S0304 Beyond The Door by J. Paul Suter

Beyond the Door is a story of a haunting. A man is haunted by visions of something coming out of the well in his cellar and by the scratching sounds in the passages of his old house. If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In here you could buy me a coffee  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker) Beyond The Door by J. Paul Suter This story was recommended by Terry Illikainen and this version was from Weird Tales volume 01 number 02, 1923-4. Jospeh Paul Suter wrote pulp tales during the early to middle part of the 20th Century for the magazines that specialised in genre fiction. He wrote mystery, detective, and supernatural stories. He was prolific and had more than two hundred stories published in these magazine. He was an American author born in 1884 who died in 1970. And that’s about all I can find about him. Beyond the Door It seems to me that Beyond The Door is one of those stories that leaves it up in the air whether the narrator is insane or haunted. In this it is like The Yellow Wallpaper or The Horla or The Beckoning Fair One. It’s a common sub-type of the ghost story genre.  My feeling is that this eccentric driven, bookish man who is focused on his interests in the scientific study of insects cannot tolerate deviation from his routine. He sees the love interest of his Australian lady as a threat to his work, and the anxiety thus provoked drives him to hill her and throw her down the well. If I was meeting him today, I would probably think he had Asperger’s Syndrome and that he couldn’t remember his murder due to dissociation.  Clues to the fact it’s a murder not a haunting are that he keeps having visions of a dog and he comments how she nuzzled his hand like a dog. No one else sees or hears anything supernatural, though the freaky house decorated with bugs dose unsettle them. The body is bruised again supporting the coroner’s theory that the stone slab of the well came down on him when his guilt just wouldn’t let him leave the crime scene alone.&