Stories Fables Ghostly Tales Podcast

EARLY DROP: Escape Double Bill: Finger of Doom & The Adaptive Ultimate You're getting this one early, because the Tale Teller is packing a bag. I'm heading over east for an event this weekend, so rather than leave you waiting, I've lit the candle a few days ahead of schedule. This week I've been in the restoration workshop with two episodes from Escape , CBS's great high-adventure anthology. B...

Halloween Special Part 1 of 4. Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore. On Halloween night 2021, a man in a Joker costume boarded a packed Tokyo train. For eight seconds, nobody moved. On 31 October 2021, a man in a purple suit and a green shirt boarded a crowded Keio Line express heading into Shinjuku. Nobody looked twice. It was the biggest costume night of the year, on a train full of people...

The last night — and the one I nearly didn't write... Mørketid ends tonight. Sweden. Fair warning on this one... This episode is about children. The bäckahästen drowns them and the Myling is one that was left in the woods to die, and while I've kept the detail out, it's there for the whole half-hour. If that's a hard subject for you, take this one at your own pace or skip it — the series works wit...

Night three of Mørketid is out. Norway. She Carries a Rake... A craft decision I want to explain... The draug should have been the finale. He's the better monster by any obvious measure — a drowned fisherman in oilskins with a mass of seaweed where his head should be, sailing half a boat against the wind, screaming out on the water where there is nobody. That's a closing image. I put him second, a...

NIGHT TWO — FINLAND Night two: Finland has a word for a person who isn't lost, isn't taken, and cannot be found — while standing right in front of you. Night two of Mørketid is out. Finland. Metsänpeitto It translates as "the forest cover," and it describes something Finns believed happened often enough that the language needed a word for it. A person walks into the forest they've known their whol...

Four nights of Nordic folklore. Night one: Denmark buried things alive under its churches — and some of them are still working. Something different for the next four weeks. No true crime at all. Mørketid — Four Nights North is a mini-series: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, one night each, pure folklore. Night one is out now. The bit that stopped me while I was writing it... The kirkegrim isn't a...

Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore, one candle at a time. In June 1981, a Japanese literature student in Paris asked a Dutch classmate to come to his apartment and help him with his German pronunciation. Renée Hartevelt was twenty-five. She said yes because she was the kind of person who noticed when somebody was sitting on their own. Issei Sagawa confessed within days. He was never convict...

What happens when folklore becomes too terrible to be fiction? Can you listen past the performance and find the true forensic history? Welcome back to Stories Fables Ghostly Tales . In tonight’s interactive special, the Tale Teller presents an impossible challenge: "Three Waters, Dark Tides: Two Myths, One Truth." We have gathered three haunting accounts of Japan's relationship with the dark, cold...

Turn the lights down low... It is time for Tall Tales and True Crime... In this episode of Stories Fables Ghostly Tales , we explore one of the most widely discussed and psychologically complex cases in modern Japan: The 1997 Kobe Case , historically known across the nation as the Sakakibara Investigation . In the spring of 1997, the peaceful neighbourhood of Suma Ward in Kobe, Japan was gripped b...

On the morning of April 23, 1994, a park cleaner in Inokashira Park opened a utility trash container expecting ordinary market waste, only to find a severed human foot inside a translucent blue plastic bag. Within hours, police recovered twenty-seven separate body parts distributed across twenty-seven public trash bins—each piece meticulously cut to an exact length of twenty centimetres, drained c...

⚠ CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains extensive, highly detailed accounts of real-world serial murder, financial exploitation, the complete thermal destruction of human remains, and themes of animal cruelty. Listener discretion is absolutely mandatory. Welcome back to Stories Fables Ghostly Tales . Tonight, we present The Art of Transparency: The Saitama Dog Lover Murders — Japan, 1993 . Deep w...

⚠ CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains detailed descriptions of a real-world serial crime involving children, systemic judicial failure, and heavy themes of unresolved communal grief. It also contains an extended discussion of traditional Japanese supernatural folklore. Listener discretion is strongly advised. Welcome back to Stories Fables Ghostly Tales . Tonight, we present The Reeds of Twilig...

G'day Tale Tellers and fans of Japanese True Crime! 👋 Thank you to my Patreon Supporters! Support me here: https://www.patreon.com/SFGT New episode is live right now — and this one hit differently while I was writing it. Tonight we're going to a mountain village in Japan called Kaio [KAH-ee-oh] . On the night of the 20th of May, 1938, a twenty-one-year-old man named Mutsuo Toi [ MOOT-soo-oh TOH-e...

