Scéaleenies

A disused church on the edge of an Irish estuary is reopened as a music venue. The sessions are lively, the crowd is warm, and the tradition feels alive again. 

But something beneath the ground is stirring. 

And the musicians have learned that the music isn’t just for enjoyment, it’s keeping something vast, old, and awake from rising too close to the surface.

There’s a hall in every town that used to be full of music.
Ours is called The Paradise.
Now it’s empty. Locked. Forgotten.
But some nights, you can hear a band playing inside.
Old songs. Perfectly played.
And when someone dies in the town…
the music draws a crowd you can’t see.
If you pass by, don’t stop.
Don’t look in.
It’s not for you.

There’s an island on estuary that used to be inhabited.
Not many families. Just enough.

They guided ships through the channel. They survived hardship. They never left.

People said it was skill.
Older people said it was a bargain.

Now the island is empty.
The last man from that line still works the river.

And on certain nights, when the weather turns and no pilot boats go out, ships are told to wait.

Because if the payments stopped…
something else may have started.

There are seven curses of Quilty.
 No one agrees on the order.

The first is peace.

What begins as healing, neighbour speaking to neighbour again, land settling, old grievances loosening, slowly becomes something else. Attention sharpens. Lines harden. Memory returns at the wrong moment. And beneath it all, something older waits.

Not anger. Not mercy.

An arrangement.

🎧 A story about community, control, and what grows quietly when everything seems finally at rest.

A scholar of Irish manuscripts begins to notice a pattern.

Not in the text. In the margins.
Across centuries, in ink, print, dreams, and now machines, something has been repeating itself. Not a story, but a structure. Not a creature, but a recurrence.
It does not need to be written.

Only noticed.

This episode of Scéaleenies explores An Athfhillteach, that which returns by repeating.

🎧 Listen if you like slow horror, Irish folklore, or the feeling that something has been quietly learning how to think.

A tired Dublin father goes out on Christmas Eve to find the one gift his son asked Santa for, a rocking horse he can't afford.
After every shop fails him, a strange figure by the canal offers him a beautifully carved hobby horse for free, in exchange for a small and very unclear bargain.

The gift works. His son loves it.

But over the following weeks the boy grows stronger, stranger, and more alive, while his parents begins to feel something quietly draining away.

A bargain isn't just for Christmas, it's for...

A man buys a cottage with “great potential,” which is auctioneer language for no heating and mice.

What begins as romantic renovation quickly becomes a quiet war. Humane traps become snap traps. Flour becomes surveillance. The walls begin to speak in scratching sounds and small movements in the night.

A story about property, vermin, and the strange rituals people invent to convince themselves they’re still in control.

 At his first international conference, funded to the exact punt and sworn not to disgrace the nation, a young Irish scholar begins exchanging chess moves with a mysterious counterpart. The ritual continues for decades across symposia, Festschrifts, and semiotic congresses, until intelligence services intervene and a foreign power claims the moves concealed a transformative technology. 

 “We decided, together, not to see.” 

On a remote Irish peninsula, the priest was the centre of everything.
He visited homes at night. Boys came home pale. Once, during a storm, a child saw him in the graveyard, listening.
No one ever proved anything.
But the parish decided, together, not to see.
New original Irish folk horror audio story now available.

Airports - The pinnacle of modernity. Long-haul flights, high technology and ever shorter attention spans. 

Dolmens - The ancient stone-age sentinels surrounded by folklore and memories older than nations and cultures. 

This is a tale of what happens when the two shall meet. When modern mundanity observes ancient exceptionalism and the curious get a glimpse into the place where the veil is thinnest.

A tale about an underground practice, where participants secretly inspect strangers’ homes, document every detail, and leave no trace. As the practice spreads, the boundaries between observer and observed begin to collapse.

Best experienced in one uninterrupted listen, after sweeping your house for listening devices.

Short audio fiction

 A stormy night folk tale about music, migration, and the pull west. 

This episode presents a spoken reading of The Emigrant Song, a literary folk-horror story set in Dublin on a stormy night near the equinox.

As a tune rises in a city pub, people begin to leave, calmly and irresistibly, drawn westward out of the capital and toward the Atlantic. The story unfolds as a meditation on Irish emigration, collective memory, and the unsettling possibility that departure itself is not always a choice, but a tradition with its own momentum.

Rooted in Ir...

 A wish, a loophole, and a Lidl car park. 

This episode presents a spoken reading of a modern folk tale set in a familiar and deeply unremarkable place: a supermarket car park in the Irish Midlands.

When an ordinary man encounters an ancient, shape-shifting being bound to grant a single twisted wish, he turns to the most contemporary authority available to him: artificial intelligence. What follows is a story about language taken too seriously, precision mistaken for safety, and the unsettling continuity between old supernatural bargains and modern systems of logic.

By placing fo...

 When the power goes out at sunset, the parish gathers to listen. 

This episode presents a full spoken reading of An Fear Glais, a contemporary Irish folk tale told through the voice of a child during a time when the nights go dark and communities gather indoors to listen again.

Set in a rural parish experiencing nightly blackouts, the story centres on the arrival of the Grey Man, a figure associated with darkness, attention, and old bargains renewed under modern conditions. As technology fails and silence returns, the story examines listening as ritual, fear as in...

  At Birr, the telescope was built to look outward. Something answered. 

This episode presents a spoken reading of The Observatory at Birr, a literary horror story rooted in Irish scientific history and theology.

Set around the great Leviathan telescope and a hidden programme of church transmissions into deep space, the story follows the discovery that the universe may have received the message, and understood it far too well. As signals repeat, archives whisper, and boundaries between sender and receiver blur, the narrator confronts a terrifying possibility: that faith, once broadcast, does not remain one-way.

...

 A pub tale of the Celtic Mist, the sea’s memory, and debts that don’t drown. 

This episode features a spoken reading of a contemporary Irish folk-horror story, told as a pub tale passed carefully from mouth to ear, with caution to pass on no further.

Set on the West coast of Ireland, the story centres on the night the Celtic Mist was escorted out of the Shannon, and what followed when mist rose, footsteps sounded on an empty deck, and the dead appeared to carry on their arguments without adjournment.

Blen...

In a coastal parish where the sea was never spoken of, old silences are beginning to fail.

A full reading of The Thing That Was Not Spoken Of, a literary folk-horror story rooted in the storytelling traditions of the West of Ireland. It follows a community shaped by implicit rules, a coastline without fishermen, and a place that remembers.

As times passage reopens what was deliberately left alone, the story examines silence as inheritance, place as participant, and the uneasy boundary between folklore and lived reality.

A quiet, unsettling piece about Ireland’s Wi...

A train trip goes awry.