Freaky Folklore

In 1560, a Jesuit priest wrote a letter from the coast of Brazil about demons that whip, torment, and sometimes kill people in the bush. It was the first monster ever recorded in Brazilian folklore. The people who lived beside it called it the Curupira. He is about the size of a child, with hair the color of fire, green teeth, and feet that point backward, so every track he leaves leads you away f...

Long before Count Dracula, something in the north of Ireland refused to stay buried. Abhartach, the dwarf chieftain of Slaghtaverty in County Londonderry, was a magician and a tyrant. Killed once, he rose again. Killed twice, he rose again. Only a yew wood blade, an upside-down grave and a heavy stone finally held him, and locals still say not to move it. This week on Freaky Folklore, we dig into...

🎃 A quick announcement for the Freaky Folklore family! If your podcast feed looked a little different this past Monday, don't worry! We participated in a feed swap, and there's nothing you need to do on your end. Our Halloween episode will arrive on Saturday morning, October 31st! Set your alarm, grab your candy, and get ready for a spooky start to Halloween with Carman. Thank you for being part...

Happy Halloween week! This is a special feed swap with History Daily, a co-production from award-winning podcasters Airship and Noiser. Every weekday, host Lindsay Graham (American Scandal, American History Tellers) takes you back to a momentous event that happened "on this day" in history. In today's episode, "The Loch Ness Photograph," it's April 21, 1934, and the Daily Mail has just published a...

Bi Mwanaidi has washed the dead for thirty-one years and has never been afraid of a body. Then she finds the same tiny puncture beneath the eyelid on three bodies that seem to have nothing in common. And then a living man comes to her gate and asks her to prepare his body before sunset. This week on Freaky Folklore, we travel to Pemba and Zanzibar to dig into the legend of the Popobawa (also spell...

It walks backward, with its head hung between its hind legs. It claps its enormous ears like a hand. And it doesn't drink your blood from your throat. It drinks it from your shadow. This week we're headed to the Visayas and Mindanao in the Philippines, for the legend of the Sigbin. It's a goat-like creature with a whip-like tail, a nauseating stench, and the power to vanish in front of you. We dig...

Every Saturday, a woman locks her door. Her husband swore he'd never open it. This week on Freaky Folklore, we dive into the legend of Melusine, the medieval French water-fairy cursed to become a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. Melusine built castles overnight, bore ten sons marked by her supernatural blood, and became the folkloric founding mother of the House of Lusignan. Her descend...

Deep in the peat hills of Shetland, the old folk won't cross the green mounds after dark. Those hills belong to the trows: small, grey, limping hill-folk descended from the Norse trolls. They'll steal a fiddler for a night that lasts a hundred years, and they'll trade a healthy baby for a sickly changeling. In this episode of Freaky Folklore, we go under the hill. First comes an original story. A...

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Sodder family's home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, burned to the ground. Five of the ten children were never found. No remains were recovered, and the case was closed almost as quickly as it was opened. For decades, their parents refused to believe their children had died that night. This is a preview from Deadly Intent, Carman's true crime psychology podcast. Every e...

She's been called a goddess. A demon. A healer. A thief of husbands, minds, and sometimes lives. Across an entire continent — and every shore the diaspora ever touched — Mami Wata has been worshipped in shrines and feared on riverbanks for centuries, and she is not finished collecting. This week on Freaky Folklore, we're wading into the legend of the Mother of Water: her murky, tangled origins str...

Deep in the cedar mountains north of Kyoto lives a creature that has spent over a thousand years being both worshipped and feared — sometimes in the same breath. The Tengu can be the greatest swordmaster you'll ever train under, or the reason you vanish off a mountain trail and turn up days later on a rooftop with no memory of how you got there. There's only one rule that decides which one you get...

When a person dies, the Diné believe the good in them moves on — and everything else stays behind. It gathers in that last breath, steps out of the body, and waits. It's called the chindi, and the wise thing, the safe thing, is to leave the dead alone: their homes, their names, the things buried with them.   Wade Corliss dug where he was warned not to. He carried something home from a death h...

