FRIGHTLY! Scary Stories and Tales of Terror
Short Storyverses 30 episodes Oct 29, 2026
FRIGHTLY! Scary Stories and Tales of Terror is a storytelling podcast featuring classic ghost stories, weird fiction, and original tales of the uncanny. It focuses on Gothic atmosphere, psychological suspense, and well-crafted horror without gratuitous gore. Episodes mix tales from masters of the macabre with new stories in the same haunting tradition. The show is part of the Short Storyverses collection of storytelling podcasts.
Episodes
The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence — How Much Luck Is Enough?
A beautiful woman married for love, and the love turned to dust. The family lives in style, always a little past its means, and the house has started to whisper. Her small son hears it. He would like very much to be lucky. D. H. Lawrence wrote this for a book of ghost stories in 1926, and it remains one of the most unsettling things he ever put on paper. If you enjoy great stories visit shortstory
The Willows - Part Two by Algernon Blackwood — Something Beyond the River Is Watching
Below Vienna, the Danube floods out into a wilderness of sandbars and willow scrub that the maps mark only as marshes. Two old friends, an Englishman and a Swede, beach their canoe on a small island to wait out a gale. The wind won’t drop. The willows won’t keep still. By morning, one of them has stopped making jokes.H. P. Lovecraft ranked Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 novella above every other supern
The Willows - Part One by Algernon Blackwood — Something Beyond the River Is Watching
Below Vienna, the Danube floods out into a wilderness of sandbars and willow scrub that the maps mark only as marshes. Two old friends, an Englishman and a Swede, beach their canoe on a small island to wait out a gale. The wind won’t drop. The willows won’t keep still. By morning, one of them has stopped making jokes.H. P. Lovecraft ranked Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 novella above every other supern
Yuki-Onna by Lafcadio Hearn — A Promise Made in the Storm
A blizzard on the river. A ferryman’s empty hut. An old woodcutter and his young apprentice bar the door and wait for morning. Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of a Japanese legend, from Kwaidan (1904), is a quiet ghost story with a long, cold reach.From Short Storyverses, where there’s always another story waiting at shortstoryverses.com.If you enjoyed the story please follow and leave a five star revi
The Hum by Don McDonald — A Widower Follows a Sound Beneath His House
It starts on a Tuesday in October, at ten minutes to three in the morning. A low tone with no seam in it.Hollis Pike's neighbors can't hear it. His phone can't record it. The audiologist says his hearing is fine, better than fine, and writes something down.So he goes looking for where it comes from. The county keeps records. The house has a history. The sound is patient.An original sto
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman — Is the Cure Worse Than the Illness?
John is a physician, and he has a plan for his wife. Rest. Fresh air. No visitors who might excite her. Absolutely no writing.He's rented a colonial mansion for the summer and given her the big room at the top, the old nursery, with barred windows and a bed that won't move. She keeps a journal anyway, tucked out of sight whenever he comes up the stairs. In it she writes about the house, th
Below Ten Thousand by Don McDonald — All the Time and No Time
He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.Now the seatbelt sign is on, the descent has started, and his brother is running out of days. In his jacket pocket is a voicemail he has never played.There's a rule pilots follow below te
The Black Cat — A Classic Tale of Human Horror by Edgar Allan Poe
As a boy he was teased for his tenderness. He kept birds, rabbits, a dog, a small monkey. And a cat, enormous and entirely black, who followed him from room to room and would have followed him into the street. Now he sits in a cell with a pen, determined to set the record down plainly. He is not mad, he tells us. He is not dreaming. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale.WARNING: Contains graphic animal
Still Water by Don McDonald — Four aircraft carriers in a lake?
Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's be
Luella Miller – A Chilling Classic Short Story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Everyone in town has a story about Luella Miller. She never seems to lift a hand, yet somehow, help is always at her side. And those who give it—well, they never quite look the same afterward. Some tales of horror are loud and bloody. This one is quiet, gentle… and suffocating. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman spins a ghostly puzzle where the most dangerous thing may be a smile too sweet to resist.Mary E.
Autopay — An Original Short Story by Don McDonald
There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.For two years she was her mother’s caregiver. Now she is her mother’s administrator. She makes lists. She keeps folders. She is very good at this.Then she reaches the bottom of the last statement.An original story, written and read by Don McDonal
The Hanging Stranger — A Classic Sci-Fi Horror Tale by Philip K. Dick
Ed Loyce spends his days fixing radios and televisions in a small town where nothing much happens. One evening he climbs out of his basement workroom, walks into the square, and sees something no decent town would put up with.Then he notices how everyone else is taking it.Philip K. Dick wrote "The Hanging Stranger" in 1953, a year when plenty of Americans had started keeping an eye on th
His Own Voice — An Original Story by Don McDonald
Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.He carries it home and records his diary each night, and the machine hands him back to himself, the nearest thing to company he has. Then the wax starts holding something he n
Murder of Crows – an Original Short Story by Don McDonald
There’s a reason crows gather in cemeteries. They remember. They watch. And sometimes, they wait. Murder of Crows isn’t a tale borrowed from the past—it’s one I wrote for New Tales Told, a series of original stories that echo in the spaces between memory and myth. This one lingers in the cold silence of the American frontier, where the shadows are long and the watchers have wings.Set in
The Boarded Window — A Classic Haunting Tale by Ambrose Bierce
In 1830, a few miles from what would one day become Cincinnati, the forest still ran unbroken. A man named Murlock lived alone at the edge of it, in a log house with one door and one window. The window was boarded shut. Nobody living could remember it any other way. He looked seventy and was closer to fifty, and whatever had done that to him was not the work of years.Ambrose Bierce tells it the wa
Frightly!
