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The House That Stands Over Your Grave

by Kyle Piper

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The first time the topic of the old house on Gray Street comes up, Lew and Kennedy are working on their math homework on the floor of Lew’s bedroom. It’s the first time Kennedy has been over, and when she calls Lew’s little two-bedroom rambler a nice house, he thinks it’s a mean joke until she tells him how bad the place she just moved out of was. That brings up the topic of crappy houses, (Kennedy’s old apartment was infested with bees, Lew’s older brother lost part of a finger helping their dad repair rot in the crawlspace here), and eventually Kennedy mentions the total wreck her dad had driven them past on Gray Street, behind the cemetery. That brings it out of Lew without so much as a thought to the credibility of the claim: just, “Oh, yeah, the haunted one?” Now Kennedy looks like she’s trying to stare a hole through his head so she can determine approximately how much bullshit it houses.

“Did you…” she starts cautiously. “Have you seen any ghosts there?”“Oh, I’ve never been inside. But I mean, I walk pretty close by it all the time. It’s super creepy.” As he says this, Lew realizes how completely stupid it sounds, but he can’t figure out how to express what he feels when he looks at that house through the jagged chain-link fence that separates its backyard from the cemetery where he so often stands. That crumbling stack of ivy-crowded wood looms over the back end of the cemetery, keeping watch over the little eroding rectangles that Lew doesn’t think even count as gravestones. Unkempt vines and brush and pale, pinkish mushrooms poke out through its backyard fence into the graveyard as though the house itself is reaching out to claw at the world around it. He’s sure it’s why the back end of the cemetery is the cheap end. Anyone who can afford the big fancy headstones puts them up front where you can barely see the house and don’t have to look at it when you visit. Lew knows that when he dies, his family and friends will have to stare at that decaying pile just like he does.

“I can definitely tell that it’s creepy,” Kennedy says, “but my gym teacher is creepy. That doesn’t mean he’s a ghost.”

“Okay, that’s not what I meant. Literally everyone who’s gone in there has seen something weird. You can ask anyone who’s done it.”

“Like?”

Lew is sure he knows plenty, but can’t come up with a single name on the spot. “Well, I don’t know, like a lot of people.”

“What did they see?” Kennedy asks.

“Ask around. There are some pretty fucked up stories.”

Kennedy does another one of those narrow-eyed stare downs. “Are you making fun of me? Trying to make me look like an idiot in front of everyone?”

“Holy shit, no. I would never do that.” He hopes the sincerity shows. By the encroaching end of eighth grade, Lew hasn’t made many friends among his peers, but Kennedy moved here just a couple months ago. He’s sure this is the only chance he’ll have to get on her good side before she finds out how much of a weird jackass he is.

A few days later, Kennedy brings up the house again. She’s laying in the dead grass behind the faded yellow double-wide she lives in, casually pulling apart a dandelion when she offers, apropos of nothing, “So, I asked some people about the house.”

Lew is hanging upside down from the tire swing dangling off the one scraggly tree in the yard. He perks up. “What did you hear?”

“A bunch of crap, mostly. Sounds to me like people are seeing things.”

“Hell yeah, they’re seeing things!” Lew pulls himself upright. “Fuckin’ ghosts!”

“So it smells bad and makes weird noises and people see stuff.” Kennedy sits up. “I remember my mom saying that mold and fungus can mess with your head. Like, make you feel weird and hallucinate. That’s probably all it is.”

Lew thinks of those weird, fleshy mushrooms that grow in the house’s backyard, but shakes his head. “There’s no way fungus and mold can make you see an entire person standing right in front of you.”

“Why not? I mean, my mom is full of shit, but that makes sense to me.”

Lew isn’t really sure how to follow up on that mild overshare, so he doesn’t. He has noted the lack of anyone going by the title of “Mom” at Kennedy’s house and can’t bring himself to inquire, which just leaves the two of them in silence. He doesn’t like the way Kennedy chooses to break it.

“So when are we going?” she asks.

Lew is painfully aware of how stupid he sounds as he slowly says, “What?”

“To the house?”

“Why would we go?”

