It's Only a Podcast - A Horror Movie Review Show · Christian Estabrook and Ian Nichols

Top 25 Haunted Houses

·1 hr 22 min·1 clip

The Winchester mystery house has staircases leading nowhere and doors opening to walls.

Christian Estabrook opens the bonus episode as the merchant of menace. With Ian Nichols beside him, he starts a ranking of haunted houses by asking about the scariest places they've ever lived, and the conversation quickly drifts into bedbugs, shootings, mice, rats, and the kind of real-life horror that sticks with you. Christian brings up the family rental that was so packed with mice that his dad would mow the yard in a hurry and try to catch rats at the same time, which turns a childhood memory into one of the episode's strangest and funniest stories. The mouse story hangs around. He also says a mouse once crawled across his face in a later house, and that detail gives the ranking a physical, slightly haunted texture before the show swings back toward movie mansions and cursed floor plans. Then the list gets moving. The hosts focus on houses that feel hostile before anyone opens the front door, using blunt language and a lot of laughter to make the architecture feel like a character that is already trying to hurt people. The stairs matter most. One house lands high on the list because the stairs are terrifying, take out multiple characters, and seem to be the only practical route through the place, while the same stretch of memory also brings up the staircase catching fire and people digging into the floor. It is a mean house. They describe its exterior as boxy, art deco, gloomy, and lonely, a big building that still looks isolated enough to warn people away. Number 10 brings glass. When they get to the 2001 remake of 13 Ghosts, the house becomes a sharp, futuristic object with an almost star-like silhouette, all angles and windows and exposed structure. It is all edges. Inside, the glass keeps going, turning walls and floors into part of the threat and making the whole place feel like a transparent trap instead of a home. The bit stays loose. Even so, the hosts keep coming back to clear opinions, ranking the houses with enough confidence that the jokes never bury the point: these places are memorable because they make the audience feel trapped in the layout. The show keeps moving. After a plug for The Third Act Podcast, they close with their usual mock-ominous sign-off and the reminder that a house is not a home if there are no demons there.

As heard by us

A haunted-house ranking that makes horror architecture feel vivid, funny, and dangerous.

This bonus episode turns a haunted-house ranking into something both funny and unsettling, using horror architecture as a running joke and a genuine source of dread.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want haunted-house rankings that turn stairs, glass, and a drab art-deco shell into punch lines.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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