The Dining Room

August 31, 2020·34 min·3 clips

Ann reveals she killed Gregory, describing how she hid his body in the trunk after the house drove her to madness.

1. In Another Room is a supernatural horror audio drama in which the protagonist, Wendy Morrow, is trapped in a house and led through rooms that reveal past tragedies. 2. In this episode, the dining room surfaces the story of Ann and Gregory Lodge, a couple who moved into the house in 1928 and were destroyed by it within six months. 3. The episode's central horror is that the house changes everyone inside it — Gregory develops rapid dementia while Ann becomes uncontrollably angry and cruel. 4. Ann calls her mother from inside the house and describes Gregory forgetting who she is: 'Some days he'll look at me and won't remember who I am. He thinks I'm someone else entirely.' 5. When her mother offers to visit and help, Ann refuses — 'I don't want you inside this house. I don't want it to get to you too.' 6. Gregory, in a moment of partial lucidity, picks up one of Ann's grandmother's plates because 'the pattern made me remember her,' then breaks it — triggering a confrontation in the dining room. 7. Gregory's confusion between Ann and a stranger escalates when he sees Ann wearing the barrette he gave her on their first anniversary and accuses her of stealing it from 'his wife.' 8. The confrontation turns violent as Gregory grabs Ann demanding to know what she has done with his wife, and Ann is heard screaming 'you're hurting me' before the scene cuts. 9. With dinner guests Adam and Laura arriving in fifteen minutes, Ann attempts to conceal what has happened and manages the evening as if Gregory is merely ill upstairs. 10. Gregory reappears at dinner in an apparently calm state, but cannot see Ann directly in front of him — instead describing her to the guests as his wife, with 'the most beautiful red hair' and 'the clearest, most piercing blue eyes.' 11. Gregory tells the story of their first date — a botched driving lesson that ended in a ditch, Ann pushing the car while her dress was torn, then laughing until she couldn't stop — and says 'I knew in that moment I would spend the rest of my life with this girl.' 12. As Gregory's confusion deepens, Ann snaps — first at the guests, then accusing Gregory of being not real, insisting it is 'the house' playing a trick on her. 13. Ann breaks down and confesses to Adam and Laura that she stabbed Gregory, cleaned up the blood, and hid his body in the dining room trunk. 14. When she opens the trunk, it is empty — and Gregory is standing quietly behind her, asking if anyone has seen his wife. 15. The narrator reveals that when authorities arrived at the house that night, they found the dining room covered in blood and both bodies inside the soaked trunk — Gregory's arms locked around Ann so tightly that paramedics had to break his bones to separate them. 16. Returning to the present, the protagonist reflects that she came to the dining room expecting to see how escape was possible, but instead witnessed only 'madness and defeat.' 17. She confronts the house directly, saying 'stop playing with your dinner and eat me already' before noticing the trunk opening on its own. 18. Under the peeling papering of the trunk's lid, she finds a key to the basement — which she believes is the heart of the house and her way out. 19. Horror fans who enjoy atmospheric, psychologically layered audio drama with historical tragedy will find the Ann and Gregory storyline among the most affecting in the show. 20. New listeners may need context about the overarching frame narrative — the protagonist's name, her goal, and the show's mechanics — before the dining room sequence fully lands.

As heard by us

A dining room, a buried case, and one more door into dread.

The Dining Room turns one room into a pressure chamber: an old radio, torn curtains, a broken plate, a stuck trunk, and a notorious case from 1928 keep dragging the present back toward what has been buried.

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Why you'd press play

A stuck trunk and a 1928 case make this room hard to leave.

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