Kennedy shrugs. “Why wouldn’t we? If there’s a ghost, I wanna see it.”

“Ew! Fuck that.” Lew has no idea why he said “ew,” and he’s starting to really regret ever having mentioned the ghost thing.

Kennedy smiles and says, “That’s fine. I’m definitely going, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.” And he knows she means it. Lew is actually pretty amazed by how reassuring she sounds, steering a wide course around the big, obvious topic at hand, which is that Lew is a total baby. He knows he is, and he’s sure she knows he is, but unlike anyone else he’s met, she never holds that against him. He’d been nervous to bring a girl over to his house for a while and she had smiled and said that was fine. When she suggested they take Honors classes together next year, and he said he wasn’t sure he could handle it, she smiled and said that was fine. Something in that particular smile makes her look more beautiful to him than anyone ever has, which somehow just makes him even more scared. On this occasion, it also makes him pretty sick of being no more than “fine.”

“Well, whatever, then. I’m going too,” he announces, as boldly as he can manage.

“You seriously don’t have to.” As much as he appreciates her still trying to offer him an out, it’s too late. The hints of mischief and pride that creep into her expression trap him. It’s a new and improved version of her approval that he finds himself immediately hooked on.

“I’m not going to make you go alone.” Her smile widens. He’s on a roll.

“Well, okay then,” she says. “When do you want to go?”

His rational mind fights back with renewed energy as he pushes it one step too far. “How about right now?”

“Awesome!” Kennedy hops up to her feet and starts toward her house. “I’ll go get flashlights!”

As she jogs away, Lew lets the veneer of confidence drop off his face and takes a moment to stew in his dread.

---

As Lew leads Kennedy through the graveyard, he does his best to maintain composure, but that gets harder when they reach the top of the hill and the humble little headstones that occupy it. As they move alongside the lopsided fence at the back of the graveyard, the house starts to become visible through the gaps in the brambles poking through the chain-link, and Lew feels its presence as it stands over them. He tries to keep his eyes off the headstones and hopes Kennedy doesn’t look too closely either. No matter how many times he’s visited, he’s never been able fight back tears when he comes to his brother’s grave, and he’s not interested in letting Kennedy see him totally lose his shit trying to explain what happened with Bryan.

Despite his efforts, Lew can’t help a glance at the headstone he’s become so familiar with, and he notes with disgust that more of the mushrooms from beyond the fence have sprouted around it. It feels like a cruel insult from the house itself. There’s a loose portion of fence just past Bryan’s grave, and Lew manages to swallow the rising lump in his throat long enough to crawl under and hold it up for Kennedy.

The approach to the house’s back porch is a minefield of broken glass bottles, cigarette butts, dried patches of tall grass, and a whole lot more of those gross mushrooms. Lew marches toward the ruin like he’s about to charge into battle. He’s come dangerously close to backing out already, and now he knows he’s at the point of no return. He hadn’t worked that hard not to cry in front of Kennedy just to wimp out now.

Kennedy examines the windows with intent to find an especially breakable looking candidate, as the former popular entrance—a broken window along the side of the house near the front—has recently been sealed off with plywood by whoever still owns the place. From what Lew has heard, even the doors inside are largely nailed shut, so people using the window have only had access to the front of the house and the upstairs. This makes Kennedy and Lew potential pioneers into the unexplored depths of the place, a fact Kennedy notes with excitement that Lew tries to feign in return. Lew is about to suggest checking out a cellar door he had seen around the other side when Kennedy thinks to try the back door directly.

A few boards block it off, but they’re nailed across the framing and don’t touch the door itself. The knob does not turn in the slightest, but with some pressure, the door swings inward, chunks of the inner frame splitting away and falling to the floor. Kennedy gives a “Hmph” of approval and ducks down under the boards. Lew takes a breath of the stale air wafting out and follows her in.

