Old Gods of Appalachia - Episode 32: Runs in the Family

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

In the early decades of the 20th century, unions are on the rise in coal country. Those who toil beneath the dark earth balk under the yoke of the Barrow family’s rule, and something must be done.CW: References to occult phenomena, unnatural means of reproduction, human sacrifice, ghosts, mutilation, beheading and maiming human beings, monster sounds.Written by Cam Collins and Steve ShellNarrated by Steve ShellSound design by Steve ShellProduced and edited by Cam Collins and Steve ShellThe voice of Pretty Polly Barrow: Tracey Johnston-CrumIntro Music: “The Land Unknown (The Pound of Flesh Verses)” written and performed by Landon BloodOutro Music: “Pretty Polly” as performed by Landon Blood and John Lee BullardSeason Sponsor: Sucrebeillle – Visit sucreabeille.com/products/nightshade and use the code LOVEGODS. Spend $25 anywhere in the store and add a dram of Nightshade to your cart to get that dram free.LEARN MORE ABOUT OLD GODS OF APPALACHIA: www.oldgodsofappalachia.comCOMPLETE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA RITUAL:FacebookInstagramTwitterBlueskySUPPORT THE SHOW:Join us over at THE HOLLER to enjoy ad-free episodes, access exclusive storylines and more.Find t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and other Old Gods merch at www.teepublic.com/stores/oldgodsofappalachia.Transcripts available on our website at www.oldgodsofappalachia.com/episodes.Old Gods of Appalachia is a production of DeepNerd Media and is distributed by Rusty Quill. All rights reserved.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/old-gods-of-appalachia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Welcome to the Dark Side. We Smell Awesome. Old Gods of Appalachia is a horror anthology podcast, and therefore may contain material not suitable for all audiences. So listener discretion is advice. The pro 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 taxmen for, 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 name family, and in this case, a great dark pattern. The rechristin 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 barrel mining companies 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. Well, after a marching band played and paychecks were handed out early, the patriarch of the Barrow family won Elias Pontius Barrow, known to most folks as simply EP, 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 in. 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 EP 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 Cole Hill as 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. Women and children screamed and ran for cover, but the working men of Barra, most still in their uniforms, stood rooted to the spot,

unable to flee. As the town folk of the newly baptized Barrow, Pennsylvania breathed then the black dust that blew forth from that breach that had opened beneath their feet, E.P. Barrow. walk calmly up the steps of his new office, stepped inside and proceeded down to the cellar, where the shiny new marble floor had split.

His two eldest sons, Conrad and Benuel, followed in his wake. Without another word, E.P. took off his coat and his hat and lay down still breathing in a coffin carved from a cold ebony wood. The box was etched in. side and out in the alien script that adorned the new town sign. The same fell tongue that had cracked the earth was still groaned and trembled beneath the foundations, and with a nod to his boys, E.P. was sealed up and lowered into the widening crack of the breach, and when the chains lowering the coffin were pulled taut, and he could be lowered no further, and it seemed like

the whole damn hill was going to fold into itself. Conrad turned to Benuel, and without so much as a hurried breath slashed his younger sibling's throat with the hunting knife. Conrad tossed his bleeding brother after their father's casket into the roaring darkness and silence fell across. In the gathering dusk on Coal Hill, the employees of the Barrow Mining Company

were still gathered, rooted in the place where they had listened to E.P.'s address. Their mouths hung slack, and their eyes stretched wide. cast skyward, alight the color of rotten plums blossoming in those dilated black porters. The dust or sutt or whatever it was

that had issued from the breach swept through the unresistant crowd like a swarm of locusts, moving through each body in turn to consume blood and soft tissue and carve out the living soul that reside in. in each, creating empty vessels for the Barrow family to work its will upon the world, and leaving them as hollow, as hollow can its capital thus established. The Barrow Mining Company set its sights on. Throughout the 1800s, Barrow operations spread throughout the hills and hollers of Appalachia like a blight.

