I Bury the Living

Robert Kraft is appointed as the new chairman of a committee that oversees a large cemetery. He begins surveying the grounds and getting to know the staff, including the meticulous cemetery caretaker. The job introduces him to the map-based system used to track graves.

Andy MacKee explains the map in the cemetery office, where black pins mark occupied graves and white pins mark sold but unoccupied graves. Kraft learns how the pins are used to track the grounds and manage plots. The system becomes central to the plot.

Kraft accidentally places a pair of black pins where they don't belong. He soon discovers that the young couple who bought those graves died in an automobile accident. He starts to believe he has marked them for death.

Hoping for reassurance, Kraft replaces a random white pin with a black one. Later that week, the person with the replaced pin dies, reinforcing his belief that the pins wield dark power.

Repeated experiments keep yielding the same result, forcing Kraft to confront a possible curse. His guilt and depression deepen as friends and coworkers grow skeptical of his explanations. The eerie pattern unsettles everyone around him.

The police, initially skeptical, decide the situation warrants investigation. They ask Kraft to place a black pin on the grave of a person known to be in France to test the source of the death.

Kraft complies and places a black pin on the French grave. He continues to sink deeper into despair as the deaths repeat or are blamed on him.

Convinced that color might control life and death, Kraft replaces all recently placed black pins with white pins. When he returns to the graves later that night, the sites are open and the bodies are gone.

As he deals with the eerie disturbance, Kraft receives a phone call reporting the death of the man in France. The timing of the report heightens his sense of doom.

The cemetery caretaker appears behind Kraft, covered in dirt, and reveals that he has been killing all of the people marked by the pins as revenge for being forced to retire. Kraft is stunned by the confession.

Kraft informs the caretaker of the France death, which the caretaker couldn't have killed, causing him to lose his grip on reality and collapse. The police arrive to confront the chaos.

The police reveal that the France death was a ruse to flush out the killer caretaker. They find the caretaker dead, and confirm that the deaths have been manipulated to frame him.