Campfire: Tales of the Strange and Unsettling

It all started in 2006 with what else but an Ouija board. Two girls at a prestigious catholic school in Mexico City led a group of peers in their first explorations of the dark arts. Soon, they began experiencing shadow figures, disembodied voices, and even suicidal ideations, but this is just the beginning of what would eventually be described as the demonic possession of over 500 people. Dive in...

We will be continuing the Campfire Classics Collection throughout the season. For this addition to the collection, we have a tale from one of the true masters of horror. The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in Graham’s Magazine in 1842. It’s a beautifully delivered allegory for the inevitability of death. Poe’s work is of course always laden with metaphor and allusion...

This week, we’re taking a look at a bit of an outlier in the psychological profiles of serial killers. Gary Michael Hilton, known as The National Forest Serial Killer, is an American serial killer responsible for four known homicides between 2007 and 2008 committed in three states, all of which occurred within the premises of national forests. What makes in stand out among other serial killers is...

Welcome to Ravenbrook. A town in northern Maine where mystery grows like a crop, monsters lurk at in every tree line,  and phantoms lurk in more shadows than not. This week, we have a tale of an internet tulpa that examines the effect of modern myth-making on our seemingly sleepy little town and a story of a family back in the 90s whose young daughter vanished into the dark forests. What will they...

In April of 1997, Judy Smith vanished from Logan International Airport. Five months later, her remains were found hundreds of miles away in Asheville, North Carolina. This, in itself is baffling, but the details of the case truly take it to another level. Join us for this truly bizarre tale of a very normal family struck by an extremely abnormal incident.  Campfire: Tales of the Strange and Unsett...

This week, we have a very special treat. After two years of attempts to line our schedules up, we finally managed to get today’s guest to sit down for an hour to talk. Cole Herrold is the brilliant mind behind the New World Explorers Society blog and a veritable human encyclopedia of Fortean knowledge. I had an amazing time chatting with him about everything from the Veggie Man and lake monsters t...

The culmination of this year’s Spooky Season has arrived! The Halloween Hellscape Listener Story Extravaganza is our chance to truly revel in the fun, terrifying, and bizarre tales that make this season what it is. Not only are we reading a selection of your very own haunting tales, we’re diving in and read just a few of the incredible stories included in the Dark Village Horror Anthology. We wrap...

This week, in our AI story hour, we have two tales of Ravenbrook. First, we follow two young friends as they venture toward the dark heart of a haunted corn maze. What lies at its center just may spell the end of our macabre little hamlet. In our second tale, we check in on Ravenbrook’s resident struggling horror author as she stumbles into a heretofore unknown trinket shop. Will the relic she rec...

For this week’s addition to the Campfire Classics Collection, we have a story from a lesser known, but equally as monumental a writer of the Victorian era, William Harrison Ainsworth. Ainsworth was a prolific English writer who lived from 1805 to 1882. Ainsworth's literary career was marked by a fascination with the macabre, the gothic, and the supernatural, making him an unsung hero of Victor...

For at least 30 years, the story of a man dressed as a bunny has haunted the residential neighborhoods around our nation's capital. In the final installment of our Spooky Season Urban Legends series, we’re getting into the deep end with The Bunny Man. Tall as this tale may sound at first, the Bunny Man has been a fixture of local legend for decades. By 1973 the so-called "Bunny Man" wa...

In this installment of the AI Story Hour, we have two tales of Halloween havoc. For our first story, we follow young Lily on what just may prove to be the most horrifying and momentous Halloween of, not only her life, but the history of Ravenbrook itself. In our second tale of the evening, a curse has taken hold of our seemingly sleepy town. Seems as though Ravenbrook has fallen under the influenc...

In our third installment of our Urban Legends series, we have a truly fascinating study in the process of myth-making in the Americas. The Woman in White has been seen by countless individuals over centuries. In dark hallways, abandoned homes, balconies, riversides, and above all roadsides. The ubiquity of this entity, born of unadulterated tragedy, has created one of the most enduring urban legen...

