Let's Talk Spooky

Shauna Taylor
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Obsessed with ghost stories, eerie folklore, and real-life paranormal encounters? Join us each week as we uncover chilling legends, haunted histories, and spine-tingling mysteries. From ancient curses to modern hauntings and reincarnation, this podcast is your gateway to the dark and unexplained. If you crave supernatural stories and strange tales that stay with you... press play and Let’s Talk Spooky!

  1. 2D AGO

    49: Folklore's Most Dangerous Women

    Send us Fan Mail Episode Description A campfire walk through some of the most feared women in world folklore, from a four-hundred-year-old spider waiting in a Japanese mountain house, to a wailing figure outside an Irish window at midnight. We travel through Slavic rivers and summer wheat fields, down dark roads in South Asia, into Colombian mangroves and the deep Brazilian Amazon, and onto the forest trails of Indigenous North America. What you start to notice, when you put these women side by side, is that almost every one of them was wronged first. Mothers who lost children. Brides who were murdered. Women buried wrong. They came back anyway. They came back hungry. And every culture on earth seems to have remembered them, independently, in its own language, in its own forest, on its own river, at its own time of day. Light a candle. Lock the door. Don’t answer if someone calls your name from past the streetlights. Sources meterial • Lady Anne Fanshawe, Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (composed 1676, first published 1829). The earliest detailed first-person Banshee account in print. • Karel Jaromír Erben, Polednice (“The Noon Witch”), 1853. Czech folklore ballad foundational to Polednice in modern memory. • Edo-period ynkai collections, including the Taihei Hyaku Monogatari and the Tonoigusa, for Jorngumo in her earliest written form. • W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). Foundational survey of Irish supernatural tradition, including Banshee accounts. • Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887). Nineteenth-century compilation of Irish folklore. • Lady Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920). Documented Banshee sightings from West Ireland oral tradition. • Tupi-Guarani oral tradition, recorded by sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Brazil, for the earliest written references to Caipora. • Slavic folklore scholarship on the Rusalka and Polednice traditions, including ethnographic work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across Russia, Ukraine, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. • Indigenous storytellers, writers, and scholars for the deeper teachings of Deer Woman. See contemporary Indigenous-led folklore podcasts, anthologies, and community-published resources. Content Note This episode discusses themes of murder, death in childbirth, violence against women and children, drowning, and historical injustice. It is intended for adult listeners. Stay Curious. Stay Spooky.

    37 min
  2. 03: REMASTERED: Ghostly Exposure: Postmortem & Spirit Photography

    5D AGO

    03: REMASTERED: Ghostly Exposure: Postmortem & Spirit Photography

    Send us Fan Mail A grieving widow develops a roll of film and finds her dead mother in the back seat. A WWI airman steps into a squadron portrait two days after his funeral. A Boston photographer swears he can capture the dead — and P. T. Barnum takes the stand to prove him wrong. Tonight, the photographs that came back heavier than they went in.  Before the smartphone, before the camera roll — before there was a way to carry your dead in your pocket — people wanted to keep the faces of the ones they loved. Some of them tried very hard. Some of them, it seems, succeeded a little too well. In this remastered episode, we’re climbing back into the strange, tender, deeply uncanny history of postmortem and spirit photography — from Victorian iron posing stands and painted-on eyes, to William Mumler’s scandalous Boston studio, to the back seat of a quiet Ipswich car on a Tuesday afternoon in 1959. Featuring the Mabel Chinnery photograph, the ghost of Freddy Jackson, the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, the haunted faces in the wake of the S.S. Watertown, Mary Todd Lincoln’s most famous portrait, and three modern firsthand-style accounts that have been quietly circulating online — the kind of photograph you delete six times, and it keeps coming back. Postmortem Photography & Victorian Death Culture • Stanley, Liz, and Sue Wise. “The Domestication of Death: The Sequestration Thesis and Domestic Figuration.” Sociology, vol. 45, no. 6, 2011, pp. 947–62. JSTOR. (jstor.org/stable/42857592) • Slate Magazine: “The Eerie History of Spirit Photography and Child Mortality in the 19th Century.” October 2017. (slate.com/human-interest/2017/10/spirit-photography-and-child-mortality-in-the-19th-century.html) • Victorian Visual Culture blog: “Photos of the Dead.” December 2020. (victorianvisualculture.blog/2020/12/14/photos-of-the-dead/) William Mumler & Spirit Photography • Cao, Maggie M. “Spirit Photographs and the Civil War.” American Art, vol. 31, no. 2. • Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. • Court records of The People v. William H. Mumler, New York, 1869. Freddy Jackson • Goddard, Sir Victor. Flight Towards Reality. London: Turnstone Books, 1975. • The Black Vault Case Files: “The Ghost of Freddy Jackson.” (theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-ghost-of-freddy-jackson/) Mabel Chinnery • Sunday Pictorial, April 19, 1959 — original publication and expert analysis. • Anomalies database (Garth Haslam): “1959, March 22 — Mabel Chinnery’s Strange Photograph.” (anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1959-mabel-chinnerys-strange-photograph) The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall • Country Life magazine, December 1936 — original publication of the photograph by Captain Hubert Provand and Indre Shira. • BBC News: coverage of Raynham Hall and the Brown Lady. (bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581) S.S. Watertown • Service News, Cities Service Company company newsletter, 1924–1925 — primary publication of the photographs and crew accounts. • Hervey, Hal. “Ghosts of the Watertown.” True Strange Stories, 1929. • Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Ynkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press, 2015 — for context on shinrei shashin in Japanese popular tradition. • Behrend, Heike, et al., eds. Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies. Campus Verlag, 2015 — for a broader cross-cultural context on photography and the spirit world. • Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast • Email: letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com • Subscribe/follow wherever you listen, and please leave a review — it helps more spooky souls find the firelight.

    41 min

  3. MAY 15

    48: Changelings

    Send us Fan Mail On Christmas Eve in 1689, a Swedish farmer and his wife carried their ten-year-old son to the manure heap at the edge of their farm and left him there overnight to freeze. They believed, sincerely and devoutly, that he was a changeling — and that the elves would come in the night and return their real son by morning. He was not the first child this happened to. He would not be the last. This week, host Shauna takes you deep into the changeling tradition — into where the lore came from, what our ancestors believed a changeling was, and the documented historical record of what they did to the children they were certain were not their own. From a courtroom in Tralee in 1826 to a Lutheran pulpit in Wittenberg in 1532 to present-day West Africa, this episode walks through five hundred years of folk diagnosis, folk cure, and the children who paid the price. Sources & Further Reading • The Gotland Trial Records, 1690 — bound in the Swedish dombok (court book), held in the Swedish National Archives, Stockholm. Studied in detail by Ilmar Arens and Bengt af Klintberg in Rig: Kulturhistorisk Tidskrift, 1979. • Martin Luther, Tischreden (Table-Talk), volume 5 — first printed 1566; standard scholarly edition in the Weimar edition of Luther's collected works (Weimarer Ausgabe). • Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, c. 1200 — British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian DX. • Tralee Assizes Trial Records, July 1826 — the case of Ann Roche; contemporary court reports and transcripts, excerpted in 19th-century Irish folklore writings. • John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 1860–1862, four volumes — The Smith and the Fairies is in volume 2. Public domain; available free at archive.org and on Project Gutenberg.

