Welcome to Undertoe, Realm's podcast of The Weird and the Wicked.

I'm your host and producer, Fred Greenhalge, and today, your storyteller as we embark on a new

season I'm calling Familiar Haunts. What is this new season all about? Well, as the title implies,

it's about things that trigger memories and

echoes of other times. Stories that remind us that ghosts are really just manifestations of the

unresolved past. Our stories will be selection of new and classic horror fiction I've created,

kicking off today with the original story written and performed by me, inspired by something

weird that happened to me while visiting my child

at home. To set the scene, we're headed into the fog-racked down-east region of Maine, where I was

born. This is a haunted county, though to be fair, Maine is haunted across all at 16 counties. It is

surely no accident that Stephen King's headwaters are found here, but where we're going today is

further away and lonelier than the

locations that inspired dairy or Castle Rock. We're visiting the parts of Maine you won't see on a

postcard, past the last of the tourist traps and approaching the eastern edge of the U.S. Canada border.

Here are the road frays at the edges. Here, the ruins of old damworks sprout from the river like

dinosaur bones. Here you see an abandoned

church with peeling white paint, the name of the church and its congregation long forgotten.

And here, taking a turn off the cracking asphalt and switching to a gravel road, might hear

ravens croon overhead as we visit the site where once stood the family farmhouse, the haunted

farmhouse, I might add. Today it lies buried, literally buried. The house was demolished 20-odd years

ago, and like my ancestors in an earlier time, it was buried in the hayfield outback. Why does one go and

bury the remains of a home? And what might be revealed if one were to dig it up?

...