Let's Talk Spooky

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,...

Send us Fan Mail Inside one of the most haunted buildings in Canada — the Ottawa Jail Hostel, formerly the Carleton County Jail at 75 Nicholas Street, Ottawa, Ontario. From 1862 to 1972, this limestone prison housed up to 150 inmates in cells barely three feet wide, with no heat, no plumbing, and no light. Three men were hanged on its still-standing gallows: Patrick James Whelan in 1869 for the as...

Send us Fan Mail What if the scariest urban legends were real? Not metaphors. Not campfire exaggerations. Actually, verifiably, documentable real — and the communities telling them knew something terrible was happening long before anyone with authority chose to listen? In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky — a solo-narrated folklore and haunted history podcast — we follow four true horror stories h...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky , we explore the chilling lore, cultural warnings, and unsettling history behind the Wendigo and the Skinwalker . These are two of the most searched and most misunderstood figures in Indigenous folklore , Canadian legend , and North American supernatural storytelling . We begin with the Wendigo , a terrifying figure found in the traditions of O...

Send us Fan Mail Step into the firelight and into one of the most fascinating festivals of the ancient Celtic calendar. In this remastered episode of Let’s Talk Spooky , we explore Beltane , the ancient Celtic fire festival that marked the beginning of summer and the thinning of the line between the human world and the spirit world. From ancient pagan rituals and sacred bonfires to fertility tradi...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky , we explore two of Canada’s most unsettling locations—places where history didn’t just happen… it stayed behind. We begin in Halifax at The Five Fishermen, a historic building that once operated as a funeral home. This site played a role in the aftermath of the RMS Titanic disaster and the devastating Halifax Explosion, where victims were brou...

Send us Fan Mail On March 17th, 1995, six teenage boys from Pickering, Ontario, disappeared in the early hours of the morning after leaving a house party near the shoreline of Lake Ontario. What followed was a large-scale search, an investigation built on fragments, and a timeline that—decades later—still feels incomplete. While the official explanation points to a tragic boating accident, the ava...

Send us Fan Mail Follow & Support If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow Let’s Talk Spooky , leave a review, and share it with your fellow spooky souls 👻 Got a story of your own? We’d love to hear it. Description:  What if someone saw you… Somewhere you’ve never been? In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky , we explore the unsettling idea of the doppelgänger—an identical double sai...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky , we explore some of history’s most unsettling disappearances—cases where people didn’t just go missing… they seemed to vanish. From children who disappeared in broad daylight, to pilots lost mid-sentence, to historical figures who stepped out of reality itself—these stories challenge what we think we understand about time, space, and human exp...

Send us Fan Mail Leprechauns are often seen as cheerful little shoemakers guarding pots of gold—but their origins are far more complex, and much darker. In this episode, we explore the folklore roots of leprechauns in Irish mythology, tracing their connection to older fairy traditions, solitary spirits, and trickster entities. We look at how these figures evolved through oral storytelling during t...

Send us Fan Mail Japan is home to some of the most chilling urban legends in the world. Stories whispered in school hallways, shared on quiet train rides, and passed between friends late at night. Some of these legends have existed for decades… while others were born on the internet and spread like wildfire across message boards. In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky , we explore four of Japan’s mo...

Send us Fan Mail The Appalachian Mountains are among the oldest mountain ranges on Earth, stretching more than 2,000 miles across the eastern United States. For generations, the people who lived in these mountains have shared stories about strange encounters in the woods, mysterious creatures, and folklore that seems to blur the line between history and legend. In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky...

Send us Fan Mail In Part One of this two-part series, we explore real missing person cases connected to the Appalachian region and the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail. Appalachia stretches from Georgia to Maine, cutting through national forests, deep mountain hollows, and some of the most rugged terrain in the eastern United States. In this episode, we examine documented disappearances, including: •...