Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode, I wanted to help get you ready for Halloween.
Halloween is a big holiday here in the United States.
It is celebrated the 31st of October every year.
I actually did an entire episode about Halloween and how Americans celebrate Halloween here in the United States.
And I will leave an iCard here if you are watching on YouTube so you can check that out.
And last year, I also did an episode where I recommended movies that are Halloween based and that you could watch to help get you in the mood for Halloween.
This year, what I wanted to do was recommend Halloween podcasts.
Now, movies and podcasts are things that you can use to help gain input.
If you've listened to this podcast at all, you know that input is so important when you are trying to learn a language.
Input is reading and listening to that language so you can help develop your skills.
With podcasts and movies, you can listen to the content, you can listen to a native speaker, and you can absorb the grammatical structures, vocabulary, and cadence and pronunciation of the speaker.
Since you are either watching this podcast on YouTube or listening to it through some podcast app, I'm going to assume that you like listening to podcasts and you like listening to podcasts that can help you improve your English abilities.
So follow along with us and learn about these six scary podcasts that you can use to help improve your English.
A reminder to look in the description of this podcast episode and all of our previous podcast episodes so you can get the vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I use.
You can take these words and phrases, put them into your own vocabulary learning system, and start using them in conversation yourself.
And a little bit about the podcast before we begin.
These podcasts are scary podcasts.
That is the entire point.
They are dealing with the paranormal and or with horror.
So paranormal, what that means is it's referring to something that is outside of the normal day -to -day things.
This includes ghosts, psychics, UFOs, monsters such as Bigfoot or shapeshifters, something along those lines.
So something that has to do with the realm that we can't fully understand.
Some of these stories are also horror stories so they might involve some type of blood, some type of gut, someone getting hurt.
So if you don't like horror, if you don't like scary things, if you don't like stuff that's involving spooky, Halloween type themes, or if you are a person who likes to watch or listen to podcasts with children, just know this might not be the best list for you.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a little bit of a description about the podcast so you can learn about them.
I'll also leave links in the description of this episode so you can check out these websites.
I am not involved with any of these podcasts.
These are not my podcasts.
I'm not getting paid to talk about any of these podcasts.
Now I will say that these are podcasts made for native speakers.
It is not like this podcast where I will explain certain terms or difficult vocabulary and have a vocabulary list for you in the description.
I do that because this is a podcast for people who have an intermediate or advanced level of English who are trying to improve their English abilities.
The podcasts that I'm going to recommend are not.
These are for native speakers.
However, you can still use them to help you learn English.
Of course, you can get the input from them.
One of the great things about AI and the changes that have occurred in the last year is that if you are a person who listens to podcasts on Apple Podcasts, there is a transcript that is generated from the episodes.
If you listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, which majority of my listeners actually do, you can look at the transcript for this podcast episode and you can follow along with it.
You can also take the podcast and put it into Link.
I've talked about Link before.
It's one of my favorite websites, my favorite apps to learn a language on and I personally use it all the time.
I will leave an affiliate link in the description below for that.
I'll leave an iCard for a episode I did on reading that talks about Link.
I'll do another episode in the future all about that app because I think it's one of the greatest language learning apps.
But again, we don't have time to get into it today.
We're going to focus on the podcast.
But just know that transcript that Apple Podcasts does is really great.
I use Apple Podcasts.
I don't use Spotify or some of the other apps.
So I'm not sure if the other apps give you a transcript or if they don't.
If they do, if you know of an app that does give you a transcript like Apple does, please let me know.
I would love to know about that so I can help my students and give them further resources.
Now, let's actually start talking about these podcasts.
The first podcast that I'm going to talk about is a fiction podcast.
Fiction means that it is a story.
It is made up. It is not real.
Okay, this is a fiction podcast that is a horror themed podcast.
It focuses on fiction stories that are relatively short and are about horror themes and the paranormal.
Perfect if you're wanting to get ready for Halloween.
The podcast is called the No Sleep Podcast and it's an anthology series.
Anthology series means that each episode is unique.
You can listen to it on its own and it's not necessary to listen to all the episodes to get the full story.
However, there is some little bit of overlap.
There is a little bit of a general story, but you can just listen to an episode if you want and get the information and enjoy that one particular episode, that one particular story if you would like.
The reason I'm recommending the No Sleep Podcast is that it is a very old podcast.
It actually started in 2011.
I'm recording this in 2024.
So at the time of this recording, the podcast has been around for 13 years.
Because of that, there are hundreds of episodes that you can listen to.
