Wilhelm Presents: Frightening Tales & Other Weird Stories

📍USA

✍️ This week's tale… written by Justin Alcalá, an award-winning Mexican-American horror and dark fiction writer. Born and raised in Chicago, he now lives with Bigfoot in the mountains of North Carolina. In the past fifteen years, Justin has published four novels and over sixty short stories in American literary journals, magazines, and anthologies.

He’s won several literary awards, including the Speculative Literature Foundation Finalist Award for A Dead-End Job and Horror Writers Association Grant for The Taming of the Cthulhu. You can find Justin on Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads, TikTok and Wordpress.

If you enjoy this story, you can visit Justin’s previous Frightening Tale “How the Devil Bargains”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m8AjcHEjxA&t=12s

Find more on this author here:

https://www.justincalcala.com/

https://www.instagram.com/justin.alcala/

https://x.com/JustinAlcala 

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal. 

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!
👁 For more than 150 previous episodes, visit: ⁠frighteningtales.com⁠ 

👁 For Show Merch visit: ⁠https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca⁠ 

👁 Patreon:

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In this week's tale …

The ad said fishing equipment.

But that may have just been the bait.

3 stories written by author Gary D, from Ontario, Canada.

Edna's Dirty Little Secret

Spiders... Yes, that's right, them big, fat juicy spiders!

Punkinhead

After a lifetime in sales and marketing, Gary has travelled and lived in various places around the world, all while carrying around what he describes as a highly overactive imagination.

For decades, that imagination has been busy producing creepy, unsettling, ghostly and downright bizarre stories, both fictional and inspired by experiences from his own life.

After years of keeping those stories in a synopsis log, Gary has finally found the time to bring them to life.

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal. 

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!

👁 For more than 150 previous episodes, visit ⁠frighteningtales.com⁠ 

👁 For Show Merch visit: ⁠https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca⁠ 

👁 Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/16811384/join ⁠

📍USA

✍️ In this week's tale… They came looking for fortune. They made the mistake of thinking the dead wouldn't miss their things. 

Written by author Gaetan Battaglia. He has had one novel and ten short stories published by Pegasus Publishers, Three Ravens Publishing, Dragon Soul Press, Colp, Pesto Comics, and Red Cape Publishers. Several narrations have been adapted on YouTube by channels such as Grimms Library and DarkLittleVoices, among others. 

Writing:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Gaetan+Battaglia&i=stripbooks&crid=1C4R35KNT8J9Y&sprefix=gaetan+battaglia%2Cstripbooks%2C181

https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Gaetan+Battaglia&ref=nav_sb_noss_l_16

Spring into SciFi 2026, Volume 2: https://cloakedpress.com/sis2026/

Big Smoke Pulp, Volume 2:

https://bigsmokepulp.com/

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal. 

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!
👁 For more than 150 previous episodes, visit:

frighteningtales.com 

👁 For Show Merch, visit:

⁠https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca 

👁 Patreon:

⁠https://www.patreon.com/16811384/join

📍CAN

✍️ This week's episode marks the 150th episode. A story written by M. G. Wilhelm. Maddie had grown up hunting down geocaches with her Dad. It was their special time together. Years later, after Maddie's dad had passed, she decided to finish what she started and find the mythical Black Weaver Cache. A geocache with an ominous history.

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal. 

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!
👁 For more than 130 previous episodes, visit frighteningtales.com 

👁 For Show Merch visit: https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca 

📍Scotland

✍️ Today’s Tale… is written by JS Apsley, an author based in Glasgow, Scotland, This story was published by Underside Stories on 1 May 2025. His debut fiction submission, "Immersion", won the Ringwood Short Story Prize and was published in January 2025.

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal.

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!

👁 For Show Merch visit: https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca

📍USA.

Then an elderly patient tells her a story about a murderer, an impossible infection and an ophthalmologist who discovered something alive inside a man's optic nerve.

She should have walked away.

Instead, she looked.

And then it said, “I see you.”

✍️ Today’s Tale… MN Wiggins is an internationally published author, voice actor, surgeon, and professor from the American South. He’s either a Frightening Tales alumnus or a repeat offender, depending on your point of view, having written The Rejuvenator in Season Four

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal.

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!

👁 For Show Merch visit: https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca

Today’s Tale… is written by Gary D, and he’s located up in Ontario, Canada. 

After a lifetime spent in sales & marketing, and having sold just about everything and anything that you can imagine, he’s both travelled and lived in various locations across our planet.

And as the tread on his tires thins and he starts to apply the brakes to slow down, over the last year or so, He’s finally found the time to share some of his wildest stories. 

📍USA.

⚠️Trigger Warning: Child loss / Miscarriage. 

❤️ Special Thanks to Mia, a British voice artist, originally from the south of England, who now lives and works in Ontario, Canada. She has voiced projects for Mercedes-Benz, MARVEL, the UK’s National Health Service, easyJet, Action Against Hunger, Pfizer, and the United Nations.

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal.

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can! It does help the channel. 

For Show Merch visit: https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca

📍USA.

✍️ Today’s Tale… is written by Jeremy Barber, a weird fiction/psychological horror writer whose fiction is based in New England. His stories explore trauma, PTSD, the horror that stems from the ordinary becoming distorted. He is currently working on his first collection of interconnected horror stories.

In this tale, a New York Cop arrives on a call to something altogether unexpected.

You can find him on Bluesky at: JTBarberwrites

https://bsky.app/profile/jtbarberwrites.bsky.social

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal.

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!

For Show Merch visit: https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca

📍Canada.

✍️

Welcome, loyal listeners. I’m your host, Wilhelm, and I’m also this week’s author.

A group of wealthy young adults head out to sea for a little fun, only to discover that they’ve sailed into waters that should have been left alone. Because some curses don’t follow you. They wait for you to enter their territory. Have a listen to X Marks the Spot.

🕯️Loyal Listeners, thank you for joining me once more for a tantalizing tale of the weird and paranormal.

Like, subscribe, and share Frighteningtales wherever you can!

For Show Merch visit: https://frighteningmerch.myspreadshop.ca