Episode notes
In 1989, a young teacher runs an adult literacy program two evenings a week in a school that has been closed since 1976. There's power in only one corridor, the building sits empty, and her students come on one condition: nobody can ever know.
In this original horror story, a woman looks back on twenty-two months spent teaching grown adults to read in a single lit classroom: a farmer's widow who kept the books by memory, a young man who came up through that same school, and a welder who could price any job to the hour but couldn't read the word "danger" on a drum. Every session ends the same way, with her reading a page aloud, slowly, while they follow along with a finger. Then she starts finding the fire door taped open with tape that isn't hers. One February night, mid-sentence, she hears a chair shift on the tile four rooms down.
A slow-burn, unsettling tale of an abandoned school after dark, a promise of secrecy, and someone who was listening the whole time. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.
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📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales
All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.