Scary reads: Do they help you get into the Halloween spirit?
If you’re like us, you spend October reading scary books so on Episode 555: Scary Reads: Our Favorite Books for Halloween, we share our Halloween reading list.
If you want to order any of the wonderful books we mention, you can find links here…
The dark hell-inspired Japanese story Tiffany recently read.
An understated but nevertheless chilling story about an innocuous but terrifying ghost.
A classic eerie book in which the most important character is a dead woman.
A creepy short story in which a neglected wife haunts her husband in a very odd way.
Katy’s favorite old-time radio play to listen to at Halloween.
An amazing collection of ghost stories (that is also beautiful) that contains a few oddly funny ghost stories.
A collection of beautifully atmospheric ghost stories by one of the greatest American authors.
Now it’s your turn! Send us your favorite ghost stories! We’d love to hear what you love to read at Halloween!
You can listen right here, or find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and elsewhere.
Related Episodes:
Episode 452: Ghostly Tales with the Hosts of Homespun Haints
Bittersweet Moment #126: Halloween with Aurelio
Five key takeaways from the episode:
- The hosts discuss various scary stories and ghost stories, including folk legends like “The Girl in the Lavender Dress” and “The Green Ribbon.”
- They recommend authors known for ghost stories and creepy tales, including Edith Wharton, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, and Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
- Old-time radio dramas, particularly from the show “Suspense,” are highlighted as great Halloween listening, with specific episodes like “Sorry, Wrong Number” mentioned.
- The hosts discuss the appeal of ghost stories, noting how the best ones build suspense and have a moment of realization that gives readers chills.
- They preview an upcoming radio play called “The Caller,” based on the urban legend of “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” which will be featured in the next episode.
Full Episode Transcript:
Katy
Hello.This is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
Tiffany in Rome, Katy in Seattle. Maybe you had to think about that. I had to think about that. Katy in Seattle, or either in Seattle or on her way back from Italy at this current moment. But yes, usually in Seattle. Since Halloween is coming up, and coming up quick, we have decided that we’re going to talk a little bit about scary stories, something that is always fun to reflect on this time of year. And in years past, we’ve talked about the scary stories that are legends about Rome, ghosts of Rome. We’ve talked about scary stories that have happened in our own lives. We’ve talked about really scary stories that have happened in our own lives. Over on the Patreon. If you’re not a supporter, I highly recommend checking out some of the ghost stories that we tell over there. https://www.patreon.com/thebittersweetlifepodcast where you can not only listen to bonus episodes, but help support this show and keep it going. But today we’re going to also share some of the best scary reads we’ve had in recent years and also our favorite scary stories from the past. So. And these are all just story stories, not things that actually happen to us in real life, as you will come to find. Where should we even begin? I mean, I’ve written down a couple folk legends that I want to tell you that are some of my favorite stories from when I was a kid that I used to listen to over and over and over without fail, every single year when Halloween time came around. I know you’ve been reading lots of scary books lately, so where should we start?
Tiffany
Well, we can start with a story that I just read. I just finished reading this morning.
Katy
Okay.
Tiffany
Which was really disturbing. I’m not very good at remembering stories that are sort of told to me. You know, I barely remember any stories that I might have heard growing up. You know, maybe a couple of classic ones. But I. For me, it’s kind of all about the written stories. So those are the ones I gravitate to around this time of year. And I’m reading a collection of short stories by, I hope I don’t butcher this Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Okay, who is, I have heard him described as the Japanese Edgar Allan Poe, if that gives you an idea. And he wrote a story called Hell Screen.
Katy
Ooh, sounds grim.
Tiffany
It is dark. It is dark. And actually, it’s the fourth story I’ve read so far of his, or fifth, and they’ve all been pretty dark so far, which I guess, you know, makes sense since he is the Japanese Edgar Allen Poe. So if you’re looking for a different type of story to read that is maybe from a different culture than your usual typical Halloween stories, I do recommend these. They’re really good, but they’re dark. Just to give you an idea, it’s about a Japanese artist who has been commissioned to paint a screen with visions of hell on it, the buddhist vision of hell, which I didn’t even know hell was a thing in Buddhism, quite frankly. And let’s just say he kind of has to almost descend into hell in order to be able to do this. And it’s like I said, it’s dark, but it’s intriguing.
