It is 1848, and misery hangs on the country like a funeral shroud. When Patrick Hartley Murphy decides to rescue an abandoned infant he finds lying atop the Irish hill, the trials of post-famine Ireland become only one part of a problem that runs much deeper, as he finds himself and his family stalked by a Night Hag, an ages-old hatred that attaches itself to the Murphys like a curse.
Fifty years later, John and Mary Murphy travel across the ocean to a small mining community in West Virginia in the hopes of leaving the evil behind. There, they discover the cruelties within the malicious depths of the White Oak’s Widow, the coal mine that swallows lives as surely and as entirely as does the Hag. Yet, while men work and die in the deep underground, the Murphy family discovers that misfortune and indifference are not the only things that followed them from Ireland.

My name is Zachary Hughes and I will be reading for you each week from my original horror novel The White Oak’s Widow on my podcast Dead Eyes and Moonlit Skies. I would greatly appreciate your support, and I hope you tune in each week on your podcast platform of choice.