Harrowing Tales Horror Stories

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There’s a cribbage board on the shelf over her sink with a game still on it. Her best friend’s peg sits in hole one-seventeen, where it stopped in the winter of 1998.

In this original horror story, a woman looks back on one last trip with Frankie, her best friend since nursing school, who quit after a semester to become an engineer because bridges don’t throw up on you. Before Frankie left for a bridge job four time zones away, they skied six miles into the backcountry to a rented yurt, cheap that week because a big storm was coming. Frankie carried a whole roast chicken on her back, named the woodstove Gordon, and cheated at the same game of cribbage they’d been playing for nine years. A card by the door said to rake the roof whenever the snow got past two feet. Frankie, the engineer, said a round roof over a hot stove would shed on its own. And around midnight, from up on the roof, came a long scrape, then a pause.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a winter storm, two best friends, and the sounds overhead that kept them safe. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On Halloween night in 1989, a cab driver made four hundred and eleven dollars, still his record after thirty-one years behind the wheel. A hundred and fifty of it came from one man, in three different costumes, going to the same address every time.

In this original horror story, a divorced father looks back on the best night a small-town cab ever has: every lodge’s Halloween dance letting out drunk, his daughter Shay’s braces due by the fifteenth, and Bernice on the night radio calling every driver “sugar.” His dashboard holds fourteen years of things nobody came back for: a pink retainer, a rosary, one roller skate, false eyelashes glued to the speedometer. At five past nine, a monk in a brown robe climbs into the back with his hood pulled so low there’s no face, asks for the end of Ferrier Road, where the dairy has been dead since the seventies, and tips him ten dollars. Two hours later, a gorilla from a different party asks for the same address. Same dry cough. Same scuffed brown wingtips.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of Halloween night, a small-town cab, and a passenger who keeps coming back. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Every kid on Larch Street knew the rule for the empty house at the dead end: you could knock on the door on a dare, but you knocked twice and you walked away, never three times. When he asked why, the older boy next door said it like it was obvious: “Three’s for the people who live there.”

In this original horror story, a man looks back on Halloween 1978, when he was eleven and would have followed Ricky Thale, fifteen, off a roof. Ricky called him Squirt, taught him to spit and to whistle through a blade of grass, and gave him all his root beer barrels every Halloween because they tasted like a cough. That year Ricky made him an offer: knock on the house at the end of Larch Street, and he could come trick-or-treating with the big kids out past the water tower, where the new houses gave out full-size bars. The house had stood empty since 1959, every ground-floor window boarded from the inside. So at seven o’clock, in a ghost costume with eyeholes cut too far apart, he climbed onto the porch and knocked twice.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a neighborhood haunted house, a Halloween dare, and the older boy he looked up to. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

He works the overnight stock shift alone at a Halloween pop-up store in a dying mall, nine weeks a year, locked in from outside until morning. It’s ten past three, and he’s sitting on the floor in the costume aisle, being very, very quiet.

In this original horror story, a twenty-four-year-old writes from inside his shift at a seasonal Halloween store, in an empty shoe-store unit in the dead east wing of the mall. If he runs overnights clean, he gets a full-time job in January, and a full-time job comes with a dental plan. His company is Gloria, a six-foot animatronic witch who’s switched off and a great listener; his grandmother, who calls at a quarter past two to ask about the knife that cuts through a shoe; and Lonnie, the mall guard, who brings him coffee with sugar every night at two-thirty no matter how many times he’s told. He checks all eight security cameras on the hour, and every night he eats at one in the only spot none of them can see. Then the eight-foot reaper he parked by the register turns up in aisle three, facing the stockroom door.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a Halloween store after hours, a locked gate, and a security camera app that shows how many people are watching. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

At ten to midnight on Halloween 1996, five teenage girls were sitting around a talking board in her basement, and it spelled out a name. Not her name, but the childhood nickname nobody had called her since she was thirteen. She heard it with her ear pressed to the heating grate on the kitchen floor.

In this original horror story, a mother looks back on the night her thirteen-year-old daughter Kelsey had her first sleepover since Grandma moved in. Her own mother had stopped recognizing her a month after arriving. She did the crossword every morning in pen, wrong, with total confidence, and some nights she stood in her doorway asking where Birdie was. The old house had a gravity furnace whose iron floor grates carried every sound from room to room like a tin-can telephone. Kelsey’s one request was “Be normal, Mom,” so she stayed upstairs, listening through the floor. Then the girls come thundering up the stairs, laughing, to tell her what the board said next.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a Halloween sleepover, a talking board, and a family name only one person in the house should have known. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Every kid in town knew the rule on Joanie Pruitt’s grave before they knew their own phone number: on Halloween, you leave one piece of candy on her stone, because Joanie never got to finish her Halloween. Leave one, never take one.

