Episodes

Five family-friendly Halloween horror stories bring together a NEPA werewolf, graveyard zombies, elemental magic, cursed music, and deadly wishes. Michelle Antisocial’s “Eh, Real Monsters from NEPA” follows scarred newcomer Patrick Marshall-Sherwood III, whom townspeople blame when livestock are mutilated. His sharp-tongued friend Marisa knows prejudice has pointed armed adults and their silver bullets at the wrong suspect. Keith Tomlin’s “Bed and Breakfast and Zombies” detours eleven-year-old ...

On Halloween night in Strickfield, three friends follow children’s laughter into a locked cemetery—and join a game called Ghost in the Graveyard. Bill Chapman, Brian “Chunker” Chunk, and Richie Horton have survived seven straight nights of trick-or-treating—and one terrifying encounter with the supernatural. But when their walk home takes them past Village Cemetery after midnight, concern for a group of costumed children draws them over the cemetery wall and into the fog. What begins as an inn...

Poisoned Halloween candy became an American urban legend despite a troubling gap between the familiar warning and documented crimes. Terrifying & True examines the deaths of Kevin Toston and Timothy O’Bryan, sociologist Joel Best’s research, and the media scares and hoaxes that helped keep parents checking wrappers. Real tragedies sit beside exaggerated claims, often pointing toward dangers closer to home than an unknown trick-or-treater’s neighbor. Why does the image of a stranger handing out p...

Ten-year-old Robin lives for Halloween and is determined to become the undisputed king of the holiday. His plan requires one reckless act: stealing from the Grinner, A rotting scarecrow dummy seated outside McClellan Hall with a candy bowl and a take-one warning. Robin’s best friend Michael knows the former funeral home’s legend and wants no part of the challenge. But when bravado wins, the boys discover why younger trick-or-treaters avoid the Grinner’s warped smile—and why some Halloween rule...

A cruel school prank helps create a Halloween monster in “Origin of the Pumpkin Man” by Charles Campbell. At LBC Middle School’s 1987 Jack-O-Lantern Jubilee, Butch Marker and Steve Vig prepare explosive pumpkins for the festivities. After a child is hurt, science teacher Raymond Mathis receives a packet marked PUMPKIN POTION and an invitation to punish those responsible. The dance is still ahead, but the evening’s rules are already changing. An ’80s Halloween horror story about recklessness, rev...

Chain letters are a documented social phenomenon that moved from copied religious warnings and charitable appeals to pyramid schemes, email spam, and viral social media posts. Their history reaches far beyond the internet, using promised blessings, threatened curses, and the pressure to keep a message moving. This episode follows Lucy Meyer’s successful 1888 dime appeal for a Methodist missionary school, the snowball collection that overwhelmed Mrs. Campbell with thousands of letters, and fundr...

Newcomer Isaiah Crane is late for a Halloween costume party in Yatesville, where his classmates insist he dress as Girald Johnson—a local man executed by Decapitation for witchcraft. A bicycle shortcut through the woods soon leaves Isaiah injured and alone. The resemblance that made him a curiosity in town may also make him the target of a headless rider rooted in old accusations and unfinished vengeance. Reaching Phoebe Hart’s party means surviving a dark trail where folklore has stepped out ...

The 1982 Corpsewood Manor murders took place at the handmade brick retreat Charles Scudder and Joseph Odom built in the north Georgia woods near Summerville. The couple left Chicago for forty isolated acres, creating an off-grid home filled with art, music, gardens, stained glass, and the symbols of Scudder’s unconventional beliefs. Their hospitality and eccentricity also inspired rumors that exaggerated their wealth and cast them as dangerous outsiders. This episode follows the planned robbery...

Raige Devereux is a Strickfield University student, police intern, and secret serial killer whose bloodlust normally makes her the most dangerous person in the room. Then a fraternity death leaves a drained body and two unmistakable puncture wounds. Raige and Detective Drake Kazmierczak follow the evidence into the city’s nightclubs, where vampires are no longer folklore and a missing young woman may be connected to a hidden crypt. To survive the investigation, hunter and detective must trust ...

La Llorona’s chilling legend leads a Halloween-ready Monthly Spooky packed with child ghosts, mystery meat, a real-life Addams family, and strange Reddit tales. With spooky season closing in, the crypt conversation follows reports of ghostly children and deeply questionable meat before diving into the haunted folklore of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman said to wander near the water searching for her lost children. The episode also explores listener-worthy oddities from Reddit and shares reaction...

Paranormal investigator Anthony Thomas has faced ghosts, demons, vampires, and eldritch abominations. Nothing prepares him for the morning his longtime partner Margaret Clark walks into the office wearing a face that only he believes is wrong. The stranger knows Margaret’s work, sits at her desk, and is accepted without question by Margaret’s wife. As Anthony searches for proof that his partner has been replaced, the mystery becomes a terrifying test of memory, identity, and whether a perfect ...

The Texarkana Moonlight Murders were a series of attacks in Texas and Arkansas during 1946, attributed to an unidentified assailant remembered as the Phantom Killer. Over less than three months, familiar lovers’ lanes and a rural farmhouse became crime scenes, leaving five people dead and three survivors carrying the only direct memories of the attacker. This episode follows the assaults on Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey, the murders of Richard Griffin, Polly Moore, Paul Martin, Betty Jo Bo...