The smell lives up to its reputation. A dry, choking odor like dust and mold and ash assaults his nose, and each breath feels like sandpaper on his sinuses. The light pouring in from the open door and boarded windows is enough to dimly illuminate what’s left of the room in which they now stand. The pale pink mushrooms are liberally peppered about the place and growing healthily, sprouting up from the floorboards and forming tiny shelves on the walls and beams. They are accompanied by a few invading vines from the yard, reaching in between the boards over the windows and crawling across the walls. Dried mud streaks the floor all around them, and piles of near-dissolved wood and rusted iron mark the places where furniture once stood.

“Well, it sure as hell looks haunted,” Kennedy says.

“I feel like the ceiling’s gonna collapse.” Lew steps into the big bay window just to the right of the door and stares out between the boards at the yard and the cemetery beyond it. He realizes that from here, he can just barely see the nicer headstones at the bottom of the lot.

“So, uh…” Kennedy looks around at her damp, reeking surroundings, “is there some kind of story with this place?”

“Oh, yeah, pretty basic ghost story stuff.” Lew is well-versed in the local legend. “Some rich asshole built it a long time ago for his pregnant wife, but she and the baby died in labor…”

Kennedy nods. “Because all ghost stories are tragedies, right?”

“And probably because doctors sucked in the past,” Lew shrugs. “There are a few different stories after that point. Basically, he was all tormented by guilt and stuff because his wife didn’t want children in the first place. Some people say their ghosts drove him crazy and he killed himself, but I like the version where he gets all into occult shit trying to resurrect them and gets pulled into Hell or something.”

“Pretty metal.”

“Either way, the spooky ending to the story is always that his wife and baby’s graves are down with the fancy headstones at the bottom of the hill, and sometimes, you can see his ghost standing right there in that window,” Lew gestures back to the bay window he had just stepped away from, “just staring down the hill at them.” A strange feeling suddenly comes over him. It’s an unexpectedly deep sympathy for this probably fictional character his classmates had cooked up, separated from his family even in death, always keeping his hopeless vigil.

“Want to check out the basement?” Kennedy jolts Lew from his reverie.

“What? Why?”

“No one’s been down there before, right? I want to be the first.”

Lew sighs before he remembers he’s trying to act like he wants to be here. “Yeah. Let’s check it out.”

The door to the basement is just across the room from the back door, easily identifiable, as it has fallen off its hinges entirely, revealing stairs descending into darkness beyond. Actually making that descent looks like it will be a more complicated matter.

“Ghosts or not, there’s no way that’s safe.” Lew looks down at the rotted and mold-blackened boards that form the steps. Kennedy places a foot on the first step and applies a little weight. It bends as if made of thick rubber but does not break.

“Seems fine.” Before Lew can protest, Kennedy flicks on her flashlight and starts sidling down the stairs, holding on to the handrail like it’s a safety line on the side of a mountain. Every step gives off deep groaning and crunching sounds, but in only a few seconds, she has safely completed her descent. She makes a quick sweep of her surroundings with her flashlight and looks back up. “Holy shit, Lew, this place is fucked up. You gotta see this.”

Lew has never paid much attention in church, but he’s starting to feel like he should have. He apologetically includes this change of heart in the brief prayer he offers as he works his way down the stairs, and it seems to be enough. The ancient wood holds.

Kennedy’s description of the basement turns out to be accurate. On his way down, Lew sees that the walls and steps and handrails of the staircase are smeared with what looks like more dried mud, and that substance is also caked on the walls and floor below. The smell is even more intense here, and Lew’s head is beginning to throb as he reaches the bottom of the stairs, but he becomes downright dizzy when he casts his narrow flashlight beam across the small concrete room. He’s never seen fungus grow to such sizes as it does in the house on Gray Street. Enormous shelves of pale pink mushrooms hang on the walls, and clusters of the fleshy material the size of his head gather in the corners and in patches on the floor, all of it connected by wispy, root-like threads that run along the ground and reach down into cracks in the concrete. It occurs to him then just how much its surface looks like skin, and the sight and smell of it all makes him nauseous.

“What the fuck…”

Kennedy stares, her adventurous mood somewhat dimmed. “Think they’re the magic kind, or the puke-your-guts-out kind?”

“They sure as hell don’t look like the put-on-your-pizza kind.”

