Weekly Spooky: Horror Stories & Scary Tales

This Week in Horror History for May 11–17 brings together a loaded week of horror movie anniversaries, Stephen King adaptations, Universal Monsters, zombie outbreak horror, slasher sequels, kaiju blockbusters, and modern home-invasion terror.

Inside this episode:

• May 11, 1936 — Dracula’s Daughter
Universal Horror gets one of its strangest and saddest vampire follow-ups, turning Dracula’s legacy into a chilly story of blood, inheritance, repression, and the desperate hope that evil might be cured.
Where to watch (U.S., this week): Rent/buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
• May 11, 2007 — 28 Weeks Later
The Rage virus returns with soldiers, checkpoints, quarantine zones, and the terrifying idea that the people in charge may declare the nightmare over long before the nightmare agrees.
Where to watch (U.S., this week): Rent/buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
• May 13, 1988 — Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Jason Voorhees rises again on an actual Friday the 13th, this time facing a telekinetic final girl in the cult-favorite slasher sequel fans often describe as Jason versus Carrie at Crystal Lake.
Where to watch (U.S., this week): Paramount+ with subscription; rent/buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
• May 16, 2014 — Godzilla
The MonsterVerse begins as Gareth Edwards brings Godzilla back to American theaters with disaster-movie scale, radioactive awe, and the reminder that humanity is not always the main character of the planet.
Where to watch (U.S., this week): Rent/buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

Then, in this week’s Deep-Cut Spotlight, we go to May 11, 1984 — Firestarter, the Stephen King adaptation about a little girl, a secret government experiment, and the terrifying question of what happens when the weapon you built learns to hate you. Drew Barrymore stars as Charlie McGee, a child whose fear and trauma can ignite into actual flame, making Firestarter one of King’s most haunting stories of power, control, and childhood weaponized by adults.

Plus: a birthday roll featuring Robert Pattinson, David Boreanaz, Megan Fox, and Bill Paxton, a Then & Now Bite about horror’s power to mutate across generations, and a Weekly Recommendation for The Strangers: Chapter 1, a modern masked-intruder nightmare that proves some old fears never stop knocking.

From Dracula’s Daughter to Firestarter, from 28 Weeks Later to Friday the 13th Part VII, from Godzilla to The Strangers, this week is packed with horror history that refuses to stay buried.

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

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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 Setagaya Family Murders remain one of Japan’s most disturbing and baffling unsolved true crime cases: a brutal family killing, an overwhelming amount of forensic evidence, and a killer who somehow vanished anyway.

On December 30, 2000, in Setagaya, Tokyo, the Miyazawa family — Mikio, Yasuko, Niina, and Rei — spent what should have been an ordinary night at home before New Year’s. Sometime between late night and the next morning, an intruder entered from the park side of the house and murdered all four members of the family.

But what happened after the murders is what has haunted investigators for more than two decades.

The killer did not immediately flee. He stayed inside the Miyazawa home for hours. He ate from the kitchen. He drank barley tea. He used the bathroom. He tended to his own injuries. He touched the family computer. Then he left behind an astonishing trail of evidence: blood, fingerprints, palm prints, clothing, shoes, a hip bag, gloves, a scarf, handkerchiefs, and even DNA.

And still, more than twenty years later, police do not know his name.Inside this episode:
The Night of the Murders: How a quiet family home in Setagaya became the scene of one of Japan’s most infamous unsolved crimes.
The Miyazawa Family: The ordinary lives behind the case — a father, mother, daughter, and son killed inside the place they should have been safest.
The Killer Who Stayed: Why the murderer’s hours-long behavior inside the home makes this case so uniquely disturbing.
A Mountain of Evidence: Blood type, DNA, fingerprints, palm prints, clothing, shoes, and personal items left behind.
Theories and Dead Ends: Robbery, personal motive, random violence, foreign suspect theories, park-side tensions, and why none have solved the case.
The Unanswered Question: How can a killer leave so many traces and still disappear?
This is not a case defined by a lack of evidence. It is defined by the terrifying failure of evidence to become identity. The Setagaya Family Murders are a story about a home violated, a family destroyed, and a killer who left behind almost everything except the one thing investigators needed most: his name.In Setagaya, the most frightening part is not that the killer vanished without a trace.It is that he left so many traces and vanished anyway.

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: [email protected]

🎵 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 slips once more into the Weekly Spooky feed, carrying a midnight cargo of old-time radio horror stories, classic OTR suspense, supernatural mystery, occult terror, and dreadful little accidents that refuse to stay buried.

Tonight’s transmission gathers four vintage nightmares from the shadowed side of the dial: black magic on a college campus, death crawling loose aboard a ship, a lonely woman’s diary curdling into terror, and a fatal road accident that becomes something far more twisted. The host is here. The tea is warm. The room is waiting. And if the stories sound like they were meant for you… well, perhaps they were.