So if you are interested in horror and the paranormal and listening to stories, this would be an amazing resource because there's so many episodes.
The episodes are also pretty high quality.
They use voice actors and they have background music and a lot of production value in the episodes.
So it's a very well done podcast.
The podcast started out of a Reddit form that was a No Sleep form, which had short stories and scary stories on the Reddit site.
And then one of the readers actually took that idea and decided to do a more dramatized version.
So dramatized means making it more dramatic and having those voice actors and those rich elements to add to the production value.
His name is Matt Hanson.
And in June of 2011, he launched the podcast.
Currently David Cummings is the host and the producer of the show.
And like I said, there are hundreds of episodes for you to go back and listen to, if this is the type of thing that you really like.
One thing about these episodes is that they are on the longer side.
Yes, it is a relatively short story.
It's not a full novel that would take hours and hours to do an audio book for, but the episodes are a little bit longer.
They're usually over an hour in length.
That's just a note.
So if you are the type of person who likes longer stories or likes podcasts that are an hour or more, this could be a great option.
But if you're someone who likes shorter episodes, maybe this isn't the best choice for you.
The next podcast on our list is very similar to the No Sleep podcast.
It is also a fictional podcast that focuses on horror stories.
And it is the Magnus archives podcast.
Just like the No Sleep podcast, it is an anthology series.
So you have these individual episodes, maybe a bit of a storyline overall, but you can listen to them individually.
And you don't have to start at the very beginning.
The podcast is a weekly horror podcast.
So you get new episodes each week.
And it is another podcast that has been around for a while.
This podcast actually has 200 episodes right now.
So if you end up liking this podcast, you have a lot of material that you could use to help improve your English.
It is similar to the No Sleep podcast in that it is a fictional or podcast.
So again, these stories are made up, they're fiction.
However, unlike the No Sleep podcast, the episodes for the Magnus archives are shorter.
These podcast episodes tend to be about 25 to 30 minutes in length.
That might be good if you have a shorter attention span, or if your English level isn't as high.
An hour might be really difficult if you're not able to follow the story, but 25 minutes to 30 minutes might be a lot more manageable.
Also, if you're busy, or if you just don't have a full hour to give to a podcast, this could be a great option because again, you are getting that horror short story type podcast, but just in a smaller timeframe because the episodes are usually 30 minutes or less.
Now, those podcasts were fictional podcasts, stories that were written, created and produced in podcast form.
There are also some podcast spooky podcasts that aren't nonfiction.
These are stories that people are telling about experiences that they had with the paranormal.
The first podcast on our list for this category is called Real Life Ghost Stories.
Real Life Ghost Stories is hosted by Emma and Dan, and it is a podcast where listeners submit their stories about what they experienced.
The stories are edited, so they have a little bit more impact.
They're a little bit more clear about what the person is trying to say happened, and then Emma reads those stories so you get to hear about the person's experience.
These stories cover anything from hauntings to ghost stories, death, aliens, psychics, pretty much everything that has to do with the paranormal.
The nice thing about this podcast is that they have new episodes three times a week.
There are new episodes every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.
As someone who has a once a week podcast, I can tell you three times a week is a lot of work, so Emma and Dan put a lot of work into their show, but that also means that you have a lot of episodes if you are interested and if you enjoy this podcast.
At the time of recording this, there are over 850 episodes of the Real Life Ghost Stories podcast.
There's a lot of episodes.
In general, the podcast episodes really vary in length.
There's some that are short as 18 minutes.
There's some that are over two and a half hours, so it really just depends.
You can look at the podcast list, find an episode that has a good amount of time for you.
Like I said, if you like something short, you can find episodes that are only 18 minutes long, or if you really like long episodes, you can find ones that are over two hours.
Look at the list, see what's a good amount of time for you, and try it out.
See if you like this one.
Now our next podcast recommendation is similar in that it is investigating real life events, and the difference here, I would say, is that this is going to be our British podcast recommendation.
It is called Uncanny.
I wanted to include this podcast because, like I said, it uses British English, which is different from the English that I speak, and also because it's produced by the BBC.
The BBC is a major company.
They have resources.
They have professionals who know how to produce content, so the quality of the episodes is pretty good.
I like listening to BBC podcasts just in general because of the production value, because of the high quality aspect of the episodes.
So production value just means how good the episodes are produced, how clean it sounds, what the sound quality and the music mix is like.
The last episode came out in July, and overall right now there are 64 episodes of the Uncanny podcast.
Not as many as some of the other shows that we've talked about, but still a good amount if this is something that you're interested in listening to.
