Sponsor: Missouri Haunted Attraction
Hollow Grove, a forgotten little town in mid-Missouri, is where it began—where she began. Morgan Hurst had always been an outcast, branded strange and wicked simply because she was born into a family of morticians. Generation after generation, the Hursts had prepared the dead, and to the town that was reason enough to call her cursed. She wore their cruelty like a shroud, bitter, hopeless, seething with hate.
One night, inside the Hurst Funeral Home, Morgan leaned over a body with her scalpel. The blade split the flesh with practiced ease, just another cut, another corpse. But this night was different. From the wound oozed a thick black substance, threaded with streaks of red. It writhed as it poured out, coating her gloves, pulsing like a living thing. It breathed.
Morgan did not know the woman on her table had been a blood witch. With each drop of the seeping fluid, a sacrifice was completed, and the witch’s power seeped into Morgan’s veins. The black ichor evaporated into her skin, flooding her body. She collapsed, shrieking, her nails tearing through her own flesh as if she could rip the fire out from within.
When the agony subsided, Morgan was no longer herself. Smoke coiled from her skin, carrying the stench of sulfur and decay. Her eyes glowed an unnatural, burning white, and her lips twisted into a smile too cruel, too knowing. In her skull echoed whispers—promises of ruin, visions of Hollow Grove drowning in shadow.
Morgan opened her fists. From her palms spilled a tar-like slime, spreading across the funeral home in slick, quivering webs. It slithered into cracks, burrowing beneath the floorboards, sinking deep into the earth. The ground itself began to pulse with her curse, and what had long been buried clawed its way back from the soil.
The town went on, blind to their doom, until the corruption reached them. Invisible tendrils slithered into their lungs, choking their breath, gagging them on blood. Neighbors convulsed, their bodies twisting, reshaping into grotesque parodies of themselves. Hollow Grove had no warning, no chance to escape.
Morgan’s curse had taken root. The dead no longer slept, the living were no longer human. Hollow Grove belonged to her now—forever bound in the Curse of the Hurst.