Let's Talk Spooky

Deep in the forests of Slavic folklore stands a hut on chicken legs, surrounded by a fence of human bones. Inside waits Baba Yaga, the iron-toothed witch of Eastern European legend who might eat you or might help you, depending on how you behave when you step through her door. Content warning: This episode includes traditional folk tales involving harm to children, death, and human remains. Connec...

For as long as people have feared witches, they’ve feared that death might not be enough to stop them. This week on Let’s Talk Spooky , we follow the strange burials of three women who were held down by stone, by tide, and by story. CONTENT WARNING This episode includes discussion of a confession obtained under likely torture, a death in custody that may have been suicide, a local legend involving...

Look closely at any Halloween witch, and you’ll find a little creature perched beside her: a black cat, a toad, an owl watching over the cauldron. But long before they were decorations, familiars were evidence. This week, we kick off our October Month of Witches with the strange and unsettling history of the witch’s familiar . Website: letstalkspooky.com Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast TikTok: @...

Everybody knows the rhyme. Almost nobody knows the truth. On a mild summer morning in 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death inside a locked house on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts — and before the police had finished searching for a stranger, the town had already decided who did it. This week we walk through the whole story: the morning of the murders, the cold and comfortl...

On a cool November night, a boy taking the shortcut home along the river hears something underneath the current that isn't the current. She has a hundred names and haunts the water from the canals of Mexico City to the concrete washes of Los Angeles — La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, searching forever for the children she lost. Tonight we follow her: where she came from, how she crossed a border, th...

A twelve-year-old boy refuses to leave the house on the night of a full moon — because he's convinced he's becoming a wolf. It sounds like something out of a dusty book of legends. It was written up by doctors and published five years ago. This week, we follow that one impossible sentence — I am becoming a wolf — back through the centuries. From the oldest werewolf ever written down to the movie r...

Sir George Mackenzie sent hundreds of Covenanters to suffering and death in the 1600s — then was laid to rest in a fine domed tomb only steps from the very ground where they starved. For three centuries, the two sides of that quarrel kept an uneasy quiet, a few feet of earth apart. Then, one December night in 1998, a man seeking shelter fell through the floor of Mackenzie's mausoleum into the bone...

Welcome to Spooky Stays , where I don't just research haunted places — I spend the night in them. First up: the Beck House in Penetanguishene, Ontario , a red-brick Victorian mansion known online as Canada's most haunted house and now a haunted Airbnb. A grieving mother, a wronged daughter, and a legend that doesn't match the record. Sources: Town of Penetanguishene Heritage Registry — Carl Beck H...

Four haunted roads, two countries, and one long drive through the dark. From a phantom black dog that's blocked a Maryland mountain pass for two centuries, to a young man forever finishing his last ride on an Ontario back road, to a crowded, cursed stretch of Colorado asphalt, to a woman hanged in an iron cage at a Québec crossroads — these are the roads that refuse to forget. Some of it's pure le...

Three campfires. Three true stories from the places we go to feel free — and the dark that waits just past the firelight. A painter who knew his lake better than anyone alive, and drowned in it under questions we're still arguing over a century later. Four teenagers who pitched a tent by a quiet Finnish lake one summer night in 1960 — and the morning only one of them came back. And a forest in Tra...

Four abandoned amusement parks. One question: what lingers when the laughter stops? From the haunted rides of Lake Shawnee Amusement Park in West Virginia, to Joyland and Louie the Clown in Wichita, to the drowned Six Flags New Orleans, to the Chornobyl Ferris wheel that never turned in Pripyat — a journey through the world's eeriest abandoned theme parks and the real deaths, ghost stories, and da...

Ten kilometres off the shore of North Bay, Ontario, five islands float on Lake Nipissing — sometimes literally. The locals call them the Manitous. Older names tell you more: Ghost Island. Devil's Island. Paddle too close, they say, and the biggest island will speak to you — and it is not inviting you in. Tonight: a curse that begins with a fish, a haunting born of war and winter, two lovers who ch...

The talking board didn’t begin in Baltimore. It began centuries earlier — in Chinese spirit-writing traditions, in medieval European divination, in the letter-grids of Elizabethan occultists. This week we trace that ancient impulse through the grief of post-Civil War America, across the Pacific to Japan’s Kokkuri-san, and into the hands of the men who bottled it, patented it, and sold it as a parl...

