The Care and Keeping of the Returning Dead is a Southern Gothic horror rom-com: dread and decay, dark humour, a slow-burn between two people who'd both rather not, and a magical mystery buried under all of it. A witch inherits her grandmother's funeral home in a small Appalachian town. She expected a house, a business, and a mess. She did not expect the caretaker.

I'm Antlers. 34, she/her, Canadian (MST). I write horror with a sense of humour and romance for grown-ups. Here are my Terms of Service:



Premise below. Don't be shy. Shoot me a message! ✨

Black Creek sits in the Appalachian foothills, on the line where North Carolina gives way to Tennessee. The mountains here are so old they've worn down to hills, and the fog fills the hollers like water in a bowl. One main street. A diner, a post office, a pharmacy that hasn't changed its sign since the '40s. Churches outnumber gas stations three to one. Everybody's grandmother is somebody else's cousin. The porch ceilings are all painted the same shade of blue, and nobody will tell you why.

At the edge of town, where the road thins and the trees crowd in, there's a funeral home on a hill. Behind it, a cemetery that runs further back into the treeline than anyone living has walked. There's a creek. It floods in spring. Things wash up. The soil here won't let the dead break down. It holds them whole and patient, long past when they ought to be gone.

The old women uphold the traditions: salt across the thresholds, brooms on the porch, laundry in before dark. They do it because that's how they were raised, and you do not argue with your grandmother. Outsiders call it folksy mountain superstition.

It is not.

In Black Creek, the dead sometimes come back. The ones with unfinished business are walkbacks: confused, decaying, more or less themselves. You can talk to a walkback. Reason with it. The old-timers say it the way you'd mention a squirrel in the attic. Oh, the Hendersons had a walkback Tuesday. It was Roy. He wanted his watch.

The ones that come back wrong are haints: empty, nothing of the person left, just something else wearing the body. A haint doesn't want its watch. A haint wants to do harm for as long as the body lasts. The porch paint isn't decorative. The salt isn't for luck.

Somebody has been keeping all of this in check for two hundred years.

He lives on the property. Doesn't sleep. Doesn't eat. Doesn't age. He is not a ghost and he is not a zombie and he is most certainly not interested in explaining the difference. He's a warlock who did the one thing magical law forbids outright to bring back someone he could not stand to lose. What returned was the first haint Black Creek ever knew. His punishment was to put the abomination he'd created down himself, and then be bound. To the land. The bloodline. Every witch in the family, born and buried. He has outlasted all of them and holds an opinion on each, none of them generous.

The witch who just inherited the funeral home inherited him too.

She got the house. The business. A family library organized by a system that makes sense to no one alive. A magical supply stock running dangerously low. A community that shows up at all hours needing help she doesn't yet know how to give. An extremely old, one-eyed cat who was not consulted and is withholding judgment. And a caretaker who can't die, can't leave, can't touch the magic he still knows by heart — and who, if he could kill her and end two centuries of servitude, absolutely would.

He had a plan for the new witch. Manipulate her, find the loophole, get free. Simple. What he did *not* account for is that she's the first person in two hundred years who looks at him and sees neither a cautionary tale nor a convenient supernatural appliance. She finds him interesting.

This is, by his account, an unacceptable development.

Meanwhile, the haints are getting worse. More frequent. Less predictable. A spectacularly decayed ancestor keeps walking back from the grave to finish business everyone assumed she'd already finished a dozen times over. And an auditor from the regional magical authority has just shown up to scrutinize the grandmother's estate — and they are not leaving until every familiar, covenant, and unlicensed magical service is accounted for. No matter how long that takes or how many people it inconveniences.

Hey there! I LOVE the premise and setting of this idea! Supernatural Southern Gothic would really tickle my fancy right about now. I've only just recently had to give up on a similar vibed roleplay as my partner went AWOL so if you want me to show you some writing samples let me know.
(I'm also 25 ahaha)

Hey there! I LOVE the premise and setting of this idea! Supernatural Southern Gothic would really tickle my fancy right about now. I've only just recently had to give up on a similar vibed roleplay as my partner went AWOL so if you want me to show you some writing samples let me know.
(I'm also 25 ahaha)

Hello and thank you for your interest and kind words! I've sent you a PM with my sample, and am including it here for anyone else perusing the thread (this was me writing as the warlock from a previous iteration of this story. I am open to writing either role though!)

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The roll was bound with a strip of the same leather it was made from, knotted twice. The knot came loose under his hands and the leather fell open across his knee.

Cedar oil and iron came up first. The cedar for preservation, the iron for everything that came after. Older than anything else in the room.

A moment of stillness before reaching in.

A pedestrian charm was knotted into the soft interior of the leather. It presented as a subtle friction on the attention, a suggestion to the hands that this wasn’t worth the trouble. It found nothing to catch on. The binding didn’t answer to Broussard magic and neither did he, now that the petals were dust.

