Copyright © 2025 by Glen Munro. All rights reserved.
Previously in Glen Munro’s Thriller, The Sour Ground...
Historian Michael Corrigan rents the haunted Bettiscombe Manor to write a book debunking its “screaming skull” legend. He’s warned never to remove the skull from the house, but soon experiences escalating paranormal events, including a physically damaging scream and the house’s plumbing erupting with grave dirt and ancient hair.
Through research in an old diary, he deduces the haunting isn’t from the commonly told legend, but from an ancient Iron Age woman whose grave was disturbed when the house was built. Believing she wants her skull back, he decides to break the rule and return it to her burial site on the hill. However, as he opens the box to take it, he finds a fresh strand of grave hair inside and a single word scratched into the dust: “BRING.” He realizes with horror that he hasn’t solved the mystery, but has been manipulated by the spirit into a terrifying trap, lured to bring the skull to her in the dark.
Episode 4: An Invitation Scratched in Dust
The lie hung in the silence after Mrs. Albright clicked off, thick and oily. Everything’s just fine. The words echoed in the kitchen, a bitter mockery from a man standing over a sink that looked like an open grave. For a moment, he had an insane urge to call her back, to scream into the receiver, Help me, for Christ’s sake, the house is sick, it’s vomiting up the dead!
But what would she have done? Called the police? The men in white coats? He could picture it already. “Yes, officer, the plumbing seems to be clogged with a mixture of Iron Age bog bodies and profound existential dread.” They wouldn’t lock up the house; they would lock him up. He was on his own. That was the simple, gut-freezing truth of it.
He had to deal with the sink.
The act of cleaning it was a journey into a special kind of hell. He found a pair of yellow rubber gloves under the sink, the kind his mother used to wear. They felt flimsy and absurd, a child’s defence against a nightmare. He scooped the disgusting sludge out with a serving spoon, his stomach doing slow, greasy barrel rolls. The smell was unimaginable, a thick, swampy reek of decay and wet earth and something else, something vaguely metallic, like old blood. The hair was the worst part. It clung to the spoon and to his gloves, long, coarse, and unnaturally strong. It was like the hair of a horse, not a human. He had to fight down the image of the woman on the hill, her two-thousand-year-old scalp still sprouting this endless, vital filth.
He dumped the mess into a black bin bag, his movements jerky and panicked. He tied a knot in the top of the bag, then double-bagged it for good measure, as if that could contain the sheer metaphysical wrongness of what was inside. He finished by pouring half a bottle of bleach down the plughole. The chemical stench was sharp and clean, a welcome violation of the ancient rot, but he knew it was a temporary fix. You couldn’t kill a ghost with Mr. Muscle.
The rest of the day passed in a blur of obsessive, terror-fueled research. He took the rector’s diary and a pot of black coffee into the study and locked the door. The house was quiet. After the sonic violence of the night before and the plumbing horror of the morning, the silence was a relief. But it was a different kind of quiet now. It was the quiet of a predator digesting its meal, waiting until it was hungry again. The house was aware of him. He could feel its attention on him, a dry, rustling pressure at the edge of his senses.
He barricaded himself behind the ramparts of history, transcribing Reverend Poole’s spidery script onto his laptop, the frantic clicking of the keys a modern counterpoint to the scratching of the 17th-century quill pen. He was looking for a pattern, a weakness, a set of rules for the game he was now forced to play.
And slowly, chillingly, the rules began to emerge.
November 30th, 1693. A parishioner, old Goody Miller, whose grandmother was said to be a cunning woman, came to me today in a state of high agitation. She spoke of the hill behind the new Manor as ‘Barrow Hill,’ and said it was a place of power that must not be disturbed. ‘What is taken from the Barrow must be returned,’ she said, her old eyes wide with fear. ‘Else the White Lady of the Barrow will come looking for her own.’ She claims the Pinney workmen have taken something, a stone or a bone, she does not know. She says the White Lady is awake now, and she is cold, and she is angry.
The White Lady of the Barrow. The name sent a shiver down Mike’s spine. It was a classic English folklore motif, but reading it here, in this house, it felt chillingly specific.
He scrolled through his transcription, his eyes scanning for more. He found it a year later, after the manor had been completed and the Pinney family had moved in.
September 14th, 1694. I was called to the Manor at dusk. Mrs. Pinney is convinced the new house is plagued by a ‘weeping woman.’ She hears the sound in the west wing at night, a sorrow that chills her to the bone. I spoke with John Pinney, who is a rational man and a good churchgoer, but even he seems unsettled. He told me, in confidence, that his cattle will not graze on the pasture that borders Barrow Hill, and that his best hunting dog, a brave and loyal beast, was found dead at the edge of the woods this morning. The animal was not torn or bloodied, but its jaw was… unhinged… in a most unnatural fashion. He believes a wolf is to blame. I do not.
