Horror freaks, October is your time to shine. This is the month for planning your Halloween costume, terrifying your neighbors with unsettling decorations, and mainlining scary podcasts.
If you're looking for a haunting aural experience this spooky season, here are 10 shows full of ghosts, murders, and haunted hallways for days. (And don’t miss my additional suggestions for more scary horror podcasts to listen this Halloween, and, if you're concerned about terrifying yourself a bit too much, this list of the best scary podcasts ranked by scariness level.)
On Caribbean Mystics, hosts Paulina and Gabrielle highlight supernatural tales that take place in the Caribbean region. A storyteller shares their own spooky experience, then Paulina and Gabrielle come on mic to supply us with the cultural and historical background, and their own impressions. Caribbean Mystics offers highly produced stories told by the people who experienced, mixed with a fun hangout session between friends.
Hosted by Tristan Redman, Ghost Story is the perfect podcast if you’re looking for something murder-y and ghosty. Tristan starts out explaining that weird things used to happen in his bedroom when he was a teenager, even though he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Later he finds out that people who lived in the house after he moved away saw strange things too. Oddly, his childhood home is next door to the home where his wife’s great grandmother was murdered in the early 1900s. Could these events be connected? It's certainly a lot spookier if you entertain the notion.
Lauren Lapkus is known for being one of the funnest improv comedians in the podcast biz. On her new show Haunting, she’s playing the fictional character Therésa, a dead influencer from the other side (finally some undead representation!) sharing non-fiction stories from the real people. Spookiness and silliness in equal measure.
On Other World, host Jack Wagner lets listeners tell their own scary stories, serving as the curious but neutral host, asking inquisitive questions, and letting the listener come to their own conclusions about what really happened. Whether you believe the stories are true or not, Jack does a great job showing us how, at the very least, they have changed the storytellers' lives.
If you had asked me to guess what kind of podcast we’d get out of the publication House Beautiful, I would never guess it’d be something so scary. Dark House is, appropriately enough, about interior design, but it’s also about the intersection of true crime and the paranormal: Beautiful homes with histories of hauntings, murders, the unexplained, and more. Magazine editors Hadley Mendelsohn and Alyssa Fiorento bring on authors, set designers, psychic mediums, and paranormal investigators to understand why we’re so obsessed with haunted houses, and to delve into what they tell us about our culture.
The Haunted Objects Podcast is hosted by paranormal researchers Greg and Dana Newkirk, known for their work with haunted objects and supernatural investigations. They delve into the strange and eerie world of haunted artifacts, with discussions on various objects from their personal collection, which is part of their Traveling Museum of the Paranormal & Occult. They talk about the objects’ chilling histories, involvement in mysterious occurrences, and the supernatural phenomena associated with them, delving into how they affected thr lives (or deaths?) of their previous owners.
If you prefer to get your night terrors from audio dramas, Tower 4 will provide you with more than your fair share. It’s part mystery, part suspense, and part psychological thriller. Mike Arche takes a job as a fire lookout in a remote tower located deep in the Wyoming wilderness. It isn’t long before he starts experiencing strange sounds, mysterious radio transmissions from another nearby tower, and general oddness. It’s a narrative so immersive, you’ll share Mike's feelings of isolation.
Lore delves into the eerie and unsettling side of history, folklore, and mythology. On every episode Aaron Mahnke invites listeners into the darker corners of human nature, superstition, and unexplained phenomena through discussions of real-life historical events and legendary tales. He mixes storytelling and research with tales of ghosts, creatures, mysterious deaths, and more. The stories are made all the more immersive by the atmospheric production and haunting music.
Limetown is an immersive, realistic sci-fi mystery that feels and sounds just like investigative journalism—so much so that many listeners initially thought that it was real. The story centers on the disappearance of over 300 people from a research facility in a small town (called Limetown). The protagonist, Lia Haddock, a journalist for American Public Radio, investigates what happened to the missing people, leading her down a path of conspiracy, government secrets, and strange experiments involving mind control. (The show was later adapted into a TV series starring Jessica Biel.)
Radio Rental places you in a fictional 1980s movie rental store (essentially a haunted Blockbuster) run by eccentric host Terry Carnation (voiced by ˆ’s Rainn Wilson) and his cat, Malechai. Terry is the scary story DJ spinning real-life tales that range from the spine-tingling to the bizarre, shared straight from the source. Produced in a documentary-esque style, the show collects stories of close encounters with serial killers and unexplainable brushes with the other side that will make you question your ordinary, every-day interactions, and remind you that something worth fearing could be lurking around every corner.
