Freaky Folklore

Long before Count Dracula, something in the north of Ireland refused to stay buried.

Abhartach, the dwarf chieftain of Slaghtaverty in County Londonderry, was a magician and a tyrant. Killed once, he rose again. Killed twice, he rose again. Only a yew wood blade, an upside-down grave and a heavy stone finally held him, and locals still say not to move it.

This week on Freaky Folklore, we dig into the Irish vampire legend and follow it from Patrick Weston Joyce's 1870 account to Bob Curran's retelling of the bowl...

🎃 A quick announcement for the Freaky Folklore family!

If your podcast feed looked a little different this past Monday, don't worry! We participated in a feed swap, and there's nothing you need to do on your end.

Our Halloween episode will arrive on Saturday morning, October 31st! Set your alarm, grab your candy, and get ready for a spooky start to Halloween with Carman.

Thank you for being part of this creepy little community. Happy early Halloween, and I'll see you on the 31st! 🕸️

Happy Halloween week! This is a special feed swap with History Daily, a co-production from award-winning podcasters Airship and Noiser. Every weekday, host Lindsay Graham (American Scandal, American History Tellers) takes you back to a momentous event that happened "on this day" in history.

In today's episode, "The Loch Ness Photograph," it's April 21, 1934, and the Daily Mail has just published an alleged photo of the Loch Ness Monster. It sparked an international sensation around one of the world's most enduring modern legends. Real or hoax? Press play and decide for yourself.

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Bi Mwanaidi has washed the dead for thirty-one years and has never been afraid of a body. Then she finds the same tiny puncture beneath the eyelid on three bodies that seem to have nothing in common. And then a living man comes to her gate and asks her to prepare his body before sunset.

This week on Freaky Folklore, we travel to Pemba and Zanzibar to dig into the legend of the Popobawa (also spelled Popo Bawa), the shapeshifting spirit said to come for you while you sleep. Its smell is burnt matches...

It walks backward, with its head hung between its hind legs. It claps its enormous ears like a hand. And it doesn't drink your blood from your throat. It drinks it from your shadow.

This week we're headed to the Visayas and Mindanao in the Philippines, for the legend of the Sigbin. It's a goat-like creature with a whip-like tail, a nauseating stench, and the power to vanish in front of you. We dig into the families said to keep Sigbin in clay jars, the link to the aswang, the folk logic behind staying...

Every Saturday, a woman locks her door. Her husband swore he'd never open it.

This week on Freaky Folklore, we dive into the legend of Melusine, the medieval French water-fairy cursed to become a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. Melusine built castles overnight, bore ten sons marked by her supernatural blood, and became the folkloric founding mother of the House of Lusignan. Her descendants ruled as kings of Cyprus and Armenia. Luxembourg, the Plantagenets, and other royal houses claimed her too. Then her husband broke his promise.

In this episode: a story of...

Deep in the peat hills of Shetland, the old folk won't cross the green mounds after dark. Those hills belong to the trows: small, grey, limping hill-folk descended from the Norse trolls. They'll steal a fiddler for a night that lasts a hundred years, and they'll trade a healthy baby for a sickly changeling.

In this episode of Freaky Folklore, we go under the hill. First comes an original story. A wind-farm technician picks up a fiddle tune in the vibrations of the ground beneath a haunted mound. It's the unfinished song his father was playing the...

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Sodder family's home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, burned to the ground. Five of the ten children were never found. No remains were recovered, and the case was closed almost as quickly as it was opened. For decades, their parents refused to believe their children had died that night.

This is a preview from Deadly Intent, Carman's true crime psychology podcast. Every episode goes beyond what happened to ask why: what was going on in someone's mind that let them do the unthinkable, and what the evidence still leaves unanswered.

She's been called a goddess. A demon. A healer. A thief of husbands, minds, and sometimes lives. Across an entire continent — and every shore the diaspora ever touched — Mami Wata has been worshipped in shrines and feared on riverbanks for centuries, and she is not finished collecting.

