Copyright © 2025 by Glen Munro. All rights reserved.
Previously in Glen Munro’s Thriller, The Sour Ground...
Disgraced historian Michael Corrigan has rented the isolated Bettiscombe Manor to write a book debunking its “screaming skull” legend, all while escaping the wreckage of his personal and professional life. After receiving a stark warning from the caretaker to never remove the skull from the house, Michael examines the artifact—the jawless remains of an Iron Age woman—and receives a powerful, inexplicable shock when he touches it.
His first night is disturbed by the ghostly sound of a woman weeping. Though an investigation reveals nothing, he is shaken. A visit to the local pub only deepens his unease when the landlord speaks of the manor being built on “sour ground,” hinting at a trouble far older and darker than the official legend.
Seeking answers, Michael explores the ruins of an Iron Age settlement on the hill behind the house and makes a gruesome discovery: a dead fox, ritually arranged with its lower jaw surgically removed in a chilling mimicry of the skull. That night, his skepticism is shattered completely when the house erupts not with faint weeping, but with a soul-shredding scream of pure agony that seems to come from everywhere at once, overwhelming him in a torrent of ancient rage.
Episode 3: The Veins of the House
The scream did not fade. It wasn’t a sound that could diminish, like the echo of a bell or the rumble of distant thunder. It was a presence, absolute and all-consuming, and then, in the space of a single, hitched heartbeat, it was gone. The silence it left behind was a physical thing, a vacuum that sucked the air from Michael Corrigan’s lungs and popped his eardrums. It was a silence made of shattered nerves and the memory of pure, sonic violation.
For a long time, maybe a minute, maybe ten, he remained on the floor, a trembling knot of flesh and bone on a Persian rug that probably cost more than his car. His throat was a raw, bloody ditch; he had been screaming, too, a thin, pathetic harmony to the house’s deafening aria of torment. The lingering vibration in his teeth, in the very marrow of his bones, was the only proof that the sound had been real. That, and the single, jagged crack that now ran like a bolt of frozen lightning across one of the tall windowpanes in the sitting room.
It was the window that got him moving.
The crack was real. Tangible. It was evidence. I did not imagine it, he thought, the words forming slowly in the buzzing hive of his skull. I am not going insane. The thought should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. The alternative—that the scream had been a real event, powerful enough to physically break glass—was infinitely more terrifying.
He got to his feet like an old man, his joints grinding, his muscles screaming in protest. A warm wetness was spreading down the leg of his trousers. He looked down, dimly surprised to see the dark patch. He had pissed himself. A forty-two-year-old historian, cowering on the floor in his own urine. The sheer, pathetic indignity of it was a second, smaller wave of horror.
He needed a drink. No, that was the wrong answer. That was the answer that had led him here, dozing on the sofa, a lamb waiting for the slaughter. What he needed was to think. To be the academic. To take this… phenomenon… and pin it to a board, classify it, understand it. It was the only defence he had.
He walked, robot-like, through the house, his bare feet sticking slightly to the floorboards. He flicked on every light switch he passed, flooding the ground floor with a harsh, electric glare that fought a losing battle against the ancient shadows clinging to the corners of every room. In the main hall, a stern-faced portrait of Azariah Pinney, the one condemned by Judge Jefferies, had been knocked askew on its hook. In the kitchen, a cupboard door had swung open, and a neat stack of plates had slid to the floor, shattering into a hundred white fragments.
Damage. Real, physical damage. It was his proof, and his damnation.
He spent the rest of the night in a hard-backed kitchen chair, a thick blanket wrapped around his shoulders, watching the black rectangles of the windows for any sign of the dawn. Sleep was not a possibility. Sleep was a country he had been exiled from. Every creak of the old house was a prelude to the scream’s return, every gust of wind a whisper of that unholy voice. He just sat, and waited, and listened to the frantic, terrified drumming of his own heart.
When the first, grey, grudging light of dawn finally seeped into the kitchen, it felt like a pardon. He had survived. The sun came up, a smear of watery orange over the dark, brooding hills of the Marshwood Vale. The world outside the windows was still sane. Birds were singing their stupid, cheerful songs. A tractor rumbled somewhere in the distance. Life went on.
He knew what he should do. Pack his bags—hell, leave the bags—get in the Land Rover and drive. Drive until Dorset was a bad memory, until the green drown of the vale was behind him, until he was back in London where the only screams came from ambulance sirens and arguing neighbours. It was the only sane choice.
But as he stood there, stiff and stinking, looking at the mess of broken plates on the floor, he knew he wasn’t going to run.
Running meant accepting defeat. Running meant he was just another footnote in the legend of Bettiscombe Manor, another terrified tenant driven out by things he couldn’t explain. But he was Michael Corrigan. He was a historian. His entire life was built on explaining things. This house, this entity, this ancient screaming sorrow—it was the ultimate locked-room mystery. The source material wasn’t a dusty book; it was alive, and it was malevolent, and it had declared war on him. And a part of him, the stubborn, academic, self-destructive part, was not about to back down. The terror hadn’t gone away, not by a long shot. But something else was stirring alongside it now: a cold, obsessive fury. He wanted to know. He needed to know.
After cleaning himself up and sweeping the broken china into a dustpan with shaking hands, he went into the study. The room looked exactly as it had before. The skull was quiet in its shoebox. The books stood silent on their shelves. It was a room of knowledge. And knowledge, he told himself, was power.
