PODCAST · fiction
American Horror Nights
by American Horror Nights
True American horror stories — haunted houses, urban legends, and things that go bump in the night across the United States. From the Bell Witch to the Mothman, new nightmares every week.
Episodes
-
The Hessdalen Lights: Norway's Unexplained Sky Lights
For decades, glowing orbs have hovered, darted, and pulsed over the remote Hessdalen valley in Norway, recorded by farmers, pilots, and the long-running Project Hessdalen research station. The episode examines the plasma-battery and gas theories, the sightings that survive every ordinary...
-
The Devil's Kettle: Minnesota's Vanishing River
In northern Minnesota, half of the Brule River pours into a rock pothole called the Devil's Kettle and never reappears — no logs, balls, or dye thrown in have ever been recovered downstream. The episode covers the legend, the geology, and the 2017 flow study that came closest to an answer without...
-
The Carroll A. Deering: The Ghost Ship of the Outer Banks
In January 1921, the five-masted schooner Carroll A. Deering was found aground off Cape Hatteras with sails set, lifeboats gone, logbook missing, and not a soul aboard. The episode traces the troubled voyage, the strange hail to the Cape Lookout lightship, and the competing theories of piracy,...
-
The Flannan Isles Lighthouse: Three Keepers Vanish
In December 1900, a relief ship reached the Flannan Isles lighthouse to find the light out, a meal uneaten, the clock stopped, and all three keepers gone without a trace. The episode weighs the official freak-wave theory against the log's phantom storm, the missing oilskins, and the island's...
-
The Screaming Tunnel: Niagara's Haunted Passage
Beneath the railway tracks near Niagara Falls stands a limestone tunnel said to trap the scream of a girl who burned to death inside it. The episode retells the legend, the famous match-blowing ritual, and the strange acoustics and firsthand accounts that keep visitors daring each other to enter...
-
The Goatman's Bridge: The Legend of Old Alton Bridge
Old Alton Bridge in Denton, Texas, is said to be haunted by Oscar Washburn, a goat farmer murdered by a jealous mob in the 1930s — a ghost with a goat's head and glowing eyes who waits at the far end of the bridge. This episode tells the legend in all its versions, separates it from the bridge's...
-
The Lake Bodom Murders: Finland's Unsolved Killings
On a bright June night in 1960, four teenagers camped by Lake Bodom in Finland; by morning three were dead and the survivor remembered nothing of an attack launched through the fabric of their tent. This episode covers the compromised investigation, the suspects who died with their secrets, and…
more -
The Springfield Three: Three Women Vanish
On the morning of June 7, 1992, a mother, her daughter, and her daughter's best friend vanished from a house in Springfield, Missouri — no struggle, no ransom note, purses and car left behind, and a smashed porch light as almost the only trace. This episode follows the compromised crime scene…
more -
Aokigahara: The Forest That Swallows Sound
Beneath Mount Fuji lies a forest so dense that footsteps and voices seem to die within feet, on ground formed by an ancient lava flow that confuses compasses and hides every landmark. Told with respect for the real human tragedy associated with the forest, this episode explores its silence, its...
-
The Taos Hum: The Sound No One Can Explain
For over thirty years, a small share of residents in Taos, New Mexico, have reported hearing a low, constant drone that investigators could never find — and that their own neighbors cannot hear at all. This episode traces the 1993 scientific investigation, the theories ranging from distant...
-
The Momo Challenge: The Face That Haunted Every Phone
In 2018 a grotesque face began appearing in parents' warnings across the world: Momo, the monster in the phone, daring children toward darkness. Police issued alerts on four continents. There was only one problem — she never existed. The true story of the hoax that haunted the planet, and the...
-
The Paulding Light: The Lantern That Never Went Out
Every clear night, strangers gather on a gravel turnout in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to watch a light rise over the treeline where no light should be. Science says it is headlights, magnified by the dark. The locals say it is the lantern of a brakeman killed on the tracks a century ago, still...
-
The Colares Incident: The Beams That Hunted People
For four months in 1977, the fishing villages of Colares, Brazil were attacked by lights that burned, punctured, and drained their victims — the 'chupa-chupa.' The Air Force team sent to debunk it filmed the objects instead, and its commander took the secret to a grave that came two months after…
more -
The Ilkley Moor Incident: The Photograph on the Moor
A retired police officer crossing Ilkley Moor in 1987 met a small green figure in the mist, raised his camera, and took its picture. Then he lost an hour of his life, and his compass never worked again. The photograph still exists. So does the question of what raised its arm to warn him back.
-
The Westall Incident: The Saucer Over the Schoolyard
In April 1966, more than three hundred students and teachers at a Melbourne school watched a silver craft descend behind the pines, leave a scorched circle, and vanish. Then the men arrived, the assembly was called, and the children were ordered to forget. Sixty years on, Australia has never...
-
The Toynbee Tiles: Messages from the Asphalt
Embedded in the streets of more than twenty American states, hundreds of tiles carry the same four-line sermon: TOYNBEE IDEA. IN MOVIE 2001. RESURRECT DEAD. ON PLANET JUPITER. For forty years no one was ever caught laying them — until investigators found a recluse, and a car with a hole in its...
-
The Salish Sea Feet: The Tide's Grim Delivery
Since 2007, human feet in running shoes have been washing ashore along the coasts of British Columbia and Washington State — more than twenty of them, severed by no blade. The search for a serial killer ended with a colder answer: the sea itself, a weak ankle joint, and a shoe built to float.
-
The Overtoun Bridge: The Dogs That Leap
For seventy years, dogs have been hurling themselves from the same few yards of a Victorian bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland — some six hundred leaps, around fifty deaths, and survivors who climbed back up to jump again. Scent, scenery, or something waiting in a thin place? The mystery of the Dog...
-
The Man Who Killed Halloween: The Poisoned Candy of Deer Park
On Halloween night 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan ate a Pixy Stix laced with cyanide and died within the hour. The neighbourhood hunted a phantom poisoner, but the killer was the boy's own father, who had insured his children's lives and invented America's greatest Halloween nightmare to…
more -
The Death of Edgar Allan Poe: The Visitor in the Night
Found delirious in a Baltimore gutter in 1849, wearing another man's clothes and crying out a stranger's name, Edgar Allan Poe died four days later without ever explaining his missing week. No autopsy, no death certificate, no answer. Tonight: the cooping gangs, the rabies theory, and the...
-
The Men in Black: Do Not Talk About What You Saw
They arrive in black suits, in cars years out of date, knowing things they cannot know — and their message never changes: forget what you saw. From Maury Island in 1947 to Albert Bender to Dr. Hopkins' vanishing coin, the Men in Black are folklore's most polite threat.
-
The Los Feliz Murder House: The Christmas That Never Ended
December 6, 1959: Dr. Harold Perelson murders his wife with a ball-peen hammer, then takes his own life beside her. The family that bought 2475 Glendower Place never moved in — and left the 1959 Christmas tree, presents still wrapped, standing untouched for nearly sixty years.
-
The Missouri State Penitentiary: The Bloodiest 47 Acres
Time magazine called it the bloodiest 47 acres in America: 168 years of riots, forty gas-chamber executions, and inmates from Emma Goldman to James Earl Ray. The Missouri State Penitentiary closed in 2004 — but staff say the cell doors in Housing Unit 4 still open by themselves.
-
The Night Marchers: Hawaii's Ghost Warriors
In Hawaii, on the sacred nights of the old lunar calendar, the drums begin where no drums should be. The Night Marchers — the armies of dead chiefs — still walk their ancient war paths, and the rule for the living has never changed: lie face down, and do not look up.
