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Podcasts are free audio programs distributed over the Internet. You can download them and listen to them as you please, essentially creating a radio station focused entirely on the topics you want to listen to. There are podcasts out there covering almost any topic that you can imagine – and probably dozens of podcasts on specific ones too.
Listed below are those mostly focused on horror – fictional and non-fictional. I have always been obsessed with things that go bump in the night. Scary movies, spooky stories, survival video games, and so on. If you’re looking for something to fill in the silence as you clean, work on art or commute to work, school or whatever else, you may find a couple of the podcasts below interesting. And it does’t have to be close to Halloween season for you to be in the mood to spook yourself into a sleepless night either.
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NON-FICTION
Lore
Lore is an award-winning, critically-acclaimed podcast about true life scary stories. Lore exposes the darker side of history, exploring the creatures, people, and places of our wildest nightmares. Because sometimes the truth is more frightening than fiction. Each episode examines a new dark historical tale in a modern campfire experience.
Spooked
Spooked is a documentary podcast focusing on folklore and supernatural myths throughout the world; think Lore, but with a narrower focus and an even sharper sense of where our universal fears originate.
Unexplained
Much like Lore, Unexplained delves into mysterious real-life events that continue to evade explanation. Some of which will keep us thinking about what is real and what isn’t. The host, Richard McLean Smith, takes us on a journey through these mysterious events and the theories to explain them. But as the host himself said: Some things are just better left unexplained.
Dark Histories Podcast
Dark Histories tells the stories of some of humanities darkest moments, deepest mysteries and strangest happenings, from large cultural events to smaller, localized legends.
Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine
Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband, Justin, dig into old medical journals to figure out some of the horrific ways we used to treat people — always weird, oddly funny, and often horrifying. Best Starter Episode: “Aah, Real Monsters”
Sword & Scale
Is an American podcast that explores nonfiction stories of true crime. It features a variety of narrated true crime stories intertwined with interviews with criminals, witnesses, victims, authors, 911 call audio, witness testimony, trial audio, interrogation tapes, music, and sound effects. This podcast doesn’t shy away from the macabre. Each episode it dives into the demented mind of a different serial killer or a truly brutal murder mystery.
Haunted Places
You’ve heard of haunted houses, haunted cemeteries, haunted islands…but do you know how a normal place can become a paranormal minefield? Every haunted place on earth has a frightening, real backstory. Greg (Co-Host of Serial Killers and Cults) takes you on an audio tour of a new haunted place, and it’s haunted history.
The Apex & The Abyss
The Apex & The Abyss is a true crime podcast. The host, Erika, dives into each case with the sole purpose to tell the stories of those we have lost, the missing and to try and comprehend the reason behind why these crimes happen.
Nighttime
Nighttime is an audio documentary series which explores Canada’s most fascinating stories. Topics range from true crime, mysteries, and a celebration of Canada’s weird and wonderful people, places, and events.
The Strange and Unusual Podcast
The unknown. It lies at the root of all fear, and has inspired legends, superstition, folklore, customs, hysteria, and even murder throughout history. Still today we feel the shadowy presence of our ancestors’ struggles to explain the mysterious in almost every facet of our lives. Whether it be in the form of religion, urban legends, pop culture, ghost stories, superstitious rituals, and so much more we are still just fighting to keep our monsters in the dark.
Astonishing Legends
Their mission is to take a look at legendary strange and unusual events from throughout history and interview people who’ve had close encounters with the unexplained. They strive to bring you everything that’s entertaining about those stories and remind you that it’s ok to laugh at scary stories sometimes.
My Favorite Murder
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast. Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark tell each other their favorite tales of murder and hear hometown crime stories from friends and fans.
FICTION
Welcome to Night Vale
Welcome to Night Vale is a fictional podcast presented as a radio show that broadcast from a small town of Night Vale, located out in some undisclosed desert in the Southwestern U.S. where things happen to get pretty strange. This podcast doesn’t pack the pure horror punch of a good old-fashioned ghost story, but the narratives it weaves are wonderfully creepy and always impressive.
