Haunted

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You come home on a cold and stormy night only to hear the reassuring sound of lively conversation in the next room. When you enter the room, you hear voices laughing, telling familiar jokes that make you smile. But your friends are not actually your friends. They’re co-hosts of a podcast, one that ended years ago. You left your TV on, and it’s streaming old episodes. A chill runs up your spine, as you realize you are utterly alone.

Spooky, right?¹

OK, so you can see why I’m not a horror writer. I am quite squeamish, actually — an eye-coverer at movies, someone who leaves the room to avoid the sight and sound of gore on TV. And yet, I do not like to suspend my disbelief for ghost stories or supernatural tales (unless they take place in outer space. A haunted ship? No thanks. But a haunted spaceship? Love it). 

Horror as a genre, and as a motif, is unavoidable in radio. The two have been together from the beginning, and even before that. After all, there is something baseline-creepy about listening to voices of people, distant both in time and space, that we cannot see. We tell ghost stories in the dark, and the eye-lessness of audio opens a door to the paranormal.

The medium speaks 

The intersection of creepiness and communication became much clearer when I read Jeffrey Sconce’s book Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Sconce is struck by the way new electronic technologies seem to sprout supernatural echoes almost as soon as they emerge. He starts off with the rise of Spiritualism in America in the 1840s, just a few years after the first wire-telegraph messages were sent by Samuel Morse. In 1848, the Fox Sisters of Hydesville, NY, set off a national mania for seances and communicating with spirits via a “medium” (and no, the double-meaning of that word is not lost on Sconce). The Fox Sisters became famous for interpreting mysterious rapping sounds made by ghosts in the same way telegraph operators interpreted the mysterious dots and dashes of Morse Code. 

When the Fox Sisters finally confessed they were making the noises themselves, at first by cracking knuckles in their toes and fingers, and then later via rigged tables, it didn’t make much difference. People wanted, and needed, to believe. The Foxes were left to drink themselves to death while Spiritualism raged on for decades.

Ghost broadcasting

In the 1890s, along came the first glimmerings of “wireless” technology, electromagnetic bursts that could be sent and received across unfathomable distances. The most important use of the wireless, of course, was on ships at sea, which could now send Morse Code distress calls. Yet this life-saving technology behaved in mysterious ways. Sometimes signals bounced off the atmosphere and came down on the other side of the planet (and detecting these faraway signals became a huge fad, DXing). Storms and solar flares could now be “heard” in the wild, wailing static. And some people thought they could hear the dead trying to communicate, as if they’d been out there all along, waiting for someone to listen.

Spirit frequencies

EVP, Electronic Voice Phenomena, is the creepy love-child of both Spiritualism and ghost-DXing, enabled by the rise of portable recording technology in the late 1950s. It was popularized by Latvian-Swedish psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who claimed to have recorded hundreds of thousands of hours of tape in which disembodied voices showed up and spoke gibberish-like enigmas in various languages. His work was made famous in the US in the 1970s by writer William Burroughs.

Honestly, I think the world is disturbing enough without searching the airwaves for voices of the dead. But it’s interesting that every time a new technology arises, we seem to have two reactions in quick succession: first, “Wow that is so cool!” and then, immediately after: “Actually, that is creepy and haunted AF.”

We are going through this now with artificial intelligence, which is alternately a pathetic scam and a psychosis-inducing threat to humanity. It seems basically impossible for us to just consider a new technology for what it is and what it might, or might not, be able to do. Instead we must first attach to it a boatload of mystical and menacing hoo-ha.

However, far be it from me to defy the spirit of the season. When it comes to scary stories, podcasting has enough to keep us in a general state of agitation for the rest of our lives. Below, I’m linking to some good, scary and/or uncanny listens. I know this is only scratching the surface, so if you have any suggestions to add, comments are open! (You do have to log onto the site to do that — but no password needed).

👻 CW’s Halloween listening recs 👻

I once got to work with a writer far, far better at writing spooky stuff than I will ever be: the novelist Hari Kunzru. Back in 2020, he made a wonderful, weird series with Pushkin Industries called Into the Zone. 

🎃 My first recommendation: Kunzru’s episode The Ghost in the Codec.

“When you put the needle down on a record, or press play on a sound file, you’re inviting a ghost into your room. You’re inviting a ghost into your head, into the acoustic space between your ears. I’m not speaking to you now, right here on this podcast. I’m not here at all. I’m speaking to you from the past.”

It’ll make you shiver to hear it, trust me. The episode’s even got a little audio of EVP!

Moving on, here are some OGs of ghost stories and paranormality:

🎃 Snap Judgment’s Spooked.

🎃 Mr. Ballen from Wondery.

🎃 Subscriber Dennis Funk recommends Terror on the Air, “a podcast that plays with all the conventions of old-time radio plays.”

🎃 Check out Weirdvoice: An Anthology of Haunted Stories, produced in part by this guy.

In terms of contemporary audio fiction, though, to my mind the highest standard will always be:

🎃 The Truth, which recently rose from the grave — so to speak — and always delivers idiosyncratic, usually dark stories, well-acted and evocative in ways that will linger in your mind far after they’re over.

Finally, let me put in a plug for the much older stuff, especially:

🎃 The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s production of Dracula, with Orson Welles in the title role.

The production is a cinematic, whirling adaptation Bram Stoker’s novel. As Jeff Porter puts it in his book Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling: “Dracula’s power over others, including animals, derives from the force of his voice to evoke submission. His is a voice, what’s more, that can be communicated across time and space — like a radio. It comes from a different order of being and is not of our world.”

🧛🏻‍♂️🧛🏻‍♂️🧛🏻‍♂️

 🎃 Welles was also an occasional fixture on the CBS program Suspense, where he narrated a spooky story by Lucille Fletcher called The Hitch-hiker. If you haven’t heard that one — dang, go get it! Rod Serling later adapted it for an episode of The Twilight Zone.

And do not sleep on Arch Oboler, the writer who took over one of network radio’s first late-night horror shows, Lights Out. Oboler’s stuff is stark, creepy and intense — much stranger than your average episode of Stranger Things. Guest-poster Sarah Montague recommends Oboler’s episode:

🎃 Revolt of the Worms. All I can say is, whether or not you think it’s a great idea, do not feed worms your giant-flower-growing fertilizer!

Anyway. Happy Halloween, and may you never say these words in a hypnotic trance.

1  Thanks to Brace Belden, host of the TrueAnon pod, for inspiration here. He just published an essay in The Baffler called The Hatred of Podcasting that describes the paradox of listening: “The hosts have gone home, you’re the only one in the room, and it’s a dead conversation that’s already happened.” 😱 

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