Weekly Spooky | Scary Stories for Spooky Season

Blade, The Exorcist III, An American Werewolf in London, You’re Next, The Night House, and Night of the Creeps headline this episode of This Week in Horror History, covering August 17 through August 23. Our late-summer Halloween horror pregame continues with Marvel vampires, supernatural possession, haunted-house grief, masked home invaders, alien parasites, reanimated corpses, and one of the greatest werewolf transformations ever filmed.

Inside this episode:
August 17, 1990 — The Exorcist III opens in U.S. theaters
William Peter Blatty returns to the world of The Exorcist with a rain-soaked supernatural detective story starring George C. Scott as Lieutenant Kinderman. A series of murders carries the signature of the Gemini Killer—a serial murderer who should already be dead—leading Kinderman toward a locked psychiatric ward, an impossible suspect, and one of the most terrifying hospital-hallway sequences in horror history.
August 20, 2021 — The Night House begins its U.S. theatrical run
Rebecca Hall stars as Beth, a grieving widow left alone inside the lakeside home her husband designed. When music begins playing by itself, footprints appear outside, and a reversed version of the house seems to wait across the water, grief takes on an architectural shape. Director David Bruckner turns negative space, mirrored rooms, hidden plans, and absence itself into a supernatural presence.
August 21, 1998 — Blade opens in U.S. theaters Wesley Snipes introduces Marvel’s Daywalker in a stylish collision of vampire horror, martial arts, comic-book action, ancient mythology, and late-1990s cool. Armed with swords, silver weapons, and absolute confidence, Blade hunts a hidden vampire society while Deacon Frost pursues the power of an ancient Blood God.
August 23, 2013 — You’re Next reaches U.S. theaters A wealthy family’s anniversary dinner becomes a masked home-invasion nightmare when attackers wearing animal faces surround an isolated house. The intruders expect frightened victims—but they do not expect Erin, whose survival skills transform every room, doorway, and ordinary household object into a potential weapon.

Deep-Cut Spotlight — Night of the Creeps
Alien parasites, fraternity zombies, exploding heads, college-campus chaos, and Tom Atkins with a flamethrower collide in Fred Dekker’s gloriously strange 1986 creature feature. 
After a frozen body is accidentally thawed during a fraternity prank, slug-like alien parasites begin entering human hosts, taking control of their brains, and reanimating the dead. Soon the campus is overrun by infected students, undead fraternity brothers, possessed animals, and a growing outbreak headed directly toward the college formal.
Night of the Creeps throws alien invasion, zombie horror, slasher history, teen comedy, detective noir, and creature-feature slime into the same movie. Fast, funny, gross, and packed with practical-effects charm, it is an ideal cult-horror addition to any early Halloween movie marathon.

Horror Birthdays This Week:
Taissa Farmiga, Peter Weir, Ray Bradbury, and Park Chan-wook enter the birthday roll, bringing connections to American Horror Story, The Final Girls, The Nun, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Thirst. 
Ray Bradbury’s autumn carnivals, October shadows, and dark childhood wonders make this an especially fitting week to begin the annual transition from summer horror into full Halloween season.

Weekly Recommendation — An American Werewolf in London
Two American backpackers cross the Yorkshire moors, ignore some extremely urgent local advice, and encounter something monstrous beneath the full moon. 

John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London blends horror, comedy, romance, supernatural tragedy, and groundbreaking practical effects without weakening any of them. David Naughton’s transformation remains one of the defining sequences in werewolf-movie history: brightly lit, painfully physical, and presented without a merciful cutaway.

Rick Baker’s landmark effects earned the first competitive Academy Award for Makeup, but the movie lasts because the creature spectacle is tied to a genuinely tragic story. David is funny, likable, frightened, and slowly becoming dangerous to everyone around him. For horror fans pregaming for Halloween, An American Werewolf in London delivers full-moon atmosphere, haunted warnings, undead visitors, creature effects, dark comedy, and the painful realization that some transformations cannot be stopped.

Plus, Weekly Spooky returns Wednesday with another original horror story, followed by more frightening history, terrifying true stories, horror movie discussion, and unexplained broadcasts throughout the week. From The Exorcist III and The Night House to Blade, You’re Next, Night of the Creeps, and An American Werewolf in London, this week in horror history proves that evil can hide inside a hospital patient, take shape within an empty house, operate beneath a modern city, surround a family home, crawl into the human brain, or wait beneath the light of a full moon.

