Who Was Wilbur Whateley?

Wilbur Whateley was born at Dunwich, in the central Massachusetts uplands, on Candlemas of 1913, to Lavinia Whateley, a deformed albino, and to Yog-Sothoth. The Archive's dossier files him as a hybrid, human and Yog-Sothoth's offspring, regionally dangerous and deceased. He was human in appearance and not in much else.

Growth

He grew at an alarming rate. By 1927 he stood more than seven feet tall, and the account says his height showed no sign of stopping. He was raised by his grandfather, Old Whateley, a cultist, for a single purpose: to complete a ritual that required the family's copy of the Necronomicon and a formula it was missing.

The Library

That is what brought him to Arkham. Correspondence with libraries as distant as Paris and Buenos Aires had failed to get him the volume he needed, so he went himself to the Library of Miskatonic University, nearest to home, in the winter of 1927–28. The librarian, Dr. Henry Armitage, refused to lend the book and was afraid of him from then on. Wilbur returned in the small hours of 3 August 1928 to take the book by force, and the great white guard dog on the campus killed him in the reading room before it could be taken.

The twin

His twin, kept hidden in the family barn and only distantly related to a human shape, outlived him and became the more immediate crisis for Dunwich. It was met and ended in the weeks that followed, by Armitage and two colleagues from the University, on Sentinel Hill. The account is The Dunwich Horror, which has been filmed twice, in 1970 and in 2009.