DeepNerd Media
163 episodes listed below
Appalachian gothic, told by firelight.
Old Gods of Appalachia tells formal, narrated horror stories set in an Alternate Appalachia of sanatorium corridors, grave doors, and old powers. Its recent episodes move with grave patience, letting institutional routine and family lore curdle into supernatural dread.
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Old Gods of Appalachia is supernatural horror rooted in an Alternate Appalachia where folklore, institutional records, family memory, and older hungers keep speaking from beneath ordinary life. The show moves slowly by design. A hallway, a security desk, a staff locker room, or a cold grave can hold an entire history before anything openly impossible occurs. Recent episodes return to Woodhaven Sanatorium, a place of private rooms, difficult patients, watchful staff, and more trouble than its managers can afford. Wally Gentry’s last shift and Marjorie Robinson’s weary authority place human routine against a background that is already starting to rot at the edges. The dead are not quiet here. Regina Fletcher wakes in her own grave, still learning the protocols of an afterlife that offers no simple comfort and no pearly certainty. The old black door becomes one of the show’s most chilling images because it is plain, solid, and patient. It waits. The series also follows darker lessons around Daughter Dooley, Shirley, ghosts, spectral hunger, and the cost of pledging oneself to powers that do not share human ideas of safety. The Black Stag casts a long shadow. Its followers, failed rituals, and ruined places of worship give the story a cultic brutality that feels both cosmic and local. Yet the show’s strongest effect is not gore or spectacle. It is the sense that every practical detail has been touched by something older: an invitation card, an elevator button, a hospital transfer, a child held too close. Songs and refrains mark the passage between chapters, returning the listener to the fireside frame without breaking the spell. The prose is formal, regional, and deliberately weighted. Dialogue brings flashes of dry humor and mountain plainspokenness, but the dominant mode is grave narration. Old Gods of Appalachia suits horror fans who prefer atmosphere, mythology, and moral consequence to fast scares. It is patient fiction with teeth.
Made for: For listeners who like supernatural horror, literary narration, regional folklore, and dread that gathers by inches. It especially suits fans of haunted institutions, old rituals, and stories where the dead still have business.
What sets it apart: Its strength is the union of formal gothic narration with concrete Appalachian texture: hospital shifts, church language, family lessons, folk warnings, and names that feel lived-in. Similar horror anthologies may chase the shock; this one lets the room darken first.
In the mountains of central Appalachia, blood runs as deep as these hollers and just as dark. Since before our kind knew these hills, hearts of unknowable hunger and madness have slumbered beneath them. These are the darkest mountains in the world. How dare we think we can break the skin of a god and dig out its heart without bringing forth blood and darkness? Old Gods of Appalachia is a horror-anthology podcast set in the shadows of an Alternate Appalachia, a place where digging too deep into the mines was just the first mistake.To learn more about Old...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
A connected horror anthology where haunted places, inherited duties, and ravenous supernatural powers keep reshaping one another.
Old Gods of Appalachia builds horror from corrupted land, inherited knowledge, restless dead, and powers that treat human bodies as raw material.
An industrial flamethrower meets mutant kudzu, and your gardening standards suddenly seem embarrassingly modest.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Jewels, blank faces, and a descent that turns courtesy into dread.
Tony enters a room where the women are dressed in jewels and the black-suited security men all seem oddly interchangeable. That careful crowd detail does the work: his unease builds in small steps, the invitation is checked with unsettling thoroughness, and the man who takes him…
A fantasy handoff into Antarctic mystery.
Old Gods of Appalachia spends its week off between arcs setting up The Harbingers, a modern fantasy podcast about the first two real magicians of the modern age and the way power starts tilting the world around them.
Revelation, spectral doctrine, and a bedside haunting give the episode its cold edge.
Episode 95, The Second Death, opens in Revelation with Daughter Dooley and a memory that will not settle. She has already seen ghosts, so the dead at Woodhaven Sanatorium land less as a surprise than as a chill that keeps widening around her.
A quiet night at Woodhaven Sanatorium gives way to cult violence, revenge, and mounting dread.
Woodhaven Sanatorium opens in near silence, with overnight shifts in a facility that has grown quieter as its population dwindles, then turns that stillness into something much uglier.
A sanatorium story where care, class strain, and dread crowd the same narrow hallway.