G'day everyone! And Happy Weekend! 👋 New episode is UP — and honestly? This one has been sitting with me for weeks. This episode we're covering the Sada Abe case. If you're not familiar — in May 1936, a woman named Sada Abe walked out of a Tokyo inn, through the city, bought new clothes, ate meals, read the newspaper coverage of her own crime... and didn't run. Not really. What she left behind in...

Welcome back to the archive, inner circle... Deep Dive: The Sovereign Paralysis of the 1948 Teikoku Bank Incident When we look back at the forensics of post-war true crime, few cases carry the chilling, systemic precision of the Teikoku Bank Incident (Imperial Bank Incident) of January 26, 1948. It stands not just as a cold-blooded mass murder, but as a terrifying demonstration of how structural a...

Welcome back to the archive. In this special dual transmission, we turn our forensic radar toward a tiny, sun-bleached rock sitting in the literal centre of the Mediterranean Sea: the island of Malta. Built entirely out of soft, honey-coloured Globigerina limestone, Malta's hyper-dense historic cities are marvels of defensive architecture. In a space so profoundly compressed, where secrets are sup...

G'day Tea Totalling Guardians 🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵 On a cold afternoon in the spring of 1988, a quiet, uniform residential grid in Nagoya, Japan, became the theater for an act of absolute absurdity and horror. A heavily pregnant young mother is strangled from behind in her own living room. What followed was a primitive surgical extraction executed with a common consumer box cutter. But this was not a foetal...

Case File #04: The SOS Tape Puzzle | The Asahidake Wilderness Anomaly 🔓 Welcome back to the archives, Guardians. The vault is officially open for Case File #05 , and this week we are leaving behind the concrete lanes and digital footprints of metropolitan Tokyo. Our destination is the northern wilderness of Hokkaido, specifically the jagged, volcanic heights of Mount Asahi . This file documents a...

MOTHERS DAY SPECIAL!!! Good evening Occult Librarians! In celebration of Mother’s Day, we are diving into the radio archives for a special double-feature that explores the many faces of motherhood—from the comedic vanity of a "mother bird" to the chilling obsession of a mother who refuses to let go!! The Jack Benny Program: "Mother's Day Show" (May 8, 1938) Our first program takes us to May 8, 193...

Case File #03: The Millennium Ghost is Now Open 🔓 Welcome to the latest archive Tale Teller Detectives... This week, we are stepping into a true crime puzzle that has frustrated investigators for over two decades. We are traveling to the Setagaya Ward in Tokyo, right on the threshold of the year 2000. While the world was holding its breath for the Y2K digital apocalypse, a very physical nightmare...

The lanterns are lit, the archive doors are bolted, and tonight, we are diving into a file that redefined the meaning of "Safety" in the modern world. The Glico-Morinaga Case In 1984, Japan wasn't just an economic powerhouse; it was considered the safest place on Earth. That ended the moment a CEO was dragged naked from his bathtub and the nation’s candy supply was turned into a chemical weapon. W...

🤒🤧 TALE TELLER IS SICK TODAY 🤒🤧 Legends writing this to let you know that there’s going to be a short delay with today's scheduled Japanese True Crime Episode due to being sick 🤧 . Unfortunately, I’ve come down with a pretty stubborn chest infection, and chest infections hit me really hard, as I had asthma growing up (makes me more susceptible to chest infections) . I tried to push through it...

The Archives are Open: Turning Lungs to Stone The Paraquat Murders remain one of the most haunting "Forensic Zero" cases in history—a spree where the weapon was a common herbicide and the battlefield was the country's own sense of public trust. In this episode, we step away from the neon lights of the Tokyo Bubble and into the quiet, suffocating reality of the "Stone Lungs." Key Talking Points The...

HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE! 🐰🐰🐰 Tonight, we step back into the fog-drenched streets of 1947 San Francisco. I’ve spent the last several sessions in the studio with iZotope RX 11 , meticulously scrubbing away nearly eighty years of crackle and "transcription hiss" to bring you two of the finest capers from The Adventures of Sam Spade . These aren't just old recordings; they are high-fidelity restorati...

The Real Unsolved Murders of Lake Bodom We zip ourselves into those thin walls of nylon and canvas, and we tell ourselves we’ve built a sanctuary. We believe that if the door is locked and the group is together, the monsters are kept at bay. But on June 5th, 1960, on the shores of Lake Bodom, four teenagers learned the most terrifying lesson of the "White Night": a tent isn’t a shield—it’s a shrou...