    32 min

  4. MAY 8

    47: The Fair Folk

    Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary On the night of March fifteenth, eighteen ninety-five, eight people in a small Irish kitchen watched a man named Michael Cleary set his wife on fire. Not one of them tried to stop him. They all believed the same thing he did: the woman on the bed wasn't his wife anymore. The fairies had taken her. In this episode, we use the death of Bridget Cleary as a doorway into something much larger. We trace fairy belief across five cultures and two centuries —through documented court cases, ethnographic records, modern road bends, and a billionaire's fall — to ask the splinter-under-the-skin question: why does almost every culture on Earth, independently, agree that there are beings just adjacent to us, and That there are rules? This is fairy folklore as our great-great-grandparents understood it. Not the wings and wishing dust of the Disney version. Something older. Something stranger.Something a man would burn his wife alive over, with eight witnesses who agreed he was doing the right thing. Sources & Further Reading On Bridget Cleary and Irish changeling cases: • Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999)— the definitive scholarly account. • Joan Hoff & Marian Yeates, The Cooper's Wife is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary (2000). • Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies andVictorian Consciousness (1999) — for documented Welsh and Irish changeling cases. On Welsh and broader Celtic fairy belief: • Elias Owen, Welsh Folk-Lore (1896) — first-hand 19th-century ethnography. • Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (1976) —the standard reference. • W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911). On Icelandic Huldufólk: • AP and BBC reporting on the Álftanes case (2013–2015). Let's Talk Spooky · The Fair Folk · Show Notes 4 • Terry Gunnell, University of Iceland — academic work on Icelandic folk belief. On Filipino engkanto belief: • Francisco R. Demetrio, S.J., "The Engkanto Belief: An Essay in Interpretation" (1969). • Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971). On the Sean Quinn / Aughrim Wedge Tomb story: • Irish Independent, "Sean Quinn's downfall is fairies' revenge say locals in Cavan" (2011). • RTÉ, biography excerpt of Sean Quinn (2022). Connect with the Show letstalkspooky.com For listener stories, episode requests, and feedback: visit the website's contact page. If this episode moved you, the kindest thing you can do is share it with one person who likes this kind of story, and leave a rating wherever you listen. It helps more than you'd think.

    38 min

  5. MAY 3

    02: REMASTERED- Secondhand Spirits: The Haunted Things We Bring Home

    Send us Fan Mail This is a remastered episode — new research, new stories, new folklore. Worth a re-listen. We pull on a blue silk dress in 1884 Boston and follow the thread back through the strange, unsettling history of secondhand things. From the rag pickers of Victorian London to the smallpox-laced wardrobes of the dead, from The Hands Resist Him to the Crying Boy paintings that wouldn’t burn, from a haunted wine cabinet in Oregon to a green velvet chair no one should have brought home — tonight we’re asking the question every thrifter eventually whispers to themselves: what lived in this thing before I did? Sources Thrifting & Victorian secondhand: Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life (2005); Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851); Le Zotte, “The Surprisingly Sanitized History of the Thrift Store,” Time (2017). Mourning culture: Lutz, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2015). Folklore traditions: Foster, The Book of Yokai (UC Press, 2015); Nigal, Dybbuk Tales in Jewish Literature. Hands Resist Him: Bill Stoneham’s artist statements (billstoneham.com); Snopes, “eBay Haunted Painting.” Crying Boy: The Sun, “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy” (Sept 4, 1985); David Clarke, Fortean Times investigation. Dybbuk Box: Mannis’s original 2003 eBay listing; Haxton, The Dibbuk Box (Truman State Press, 2011); LA Times coverage (July 2004). Listener folklore: r/ThriftStoreHauls Reddit thread. Connect with the Show Got your own haunted thrift story? I want to hear it. Email: letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com TikTok: @letstalkspookypod Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast Stay Curious. Stay Spooky. Written, researched, and produced by Shauna.

