The spookiest podcasts to haunt your Halloween
Having listened to everything from creepy Lynchian communities to demonic reiki spirits, our intrepid correspondent Greg Thomas tentatively emerges from behind his sofa to report on podcasts that go bump in the night
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I ‘m on my fifth back-to-back episode of Danny Robins’ Uncanny podcast, in which the comedian turned ghost hunter (comedium?) interviews members of the British public about their encounters with the underworld. I’m lying in bed with the lights down (might as well get in the headspace) while Ken, a mildly spoken Irish scientist, recalls the time during his undergraduate years when a pitch-black figure appeared at the end of his bed, on the sixth floor of a post-war tower block. The figure was, he says, full of ‘pure, distilled evil’.
Suddenly I realise I need to pee. That’s when I know this show has done its job. In truth, I haven’t heard anything my rational brain can’t swat away, but the stories have activated a more primal response, the kind that would doubtless have saved my ancestors from sabre-toothed tigers. I dart across the hall of my flat, noticing for the first time the black voids opened onto by my kitchen and living-room doors. I strain to get the job done as fast as possible and dash gingerly back, embarrassed at my fearfulness.
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I’ve been tasked with listening to supernatural-themed podcasts all day and night and reporting back on the results. As a victim, I’ve been chosen either well or badly, because it’s really important to me that ghosts don’t exist. I don’t find the idea of them especially entertaining or whimsical. Rather, if I was confident I had seen one, my whole sense of reality would come crumbling down around my ankles. Of course, this also reflects my sense of what reality is. I am, for all intents and purposes, an atheist (Pascal’s Wager aside), and while I hate sneering Richard Dawkins-style anti-theism, I do feel that collective investment in superstition is a bad thing, too often a means of enforcing stifling norms, disguising real-life harms or creating scapegoats.
My auditory voyage begins in the morning with The Magnus Archives and Welcome To Night Vale, two fictional series which take what we might call the Big Creepy Almanac approach to horror storytelling. A central conceit (in the first case, recordings from an archive of esoteric research; in the second, community radio updates from a Lynchian desert town) allows stories to be spun off and muse on certain consistent themes. The Magnus Archives is smart, goosebump-raising stuff, the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson alive and well in its fin de siècle folk-tale stylings which include a floating angler-fish-man that swallows up drunk revellers in an Edinburgh wynd. Welcome To Night Vale is a more comic caper featuring an ambient faux-spookiness, with the community in question falling prey to floating clouds dropping dead animals, and so forth.
But the real-life stuff is the contraband, isn’t it? Sadly, or thankfully, my first two outings into this genre disappoint as fright-inducers. In LA-based series Otherworld, host Jack Wagner interviews guests about their interactions with various dead and evil matter. His credulity is tempered with Yankee hawkishness (‘if a demon appeared during my massage, I’d demand my money back’) and the stories I listen to come weighed down with too much North American cultural baggage to take seriously. Bonnie, who writes songs for Katy Perry, accidentally unleashes an evil spirit during her reiki session. She calls her mom for a second opinion and is told, ‘go get your crystals and send it light’. I’m not surprised that Bonnie believes in ghosts.
Two Girls One Ghost, meanwhile, is a comedy horror podcast in which Corinne Vien and Sabrina Deana-Roga pore over listener stories and historic cases of haunted objects, demonic possessions and more. They take these anecdotes absolutely seriously while talking about them like diverting snippets of pop culture. I don’t get it. When they agree it’s a great thing that there are now over 100 exorcists practicing in the USA compared to the 1980s when there were only ten, I wonder why they don’t have a stronger angle on what Satanic Panics meant for women (on which note, see the brilliant series The Devil You Know With Sarah Marshall).
Haunted UK and Eerie Edinburgh are in the ghostly tour-guide vein. They offer nuggets of folk history, with each episode introducing a different haunted location or ancestral tale. But they lack the punch that comes from lived experience when it’s done right. Back to my final podcast of the 24 hours, and by far the best, Robins’ Uncanny. A mixture of multiple encounters, the host’s quizzical yet empathetic style, and the marshalling of expert witnesses (including an Australian ‘building psychologist’, of all things) nudges you into a state of credulousness. By the time Robins utters ‘bloody hell, Ken’ after his guest recounts the story of a door banging off its hinges in an empty corridor, I’ve been got. It’s time to turn off.
All podcasts available from wherever you get your spooky listening.