PRINT Once In A Haunted House Folk Horror Edition

Once in a Haunted House — Volume 2: Folk Horror

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast Zine — Summer 2026

The second issue of Once in a Haunted House takes its theme from the tradition that understands landscape not as backdrop but as protagonist. Folk horror at its best is not about monsters or the supernatural as a violation of natural law. It is about the thinning of the membrane between people and the land — the moment a place stops being scenery and reasserts itself as something older, and less indifferent, than we had assumed.

The ten stories and essays in this issue take that idea seriously. A woman alone in a house makes a quiet pact with a mouse, and something shifts in the arrangement. A walker on an ancient chalk barrow finds the map no longer quite describes where he is. A fossil collector on a remote shoreline brings something home that shouldn’t have come. An apartment building holds its tenants closer than they know. A villa in an English village carries the weight of what happened there. A European street at night is subtly, persistently wrong. The dead take many forms; some of them help.

Alongside the fiction, Jasper LeStrange, the zine’s film critic reviews folk horror on screen, and the editor reflects on why the genre keeps returning to the same question: what does it mean to be a self, sealed inside your own skin, walking through a world that remembers everything?

Contents:

• The Mouse — Monica McGuinness

• Blackthorn Barrow — Josh Maybrook

• Ghost of a Fossil — C. P. Webster

• Apartment 31 — S. Reddy

• The Wood on the Eston Hills - A True Account — Marc Curry

• At Hobchalk Villa — J. L. Worrad

• In Salesianergasse — David Ashley Kilvington

• Psychopomps — Amelia M. Smith

• The Peace of the Pink Rose — Annie Smith

• Upper and Lower Crust in the Middle World — Owain Ddraig

• The Lady of Russell Farm — R. A. Sunter

• Film reviews: The Cutting Room with Jasper L’Estrange