This week on Freaky Folklore, we're wading into the legend of the Mother of Water: her murky, tangled origins stretching from indigenous river goddesses like Yemoja and Ogbuide, to a 19th-century German print that accidentally became her global face. We cover her powers, her price, the rules that keep her happ...

Deep in the cedar mountains north of Kyoto lives a creature that has spent over a thousand years being both worshipped and feared — sometimes in the same breath. The Tengu can be the greatest swordmaster you'll ever train under, or the reason you vanish off a mountain trail and turn up days later on a rooftop with no memory of how you got there. There's only one rule that decides which one you get: respect the mountain, or don't whistle in the dark.

Tonight on Freaky Folklore, we trace the Tengu from its origins as a corrupted Ch...

When a person dies, the Diné believe the good in them moves on — and everything else stays behind. It gathers in that last breath, steps out of the body, and waits. It's called the chindi, and the wise thing, the safe thing, is to leave the dead alone: their homes, their names, the things buried with them.

Wade Corliss dug where he was warned not to. He carried something home from a death hogan out in the red-rock country — and it followed him. This week on Freaky Folklore, we walk carefully into a living Diné traditi...

Scotland's most famous cryptid has her face on a shortbread tin — but the folklore underneath is one of the deadliest water legends in all of Europe, and it doesn't begin in 1933 with a grainy photograph. It begins in the year 565, with a burial.

In this episode of Freaky Folklore, we drag Nessie out of the gift shop and back into the black water where she came from: the deepest, coldest, most lightless loch in Britain. We get into the 1,400-year-old account of Saint Columba and the "water beast" that had already killed a man before he...

Today, we’re excited to share part one of a two-part series from the award-winning true crime podcast RedHanded, hosted by Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire. RedHanded is the UK's #1 True Crime podcast, covering everything from high-profile murders and cults to con artists and cultural catastrophes, always asking not just what happened, but why.

In this episode, Suruthi and Hannah dive into the story of Robert "Willie" Pickton, otherwise known as the Pig Farm Killer. They uncover the investigation into the missing women, the community whose cries for help went unheard, and the systemic failures that kept au...

Deep in the frozen forests of the Wabanaki Dawnland lives a giant with a heart of solid ice — a monster that was once a human being, transformed by the cruelest cold there is. Tonight we follow trapper Alistair Crewe into a winter he barely survives, and uncover the origin, powers, and one strange weakness of the Chenoo: the cannibal ice giant of Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy legend. Warmth, hunger, and the terrifying question of what a person can turn into… one frozen choice at a time.

#FreakyFolklore #Chenoo #Wabanaki #NativeAmericanFolklore #IceGiant #Wendigo #Cryptid #Folklore #HorrorPodcast #Myths...

There's a rule whispered from senior girls to juniors in Nigerian boarding schools, passed on in the dark after the matron locks the doors and carries the only key home: if you wake in the night and hear the slow click of heels down the corridor — koi, koi, koi — you do not move, you do not call out, and whatever you do, you never open your eyes to look. Because once there was a teacher who loved her red high heels more than any student in her care, and death only made her crueler. This week on Freaky Folklore, we w...

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There's an old woman at the edge of the village. She keeps to herself, lives in the shadow of the silk cotton tree, and has no husband, no children, no people anyone can name. And in the mornings, the babies three houses down wake up pale, exhausted, and marked with bruises in the soft places — where the blood runs nearest the skin.

Tonight we travel to the eastern coast of Trinidad to meet the Soucouyant: the skin-shedding fireball witch of the French Creole Caribbean, who peels off her own skin like a wet dress, folds it...

Deep in the karst mountains of eastern Serbia lives a monster no one has ever described, because no one who saw it came back. The Bauk waits in caves, holes, and abandoned houses, lurching through the dark on a clumsy gait, and it can only be driven off by two things: light and noise. For centuries, Serbian parents used it to make children behave. Tonight, two American YouTubers turn its cave into content... and learn why the old rules exist.

In this episode: the real folklore preserved in the era of Vuk Karadžić, the meaning of "ba...

