to have been abandoned for a least a couple of months.

When Eleanor Peck learned of Akeley’s disappearance through the police, she suggested that podcasters, Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher, investigate the case which, with Akeley’s son’s blessings, they did. Akeley made contact with Fisher via his smart doorbell telling her to stop searching for him. However, the audio from this brief exchange enabled Fisher to track Akeley to April Marston’s house in the neighbouring town of Saxmundham.

By this point, Henry Akeley’s body had become a vessel to Nyarlathotep. With the help of Marston and her wife, Isabel, the Akeley vessel captured and restrained Fisher. While questioning her, Akeley and Nyarlathotep fought for control of Akeley’s body but Akeley was ultimately too weak to overcome Azathoth’s avatar.

For months, perhaps ever since he had moved back to Rendlesham, Akeley had been stalked by Nyarlathotep for use of his body as a vessel. This connection between the two was established all the way back during the Babalon Working ritual in Rendlesham Forest in 1980.

> “*Henry had a profound experience a long time ago, but he resisted the implications of that experience. He bought a ticket for a journey he then decided not to take. Unfortunately, tickets are non-refundable. And once you're on the train, you can't get off.*” (Nyarlathotep while possessing Henry Akeley)
>
>

Once Nyarlathotep had gained control of Akeley’s body, he surgically removed the man’s face and preserved it in formaldehyde. Nyarlathotep sought to use Fisher in his ritual to summon Azathoth from the dreamlands but his efforts were frustrated by Fisher and a number of Department of Works operatives. After the unsuccessful ritual, Henry Akeley once again disappeared, with Department operative Parker saying that his whereabouts was “complicated”.

## Relationships

### Family

* Son (estranged)
* Daughter-in-Law †

### Allies

* Albert Wilmarth
* Barbara Sayers †
* The Suffolk Coven
	+ Amelia Fenner †
	+ Thomas Marston †
	+ Tania Radcliffe †
	+ Walter Brown † (estranged)

### Enemies

* Nyarlathotep
* April Marston

## Appearances

* *The Lovecraft Investigations*
	+ The Whisperer in Darkness
		- "Episode 1" (voicemail only)
		- "Episode 2" (voice recording only)
		- "Episode 3" (voice recording only)
		- "Episode 4" (voice recording only)
		- "Episode 5"
		- "Episode 6" (voice recording only)
		- "Episode 7"
		- "Episode 8"
	+ The Shadow over Innsmouth
		- "Apartment 6" (archive audio)

## Notes/Trivia

* It’s unclear exactly how old Henry Akeley is. Eleanor Peck remembers him from Birkbeck in 2012 as being in his “mid-60s”, while Walter Brown described him in 2019 as being “nearly 70 years old”.
* This character is based on Henry Wentworth Akeley, a character from the original Lovecraft story, The Whisperer in Darkness.

## References

1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 TWiD: "Episode 1"
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 TWiD: "Episode 8"
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 TWiD: "Episode 2"
4. ↑ TWiD: "Episode 3"
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 TWiD: "Episode 4"
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 TSoI: "Rubaiyat"
7. ↑ TSoI: "Apartment 6"
8. ↑ TCoCDW: "Episode 5"
9. ↑ TCoCDW: "Episode 10"
10. ↑ TWiD: "Episode 5"
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 TWiD: "Episode 7"