There are places in the Appalachian hills where stories don’t die.
They settle in the stone and wait for someone foolish enough to listen.

Freelance journalist Ellie Glass thought she was chasing history when she drove to Weston, West Virginia — the site of the abandoned Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. What she finds inside isn’t history at all. It’s hunger.

Once a beacon of hope, the asylum’s long corridors now breathe with something older than medicine, older than faith — a living memory carved into the foundation itself. With her recorder in hand and her past clawing its way through the cracks, Ellie searches for the truth behind her mother’s disappearance and the voices that still whisper through the walls.

But the deeper she digs, the more the lines between past and present, sanity and damnation, begin to blur. The stone remembers. The walls listen. And beneath it all, something ancient stirs — something that wants her to finish what was started long ago.

As the investigation descends into madness, Ellie must face the ghosts of both her family and the land itself. Some stories demand to be told. Others demand a body to tell them through.

Set against the haunting backdrop of the Appalachian hills, Echoes in the Stone is a standalone psychological and supernatural horror novel from Joshua Bish, author of The Lady in Flesh and Room 316. Drawing from the real-world history of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, it explores the uneasy boundary between memory, madness, and faith — where trauma becomes inheritance, and history feeds on the living.

Perfect for readers who love the slow-burn dread of Shirley Jackson, the atmospheric decay of Mike Flanagan’s horror, and the emotional weight of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, this novel is both a ghost story and a confession — a journey into the quiet corners of grief where something still waits to be heard.

Themes:

Appalachian folklore and forgotten history

Intergenerational trauma and inherited sin

The thin line between faith and obsession

The echo of voices left behind by time

Praise for Joshua Bish’s horror universe:

“Visceral, elegant, and deeply human — Bish writes horror that lingers like a hymn.”
“An author who understands that the scariest monsters are the ones that remember us.”

If you’ve ever stood in an empty hallway and thought you heard something breathing behind the walls…
then you already understand.

Author: Joshua Bish
Genre: Horror
Subgenre: Horror
Tropes: Slow burn
Audience: Adults

Content notes based on the synopsis: Bereavement / grief