The narrator rents a little country house on the banks of the Seine River. Here he befriended a boatman who tells
the narrator his queer experience on the river.
One evening while returning the boatman stopped at a point in the river where many reeds grew, to smoke his pipe. He threw the anchor in the stream. The night was totally silent. Not even the movement of water was heard. He tried to settle himself at the base of the boat and smoke but couldn’t take more than two puffs. He stretched himself at the bottom of the boat. Soon the boat started moving slightly as if someone was pulling it down to the bottom of the water and then lifting it and then again pulling it down. Then he started hearing all sorts of noises all around him.
He sat upright and all was calm again. So he decided to go instead of waiting there any more. He tried to pull the anchor but it was stuck at the bottom which won’t come out anyway. He sat back and drank two or three glass of brandy. Suddenly there was a knock at the side of the boat. He stood up and tried to pull the anchor but slowly a thick white mist covered the river and he could not even see his feet but he could see some reeds which swayed and made ghostly figures. He felt someone was trying to climb the boat. He was terrified and to escape that feeling he again drank few glasses of brandy. Then he began shouting. He could hear a dog howl quite a distance away. He again lay down in the bottom of the boat.
After some hours he could hear all the denizens of the water, the water lashed, the wind whispered and it grew cold. He drank the remaining brandy. As the blackness diminished he saw a shadow slipping along near him. He utters a cry. It was a fisherman. Both of them hailed another fisherman and all of them pulled the anchor. At last it yielded. A corpse of an old woman with a great stone round her neck was stuck to the anchor.