Scotland's most famous cryptid has her face on a shortbread tin — but the folklore underneath is one of the deadliest water legends in all of Europe, and it doesn't begin in 1933 with a grainy photograph. It begins in the year 565, with a burial.   In this episode of Freaky Folklore, we drag Nessie out of the gift shop and back into the black water where she came from: the deepest, coldest, m...

Today, we’re excited to share part one of a two-part series from the award-winning true crime podcast RedHanded, hosted by Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire. RedHanded is the UK's #1 True Crime podcast, covering everything from high-profile murders and cults to con artists and cultural catastrophes, always asking not just what happened, but why. In this episode, Suruthi and Hannah dive into the stor...

Deep in the frozen forests of the Wabanaki Dawnland lives a giant with a heart of solid ice — a monster that was once a human being, transformed by the cruelest cold there is. Tonight we follow trapper Alistair Crewe into a winter he barely survives, and uncover the origin, powers, and one strange weakness of the Chenoo: the cannibal ice giant of Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy legend. Warmth...

There's a rule whispered from senior girls to juniors in Nigerian boarding schools, passed on in the dark after the matron locks the doors and carries the only key home: if you wake in the night and hear the slow click of heels down the corridor — koi, koi, koi — you do not move, you do not call out, and whatever you do, you never open your eyes to look. Because once there was a teacher who loved...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's an old woman at the edge of the village. She keeps to herself, lives in the shadow of the silk cotton tree, and has no husband, no children, no people anyone can name. And in the mornings, the babies three houses down wake up pale, exhausted, and marked with bruises in the soft places — where the blood runs nearest the skin.   Tonight we travel to the eastern coast of Trinidad to meet...

Deep in the karst mountains of eastern Serbia lives a monster no one has ever described, because no one who saw it came back. The Bauk waits in caves, holes, and abandoned houses, lurching through the dark on a clumsy gait, and it can only be driven off by two things: light and noise. For centuries, Serbian parents used it to make children behave. Tonight, two American YouTubers turn its cave into...

Every coastal people on earth knows the same rule: if something takes you in the water, you swim for shore. The shore is safety. The A-mi-kuk does not care about the shore. Four long arms. No legs. A body of slick, naked hide, like an animal that was skinned and never got the message. It rises up under kayaks off the Alaskan coast and drags men down into the silt. And when you claw your way onto t...

Jenny Greenteeth — Beneath the still, duckweed-choked surface of Britain's ponds and canals lurks Jenny Green Teeth, an ancient water hag from English folklore with elongated grasping arms, needle-sharp teeth, and a centuries-old hunger for children who wander too close to the water's edge. When a drainage project disturbs the old binding that has held her captive for generations, two young siblin...

In the villages of Malaysia and Indonesia, desperate people pay shamans to raise a toyol—the enslaved spirit of a dead infant that steals riches for its master—but every coin it brings home comes with a debt no one can afford to pay.   #FreakyFolklore #Toyol #Tuyul #MalayFolklore #MalaysianLegends #IndonesianFolklore #SoutheastAsianMythology #GhostStories #BlackMagic #Bomoh #FolkHorror #CreatureFe...

Deep in the Richtersveld, where the Orange River cuts through some of the oldest, driest land on Earth, there is a cave the locals call the Bottomless Pit. They say it runs sixty feet straight down before it opens into the dark — and that it is the source of every diamond South Africa has ever surrendered. They also say something guards it. Something forty feet long, with diamonds set in its eye s...

In the frozen forests of the far north, a greedy fur trapper learns that something has been feeding on his catch — a beast that gorges until its body swells tight as a drum, squeezes itself empty between two trees, and then returns to feed again, and again, and again, until nothing is left.   #Gulon #FreakyFolklore #NorseLegend #ScandinavianFolklore #Wolverine #OlausMagnus   CONTENT WARNING This e...

Along the canals and riverbanks of rural Egypt, the old fishermen follow one rule: if a voice calls your name from the water after sunset, you do not answer. They call her El-Naddaha — The Caller. A beautiful woman in white, standing among the reeds, who whispers the name only your mother used, the name nobody else should know. And once she learns it, she never stops calling. This week on Freaky F...