[1][2] Folklorist R. B. Wilcox, collecting material for a book on the legends of upstate New York, queries Aceria Jones, a Gahato tea room hostess, regarding the village's rumored haunted woodpile.

Aceria dismisses the story, but suggestively tells him she would be extremely grateful if he could point her to a job in the vicinity of a Norway maple (Acer platanoides).

The history of the woodpile goes back to a mansion built by 19th century Swiss immigrant August Rudli, who imported two Norway maples to grace his estate.

A century later the house had gone back to nature, but one of the maples still thrived, until all the hardwood timber on the lot was sold and logged in the winter of 1938.

The logs cut from the tree end up in Gahato at Dan Pringle's sawmill, where the next spring they are sawn into boards and stored in Pile No.

Mill workers Henri Michod and Olaf Bergen are spooked when the remaining lumber in Pile 1027 begins swaying beneath them for no logical reason.

In the days that follow, the pile's supernatural reputation grows as Aceria invisibly undermines all efforts by Pringle's employees to move the wood, and begins to sabotage his operation in other ways.

Pringle sells the whole pile at a cut rate to the owner of The Pines tea room, Earl Delacroix, who needs a new dance floor.

Everett F. Bleiler, reviewing The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales, considered "The Hardwood Pile" one of the two best stories in the collection, and its background of "the workings of a lumber yard" to be "particularly interesting."