Overall the episode lengths are about a half hour long, so if a half hour is a good amount of time for you, and if you like investigating paranormal things, this could be a great option.
Now the last two on our list are two that are personally some of my favorite podcasts, podcasts that I really enjoy listening to.
The first one that we're going to talk about is You Can See Me in the Dark.
You Can See Me in the Dark is a podcast that is hosted by Melissa and Nathan, and they are the hosts but they're not usually the main people who are talking.
So they speak at the beginning of the episode and at the end of the episode, but the majority of the episode is an interview with someone, or actually someone actually telling their story themselves.
This means that someone who has experienced a paranormal event actually tells you about that event, where they were, what happened, what their feelings were when the event happened.
Because of this you get a wide variety of different people talking.
You get a wide variety of accents.
There's people who have different dialects, different accents when they're talking, and you get a wide range of events, a bunch of different experiences from different people.
That's one of the reasons why I like it.
I find it more interesting when someone is telling their own story about what they experienced and that's one of the reasons why I listen to it.
There are currently 73 episodes of the podcast.
They're usually about 20 to 40 minutes long.
It depends on the person and how many events they had, how many experiences they had, and how much they have really to say about what occurred to them.
So it kind of depends, but the lengths are about 20 minutes to about 40 minutes.
There might be some that are longer, again some that might be shorter, but around that in general.
One thing I will say about the podcast is it only comes out once a month, so it's not as frequent as some of the other ones that we've talked about, but still it has 64 episodes so if you would like to go back you can go back and listen to the previous episodes.
64 is still a pretty good number if you're interested in going back and listening to those.
And the last podcast is my personal favorite out of all these spooky podcasts that we've talked about and it is called Spooked.
So you might have heard me say spooky a lot already and the name of this podcast is Spooked.
So if you're not sure if you don't really know what that means, spooky just is another way of saying scary.
You hear that word a lot when it comes to October when people are talking about Halloween and also when they're talking about the paranormal.
Spooked is produced by NPR which is National Public Radio.
NPR like the BBC is a professional organization and they're really good at producing podcasts.
They have professionals working for them.
They have high production value and that's the reason really why I started listening to NPR podcasts and why I enjoy Spooked so much.
Spooked is very similar to You Can See Me in the Dark in that the episode starts and ends with the host.
The host's name is Glenn Washington.
He starts the episode with a kind of little spooky scary mini story that's a few minutes long.
He ends the episode wrapping up and talking about something about the podcast but the majority of the time is someone telling you their story, saying what happened, what they experienced.
Very similar to You Can See Me in the Dark.
You're going to get a wide range of accents.
There's also people who are from different countries and that they use an interpreter to tell their story in English.
So the stories are really based anywhere around the world from Japan to Colombia to the United States really anywhere.
Again the podcast the main part of the podcast episode is someone telling you what they experienced what their story was.
Overall in length I would say they're about 25 to 40 minutes.
Again it depends on whoever is telling the story and what the story is, how much time they need to tell their story.
So some might be a little bit shorter, some might be a little bit longer.
There are 172 episodes currently on Apple Podcasts for the Spooked podcast and it releases every week.
So every Friday they do have a new episode that you can enjoy and that you can listen to.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you heard about some particular podcast that you found interesting and might want to listen to.
Again I think it's very important to try to get as much input as possible.
You can listen to the podcast, you can also read the transcript that goes along with the audio, and both of those things are great sources of input for you to listen to, to read, and to help improve your overall English abilities.
A reminder to look in the description for the links to all of these podcasts, to the vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I used in this episode.
That way you can take those words and phrases and start learning them and hopefully start using them in conversation yourself.
If you liked this episode, if you found these recommendations interesting, please let me know.
If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment.
Tell me if you have listened to any of these podcasts or if you listen to other spooky or scary podcasts that you would recommend.
You can also let me know if you just liked getting these recommendations.
There's a lot of different podcasts that I could recommend so let me know if you want more episodes like this.
I could do many more but I don't know if you want me to unless you let me know.
If this podcast is helping you with your English abilities overall, please consider leaving as a rating on whatever app you are using to listen to this podcast on.
You can also tell a friend or tell a family member, tell someone who is trying to learn English how this podcast is helping you.
That way we can reach a larger audience and continue to grow the show.
I really appreciate all of your support because we have grown so much over the past year and I just want to thank you for all of the support that you have given my little podcast that's here to help teach English.
A reminder that you can follow us on social media at Learn English Pod.
The website is learnenglishpod .com and remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss our next episode when it comes out next week.
Until then, keep learning English!