    34 min

  6. MAY 1

    46: Canada's Most Haunted Locations: Carleton Jail Hostel

    Send us Fan Mail Inside one of the most haunted buildings in Canada — the Ottawa Jail Hostel, formerly the Carleton County Jail at 75 Nicholas Street, Ottawa, Ontario. From 1862 to 1972, this limestone prison housed up to 150 inmates in cells barely three feet wide, with no heat, no plumbing, and no light. Three men were hanged on its still-standing gallows: Patrick James Whelan in 1869 for the assassination of the Father of Confederation, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, William "Billy" Seabrooke in 1933, and Eugène Larment in 1946 — the last public hanging and the last execution in Ottawa's history. Roughly 140 unmarked graves were uncovered beneath the site's parking lot. Today, paying guests sleep in converted death-row cells. Visitors and staff report a dark figure at the foot of the bed, the Lord's Prayer whispered in empty corridors, sudden nosebleeds near Whelan's unmarked grave, sleep paralysis in the old Warden's office, and the unmistakable sense of being watched on the eighth floor. We walk the building room by room — the basement "Hole," the women's wing, death row, the gallows, and the courtyard — and ask the harder question this place keeps raising: what does it mean to turn a site of real human suffering into somewhere you pay to spend the night? Visit the Carleton County Jail & Ottawa Tours If this episode pulled you in, the building itself is open to visitors. For guided historical and ghost tours of the Ottawa Jail and surrounding heritage sites, we recommend reaching out to our friend at Ottawa Tours by TAF — local, knowledgeable, and passionate about the haunted history of the capital. OTTAWA TOURS BY TAF Carleton County Jail & Ottawa Heritage Tours Website: ottawatoursbytaf.ca Connect With the Show Subscribe, share, and tell a friend who loves haunted history. Every listen helps us find the next story. Folklore · Haunted History · Urban Legends Website: www.letstalkspooky.ca Sources • Historical Society of Ottawa & Today in Ottawa's History • The Globe (1869), Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette (1933) — archival coverage • The Canadian Encyclopedia & Dictionary of Canadian Biography — Whelan / McGee • Lorna Poplak, Drop Dead (Dundurn, 2017) • Heritage Ottawa & Ottawa Police Service historical archive • Globe and Mail (Roy MacGregor, 2015); Canadian Geographic (Robin Esrock, 2024) • Hostelworld — Jeff Delgado interview; Haunted Walk of Ottawa

    44 min

  7. APR 24

    45: When the Legend Was Real — True Stories Behind History’s Scariest Urban Legends

    Send us Fan Mail What if the scariest urban legends were real? Not metaphors. Not campfire exaggerations. Actually, verifiably, documentable real — and the communities telling them knew something terrible was happening long before anyone with authority chose to listen? In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky — a solo-narrated folklore and haunted history podcast — we follow four true horror stories hidden within four legends you thought you already knew. Visit letstalkspooky.com  to connect with our socials and see what's new!!  Connect with us:  If this episode got under your skin — share it. The best way to help Let’s Talk Spooky grow is to leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and to send it to one person you know who loves a good dark story. Word of mouth is still the most powerful algorithm there is. Sources & Further Reading The Pied Piper of Hamelin • Lüneburg Manuscript (c. 1440–50); Hamelin Town Chronicle (1384); Stained glass window, Marktkirche Hameln (c. 1300); Rattenfängerhaus inscription, Hameln, Germany. • Mieder, Wolfgang. The Pied Piper: A Handbook. Greenwood Press, 2007. • Udolph, Jürgen. Linguistic surname research linking Hamelin to Polish & Pomeranian records. • Kadushin, Raphael. “The Grim Truth Behind the Pied Piper.” BBC Travel, 2020. The Greenbrier Ghost • The Greenbrier Independent & The Monroe Watchman, 1897 (archived, WV Division of Culture and History). • Baltimore American. “Mother-in-Law’s Vision as Evidence.” July 5, 1897. • Greenbrier County Courthouse — trial records and autopsy report, 1897. • Lyle, Katie Letcher. The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives. Quarrier Press, 1999. • e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Greenbrier Ghost.” wvencyclopedia.org. Cropsey & Andre Rand • Zeman & Brancaccio, dirs. Cropsey. Antidote Films, 2009 (Tribeca Film Festival). • Rivera, Geraldo. Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace. WABC-TV, 1972. • The New York Times — coverage by Todd Purdum (Aug. 6, 1987) and Elizabeth Neuffer (Aug. 14, 1987). • The Charley Project — case files for all confirmed and suspected victims. charleyproject.org. The Black Volga • Czubala, D. Wspónczesne Legendy Miejskie. Uniwersytet nlnski, 1993. • Brunvand, J.H. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. ABC-CLIO, 2001. • Kunicki, M. “The Red and the Brown.” East European Politics and Societies, 2005. • Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Warsaw — Piasecki case archival materials.

