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Episode 2 - Ren

November 8, 2023·33 min·3 clips

Ren finds a massive oak tree smeared with blood and witch marks, with a box of rotting animal hearts at its base.

The episode opens with Ren narrating her drive up a winding mountain road crossing the North Carolina and Tennessee border into Kilruin, an isolated village where she was born and barely remembers. She is on the phone with Tyler, a recent ex who has been texting obsessively, and she firmly ends the call by telling him she refuses to become another victim like Frankie. She recalls that Janet and Tyler were her only real friends, and Janet has now gone missing on the Appalachian Trail. Arriving in the area, Ren finds a tree deliberately felled across the road using an axe. Beside the road stands a large oak covered in carved witch marks — circles, arrows, wing shapes — with the carved lines smeared in dark blood and flies swarming. At the base of the tree is a woven box full of various animal hearts. Ren examines the box with clinical detachment, reflecting on growing up on a farm where dissecting animals was unremarkable. She surmises the tree and offerings may be meant to scare people off. Moving into Kilruin itself, Ren surveys the centuries-old stone buildings and muddy paths and recalls her miserable childhood there as a red-haired foundling who no one would speak to. The townspeople regard her with open hostility. In the general store, the owner Charles Pugh and several other men pressure her to leave, but she spots Janet's distinctive olive green backpack with purple threads hidden behind the counter under a surplus army blanket. She confronts them and a violent scuffle breaks out — she stabs one man named Noah Barnes in the leg with a screwdriver. Four men overpower her and throw her out onto the gravel road. Locked out of the hostel and every house, Ren plans to sleep in her car but senses men following her in the dark. Seeking safety, she approaches the church — a place she swore she would never return to — and finds a light moving inside. She enters and is immediately slapped across the face by Sister Ginevry, the woman who raised her in the church's nursery, who calls her by her birth name Catherine. Sister Ginevry invites her inside, saying the night is unfit for homecomings.

As heard by us

A mountain-town story turns border roads, memory, and dread into a slow burn.

Kilruin comes across as a mountain town already heavy with memory, where the road crosses the North Carolina-Tennessee border three times and the land feels used up before the horror fully shows itself.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a mountain town that remembers your blood, press play tonight for a colder chill.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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