Image: zef art (Shutterstock)
When I was a odd little kid, I’d pull up the covers and listen to episodes of creepy old time radio shows before bed. (Listening alone to decades-old radio dramas was a very cool thing for children to do back then; I had tons of friends and was in no way considered a weirdo.) Popular storytelling wisdom is that you should show rather than tell, but there’s something very primal about horror delivered via headphones—your imagination being often much more vivid than anything you’d see in a film.
Many of those vintage programs were stunningly effective for that reason, but I definitely wasn’t spoiled for choice—the art form was also pretty much dead until the emergence and subsequent explosion of podcasts as a medium for storytelling over the past decade-plus, providing artists a new venue to create horrors and pump them directly into our earholes.
What follows are some of my personal favorite horror podcasts, suited to different moods: there are narrated stories, full-cast audio dramas, call-in shows, and conversations that deal with ghosts, demons, truckers, an ambitious Glow Cloud and, most terrifying of all, a real-life doctor who was scarily bad at his job. (Drop your own freaky recommendations in the comments.)
