Freaky Folklore

It walks backward, with its head hung between its hind legs. It claps its enormous ears like a hand. And it doesn't drink your blood from your throat. It drinks it from your shadow. This week we're headed to the Visayas and Mindanao in the Philippines, for the legend of the Sigbin. It's a goat-like creature with a whip-like tail, a nauseating stench, and the power to vanish in front of you. We dig...

Every Saturday, a woman locks her door. Her husband swore he'd never open it. This week on Freaky Folklore, we dive into the legend of Melusine, the medieval French water-fairy cursed to become a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. Melusine built castles overnight, bore ten sons marked by her supernatural blood, and became the folkloric founding mother of the House of Lusignan. Her descend...

Deep in the peat hills of Shetland, the old folk won't cross the green mounds after dark. Those hills belong to the trows: small, grey, limping hill-folk descended from the Norse trolls. They'll steal a fiddler for a night that lasts a hundred years, and they'll trade a healthy baby for a sickly changeling. In this episode of Freaky Folklore, we go under the hill. First comes an original story. A...

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Sodder family's home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, burned to the ground. Five of the ten children were never found. No remains were recovered, and the case was closed almost as quickly as it was opened. For decades, their parents refused to believe their children had died that night. This is a preview from Deadly Intent, Carman's true crime psychology podcast. Every e...

She's been called a goddess. A demon. A healer. A thief of husbands, minds, and sometimes lives. Across an entire continent — and every shore the diaspora ever touched — Mami Wata has been worshipped in shrines and feared on riverbanks for centuries, and she is not finished collecting. This week on Freaky Folklore, we're wading into the legend of the Mother of Water: her murky, tangled origins str...

Deep in the cedar mountains north of Kyoto lives a creature that has spent over a thousand years being both worshipped and feared — sometimes in the same breath. The Tengu can be the greatest swordmaster you'll ever train under, or the reason you vanish off a mountain trail and turn up days later on a rooftop with no memory of how you got there. There's only one rule that decides which one you get...

When a person dies, the Diné believe the good in them moves on — and everything else stays behind. It gathers in that last breath, steps out of the body, and waits. It's called the chindi, and the wise thing, the safe thing, is to leave the dead alone: their homes, their names, the things buried with them.   Wade Corliss dug where he was warned not to. He carried something home from a death h...

Scotland's most famous cryptid has her face on a shortbread tin — but the folklore underneath is one of the deadliest water legends in all of Europe, and it doesn't begin in 1933 with a grainy photograph. It begins in the year 565, with a burial.   In this episode of Freaky Folklore, we drag Nessie out of the gift shop and back into the black water where she came from: the deepest, coldest, m...

Today, we’re excited to share part one of a two-part series from the award-winning true crime podcast RedHanded, hosted by Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire. RedHanded is the UK's #1 True Crime podcast, covering everything from high-profile murders and cults to con artists and cultural catastrophes, always asking not just what happened, but why. In this episode, Suruthi and Hannah dive into the stor...

Deep in the frozen forests of the Wabanaki Dawnland lives a giant with a heart of solid ice — a monster that was once a human being, transformed by the cruelest cold there is. Tonight we follow trapper Alistair Crewe into a winter he barely survives, and uncover the origin, powers, and one strange weakness of the Chenoo: the cannibal ice giant of Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy legend. Warmth...

There's a rule whispered from senior girls to juniors in Nigerian boarding schools, passed on in the dark after the matron locks the doors and carries the only key home: if you wake in the night and hear the slow click of heels down the corridor — koi, koi, koi — you do not move, you do not call out, and whatever you do, you never open your eyes to look. Because once there was a teacher who loved...

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There's an old woman at the edge of the village. She keeps to herself, lives in the shadow of the silk cotton tree, and has no husband, no children, no people anyone can name. And in the mornings, the babies three houses down wake up pale, exhausted, and marked with bruises in the soft places — where the blood runs nearest the skin.   Tonight we travel to the eastern coast of Trinidad to meet...

Deep in the karst mountains of eastern Serbia lives a monster no one has ever described, because no one who saw it came back. The Bauk waits in caves, holes, and abandoned houses, lurching through the dark on a clumsy gait, and it can only be driven off by two things: light and noise. For centuries, Serbian parents used it to make children behave. Tonight, two American YouTubers turn its cave into...