From where they stand, the basement seems to be a sprawling labyrinth. There are multiple empty doorways leading off to other rooms, and Lew realizes that it probably matches his own entire house in square footage.

“Whoa, look at that.” Kennedy stares down one of the open doorways. Lew looks down her flashlight beam into the next room, where it casts its weak yellow light over the adjacent wall. The concrete there is not just cracked, but entirely crumbled away, leaving a chasm in the wall almost as tall as Lew. Moist earth blocks it up on the other side, and that dirt is marbled throughout by tiny strings of the resident fungus. Kennedy approaches the opening cautiously and squints at it. Lew follows at a distance. “That’s so weird…” she says.

Kennedy examines the hole for a minute and then looks back at Lew. As she does, her flashlight swings around to the other side of the room they’ve walked into, and a look of disgust crosses her face. Lew turns quickly and immediately gags.

In the center of the room is an oozing pile of fungal growth longer than he is tall and nearly shin high. It is by far the largest collection of the stuff they have seen, and tiny tendrils of it reach out in all directions, many of them snaking into the earth through the hole in the wall. Under the shaking glow of their flashlights, Lew almost convinces himself that he can see it gently throbbing.

“Oh… no,” is all he can say. He wants to look away, but he can’t take his eyes off it.

After a few moments of staring, Kennedy manages to say, “Is that… Does that look like…”

She doesn’t need to finish her thought. Lew sees it too. As he stares, his mind starts to make sense of the amorphous shape of the thing. It’s like some hellish crime scene chalk outline, and once that thought occurs to him, Lew cannot unsee its vaguely humanoid form.

“No…” he lies. “There’s no way.”

Kennedy seems determined not to discuss the resemblance any further. Lew isn’t sure if it’s the weak light or his imagination, but she looks a little queasy now.

“I think I’ve had enough of the spooky house,” she says. “All this mushroom shit might actually be poisonous or something. Can we go?”

Lew would agree emphatically, even thank her for being the one to voice her concern first, but he finds that he cannot speak at all. He can only gape at the wall of soaked earth just past Kennedy’s head, trying to form words as the soil slowly begins to bulge outward. Kennedy sees the terror manifesting on Lew’s face and begins to mirror it as she stands perfectly still and watches him watch the wall behind her. The trance is broken when the first clump of dirt hits the concrete floor with a heavy slap. Kennedy does not turn to look. She charges forward, wrapping an arm around Lew, and drags him toward a pile of debris that had once been an old desk.

They kill their lights and dive into the tiny space under the sloped desk, only two of its legs still standing. As they listen to more thick mud cascading out from the hole in the wall, Lew tries to make sense of what is happening, but for some reason, all he can think about are the earthquake drills at school. Get under the table and hold its legs with one hand, they always say. He’s dizzy, and his heart is beating in a heavy, lurching way it never has before. Cover the back of your neck with your other hand, he remembers, and he does. Kennedy’s fingernails are digging into the skin on his arm, and her breath casts waves of heat across his face. A new sound comes from the hole in the wall now, a deep, rasping exhale that seems to last forever. Heavy footfalls sound, dragging something ponderously forward, and with each sound, Lew becomes more certain that he will not live long enough to follow his teacher to the nearest exit and gather on the sports field.

He can’t believe that the footsteps have simply passed them by until he hears the sound of the basement stairs creaking one at a time. They sit in absolute silence for what could be twenty seconds or twenty minutes. When Kennedy clicks her flashlight on, it startles Lew so badly that it feels like all of his veins have tried to leap out of his skin. Tears are streaming down Kennedy’s face, and she speaks in a whispered shout.

“What the fuck was that?” she asks, as if he knows. Lew only shakes his head and stammers. Something like rage peeks out through the mask of terror Kennedy wears. She barely contains herself to a whisper. “You’re fucking with me. You set this up.”

The denials, questions, exclamations, and constructive suggestions that are all trying to escape Lew’s mouth at once get stuck in the door. He stares dumbly and begins to cry as well. This seems a sufficient denial on its own. The accusatory edge to Kennedy’s expression fades and leaves only near-manic fear, possibly magnified now. “Okay.” She nods, trying to twist her face into a look of grim determination and getting only partway there. “Just follow me.”