Katy
We’ll make a list of the authors that we mention and the stories that are mentioned in the show notes. Some stories, however, that I’m going to mention do not have authors. I mean, they do. If you were to look them up and find them in, say, the library or a bookstore, it would be written by somebody. But it’s a legend that’s passed down. Passed down through generations and generations. Should I tell you one of my favorite folk legends? Okay. You may have heard some of these stories, but stick with me. I have two that I want to tell you. So one of the ones that I was so taken by when I was a kid, there’s a lot of different iterations of this story. It is just considered a folk story, so passed down through folk tales throughout the years. And it’s called the girl in the lavender dress. Here’s basically how it goes. Two college students are heading down a lone country road when they pass a girl in a lavender dress who’s just coming out of the forest. And they stop their car, and they ask her if she needs a ride somewhere because she kind of looks all sparkly, like she’s dressed for a party, but it’s sort of chilly outside, and she’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. And she immediately agrees. She gets into the car, she sits between them, and she introduces herself as lavender. And she says that she’s going to a dance, and she’s so charming and fun as they drive her to this dance that these two young men decide that they’re going to go to the dance with her because why not? They’re two young college guys out for a stroll, and they have an absolute wonderful time. She’s a delight to be around and she’s a very talented dancer, and the dance is a lot of fun. But eventually, of course, as all happens in every night, it comes to an end. And they, all three of them return back to the car. And it’s dark now and it’s getting colder. And one of the young men, being a gentleman, offers lavender his coat, which she gladly takes because she’s just wearing this thin little dress. And they get in the car, she directs them down these quiet country roads and eventually has them stop at a rundown looking shack that looks so abandoned, it looks like as if nobody would live there, except that there is a slight light inside and there is kind of a lacy, ragged curtain covering one of the windows. So they leave her there. She gets out of the car. She promises that she would love to see them again sometime in waves as they drive off, standing on the side of the road as they drive away. And they’re quite a ways away by the time that they realize. The young man who gave her his jacket realizes that, oops, I forgot to get my jacket back from her when we left. And they decide that they’ll go back the next day and try to get the jacket back. So the next day, of course, it’s not the easiest task in the world to find where this little shack is again. They spend a lot of the afternoon looking for it. Finally, they find it and they get out of the car and they go knock on the door, and an old woman answers and they ask for lavender, and she says, oh, are you old friends? And the boys don’t really want to get her in trouble by, like, letting her mother know that she was out with two men that she had just met the night before. And so they say, oh, yeah, yeah, we’re old friends. And she said, well, you know, she’s dead. She’s been in the graveyard up the street for ten years. And the boys say, oh, well, you know, I don’t know. There must be some mistake. Maybe we have her name wrong. We’re looking for somebody that we were with last night. And the woman says, oh, no, you couldn’t have been with her last night. She’s dead. She’s been dead for ten years. Not knowing what else to do, the boys maybe assuming that this woman is just confused, they leave. And as they’re driving away, they happen to notice they’re in the forest. There is a graveyard there. And so they pull the car over and they get out and they walk through the graveyard, and eventually they come upon her stone. There she is indeed. But on the curved mound in front of her, stone, carefully folded, is the boy’s jacket. Now, you didn’t see that coming, did you?