Every coastal people on earth knows the same rule: if something takes you in the water, you swim for shore. The shore is safety.

The A-mi-kuk does not care about the shore.

Four long arms. No legs. A body of slick, naked hide, like an animal that was skinned and never got the message. It rises up under kayaks off the Alaskan coast and drags men down into the silt. And when you claw your way onto the mud, certain you have survived it, it keeps coming. It swims through solid ground the way it...

Jenny Greenteeth — Beneath the still, duckweed-choked surface of Britain's ponds and canals lurks Jenny Green Teeth, an ancient water hag from English folklore with elongated grasping arms, needle-sharp teeth, and a centuries-old hunger for children who wander too close to the water's edge. When a drainage project disturbs the old binding that has held her captive for generations, two young siblings discover that some legends were never just stories meant to frighten. Listener discretion advised.

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#JennyGreenTeeth #EnglishFolklore #WaterHag #FreakyFolklore #BritishHorror #Cryptids #FolkHorror #DrowningLegends #Lancashire #ScaryStories #PodcastHorror #Ginnygreenteeth #Horror #Creepy #Folk...

In the villages of Malaysia and Indonesia, desperate people pay shamans to raise a toyol—the enslaved spirit of a dead infant that steals riches for its master—but every coin it brings home comes with a debt no one can afford to pay.

#FreakyFolklore #Toyol #Tuyul #MalayFolklore #MalaysianLegends #IndonesianFolklore #SoutheastAsianMythology #GhostStories #BlackMagic #Bomoh #FolkHorror #CreatureFeature #SupernaturalPodcast #UrbanLegends #ParanormalPodcast #FolklorePodcast

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Deep in the Richtersveld, where the Orange River cuts through some of the oldest, driest land on Earth, there is a cave the locals call the Bottomless Pit. They say it runs sixty feet straight down before it opens into the dark — and that it is the source of every diamond South Africa has ever surrendered. They also say something guards it. Something forty feet long, with diamonds set in its eye sockets, that leaves a trail three feet wide in the river mud and never, ever leaves the print of a foot.

This is the...

In the frozen forests of the far north, a greedy fur trapper learns that something has been feeding on his catch — a beast that gorges until its body swells tight as a drum, squeezes itself empty between two trees, and then returns to feed again, and again, and again, until nothing is left.

#Gulon #FreakyFolklore #NorseLegend #ScandinavianFolklore #Wolverine #OlausMagnus

CONTENT WARNING

This episode of Freaky Folklore contains disturbing content including graphic violence, gore, body horror, animal death, descriptions of evisceration and consumption, and the death of a human character. List...

Along the canals and riverbanks of rural Egypt, the old fishermen follow one rule: if a voice calls your name from the water after sunset, you do not answer. They call her El-Naddaha — The Caller. A beautiful woman in white, standing among the reeds, who whispers the name only your mother used, the name nobody else should know. And once she learns it, she never stops calling. This week on Freaky Folklore, we travel into the Nile Delta to explore one of Egypt's most unsettling legends — a spirit who doesn't chase, doesn't stalk, and doesn't break down doors. She simp...

A photograph you were never supposed to see is spreading across the internet — and everyone who looks claims to see something different, something wrong, something that follows them home.

#SmileDog #Creepypasta #ModernFolklore #CursedImage #InternetHorror #FreakyFolklore

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A little something different this week. Carman Carrion just got back from four days in a cabin on the Ouachita River near Hot Springs, Arkansas—and she didn't come home empty-handed.

In this special shorter episode, there are no dramatized retellings. No fictional reenactments. Just a folklore field report from the deep hollers of the Ouachita Mountains, told the way it might've been told on a porch a hundred years ago.

Pull up a chair and listen in as Carman shares what she learned about the old mountain ways—the folk magic, healing traditions, and dark...

