A good scary story doesn’t just come to life. It takes great narrative ability and some out-there content. Fortunately, there are plenty of podcasts for just that.
Sure, we love a good music podcast, but sometimes you want that eye-opening rush otherwise known as fear. The best horror podcasts reawaken that sense and remind us that not only are humans strange, but some things are just really, really hard to explain. So as the days get a little longer and the darkness of winter subsides, hang on to a bit of that darkness with a good old-fashioned terrifying tale.
Here are the best horror podcasts of 2023. You can also take a look at our list of the best podcasts overall for more options, including some of our favorite true-crime series.
Dark House
There’s something extra scary about a haunted house. This show examines that very phenomenon, focusing on a single structure in every episode. As you might imagine, these are houses with questionable histories, whether they served as the backdrop for a murder or some extraordinary series of circumstances. In that sense, it’s a well-hosted show that dabbles in sci-fi, interior design, true crime, and more.
Demonic presences in Pennsylvania? Check. People that vanished in snowstorms? Sure. A St. Louis mansion with enough paranormal activity to make your head spin? You bet. Dark House is a tour across the land from terrifying residence to terrifying residence. It may be about the history of these places, but the chilling past extends well into the present.
PseudoPod
A member of the old guard when it comes to horror podcasts, Pseudopod has been at it since 2006. The show puts some of the best horror fiction on a pedestal, showcasing talented authors from all over. The stories tend to be short but are packed to the gills with plenty of chilling content. It’s fiction, yes, but it’s often so disturbing and vivid that it’s easy to plant yourself right into the dark narrative.
When narrators are involved, they don’t always match the feel of the story, but that’s rarely the case here. This makes the believability of these stories all the greater and the fear factor, well, palpable.
The Horror of Dolores Roach
When the first episode of a podcast is titled “All the Gory Details,” you typically know what you’re getting into. And when this series is written by the Gimlet Media team, you know that you’re getting some of the best production skills in the business.
The Horror of Dolores Roach is a Sweeney Todd-inspired tale buttressed by nerve-inducing piano. The titular Roach begins with a promise to share “all the gory details” regarding her return to her New York City neighborhood after 16 years behind bars. What’s revealed is a gothic-tinged modern urban legend soaked in a potent potion of love, betrayal, weed, gentrification, cannibalism, and survival of the fittest. Roach’s childhood neighborhood changed drastically in her absence.
With her boyfriend missing and her family long gone, Luis, her old stoner friend, is the only person left to harbor Dolores. He gives her room and board and allows her to ply her trade, selling massages for cash in the basement apartment under Luis’ dilapidated empanada shop. Like so many released prisoners before her, the promise of newfound stability for “Magic Hands Dolores” is quickly threatened, driving her to extremes to survive. Episodes keep you on the edge, hanging you over the abyss Roach faces, not letting you go until its chilling conclusions in seasons 1 and 2.
Alice Isn’t Dead
Conceived by Joseph Fink, co-creator of sweetly spooky Welcome to Nightvale, the writer boiled a much more inky brew with the Alice Is Dead. The story about a lone truck driver’s search across the U.S. for the wife she had long assumed was dead sprawls across 30 main and 24 bonus slow-boiling, unsettling episodes.
Told by one lone, first-person narrator (voiced by the vocal talents of Jasika Nicole), a female long-haul truck driver roams the country via big rig in search of her lost love, Alice. Keisha (as she’s finally identified at the end of season 1) first reminisces about her missing lover, but it doesn’t take long before things like paranormal creatures with murder on their minds begin to go bump in the night. Down the road is a town lost in time and a massive conspiracy that comes together one achingly suspenseful piece at a time. The Welcome to Nightvale team builds an enveloping horror effect with soft, measured tones. The hypnotic rumble of truck wheels lulls readers into a trance that’s only broken like glass by things leaping from hidden highways.
Old Gods of Appalachia
Steve Shell is the perfect narrator (and co-founder) of Old Gods of Appalachia. With a melodic, time-worn drawl, he draws you into the dark shadows to find the creatures and phantoms that lurk in ancient Appalachian hills. Fans of classic horror tales penned by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft will find their black hearts titillated by this beautifully produced homage to the genre’s roots. The stories in Old Gods embody the dark, brooding menace native to the second-oldest mountain range in the world. This is the Edenic place raped by blind greed and headlong ambition, creation’s home worn down by rapacious capitalism, thinning the walls of cornering forces ready to wreak their revenge.