Tiffany
I didn’t. I didn’t see it coming, actually, that she was a ghost. But now that you say that, I probably should have put two and two together before. Maybe there needed to be a few more clues in there somewhere that there was something off about this person. But I do love that kind of story. I mean, I love ghost stories because more than I like scary stories. So, like the hell screen, it’s kind of scary story. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, which I also read recently, kind of scary. The ghost story to me is there’s, I mean, I’m not the only person who feels like this, I know, but there’s something about the ghost story, because it tricks you. It tricks you in a way, you know, that’s not dastardly or evil or it’s just like all of a sudden, that moment, you make a realization that the person you thought was alive is dead, is. I don’t know, there’s something so mysterious and I. Thrilling in the full meaning of the word thrilling that I just love, and I love that moment. And it reminds me of kind of like, maybe one of the first ghost stories, good, true ghost stories that I ever read was by Edith Wharton. It’s called the Lady’s Maid’s Bell. There are a couple of authors who are really good at ghost stories. Edith Wharton is one. Henry James is another, Daphne du Maurier and Edgar Allan Poe, obviously, but this one by Edith Wharton. It was one of the first ghost stories, like I said, that I ever read. And it’s not that scary if you sit and think about it, you know? But when you’re reading it, because it starts out, my favorite type of ghost story is a story that you don’t really know that it’s going to be a ghost story when you start reading it. Or maybe, you know, because it’s like, you know, Henry James ghost stories or whatever, but you don’t really think about it, and you’re just going with the story and you’re going along and you’re just assuming you’re in a normal world. And all of a sudden you get that little cold feeling in your chest when you realize that one of the characters is a ghost, which is what I can only imagine you would actually feel if you actually encountered a ghost. And that story is so innocuous, I can’t even really remember what happens. But there’s just that moment when the heroine, the narrator realizes that she’s dealing with a ghost, that just gives me the chills, and I love it. And I think that’s, I think, a good ghost story, whether it’s a verbal one or an oral one or a written one, it’s gotta have that moment that, like, you know, the mother of this girl saying, oh, well, she’s been dead for ten years.
Katy
Yeah. And, you know, the thing I loved.
Tiffany
About that moment of realization for me.
Katy
It was really that the carefully folded jacket on the grave, you know, was my favorite part as a kid, where you’re just like, and not only is she dead, she folded this jacket up and then went back down below.
Tiffany
Well, yeah, because, I mean, up until that point, you don’t know if, okay, maybe there was a different girl. Maybe it was somebody else. Because you got your rational mind, you know, when even the narrator usually is struggling with this, they’ve got their rational mind trying to explain away the situation. So you think to yourself, well, it must have been someone else. It must have been, you know, you see the jacket folded? Well, there’s your proof.
Katy
Mm hmm. There’s your proof. Yeah. Edith Wharton, I actually wrote down as one of the books, and I didn’t write down a lot of books, but one of the books, the only book I wrote down was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which isn’t really a ghost story, but it is the only book that I can recall reading where a woman who is dead is one of the main characters. She basically hovers over everything else. She’s completely absent and also so dominantly present throughout the whole book that it leads this sort of creepy overtone. The whole book has just, like, this creepy unfolding overtone.
Tiffany
It’s so creepy. And the character of Misses Danvers has got to be one of the creepiest characters in all of fiction. Just absolutely terrifying character, I felt, and I’ve seen two movie versions of it. There’s the old classic with, I want to say that swedish actress’s name. What’s her name? Bergman.
Katy
Oh, Ingrid Bergman.
Tiffany
Ingrid Bergman. I think it’s Ingrid Bergman. I’m pretty sure. I’m not 100% positive. I think it’s Ingrid Bergman. And then there’s the modern version that is on Netflix right now. And I think Helen Mirren plays misses Danvers in the modern version. And, man, she nails it, but so does the original one. And, of course, the book, you know, book is the best. But that is definitely. There are certain authors who just have this knack for creeping you out. And Daphne du Maurier, is certainly one of them. Obviously, Edith Wharton. Daphne du Maurier has two collections that I know of. Maybe there are more of short stories now. They’re not all ghost stories, but they’re all creepy stories. And in fact, several, at least a few, if not several of her stories were purchased by Alfred Hitchcock and used in Alfred Hitchcock presents.
Katy
Nice.
