 "The Goddess of Death" was Hodgson's first published story, and appeared in 1904 in "Royal Magazine".A village is terrorized by a number of murders by strangulation, and the chief suspect is a statue of the goddess Kali stolen from a Thugee temple.The narrator is a visitor who believes there must be a rational explanation, but he finds it increasingly difficult to explain what is going on when the town's mysterious 8-foot statue is missing from its base and he sees what looks like the statue itself running through the night, carrying a cloth garotte.