Stories Fables Ghostly Tales

Stories Fables Ghostly Tales Podcast
  • 4.7 (251)
  • True Crime
  • Updated Daily

Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore — each episode pairs one real case with one myth that shares its structure. Sada Abe and the jorōgumo. The Saitama kennel murders and the inugami. Inokashira Park and the noppera-bō. Plus more than 900 episodes of horror in the archive: creepypasta, NoSleep, Let's Not Meet, Old Time Radio, Project Gutenberg and original audio drama. No adverts, ever. New episodes weekly. There's a story here for everyone. I'm the Tale Teller. Stay curious. Stay a little scared.

  1. 6d ago

    The Black Death Was An Old Woman

    Night three of Mørketid is out. Norway.She Carries a Rake...A craft decision I want to explain... The draug should have been the finale. He's the better monster by any obvious measure — a drowned fisherman in oilskins with a mass of seaweed where his head should be, sailing half a boat against the wind, screaming out on the water where there is nobody. That's a closing image. I put him second, and gave the ending to an old woman walking up a path. Here's why. Everything in these four episodes has a countermeasure. Say the Näkki's name. Turn your coat inside out. Be polite to the Huldra and keep your luck. Stay off the water. Every horror in this series comes with something small and stubborn you can do about it — that's the whole argument the finale makes. Pesta has nothing. She isn't cruel and she isn't kind and she cannot be bargained with and nothing you did brought her. In 1349 the plague came into Bergen on a ship and Norway lost somewhere between half and two thirds of its people in about eighteen months, and because Norway is a country of valleys reachable by one path each, it didn't sweep. It walked. At the speed of a person, because it was carried by people. So you knew it was coming. You'd had word. It had been three valleys over, and then two, and then the next one. And what they made out of that is the most efficient piece of horror I've ever come across. She carries either a rake or a broom. A rake has gaps — things slip between the tines, and some of you live. A broom has none. And you can see her on the path, a long way down, for about an hour. And the only thing you are doing for that entire hour is trying to work out what's in her hand. If you want to go deeper... Theodor Kittelsen painted Pesta over and over in the 1890s and those images are what most Norwegians still picture. Worth looking up before you listen. It's the flatness of her face that does it — she isn't malicious. She's just arriving. Next Episode... Sweden. And that one was the hardest of the four to write, so fair warning. The candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

    The Black Death Was An Old Woman

  2. Sep 5

    The Finnish Forest Hides People

    NIGHT TWO — FINLANDNight two: Finland has a word for a person who isn't lost, isn't taken, and cannot be found — while standing right in front of you.Night two of Mørketid is out. Finland. Metsänpeitto It translates as "the forest cover," and it describes something Finns believed happened often enough that the language needed a word for it. A person walks into the forest they've known their whole life. They don't come back. The village searches properly — small community, everyone knows the ground, they go out in a line and call. And the belief isn't that the person wandered off. The belief is that they are still there. Six feet away. Possibly standing directly in front of the search line. And the forest has put something over them. Here's the part I had to stop reading and walk away from: in the collected accounts, from people who said it had happened to them, the person under the cover is awake the whole time. They can hear the search party. Some of them describe watching people walk past. They can't be seen, can't be heard, and can't make their legs carry them toward the voices. No creature. Nobody arrives. Nothing hurts you. You are simply removed from the category of things that can be found. And then there's the cure.... Turn your coat inside out. Put your shirt on backwards. Take your shoes off and swap them onto the wrong feet. That's it. That was the remedy, believed all across Finland and into Karelia and Estonia. And it makes an awful sense — if the forest has taken the shape of you and put a lid over it, stop being that shape. But picture actually doing it. A grown adult in failing light who has been shouting for three hours and has stopped shouting, sitting down on the pine needles and very carefully swapping their shoes over, because it is the only thing left in the world that they can try. That's the cover art for this episode, by the way. Just the boots. The other half... The Lemminkäinen section is the saddest thing I've written for this show. His mother rakes the black river of the underworld until she has all eight pieces of him, sews him back together, wakes him — and he stretches and says he's been asleep a long time and slept well. He never knew. She never told him. Next Episode... Norway. An old woman walking up a valley path carrying either a rake or a broom, and everything depends on which. The candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

