“THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK” by H.P. LOVECRAFT (Classic Horror)
“THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK” by H.P. LOVECRAFT (Classic Horror)  
Podcast: Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
Published On: Sun Jun 28 2026
Description: A writer obsessed with the occult and forbidden knowledge uncovers a nightmarish secret lurking within a long-abandoned church—one that watches, waits, and is drawn to the dark.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/haunterofthedarkREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9ecf8yFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I’m back with a classic horror story, requested by one of you, my Weirdo family members. “The Haunter in the Dark” written by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:00:59.102 = About The Story00:03:15.896 = The Haunter of the Dark ***01:05:59.476 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:POEM: “Nemesis” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y466z69vThe Cthulhu Mythos: https://tinyurl.com/y22oe79f“The Haunter of the Dark” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y33eprua(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 30, 2020On this listener-requested episode of Weird Darkness, Darren Marlar narrates H.P. Lovecraft's last known story, "The Haunter in the Dark," the centerpiece of a three-part collaboration with fellow horror writer Robert Bloch.The episode opens with how the story came to be written. Robert Bloch, then a young admirer of Lovecraft, published "The Shambler From the Stars" in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales, setting his tale inside Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Two months later, in early November 1935, Lovecraft answered the homage by writing "The Haunter in the Dark" and dedicating it to Bloch; the story ran in Weird Tales in December 1936 (Volume 28, Number 5). It was the last story Lovecraft is known to have written before he died on March 15, 1937, and Bloch eventually closed the trilogy in 1950 with "The Shadow of the Steeple." The story's epigraph comes from the second stanza of Lovecraft's own 1917 poem "Nemesis."From there, the narration follows Robert Harrison Blake, a writer and painter of weird fiction who leaves 620 East Knapp Street in Milwaukee and takes the upper floor of an old house on College Hill in Providence during the winter of 1934–35. Blake grows obsessed with a black, abandoned church across the city on Federal Hill — a steeple shunned by birds and feared by the Italian neighborhood around it — and eventually breaks in, finding the moldering relics of the Starry Wisdom sect, a cult that took root after Professor Enoch Bowen returned from Egypt in 1844 carrying an artifact called the Shining Trapezohedron. In the windowless tower he uncovers the stone itself, a four-inch red-striated polyhedron that opens like a window onto other worlds, resting beside the charred skeleton of Edwin M. Lillibridge, a Providence Telegram reporter who vanished inside the same building in 1893. Gazing into the crystal rouses the Haunter of the Dark — an avatar of Nyarlathotep that can move only in blackness and is driven back by light — and the rest of the tale tracks Blake's collapse into sleepwalking, scorched hair, and frantic diary entries as a violent August thunderstorm threatens the streetlights keeping the entity penned in. When the power fails over Providence at 2:12 in the morning, the thing leaves its steeple, and Blake is found dead at his desk the next day with bulging eyes and a face frozen in terror, his final scrawled line describing a three-lobed burning eye — after which the physician Dr. Dexter hurls the box and the glowing stone into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay.