Once In A Haunted House Summer 2026

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, 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