Deep in Japanese coastal folklore lurks the Nure-onna, a terrifying yokai that appears as a beautiful woman in a white kimono—until she reveals her serpentine lower body. This "wet woman" haunts beaches, rivers, and tide pools, using an enchanted baby bundle to trap victims or stealing real infants from their mothers. Discover the chilling legend of a predator that weaponizes maternal instinct, the regional variations from Shimane to Niigata, her partnership with the ox-demon Ushi-oni, and why this ancient warning about stranger danger remains relevant today.

#Freaky Folklore #Nureonna #JapaneseYokai #CoastalLegends #SnakeWoman #JapaneseFolklore #Yokai #Bab...

The male demon that visits women in their dreams, stealing more than just sleep. Handsome, seductive, and deadly—the Incubus is the dark counterpart to the Succubus, and his victims wake up exhausted, violated, and sometimes pregnant with something that shouldn't exist.

#Incubus #Succubus #DemonLover #Cambion #Merlin #MedievalDemonology #SexDemon #FreakyFolklore #DarkFolklore #ChristianDemonology #MalleusMaleficarum #WitchTrials #SupernaturalSeduction #DemonicPregnancy #NightDemon #ForbiddenDesire #ParanormalFolklore #DemonMythology #Mythology #HorrorPodcast #FolklorePodcast #AncientDemons #MedievalLegends

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The Gobi Desert holds a secret that has terrified Mongolian herders for centuries: the Olgoi-Khorkhoi, or Mongolian Death Worm. This two-to-five-foot creature allegedly kills from a distance—spitting corrosive acid that melts flesh in seconds and discharging electricity through the sand. No eyes. No legs. Just a thick, blood-red worm that surfaces when the ground gets hot and leaves nothing but blackened corpses and stained sand in its wake.

Join me as we explore one of cryptozoology's most persistent mysteries, where the line between folklore and fatal reality gets buried in the sand.

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Deep in the Louisiana bayou, where Spanish moss hangs like funeral shrouds and cypress trees rise from black water, Cajun parents have been warning their children for generations: don't stay out after dark, don't wander too far from home, and never, ever ignore the call to come inside. Because if you do, Père Malfait might find you. And when this moss-covered demon wraps its arms around you in a crushing bear hug, there's no escape—just the slow, agonizing pressure as your ribs crack, your lungs collapse, and the swamp claims another victim.

#FreakyFolklore #Père...

In the dark forests and lonely roads of Germany, travelers learned to fear something worse than bandits or wild animals. The Aufhocker didn't rob you or tear you apart—it jumped onto your back and stayed there, growing heavier with every step you took. This wasn't a creature you could fight or shake off. Once it mounted you, your only hope was to reach sanctuary before the crushing weight broke your spine, drove you to madness, or forced you to your knees where you'd die slowly under an invisible burden.

German folklore is filled with pra...

In the cremation grounds outside ancient Indian cities, where funeral pyres burned and the boundary between life and death grew thin, something waited in the darkness. The Vetala weren't mindless undead stumbling through graveyards—they were intelligent spirits that possessed corpses, animating dead flesh with terrible purpose.

#Vetala #HinduFolklore #FreakyFolklore #IndianMythology #BuddhistFolklore #SanskritLegends #CremationGrounds #UndeadSpirits #IndianGhosts #CorpsePossession #Folklore #VetalaLegend #BaitalPachisi #HinduMyths #AncientIndia #SpiritPossession #Cremation #SanskritStories #IndianLegends #FolklorePodcast #HorrorFolklore #DarkFolklore #SupernaturalIndia #TantricLore #HinduDemons #CreepyLegends

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In the summer of 2019, videos started appearing on TikTok that made viewers sleep with the lights on. A woman in a white dress, dancing alone on empty streets. Nothing that unusual—except her movements were wrong. Joints bending at angles that made your stomach turn, limbs jerking like a marionette with cut strings, bare feet slapping pavement with mechanical violence.

The videos spread like wildfire, spawning thousands of recreations, alleged sightings, and one of the internet's most disturbing urban legends: the Serbian Dancing Lady. Unlike most creepypasta that admits its fictional origins, this legend lives in an un...