She rises and traces the room with her flashlight. The soil-clogged hole in the wall is now concave, much of its contents spilled out on the floor. The black mud lies in a pile beneath it and outlines footprints leading to the staircase in the next room. Kennedy follows the prints, walking quietly. Lew does not move. He stands still and watches her peer around the stair railing up the flight. She waves him over. He’s shaking uncontrollably now. He staggers forward, sure that he will fall on his face, but he makes it to the foot of the stairs. Kennedy is two steps up, still staring forward. The footprints mark each step, and a hand print clings to the wide, flat railing to Lew’s left, fresh mud aligned with the dried streak Lew saw before.

“We’re just gonna run, okay?” Kennedy whispers. “Right to the back door.”

Lew shakes his head. He slurs and wonders if he’s speaking too quietly or too loudly. “There’s another door.”

“We don’t know if it’ll open.”

“To the basement. I saw it. On the side of the house. It leads right outside.”

“Bullshit. I didn’t see anything.”

“I swear.”

“I’m not running around in the basement looking for another door. We know where the back door is.”

“I can find it.” Lew wishes he could grab her and drag her to it. “Please just trust me.”

Kennedy looks down at him with frustration and urgency, but as she stares him down, her expression softens. “Are you sure?”

“Trust me.”

Kennedy clenches her teeth and lets out a quiet sigh like a hiss. She nods. “Okay.”

As she reaches for the railing and starts back down, Kennedy’s hand brushes the muddy print. She withdraws sharply and wipes her fingers on her pants, snapping the beam of her light onto the patch of wet soil. Lew looks closely at that hand print now and feels all the blood drain from his face as he does. It’s small—larger than his, but not quite the size of an adult’s—and thin threads of the pink fungus trace through it. Four of its five fingers are accounted for in full. The middle finger is missing its tip, and that is what pushes Lew over the edge.

“No, no, no, no…” is all he can say to express his thoughts. He thinks of the wiry fungus running through the hand print, through the house, through the soil and reaching out toward the graveyard, all the way out to the graves at the top of the hill. He thinks of the thing that climbed out of the black earth and marched upstairs, waiting for them just at the top of the steps. He thinks of too many things all at once and feels his body taking control of everything his mind no longer has the capacity for. His feet carry him backwards, his mouth keeps forming one word: “…no, no, no…”

“What?” Kennedy is baffled. “Lew, what is it?”

His chant, “…no, no, no…” is a prayer and a ward against the thing upstairs, a call to every version of God that might hear, asking that he will not have to see it and confirm what he already knows. He stops worrying about his volume then. He has to say it louder, shout it to everyone and everything that might hear. He has to be on record as having said in no uncertain terms to the thing upstairs, “…no…”

“Lew, shut the fuck up!”

Lew cannot shut up, so he does the next best thing. He turns and runs.

“Lew!” Kennedy reaches for him and takes a step—a sudden, heavy step into the middle of a rotting board. Lew hears it crack, hears Kennedy’s cry cut short as she strikes the concrete, sees her flashlight’s beam pirouette around the room as it sails away from her. He runs faster.

Cold concrete, shelves stacked with rotting volumes titled in illegible Latin, shattered laboratory equipment, stone altars adorned with candles and cobwebs, and endless clusters of that awful fungus all blur past him as he charges forward. As big as the basement is, there are only so many rooms to run through, and he finds the short stairs quickly enough, outlined by thin shafts of light slicing through the wooden doors laying at a steep angle above him. He doesn’t slow at all as he barrels up the stairs, shoulder first. The rusted chain and padlock hold, but the rotting wood does not. It splits, and sunlight washes over him like hot water. For the first time in what feels like hours, the air tastes like it’s meant for human lungs. He pushes through the narrow alley against the fence at the side of the house, a dense blackberry thicket ripping at his clothes and skin as he forces his way through to the back yard. The fence is only fifteen yards away. Maybe ten. He only makes it halfway.

