"The Peabody Heritage"

by August Derleth
originally published The Survivor and Others, Arkham House, 1957

Asaph Peabody dies in 1905 and leaves his run-down, 27-room house in the countryside of Wilbraham, MA, to his family.  Who don't want anything to do with it but also won't sell it.  So it sits.  Until after 1929, when the narrator, who's first name is never given but whom we will call "Peabody", cuz - decides to re-furbish it and move in.

Trouble starts pretty fast.  The locals are unfriendly.  The family mausoleum is opened, and Peabody find's Uncle Asaph is upside down in his broken-open coffin.  Peabody turns him over ("this act, which might have seemed grisly in other circumstances, seemed only wholly natural" he notes - um, yeah ... sure...).  A secret room is found in the house, with a burnt-looking desk, cabalistic symbols on the floor, and books of black magic.  And the narrator is plagued by dreams of uncle Asaph and a big black cat flying around at night.  And sometimes a "Black Man".  When some workmen break open the north wall of the strangely-angled room, they find bones and skulls - small ones.

Does Peabody do the obvious thing and call the cops?  No!  I guess he doesn't watch Law & Order or CSI.  Instead he hides the bones in the mausoleum  and goes off to research Asaph's life.

It seems the locals thought Asaph was a witch/warlock, and he was thought to have a big black cat as a familiar.  And children used to go missing all the time.  Oh, and he was buried upside down in his coffin, because superstition said that would keep him from rising from the dead and continuing his nocturnal nastiness.

Well, Peabody knows what to do - burn Asaph's remains!  But when he rushes to the tomb, he finds the body of a recently-gone-missing child in the coffin with Asaph (someone's in the coffin with Asaph...), and it seems Asaph's bones are starting to fill out.

Peabody sets the coffin afire and heads back to the house, where he's menaced by a great black cat.  He shoots it.  To no avail....

Here we have a pretty standard Derleth tale, seemingly inspired in part by the story of the Chase Family Vault, whatever notes there might have been of HPL's, and "Dreams in the Witch House", an interesting choice since Derleth didn't apparently hold "Dreams" in very high esteem, at least when he read it in manuscript form.

It's not a bad story by any means, despite some lapses in logic.  Derleth was an effective enough spook-writer, and there's some decent atmosphere. But clearly HPL did a lot more with the idea - in a story generally regarded as not among his best.