Tiffany
Same thing for Patricia Highsmith, although I don’t think Patricia Highsmith’s stories are as chilling as Daphne du Maurier. They’re good, but they’re more like suspense. But the Daphne du Maurier just captures that eerie, freaky, off putting feeling that it’s not like it’s so much less scary than horror or anything like that, but yet somehow it’s even scarier because it’s so understated. There’s a great story by Daphne du Maurier actually called the Apple Tree.
Katy
Okay, which I read probably a year.
Tiffany
Or two ago, and it’s. Well, I’ll just tell the story if I can remember it. It’s been a couple years, but I think I can remember it. And, you know, I’ll ruin it for you if you haven’t read it. But, you know, there’s so many more that you should go out and get one of these collections and just read them all. But it’s a story about a husband and wife, and they’re older, and he’s kind of not nice to her. You know, on the surface, he’s a nice husband, but he’s not very nice to her. And she’s not well. And she has this prized apple tree that she loves, and he hates it because she loves it so much because he’s got this antagonism towards her. Well, long story short, she eventually dies. And to be honest, I can’t remember, and I should have remembered this detail, but I can’t remember if he has a hand in her death or not. It might just be that he sort of doesn’t help her when she’s calling for help. It might not be that he actually sticks a knife into her, but he lets her die. Whatever it is, he’s happy that she’s gone. So as he’s living his life and he’s very smug now that he doesn’t have this wife to deal with, he decides he’s going to chop down that. That apple tree. And first he tries to get his servants to do it, and either they refuse or they’re not able to. Then, you know, he’s going through all these things trying to figure out how to get rid of this apple tree because he starts to notice that it looks like her. He looks out the window and he sees her in it. He sees her shape somehow, in a very strange way, he feels her in this tree. Finally, he’s had enough. He can’t stand it anymore, stand seeing this tree outside of his window. And it’s the middle of winter. Remember, he’s an older man, and he goes out and he’s like, if I can’t get someone to do this, I’m chopping down this tree myself. And he hacks it and he hacks it and he hacks it and he hacks it away, but it falls on him and it pins him down. And he is stuck there and he can’t scream loud enough for anyone to hear him. And it’s the middle of the night and he dies in this snowstorm.
Katy
Amazing.
Tiffany
It’s so good. It’s such a good one. I mean, all her stories are good, but that’s one of my favorites of her short stories.
Katy
It reminds me, I think, see, I’m wondering if I’ve actually read it or if they made a version of it into an old time radio show because, so this is not a book. But you know me, I love listening to the golden age of radio shows. I love old time radio dramas, and they’re especially great around Halloween. And there are particular writers, just like there are particular writers who are great at the short story, the creepy short story. There are particular writers who are really great at the creepy radio drama. They tend to be good at the scary short story as well. But there was one woman in particular named Lucille Fletcher, who, I mean, if I. She did a lot of different episodes of the show. Suspense, not a lot, but a small handful, which for a woman at that time was a lot. So the standard of today, not a lot of women working in the industry that weren’t acting. But she wrote some of the most famous radio plays of all time, all of which are worth listening to around the Halloween season. The most famous of which probably being. Sorry, wrong number, which eventually gets turned into a movie. I think I’ve seen that the radio play is starring Agnes Moorehead. I believe she’s actually in the film, too. Sorry, wrong number. I mean, it’s basically one woman. There are other characters in it, but she basically stars in it by herself. So it’s like a feat of acting, of a woman becoming more and more hysterical. But what’s interesting about it is, as far as a radio play is concerned, was, you know, radio plays were live at the time they went live. So the actor is there doing it while you’re at home listening to it on the radio. And. Sorry, wrong number. Was so scary and so dramatic and so well loved by the people who listened to it that they got flooded with requests to do it again. Because, of course, if somebody missed it, it’s gone. That’s it. It happened live. And so it was one of the few radio plays that I know about that gets a reboot. Like, they do it again live again. And there are recordings of it, you know, some things we’ve lost. But she also wrote a very famous one called the Hitchhiker, which stars Larson Wells, which was another one that was made people listening just go frantically crazy for it. And I think that one got also turned into a tv show or a movie or something, I’m not sure. But anyway, yeah, the show suspense, I can’t recommend it enough as far as if you want to listen to a creepy, creepy radio during this holiday season.
