Lore Alive 3: Under the Rug
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Welcome to Lore Alive, a special Halloween bonus series that brings dark tales from history to life with immersive sound design and voice actors.
For today's spooky tale, we travel north to Maine, and the tiny community of Dark Harbor. It is here that a promising marriage falls apart, and a horrifying legend grows up in its place.
Lore Alive was created by Aaron Mahnke, with writing and direction by Nicolas Tecosky, audio production and sound design by Brandon Grugle. This week's episode starred Sarah Palm and Joanna, Nick Tecosky as Sal, and Amanda Cucher as Amanda.
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- Warby Parker: Right now, buy one pair and get additional pairs for 20%. Go to WarbyParker.com/LORE to try on any pair virtually!
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- Get Ad-Free Lore: lorepodcast.com/support
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©2026 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.
Every Friday this October, we're bringing one story from history to life with immersive sound design and talented actors to create an atmosphere that fits the tale. It's the style that you know from other shows I've made, like 13 days of Halloween or Havoctown, applied to true tales from history's darkest corners. This is lore alive. I've been at this for nearly 12 years now, and that means that I've told you hundreds of stories that sit at the intersection of history and folklore. Sometimes those tales are of a strange beast that roams the nearby woods, or maybe stories of a person who went too far, crossed the wrong line, and transitioned from normality to infamy. Most though are legends of the things we leave behind, our pain, our troubles, our suffering. Sometimes those hard moments cut so deep that they leave a mark, they haunt us in more ways than one. By the way, this entire Halloween bonus series was made possible by the generous supports of Warby Parker, my absolute favorite maker of prescription glasses. I've been a loyal customer of theirs for over a decade, and it means so much to have their support. More about that after the show. For today's spooky tale, we're traveling north to Maine, where a tiny island in Penobscot Bay is home to a small community called Dark Harbor, and it's here that locals still whisper about a promising marriage that fell apart in the horrifying legend that took its place. There are no warm fuzzies here, my friend. Just anger, and pain, and terror, and if you're ready, let's begin. There was a lump underneath the rug in the parlor. You expect old houses to have quirks, poorly patched wiring, leaky pipes, creeks and groans from multiple lifetimes of settling. These things are not unusual. All of this is to be expected. And with a house as old as the one we bought, you have to accept the occasional haunting, a child who gets drowned in the bathtub, a gentle grandmother who drew her last breath in the bedroom down the hall. It's rare that you stumble upon something truly horrible that has somehow seeped into the floorboards and walls. I do so love this house, but I do so wish I'd never laid eyes on it. My husband and I moved here from New York. It was hard to leave. That's where we'd met in a graduate program that my husband Charlie still loves to name drop 20 plus years later. And we lived there for a very long time after, nearly half of my life now. But the city had begun making us both anxious in recent years. And so when my husband got brought on as a lecturer at a community college, well, we both decided that we could write anywhere and that a change would do us a world of good. And it is lovely here in dark harbor, though I do find manors to be sometimes maddeningly closed off. I also find winters to be interminable. On the whole, it can become claustrophobic even in this large house with the vast wilderness surrounding us. It was six months into our time here when the disturbance began. One morning I came down the stairs to find that every single piece of furniture in the parlor had been moved in the night.
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