The NoSleep Podcast
NoSleep is an anthology horror fiction podcast. NoSleep began as a “subreddit” or forum on Reddit where people would exchange scary stories and frightening experiences. Both the podcast and the subreddit have a clear credo: tell us a scary story and make it feel real. There’s no doubt that very few, if any of the stories told on The No Sleep Podcast are actual first-person accounts of individuals dealing with paranormal phenomena, but the important thing is that they feel like they are.
The Black Tapes
The Black Tapes is a serialized docudrama podcast. It focuses on reporter Alex Regan who follows a cynical paranormal investigator Dr. Richard Strand into the investigation of his “black tapes” – files that feature paranormal activity that he was unable to disprove. Throughout the serialized story, listeners are treated to some great spooky side-quests and an epic overarching narrative about lost daughters and corporate cover-ups. It’s best described as Serial (an investigative journalism podcast) meets X-Files.
Alice Isn’t Dead
The team behind the aforementioned Welcome To Night Vale created Alice Isn’t Dead, a serialized story of an unnamed truck driver (unnamed to us at least) and her country-wide search for her missing wife, Alex. The main story is tragic, spooky, and a wonderful jumping off point for all manner of other paranormal spooks.
Knifepoint Horror
Knifepoint Horror is an intermittent anthology podcast where each episode features a weary-voiced narrator telling a standalone, first-person story that inevitably builds from ominous dread into an all-consuming horror fest. This podcast has no frills and no production frippery; its effectiveness derives partly from its minimalism, and the way creator Soren Narnia allows the silence to fill your mind with terror.
Limetown
Much like The Black Tapes, Limetown follows the reporting of a fictional public radio journalist named Lia Haddock as she investigates the disappearance of over 300 people from a small town in Tennessee.
The Message and Life After
The Message and its follow-up series Life After are lush sci-fi thrillers that center on the decoding of an intercepted signal of apparent alien origin — and which might just be a curse. In The Message, though the stage is initially set to mimic your average journalistic nonfiction podcast, the completely fictional story rapidly goes off the rails, all while hewing close to real-life searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. The follow-up series, Life After, which deals with AI technology and the terrifying potential of immersion in a fully digital world, can be standalone but works even better as a sequel.
The Lost Cat Podcast
The Lost Cat Podcast is a modern homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s obsessive, paranoiac narrators and the endlessly disturbing worlds in which they live. It’s surreal, blackly comedic, and often totally bizarre, but the concept is irresistibly simple: In each episode, the narrator continues an ongoing search for his cat. What he finds instead is a host of eminently compelling weirdness.
Point Mystic
Point Mystic is endlessly spine-tingling podcast that sounds like a news program, similar to Welcome To Night Vale because the town it covers is full of discordant weirdness, from faceless firemen to terrifying wooden shapes in the forest. With its emphasis on surreal horror rendered via naturalistic storytelling, Point Mystic also echoes the aforementioned Knifepoint Horror, but its impressive production value places it at the opposite end of the podcast spectrum.
The Magnus Archives
The Magnus Archives is a horror fiction anthology podcast. It focuses on The Archivist Jonathan Sims (also the actual name of the writer and the actor playing him) who works at Magnus Institute in London, an shady organization dedicated to researching and collecting personal accounts of the paranormal. Magnus is fearless in its subject matter, utilizing everything from an astronaut undergoing an isolation experiment to creepy taxidermy to curious pest control in order to launch tales presented as deeply disturbing personal testimonies.
We’re Alive!
We’re Alive is a audio drama podcast about survival. It follows a large group of survivors of a zombie apocalypse in downtown Los Angeles, California. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead you may enjoy this.
