<![CDATA[The Weeping Willows Inn]]> https://rss.com/podcasts/weepingwillows In the valley town of Little Gap, three old willows have wept along the Buckwha for sixty years. This August, very quietly, they have begun instead to bow — leaning down-valley toward the lights of the village, toward the covered bridge and the small white chapel and the inn at the bend in the road.

Eighty-year-old Mike O'Donnel has spent a long, quiet life learning to read the things other people miss. A retired man with an old training he doesn't talk about, he watches the willows lean, watches a stranger in a long coat walk the rail bed at the foot of his land, and finds a white stone — a Celtic cross hand-cut into its face — set fresh among the roots. Something patient has been waiting in this valley for far longer than sixty years. It is no longer patient.

The Weeping Willows Inn is a slow-burn gothic mystery told in serial, a chapter per episode — family and memory and the long shadow a place can keep. New chapters as they're read.

]]> RSS.com 2026.609.160344 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:16:06 GMT en 6acf4f28-3fd9-549b-8616-78bb52bfa6fb https://media.rss.com/weepingwillows/podcast_cover_20260616_120639_340a1204897fc0d58cddd255565f2d4b.jpg The Weeping Willows Inn https://rss.com/podcasts/weepingwillows no Wallace Thorne Wallace Thorne false episodic podcast Saint John the Baptist Monastary, Bass Road, Warwick, Northfield, Franklin County, Massachusetts, 01378, USA false <![CDATA[Chapter 1 — The Bowing of the Three Willows]]> For sixty years the three willows along the Buckwha had been weeping. This August they began, very quietly, to bow.

In the first chapter, Mike O'Donnel rises at five to a valley wearing its mist like a second coat, and counts the wrong things one by one: the willows leaning down-valley toward the village; a child half-hidden in a photograph he has walked past for eight months; six cats fixed on a place at the foot of the largest tree where nothing, quite, can be seen; a stranger in a long coat for August walking the old rail bed; and a white stone, dew-fresh, with a Celtic cross cut into its face. A man does not, in eighty years, learn to read the difference between a stranger and a returning man. Mike has it in him anyway — and what walks the village's way this week has been waiting a great deal longer than sixty years.

Chapter 1 of The Weeping Willows Inn, a serialized gothic mystery.

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