Long before European contact transformed the Great Lakes region, the Ojibwe people told stories about something that hunted from the skies—a skeletal warrior with glowing red eyes that flew on invisible wings, firing arrows no living person could see. The Baykok wasn't a cautionary metaphor or a teaching story for children. It was a predator. A hunter of hunters who targeted the strongest, most skilled warriors and left them dead without a mark.

In Ojibwe tradition, the Baykok represents one of the most terrifying possibilities: thatdeath itself can take physical form, stalk you through the forest, an...

As winter finally loosens its grip and warmer days call us toward beaches, jungles, and humid nights under foreign stars, I find myself drawn to the monsters that thrive in heat and darkness—the creatures that hunt where the air is thick, where the jungle closes in, and where something ancient waits beneath the canopy.

Today we're diving deep into the tropical terrors of Southeast Asia and the Philippines—a collection of six creatures that prove the warmth doesn't keep the monsters away. From the Aswang's detachable torso to the Pontianak's vengeful hunt, from the Tiyanak's false crie...

For centuries along the Anglo-Scottish border, crumbling castles and forgotten towers whispered warnings about something far worse than human violence. Redcap doesn't haunt these ruins because they're atmospheric—he lives there because they're perfect hunting grounds, soaked in the blood of centuries of warfare. This malevolent goblin of English and Scottish folklore isn't content to frighten travelers. He murders them, brutally and without hesitation, for one horrifying purpose: to keep his iron-shod boots moving and his distinctive red cap freshly dyed in human blood. In a landscape already stained by border conflicts and ancient brutality, Redcap represents the darkest po...

Born from 1930s Japanese schoolyard whispers and now embedded in global horror culture, Aka Manto represents modern urban legend at its most psychologically visceral. This isn't ancient folklore passed down through centuries—it's a contemporary yokai that emerged from the anxieties of modern life, transforming the mundane vulnerability of a bathroom stall into a trap with no escape. When you answer the wrong question, there's no bargaining, no mercy, only the terrible realization that you've sealed your own fate. Aka Manto reminds us that new monsters are born every generation, shaped by our evolving fears—and sometimes, the most terr...

Born from Clive Barker's 1984 horror fiction but rooted in genuine British pagan tradition, Rawhead Rex represents modern folklore at its most visceral. This isn't an ancient legend—it's a contemporary monster that tapped into real fears about buried gods, standing stones, and pre-Christian powers lurking beneath Britain's soil. When a farmer breaks the seal imprisoning this nine-foot creature of muscle and teeth, it brings with it an appetite that hasn't been satisfied in over a thousand years—and a reminder that new folklore emerges when fiction resonates deeply enough with our ancient terrors.

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A special cross-promotional message from Carman introducing Freaky Folklore and Destination Terror listeners to Deadly Intent through the chilling case of Israel Keyes a serial killer who engineered randomness, buried kill kits across the country years in advance, and remained undetected until a single debit card transaction unraveled his carefully constructed design. Discover why understanding intent matters when facing someone who turned murder into a long-term project. New episodes of Deadly Intent every Tuesday.

#DeadlyIntent #IsraelKeyes #TrueCrime #SerialKiller #CriminalPsychology #CrossPromotion #FreakyFolklore #DestinationTerror #TrueCrimePodcast #CriminalIntent #PodcastPromo #Psychology #Investigation #UnsolvedMysteries #FBI

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Gashadokuro - Born from the bones of those who died from starvation and left unburied, the Gashadokuro are massive skeletal yokai that tower fifteen to ninety feet tall, hunting humans in the dead of night with an insatiable hunger that can never be satisfied. Their approach is heralded by the sound of rattling bones—gachi gachi gachi—and their victims are crushed, devoured, and sometimes absorbed into the creature's ever-growing skeletal form.

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#Gashadokuro #JapaneseFolklore #Yokai #FreakyFolklore #JapaneseHorror #StarvingSkeletons #BodyHorror

CONTENT WARNING This episode of Freaky Folklore contains distur...