The Tell-Tale Heart

A narrator, insisting all the while on his perfect sanity, calmly explains how and why he murdered an old man he lived with. He had nothing against the old man — indeed he loved him — except for one of his eyes: a pale, filmed 'vulture eye' that filled the narrator with dread. Night after night he creeps to the old man's door, until the moment comes to act.

Having committed the deed and concealed the body with meticulous care, the narrator receives the police with perfect composure — until a sound only he can hear begins to build beneath the floorboards, driving him toward a frantic confession.

One of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous and widely taught stories, 'The Tell-Tale Heart' (1843) is a compact masterpiece of psychological horror. Told by a compulsively unreliable narrator, it turns guilt, obsession, and madness into unbearable suspense in only a few pages.