He’d been focused on the wrong story. The slave from Nevis, John Frederick Pinney, the supposed tuberculosis—it was all a distraction. A 19th-century ghost story, as Arthur Grimble had said, slapped on top of something much, much older. The power wasn’t in the skull; the skull was just a battery, a focal point. The power was in the ground. The sour ground. The woman of the hill.
He began to search the library, not for books on folklore, but for local histories. Parish records, geological surveys, and archaeological reports. Anything that could tell him about the land itself. For hours, he worked, pulling down dusty tomes, the frantic energy of his new obsession pushing back the exhaustion and the fear. He found plenty on the Pinney family, their sugar fortunes, their political dealings. He found architectural plans for the manor’s construction around 1694. But nothing about what was there before. It was as if history had begun with the first stone laid by Nathaniel Pinney’s father.
It was in a crumbling copy of ‘A Rector’s Rambles Through West Dorset,’ published in 1888, that he found the first real clue. Tucked into the back of the book, used as a bookmark, was a thin, leather-bound diary. The ink was faded, the handwriting a spidery, almost illegible scrawl. The diary belonged to a Reverend Thomas Poole, rector of St. Stephen’s in Bettiscombe from 1685 to 1715. He was the rector while the manor was being built.
Mike’s heart hammered. This was primary source material of the best kind. He carried the diary to the desk, his hands trembling as he turned the brittle pages. Most of it was mundane: notes on sermons, records of baptisms and burials, complaints about the price of corn. But then he found the entries for the autumn of 1693.
October 12th. The workmen at the new Pinney house are much disturbed. They complain of a constant sorrowful air about the place, and of a wailing on the wind when no wind blows. John Pinney is a hard master and drives them on, but three have deserted their post this week, forfeiting their pay. They speak of the land being ‘unsettled’ by the digging of the foundations.
October 19th. Young Will Stokes, a labourer, was taken with a madness today at the building site. He ran from the half-built house screaming that a woman was rising from the earthworks, her face a mask of mud and her mouth open in a silent cry. He has been confined to his home. His mother claims it is a fever, but those who saw him say his eyes were filled with a terror not born of this world.
November 2nd. The foundations are laid, but the work is cursed. Animals will not approach the site. The masons’ dogs whine and tuck their tails, and a dray horse bolted this morning, shattering its leg on the stones, its eyes rolling white with fright. Pinney is furious, but I feel a great disquiet. We have disturbed a long slumber. There is a grief in this soil that is older than our church, older than Christ Himself. I prayed over the ground today, but my words felt like pebbles thrown into a bottomless well.
Mike read the last entry three times, a cold dread seeping into him. It was all there. A hundred and fifty years before the slave from Nevis ever set foot in Dorset, the haunting had already begun. The wailing on the wind. The woman rising from the earth. A grief older than Christ.
He sat back, the diary open on the desk in front of him. He felt a surge of grim, academic triumph mixed with sheer, bowel-loosening terror. He was right. He was on the right track. The house hadn’t become haunted. It had been born haunted, built on the raw, open wound of a forgotten tragedy.
A foul, sulphurous smell suddenly filled the study. It was the smell of stagnant water and decay, of things left too long in the dark and damp. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen. Wrinkling his nose, Mike got up to investigate. The smell was stronger in the hall, a thick, gagging stench of rot. He pushed open the kitchen door.
The sink was full of filthy, black water that wasn’t draining. Clogged pipes, he thought. Just another joy of living in a 300-year-old house. He sighed and rolled up his sleeves, reaching into the greasy water to clear the drain. His fingers met a thick, slimy mass. Probably old food waste. He grimaced, got a good grip, and pulled.
What came up from the drain was not food.
It was a thick, tangled wad of what looked like black peat and mud, the same dark, loamy soil from the hill. But it was the other things, tangled in the mud, that made him cry out and stumble back, wiping his hand frantically on his trousers.
Worms. Dozens of pale, writhing earthworms, twisting in the black sludge.
And hair.
Long, impossibly long strands of coarse black human hair, woven through the mud like rotten thread, coiling and looping through the squirming bodies of the worms. It was ancient hair, caked with the filth of the grave. As he watched, horrified, a bubble rose from the plughole with a thick, syrupy gloop, and more of the vile concoction pushed its way up into the sink, a gout of earth and hair and worms, a physical eruption of the sour ground into the very veins of the house.
He stared, mesmerized by the horror of it. This wasn’t just a haunting anymore. It wasn’t just sounds in the night or a feeling of unease. The house was contaminated. The grief of the woman on the hill, the entity in the soil, was physically pushing its way up from the foundations, forcing its own corruption into the pipes, into the water, into the heart of the home.
He was about to turn and run, to vomit, to do both at the same time, when the telephone on the wall, a ridiculously old-fashioned rotary model, began to ring.
Next week on The Sour Ground...
The plan was a lie. The hope was a trap.
Michael Corrigan has received an invitation, scratched in dust by an inhuman hand. He has been manipulated, led to believe he could be the hero of this story. Now he knows he is just a pawn.
The White Lady of the Barrow wants him to bring her the skull. She is waiting on the hill.
He faces an impossible choice: defy the summons and remain locked in a house that is already a part of her, or accept the invitation and walk willingly into the ancient dark. The house may be a prison, but what awaits in the woods is something else entirely.