It’s a combination of the sunlight, the warm air, and simply the few moments that have passed since he lost control that give his mind a chance to catch up to his body and freeze him in place. He’s in the tree again, the one he bet Bryan he could climb up higher, listening to the sound of his older brother colliding with every branch he’d touched on the way up. He’s frozen again, staring down at the broken body of the person he’d brought up there in another pitiful attempt to prove his bravery, one just as stupid as a visit to a haunted house. His hesitation lasts only moments. When he starts running back, he tells himself that this is the courage he’s never had before, but he knows which thought had actually turned him around: he doesn’t deserve to be the person who walks away again.

It would take too long to go back around. He can’t imagine forcing his way back through the blackberries or lifting the heavy cellar door from above, and Kennedy is just down those stairs, just a few strides beyond the back door. Past the thing that crawled up from the basement. He can get by it without even having to look at it if he’s quick. He can leap down the stairs to where Kennedy lies unconscious, get her up, drag her if he has to.

He ducks the boards and passes into the half-light inside the house, ready to sprint for the basement door as soon as he’s upright, but he freezes when he sees Kennedy across the room, already at the top of the basement stairs. She’s crouched, half hidden behind the doorframe staring back, not at Lew, but at the bay window just to his right. It takes him a moment to read the look of horror on her face and understand what’s causing it, but by then, he can already feel the cold hand on his shoulder.

It occurs to him that he should not turn to look only after he has. The thing standing next to Lew is only a little taller than him, shorter than he remembers. Dirt or rot has painted it black from head to toe, rags of a cheaply bought, poorly fitted suit still cling to it and hang off its body. Lew doesn’t know if there’s any flesh on it at all, or if what he sees plastered onto its bones is no more than soil and the flesh-colored fungus that wraps around and tunnels through it. It turns slowly from the window it had been staring out, the window that has the slightest view of the graves at the bottom of the hill, and fixes its gaze on Lew. A long, gurgling sigh escapes its opening jaw, its breath a wispy pink cloud that Lew’s gasp of terror draws into his lungs. It stares down at him through empty sockets as the corrupted air burns its way down his throat, tasting like the house’s choking stench, like rotting flesh, and like blood.

He feels other hands around his arm then, the warmth of Kennedy’s grasp shaking him out of his stupor and dragging him away from the creature in front of him. It either cannot or does not keep its grip, instead watching placidly, sadly even, as they slide away from it and through the door in what feels like slow motion, the world spinning wildly around Lew. As they duck under the boards, Lew tries to take a deep breath of the clean air outside, but can only feel the heavy atmosphere of the house in his lungs. The next breath he tries doesn’t come easily, and the breath after that doesn’t come at all. He does not know if his legs are moving or if Kennedy is carrying him away from the house. He isn’t sure what side of the fence he’s on when he hits the ground. Kennedy kneels over him as he coughs and gasps. Her face looks farther and farther away as black smog crawls across his vision and bright flashes pop in and out around him. He sees her screaming his name, but he does not hear her. Tears flow from her eyes and fall to his face, and as his vision fades, he decides that he always thinks she’s beautiful, even when she isn’t smiling.

---

Time seems to pass slower in small towns. Kennedy used to prefer them for that reason, but now it only stretches out every day, week, and month in this place that she just wants to end. They had moved from every other rambler, trailer, apartment, townhome, or whatever before this one, and she knows they’ll move again eventually. She only hopes it will be soon. She had expected to be ostracized entirely after what happened, but she was amazed by the sympathy and credulity with which the other kids received her full story, and a censored version played well with the adults. Lew had been right that everyone agrees about the house on Gray Street, but their pity is little comfort. The incident will define her in their eyes for as long as she stays. It makes her want nothing more than to be gone.

Lew’s parents ask that she not attend the funeral, and she thinks that’s for the best. Anaphylaxis caused by mold or fungus in the house is the official cause of death, but Kennedy knows better. She killed him as surely as if she had choked him herself. Fear and guilt hold a tight competition in keeping her away from the grave, but it doesn’t take long for her to push both of them down long enough to make her first visit. There, she imagines all the days Lew spent in the shadow of the house that stands over his brother’s grave and understands his fear of the place in a way she wishes she had before. She also sees, among the flowers, photographs, and dead candles, a framed picture standing in between Lew and Bryan’s graves. It shows the two brothers standing together, smiling, Bryan’s left arm wrapped around Lew’s shoulders. His fingers hang over the garish band logo on Lew’s t-shirt, and Kennedy stares for a long time at the missing tip of the middle finger.