Woodhaven Sanatorium, 1928, is all pressure and no slack. Wally Gentry, neat in his white slacks and shirt, is on his last shift, while Marjorie Robinson tries to keep the private wing from becoming one more expense the place cannot carry.
A patient, atmospheric chapter where Troy's offer of power gives way to the haunted Mercury Theater.
Episode 89 opens with a blunt exchange: Troy offers power to a ragged crew, and the scene makes that offer feel physical, almost hungry. From there, the story shifts to the Mercury Theater, which comes across as shabby and haunted in Market Square.
A backwoods cleanup turns into a steady, uneasy look at memory, land, and what keeps taking root.
Chip's brush-clearing work gives the episode its best texture. Garlic mustard, kudzu, the endoskeleton flamethrower, the old barn, and the fence line on Cumberland Valley Authority land keep the scene grounded in place.
A promotion inside the CVA becomes a descent into polished, bureaucratic horror.
Old Gods of Appalachia follows Vincent Albright, a legal department veteran at the Cumberland Valley Authority, as a long-awaited promotion pulls him into classified acquisitions and field training.
Serialized pulp radio drama: Red Panda battles android-army supervillain Captain Clockwork in 1930s Toronto.
Deborah Treisman and a guest writer read and dissect one archival short story monthly.
Mike Muncer and a different guest dissect two horror films per episode, by subgenre.
Tony sits in a room full of jeweled women and men in black suits, trying to read a gathering that feels too formal and just a little rotten.
Magic is real.
A horror story about Regina Fletcher waking in her grave and confronting an unexpected, terrifying afterlife.
Old Gods of Appalachia Episode 95, "The Second Death," opens with a Revelation 20 quotation about death, hell, and a second death, then shifts to Daughter Dooley meeting three ghosts at Woodhaven Sanatorium.
Old Gods of Appalachia Episode 94, “Phantoms in the Early Dark,” follows Nurse Phyllis Moore at Woodhaven Sanatorium and Daughter Dooley under the control of a “dread child.” Phyllis confronts unseen shadows in room 16, while the story cuts to Dooley at Butler Ridge in Johnson County, Tennessee, and later at the ruins of New Golgotha.
Woodhaven Sanatorium, 1928.
This episode is a promotional segment encouraging listeners to support the horror anthology podcast Old Gods of Appalachia through one-time donations via ACAST.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, blending folklore and cosmic horror.
A man writes a farewell letter to his wife before undertaking a dark mission to preserve family oaths and avenge his son's death in an alternate Appalachia.
A nurse's log documents the strange case of a patient in a sanatorium who causes furniture to be thrown about while remaining asleep.
A foreman reports strange occurrences at a construction site after a shipment of limestone arrives with unsettling markings.
A birthday episode of Old Gods of Appalachia, a horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a special story for listeners.
A horror anthology episode set in Appalachia where a teenage girl finds temporary escape from her anxieties while attending a music performance in Knoxville.
Troy brings hunger into the room.
This episode follows Miranda Coffey, a new vampire trapped in a van, as she reflects on her fledgling immortal existence and grim circumstances.
In 1991 Araminta, Tennessee, Hummingbird Bonite secretly teaches self-defense classes in a church basement while the congregation worships above, embodying her 'by any means necessary' philosophy.
In 1991 Virginia, a mother confronts her daughter and cousin about a flyer from a hidden record store rumored to attract devil-worshippers and druggies.
This episode of the horror anthology podcast Old Gods of Appalachia follows tow truck driver Cody Blevins on a long, exhausting day of work in Baker's Gap, Tennessee in 1991.
Chip has had enough.
Vincent Albright was very good at his job.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a story about a mysterious stranger encountered by two friends.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a dark narrative about a family traveling a mysterious road.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a story about a man facing an army of the dead.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where ancient gods and dark forces lurk beneath the mountains.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a supernatural entity recounting a deal with a man named Trevor Gilbert.
A horror anthology set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a courtroom scene with mythical creatures like Taily-Po.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring dark folklore and supernatural elements.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a trial scene with supernatural elements.
A witness testifies in a supernatural trial beneath Pennsylvania mountains in an alternate Appalachia.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where ancient gods and dark forces lurk beneath the mountains.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a story about a gathering to decide the fate of a man named Jack, with a woman revealing a disturbing use of wolf grease.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a courtroom scene in an underground chamber.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring dark folklore and supernatural tales.
A horror anthology podcast set in an alternate Appalachia, featuring a man trapped in a dark place calling out for help.