absorbing smaller mines and acquiring adjacent land from the people who'd settled there by whatever means proved necessary, and for some families it didn't take much truth to tell. Frontier life was hard, breaking the backs and hearts of a goodly number of folks who pushed west in search of a place they could put down roots and call their own. Flash a little point their way, enough say to let them return to the more established cities back east, and they were more than happy to cede their claim to a land that had never wanted them here in the first place. Others, though. Others had managed to carve out a home for themselves in this unforgiving land, settling into the mountains like a hand into a glove,

and those would require a different approach. The approach in question often involved a visit from a special representative of the Barrow Mining Company, someone with the requisite skills to clarify for the more intransigent residents while accepting the barrow's offer was, in fact, in the best interest of them, their families, and quite possibly every one they knew. But the landowners proved more resistant than usual, a member of the bearer family might need to pay a personal call. Now, for decades, this duty fell to E.P.'s younger son, Benuel,

A visit from a dead man, making quite the impression on most folks who suddenly found they might be willing to reconsider the barrow's generous offer after all. Over the years, however, Benyles started to be more of a problem, becoming less predictable, harder to control. He might be sent to a tiny coal camp as a misbegotten holler in West Virginia, tasked with ridden the barrows of a meddlesome tax assessor and end up laying waste of the entire town. It's a common thing with haints who have overstayed their welcome on this mortal plane, you see, clinging to a life that has long since ceased to be theirs to claim.

Their behavior becomes more erratic and dangerous. And while E.B. had no concern for the collateral damage his younger boy might do to the communities where he was sent, Benuel's disobedience. was becoming a problem. Replacing a town's entire labor force was costly and inefficient. Benial was fast becoming a liability in the field, and Conrad had the whole of the Barrow-Clean's business interest to attend to on his father's behalf,

and thus E.P. turned his eye to the concept of producing another heir. The process of expanding the Barrow family was lengthy and was delicate work. See, Conrad and Benuel were not E.P.'s only progeny, no. They were simply his only children fit to represent the public face of Barra Mining Company,

the only ones who could pass relatively unnoticed amongst its human workforce. Yet something had to be done, and so E.P. instructed his sons to add more links to the great iron chain that suspended the black black box that had been prepared for him.

He poured him even further into the earth. Deep beneath the grand home office he had constructed. Conrad barred the door that led to the building so that none might disturb him and dismissed the staff for several months so none could carry the tales of the sounds that echoed up from beneath the family's headquarters. The foundations trembled. The air inside that place grew unaccountably cold, far colder than the snow that fell on the mountains around Cole Hill dread voices echoed up from the places below in a language that even

Conrad and Benuel could not understand and EP's sons quaked with fear and then to sky. It was everything the Barrow Patriarch could have desired in his progeny, brilliant, beautiful, and strong. Oh, so strong. Her particular talents began to manifest at the tender age of three. when a well-meaning nanny clasped the hand of the fussy toddler who wanted to stay outside and chase lightning bugs around the family's sprawling country estate

rather than come inside for dinner. The young woman had only meant to draw the little girl alongside her into the house, but Polly responded, her tiny hand morphing suddenly into a huge gauntlet armored with plates of bone and little Polly had simply crushed the bones of the nanny's hand. And then her mutant paw returned to her. its normal dimension slipped free of her pulpy grasp and returned to trailing her new glowing friends around the manicured lawn. E.P. His daughter's strength was matched only by her relentlessness in

pursuit of her aims, and E.P. set about honing her into a weapon that could be used deftly in any number of situations, depending on his need. He ended a tool that was versatile, adaptable, and above of all ruthless. And pretty Polly more than fit the bill. Were their palms to be greased in the halls of government? Polly's intelligence, her stature and demeanor demanded respect, even from the human men who played at their petty politics, must deals be struck with the wealthy and the powerful.