Summer is beginning to fade, the nights are arriving earlier, and the Halloween horror pregame is officially gaining momentum.

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Twitter: @WeeklySpooky
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🎵 Music by Ray Mattis 👉 Check out Ray’s incredible work here !
👨‍💼 Executive Producers: Rob Fields, Bobbletopia.com
🎥 Produced by: Daniel Wilder
🌐 Explore more terrifying tales at: WeeklySpooky.com

The Pale Crawler is a modern cryptid legend and Halloween Favorite tied to The Rake, a creepypasta deliberately created online in 2005. What began as an anonymous forum experiment soon became a wave of alleged humanoid sightings, viral trail-camera images, Reddit stories and YouTube horror. 

In this episode of Terrifying & True, we trace Operation Crawler and the birth of The Rake creepypasta, the alleged Effingham, Illinois and rural Kentucky encounters, the notorious Louisiana “swamp monster” trail-camera hoax, and the internet feedback loop that transformed a collaborative horror story into modern folklore. We also examine ordinary explanations behind many Pale Crawler sightings, including mangy deer, low-light misidentification, pareidolia, sleep paralysis, pranks and staged footage.

As Halloween season approaches, the Pale Crawler has become a perfect spooky-season urban legend: a blank-faced humanoid said to crawl on all fours, rise taller than a person and vanish into the woods. Like Slender Man and other internet-born monsters, it survives because every eyewitness account, comment and viral video makes the story feel a little more real.

Inside this episode:
• Operation Crawler and The Rake’s 2005 creepypasta origin
• The alleged Effingham, Illinois and Kentucky Pale Crawler encounters
• The 2010 Louisiana swamp-monster trail-camera hoax
• Reddit, YouTube, TikTok and the rise of r/CrawlerSightings
• Pareidolia, sleep paralysis and misidentified wildlife
• How an internet monster entered modern Halloween folklore

Was the Pale Crawler created by the internet—or did the internet merely give an older fear a name, a shape and a blank white face?

We're telling that story tonight.

🎧 LISTEN NOW and subscribe for spine-tingling horror stories every week!

🎉 Unlock exclusive bonus episodes and support the show on Patreon!
👉 WeeklySpooky.com/Join

📬 Contact Us / Submit Your Horror Story!
Twitter: @WeeklySpooky
Facebook: facebook.com/WeeklySpooky
Email: WeeklySpooky@gmail.com

🎵 Music by Ray Mattis 👉 Check out Ray’s incredible work here !
👨‍💼 Executive Producers: Rob Fields, Bobbletopia.com
🎥 Produced by: Daniel Wilder
🌐 Explore more terrifying tales at: WeeklySpooky.com

Unknown Broadcast sails beyond the last reliable chart for four classic OTR tales of island horror, radio mystery, and tropical suspense. The Beach of Falesa, The Far-Away Island, The Island, and Escape to Skull Island promise refuge, fortune, or paradise—and collect a different price from every visitor.

The beaches are white, the water is warm, and the boats all seem to be pointed the wrong way.
☀ The Beach of Falesa — A trader arrives on a remote Pacific island seeking a future and finds a web of fear, power, violence, and voodoo waiting ashore.
✧ The Far-Away Island — A fugitive returns to the island that once promised him refuge while an unseen and murderous pursuer closes the distance.
⚔ The Island — A battle-weary Marine clings to a vision of an island without hunger or war, but the dream may demand more than escape.
☠ Escape to Skull Island — A hunted killer buys passage toward Skull Island, carrying a crime that refuses to stay behind on the waterfront.This old-time radio transmission ends at the shoreline.

Whatever followed you onto the island is staying for the night.

🎧 LISTEN NOW and subscribe for spine-tingling horror stories every week!

🎉 Unlock exclusive bonus episodes and support the show on Patreon!
👉 WeeklySpooky.com/Join

📬 Contact Us / Submit Your Horror Story!
Twitter: @WeeklySpooky
Facebook: facebook.com/WeeklySpooky
Email: WeeklySpooky@gmail.com

🎵 Music by Ray Mattis 👉 Check out Ray’s incredible work here !
👨‍💼 Executive Producers: Rob Fields, Bobbletopia.com
🎥 Produced by: Daniel Wilder
🌐 Explore more terrifying tales at: WeeklySpooky.com

Four scary stories unleash a haunted house, a cursed yard-sale object, escaped serial killers, and flesh-eating cannibal monsters. Celebrate Summerween and Halloween in summer with a complete horror fiction anthology packed with ghost stories, paranormal activity, haunted objects, home-invasion horror, supernatural creatures, and terrifying encounters in the woods.

