Spooky Story Time

From creepy dolls to haunted houses, this extra spooky compilation brings you some of our best horror stories about kids and children. The Music Box (00:00) The Things Tommy Sees (08:20) A Miniature Haunting (14:48) St. Ainsley's (23:44) The China Dolls (34:11) Black-Eyed Children (42:31) Not for kids - listener discretion advised. ------------ Beth's Spooky Story Time is your new favourite horror...

Most people think getting locked in a mall overnight would be inconvenient, maybe even funny. But when the lights die section by section, the escalators fall silent, and the mannequins start to move, the empty mall becomes something else entirely. Some places don't close... they just wait. If you love liminal‑space horror, uncanny retail settings, or stories where the familiar becomes deeply, dist...

On the first night of winter in Oakhaven, you’re supposed to bolt the door, draw the blinds, and ignore every sound that comes from outside. It’s an old superstition - a warning about the Guest of the Cold, a presence said to descend from the mountains when the first frost hits. Eli never believed any of it… until last November, when the temperature dropped twenty degrees in three hours and someth...

I joined a simple heritage walk to learn more about my neighborhood. Then the street shifted beneath my feet, the air changed, and I found myself walking through Brixton as it was in the 1950s... with someone limping steadily behind me. One moment I was photographing a mural, and the next, the world around me had slipped decades backward. The gastropubs were gone. The streetlights were dim and yel...

I used to think the Black‑Eyed Children were just an old internet myth, until two kids knocked on my basement door at 2:14 AM and asked to be invited inside. This is the one encounter I still can’t explain. I was twenty‑four, living in a basement suite with a ground‑level window and a bad habit of working until dawn. The knock wasn’t normal, and when I looked through the peephole, two kids stood s...

My grandmother always said the Winter Gardens weren’t haunted - they were remembered. And the day she told me about the waltz she danced with someone who wasn’t there, I stopped believing ghosts were meant to be frightening. This story has shaped the way I understand the unseen. My Grandma Rose was elegant, dramatic, and full of stories, but none stayed with me like the one about the abandoned Vic...

I used to think I was just anxious, until the shelving unit collapsed. Since then, I’ve been remembering things that haven’t happened yet. I’m telling this because tonight feels different. For six months I’ve been living with these “glitches” - memories of futures that haven’t arrived, flashes of grief for strangers I’ve never met, the bone‑deep certainty of disasters that sometimes happen and som...

I was on my usual Tuesday commute when a woman slipped through the closing tube doors—wearing my coat, my ring, my face. She didn’t look surprised to see me. She looked expectant. I’m telling this because what happened on the Northern Line that morning has been bleeding into my life ever since. She sat directly opposite me, mirroring every detail of my appearance down to the childhood scar on my n...

I woke up from what was supposed to be routine gallbladder surgery and saw a tall figure sitting in the visitor’s chair; too still, too silent, and too close to the ceiling. When it touched my wrist, everything went black. I’m telling this because twelve years later, I still don’t understand what happened in that recovery room. The lights were dim, the monitor was silent, and a man-shaped shadow i...

I stepped into an old mall elevator for a quick ride to the third floor. Five minutes later, the lights died, the emergency phone crackled to life, and a voice started reciting my secrets back to me. I’m telling this because I still don’t understand how it knew so much. One moment I was exhausted, leaning against the wall, waiting for the doors to open. The next, the elevator shuddered, the lights...

I was fifteen when something in the attic above my bed started dragging itself toward me every night, and by the time I found the carvings in the beams, it already knew my name. I’m telling this because this is the one story from my childhood I still can’t shake. My parents bought a tall, narrow Victorian, all charm and “original features,” but my attic bedroom felt wrong from the first night. The...

I signed up for a paid sleep study because I was exhausted and broke. By the seventh night, the researchers weren’t asking if I saw the man in the corner... they were asking what he was doing. I’m telling you this because I need people to understand what the Miller‑Vaine Institute was really studying. I thought I was just being monitored while I slept. Instead, every morning the lead researcher as...

I was driving home on a foggy Sunday night when a formation of orange‑red lights began pacing my car along the A303. Silent, precise, and moving in ways nothing man‑made should. I still don’t know what I saw. One moment it was just drizzle, darkness, and a sleepy podcast. The next, five or six glowing orbs were hovering above the tree line, drifting, then darting across each other with impossible...

