What if the things you trust most...the deep silence of the woods, the familiar voice of a loved one, a desperate cry for help in the dark...were all just bait?

For this special Halloween episode, Dust and Echoes presents a triptych of terror. Three Original Tales of Terror from author James Cawley that explore the unsettling truth that we are never truly alone, and that something ancient is learning how to get closer.

These stories take you from a solo camping trip where the wilderness is watching back, to a locked door with a terrible choice on either side, to the bottom of an old, dry well where a voice is waiting for a hero.

These aren't just scary stories. They're glimpses into a world where our safe places are being mapped, our voices are being recorded, and our very compassion is being used as a lure.

Seeking total solitude in the vast, silent corners of the Utah desert, a traveler believes he's finally alone. But the darkness is listening...and waiting. 

When a relentless siege begins against the thin fabric of his small tent, he is forced to remember the ancient, whispered rules of the night:

Don't speak,

don't whistle,

and never, ever tell the darkness your name.

This is a terrifying psychological battle against a patient predator that specializes in mimicry, using the voices of the loved ones he's lost.

Our traveler will fight to survive the long, dark night, but sometimes, the greatest horror isn't what's trying to break down your sanctuary...it's the rules you forget, before you encounter it.

Under the searing Utah sun, where the San Juan River cuts through stone and silence, a quiet frontier life is set ablaze. When a brutal betrayal rips her world apart, Emma Hawthorne rises from the ashes...scarred, armored, and guided by something far older than the church bells that once tried to tame her.

Redemption is not your typical western. It’s a vengeance-soaked, faith-fractured, desert-burning odyssey. A cinematic audio drama where religious power turns violent, colonial myth collides with Indigenous truth, and one woman’s grief is forged into something unstoppable.

Redemption is an Original Dust and Echoes Story in Audiobook style Podcast form. 

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After the funeral and the estate sale Thomas stays behind to spend one final night alone in his childhood home.  To say goodbye before it's sold. 

The rooms are now empty. But something still moves in the silence.

As he clings to fading memories, something within the house begins to respond.

A slow-burning tale of guilt, loss, and the dark things that wait in places we think are safe.

Written and performed by the Author, James Cawley. 

Some roads lead to what people would rather forget.

In the backroads of Indiana, the corn grows high enough to swallow the horizon. Mile after mile of silent rows, where sound dies and even daylight feels heavy. Farmers tell their children to stay clear of the fields after dark. Hunters avoid them altogether. And still, the missing persons reports grow.

This is the story of what Jenson and Susan McBride stumbled into one late summer evening when a wrong turn, a stranger, and a simple act of kindness led them into a darkness beyond imagination.

Part crime story, part rural legend, The Corn Witch is a descent into isolation, obsession, and the terror that grows wild when no one’s looking.

A Dust and Echoes original story, written and performed by James Cawley.

Three hundred years after the fall of the old world, the survivors live not in cities… but inside their skeletons.

High above the vine-choked ruins of what once was Manhattan, the Stone Tree Clan endures among the rooftops guided by firelight, memory, and the stories passed down since the first flames were lit. Stories that remind them of the sins that burned the world… and of the one law that has kept them alive:

Stay close to the flame.

But rules can’t hold forever.

The Down Dark is a haunting tale of survival, silence, and the weight of tradition in a world built on ashes. A cinematic story told in the rhythm of oral myth, kept alive through fearing the shadows of the past.

From Dust and Echoes, this is James Cawley’s The Down Dark

Some places will never let you go.

Jeff Bauer thought he escaped his hometown of Burley, Idaho. He traded wheat fields for Hollywood lights, childhood ghosts for film scores and awards. But a phone call from an old childhood friend drags him back into the nightmare that he thought he'd escaped. 

Developers are unearthing the farmland where two kids once hid things that they hoped would always stay buried. Now, Jeff must confront the dungeon once again....the town he fled, the boyhood pact he broke, and secrets the Idaho soil refuses to keep.

In Burley, silence is currency, memory is a trap, and loyalty can cost more than blood.

Listen to past episodes and see what's next at: 

Long before covered wagons creaked across endless sagebrush and steam locomotives chased the horizon...something ancient arrived from the cold stillness between distant galaxies, and it buried itself deep into the red clay of Shoshone land.  And there, it waited for the old man and the girl. 

Generations later, Dzoon awakens it. The visions it brings are unlike anything he’s ever known...not memories, but omens. Fire. Ruin. A ghostly old woman.

A warning...

A fragile thread of hope that his people might survive a new darkness rising in the East.  Dzoon and Shaya must take a stand to keep the ember of their people alive and protected, before everything is buried behind the coming silence.

This is a story about ghosts trapped within the walls of our history.

Told in a cinematic, audio-book style by the author and host of Dust and Echoes, James Cawley. 

The Sky We Carried blends myth, ancestry, and prophecy into a story that refuses to be forgotten.

Dust & Echoes is a fiction podcast blending horror, mystery, adventure and suspense in original short story form. Each episode is a cinematic, immersive experience drawing you into tales of the strange, the forgotten, and the haunted parts of being human.

Written and performed by author James Cawley, Dust & Echoes delivers a modern campfire experience, one story at a time.

Unheard. Unpublished. Until now. 

New episodes every Tuesday.  Each one a new original story. 

See what's coming next at:  https://www.dustandechoespodcast.com

When neurosurgeon Garrett Goodwin boards the Celestia Maris with his family, he’s looking for quiet. But in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle, the ocean gives him something else: silence. The kind that feels… alive and watching. As strange orbs appear on the horizon and a boy in the ship’s medical wing whispers in someone else’s voice, Garrett is drawn into a nightmare of reality that science can't explain.

The Bermuda Meridian is a psychological thriller that blends cosmic horror with intimate human dread, taking you deep into the terrifying unknown...and into the parts of ourselves we pretend don’t exist.