The White-Noise Podcast
White-noise, is a collaborative podcast about a girl named Sarah Jones. Sarah was your average teenager from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, till one day she discovers she has died and is now a ghost. With the help of a Confederate soldier named Sam Dickerson, she is introduced to Death and Death’s assistants, who have the answer to why she is still a lingering.
Pseudopod
Pseudopod is a horror fiction podcast. Each weekly episode brings you some of today’s most terrifying tales of fiction from a variety of horror authors. Listening to Pseudopod will make you feel like you’re sitting around a campfire swapping ghost stories, but without the wholesome part. After all, the stories presented here are intended to disturb and are likely to contain death, graphic violence, explicit sex (including sexual violence), hate crimes, blasphemy, or other themes and images that hook deep into your psyche.
Deadly Manners
Deadly Manners is a 10 episode, dark comedy murder-mystery podcast set in the winter of 1954. The listeners is introduced to the Billings family and their esteemed guests of their annual dinner gala. Everything is going swimmingly… until the power goes out. It features the voices of Kristen Bell, Denis O'Hare, RuPaul, Timothy Simons and Anna Chlumsky.
Rabbits
Similar to Limetown in that it tells the story from the perspective of a reporter looking to solve a mystery. Only this time, rather than a missing town, our intrepid narrator Carly is trying to crack a case involving her best friend, avid gamer and fellow journalist Yumiko.
Yumiko disappeared and Carly’s case has gone cold. The police aren’t looking for her — there is no Amber Alert for adults, after all, as Carly says. Carly thinks Yumiko was involved in a secret society of sorts, one that played an “alternate reality game” called Rabbits that makes contestants go insane.
The Dark Verse
The Dark Verse is a multiverse of Lovecraftian terror written and narrated by M. Amanuensis Sharkchild. The stories range from demented entities to gross worlds, undead recollections to philosophical and psychological possessions, and twisted, inventive imagery to unhindered terror.
Return Home
Return Home is a serialized audio drama, done in the style of radio shows of ages past. It tells the story of Jonathan Barker, who returns to his home of Melancholy Falls, NJ, after five years away. An unknown entity beckons him back East, in order to unravel the mystery of what his home town has become…or has always been. Reunited with his best friends, Buddy and Ami, Jonathan must discover the secrets of Melancholy Falls, and why he was told to return home.
Nightmare Magazine
The Nightmare podcast, produced by Grammy Award-winning narrator and producer Stefan Rudnicki of Skyboat Media, is presented twice a month, featuring original audio fiction and classic reprints. This podcast is a digital magazine of horror and dark fantasy. In its pages, you will find all kinds of horror and dark fantasy, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror. It features a variety of authors: from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet.
The Dark Tome
What if there was a book that literally opened up doorways to other worlds? Where would it lead, and could you handle what you found on the other side? Cassie, a wayward teen, is about to find out. One day, after she wraps up community service at a local hospital, she stumbles out of the basement of a spooky bookshop and into a story set on a devil’s staircase in a remote Italian village. The Dark Tome is a new take on the anthology audio fiction podcast, featuring fantastic stories by contemporary authors from across the globe.
Sable
Sable is a single narrative horror podcast that’s meant to chill you to your very core and ask you one simple question; How much of this world is actually real? What has been hidden from us? Who, exactly, is doing the hiding? It’s a podcast that can take place in multiple universes, all coming together to find an answer to all those questions and more.
Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery
Wormwood is a serial occult mystery podcast. When a strange vision of murder sends him to a small town to investigate, Dr. Xander Crowe discovers that Wormwood is far from ordinary. Secrets lurk within every resident, from the innkeeper to the town librarian to the waitress at the diner. The seemingly idyllic surface of Wormwood hides a mystery unlike anything Crowe has ever experienced — he finds himself drawn into a web of dark conspiracy, strange romance, and arcane mysticism. As Crowe begins to unravel the mystery at the heart of Wormwood, he finds that his very presence there may not be a coincidence at all.
