Weekly Spooky | Scary Stories for Halloween

Halloween season is almost here, and Monthly Spooky is kicking off the countdown with haunted houses, Bigfoot, UFOs, cryptids, unexplained mysteries—and bat people living on the Moon.

In the August 2026 edition of Monthly Spooky, Henrique Couto and Michelle are getting ready for Halloween with another strange trip through paranormal news, ghost stories, cryptid sightings, UFO and UAP reports, weird history, unexplained phenomena and creepy mysteries before diving into one of the most wonderfully bizarre media sensations of the nineteenth century: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

Beginning in August 1835, newspaper readers were treated to astonishing reports supposedly describing life discovered on the Moon—including extraordinary landscapes, animals, beavers and winged bat people. Henrique and Michelle dig into how the Great Moon Hoax spread, why people believed it, and how an outrageous piece of fiction became an early example of a sensational story going viral. But first, there is plenty of fresh spooky news to get everyone into the Halloween spirit.Inside this episode:
A new haunted renovation series sends designers into a reportedly haunted Ohio mansion, where they have to live and work inside the property while confronting its supernatural reputation.
The possible “Croc Ness Monster” causes a stir after what appears to be a crocodile is photographed near an Italian lake.
Officials in Brussels receive and examine unusual UFO and UAP reports, including material submitted by amateur astronomers.
A reported Bigfoot sighting in Connecticut gets the attention of cryptid investigators.
Scientists find a mysterious molecular signature associated with both Pluto and Titan.
A mysterious large cat sparks discussion near Dundee, Scotland.
An extremely strange planetary system raises questions about a possible enormous exomoon.
Seattle embraces Hot Jimothy Summer as an exceptionally round raccoon becomes an internet celebrity.
Sailor Matt Rutherford attempts the dangerous feat of navigating the Arctic Ocean alone.
Henrique shares a spoiler-free look at the dinosaur horror adventure The End of Oak Street.
And Michelle brings a perfectly timed Halloween haunted-house mystery involving two college students, a strange room and an archive extension that the library later claims it knows nothing about.
Then it is off to the Moon for the main event: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, complete with lunar wildlife, bizarre civilization and the unforgettable image of humanoid bat creatures soaring across the lunar landscape.Whether you're already building your Halloween podcast playlist, looking for scary stories for spooky season, or just love ghosts, paranormal mysteries, Bigfoot, UFOs, cryptids, folklore, weird history and unexplained encounters, this month's Monthly Spooky is your early ticket into Halloween.Follow Monthly Spooky on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next round of spooky news, strange history, paranormal stories and creepy discoveries as the countdown to Halloween continues.

🎂 Celebrate Henrique's 40th Birthday!
Henrique's 40th birthday is coming up, and as mentioned in the episode, listeners who would like to help him celebrate—or spoil him a little—can check out his Amazon birthday wishlist here. The upcoming milestone is part of the conversation at the beginning of this month's show. Henrique's Amazon Birthday Wishlist:
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/LRQQR0M18M4T

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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

Unknown Broadcast opens its eyes to four classic OTR mysteries about blindness, eyewitness testimony, and the dangerous distance between seeing and being believed. The Blind Witness, The Country of the Blind, Eyewitness, and With My Own Eyes turn perception itself into the scene of the crime.Look closely. Then look again.

The signal has been known to move things while you blink.
◖ The Blind Witness — A blind man becomes the unseen witness to a paid killing—and the one loose end two professionals did not expect.
▲ The Country of the Blind — A sighted mountaineer enters an isolated civilization where blindness is normal and his precious vision is treated as a disease.
⚠ Eyewitness — A reporter touring a state prison is trapped inside a violent mutiny and forced to watch desperate men seize control.
◉ With My Own Eyes — A convalescent sees a murder with her own eyes, then finds everyone around her determined to make sight itself the lie.

The classic OTR signal is going dark now. Keep your eyes open if it makes you feel safer.

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

🎉 Unlock exclusive bonus episodes and support the show on Patreon!
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📬 Contact Us / Submit Your Horror Story!
Twitter: @WeeklySpooky
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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

Five Halloween horror stories unleash headless folklore, haunted drive-ins, supernatural transformation, vampires, and body horror in a nearly five-hour scary-story audiobook from Weekly Spooky. Halloween Changes You is a long-form Halloween horror compilation about masks that become identities, second lives that demand a price, and monsters who discover that becoming something new may be easier than becoming human again.

Presented in story order, this Halloween fiction anthology moves from an intimate chase through the woods to an afterlife movie marathon, a funeral-home reckoning, a mutant spider origin, and a full-scale vampire battle over love, family, and survival.

Inside this Halloween horror compilation:
• “Dullahan” by Morgan Moore — On Halloween night, new kid Isaiah Crane takes a shortcut through the woods on his way to a costume party. A black horse, a headless rider, and a forgotten witch-trial museum turn a simple bike ride into a desperate fight to keep his head.
• “Retro Halloween Weekend” by Rob Fields — Destiny Mirren and Sienna Michaels sneak into the wrong Strickfield drive-in with robbery on their minds. The vintage horror marathon soon becomes an afterlife judgment, and Death has a pair of unexpected job openings.
• “Retro Halloween Revelations” by Rob Fields — The old drive-in ground has become a funeral home, and Destiny—now living under a new name and a far darker calling—must face the family that helped shape her. One Halloween confession will decide who receives mercy and who takes the final journey.
• “New Life” by Rob Fields — After surviving a blood-soaked Thanksgiving, Felicia Mirren discovers that an experimental resurrection compound and her pet tarantula have changed her forever. By Halloween, she is caught between undead attacks, a secret society, and a monstrous new body that may make her Strickfield’s strangest protector.
• “Madelyne's Revenge” by Rob Fields — Felicia has built a new family and a new life, but a vampire from another world has returned to destroy both. What follows is a Halloween battle of spider powers, vampirism, dark magic, grief, and the kind of revenge that refuses to stay buried.