-
The Ghost Blimp: The Airship That Came Home Empty
August 16, 1942: Navy blimp L-8 leaves Treasure Island with two officers aboard and drifts home five hours later — engines warm, coffee unfinished, door hanging open, crew gone without a trace. No distress call, no parachutes, no bodies. The Navy's verdict: cause undetermined.
-
The Beast of Bladenboro: North Carolina's Vampire Beast
Winter 1953–54: dogs across Bladenboro, North Carolina are found drained of blood, skulls crushed, meat untouched. Then a woman meets the beast face to face — a round-faced black cat the size of a small panther. A thousand men hunted it through the swamps. It was never caught.
-
The Kecksburg Incident: The Acorn That Fell from the Sky
December 9, 1965: a fireball crosses six states, and something acorn-shaped, bronze, and lettered with hieroglyph-like symbols comes down in the Pennsylvania woods. Firemen saw it up close. The Army hauled it away under a tarp before midnight — and NASA later said the files were lost.
-
Roswell: The Crash That Started It All
July 1947: the Army Air Forces announced it had captured a flying disc — then took it back within hours. Mac Brazel's debris field, Jesse Marcel's confession, Walter Haut's sealed affidavit, and the bodies that may never have existed: the night the modern UFO age began.
-
The Exorcist House: The Boy Who Inspired a Nightmare
St. Louis, 1949: a fourteen-year-old boy, scratches spelling out words, a bed that shook, and some thirty sessions of exorcism recorded in a secret diary by Jesuit priests. The case later became The Exorcist — and the boy grew up to work for NASA and never spoke of it again.
-
The Cecil Hotel: Death Checks In
Opened in 1927 as a grand hotel, the Cecil became Skid Row's palace of death: dozens of suicides, an unsolved murder, and two serial killers — Ramirez and Unterweger — in residence. Then, in 2013, guest Elisa Lam was found inside a rooftop water tank, and the elevator footage still has no...
-
The Great Clown Panic of 2016: When America Scared Itself
Autumn 2016: clowns in the woods, schools locked down on three continents — and the woods were empty. The purest haunting of the internet age: a monster crowdsourced entirely out of fear.
-
The Sorrel-Weed House: Savannah's House of Sorrow
Savannah's grandest mansion holds its saddest legend: a betrayed wife, an enslaved woman found hanged, and a mistress dead on the courtyard stones. The voices in the carriage house still beg to be heard.
-
The Hat Man: The Shadow in the Doorway
Thousands of reports, every culture, one figure: a solid-black man in a fedora standing in doorways at night, watching. Sleep science has an explanation — but it can't explain why he wears the same costume worldwide.
-
The Van Meter Visitor: Iowa's Winged Terror of 1903
Five nights in 1903: a winged, beaked creature with a searchlight in its forehead terrorizes an Iowa town, shrugs off shotgun blasts from its most respectable citizens, and escapes down a coal mine.
-
The Dark Watchers of Big Sur: Giants on the Ridge
For centuries, impossibly tall figures in wide-brimmed hats have stood on California's Santa Lucia ridgelines at dusk — reported by settlers, Steinbeck, rangers, and fire crews. They never approach. They only watch.
-
Don Decker: The Man Who Made It Rain Indoors
Stroudsburg, 1983: rain falls inside houses, a pizzeria, and a jail cell — sideways, in front of police officers, a warden, and a chaplain. The most witnessed poltergeist case in American history.
-
The Driskill Hotel: Austin's Haunted Palace
Austin's pink-granite palace since 1886: a colonel's cigar smoke, two honeymoon brides, haunted mirrors — and a little girl in a white dress still bouncing her ball down the grand staircase.
-
Travis Walton: The Fire in the Sky Abduction
Arizona, 1975: seven loggers see a glowing disc, a beam throws Travis Walton to the ground, and he vanishes for five days. Six witnesses passed state polygraphs. Fifty years on, nobody has broken the story.
