We recommend: Paranormal podcasts with eerie episodes
Editor’s Note: Spooky season is here and so is our list of excellently scary podcasts—including Indian noir, paranormal tales and even real-life monsters. Happy Halloween!
Campfire Radio Theatre: Inspired by the American radio dramas of the 80s, this podcast brings alive campfire scary story sessions—in its most cosy, atmospheric and immersive form. Each episode is centred on a different urban legend. Since the podcast started in 2011, you have plenty of episodes to choose from. Our faves: ‘The Bones of Saint Nicholas’ and ‘Discrete’. Beware, the voices really give you the creeps.
Indian Noir: In 2018, Nikesh Murali—an award-winning horror writer—started hosting this chilling series—which brings Indian urban audiences a slice of Indian creepypastas—horror-related content shared online. The episodes basically read like a Reddit thread with minimal editing and are super bingeable as the stories are hardly 10-20 minutes long. Our fave: ‘Death House’.
Ghost Maps: This brings you real paranormal stories from Singapore and other SEA countries. The host has the most calming voice and narrates the story in the first person—almost like you were reading a book—but with eerie background music. The stories have all the typical tropes explored in horror—from angry kid spirits to haunted hospitals to graveyard hopping. Though the episodes don’t use the overtly spooky sounds, they are still pretty scary to listen to at night. There are about 120 stories available so you can start with any.
The Last Podcast on the Left: An academic, a conspiracy theorist and a comedian come together to nerd out over all things murky and macabre, traversing the line between fact and fiction. With a library of nearly 600 episodes and a sister ‘Side Stories’ series, we’re clearly dealing with veterans of the paranormal podcasting game here. The trio have got their format and style locked down, seamlessly playing off of each other. Topics range from skeletons in SeaWorld’s closet to extraterrestrial encounters—a personal favourite of ours is their two-parter deep dive into Nazi Germany’s fascination with the occult.
Archive 81: An ominous offering that feels like a time capsule from the early 2010s—when found footage films like the ‘Paranormal Activity’ series, ‘Chronicle’, and ‘Trollhunter’ were all the rage before the creative well ran dry. Featuring a nifty 35 episodes of 15 to 45 minutes each, this narrative pod is an ode to the finest works of that era as it makes the most of eerie sound effects and conversational dialogue to adapt the genre into the audio format, without coming across as gimmicky.
Sweet Bobby: This one doesn’t exactly fit into the horror genre, but is no less frightful. It’s now a popular Netflix series but hardly does justice to the multi-part investigation the podcast had us swearing off social media. It tells the story of an Indian-origin woman in London, Kirat who is subjected to a sophisticated and brutal catfishing attack. While the build-up with characters from the small community that migrated to the UK from India via Africa is fascinating, it is the length of the scam (nearly a decade) and the shocking reveal that had us hooked. Unlike the series, the revelation here comes in Episode 3 (of six). The horror and the aftermath of the multi-layered attack are atmospheric and truly palpable.
A Paranormal Chicks: Taking a left-field route to podcasts with a paranormal or creepy setting, this one is as funny as it is terrifying, as two best friends, Donna and Kerri, trade hot takes about paranormal activity and true crime stories! They’re more than 300 episodes in, so this one can keep you occupied for a while. A section we love: Sinister Sightings, where they share stories sent in by their listeners.