She makes a regular habit of visiting after that, trying harder and harder not to look at the house, to pretend it was never there at all. It takes a while, but she works out a schedule for her visits based on the regular efforts of the groundskeepers. It’s usually Tuesdays or Wednesdays that they mow the lawn and cut away the overgrowth reaching out from the fence in the back. Kennedy comes only after they do this so that she doesn’t have to see the creeping foliage that seems to reach farther and farther into the graveyard each week. This way, she can avoid the tiny clusters of pale, pinkish mushrooms that poke through the fence and sprout out of Lew and Bryan’s graves, and others around them. Every week, the groundskeepers pluck them from the soil and throw them away to rot. Every week, they come back, sprouting just a little farther down the hill.

---

Host Commentary

INTRO

PseudoPod, Episode 944 for October 25th, 2024.

The House That Stands Over Your Grave, by Kyle Piper

Narrated by Peter Behravesh; hosted by Scott Campbell audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Scott,  Assistant Editor at PseudoPod], your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have The House That Stands Over Your Grave, by Kyle Piper. This story is a PseudoPod original.

Author bio:
Kyle Piper is a Pacific Northwest-based writer and video essayist. When he’s not imagining horrible things to write about, he’s probably spending time with his wife and (a strange animal purporting to be a) cat, trying to get through to his emotionally closed-off pet box turtle, or playing weird videogames from the 90s. He also writes about the weird videogames, and you can find that content on his YouTube channel, Monster Closets.

Narrator bio:
Peter Adrian Behravesh is an Iranian-American musician, writer, editor, audio producer, and narrator. For these endeavors, he has won the Miller and British Fantasy Awards, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Ignyte, and Aurora Awards. His interactive novel is forthcoming from Choice of Games, and his essay, “Pearls from a Dark Cloud: Monsters in Persian Myth,” is forthcoming in the OUP Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth. When he isn’t crafting, crooning, or consuming stories, Peter can usually be found hurtling down a mountain, sipping English Breakfast, and sharpening his Farsi. You can read his sporadic ramblings at peteradrianbehravesh.com

And check if you got fresh batteries for your flashlight, because this house has a story for you and we promise you, it’s true.

---

ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of The House That Stands Over Your Grave by Kyle Piper? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

This is what Kyle said about this story: “For as universal as it is, I find it weirdly difficult to explain grief in a way that feels satisfying. It’s a slippery, nebulous thing. It can hide from you or disguise itself, look like one thing on the surface while growing into something else underneath. It can reach out for the people around you, blending with their grief, cross pollinating and mutually mutating—and that process isn’t always a balanced one. There’s an ugly economics to grief. Some people are more vulnerable to it, while others have the means to withstand it better, find support more easily, or at least express it louder. Your background, personality, and a million other things you can’t even see all flavor a manifestation of grief that’s unique to you. But whatever form it takes, it’s such a vast, amorphous thing that attempts to describe it always seem to miss some crucial aspect. I’ve carried some of my own for a while now, and I’m still trying to figure out how best to describe it. This story is an attempt at that.”

Grief, as described here, is a monster.  The best or worst monsters are ones that are nebulous and amorphous.  You might get some clarification on its looks or motivations but you’ll never completely understand it.  SInce you can’t completely understand it, dealing with grief can be that much harder.  Have you healed your grief or are you trying to avoid it?   Lew definitely hasn’t dealt with his grief but he manages day by day until Bev and the haunted house opens up that wound and all that pain and guilt empties out, leaving nothing.  For some people, the monster is all they have in their life.  THis is true horror.

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

And finally, PseudoPod, and the Ghost Host of the Haunted Mansion, know…. Actually, we have 999 happy haunts here. But there’s room for 1,000. Any volunteers?

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.