Horror is one of the few genres people willingly seek out to feel uncomfortable. We queue up stories that make us tense, second-guess every sound, and glance over our shoulders. Somehow, that controlled dose of fear is exactly what keeps us coming back. Horror podcasts have perfected that experience, using nothing but voices, sound, and silence. A list of horror podcasts probably shouldn't have any number other than 13, so here's our pick of the 13 eeriest shows worth listening to.
1. Archive 81: Haunted cassettes
Daniel Powell spent two years working from home for Soundsnap, a company that sells stock sound effects, listening through hours of raw audio before any of it went up on the site. His friend Marc Sollinger, a public radio producer, thought there was a horror story sitting inside that job description. So in August 2015, the two of them started building it into one.
The story follows Dan, voiced by Powell, an archivist hired to restore cassette tapes recorded by a documentary filmmaker named Melody Pendras during her stay in a Manhattan high-rise called the Visser. The podcast lets the tapes play, hiss and static included, across three seasons and 35 episodes. Netflix eventually adapted the first season into a television series, executive produced by James Wan, the director of Saw and The Conjuring. Fun fact: Powell started recording amateur radio shows as a kid, using the family computer and Windows 95.
2. Something Scary: Global folklore
Something Scary started out as an animated YouTube series, created by Sapphire Sandalo in 2016, before turning into a podcast two years later under host Markeia McCarty, a self-described medium. Filmmaker Blair Bathory and psychic medium Steffany Strange took over as co-hosts in 2022.
The Something Scary podcast now reaches more than three million listeners a month with weekly episodes covering ghost stories, urban legends, and folklore from around the world. That reach has made it one of the best horror podcasts focused on global folklore rather than any one country's ghost stories. Fun fact: Before Something Scary, Bathory worked as a video creator at BuzzFeed, and wrote a feature-length horror screenplay for a separate production company.
3. Let's Not Meet: Reddit stalkers
Let's Not Meet takes its name and its material directly from r/LetsNotMeet, a subreddit where people post first-person accounts of stalking, near-abductions, and other encounters. Andy Tate started reading a selection of these stories aloud for producer Cryptic County in January 2017, with each account narrated largely as its original author wrote it.
The Let's Not Meet podcast has run 14 seasons and passed 300 episodes since launching, and was a finalist for the 2019 Discover Pods awards. Because the stories come from a public subreddit rather than one commissioned writer, the tone shifts from one account to the next. It's frequently named among the best real life ghost stories podcast picks for the variety and first-hand feel the listeners get. Fun fact: Some of the stories have gotten a second life on other shows, including a themed episode of Two Hot Takes assembled entirely from Let's Not Meet submissions.
4. Old Gods of Appalachia: Appalachian Gods
Steve Shell got the idea for Old Gods of Appalachia while driving through the mountains to host a storytelling event at Appalshop in Kentucky. He returned home to Asheville and began writing soon after. The show premiered on Halloween 2019, set in a fictional version of Appalachia where an ancient force called the Inner Dark has been sealed beneath the mountains for eons, held back by a rival power the show calls the Green. This is the best scary story podcast for anyone who wants their horror soaked in place and history, though some episodes include sensitive topics and content warnings.
The scripts draw on documented regional history, mining disasters, coal camp religion, and Appalachian folklore. Shell and Collins both quit their day jobs once the show took off, and it has since passed eight million downloads and inspired a tabletop RPG from Monte Cook Games. Fun fact: The opening arc is set in a coal town called Barlo, Kentucky, featuring a fictional mining catastrophe called the Old Number Seven Disaster.
5. Knifepoint Horror: Witness confessions
This horror podcast launched in November 2010 by a writer working under the pen name Soren Narnia. Several of the stories in this podcast are also available as short fiction in print and ebook form. The full catalog now runs to 121 episodes, released under a Creative Commons license, and a quarter of all merchandise profits go to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
It has the structure of a true scary stories podcast even though it's fiction, since every episode is written to sound like something a witness would say out loud under questioning. Fun fact: The very first story, about a man drawn into a researcher's obsession with a town called Robin Song, Virginia, was re-recorded by the author himself years after its original 2010 narration by a different voice actor, Dennis Smith.
6. The Magnus Archives: Supernatural sightings
When Rusty Quill founder Alexander J Newall asked Jonathan Sims what he wanted to write for the company's first audio drama, Sims said he wanted to make a horror anthology. The result was The Magnus Archives, a horror fiction podcast set at a fictional research institute in London called the Magnus Institute, which keeps written statements from people who claim to have witnessed something supernatural. In the story, the new head archivist's job is digitizing that backlog of statements and reading them aloud into a recorder one at a time.
The Magnus Archives ran weekly for five seasons and 200 episodes before wrapping in March 2021, picking up a British Fantasy Award for Best Audio and nine Audio Verse Awards along the way. Rusty Quill later revived the concept with a follow-up series called The Magnus Protocol, which launched in January 2024 and continues the story inside a new archive. Fun fact: Jonathan Sims originally wrote the archivist character with his own name as a placeholder, planning to change it later, but then he decided to stick with it.