Every coastal people on earth knows the same rule: if something takes you in the water, you swim for shore. The shore is safety. The A-mi-kuk does not care about the shore. Four long arms. No legs. A body of slick, naked hide, like an animal that was skinned and never got the message. It rises up under kayaks off the Alaskan coast and drags men down into the silt. And when you claw your way onto t...

Jenny Greenteeth — Beneath the still, duckweed-choked surface of Britain's ponds and canals lurks Jenny Green Teeth, an ancient water hag from English folklore with elongated grasping arms, needle-sharp teeth, and a centuries-old hunger for children who wander too close to the water's edge. When a drainage project disturbs the old binding that has held her captive for generations, two young siblin...

In the villages of Malaysia and Indonesia, desperate people pay shamans to raise a toyol—the enslaved spirit of a dead infant that steals riches for its master—but every coin it brings home comes with a debt no one can afford to pay.   #FreakyFolklore #Toyol #Tuyul #MalayFolklore #MalaysianLegends #IndonesianFolklore #SoutheastAsianMythology #GhostStories #BlackMagic #Bomoh #FolkHorror #CreatureFe...

Deep in the Richtersveld, where the Orange River cuts through some of the oldest, driest land on Earth, there is a cave the locals call the Bottomless Pit. They say it runs sixty feet straight down before it opens into the dark — and that it is the source of every diamond South Africa has ever surrendered. They also say something guards it. Something forty feet long, with diamonds set in its eye s...

In the frozen forests of the far north, a greedy fur trapper learns that something has been feeding on his catch — a beast that gorges until its body swells tight as a drum, squeezes itself empty between two trees, and then returns to feed again, and again, and again, until nothing is left.   #Gulon #FreakyFolklore #NorseLegend #ScandinavianFolklore #Wolverine #OlausMagnus   CONTENT WARNING This e...

Along the canals and riverbanks of rural Egypt, the old fishermen follow one rule: if a voice calls your name from the water after sunset, you do not answer. They call her El-Naddaha — The Caller. A beautiful woman in white, standing among the reeds, who whispers the name only your mother used, the name nobody else should know. And once she learns it, she never stops calling. This week on Freaky F...

A photograph you were never supposed to see is spreading across the internet — and everyone who looks claims to see something different, something wrong, something that follows them home.   #SmileDog #Creepypasta #ModernFolklore #CursedImage #InternetHorror #FreakyFolklore   EXPLORE MORE SPINE-CHILLING CONTENT: Freaky Folklore: https://www.eeriecast.com/podcasts/freaky-folklore Carman's Crypt (Ori...

A little something different this week. Carman Carrion just got back from four days in a cabin on the Ouachita River near Hot Springs, Arkansas—and she didn't come home empty-handed. In this special shorter episode, there are no dramatized retellings. No fictional reenactments. Just a folklore field report from the deep hollers of the Ouachita Mountains, told the way it might've been told on a por...

Deep in Japanese coastal folklore lurks the Nure-onna, a terrifying yokai that appears as a beautiful woman in a white kimono—until she reveals her serpentine lower body. This "wet woman" haunts beaches, rivers, and tide pools, using an enchanted baby bundle to trap victims or stealing real infants from their mothers. Discover the chilling legend of a predator that weaponizes maternal instinct, th...

The male demon that visits women in their dreams, stealing more than just sleep. Handsome, seductive, and deadly—the Incubus is the dark counterpart to the Succubus, and his victims wake up exhausted, violated, and sometimes pregnant with something that shouldn't exist.   #Incubus #Succubus #DemonLover #Cambion #Merlin #MedievalDemonology #SexDemon #FreakyFolklore #DarkFolklore #ChristianDemonolog...

The Gobi Desert holds a secret that has terrified Mongolian herders for centuries: the Olgoi-Khorkhoi, or Mongolian Death Worm. This two-to-five-foot creature allegedly kills from a distance—spitting corrosive acid that melts flesh in seconds and discharging electricity through the sand. No eyes. No legs. Just a thick, blood-red worm that surfaces when the ground gets hot and leaves nothing but bl...