“Stay back from it a little,” he said. “There’s a ward on the leather. Meant to discourage exactly this.” A beat. “Won’t trouble me any.”

The outer pockets first. Chalk in two preparations, stick and ground, stored separately. Thread on a card, red and black, the red spool near-depleted. A hand mirror no bigger than his palm, bevelled edge, old enough that the silver backing had gone patchy at the corners. Three wax-stoppered vials, two empty, the third dark with dried residue. He held it to the light without opening it. Old. Spent. A working done elsewhere to someone else, before he came here.

Each item laid on the rug with the care of a man unpacking a surgical kit.

“These are for blood magic,” he said. “Sanctioned, most of it. Every practitioner workin’ estates and covenants carries somethin’ like this. Chalk for warding lines. Thread for bindin’ prep. Mirror’s for scrying.” A touch to the near-empty red spool. “Red thread’s for tying a working to a living person.”

The spool was near-empty. Worth noting once.

The centre pocket gave up the fleam in its own sleeve of oiled cloth. Brass handle, darker at the grip from decades of hands that were not Sebastien’s. A monogram on the end cap, read and set aside. A phlebotomist’s instrument at its origin, a practitioner’s instrument by long re-use, the metal held the warmth of a thing that had been picked up and put down by the same kind of hands for the same kind of purpose across more years than Sebastien Broussard had been alive. Beautifully made. Very old. The weight of it exceeded the brass.

He balanced it on his knee.

A small tin beneath the fleam sleeve. The lid pried open with his thumbnail.

Graveyard dirt. Dark, fine-grained, the smell immediately distinct from garden soil, layered, with depth to it. The lid went back on.

“That’s not sanctioned,” he said. His voice had gone flat and he left it that way. “Not for any audit. In compulsion work, graveyard dirt weights a living person’s will toward the dead. Makes them more—” A pause for the word. “Persuadable. Thread and dirt together, that’s the beginnin’ of overridin’ somebody’s judgment without them knowin’ it’s been touched.”

The last pocket held a small dark bottle, cork stopper, hand-labelled in cramped script: Bend Over. A condition oil, the bottle shy of full. Onto the rug. The petition paper was folded beneath it, one corner oil-stained from contact. Cream stock. Twice-folded.

He unfolded it.

Her name written nine times in a ruled column. Crossed by Sebastien’s own name nine times. Around both, circling the page until it ran out of room: as I will, so she will.

Long enough to be certain of what was there. Then turned so she could see.

His mother’s word came up. Geis. A binding obligation laid on a person at their most vulnerable, with the force of fate behind it, by a woman who knew exactly what she was making. Sebastien had managed cream stock and a condition oil with a label that said plainly what it was for. The ambition was the same. The craft was not.

“Called a defixio, in older practice. Lead tablet instead of paper. The Romans left them at graves.” He let her read. “Same intention.”

The fleam came back into his hand while she read.

Good balance. The blade folded into the handle cleanly, the hinge without play. The edge opened with his thumb and caught the firelight and held it.

The knowledge was in his hands before it reached his mind. From the years before the binding, from practice the binding had stripped power from but kept the memory of. Where blood came fast. Where it came slow. Where pain arrived immediately and where it arrived by degrees. A man could be bled a long time before the situation became critical. A man could be made to understand considerable things in that interval.

The thought came sideways then, and it was a cold one: what Sebastien had managed with improvised materials and a borrowed conduit. Petals off a vine, a pocket watch, and one cloth soaked in her stale blood. A middling talent working fast with what the property offered, and even so it had nearly been enough. Closer than Gideon had let himself account for yet. Someone with the kit fully deployed, the patience to work properly, enough power to use all of it — that was a different morning entirely.

His thumb ran along the flat of the blade. His breathing slowed to nothing.

Then a breath, and the blade folded closed and went back on the rug with the rest.

The kit reassembled. Fleam last, petition paper folded back into the leather, the whole thing rolled and knotted as he’d found it.

On his feet then. Two logs fed to the fire and a moment standing with his back to her while the wood caught, the flame finding its way into the grain. Then across to the loveseat.

The DMV envelope was where he’d left it, on top of the Laurel House letterhead. The registration came out with two fingers. The address on it was a rural route outside Asheville.

He crossed the floor back to her with it and settled down onto the rug once more. Handed it to her.

“Vehicle’s registered to an address in these mountains,” he said. “Burke County. Near Asheville. Could mean he’s been up here longer’n two years — or that he’s got reason to be close.” The registration went on the rug between them. “Either way, he knew this property. Didn’t come up that drive cold.”

His eyes went to the wall that held the unconscious warlock on the other side of it.

“Morphine’ll wear off soon. We ought to start thinkin’ about what we’re doin’ with him when it does.”