Jessa Crispin

The best podcasts where girls sit around talking about ghosts

Dark House and American Hauntings both pay careful attention to the wider context of ghost stories, which are often about ethics

Ramon Novarro's spirit is said to be in residence at his former Hollywood hillside home, which was also the site of his murder in 1968. Image: Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images 
issue 16 October 2021

‘I’ve actually seen ghosts.’ This statement comes less than ten minutes into the first episode of Dark House, a limited-series podcast about ghosts, houses and interior decoration from House Beautiful magazine. And this is the moment, I assume, a certain number of people roll their eyes and switch over to the next podcast in their queue.

Humans are fascinated by ghosts. We tell the stories, we take the city tours of hauntings when we travel, we see all the films in the Conjuring and Insidious series. But that’s a bit different from seeing real ghosts, which is just someone taking things too far. It was a shadow, or a dream, or a trick of the light, or a flaw with the camera. There’s something very unserious about a person who can see ghosts, so when co-host Alyssa Florentino comes out and says she’s seen ghosts in her house since she was a child, I kind of admired her moxie.

Few of the many podcasts about ghosts spend as much time as I would like on the furnishings

There are plenty of podcasts about girls sitting around talking about ghosts, some good (Two Girls One Ghost) and others not so good (oh my god, all of the others).

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