Twelve-year-old Darcy Reed finds a mysterious arcade game at a gas station in 1982—and learns it is testing her for a real war against alien invaders. Darcy pedals through a June storm in upstate New York after Billy McIntosh reports that Rocco’s Gas and Go received a rare cabinet. The machine tells the story of Edgar Winchell, a Victorian paranormalist who discovered Ophiuchus, the hidden thirteenth sign of the zodiac, on New Year’s Eve 1899. Its game pits the player against fishlike Dagonites...

The 1965 murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis remains one of Indiana’s most disturbing true crime cases. Left in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski while her parents worked, Sylvia was isolated and abused over months as Baniszewski’s children and neighborhood youths were drawn into the cruelty. This episode examines the adults who saw warning signs, the police response after Sylvia’s death, and the 1966 trial involving Gertrude, Paula, John Jr., Richard Hobbs, and Coy Hubbard. It a...

Nine-year-old Benjamin slips away during a funeral at Hobart’s Funeral Manor and meets a strange little girl hidden inside the house built for the dead. The residents of Calvary have always found the old funeral home and its owner unsettling, but Benjamin is more bored than afraid while his family pays respects to his great-grandfather. When a small shadow moves through a forbidden doorway, curiosity leads him beyond the public viewing rooms and into the private residence of Mr. Hobart. There ...

At nineteen, a young woman in a large Canadian city accepts an after-hours cleaning job at a neighborhood pharmacy. The work is quiet, close to home, and normally solitary—until one of her father’s much older friends begins waiting outside the locked doors and asking when her shift ends. His behavior escalates from lingering outside both buildings to following her after work, pressuring her to attend a late-night movie, asking for her phone number, and offering to buy her shoes. Even after her ...

Shawnee awakens naked in the Strickfield police morgue, reunites with her best friend Bev, and discovers that both girls now hunger for human brains. Two days earlier, an alarm clock from Tinker’s raised every corpse in Strickfield Cemetery during the friends’ slumber party. Bev survived the attack only by becoming undead, then bit Shawnee rather than lose her. Shawnee remembers dying outside her doctor’s office only after ordinary food and her favorite Caffeine Junction latte become revolting—...

Sleep paralysis, the terrifying “old hag” experience, dancing coffins, and modern horror movies collide in this month-in-review conversation with Henrique and Michelle. The hosts descend into the crypt for strange news involving haunted burial places, sharks, and catastrophic sinkholes before turning to a fear that can follow people into their own bedrooms. Henrique shares his personal experience with sleep paralysis, and the discussion explores why the sensation of waking unable to move is so ...

An eighteen-year-old night clerk expects boredom at a Stop N Go in Portage—until a mysterious woman named Elizabeth begins visiting after dark and turns his Horror-movie obsession into something dangerously real. Between late-night customers, VHS rentals, an increasingly intimate stranger, and a violent robbery, the convenience store becomes the setting for a vampire story in which romance and bloodlust arrive before closing time. The familiar rules of the undead may not work quite the way the...

In the early 1980s, two young paperboys vanished from Des Moines, Iowa under hauntingly similar circumstances. Twelve-year-old Johnny Gosch disappeared in 1982 while delivering newspapers before sunrise, leaving behind his wagon, undelivered papers, and a family forced to fight for answers. Two years later, thirteen-year-old Eugene Martin vanished from his own paper route, leaving behind a delivery bag full of newspapers and another devastated family. The cases were never officially connected, ...

A hunting family in northern New York has survived for generations by honoring one rule: leave the first kill in the forest for Ol’ Bones. When the offering is gone, only enormous two-legged tracks and a carcass hanging in the trees remain. The narrator has never seen the creature his grandfather feared, but he knows the boundary markings along the creek and the price of crossing them. A return to those woods turns inherited folklore into a confrontation with an ancient, ravenous thing that tr...

The Mary Celeste is the Atlantic ghost ship found deserted in December 1872 with ten people missing and no certain explanation for why they left. Sailors from the Dei Gratia discovered the cargo vessel still seaworthy, its industrial alcohol largely intact, its provisions and personal belongings in place, and its lifeboat gone. Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their young daughter Sophia, and seven crewmen had vanished. This episode separates the documented evidence from inventions that...

Corrupt attorney Spencer Ambrose travels to Belfast, Texas, where buried chemical weapons make the cattle hallucinate that human beings are food. Spencer built his career convincing victims that they caused the disasters hurting them. His latest job is protecting the wealthy Dean cattle dynasty after BZKL—nicknamed Buzzkill—leaks from an abandoned copper mine into the local environment. The weaponized hallucinogen was designed to make people turn on one another, and Spencer expects another prof...

A delivery-truck driver is repeatedly written up for carrying an unauthorized passenger—except he cannot see anyone sitting beside him. The company’s new cab camera can. In this supernatural road-horror story, a veteran driver writes to his nephew Harry to explain why he will never recommend a trucking job. After his employer installs cameras facing both the road and the cab, management begins confronting him with footage of a large, middle-aged man in the passenger seat. The stranger’s red cap...