Polly was a shrewd negotiator and a charming dinner guest. The foreman at one of the smaller mining operations, taken more than his fair share from the co-obeyed, cookie jar thinking no one in faraway bearer would notice, Polly was there to swing the axe and cut off the offending hand. Grubby roughnecks making a fuss about working conditions in the mine, well, sweet Polly could be counted on to make an example that made a lasting impression. The need for those examples became more and more persistent as the new century progressed,

and the unions began to take hold. The rabble had seized upon the troubling idea that they were owed something by those for whom they toiled beneath the dark earth, and this simply would not do. Thus it fell to polly to collapse mine shafts and break spines and mount heads on pikes, wherever a lesson needed to be taught. It was becoming a rather annoying waste of her time, particularly as the workers grew more agitated with the hardships visited upon them by the previous year's stock market crash, It seemed, however, that her father had devised a plan to put the cattle firmly in their places once and for all.

And thus, in the autumn of 1930, Polly's older brother Conrad summoned her home to hear the voice of their patriarch. The sun had just sunk beneath the hills, painting the sky and orange fire when the sleek black Cadillac, pulled up the gently curving paved road that wound up coal hill to the stately limestone mansion that had come to be known as Barrow House, which had served as the family's base of operations now for more than a hundred years. And though they had allied themselves with lock rail some time ago to form the Barrow and Lock Mining Combine, the two families maintained a number of separate business interests and their distance. trust being in short supply among the heirs and those who serve them. Two men.

One a towering, lanky man with a perpetual stoop. The other compact, solidly built, and elegantly dressed, stepped out of the car. And the driver turned to quickly open the door for his backseat passenger. The woman who emerged was tall and shapely, with glossy black hair pinned back in soft waves, smooth alabaster skin and amber eyes. She wore a fine gray wool suit with a narrow pleated skirt and a graceful swing coat and matching hat

and a deep red blouse printed with white lilies. Her fine leather T-strap heels matched the blouse perfectly. They made a sharp clicking sound as she ascended the marble steps to a pair of wide double doors already peeling off her gloves as she walked. The doors swung open as her foot struck the top step, held wide for her by a pair of nervous-looking clerks who kept their eyes on their toes as they mumbled,

Even, Miss Berra. Ollie Bearer removed her hat and handed it to the nearest of the two, while the tall man who had driven the car stepped forward to take her coat. Coat and gloves were also deposited with the clerk. Mr. Crane, Mr. Churchman, with me, please. She proceeded with quick, purposeful strides down a dark hallway to the right of the entrance. Her two subordinates trailing in her wake. Crane and Churchman had served Polly almost exclusively since the mid-20s,

an honor they had earned through hard work and a willingness to get their hands dirty when the situation called for it. This was not the first time they had been called into the... presence of the patriarch, and they did not hesitate. Still, she could sense their discomfort. Even among the hollow, there remained a healthy fear of those who bore the name of Barra, and that was good. A tool which had no sense of self-preservation could not be relied upon to behave appropriately in certain situations.

Complications could arise. Look at Benial, Polly thought, as she descended the shallow marble stairs into the basement, a space that had become her father's office and throne room and sanctuary. The sigils that adorned the black box that was E.P. Barrow's beer and throne had spread over the years, creeping up the walls and etching their way deep into the marble beneath her feet. Many of these had accompanied Polly's own conception. A powerful evocation that had further cracked the foundations of Barrow House, shattering glass up above and nearly shaken the walls apart,

and thus had been present all her life. Others had appeared later. Mementos of her father's will made manifest. As they stepped through the door of the sanctuary, crane and churchmen each sank to one knee on either side of the door, bowing their heads in reverence. Across the room, Polly's brothers each held a similar position on the edge of the crevasse into which their father's coffin was sunk.

A heavy crate rested on the floor between them. It was hewn from the same night-black wood as their father's coffin, carved with ruins that the eye couldn't quite settle on, and curiously featured a number of holes cut into the same. sides along its top edges. Polly's heels echoed on the cold marble as she approached. She did not kneel as her brothers did,

though she inclined her head respectfully as she greeted their father. Evening Daddy. Boys. Conrad and Benuel glared at her over their shoulders. Relations between the bearer siblings had never been particularly warm. An E.P.'s obvious preference for the child he's spoke of as his greatest creation, had not improved matters. Duty was duty, however. And Polly's eldest brother, Conrad, was nothing, if not, an obedient soldier in E.P. Barras' service.

