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Tonight’s installment brought us into the cool, aching sorrow of “Funeral Birds” by M. Rickert, a story that feels like a single long, haunted breath. Rickert’s prose moves slow and deliberate, folding small, intimate details into an ever-widening sense of loss until the landscape itself seems to remember grief. The tale follows characters whose lives are quietly eroded by absence and memory; birds arrive and behave like elegies, ordinary things become uncanny, and the reader slides effortlessly from the domestic into the uncanny without a shove. It’s not horror that screams—it's horror that lingers in the margins, in the sound of wings at dusk and in the way people carry the weight of what they cannot say aloud.

The narrative’s power is in its accumulation: a sequence of domestic fragments that, when stitched together, reveal an emotional logic as inevitable and terrible as a tide. Rickert is working in the small motions—gestures, rituals, a funeral procession, the way neighbors glance away—and those small motions swell into meaning. The atmosphere is elegiac rather than lurid; the fear Rickert conjures is the old kind, the one that sits beside you at the table and refuses to leave. Listeners who came expecting jump-scares will find something subtler and deeper: a slow, unavoidable ache that turns ordinary birds into portent and ordinary grief into something almost mythic.

Tonally, the story fits the Halloween special not by offering gore or spectacle but by demonstrating another face of the season: the way endings gather around us like migrating flocks, how memory and mortality can coalesce into a kind of cold, beautiful terror. It’s a night-walking story, best heard with the lights low and the windows shut, the kind that leaves you thinking about neighbors, about little civic rituals, and about how closely tenderness and menace can sit together. The emotional tail of the piece doesn't resolve into tidy catharsis; instead it leaves a residue—an image, a sound, a bird’s cry—that will hang in the mind long after the episode ends.

This was a beautifully restrained piece for tonight’s run—quiet, aching, and precise—an invitation to sit with sorrow rather than outrun it. If you liked the atmosphere here, come back tomorrow for another night’s offering; this series is built to show horror’s many faces, from the grotesque to the heartbreakingly ordinary.

Credits: This episode was produced by Mickie Eberz and narrated by Spring Heeled Jack (Anthony Landis). The story, “Funeral Birds,” is by M. Rickert. All original music for tonight’s episode was written and performed by Empress. Closing track: “Sometimes When I Walk Through Tall Trees, I Want to Hang Myself From Them,” written and performed by Empress.

Thanks for listening—make sure you check back tomorrow at midnight for the next story. Stay spooky.

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