Having graduated from the University of Virginia, podcast creators Shell and Cam Collins are homegrown talents whose knowledge turns the region’s history and geography on its head, disorienting the listener so that the supernatural is as real as it would be to a child listening at their granny’s knee. This series captures everything listeners love about regional folklore, right down to the folksy interludes. Here you can soak into the old-time religion that twists with the primeval mists that still swirl, hidden in the trees.
Lore
Creator, writer, host, and producer of Lore, Aaron Mahnke, covers an important, perhaps even more chilling side of horror in Lore: true-life scary stories. The podcast shines a light on the eerie side of history, exploring the creatures, people, and places of our wildest nightmares.
Each Lore episode examines a new, dark historical tale, drawing listeners around a universal campfire experience. With the show’s more than 40,000 5-star reviews on Apple Podcasts, and over 390 million listens, there’s certainly more than a few of us who like to shiver by the flames peeking into the night. This goes for skeptics as well. Mahnke reveals the explanation behind each spooky phenomenon toward the end of the episode, which takes nothing away from the pod’s chilling effect, as the truth can be more frightening than fiction. Over 200 episodes in, and these stories are still just as interesting and spine-tingling.
Spooked
Staying on the theme of true-life tales, Spooked features firsthand stories of the supernatural told firsthand by people who still sound astonished at their frightening encounters with the other side.
Forged in the “dark of night” by Snap Judgment Studios and WNYC, Spooked is haunted by demons, dark spirits, mysterious creatures, and all other sorts of foreboding, fantastic apparitions that emerge from that blurry line between our reality and other dimensions. Now in its seventh season, each episode host Glynn Washington relates his own harrowing story while introducing each new narrator. There’s virtually no drop-off in the quality of each story and the chills that each delivers in its own distinct way.
The Last Podcast on the Left
If you like your terrifying audio treats served with a serious dose of black comedy and profanity-laced stoner humor, The Last Podcast on the Left is a great digital destination. The trio of Ben Kissel, Marcus Parks, and Henry Zebrowski bring equal parts joy and dread to accounts of serial killers, alien visits, haunted lands, horror films, werewolves, war crimes, and more.
The narrative is buoyed by the boys’ chemistry — the antic Zebrowski bouncing maniacally from Parks’ carefully parsed script while Kissel plays the foolish foil to everything high and strange. With over 500 episodes of content, if there is something spooky to discuss, the LPOL team is likely to have dug deep into it. It’s a terrible delight that just might be the creepy-crawliest Spotify podcast out there.
Dr. Death
The Wondery team keeps killing it with Dr. Death. The story is a real-life nightmare — a neurosurgeon who brutally botches spinal surgeries. Season 1, reported and hosted by Laura Beil, digs into the professional life of Christopher Duntsch, a neurosurgeon who claimed he was the best in Dallas. If you had back pain that failed to recede with all other methods, Dr. Duntsch offered his miraculous scalpel to slice the spinal pain away. As Duntsch’s patients started to experience complications, however, the system failed to protect them.
Dr. Death shows the true horror that humanity is capable of can be scarier than the possibility of alien abductions, Jersey Devils, and other haunting supernatural legends. The pod has even been adapted into a Peacock series if you want more horror after binging all the episodes of the Wondery podcast.
The Man in the Window
Speaking of spooky real-life tales, there are few things scarier than a serial killer stalking a community. And when it comes to history-as-horror, not many producers do it better than the Wondery team. Their meticulous research and glossy production values turned mundane police blotter into thrilling coverage of a chilling nightmare.
The Man in the Window is one of Wondery’s best efforts, a team-up with Paige St. John, a Pulitzer Prize-winning L.A. Times investigative reporter. St. John narrates the origin story of the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer/rapist who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1970s. This bonafide reporting keeps things bare bones and terrifying. Interviews with detectives, stories from living almost-victims, and sound recordings of the killer’s voice have scared listeners sleepless since 2019. Though the show might have you looking over your shoulder, you won’t be able to turn away from the horrible silhouette outside a thin pane of glass.
My Favorite Murder
If you’re looking for some laughs as you get your horror podcast fix, check out My Favorite Murder, which bills itself as “a true crime comedy podcast.”
Hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark launched the podcast in 2016, after covering news stories regarding infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker and other gruesome and infamous murderers. Each week Kilgariff and Hardstack take a deep dive into a murder, with the stories ranging from Victorian England to the modern day.
While the show does feature a good dose of humor, don’t be fooled, this is not a comedy podcast. Each story is infused with enough gruesome and scary details to keep you up at night. My Favorite Murder has sparked an intense fan following during its long run, with dedicated listeners referring to themselves as “Murderinos.”
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