Tiffany
Did you say there’s a show called suspense?
Katy
Yeah. So all of these radio plays happen under a larger moniker, which is the show that’s called suspense. And it was one of the longest running radio shows of the golden age. I think it was on for over 20 years, which was quite a few.
Tiffany
How do you find it?
Katy
You can find a lot of the episodes online. There’s a lot of podcasts that specialize in old time radio, or there’s a site called https://archive.org/ that has a huge archive of a bunch of old golden rage radio shows. So you could just look for suspense and listen to them there. There’s two other shows that are not written by her from suspense that I love around this time of year. One’s called the House on Cypress Canyon, and the other one is called will you make a bet with death? Those three. So sorry, wrong number. The house on Cypress Canyon and will you make a bet with death are probably my favorite Halloween listening shows around this time of year.
Tiffany
Okay, duly noted.
Katy
Do you want me to tell you another?
Tiffany
Tell me another one. All right.
Katy
I’ll tell you my. My last favorite folk tale that I’ve set aside. This one. This one really tickled my fancy as a kid, and I think you’ll see why. This, from what I did a little research before we got on, and apparently some people believe that this is an old german fairy tale. But I don’t know. That’s just what I was seeing around. And it’s often called the green ribbon. Sometimes it’s called the black ribbon, but most versions I found. I was finding were called the Green Ribbon. Anyway, here’s essentially the story. Once upon a time, because, you know, it’s a fairy tale, there was a girl who always wore a green ribbon around her neck. And later on, as she got into school, growing up, she met a boy who liked her very much, and she liked him in return. And one day this boy asked her, why do you always wear a green ribbon around your neck? And she says, I cannot tell you. Of course, he keeps asking and she keeps not answering. And over time, they grow up. And as you do in a fairy tale, they fell in love. And of course, they got married. And after they were married, the husband says, well, now that we’re married, you know, surely you can tell me why you’re always wearing a green ribbon around your neck? And she says, well, no, no, no. You still must wait to get an answer about that. But I’ll tell you someday. I’ll tell you, but it’s just not right now. And so they had a really good life together. They lived. They grew old. Eventually, the woman becomes very sick. And her doctor tells her that she doesn’t have long to live. And so she calls her husband to her side and she says, now I can finally tell you about the green ribbon. Go ahead and untie it, and you will see why I’ve been wearing it this whole time. And the man, very slowly and very carefully, unties the ribbon, and the woman’s head falls off.
Tiffany
I knew this story when I was little, too. But it was a red ribbon in the story I knew.
Katy
It’s so. I think I loved it as a kid because it’s so macabre. But it’s also so absurd. Like, how in the world would a ribbon around your neck keep your head on the whole time? And of course, the moment it’s untied, your head falls off and you die. As if nothing was connected except for the ribbon. I loved that notion as a kid. I just loved it. I thought it was so funny.
Tiffany
Yeah, I remember liking that story, too, but I didn’t remember it being quite as long. But I had the notion of it in my memory from many years past.
Katy
Well, a very talented writer friend of mine said that the longer the hallway, the greater the suspense. So.
Tiffany
Course. Of course, that’s absolutely true.
Katy
I may have drawn that out a little bit just for the suspense of what was going to happen.
Tiffany
Yeah, well, I mean, that’s also what makes this scary short story challenging is because you only have a certain number of pages. And so it really has to move, and you can’t build the suspense as much as you could in a whole, you know, in a full length book.
Katy
Yeah. So. Well, before we run out of time, do you have anything else you want to throw on the table as a recommendation?
