The best horror podcasts for the long dark walk

Horror belongs in audio more than in any other medium, and it took the industry about eighty years to remember that. Radio worked out in the 1930s that a sound with no image attached is the most frightening object available, because the listener builds the thing themselves and everyone builds something worse than a designer would.

Then television arrived and horror went visual for two generations. Podcasts gave it back. Here is what to listen to, and a warning that the good ones are genuinely effective on a dark walk.

The best of the fiction shows

The Magnus Archives is the high point of the whole medium. Two hundred episodes of an archivist reading witness statements about things that should not have happened, which starts as an anthology and slowly reveals that every statement is part of one structure. The first twenty episodes are good. By episode eighty it is doing something no other horror fiction in any medium has managed. Start at the beginning and do not read anything about it first.

Old Gods of Appalachia is the most beautifully made show on this list. Folk horror in the coal country, narrated with real regional care, and frightening in a slow geological way rather than a jump-scare way. The sound design is extraordinary. Best listened to with the lights on.

The White Vault is found-footage horror done as audio, set in a research station in Svalbard. Claustrophobic and very well acted. The seasons that leave Svalbard are weaker.

Knifepoint Horror is one man, no music, no effects, reading a first-person account of something awful in a flat unhurried voice. It is the cheapest-sounding show here and the one most likely to make you turn a light on. There is nothing else quite like it.

Welcome to Night Vale is the one that started the boom and it is not really horror, it is a comedy about a town where horror is municipal. Still worth starting.

The non-fiction and folklore end

Lore by Aaron Mahnke is the biggest show in this space and the one to try first if fiction is not your thing. It takes a folk belief or a historical episode and traces where it came from. It has been criticised for accuracy in places and it remains the best-produced introduction to folk horror as a subject.

Unexplained by Richard MacLean Smith is the better show for adults who want the same material handled with more scepticism. He is genuinely interested in why people believe things, which makes the episodes stranger rather than sillier.

Uncanny from the BBC takes a first-hand account of something inexplicable and puts a believer and a sceptic on it. The format is a bit of a game show and the testimony is often remarkable.

The NoSleep Podcast is the long-running anthology of listener-submitted stories with full cast productions. Wildly uneven by design and the hit rate is high enough that it is worth digging.

What to do in the last week of October

Every one of the shows above has a back catalogue, and the trouble with a back catalogue in this genre is that horror fiction is hard to dip into. You cannot start The Magnus Archives at episode ninety.

What the last two weeks of October actually want is something short, self-contained, and real. Not fiction. The history and folklore underneath the fiction, which is usually stranger.

HearLore is a listening library of short narrated entries, and this corner of it is well stocked. Dracula, about thirteen minutes, is the novel and where Stoker got it, which is not Transylvanian folklore so much as Victorian anxiety about immigration and blood. Frankenstein, about fourteen minutes, is a teenager on a wet holiday inventing science fiction. Mary Shelley, about thirteen minutes, is a life with more death in it than the novel. Gothic fiction, about thirteen minutes, is the whole tradition and where every haunted house you have ever seen comes from.

Edgar Allan Poe, about fourteen minutes, is the man who invented both the horror short story and the detective story and died broke in Baltimore. H. P. Lovecraft, about fourteen minutes, is the most influential horror writer of the century and the entry does not skip the parts about him that are indefensible.

For the folklore rather than the fiction, vampire, about thirteen minutes, is the belief before the novel, including the actual exhumations. Witchcraft, about ten minutes, is the real history and it is bleaker than any fiction. Folklore, about twelve minutes, is what the whole category is and why it persists. Ghost, about eleven minutes, is a genuinely careful entry on the most widespread belief humans have. Halloween, about eleven minutes, is two thousand years of the same festival changing hands.

And if you want something unresolved rather than supernatural, the Dyatlov Pass incident, about fifteen minutes, is nine dead hikers and no satisfying explanation.

Start with Dracula. Thirteen minutes, on a dark street, and then follow it wherever it goes.

The rabbit hole has no bottom.