FRIGHTLY! Scary Stories and Tales of Terror

Short StoryVerses
Short StoryVerses
  • 4.2 (5)
  • Fiction

Enjoy a family fright night with stories that thrill—but don’t traumatize. FRIGHTLY! drags classic and original horror tales into the cold light of your headphones (or car). From haunted manors to twisted minds, each story is performed with cinematic intensity—no cheap jump scares, no clichés, just unsettling beauty and bone-deep dread. Hear the masters of the macabre reborn, alongside new nightmares crafted to feel too real for comfort. Discover tasteful tales of terror without gratuitous gore. Frightly! features classic chills and traditional thrills. Because fear deserves better storytelling. FRIGHTLY! is part of Short Storyverses (shortstoryverses.com), a growing collection of podcasts devoted to exceptional storytelling. Explore Litreading—our original classic short story podcast featuring a variety of timeless tales; Season’s Readings to brighten your holidays any time of year; New Tales Told for original storiesr; and  Readastorus for for younger listeners. Search for all of these titles wherever you get your podcasts. All episodes are narrated by professional voice actor, Don McDonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 1d ago

    Autopay — An Original Short Story by Don McDonald

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Autopay — An Original Short Story by Don McDonald

  2. 5d ago

    The Hanging Stranger — A Classic Sci-Fi Horror Tale by Philip K. Dick

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Hanging Stranger — A Classic Sci-Fi Horror Tale by Philip K. Dick

  3. Sep 28

    His Own Voice — An Original Story by Don McDonald

    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. For more short stories, visit ShortStoryverses.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    His Own Voice — An Original Story by Don McDonald

  4. Sep 22

    Murder of Crows – an Original Short Story by Don McDonald

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Murder of Crows – an Original Short Story by Don McDonald

  5. Aug 26

    The Boarded Window — A Classic Haunting Tale by Ambrose Bierce

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Boarded Window — A Classic Haunting Tale by Ambrose Bierce

  6. Aug 14

    Frightly!

    Fear Deserves Better Storytelling Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  7. Aug 12

    The Willow Walk — A Classic Tale by Sinclair Lewis

    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 . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Willow Walk — A Classic Tale by Sinclair Lewis

  8. Aug 5

    August Heat — A Classic Tale by W.F. Harvey

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    August Heat — A Classic Tale by W.F. Harvey
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Ratings & Reviews

4.2
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Enjoy a family fright night with stories that thrill—but don’t traumatize. FRIGHTLY! drags classic and original horror tales into the cold light of your headphones (or car). From haunted manors to twisted minds, each story is performed with cinematic intensity—no cheap jump scares, no clichés, just unsettling beauty and bone-deep dread. Hear the masters of the macabre reborn, alongside new nightmares crafted to feel too real for comfort. Discover tasteful tales of terror without gratuitous gore. Frightly! features classic chills and traditional thrills. Because fear deserves better storytelling. FRIGHTLY! is part of Short Storyverses (shortstoryverses.com), a growing collection of podcasts devoted to exceptional storytelling. Explore Litreading—our original classic short story podcast featuring a variety of timeless tales; Season’s Readings to brighten your holidays any time of year; New Tales Told for original storiesr; and  Readastorus for for younger listeners. Search for all of these titles wherever you get your podcasts. All episodes are narrated by professional voice actor, Don McDonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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