In this original horror story, a woman looks back on October 1991, when she was fifteen and in trouble. She’d cracked her mother’s heirloom watch at the homecoming dance, the repair cost twenty dollars, and her mother’s birthday was nine days away. Then a junior with her brother’s car bet her exactly twenty dollars that she wouldn’t climb into the cemetery at midnight and take one piece of candy off Joanie’s grave. Her best friend Tasha, who could do the principal, the priest and a cat being sick, spent the whole week doing Joanie’s ghost voice: “She’s gonna want that back.” And at dusk on Halloween, they watched an old woman with a cane climb the hill and leave one homemade peppermint on top of the pile.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a small-town legend, a dare, and the one thing on the grave that was really meant for Joanie. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Every year, the week after Halloween, the local paper ran the same little item: on Mischief Night, someone had soaped a single word onto a single front window, and nobody saw who did it. The paper called it a prank. Her neighbor, who had lived on Fulton Street for fifty years, said none of them were ever random.

In this original horror story, a single mother looks back on her first fall in a narrow 1911 house she could barely afford. The radiators knocked all night, the fuse box blew whenever the dryer and the space heater ran together, and she worked nights on a hospital ward while her twelve-year-old son Petey left notes on the kitchen table (“Ate the meatloaf. All of it.”). Then, the Saturday before Halloween, she comes home to a single curved stroke of white soap on her front window, at about the height of her face. So on Mischief Night she turns off every light, pulls her chair up to the glass with a thermos and a flashlight, and waits to catch them.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of Mischief Night, an old house, and a message she read the wrong way. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The night corn maze had one rule, painted on a board at the gate: if you get lost, raise your flag and stay put, and a guide will come to you. In October 1994, a father and his eight-year-old daughter went in with flag number fourteen.

In this original horror story, a man looks back on the brave night he planned for his daughter Cass, a girl as afraid of the dark as other kids are of dogs. For her eighth birthday, she chose six acres of field corn after dark, with a flashlight, an orange flag on a pole, and a farmer’s joke about the old roped-off well out at the north end. Cass named the walls of corn (the tall ones were Big Steve), held onto his belt loop, and kept her flashlight pointed at her sneakers so nothing could jump into the light. About an hour in, they’re properly lost, so they do what the sign says. They raise the flag, and a voice in the corn calls their number.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a night corn maze, a father and daughter, and a rule that’s supposed to keep you safe. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

For forty-one Halloweens, the retired mailman across the street gave out the most famous popcorn balls on Wheeler Avenue. In 1997, from his hospital bed, he asked his neighbor for one last favor: hand out his treats, and save the single popcorn ball left on his counter for the boy in the fireman suit.

In this original horror story, a single mother looks back on the Halloween she sat on Mr. Eberly’s front step in his place. He was the man who had shoveled her walk and fixed her furnace with a coat hanger the winter her husband left, and who taught her daughter Maddie to whistle with two fingers. Every other day she let herself in with the key under the ceramic frog to water his forty pots of African violets, from underneath, the way his index card said. His voice on the phone was weak and thick, as if he were talking through a dish towel, but his instructions were clear: the popcorn ball was only for the boy in the fireman suit, and only if he asked for it by name.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of Halloween night, a kind old neighbor, and a promise kept exactly as asked. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 2003, she took a job playing a corpse in a small-town haunted house: lying under a sheet on a gurney in a room called the Morgue, Fridays and Saturdays, six to one. The girl who had the job before her lasted one weekend, then quit without picking up her last paycheck.

In this original horror story, a woman looks back on the October she was nineteen, taking two buses to community college and saving every dollar for a used green Civic. The haunted house was built inside an old feed warehouse. Her coworkers were Augie, who sang an entire French Revolution musical in order from the Meat Locker next door, and John Doe, a four-hundred-dollar prop corpse on the gurney eighteen inches from hers. The rules were simple: corpses keep their eyes closed, nobody touches anybody, and if you need help, you say “red.” Then, after the last group one Saturday night, a single set of footsteps comes into the Morgue and stops at the foot of her gurney.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a Halloween haunted attraction, the rules that keep you still, and what was lying eighteen inches away. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.