From Dullahan and headless-rider folklore to haunted drive-in horror, supernatural afterlife stories, vampire revenge, spider monsters, and full-body transformation, this collection is built for listeners searching for scary Halloween stories, horror fiction anthologies, dark fantasy audiobooks, folklore horror, body horror, and long-form spooky-season listening.

Follow Weekly Spooky on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast app, and return every Wednesday for a brand-new scary story. Keep the Halloween season going with more frightening fiction, monsters, ghosts, and nightmares from the Weekly Spooky horror podcast.

🎧 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

When Legends Turn Deadly is a nearly five-hour Terrifying & True true crime and folklore marathon featuring eight stories about monsters, cultural memory, Spiritualism, murder, extremist violence, and fatal belief. The Hat Man, the Deer Woman, Djinn, the Melonheads, the Fox sisters, the Greenbrier Ghost, the murder of Jeffrey Hall, and the exorcism of Anneliese Michel form one escalating journey from modern nightmare to documented human tragedy.

The journey begins between dreaming and waking, where people across cultures report a faceless silhouette in a wide-brimmed hat. Science points to sleep paralysis and suggestion; folklore and online testimony have turned the figure into a modern legend. The Deer Woman then carries a living Indigenous warning about predation and consequence. From there, Djinn traditions reveal what is lost when ancient spiritual beings are reduced to evil genies, while the Melonheads show how regional rumor can transform illness, disability, and exclusion into a monster. The Fox sisters then turn unexplained knocks into modern Spiritualism.

The second half crosses into true crime. In 1897 West Virginia, Mary Jane Heaster said the ghost of Zona Heaster Shue revealed her murder. In Riverside, California, a ten-year-old killed his neo-Nazi father, Jeffrey Hall, inside a home saturated with weapons, violence, and hate. In 1976 Bavaria, prolonged exorcisms and abandoned medical care ended with Anneliese Michel dead from malnutrition and dehydration.

Together, these cases separate documented history from paranormal claim without draining the fear from either. They ask how stories can protect people, distort a culture, stigmatize outsiders, manipulate believers, expose a crime - or make ordinary warning signs disappear behind absolute certainty.

Inside this episode:
 The Hat Man, sleep paralysis, and a modern nightmare shaped by shared testimony
 The Deer Woman as warning, consequence, and living Indigenous tradition
 The Djinn, their place in Middle Eastern and Islamic tradition, and their distortion into evil-genie stereotypes
 The Melonheads Curse and the way regional folklore transforms abandoned or abused children into monsters
 The Fox sisters, the Hydesville rappings, and the rise of Spiritualism
 The Greenbrier Ghost, Zona Heaster Shue, and a West Virginia murder trial
 The murder of Jeffrey Hall and the effects of racist extremist ideology inside a family home
 The exorcism and death of Anneliese Michel in Klingenberg, West Germany

Do monsters begin in the dark, or in the explanations we refuse to question?

🎧 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
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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

Universal Orlando holds the first of its two 2026 Premium Scream Nights on August 27, followed by the regular Halloween Horror Nights event opening on August 28 - and this week's Thursday Thrills goes inside the architecture of fear. Rather than rank haunted houses before they open, Henrique Couto asks what a walk-through attraction can do to our bodies and imaginations that a horror movie cannot.

The answer begins inside a real haunted-house experiment, where visitors wore heart-rate monitors while researchers studied the strange overlap between fear and enjoyment. Their findings showed a group-level inverted-U association across three recorded scare points: moderate fear ratings tended to accompany greater enjoyment than very low or very high ratings. Other studies examined links among unexpected attacks, complete darkness, and social context; they did not establish that these factors always increase subjective fear or enjoyment.

Then we enter the announced 2026 haunt season. Universal Orlando's thirty-fifth-anniversary lineup comprises ten houses spanning Stranger Things 5, Sinners, Hellraiser, Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness, Evil Dead Burn, and five original concepts. Universal Studios Hollywood has announced a Terror Tram starring Art the Clown, KILLceañera: Music by SLASH, and its first Unmasking the Horror Tour Add-On. Knott's Scary Farm brings two new park-created stories to a ten-maze lineup, while Six Flags Great America plans to send guests through the near-total darkness of Blair Witch: No Signal.
Henrique examines the filmmaker's tools hiding inside every maze: forced attention, negative space, sound cues, misdirection, familiar images, live performers, and the unpredictable pace of a moving crowd. It is a spooky-season tour for fans of Halloween podcasts, haunted attractions, horror filmmaking, theme parks, scary stories, and the wonderfully strange reason we pay to be frightened.
The episode also asks whether the scariest design is the monster audiences already recognize or the unmarked door hiding a story they have never encountered. The answer lives somewhere between expectation and surprise - and changes with every group that enters.

All 2026 attraction details discussed were announced as of August 25 and remain subject to change.

🎧 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