How Short Can a Haunting Be?

What if the scariest stories are the ones that end a beat too soon? We lean into the art of short hauntings—tight, vivid tales that land in your head and refuse to leave—guided by listener emails, a few razor‑sharp micro‑stories of our own, and a fresh brush with a restless room upstairs from a haunted oyster bar. A phone answers itself from a nightstand across town. A “mother” ghost leaves cups by the bed—until an old headline flips kindness into menace. A chair inches toward the center of the room, and a single photo rewrites a childhood.

We unpack why brevity amplifies dread: how one concrete image, one sound you can’t unhear, and one final turn can keep a mind spiraling long after the audio stops. You’ll hear the craft behind near one‑liners—shifting a comforting detail by time or place, letting a mirror become a door, and cutting every extra word so the last line opens like a trapdoor. We also talk shop about our role: not as ghost hunters, but as storytellers who report the paranormal as we find it, using the most honest instruments we have—memory, language, and the body’s alarm bells.

The field notes get personal upstairs in the music room: hair rising in unison, a quiet exit that says everything, and a staff warning about a top‑hat figure who dislikes perceptive people. It’s a reminder that archetypes endure for a reason, and that the quickest scares can be the ones that follow you home, asking you to check the mirror, the nightstand, and the top of the stairs one more time. Listen for the stories; stay for the questions they leave behind. If a line or two gave you chills, subscribe, share with a friend who loves the uncanny, and send us your tightest ghost or paranormal story—we’re ready to read it on air.

