The best podcasts where girls sit around talking about ghosts

‘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.

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). One thing has been true since the beginning of time: ghosts love girls, and girls love ghosts. Whether it’s a poltergeist flinging rocks at a sexually frustrated teen girl or a group of girls exchanging erotic energy by telling stories to chill and horrify, this is lady culture. As for the men? Well, I don’t know if you have seen any of those ghost-hunter television series, but there is always a middle-aged couple, the woman near frantic as she recounts stories of being terrified and hounded by some unseen force, and the man rolling his eyes and saying something like: ‘She always did let her imagination run away with her.’