Steve Shell

Old Gods of Appalachia is a horror anthology podcast and therefore may contain material not suitable for all audiences.

So listener discretion is advised.

The Barrow clan began digging deep in the mountains of Appalachia and selling what they found there long before this country was even the radical dream of a few folks looking to dodge some tax men from across the ocean.

By the 1800s, their influence in the mountains of Pennsylvania had become such an accepted fact of life that the little mountain township of Pine Grove was renamed Barrow to honor the family and the company they had founded.

There is power in a named family, and in this case, a great dark power.

The rechristian of the town brought with it a great festival celebrating the glorious history of coal, the bituminous and the anthracite, the soft and the hard, the graves both deep and shallow.

The local holiday culminated in a ceremony atop Coal Hill, the high point and center of town, atop which crouched the Barrow Mining Company's newly built home office.

A grand and sprawling affair of limestone and white columns topped with a shining copper dome that shamed the local churches and the county courthouse with its stateliness.

After a marching band played and paychecks were handed out early, the patriarch of the Barrow family, one Elias Pontius Barrow, known to most folks as simply E.P., flanked by his adult children, delivered a speech on the front steps of that grand new building wherein he unveiled the new town sign.

which featured the family name and the date carved deep into its stone face.

It also bore a line of strange symbols upon it, words etched in a tongue that no human mouth should have ever been able to speak.

But E.P.

Barrow did just that.

His mouth contorting to produce sounds that pierced the ear and clouded the mind, and with those words came a great shaking and breaking of the earth, and the hill cracked, and a great crevice opened in the ground, beginning at the front of Coal Hill and snaking right up to the foundations of the home office, and from it issued a cloud of sooty darkness that swept into the air like sentient ash.

Women and children screamed and ran for cover, but the working men of Barrow, most still in their uniforms, stood rooted to the spot, unable to flee.

As the town folk of the newly baptized Barrow, Pennsylvania, breathed in the black dust that blew forth from that breach that had opened beneath their feet, E.P.

Barrow died.

walked calmly up the steps of his new office, stepped inside and proceeded down to the cellar, where the shiny new marble floor had split wide.

His two eldest sons, Conrad and Benuel, followed in his wake.

Without another word, E.P.