7. Lore: Dark history
This award-winning horror podcast was almost deleted before it existed. Aaron Mahnke had written the material as a promotional essay for his own thriller novels, and once the promotion ended, he nearly trashed the file. But then, he decided to record it as a podcast instead. Every episode has taken one dark corner of documented history, witch trials, hauntings, unsolved crimes, and told it like a campfire story.
Lore won an iTunes Best of 2015 award, then the Academy of Podcasters' Best History Podcast award in 2016, and picked up a two-season Amazon Prime adaptation from a Walking Dead producing team not long after. The high quality and fascinating stories have carried the show past 800 million downloads. Fun fact: Mahnke also runs a bite-sized spinoff, Cabinet of Curiosities, pairing two short stories per episode.
8. The Black Tapes: Paranormal story
Paul Bae and Terry Miles built The Black Tapes to sound like an actual public radio documentary. It launched in May 2015, following journalist Alex Reagan as she sets out to interview people with unusual jobs and ends up meeting Dr. Richard Strand, a professional paranormal debunker with a handful of cases he has never managed to disprove, the ones he calls his Black Tapes.
The show keeps its illusion going even in the bonus episodes where the hosts answer listener mail, staying fully in character the entire time. Co-creator Paul Bae has said the show leans on regional lore, including the actual occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons, as a recurring reference point. Fun fact: Nic Silver, the character who plays Alex Reagan's producer within the show, later got his own spinoff series, Tanis.
9. Tanis: Endless Mystery
Tanis is a spinoff of The Black Tapes, centered on Nic Silver, the producer character from that show, voiced by executive producer Terry Miles. It premiered on October 13, 2015, using the same fake-documentary format as its parent show.
The show ran five seasons and 60 episodes, released every other week for the first four seasons and weekly for the last, before wrapping in November 2020. It shares a universe with another podcast besides The Black Tapes, called Rabbits. Fun fact: The show still lists a working phone number and email address for listeners to report their own encounters with the myth.
10. Alice Isn't Dead: Highway Horror
The main character of this horror podcast is Keisha, a long-haul truck driver recording radio messages to her missing wife Alice while she drives across the country. Along the way she keeps running into towns stuck in the wrong decade and killers who are not entirely human.
The horror plays out at truck stops, motels, and gas stations rather than anywhere overtly supernatural. The show ran three seasons and 30 episodes through August 2018, was adapted into a novel that same year, and returned in April 2026 with a sequel series called Don't Tell Alice. Fun fact: Keisha's own name is never spoken during the entire first season, only surfacing in the finale.
11. Chilling Tales for Dark Nights: YouTube Roots
Craig Groshek started Chilling Tales for Dark Nights in 2012 to promote a book. The book never came out. What did come out was a YouTube channel of horror readings covering everything from internet creepypasta to Poe and Lovecraft, and it grew large enough that Groshek eventually turned it into a standalone podcast hosted by Steve Taylor and produced by Jeff Clement and Jesse Cornett.
New episodes go up weekly now, each one stitched together from several stories sent in by outside writers and performed by a rotating cast of voice actors with full sound design behind them. Guest performers over the years have included Daniel Radcliffe and Patrick Rothfuss. Fun fact: Chilling Tales has adapted several Five Nights at Freddy's fan stories into audio readings.
12. The White Vault: Arctic Outpost
K.A. Statz and Travis Vengroff are a married couple who write and produce horror fiction together under their own company, Fool and Scholar Productions. The White Vault started from a trip the two of them took to Iceland while Statz was finishing a master's degree in England, and that trip became the seed for a story about a repair crew sent to fix a strange signal at a remote outpost in Svalbard, Norway. They released the first season in 2017.
Statz writes every script, and Vengroff directs, edits, and builds the sound design and foley work. It ran eight seasons and 80 episodes before wrapping in 2022, picking up a Webby Award People's Voice honor and a New Jersey Web Fest award for Outstanding Horror/Thriller in 2021. Fun fact: The same fictional world holds several self-contained miniseries in other eras, including one set during the 1648 Cossack uprising and another following a Jesuit mapmaking expedition through Qing dynasty China.
13. Campfire Radio Theater: Old-School Radio
John Ballentine fell in love with radio drama as a teenager in the early 1980s, listening to the Canadian anthology series Nightfall on NPR. He held onto that interest for roughly thirty years, before podcasting gave him a cheap way to try the format himself. Campfire Radio Theater launched in December 2011 as a modern version of that old-school anthology format.
Ballentine writes, directs, produces, and edits most episodes on his own, working with a rotating cast of voice actors and composer Kevin Hartnell for the scores, and each self-contained story runs between 26 and 43 minutes. Fun fact: Ballentine has described himself as a regular married guy with a day job who gave up drag racing because horror radio drama turned out to be the cheaper hobby.
Great horror isn't reserved for October. Whether you're after a quick scare on your commute, a slow-burning mystery to binge over several nights, or stories that leave you checking the locks before bed, there's something on this list for every kind of horror fan.