Welcome back, everyone to 1001 Ghost Stories and Tales of the Macab.

This is your host, John Hagadorn.

And today's story, The Picture in the House, by H.P. Lovecraft.

Searchers after horror haunts strange, far places, for them are the catacombs of the Ptolemae and the

carven mausolia of the nightmare countries.

They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles and falter down black cobweb

steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia.

The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they'd linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.

But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence,

esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of Backwoods New England,

for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance,

combined to form the perfection of the hideous.

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from traveled ways,

usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.

Two hundred years and more they've leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled

and the trees have swelled and spread.

They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow,

but the small-paned windows still stares shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which

wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never

seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exited them from

their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There, the scions of a conquering race

...