Mike’s blood ran cold. The jaw. It was a signature. A calling card left across three centuries.
The final entries were from the last year of the Reverend’s life, his handwriting grown shaky, his tone bordering on frantic.
May 3rd, 1714. I am an old man now, and I fear I have failed in my duty. For twenty years I have watched the sorrow of this place take root in the stones of that house. The Pinneys have grown used to the drafts and the weeping, as a man grows used to a chronic sickness. But the sickness is deepening. Last night, I saw her. I was walking home from a late catechism and saw a light in the woods on Barrow Hill. Thinking it poachers, I approached. It was no lamp. It was a woman, or the shape of one, pale as bone, moving between the trees. She was not walking on the ground but through it, and her face… God forgive me, her face was a blur of ancient grief. The house is not merely built upon her grave. I fear the house has become her new grave. She is in the walls, in the water, in the very air of the place. We have not built a home; we have built a tomb for a ghost, and now she will never leave it.
Mike pushed his chair back from the desk, his hands shaking. She is in the walls, in the water. He thought of the sink. He thought of the scream that had come from everywhere at once. The Reverend had seen it all, understood it all, three hundred years ago.
A hypothesis, cold and clear and terrifying, formed in his mind. Goody Miller’s words: What is taken from the Barrow must be returned. The workmen building the house, digging the foundations, had disturbed the barrow. They had found the skull. Maybe they thought it a curiosity, brought it down from the hill. And when the haunting started, they were too scared to admit what they had done. They hid it in the half-built house. Over the centuries, the story got twisted, rewritten. The Pinneys’ colonial guilt provided a new and convenient narrative, a story about a slave that covered up the older, deeper, pagan truth.
The skull didn’t belong in the house. It belonged to the White Lady of the Barrow. And she wanted it back.
The screams, the plumbing, the dead fox—it wasn’t just random haunting. It was a demand. A tantrum of seismic proportions. Give it back.
A wild, desperate plan began to form in his mind. He was a historian. An academic. But the time for passive observation was over. If the entity wanted the skull back, he would give it to her. He would take the skull out of the house, carry it up Barrow Hill, and return it to the clearing with the standing stones. He would put it back where it belonged. Appease the spirit. End the haunting.
It flew in the face of all the legends, of Mrs. Albright’s stark warning. Don’t you ever take it over the threshold. But the legends were wrong. They were based on the wrong story. The skull wasn’t a talisman protecting the house; it was a poison fouling it. Keeping it here was the problem. Removing it was the solution.
It was logical. It was rational. And it was the only thing he could think of to do, other than run screaming into the night. For the first time since he’d arrived, he felt a sliver of hope, a sense of agency. He was going to take the fight to her.
The sun was setting, painting the study in long, bloody fingers of light. The time was now. There was no point waiting for another night of terror. He would do it at dusk, on the edge of her time, her world. A respectful offering.
He stood up and walked to the cabinet by the fireplace. His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs, a mixture of terror and exhilaration. He was breaking the ultimate taboo. He opened the cabinet door. He reached in and took out the Clarks shoebox.
It felt different. Heavier. And it was cold, so cold it was like holding a block of dry ice. A faint mist of condensation bloomed on the cardboard. He carried it to the desk and set it down in the last of the fading light.
He hesitated for a second, then lifted the lid.
And his breath hitched in his throat, a dry, rattling gasp.
The skull was there, nestled in its bed of yellowed cheesecloth. But it was not alone.
Lying on the cloth, coiled delicately around the dome of the cranium like a dark, obscene serpent, was a single, long strand of coarse black hair.
It was the same hair he had just pulled from the sink.
He stared, his mind refusing to process what he was seeing. It was impossible. He had cleaned the sink, bagged the filth, locked the study door. No one had been in here. No one could have put it there.
No one human, anyway.
His eyes darted around the inside of the box, looking for some other sign, some other change. And then he saw it. In the thin layer of dust on the cardboard bottom of the shoebox, something had been written. It was not writing, not exactly. It was a series of scratches, thin and sharp, as if gouged into the surface by a long, hard fingernail. The scratches were fresh. They spelled out a single word.
BRING
The sliver of hope in his chest shattered into a million icy fragments. This wasn’t his plan. He hadn’t come up with it on his own, a brilliant historian solving an ancient puzzle. He had been led. The diary, the clues, the logical conclusion—all of it had been a carefully laid path, a breadcrumb trail leading him to this exact moment. She hadn’t been screaming for him to return the skull. She had been goading him, testing him, manipulating him into a decision he thought was his own.
This wasn’t an appeasement.
It was an assignation.
And the single, stark word, scratched into the dust by an unseen hand, was not a demand. It was an invitation. An invitation to leave the relative safety of the house and walk up the hill, into the dark woods, into her world. Into her arms.
Next Episode: Oct. 16, 2025