    The Finnish Forest Hides People

  3. Aug 29

    Denmark's Sleep Paralysis Demon

    Four nights of Nordic folklore. Night one: Denmark buried things alive under its churches — and some of them are still working.Something different for the next four weeks. No true crime at all. Mørketid — Four Nights North is a mini-series: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, one night each, pure folklore. Night one is out now. The bit that stopped me while I was writing it...The kirkegrim isn't a legend in the way the others are. It's a practice. When a new churchyard was consecrated, the belief was that the first body buried there had to stand guard over the ground forever — so rather than doom a person to that, they buried an animal alive instead. Usually a lamb. That happened. Across Denmark, across Sweden, across England, for centuries. There are churches standing today where the bones are still down there. I wrote that section three times because I kept making it too gothic. It works better plain — a man in a wool coat, on a cold morning, holding a lamb that isn't frightened because lambs aren't frightened of people. That's the version that's in the episode. A note on the format...These aren't candles. The hundred-candle game is specifically Japanese, and burning four of the hundred on Nordic material would break that whole arc. So Mørketid gets its own frame, and it's the exact inverse: in Japan you blow candles out until the dark arrives. Up north the dark is already there — you light one and count nights until the sun comes back. Four nights, then we go back to Japan. Next Weekend...Finland. And Finland is the worst of the four. There's a word up there for what happens when the forest doesn't take you anywhere, doesn't hurt you, and simply stops letting you be found — while you stand in it, awake, listening to the search party call your name. The candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

    Denmark's Sleep Paralysis Demon

  4. Aug 22

    The Kobe Cannibal Got A Food Column

    Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore, one candle at a time. In June 1981, a Japanese literature student in Paris asked a Dutch classmate to come to his apartment and help him with his German pronunciation. Renée Hartevelt was twenty-five. She said yes because she was the kind of person who noticed when somebody was sitting on their own. Issei Sagawa confessed within days. He was never convicted, never imprisoned, and never spent a single night in a cell. He spent the next thirty-six years being interviewed, published, booked and paid — and at one point, employed as a restaurant critic. This episode pairs his case with the jikininki: the Buddhist hungry ghost, cursed to devour the dead every night through a throat too narrow to swallow anything at all. A creature no court can touch, no prison can hold, and no executioner can reach — one that ends only when somebody finally decides to stop feeding it. Two stories about an appetite that was never the crime. It was the sentence. ⸻ Contains: graphic violence, cannibalism, sexual violence (referenced, not depicted), and detailed discussion of a real victim. Listener discretion advised. Chapters 00:00 The Lighting 02:40 The Priest at the Hermitage 15:30 Renée 20:40 The Woman in the Ground-Floor Apartment 27:30 The Eleventh of June 36:00 The Hole in the Law 40:00 The Godfather 43:30 The Rite 50:00 The Ones Who Keep The Candles Lit ⸻ There is an old Japanese game. A hundred candles are lit in a windowless room. Every story told puts one out. Nobody agrees on what arrives when the last one dies — only that you should not be there to see it. This is Candle 001. Ninety-nine to go...

    The Kobe Cannibal Got A Food Column

  5. Aug 9

    Three Waters, Dark Tides: Two Myths, One Truth (Ep01)

    What happens when folklore becomes too terrible to be fiction? Can you listen past the performance and find the true forensic history? Welcome back to Stories Fables Ghostly Tales. In tonight’s interactive special, the Tale Teller presents an impossible challenge: "Three Waters, Dark Tides: Two Myths, One Truth." We have gathered three haunting accounts of Japan's relationship with the dark, cold element of water. One is a factual, historical tragedy; the other two are timeless legends. Your mission is to determine which of these deep, dark tides actually swept across our reality. Do not let the mythology fool you. Lock in your guess internally. Story 1: The Riverman’s Debt. We travel to the muddy riverbanks of the Edo period to meet the Kappa, the bizarre, polite river imp possessing a lethal obsession with the human shiridama. Story 2: The Bailing Phantoms. We step onto a 1930s fishing trawler in the open ocean to face the Funayūrei, ghost ships manned by the victims of maritime tragedy, draped in white funeral shrouds, demanding empty dippers to flood passing vessels. Story 3: The Saint of Shinjuku. We travel to the crumbling ruins of post-war Tokyo to confront the terrifying modern legend of the sanatorium run by "Sensei," also known as "The Saint," who was whispered to perform a chilling "mercy ritual" in the nursery known as "Cold Storage." Keep your tea hot, keep your porch lights burning against the rising fog, and remember... sometimes the Saint is just a monster with a good alibi. Until next time... pleasant dreams... if you can sleep at all. Did you guess the story...correctly? I am your Tale Teller... Have a wonderful night... 💜💜💜

    Three Waters, Dark Tides: Two Myths, One Truth (Ep01)

  6. Aug 2

    The Quiet Boy Who Terrified a Nation: Japan's Darkest Mystery & The Satori

    Turn the lights down low... It is time for Tall Tales and True Crime... In this episode of Stories Fables Ghostly Tales, we explore one of the most widely discussed and psychologically complex cases in modern Japan: The 1997 Kobe Case, historically known across the nation as the Sakakibara Investigation. In the spring of 1997, the peaceful neighbourhood of Suma Ward in Kobe, Japan was gripped by sudden fear following a series of alarming suburban incidents. For three long months, an entire community lived in heightened state of caution while detectives worked tirelessly to track down a phantom subject who communicated through cryptic notes sent to local newspapers. When law enforcement finally identified the individual responsible, the revelations reshaped Japan's legal framework and societal views on youth mental health forever. In the second half, we step away from modern investigative archives and journey into the deep mountain forests of ancient Japan to explore the legend of the Satori —a famous Yōkai from Edo-period folklore known for its uncanny ability to read human thoughts in real time and unmask hidden intentions. We weave these two worlds together, contrasting the mind-reading spirit of mythology against the real-world psychological mystery of silent warnings and unexamined shadows. Turn down the lights... Lock your doors... Stay Safe... Thank you for listening! 💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨

    The Quiet Boy Who Terrified a Nation: Japan's Darkest Mystery & The Satori

  7. Jul 26

    27 Pieces: The Unsolved Horror of Inokashira Park - True Crime Japan

    On the morning of April 23, 1994, a park cleaner in Inokashira Park opened a utility trash container expecting ordinary market waste, only to find a severed human foot inside a translucent blue plastic bag. Within hours, police recovered twenty-seven separate body parts distributed across twenty-seven public trash bins—each piece meticulously cut to an exact length of twenty centimetres, drained completely of blood, and scrubbed clean. Despite deploying over 110,000 police officers, investigating countless leads, and uncovering forensic perfection that defied normal criminal behaviour, two-thirds of the victim's body—including his head and internal organs—were never found. The case eventually hit the statute of limitations, leaving investigators staring into an absolute void. In this episode, we explore the chilling Inokashira Park dismemberment and pair it with the ancient Japanese myth of the Noppera-bō (The Faceless Phantom)—examining how a human predator wiped away a man's face, identity, and record from history, leaving behind a blank, featureless slate. Unique Facts About This Case The killer cut every single body part to an exact length of 20 centimeters specifically because that was the precise width of the trash can slots in the park. The remains were so thoroughly drained of blood and treated that investigators found no bloodstains inside the plastic bags or the bins where they were left. To this day, two-thirds of the victim's body—including his face, skull, and internal organs—have never been recovered. Thank you for listening legends... Stay curious... Stay a little scared... And whatever you do... if you pass a stranger in the dark tonight... don't look too closely at their face. Have a great week ahead legends! 💀

    27 Pieces: The Unsolved Horror of Inokashira Park - True Crime Japan

  8. Jul 19

    Japanese Kennel Killers - Turning Their Enemies to Dust (1993)

    ⚠ CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains extensive, highly detailed accounts of real-world serial murder, financial exploitation, the complete thermal destruction of human remains, and themes of animal cruelty. Listener discretion is absolutely mandatory. Welcome back to Stories Fables Ghostly Tales. Tonight, we present The Art of Transparency: The Saitama Dog Lover Murders — Japan, 1993. Deep within the mountain passes of Saitama Prefecture, a remote wooden hut once hid a factory of absolute non-existence. We pull back the friendly, commercial facade of a luxury pet breeding kennel to dissect a terrifying pattern of cold-blooded, economically driven slaughter. 🎧 The Case: Making Men InvisibleIn 1993, the charismatic operator of the Africa Kennel, Gen Sekine and his cold, analytical partner, Hiroko Kazama , found themselves drowning in millions of yen of bubble-era debt. Their solution was chillingly simple: make their creditors and business rivals completely "transparent." Utilizing a lethal veterinary compound mixed into polite health tonics, they killed their victims in minutes, dismembered the remains, incinerated the tissue to powder, and hammered the bones to dust before casting them into mountain rivers. They believed that without a body, there was no crime—until forensic teams literally began sifting the riverbeds for tooth shards. 🐕 The Myth: The Volatile Fury of the HoundThe cold, predatory architecture of this modern kennel crime perfectly mirrors a forbidden, ancient folk sorcery from Japan's rural past: the invocation of the Inugami . Born from an act of unspeakable human cruelty—starving a hound and severing its head at the absolute peak of its fury—this invisible dog-spirit was bound to households to destroy competitors and generate immense, illicit wealth. But the folklore carries a terrifying trap. The Inugami obeys only out of constraint, and if the master's willpower slips or their greed becomes too bloated, the curse turns entirely inward, consuming the family until they descend into madness. Did Gen Sekine truly master the art of non-existence, or did the ancient malice of the kennel jar simply turn around to bite back? Hit play, sit back, and get comfortable. And remember... if you see a ripple of heat moving through a freezing fog... don't assume you're walking alone. Stay curious. Stay a little scared. Goodnight. 💀

    Japanese Kennel Killers - Turning Their Enemies to Dust (1993)
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About

Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore — each episode pairs one real case with one myth that shares its structure. Sada Abe and the jorōgumo. The Saitama kennel murders and the inugami. Inokashira Park and the noppera-bō. Plus more than 900 episodes of horror in the archive: creepypasta, NoSleep, Let's Not Meet, Old Time Radio, Project Gutenberg and original audio drama. No adverts, ever. New episodes weekly. There's a story here for everyone. I'm the Tale Teller. Stay curious. Stay a little scared.

Information

  • Creator
    Stories Fables Ghostly Tales Podcast
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    991
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026
  • Show Website
    Stories Fables Ghostly Tales

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