For this week’s addition to the Campfire Classics Collection, we have one of the most famed contributors to English Literature dipping his toes into the horror genre to great success. Robert Louis Stevenson, most famous for his 1883 novel, Treasure Island, published this short story the following year in The Pall Mall Gazette. Its characters were based on criminals in the employ of real-life surge...

Now, deep into Spooky Season, we are continuing our experiment with ChatGPT’s ability to compose short horror stories. For our first story, we venture outside of Ravenbrook to a neighboring town as a group of teens attempt to unravel the mystery of the Beast of Bear Creek! Will their journey into the Hollow spell their own demise? Our second story comes home to Ravenbrook to check in with a family...

In the second installment of our Urban Legends Spooky Season series, this week, we’re diving into a legend that all of us here in the West grew up with. None other than Bloody Mary. While the origins of this entity are absolutely up for debate, since the mid-18 th  Century, legends of this other-dimensional walking horror story have plagued the dreams of children all over the world and we’re here...

This week, we are continuing Spooky Season with our first official Friday Night Fright of October! From now, until the end of October, we will be continuing our experiment with ChatGPT’s ability to compose short horror stories. This month, the stories will have a distinctly spooky theme. Our first story follows a group of unsuspecting Halloween party goers as they fight for their lives in a labyri...

It’s finally Spooky Season, and we are diving into the deep end of our October series on Urban Legends! This week, we have an absolute classic. We all know the legend of the Hook Hand, the Hook, or the Hookman. An urban legend about a killer with a pirate-like hook for a hand attacking a couple in a parked car. In many versions of the story, the killer is typically portrayed as a faceless, silhoue...

This week, we are officially beginning Spooky Season! From now, until the end of October, we will be continuing our experiment with ChatGPT’s ability to compose short horror stories. This month, the stories will have a distinctly spooky theme. Our first story follows a trio of young teens as they explore the deeply disturbing depths of a haunted carnival. Our second story documents the experiences...

Ted Bundy was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered dozens of young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 murders committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. His true victim total is unknown. This week, we dive into the mind and crimes of one of the world’s most infamous killers. This one gets incr...

This week, we are joined by author, diviner, amateur historian, and all-around lovely human being, Joy Johns. We talk about the influence of geography on mythmaking, folk magic, our mutual love of history, ethics in paratourism, and Joy’s personal history with paranormal activity and divination. She is funny and thoughtful and disarmingly insightful. This talk was just as great as we always knew i...

Clara and Phil Dandy lived in the Hinsdale House along with their children in the early 1970s. The paranormal activity became so frequent and so menacing that they called Father Alphonsus, a priest from St. Bonaventure University for help. With legends of a hanging tree, a pond that has claimed at least one life, a “structural exorcism”, and hills that are said to hold the graves of countless, to...

This week, we have a very special treat. Jonathan Dodd and Matt Schang sat down with us to discuss an absolutely incredible encounter that they recently had in rural Chautauqua County in Western New York. This was an absolute blast and hearing about this life-altering experience was genuinely inspirational. Matt and Jon are dear friends of the show, and you should absolutely go and support them in...

In November 2018, New York Magazine published “The Watcher,” which chronicled an affluent New Jersey family being stalked by a mysterious, threatening letter writer. The article, by Reeves Wiedeman, became the basis of a Netflix limited series created by Ryan Murphy. This is a truly bizarre mystery with twists and turns and moments of deep introspection. What happens when scandal and fear are intr...

This week, we are joined by friend of the show and host of Fireside Paranormal Podcast, Jordan Cline. He’s an old-school paranormal radio guy who has been in the game for a very long time, and some of the stories that he has about people who have gone on to become legends of the field are mind-blowing. We talk a bit about how he found himself wrapped up in this business, and Jordan tells a few of...

In April 1983, Mary Cousett from Alton, Illinois disappeared after leaving her home with her boyfriend Stanley Holiday Jr. Holiday was arrested and would confess to her murder. The only problem? Investigators could not find the 27-year-old's body. After seven months of searching, police took an unusual route. They called Greta Alexander, a woman with psychic abilities. Alexander was known loca...