Fear Deserves Better StorytellingFRIGHTLY! is no longer adding stories. You’ll find these same tales of love, along with my latest narrations, on LitReading—where it all started. Search for LitReading in your podcast app and follow the show there. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Willow Walk — A Classic Tale by Sinclair Lewis
Jasper Holt counts other people's money at the Lumber National Bank, and he is very good at it. Out in Rosebank, at the end of a brick path a block long and roofed over with willows, his brother John lives alone, shabby, devout, and nearly invisible. The brothers are not much alike. Sinclair Lewis builds this one patiently, a small arrangement at a time, and then lets the willows lose their leaves
August Heat — A Classic Tale by W.F. Harvey
August 20th, 1910. The worst heat in living memory, the kind that flattens a city and slows the blood.An artist named James Clarence Withencroft spends the morning drawing a man in the dock, caught at the instant sentence is passed on him. Then he walks out into the glare, wanders without direction, and finds himself in a stonemason's yard, where the man from his drawing sits carving a headstone.
The Rips — An Original Story by Don McDonald
There are things we expect from the world.Walls stay still. Rooms hold their shape. The spaces we live in behave.And when they don’t, we look for explanations.Old houses settle. Pipes shift. Light plays tricks.But sometimes the world doesn’t explain itself.When an answer can’t be seen, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.There is something.Something all too real.Something beyond frightening.FRIGHTLY
The Diary of a Madman – A Classic Tale of Terror by Guy de Maupassant
There is a special horror in hearing a mind unravel from the inside. In The Diary of a Madman, Guy de Maupassant pulls us into the private writings of a man who can no longer trust his own thoughts. His diary entries begin quietly enough—simple observations, small disturbances—until each page edges closer to something darker, something unmoored, something deeply and intimately wrong.This is t
The Tell-Tale Heart – A Classic Tale of Terror by Edgar Allan Poe
A man insists he is calm… reasonable… even kind. Yet something small and ordinary, something most people would ignore, begins to consume him. It creeps into his thoughts, scrapes against his nerves, and finally drives him toward an act he believes is both necessary and brilliant. But the mind doesn’t stay quiet for long. As the story tightens, the world around him narrows to a single sound he cann
A Haunted House–a Classic Ghost Story by Virginia Woolf
There’s a certain kind of ghost story that doesn’t knock at the door or rattle chains. It whispers. It lingers. It asks you to listen a little more closely than you usually do.Virginia Woolf remains one of the most influential voices in 20th-century literature, and A Haunted House shows why. In just a few pages she turns a simple domestic space into something tender, uncanny, and alive w
The Damned Thing–a Classic Scary Story by Ambrose Bierce
In this unsettling tale, Ambrose Bierce invites us to witness an inquest—one that begins as a routine matter and unravels into something far stranger. A man has died. The evidence is sparse. The testimony is contradictory. And the truth… well, it might be standing right there in the room, unseen.Prepare for a story that taps on the thin walls of perception and asks whether the most terrifying thin
The Monkey's Paw–a Classic Tale of Terror by W.W. Jacobs
There are stories that whisper warnings, and then there are stories that lean in close and breathe those warnings right into your ear. This is one of the latter. It begins, as these things often do, with an ordinary family in an ordinary home… until a strange relic from a far-off land arrives and tilts the whole world off its axis. It’s a tale about wishes—how badly we want them, and how steep the
The Pale Man–a Classic Scary Story by Julius Long
Julius Long’s The Pale Man is a masterclass in quiet dread—an intimate journal of a traveler who becomes aware of a strange newcomer haunting the corridors of his hotel. Nothing overt happens, nothing jumps out, yet the sense of creeping inevitability grows with every page. Its power lies in what we notice… and what we don’t want to.Julius Long (1907–1955) was an American author best kno
The Judge's House – A Classic Ghost Story by Bram Stoker
Some houses advertise their menace. Others wait. In The Judge’s House, Bram Stoker gives us a quiet old home with a history no one wants to speak aloud. A university student, seeking absolute solitude to study, leases the abandoned residence of a long-dead magistrate known for his severity—and for something darker. At first, it is only the silence that unnerves him. Then comes the persistent
A Wireless Message - A Supernatural Short Story by Ambrose Bierce
A Wireless Message is a brief, uncanny tale about a man who receives an impossible warning in the dead of night—one that seems to pass through neither voice nor wire, but something far more mysterious. What begins as a mundane moment on a quiet country road turns suddenly intimate and chilling, as the narrator confronts a message meant only for him, delivered by someone who could not possibly
The Furnished Room – a Classic Haunted Tale by O. Henry
In “The Furnished Room,” O. Henry trades his usual light touch for something far more haunting. A weary young man arrives at a shabby New York boarding house, desperately searching for the woman he loves. The room he rents feels strangely steeped in old emotions… and in secrets the landlady would rather not discuss. As he follows faint traces of her presence—a perfume, a song, a whispered memory—t
The Man with Two Lives – A Chilling Old West Tale by Ambrose Bierce
When a young man survives an event that should have ended his story, he returns changed in ways no doctor—or priest—can explain. Lean, eerie, and unmistakably Bierce, The Man with Two Lives follows a life restored… but not returned intact. What happens when a man comes back carrying more than himself?Ambrose Bierce (1842–circa 1914) carved his place in American literature with a soldier’s gri
The Cask of Amontillado - A Classic Scary Story by Edgar Allan Poe
Beneath the streets of old Italy, where carnival laughter drowns out good judgment, Edgar Allan Poe takes us into one of literature’s most unsettling descents. The Cask of Amontillado is a cold, precise story of pride, manipulation, and a man who knows exactly how far he’s willing to go to avenge an unnamed insult. What begins as a simple invitation to taste a rare wine turns into a slow
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