I thought I knew every inch of Black Peak, until a lantern‑bright glow appeared in the fog and began moving toward me, like it had been waiting. This is the one hike I can’t explain away. I’d spent years on those mountains, confident, experienced, unshakeable. But the day the fog rolled in, I saw a warm, amber light drifting through the trees, too steady to be a reflection, and too old‑fashioned t...

I thought sleep deprivation was making me see things... until my baby started smiling at something pacing in the nursery, and toys began coming back with fingerprints too big to be his. This is the story I’ve never said out loud. It started with a shadow on the baby monitor. I tried to explain it away - bad lighting, exhaustion, anything rational - but then Leo began giggling at things I couldn’t...

I heard someone sobbing in the stall next to mine in the campus bathroom. When security opened the door, the stall was empty. Locked, silent, and impossible. I still feel the cold tile under my slippers and the echo of that hysterical wail. It was finals week, the library a fluorescent tomb, and the crying started soft and private before escalating into a raw, terrified sound that made my skin cra...

I got into a ride‑share after my car broke down and the driver called me by my full name - my private middle name - and then told me he’d been waiting for this ride. I ran. I’m still running. I’m telling this because it happened to me and because I need other women to hear what can happen when a stranger knows more than they should. One ordinary Tuesday night my car died on the M2. A black Audi ar...

A stranger at a crowded bar raised a crystal flute and toasted me with three words... “to your last New Year,” then vanished. That toast has been the drumbeat of my life for a year. I’m telling this quietly because I don’t want to invite more attention, only to share what it’s like to live under a sentence. One midnight, a man in an impossibly sharp suit appeared beside my booth, offered a single,...

I came home one evening to find my keys on the kitchen counter and my slippers arranged like a message. By the time I hid a camera, the footage showed someone who looked exactly like me, living my life, smoothing my comforter, and leaving a strand of dark hair on my shoes. I’m terrified, and I need you to hear this. For six months my apartment has been subtly rearranged. Small, intimate intrusions...

Windward is a coastal village where the sea keeps a terrible bargain. A single, monstrous bell toll at 3 a.m. names the next soul to be claimed by an ancient covenant, and this time, I became the unwilling successor to the Salted Hand. What begins as local folklore unfolds into a visceral, maritime horror: a belfry stained with brine, a dragging sound from the dark, and a cold, salt‑scented mark o...

Havenwood’s quaint December charm hides a ritual that chills the town to its bones. Each Christmas Eve, a reclusive resident dons an immaculate scarlet suit and walks the streets in silence. At first a local eccentric, his midnight rounds become something far darker when families begin to change, children fall ill, and a tiny carved token appears on a windowsill. But one year, Arthur stops outside...

I never thought a greeting card could ruin my life, but for twelve Decembers it has. Every year a new card arrives—first a glittery Santa, then a photo taken through my window, then a strand of my own hair tucked behind a pressed flower—and each one escalates the terror. I moved, changed my locks, installed cameras, and even filed reports, but the cards keep coming, always beginning the first week...

A twenty‑year nightmare becomes disturbingly real when I return to my childhood street to confront the source of decades of sleep‑paralysing dreams. What was meant to be a rational, daylight exorcism of memory turns into a confrontation with an impossible, decaying house that matches every architectural detail of the recurring dream. A brass key, a chipped ceramic fawn, and a black‑peepholed door...

Turn off the lights for tonight's chilling tale of shared living gone impossibly wrong. In The Outside Lock, a new tenant moves into a perfect Victorian flat and meets their roommate Chloe only once - a brief glimpse through a cracked door. For three months, Chloe exists only as notes on creamy cardstock, the scent of rosewater, and precise morning sounds. But when she discovers Chloe's door is bo...

On this episode, a grieving sibling downloads a viral app as a desperate distraction and receives a reply that should be impossible. What begins as cynical curiosity turns into a bone‑deep shock when the app answers with private memories only the narrator and their late sister shared. A hidden locket, a childhood secret about a botched haircut, and a napkin note no one else knew about arrive as te...