FRIGHTLY! Scary Stories and Tales of Terror

A beautiful woman married for love, and the love turned to dust. The family lives in style, always a little past its means, and the house has started to whisper. Her small son hears it. He would like very much to be lucky. D. H. Lawrence wrote this for a book of ghost stories in 1926, and it remains one of the most unsettling things he ever put on paper.

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Below Vienna, the Danube floods out into a wilderness of sandbars and willow scrub that the maps mark only as marshes. Two old friends, an Englishman and a Swede, beach their canoe on a small island to wait out a gale. The wind won’t drop. The willows won’t keep still. By morning, one of them has stopped making jokes.

H. P. Lovecraft ranked Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 novella above every other supernatural tale in English.

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Below Vienna, the Danube floods out into a wilderness of sandbars and willow scrub that the maps mark only as marshes. Two old friends, an Englishman and a Swede, beach their canoe on a small island to wait out a gale. The wind won’t drop. The willows won’t keep still. By morning, one of them has stopped making jokes.

H. P. Lovecraft ranked Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 novella above every other supernatural tale in English.

For more short fiction podcasts, please visit shortstoryverses.com.

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A blizzard on the river. A ferryman’s empty hut. An old woodcutter and his young apprentice bar the door and wait for morning. Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of a Japanese legend, from Kwaidan (1904), is a quiet ghost story with a long, cold reach.

From Short Storyverses, where there’s always another story waiting at shortstoryverses.com.

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It starts on a Tuesday in October, at ten minutes to three in the morning. A low tone with no seam in it.

Hollis Pike's neighbors can't hear it. His phone can't record it. The audiologist says his hearing is fine, better than fine, and writes something down.

So he goes looking for where it comes from. The county keeps records. The house has a history. The sound is patient.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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John is a physician, and he has a plan for his wife. Rest. Fresh air. No visitors who might excite her. Absolutely no writing.

He's rented a colonial mansion for the summer and given her the big room at the top, the old nursery, with barred windows and a bed that won't move. She keeps a journal anyway, tucked out of sight whenever he comes up the stairs. In it she writes about the house, the garden, the baby, her husband's kindness.

Mostly she writes about the wallpaper.

Published in 1892 and still unsettling. Read by Don McDonald

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He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.

Now the seatbelt sign is on, the descent has started, and his brother is running out of days. In his jacket pocket is a voicemail he has never played.

There's a rule pilots follow below ten thousand feet. Nothing gets said that doesn't need saying. He always thought that sounded like a good way to live.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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As a boy he was teased for his tenderness. He kept birds, rabbits, a dog, a small monkey. And a cat, enormous and entirely black, who followed him from room to room and would have followed him into the street. Now he sits in a cell with a pen, determined to set the record down plainly. He is not mad, he tells us. He is not dreaming. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale.

WARNING: Contains graphic animal and human violence.

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This show is one corner of Short Storyverses, a family of fiction podcasts. Some lean literary. Some are funny. Some will keep you up with the lights on, and some belong by the fire in December. There are classics nobody reads anymore and should, and original stories you won't hear anywhere else. They're all read by Don McDonald from his studio booth, and all short enough to finish on a drive, a walk, or a sleepless night.

Come explore at shortstoryverses.com. Pick a universe. Stay a while.

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Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's been measuring the right thing all along.

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Everyone in town has a story about Luella Miller. She never seems to lift a hand, yet somehow, help is always at her side. And those who give it—well, they never quite look the same afterward. Some tales of horror are loud and bloody. This one is quiet, gentle… and suffocating. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman spins a ghostly puzzle where the most dangerous thing may be a smile too sweet to resist.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman wasn’t known for monsters or gore. She wrote about the quiet corners of New England life—where duty, repression, and superstition sat heavy in the air. But every so often, she let the shadows slip through. “Luella Miller” is one of those rare stories, proof that horror doesn’t always need screams… sometimes it only takes a fragile smile.

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There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.

For two years she was her mother’s caregiver. Now she is her mother’s administrator. She makes lists. She keeps folders. She is very good at this.

Then she reaches the bottom of the last statement.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

Explore our multiverses of short fiction at shortstoryverses.com.

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Ed Loyce spends his days fixing radios and televisions in a small town where nothing much happens. One evening he climbs out of his basement workroom, walks into the square, and sees something no decent town would put up with.

Then he notices how everyone else is taking it.

Philip K. Dick wrote "The Hanging Stranger" in 1953, a year when plenty of Americans had started keeping an eye on their neighbors. Seventy years on, it still makes you check who's standing behind you.

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and spent most of his life in California, writing fast, living broke, and asking one question in more than forty novels and over a hundred short stories: what's real? He won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle in 1963, yet for most of his life he was paid like a pulp writer and read like a cult figure. He died in March 1982, a few months before Blade Runner, adapted from his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reached theaters. After that the rest of the world caught up. Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle all came from his pages. The paranoia turned out to be prophecy.