For Canada Day, we’re taking a six-province ghost story road trip — from an abandoned BC sanatorium to a 275-year-old Halifax church still bearing a scar from 1917. Content Warning: This episode discusses tuberculosis and institutional death, the historical mistreatment of Indigenous patients within Canada’s healthcare system (including forced hospitalization and non-consensual medical procedures)...

On the brightest night of the year, a woman walks into a hill that everyone else avoids — and finds a feast, a fairy King and Queen, and a workbench where small hands shape weaponsmeant for the unsuspecting. It's a story she really told, in 1662, in the Scottish parish of Auldearn — one of the most detailed witch trial confessions ever recorded, given, as far as we know, without torture. This epis...

On a dark Venezuelan highway, a truck driver hears something that shouldn't be there — a whistle, seven notes, rising and falling. What he doesn't know is that the closer it sounds, the further away the danger really is. In this bonus deep-dive, we go back to a legend first touched on in Episode 4 and give El Silbón — the cursed soul of the Venezuelan plains — the full story he deserves: the murde...

Listener Favourites We’re taking a week off to let the team rest, recharge, and get ready for more spooky stories — but we didn’t want to leave you without something eerie to listen to. This week, we’re revisiting a few listener-favourite episodes: the ones that stayed with you long after they ended. These episodes explore the places where folklore, history, fear, and belief begin to blur. From th...

CONTENT WARNING This episode contains discussion of the murder of three children (Camp Scott, Oklahoma, 1977), documented sexual abuse at summer camps, predatory behaviour toward minors, and the legend of Elias White, which involves the hanging of an enslaved man. Please take care if any of these topics are difficult for you. Every sleepaway camp has a monster. Not the same monster — each one buil...

Content note: This episode contains discussion of racial violence, lynching, and the racially motivated expulsion of an entire Black community in 1912 Georgia. It also includes detailed accounts of multiple drowning deaths and body recovery. Additionally, this episode covers the colonial erasure of Indigenous spiritual tradition. Listener discretion is advised. In July 2023, three men died at Lake...

What's the oldest fear in the human record? Not vampires. Not werewolves. Not anything that hunts in the dark. It's the person sitting across from you at dinner—the one who poured your drink. In this episode, we're diving into one of history's most chilling archetypes — the woman poisoner. From the prison cells of ancient Rome to a TikTok trend that exploded in 2024, the legend of the woman who kn...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Description A campfire walk through some of the most feared women in world folklore, from a four-hundred-year-old spider waiting in a Japanese mountain house, to a wailing figure outside an Irish window at midnight. We travel through Slavic rivers and summer wheat fields, down dark roads in South Asia, into Colombian mangroves and the deep Brazilian Amazon, and onto the fo...

Send us Fan Mail A grieving widow develops a roll of film and finds her dead mother in the back seat. A WWI airman steps into a squadron portrait two days after his funeral. A Boston photographer swears he can capture the dead — and P. T. Barnum takes the stand to prove him wrong. Tonight, the photographs that came back heavier than they went in.  Before the smartphone, before the camera roll — be...

Send us Fan Mail On Christmas Eve in 1689, a Swedish farmer and his wife carried their ten-year-old son to the manure heap at the edge of their farm and left him there overnight to freeze. They believed, sincerely and devoutly, that he was a changeling — and that the elves would come in the night and return their real son by morning. He was not the first child this happened to. He would not be the...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary On the night of March fifteenth, eighteen ninety-five, eight people in a small Irish kitchen watched a man named Michael Cleary set his wife on fire. Not one of them tried to stop him. They all believed the same thing he did: the woman on the bed wasn't his wife anymore. The fairies had taken her. In this episode, we use the death of Bridget Cleary as a doorway int...

Send us Fan Mail This is a remastered episode — new research, new stories, new folklore. Worth a re-listen. We pull on a blue silk dress in 1884 Boston and follow the thread back through the strange, unsettling history of secondhand things. From the rag pickers of Victorian London to the smallpox-laced wardrobes of the dead, from The Hands Resist Him to the Crying Boy paintings that wouldn’t burn,...