The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It follows an unnamed, unreliable narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a "vulture eye". The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by cutting it into pieces and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator's guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the man's heart is still beating under the floorboards.