The Witch Bottle Under the Porch | Folk Horror Scary Story

The Witch Bottle Under the Porch is a narrated scary story about a family who finds a dark glass bottle buried beneath the porch of an old rural house. Packed with rusted nails, red thread, yellowed paper, and human hair, the bottle looks like something hidden there for a reason. When it breaks, the house begins to change, and every door starts opening inward, even the ones that had been locked.

What begins as a strange discovery during a home repair turns into something darker as the family realizes the bottle may have been keeping something out, or keeping something buried. This episode is for listeners who enjoy folk horror, witch bottle folklore, haunted object stories, creepy old house horror, rural supernatural suspense, cursed objects, basement horror, old-house hauntings, and eerie tales about what happens when old warnings are ignored.

So, be careful what you dig up under an old porch.

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Production Note: Feral by Night is a human-voiced original production by Papa Gee. Any supplemental voice modeling is authorized by Papa Gee. Stories may draw inspiration from folklore, superstition, haunted history, urban legends, strange news, and original fictional premises.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Feral by Night is a storytelling series of eerie tales, strange houses, hauntings, weird things that happen on lonely roads, and all the things that go bump in the night. I'm Papa G and this is Feral by Night. So turn the lights down and settle in. Some stories are better heard after dark. The first door opened by itself while the family was still standing over the broken bottle. It was the back door, the one off the kitchen, the one Mason had locked less than ten minutes earlier, because he didn't like the way the wind was moving through the yard. The latch clicked, the knob turned. Then the door swung inward, slow and steady, until it bumped the wall with a soft wooden thud. Nobody moved at first. Mason stood in the mud beside the porch with a shovel in his hand. His wife Tessa had one arm across their daughter's chest, holding twelve year old June back from the hole they dug beneath the sagging porch steps. At their feet, dark glass glittered in the porch light. The bottle had been buried about two feet down, tucked under a flat stone with an old horseshoe laid across it. Mason had found it while digging out rotted boards from the front steps. He thought it was trash at first. Then the shovel hit something hard, and when he pulled it out of the dirt, the whole thing was wrapped in blackened cloth and tied with threads so old it came apart in his fingers. Tessa had told him to leave it alone. She didn't make a big scene about it. She just said the house was old, and old houses had old things in them, and some things were better off put back where they were found. Mason laughed it off. He said it was probably a medicine bottle or some old farmer's junk. He wiped the mud off with his thumb and held it up to the porch light. The glass was almost black, but something inside shifted. June leaned closer and said there was hair in it. That was when Mason dropped it. The bottle hit the edge of the shovel blade and burst open across the wet ground. Rusted nails spilled out first, long square ones with orange flakes clinging to them. Then came a tangled wad of red thread, a strip of yellowed paper, and a knot of hair tied tight enough to look like a small dead animal. Tessa made a sound in her throat, then the back door opened. The kitchen light spilled out into the yard, pale and flat. Beyond the doorway, the house looked too quiet. The table was still set from dinner. A glass of tea sat beside Mason's plate. The dog, Banjo, stood in the middle of the kitchen with his ears pinned back and his tail tucked low. Tessa told Mason to get June inside the car. Mason said they were overreacting, but his voice had gone thin. He walked to the back door and pushed it shut. He turned the deadbolt. Then he tested the knob twice. It held. He gathered the broken glass with a garden trowel, scraped the nails and thread into an old coffee can, and set the can on the porch rail. Tessa told him to put it back in the ground. Mason said he wasn't bearing broken glass where somebody could step on it. He said he'd throw it away in the morning. That night, the hallway closet opened at 213. Tessa heard it from the bedroom. The old hinge made a drawn out squeal, followed by the familiar sound of the knob tapping the wall. She woke Mason and told him someone was in the house. He checked every room. The front door was locked, the back door was locked, the windows were latched. June was asleep under her quilt with her nightlight glowing blue beside the bed. The hallway closet stood open. Mason shut it, pushed a chair under the knob, and went back to bed. Ten minutes later the chair scraped across the floor. By morning, every door inside the house had opened inward. Bedroom doors, closet doors, the pantry, the little door beneath the stairs that led into the crawl space. Even the bathroom door, which had swollen in its frame and usually had to be shoved with a shoulder, stood wide open. Mason blamed the settling house. Tessa didn't argue with him. She went straight to the porch rail and looked for the coffee can. It was empty. The nails were gone. The thread was gone. The clump of hair was gone. Only a smear of black mud remained at the bottom. That afternoon, Mason searched under the porch with a flashlight. He found no footprints, no animal tracks, and no sign that anything had crawled beneath the boards. Still, from somewhere under the house, there came a faint ticking sound. It sounded like fingernails tapping glass. By the third night, the doors had a pattern. They always opened inward, never outward, never halfway. They opened all the way as though something on the other side had been invited in and knew exactly how far it was allowed to go. The front door opened while Tessa was washing dishes. The deadbolt slid back first. She watched it turn, smooth as a hand had touched it. Then the knob twisted. Banjo growled once and ran under the table. Mason installed chain locks the next day. He put one on the front door, one on the back door, and one on June's bedroom. He changed the deadbolts himself and told Tessa that old locks failed all the time. That night, the chain on June's door lifted out of place. Tessa saw it happen from the hallway. The little brass chain rose link by link until it dropped free. Then June's bedroom door opened inward. June sat upright in bed staring at the dark hall. She told her mother in a flat and sleepy voice that someone had been standing beside the closet asking where the bottle went. Tessa packed a bag before sunrise. Mason said they couldn't leave over noises and bad hinges. Then the basement door opened behind him. That door had been nailed shut since they bought the house. The former owner had warned them about it during the closing walkthrough. He said the basement was more of a root cellar, damp and useless, and the stairs were rotten enough to kill somebody. Mason had promised to seal it up better once they moved in, but he never got around to it. Now the nails lay on the floor in a neat row. The door stood open. Cold air pushed through the kitchen and carried the smell of wet dirt with it. From the darkness below came the slow drag of something being pulled across packed earth. Tessa took June to the truck. Mason stayed behind, he said he needed one minute. He went to the porch, grabbed the shovel, and dug through the mud beneath the steps until he found the flat stone. He placed the broken pieces of the bottle back in the hole. Then he dropped in every nail he could find from his toolbox, a spool of red thread from Tessa's sewing basket, and hair cut from his own head with kitchen scissors. He covered it all with dirt and set the horseshoe back on top. For two days the house went still. The door stayed shut. Banjo came out from under the furniture. June slept through the night. Then on the third morning, Tessa found Mason standing on the porch before dawn. He was facing the front door. It had opened inward during the night. So had the storm door. So had every door inside the house lined up one after another through the dark rooms, making a long open path from the porch to the basement. At the far end of that path, below the kitchen, something tapped softly from under the floor. Mason turned toward Tessa with dirt on his bare feet, and red thread was winding around his wrists and twisting around every finger. Behind him, the front door began to swing wider. You can find information on both podcasts on feral folklorist.com. And if you'd like to see the animated video versions of these stories, consider becoming a patron of my Patreon at patreon.com slash Papa G. And if you're ever in the market for metaphysical supplies, our store Aromage's Botanica has been weaving magic for over twenty-five years. That's over at Aromage's dot com.