The Outhouse Haint, born Caleb Kirk, is a Stripling from the Great Depression who is responsible for over a dozen disappearances in the American Southeast since the turn of the millennium.
History[]
In Life[]
After nearly a century of torment, Caleb Kirk has forgotten almost everything about his life, save for its end. Told by his abusive mother never to enter what she termed “the lady box,” he disobeyed in a moment of need, fell through rotted floorboards, and drowned in the muck below.
Oblivion's erosion of himself means that the boy remembers nothing of his life except the awful distress that compelled him to enter the forbidden outhouse (a moon carving on the exterior indicated a privy for women; a privy for men bore a carving of the sun; unisex spaces had both), the terror of his fall, the shame and disgust at what he plummeted into, and the waning of hope as no one came to his rescue.
In Death[]
Like some who suffer physical abuse by a parent, this deceased youngster passes along that abuse — posthumously, in his case, but in deadly fashion. Men, boys, or persons whom the ghost perceives as male who enter the outhouse meet the beslimed and stinking Spectre immediately, as he springs from the squat, squarish, wooden-lidded privy to drag his victim head-first into what lies beneath.
Although the ghost has the semblance of the child who died, still stuck in the conditions of his death, he is somewhat venerable for his kind, which simply makes him potent, enraged, and implacable.
Image[]
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When luring prey in the Skinlands, the Haint manifests a one-person outhouse, an ancient-looking thing: paintless gray horizontal boards around gray vertical boards that form a door, which has a crescent-moon-shaped hole about eye level for a grownup; overhead. The whole thing wears a beveled roof — higher in front — with timbers and slats overhanging the walls.
Like its accursed resident, the structure has tactile presence: Its constituent boards feel like weathered wood, albeit cool to the touch, even in direct sunlight. Its olfactory nature — or supernature, perhaps — is instantly mutable, however: Outside of the little building, only scents of whatever might be in bloom nearby, or smells carried there from afar on the breeze can be detected. Any person who crosses the threshold, however, immediately faces an assault that can be likened only to having fresh human feces smeared inside the nostrils.
The Spectre itself is incorporeal and bound to the outhouse, and only arcane means are able to separate it enough for any meaningful interaction. The Haint is also powerless against women.
Operations[]
Like the lure of an angler fish, the Haint manifests its outhouse along a certain remote stretch of the Appalachian Trail. All of the Haint's victims so far have been male. Whenever one of the quick enters its outhouse, if the person is (or looks/ is dressed in attire 1930s Appalachia would have considered) male, the slick, brown-caked ghost bursts forth to supernaturally grapple the victim with force comparable to that of an anaconda or other large constrictor. The victim is then pulled into a vast, extradimensional pit of slime beneath the outhouse, and once fully drowned, the outhouse and its occupants dematerialize.
The Haint currently remains at large as the subject of numerous tabloid papers, and will only be displaced from its hunting ground upon receiving a proper exorcism. However, a simpler act could also undo its assaults: a woman’s voice commanding it to stop misbehaving, to let those people be, or any similar language, as long as it includes its name, first or full.
References[]
- HTR: 5th Edition Core Book, p.199-201