🕯️ The Sending — A university lecture on ancient magic opens the door to something older than reason, as youth, power, and blood become part of a terrible bargain.
🐍 A Shipment of Mute Fate — A ship carries deadly cargo across the sea, but when that cargo escapes, every dark corner becomes a hiding place for death.
📖 The Diary of Sophronia Winters — A lonely woman believes romance has finally found her, but the pages of her diary begin to reveal a much colder, crueler destiny.
🚗 Blind Alley — A drunken accident, a hidden body, and a wealthy family’s secrets twist into a trap where guilt may not be the only thing waiting in the dark.

Four classic OTR horror stories drift through Unknown Broadcast tonight… and somewhere between the static, the shadows, and the old radio glow, something may already be drifting back toward you.

🎧 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: [email protected]

🎵 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

Backwoods horror, road trip terror, gas station nightmares, isolated towns, Ozark creatures, and middle-of-nowhere survival collide in this brutal collection of four creepy horror stories. If you love roadside dread, rural secrets, desperate escapes, strange towns, and stories where one wrong turn changes everything, this episode is built to leave dirt under your nails and headlights in your nightmares.

Tonight’s lineup takes you from a father-daughter road trip that veers into pure nightmare, to a security job in a town where something ancient is waiting beneath a church, to a vicious Ozark creature feature soaked in blood and panic, and finally to a gas station shift where the fluorescent lights hide something far darker than bad coffee and impatient customers. This is horror at the edge of the map—where the woods close in, the locals know more than they say, and the next stop might be the worst mistake of your life.

• Strike-Out! — by Morgan Moore
A spring road trip to see family turns catastrophic when a father and daughter break down at the worst possible place imaginable. Tense, nasty, and full of survival-horror momentum, this one feels like a childhood nightmare told with the pedal pinned down.

• I Was Sent to a Small Town Where Strange Things Were Happening — by Michael Kelso
A security specialist arrives in a remote New England town to investigate frightened workers and finds vanished people, forbidden tunnels, and something inhuman wearing a human face. This one leans hard into eerie isolation, old evil, and creeping dread.

• Bite Me — by David O’Hanlon
A reunion weekend in the Ozarks becomes a blood-soaked creature nightmare when something impossible starts feeding in the woods. Wild, fast, and vicious, it mixes backwoods horror with monster-movie chaos in the best way.

• I Hate Working at the Gas Station After Discovering Its Dark Secret — by Michael Kelso
A bitter overnight clerk, a missing coworker, corporate surveillance, and a horrifying secret tied to a distribution center turn a routine gas station job into full paranoid nightmare fuel. Funny, grim, and deeply unsettling.

From lonely mountain roads to church basements, flea-ridden woods, and convenience stores where the cameras always seem to be watching, this collection is all about the moment a familiar place turns wrong and keeps getting worse.

🎧 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: [email protected]

🎵 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

Typhoid Mary: The Shocking True Story of New York’s Silent Killer is one of the most eerie, gripping, and unexpectedly timely episodes of Terrifying & True. In this Best of 2025 revisit, we return to the haunting real case of Mary Mallon, the woman history would remember as Typhoid Mary—an apparently healthy cook linked to deadly typhoid fever outbreaks across New York and Long Island.

At the center of this unforgettable historical mystery is a terrifying idea: what if the person spreading disease shows no symptoms at all? In the early 1900s, affluent households were suddenly struck by baffling illness. The homes were clean, the water was safe, and no one could explain why people kept getting sick. As investigators followed the trail, they uncovered one of the most chilling public health cases in American history—one involving invisible infection, forced quarantine, fear, stigma, and a woman who insisted she had done nothing wrong.

This episode is one of the most engrossing Terrifying & True episodes of 2025 because it works on so many levels at once: as a historical true story, a medical mystery, a New York nightmare, and a disturbing ethical drama about freedom, blame, and public safety. It’s creepy not because of gore or violence, but because the threat is silent, intimate, and impossible to see. That makes this Best of 2025 re-air especially strong for discoverability—and especially worth revisiting.

Inside this episode:
The 1906 Oyster Bay outbreak that launched the mystery
George Soper’s investigation into a hidden source of repeated typhoid cases
Mary Mallon’s confrontation, arrest, and forced testing
The quarantine on North Brother Island and the legal controversy that followed
Her return to cooking under aliases and the second outbreak that sealed her fate
Why Typhoid Mary still matters today in conversations about disease, stigma, and public health
If you’re drawn to historical true crime, dark history, medical mysteries, epidemic stories, New York history, and bizarre real cases that feel almost unbelievable, this is one of the strongest examples of what Terrifying & True does best. This Best of 2025 episode is a chance to revisit one of the show’s most unsettling and memorable stories—one that still feels unnervingly relevant more than a century later.

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: [email protected]

🎵 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