The Bright Sessions
The Bright Sessions is a science fiction audio drama podcast that follows a group of therapy patients. But these are not your typical patients - each is an atypical who has a unique supernatural ability. The show documents their struggles and discoveries as well as the motivations of their mysterious therapist, Dr. Bright.
The Moonlit Road
The American South is ripe with stories of ghosts, folktales, myths, legends and other strange tales.
The Darkest Night
Darkest Night is a binaural audio drama that places you, the listener, at the center of a recovered memory that sounds as though it’s happening around you in real time. Each chapter delves into the last memories of the recently deceased, slowly revealing a horrifying master plan. Who is weaving this master conspiracy, and what is their ultimate goal? Darkest Night is narrated by Lee Pace (The Hobbit Films, Guardians of the Galaxy, Pushing Daisies. Halt & Catch Fire, etc). It also features acting performances from Denis O'Hare (American Horror Story), Maynard James Keenan, Missi Pyle (The Artist & Dodgeball), RuPaul, Michelle Visage, and Jeffery Bowyer-Chapman.
Gone
Gone is a wonderfully written, one-woman show that’s done in a audio journal format. The protagonist awakens one morning to discover that everyone in the immediate area – and perhaps everywhere – has disappeared without any indication as to what happened or where they’ve gone. At first everything – except for the total absence of everyone – appears eerily normal. Then, bit by bit, that changes.
SunDown UNDEAD
Blackstone Pharmaceuticals is run by a Mr. Blackstone, the CEO who’s a sociopath that has developed a drug capable of reviving the dead. Intent on destroying his competition he concocts a plan to murder his rival at a small hotel and quarantine the witnesses. The guests inside are left without answers as the dead return to life with an appetite for flesh.
Paralyzed
This fictional podcast follows David, a chronic sufferer of sleep paralysis on his annual camping trip with friends. But something evil from his dreams awaits.
What’s The Frequency
What’s The Frequency is a psychedelic noir audio drama podcast set in 1940s Los Angeles. Recently radio broadcasts in the city have been reduced to static, leaving a popular radio serial as the only remaining show on the air. Even then the show finds itself continuously interrupted by a mysterious broadcast. A lone distorted voice reaching out for help. Follow P.I. Walter “Troubles” Mix and his partner Whitney as they search for a missing writer and navigate through a city quickly falling into madness.
Palimpest
Palimpsest is a serial fiction podcast about memory, identity, and the things that haunt us. Instead of relying on jump scares, the Palimpsest podcast explores psychological terror. Framed around a ghost story told through a therapy patient’s audio notes, the first season follows that patient, a woman named Anneliese, who is mourning the death of her sister Claire. As the creep factor ticks up, listeners have to decide what’s real and what’s not, and how reliable a narrator Anneliese truly is.
Station Blue
Station Blue is an atmospheric isolation horror podcast. Think The Thing or Alien. The story follows a troubled man named Matthew Leads who takes a job as the caretaker of an Atlantic research facility. The listeners follow his struggles with mental illness, a broken heart and the suffocating presence of Station Blue.
Chilling Tales for Dark Nights
This podcast is devoted to doing dramatic readings of popular internet horror stories (i.e. creepypastas) and classic horror literature such as the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. This is also available on YouTube. It has currently had dozens of guest narrators, some of which are popular on Youtube and some celebrities outside of it. Such as Daniel Radcliffe (who performed Fear of Hue) or the well known YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach (who performed The Scarecrow Corpse and The Rake).
The Other Stories
These aren’t the stories your mother used to tell you … no, these are The Other Stories. The Other Stories is a weekly short story podcast. A modern take on The Twilight Zone, Tales From The Crypt, or The Outer Limits. It has got a little bit of everything: Sci-Fi, Horror, Thriller, and WTF stories.
 DamnBlackHeart · Sun Sep 16, 2018 @ 12:14am · 0 Comments |
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