FRIGHTLY! is part of Short Storyverses. If you want more stories like this one, and plenty that are nothing like it, they're all waiting for you at shortstoryverses.com. Go have a look around. Just don't stand under any lampposts on the way there.

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Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.

He carries it home and records his diary each night, and the machine hands him back to himself, the nearest thing to company he has. Then the wax starts holding something he never put there.

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There’s a reason crows gather in cemeteries. They remember. They watch. And sometimes, they wait. Murder of Crows isn’t a tale borrowed from the past—it’s one I wrote for New Tales Told, a series of original stories that echo in the spaces between memory and myth. This one lingers in the cold silence of the American frontier, where the shadows are long and the watchers have wings.

Set in Montana Territory, 1868, Murder of Crows is a western—but not the kind you remember from Saturday matinees. The dead don’t rest. The land doesn’t forget. And the crows? They remember everything.

Author's Note

There’s an old belief that crows remember faces. That they mourn their dead. That they never forget a slight.

It was early morning when a murder of crows descended on the sycamore outside my bedroom window, their cries so sharp and relentless they pulled me from sleep with a strange sense of dread. I lay there, half-conscious and irritated, staring at the ceiling as their screams echoed through the glass. And in that moment—quietly, almost reflexively—I had a thought I wasn’t proud of: Maybe this murder deserves one of its own.

From that flash of anger came something unexpected: a story. Murder of Crows began as a whisper of guilt and folklore. Though it draws faint inspiration from the life and legend of Jeremiah Johnson, this tale is entirely imagined—fiction through and through. But like many stories, its roots are tangled in real emotion: grief, memory, regret… and the uncanny way the natural world sometimes stares back.

As for the birds? They haven’t left.

They’re still watching.

Just outside my window.

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In 1830, a few miles from what would one day become Cincinnati, the forest still ran unbroken. A man named Murlock lived alone at the edge of it, in a log house with one door and one window. The window was boarded shut. Nobody living could remember it any other way. He looked seventy and was closer to fifty, and whatever had done that to him was not the work of years.

Ambrose Bierce tells it the way frontier stories actually traveled, thirdhand, handed down from a grandfather who knew the man. It is very short, and it is very quiet, right up until it isn't. When you find out why the boards went up, you will not be able to unknow it.

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Fear Deserves Better Storytelling

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Jasper Holt counts other people's money at the Lumber National Bank, and he is very good at it. Out in Rosebank, at the end of a brick path a block long and roofed over with willows, his brother John lives alone, shabby, devout, and nearly invisible. The brothers are not much alike. Sinclair Lewis builds this one patiently, a small arrangement at a time, and then lets the willows lose their leaves.

Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a small town he spent the rest of his life dissecting. He worked his way through Yale, then through the magazine trade, turning out stories for the Saturday Evening Post and others while he learned how to aim. "The Willow Walk" comes from that stretch, 1918, and was picked up that same year for The Best American Short Stories. The novels followed fast, Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, each one taking a layer off American respectability. In 1930 he became the first American awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Rome in 1951.

If this one held you, there's a shelf of them waiting at shortstoryverses.com. Litreading is where the classics live, Chekhov, Faulkner, Chopin, Mansfield, read the way they were meant to be heard. New Tales Told carries original fiction you won't find anywhere else. FRIGHTLY handles the dark. HumorUs takes on the funny. Love Lit, Season's Readings, and Readastorus round it out, the last one built for kids and always free of commercials. All of it narrated in one studio by one voice, all of it free. Come find your next story at .

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August 20th, 1910. The worst heat in living memory, the kind that flattens a city and slows the blood.

An artist named James Clarence Withencroft spends the morning drawing a man in the dock, caught at the instant sentence is passed on him. Then he walks out into the glare, wanders without direction, and finds himself in a stonemason's yard, where the man from his drawing sits carving a headstone. Neither has ever laid eyes on the other. The name cut into the stone is Withencroft's own, and so is the date.

They agree the safest thing is to sit together until midnight passes.

W.F. Harvey wrote this in 1910, six pages that have refused to loosen their grip in the century since

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There are things we expect from the world.

Walls stay still. Rooms hold their shape. The spaces we live in behave.

And when they don’t, we look for explanations.

Old houses settle. Pipes shift. Light plays tricks.

But sometimes the world doesn’t explain itself.

When an answer can’t be seen, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

There is something.

Something all too real.

Something beyond frightening.

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There is a special horror in hearing a mind unravel from the inside. In The Diary of a Madman, Guy de Maupassant pulls us into the private writings of a man who can no longer trust his own thoughts. His diary entries begin quietly enough—simple observations, small disturbances—until each page edges closer to something darker, something unmoored, something deeply and intimately wrong.

This is the slow, suffocating terror of a mind turning against itself.

Guy de Maupassant, one of France’s great masters of psychological horror, wrote with an uncanny instinct for the fractures that hide beneath ordinary life. His stories rarely rely on monsters or myth—only on the terrible things people can do, think, or become.

If you enjoyed this tale, explore more shadows and unsettling corners in the Short Storyverses collection at shortstoryverses.com.

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