A first date leads two Strickfield teenagers into an abandoned haunted mansion where a ghost child watches from the window. Trapped inside the Carnovasch Estate, they follow the spirit into a dark basement and uncover a two-hundred-year-old secret sealed behind a brick wall. Then a young couple buys a handmade ceramic bowl for one dollar at a yard sale. The cursed object moves by itself, returns whenever they attempt to abandon it, and summons the freezing ghost of a missing artist into their apartment. Their thrift-store bargain has become a paranormal nightmare—and escaping the haunting may require passing it to someone else.

Next, two violent serial killers invade an isolated country home and terrorize the family preparing dinner. But the home invaders have chosen the wrong victims. Something inhuman lives inside the house, and the killers are about to learn that they are no longer the most dangerous predators at the table. Finally, a nighttime party in the woods becomes a brutal survival nightmare when two teenagers discover their friends murdered beside an old stone chimney. Humanoid forest creatures emerge from the darkness with sharp claws, sadistic intelligence, and an appetite for human flesh. 

Tonight’s Scary Stories:
“First Date” by Rob Fields
A haunted-house ghost story set in Strickfield, Ohio, featuring young romance, an abandoned mansion, a floating ghost girl, and bodies hidden inside the basement walls. “Thrifting Fail—We’re Now Haunted!” by Bruce Haney
A cursed-object horror story about a haunted ceramic bowl, a missing occult collector, and a freezing apparition that refuses to leave its new owners.
“The Dinner Guests” by Shane Migliavacca
A serial-killer home-invasion story in which two murderers hold the wrong family hostage and discover something monstrous waiting for dinner.
“Party in the Woods” by Joe Salmo
A terrifying forest-creature story about teenagers hunted and tortured by intelligent, flesh-eating humanoid monsters beyond the firelight.

These four terrifying tales combine haunted-house horror, ghost children, cursed objects, haunted antiques, thrift-store horror, paranormal activity, serial killers, home invasions, cannibal families, forest monsters, creature attacks, supernatural suspense, body horror, survival horror, and dark comedy.

Perfect for listeners searching for scary stories, horror audiobooks, horror fiction podcasts, ghost stories, haunted-house stories, haunted mansion stories, cursed-object horror, haunted thrift-store finds, paranormal stories, serial-killer stories, home-invasion horror, cannibal horror, forest-creature horror, monster stories, Summerween entertainment, and Halloween podcasts.

The summer nights are warm, the yard sales are open, and the woods are waiting. Some bargains follow you home, some houses never release their dead, and some monsters are already preparing dinner.

🎧 LISTEN NOW and subscribe for spine-tingling horror stories every week!

🎉 Unlock exclusive bonus episodes and support the show on Patreon!
👉 WeeklySpooky.com/Join

📬 Contact Us / Submit Your Horror Story!
Twitter: @WeeklySpooky
Facebook: facebook.com/WeeklySpooky
Email: WeeklySpooky@gmail.com

🎵 Music by Ray Mattis 👉 Check out Ray’s incredible work here !
👨‍💼 Executive Producers: Rob Fields, Bobbletopia.com
🎥 Produced by: Daniel Wilder
🌐 Explore more terrifying tales at: WeeklySpooky.com

Seven chilling cryptid encounters and true crime folklore stories uncovered just in time for Halloween: From Bigfoot sightings in 1970s Ohio to Chupacabra terror in Puerto Rico, explore supernatural folklore that shaped America's scariest legends. This immersive horror marathon weaves Wendigo mythology, the Black-Eyed Children, the Fouke Monster, and Indrid Cold into a cinematic deep dive across cursed regions and paranormal hotspots—perfect for Halloween preparation with expertly narrated, eerie storytelling that blurs fact and fright.

🎧 LISTEN NOW and subscribe for spine-tingling horror stories every week!

🎉 Unlock exclusive bonus episodes and support the show on Patreon!
👉 WeeklySpooky.com/Join

📬 Contact Us / Submit Your Horror Story!
Twitter: @WeeklySpooky
Facebook: facebook.com/WeeklySpooky
Email: WeeklySpooky@gmail.com

🎵 Music by Ray Mattis 👉 Check out Ray’s incredible work here !
👨‍💼 Executive Producers: Rob Fields, Bobbletopia.com
🎥 Produced by: Daniel Wilder
🌐 Explore more terrifying tales at: WeeklySpooky.com