Tiffany
I have a couple, I have a, I have a collection of ghost stories from the everyman’s library edition.
Katy
Okay.
Tiffany
And there’s a lot of great stories in here, but one of them is called the honeysuckle cottage.
Katy
Okay.
Tiffany
By PG Wodehouse. It’s funny. It’s a ghost story, but it’s a funny ghost story. And basically, I won’t go into the whole story because I also don’t remember the whole story. But the point is it’s about a writer, and he writes detective fiction, and he, for some reason, has to go out and stay. I don’t know. Maybe he, like I said, I don’t remember the details, but for some reason he’s out in the country in a cottage writing where he doesn’t usually write. Now, why he’s there, I can’t remember. Don’t ask me. But the point is that as he’s, he’s in this cottage, like, he starts writing in this really flowery way. Everything starts suddenly, is coming out like a romance novel.
Katy
Mm hmm.
Tiffany
But like an over the top romance novel. Like, you know, he’ll be writing a scene in which there’s a woman that he’s interviewing, and, you know, all of a sudden she’ll have, you know, full lips and crimson cheeks and she’s got a sparkle in her eye. He’s like, what? Why did I write that?
Katy
Yeah.
Tiffany
And it basically, he keeps happening and this keeps happening. And it turns out that place he’s staying in was the home of this romance novelist who’s dead. That’s so, her style is infecting his writing. It’s so good. It’s such a great story. And another one I really love is called the High Boy by Alison Lurie. Have you ever heard of the story called the high boy?
Katy
No.
Tiffany
This is another just, I mean, I just think about these writers and I think, man, like, where did you come up with this idea? Is the story of these two couples, and one of them inherits this enormous highboy, you know, which is like a chest of drawers that’s really tall, and it’s like an antique. And I can’t, again, don’t ask me the details of the story, but it’s back and forth and are we going to keep it and are we going to get rid of it. Are we going to give it to a museum or are we going to keep it in the house? And apparently this highboy, long story short, the high boy has a consciousness. And really, I can’t remember if it wants to be in the museum or it doesn’t want to be in the museum. I can’t remember which it is, but it definitely has. It has an opinion on where it lives, and it has to be. Oh, I know what it is like. It has to be treated really, really well. It has to be oiled. It has to be polished. It has to be taken care of in a certain way. And the woman who’s living with this thing, she’s like, I don’t understand, like, what’s going on. She’s trying to tell her husband. He’s like, you’re crazy. She’s like, no, no, no. You don’t understand. This high boy, this thing has, like, a mind of its. Anyways, long story short, she realizes what’s going on. She says, oh, don’t worry, I’m going to have it go to the museum, and it’s going to be taken care of and everything’s going to be great. And then her husband accidentally has a conversation in front of this thing, and it comes out that it’s not true. And the next thing he knows, it’s fallen on his wife and crushed her and killed her.
Katy
So similar, kind of, to the apple tree.
Tiffany
Similar to the apple tree in this case. I don’t think that the high boy is actually being possessed by the ghost of someone. I think it actually has its own consciousness. And. But it’s just, you wouldn’t think that it could be even believable, you know? But it works. It works as a story, and it’s really good. And then, of course, Henry James. I read the turn of the screw this year. That is. That’s a trip. That’s a trip. But actually, there were some other stories in the collection that I liked better. The jolly corner, which we talked about on a previous episode. You’ll remember. Do you remember that episode? We talked about it. Ghosts of us. The guy who encounters a ghost of what he would have been like if he’d made different life choices.
Katy
Yes, I. Vaguely, because I know we talked about that. You know, the different.
Tiffany
We talked about it on an episode.
Katy
Yeah, I do.
Tiffany
The ghosts of us. And it was based on me reading the Jolly Corner by Henry James. But, I mean, those are the three authors I would recommend the most. Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Daphne du Maurier. But I also really recommend this collection of ghost stories from the everyman’s library collection, because there’s just so many, and I just wish that there were more. I feel like there’s got to be more out there. So if anybody has ghost stories that you particularly love, write it and tell us, because I’ve read all of these now and I need more.