-
The Smurl Haunting: Pennsylvania's Tormented Family
West Pittston, 1986: the Smurl family's duplex erupts with claw marks, hoofbeats, and a stench from nowhere. Priests, neighbors, and the Warrens all witnessed it — one of the most documented hauntings in American history.
-
Lake Lanier: The Drowned Town's Revenge
Beneath Georgia's Lake Lanier lies Oscarville, a town driven out in 1912 and drowned in 1956 — graves, roads, and all. With 700+ deaths on the water, feeling hands in the deep, and the lady in the blue dress still hitchhiking the Lanier Bridge, this is America's most haunted lake.
-
The Bloop: The Sound from the Deep
In 1997, underwater microphones across the Pacific picked up a sound louder than a blue whale — a rising 'bloop' from the most remote ocean on Earth. NOAA first thought: an animal bigger than anything known. The truth, when it came, was stranger in its own way.
-
The Cash-Landrum Incident: The Diamond in the Sky
December 29, 1980: Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and seven-year-old Colby watched a huge diamond-shaped craft shoot flames over a Texas piney-woods road — shadowed by military helicopters. All three fell violently ill. Their lawsuit against the US government went nowhere.
-
Himuro Mansion: Japan's Bloodiest Urban Legend
Deep in the mountains outside Tokyo stands a mansion where, legend says, a family sacrificed a young woman every fifty years to seal something beneath the house — until the last ritual failed and the dead rose. The mansion behind Fatal Frame, and the truth buried under the myth.
-
The Shag Harbour Incident: The Night Something Crashed
October 4, 1967: residents of Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia watched four orange lights crash into the sea. The RCMP, the Coast Guard, and the Canadian military all responded — and the official file calls it a UFO. The search found nothing. Something left the water that night.
-
The White Lady of Balete Drive: Manila's Vanishing Hitchhiker
On Balete Drive in Quezon City, drivers tell of a woman in white who appears in the back seat and vanishes at the balete trees. Manila's most famous ghost — a vanishing hitchhiker with roots in a real tragedy, and sightings that never stopped.
-
The Beast of Exmoor: England's Phantom Cat
For fifty years, farmers on Exmoor have found their sheep slaughtered with throats torn out — and witnesses describe a huge black cat the size of a Labrador. The Royal Marines were sent to hunt it in 1983. They found nothing. The Beast is still out there.
-
The Rendlesham Forest Incident: Britain's Roswell
December 1980: over three nights, US Air Force personnel at RAF Woodbridge watched strange lights descend into Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk. Deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt recorded it all on tape — the most documented UFO encounter in British history, and still officially unexplained.
-
The Pascagoula Abduction: Taken from the Riverbank
October 11, 1973: Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing off a pier in Pascagoula, Mississippi when a whirring, blue-lit craft appeared and three wrinkled, crab-clawed beings took them aboard. They passed polygraphs, never changed their story — and never cashed in.
-
The Kuchisake-onna: Japan's Slit-Mouthed Woman
She appears on lonely streets at dusk and asks a single question: 'Am I beautiful?' Answer wrong, and the slit-mouthed woman of Japanese legend shows you what beauty costs. The 1979 panic that swept Japan's schools, and the spirit that still walks the night.
-
The Ammons Demon House: Terror in Gary, Indiana
In 2011, Latoya Ammons and her family moved into a rental house in Gary, Indiana — and within weeks reported swarms of flies in winter, shadowy figures, and her children levitating and walking up walls. Police officers, a DCS caseworker, and a Catholic priest all witnessed things they couldn't...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does American Horror Nights have?
American Horror Nights currently has 214 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is American Horror Nights about?
True American horror stories — haunted houses, urban legends, and things that go bump in the night across the United States. From the Bell Witch to the Mothman, new nightmares every week.
How often does American Horror Nights release new episodes?
American Horror Nights publishes regularly with 214 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to American Horror Nights?
You can listen to American Horror Nights on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts American Horror Nights?
American Horror Nights is created and hosted by American Horror Nights.
URL copied to clipboard!