Chapters

• 0:02 Pivot to Short Ghost Stories
• 1:10 The Nightstand Phone Mystery
• 2:08 Mother, Poisoned Milk, and the Chair
• 4:18 Why Short Scares Work
• 5:16 Our One‑Line Hauntings
• 6:19 Not a Ghost Hunter, a Storyteller
• 7:52 The Haunted Oyster Bar Visit
• 10:05 The Top Hat Warning and Sign‑Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Good evening, everybody. It's Dr. G Spirit Tales and Magic. Hope everyone is doing great. It's working on 6 30 in Phoenix. Cassandra and I have had a pretty busy day. We were at a couple of haunted restaurants picking up some stories and reading a lot of emails. The episode for tonight, I'm going to change because of a lot of emails from some fans. The super short ghost stories that we mentioned yesterday. Now I don't know if they actually made these or it's something they heard. Is it an urban legend? That sort of thing. But the email says, hey Doc, please don't read my name. My wife told me that I shouldn't put this up. Okay, Jeff, I'll save you. But anyway, I've known this guy for a very long time. He's pretty cool. She is too. So one of my favorite short ghost stories goes like this. Last night, a friend rushed me out of the house to catch the opening act at a local bar's music night. You know, after a few drinks, I realized my phone wasn't in my pocket. I checked the table we were sitting at, I checked the bar, the bathrooms, and after no luck, I used my friend's phone to call mine. After two rings, someone answers, gave out a low, raspy giggle, and hung up. They didn't answer again. I went on with my night, I eventually gave it up as a lost cause, and I headed for home. To find my phone lay on my nightstand right where I left it. Different listener sends this one. When my sister Betsy and I were kids, our family lived for a while in a charming old farmhouse. We loved exploring its dusty corners and climbing the apple tree in the backyard, but our favorite thing was the ghost. We called her mother because she seemed so kind and even nurturing. Some mornings Betsy and I would wake up, and in each of our nightstands we'd find a cup that hadn't been there the night before. It's as if mother had left them there, worried that we'd get thirsty during the night. She just wanted to take care of us. Among the home's original furnishings was an antique wooden chair, which we kept against the back of the wall in the living room. Whenever we were preoccupied watching TV or perhaps playing a game, mother would inch that chair forward across the room, toward us. Sometimes she'd manage to move it all the way to the center of the room. We always felt sad pulling it back against the wall. We said, you know, mother just wanted to be near us. Years later, long after we had moved out of the farmhouse, I found an old newspaper article about the farmhouse's original occupant. A widow. She had murdered two of her children by giving them each a cup of poisoned milk before bed. Then she hung herself. The article included a photo of the farmhouse's living room and a woman's body hanging from the beam. Did it get colder in here or is it just me? So those are a couple of short stories. And a lot of those short stories are designed to leave an impression. There's an old adage in show business, always leave them wanting more. Some of those kind of things are engineered to get in your head where my creepy little man with the top hat lives. And of course, we want to ask you what's your short ghost story? How long does a ghost story have to be? We discussed that a little bit yesterday. Sometimes they don't have to be very long at all. There was I can't remember what Metro it was. I want to say it was New York. They wanted to put together something spooky. So they hired some folks to come up with one or two or three-lined ghost stories. Cassandra and I submitted a couple of stories to that project. One of them got picked, one of them didn't. There's nothing like the laughter of a baby. Unless it's 1 a.m. And you're home alone. Mummy, the man at the top of the stairs said you should leave. I woke up to hear knocking on the glass. At first, I thought someone was tapping on the window. Until I realized it was coming from the mirror. So those are a couple of not one-liners, but pretty close ghost stories. Don't forget you can send your ghost stories to us. We'd love to hear them. And again, it doesn't have to be a ghost story, it can be a paranormal story. Tomorrow's is going to be a little more lengthy project that several of us have worked on. When I say us, I say people that either research the paranormal or or are involved in the paranormal in some way. And we always clarify some things that had a listener in Russia who asked, How long have you been a ghost hunter? I'm not. I'm not a ghost hunter. I am a storytelling person. I do storytelling magic and I do this podcast, and I kind of report the paranormal as I see it. I've been involved with the paranormal a very long time. I have gone on some ghost hunts. I think Cassander and I still own a couple of pieces of equipment, one of which was uh the meter that we used in the meat hangers room. And while we're talking about that particular room, if you remember in that podcast, that's the second most haunted room in the hotel. A friend of mine that I haven't seen for a long time met us today in a haunted oyster bar. There's uh an upstairs, there's a music room and what they call the blue room. They call it that because it's obviously all done in blue. The rooms are small. You can get maybe five to ten people in the rooms. Um, if you really pack them in tight, maybe twelve. So we have lunch, we talk about a couple of projects that you're gonna find about out about here pretty soon. And we go upstairs because I had not seen the rooms, been in there many, many times. And one of the waitresses comes over and she says, Hey Doc, I heard your podcast last night. It was great. Have you ever been up there and seen those rooms? I'm like, No, I haven't. You should go up there. She was just, you can't see the way up from here. Here's how you get to it. So she explains it. And Cassandra and I, and this gentleman and his wife went up to the rooms. She said, Be very careful. The last person that went up there got pushed down the stairs. And the stairs are this is a very old building. The stairs are very nurture narrow. There's a couple of pretty steep curves and things like that. We get up there. I really don't feel much of anything in the blue room, and then we go into the music room. Yeah, all the hair on the back of my neck and on my arms stood straight up. Just as I was debating whether I should say anything about it or not, I look over and my friend's got on a really short sleeve shirt. I'm wearing a suit. I look at his arms, Harry's arms is standing straight up, and his wife says nothing, turns around, and quickly, but with a sure footing, gets down the stairs and out the door. She hits the exit door, she's gone. So we go down, and I had said to the waitress that books the room for rentals, I said, we're gonna go ahead and take this for one night and do a show in it. She's I don't know about that. I don't know if I want you to do that. Why's that? What she said next I can barely believe. One of the ghosts up there is a guy in a top hat. And uh he doesn't like people who are perceptive. That guy on a top hat. Go figure. Send me your ghost stories, send me your paranormal stories. Thank you, all of you, so much for listening and sharing. Follow us. The algorithm has to grow so that the audience can grow. We always say these two things. There is indeed a world unseen. It's a world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and then, for whatever the reason, we catch a glimpse of it, and the dead get in. And the other thing when you're sitting around and you don't have anything to do, tell a ghost story. It's good for ya. We'll talk tomorrow. Good night from Phoenix.