Katy
Yeah. Next year is already coming for sure. Yes.
Tiffany
Yeah. Yes.
Katy
This is the thing with the ongoing, the ongoing arrival of Halloween and how every year we reflect on these spooky things just for the fun of it, is that you always have to come up with something new.
Tiffany
Well, I hope that there is an inexhaustible font of stories. I feel like there should be, because there’s, you know, if you, if you put all the ghost stories with the suspense, with the crime, with the, you know, put it all together, there’s got to be enough to last a lifetime.
Katy
I hope. I would be surprised if there wasn’t. Yes. So send your recommendations. You can always write to us at bittersweetlifepodcast@gmail.com. And in the spirit of the spooky tale, the urban legend, the folk story, next week, in honor of Halloween, we are very proud to present another radio play, radio drama by Matthew P. Woerner. If you listen to this show in the past, you’ve heard both his scary stuff and you’ve also heard his Christmas stuff, which are basically polar opposites, except that they’re both very well audio produced stories. This particular one that you’re gonna hear next week is a take on an urban legend that surely if you had any sleepovers when you were a middle school student, you might have shared with one another. And he has written a radio play version of it. He calls it “The Caller.” And Tiffany, I can play you a little preview if you want to see what you think.
Tiffany
I’d love to hear it.
Preview of THE CALLER by Matthew P. Woerner
Alone in a house with two sick children asleep upstairs, young Jill Harlow is about to hear the five most blood curdling words one could ever hear over the telephone. Based on the urban legend, the babysitter and the man upstairs. Audio imagination 77 Productions presents…”Hello?”
“Have you checked the children?”
“The Caller,” an audio drama in terror.
“Uh, well, you scared me. I guess that’s what you wanted. Is that what you wanted?”
“No.”
“What do you want?”
Written, produced and directed by Matthew P. Warner. Coming this fall. “The Caller”
Katy
All right, so that’s what we’re gonna listen to next week.
Tiffany
I love his voice. It’s very, very creepy. And, yeah, that story is terrifying. If you’ve ever been a babysitter, I mean.
Katy
Yep.
Tiffany
Yeah, it’s scary, scary stuff.
Katy
Well, lucky me, I’ve already gotten to hear it, and it is a very spooky take on it, so I think everybody will enjoy it. Prepare yourself. Matt suggests that if you can plan a night where you can turn off the lights and put your headphones on and really get immersed into the. To the story as if it’s happening all around you, that’s the ideal way.
Tiffany
It’s interesting. Just the last thing I want to say before we close is that that story has created a shorthand that we still use today. People still use that expression, the call is coming from inside the house to mean so many, you know, I mean, we use it in different situations, not just horror stories, but we use it to say, like, you know, when there’s somebody like an insider, like a whistleblower, you know, who’s coming forward. The call is coming from inside the house.
Katy
Yes. Yes.
Tiffany
It’s interesting how an urban legend would create that cultural language.
Katy
That’s so true. That’s a very good observation. And I will say that it is awfully fun because obviously you heard the rotary phone there of the dial. It’s set in the eighties, so it’s all set with all the old sounds of the phones that we all grew up with. Well, not we all, some of us. Many of us grew up with. And so it’s sort of fun to hear all that sound, too, which is basically around the time when maybe we would have started telling this story as kids trying to freak each other out on a weekend, you know, a trip or a walk or on Halloween night.
Tiffany
Or sitting around a campfire.
Katy
Exactly. All right, well, we’ll leave it there for now. The list of these stories that we talked about are in the show notes. You can also find a link there to support the show. Patreon.com slash The Bittersweet Life podcast definitely look for the episode we did about the scary things that happened to us that we would not be willing to share in normal, wide public ways. I can’t remember what the name of it is, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find it pretty easily, and we’ll talk to you soon. And until next time, this is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
Join us again. Bye!
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