 In the story, the unnamed narrator describes the final fate of his good friend, Denys Barry, an Irish-American who reclaims an ancestral estate in Kilderry, a fictional village in Ireland.Barry ignores pleas from the superstitious local peasantry not to drain the nearby bog, with unfortunate supernatural consequences.The story was written at speed and to order, for oral delivery as an after-supper "shocker" for a Hub Club gathering of amateur journalists in Boston on March 10, 1921.