: A man buries his sister alive. Hacking the coffin, the woman returns from the crypt for her brother, and the walls of their house collapse, burying a terrible crime under the rubble.

The narrator receives a letter from an old friend of Roderick Asher, whom they have not seen for many years. Asher so desperately asks him to come, that there is nothing left for him but to saddle his horse and hit the road. When the storyteller met, the terrible change that happened to his comrade was shocking, his face became so emaciated and colorless! Roderick turned into a restless person, voluntarily imprisoned in the walls of his family castle.

He was possessed by a strange superstition associated with the house where he lived and from where he had not dared to go away for many years ...

Asher admits that the cause of his experiences, on the one hand, is a merciless affliction and the approaching death of the only native and beloved person - the twin sister Madilein, and on the other - a painful aggravation of his own feelings.

The narrator is surprised to see how the appearance of the family estate corresponds to the nature of its owners. The house, in the view of its owner, is an organism formed from stones and mold growing on them. The validity of this thought is allegedly confirmed by the thickening of “its own special atmosphere” over the lake and around the walls, which adversely affected the ancestors of Roderick Asher, and now himself.He explains the gloomy and oppressive atmosphere of the house with the fact that "plants are able to feel." However, the house does not seem fragile.

Only a very close look could discern a barely noticeable crack that began under the roof itself, zigzagled along the facade and lost in the gloomy waters of the lake.

Roderick dryly and laconicly tells the storyteller about the death of Lady Madeline. Asher is sure that the worst will happen after the death of his sister ... He decides to place the coffin with her body in the cave of the house, located directly under the storyteller’s bedroom, for two weeks, and after this time - to bury it in the family cemetery.

One night, after "several unspeakably mournful days" after the sudden death of Lady Madilein, a terrible thunderstorm begins. Through the howling wind, the narrator reaches strange muffled sounds of unknown origin. To calm and distract Roderick from painful thoughts, he reads a book to him. Suddenly, "crackling and the rumble of breaking boards." The narrator associates suspicious sounds with a hurricane outside the window, and only Roderick Asher understands: it is his dead sister who broke her coffin. He mutters barely that he buried Madilein alive, that he did not dare to admit it because of his cowardice, and that, wanting revenge on him, she now stands "here, behind the door."

A powerful gust of wind opens the heavy, ancient doors to the room - behind them in a bloody shroud is Lady Madilein.

All trembling and staggering, she stood on the threshold ... then, with a soft drawn-out groan, she swayed, fell to her brother's chest - and in the last mortal convulsions she dragged him to the floor, already lifeless.

The narrator in horror runs away from the castle.And a barely visible crack in the wall of the house suddenly begins to expand, and through it the light of the moon is pouring. Then "... there was a wild deafening roar, like the roar of a thousand waterfalls ... and the deep waters of an ominous lake <...> silently and gloomily closed over the wreckage of the house of Asherov."