He inclined his head to his younger sister in greeting as he spoke. Our father has an important errand which he has chosen to entrust. To you, Manuel graded angrily, I and Polly with malice. If her incorporeal brother could do her harm, Polly didn't doubt that he would. But Benuel didn't have the juice these days. He might still be driving half-starved hill folk to madness with a whisper, but he'd long since grown too weak to affect her. His days on this plane were numbered.

Of course, I am, as always, at your disposal. Daddy? EP's voice echoed from the depths, harsh and resonant, as his children flinched, snapping to attention. Yes, Daddy? Yes, sir. Yes, Daddy. Yes, of course. I understand.

I will be done, Daddy. Conrad rose to his feet, gesturing to the heavy crate that Polly had noticed when she entered the sanctuary. The weapon is here in the box. Polly strolled over to the crate, resting a hand lightly against its surface as she examined it. The wood was cold to the touch, but seemed unremarkable otherwise. What is it? You'll see. Polly knelt down to peer inside through one of the holes carved into the black walls of the box.

Her eyes widened in surprise. Just take it to the cold camps and set it loose. It will perform the task it was created for. And then you just load it back into the box. Move on to the next, just as father said. Unless, of course, you are. I'd be to take it off your hands. Polly narrowed her eyes and shot her brothers a poisonous smile.

We'll be just fine, brother dear, but I appreciate your concern. Gentlemen, in the back of the car, if you please. Crane and churchmen rose to their feet and dutifully hoisted the unwieldy crate between them. She headed for the door footsteps echoing on the stairs, and the two hollow men followed. Polly had learned long ago what could happen if you turned your back on Benual Barrow. and she didn't think it wise to underestimate Conrad either. It paid to be cautious. The two clerks occupying the front desk in the lobby snapped to attention

as soon as they saw her, one holding her coat for her, while the other held the door open for her companions. Polly put on her coat, hat, and gloves, and followed the two men outside. They had already loaded the crate onto the back of the car, and Mr. Churchman was sliding. behind the wheel. Mr. Crane awaited Polly, holding the back door open for her.

Home, Mrs. Beverell? Crane asked as she slid into the plush interior. No. West Virginia, I'm afraid. We're told the union organizers are sniffing around again. The children have forgotten their lessons. And it falls to me. Once again, to play school mistress.

Yes, ma'am. Crane joined churchmen up front, passing on Polly's instructions. The car's powerful engine roared to life, and the three sped off into the night. Southbound for the Barra Coffield. Well, hey there, family. Welcome to the first proper story arc of Season 3 of Old Gods of Appalachia as above. So below.

Are y'all surprised to meet Miss Polly Barrow once again, and so soon? Well, she has missed the pleasure of your company. And if you don't know who Polly Barrow is, I highly suggest you. Make sure you didn't mess out on our holiday special Salt of the Earth back around Christmas time. We are so excited to have y'all with us for season three. It's hard to believe that we're already on our third season. We have so many exciting stories to tell you this time around, new characters, new places, maybe a familiar face or two, but it's just good to be home.

It's good to be back with y'all. And we ask that if you want to keep up with everything, please complete your social media ritual. Head on over to old gods of Appalachia.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the Discord server, all that good stuff. You can get all the upcoming news on our tabletop role-playing game that the Kickstarter is getting ready to launch for Monty Cook Games

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patreon.com slash old gods of Appalachia, where you can find 17 episodes of Build Mama a Coffin, the two-parter door under the floor. We're getting ready to wrap up Blackmouth Dog, our newest prequel to build Mama a Coffin. There's so much great content on there. We do our best to make it worth it because y'all keep our lights on. Y'all have enabled us to make this our full-time thing, and we owe it all to you. So please, if you want to get it on that and truly join with us, patreon.com slash old gods of Appalachia. And Old Gods of Appalachia is a production of deep nerd media, distributed by Rusty Quill. Today's story was written by Cam Collins and Steve Schell.

Our intro music was by our brother Landon Blood, and our outro music was by Landin Blood featuring John Lee Bullard on the banjo. And the voice of Pretty Polly Barrow is Tracy Johnson Crum. Talk to you soon, family. Talk to you real soon.