    39 min

  8. APR 16

    44: Wendigo and Skinwalker: The Warnings Hidden in the Woods

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky, we explore the chilling lore, cultural warnings, and unsettling history behind the Wendigo and the Skinwalker. These are two of the most searched and most misunderstood figures in Indigenous folklore, Canadian legend, and North American supernatural storytelling. We begin with the Wendigo, a terrifying figure found in the traditions of Ojibwe, Anishinaabe, Cree, Algonquin, Innu, and other Algonquian-speaking Nations. Often connected to winter, starvation, greed, isolation, and transformation, the Wendigo has become one of the most haunting presences in Canadian folklore, forest legends, and Indigenous oral tradition. We also explore real historical cases from Canada, including Swift Runner in Alberta and Jack Fiddler in Ontario, and examine how Wendigo stories were shaped, misunderstood, and reinterpreted through colonial history. From there, we move into the deeply feared and widely misunderstood figure of the Skinwalker, known in Diné (Navajo Nation) tradition as yee naaldlooshii. Unlike pop culture versions of shapeshifters and monsters, the Skinwalker belongs to a specific cultural framework and should not be treated as generic paranormal folklore. In this episode, we discuss the Skinwalker carefully, focusing on public knowledge, cultural context, and the reason these stories continue to inspire fear across discussions of forest spirits, dark folklore, paranormal legends, and unexplained creatures in the woods. This episode is for listeners interested in Wendigo stories, Skinwalker lore, Indigenous legends, Canadian supernatural tales, creepy forest creatures, dark folklore podcast episodes, and unexplained cryptid stories. As always, we approach these traditions with care and deliberately avoid sacred ceremonial or ritual details. If you’re drawn to stories about haunted forests, forest spirits, ancient warnings, cryptids, supernatural creatures, and the darker side of folklore, this episode is one you won’t want to miss.  A Note on Consent and Representation This episode deliberately omits ritual and procedural details from both traditions. No sacred ceremonial knowledge has been reproduced. The accounts included are drawn from publicly shared oral histories, published journalism, and documented community storytelling. The producers of this podcast encourage listeners to seek out Indigenous voices directly. Sources and Further Reading Cultural attributions: Wendigo tradition: Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), Cree, Algonquin, Innu, and related Algonquian-speaking NationsSkinwalker (yee naaldlooshii) tradition: Diné (Navajo Nation)Recommended reading: Louise Erdrich — The Night Watchman, LaRose, and essays on Ojibwe traditionTomson Highway — The Rez Sisters and interviews on Cree spiritual lifeAdrienne Keene — Native Appropriations blog and academic writing on Indigenous representationNavajo Times — navajotimes.comBasil Johnston — Ojibway Heritage

    31 min
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About

Obsessed with ghost stories, eerie folklore, and real-life paranormal encounters? Join us each week as we uncover chilling legends, haunted histories, and spine-tingling mysteries. From ancient curses to modern hauntings and reincarnation, this podcast is your gateway to the dark and unexplained. If you crave supernatural stories and strange tales that stay with you... press play and Let’s Talk Spooky!

Information

  • Creator
    Shauna Taylor
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    52
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Let's Talk Spooky
  • Show Website
    Let's Talk Spooky

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