44 episodes listed below
Narrated horror tales, written and scored by one hand.
A horror anthology of narrated fiction from Moth Sanctuary Productions, with stories and music by Andrew Bate, read by Bate himself or by Chloe Gorman. Its settings run from a candlelit opium den and a cemetery at twilight to a broken-down theatre staging a mysterious new opera.
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Penny Dreadfuls from the Moth Sanctuary is a horror anthology from Moth Sanctuary Productions, and it is fiction in the plainest sense. Each episode is a narrated story with original music. Most open with a single line naming the series and go straight into the tale, and the credits wait for the end. Andrew Bate is the constant. He writes the stories and composes the music, and he reads several of them himself. Chloe Gorman reads others, among them 'A Dying Art' and the novella The Outsider, so one writer shapes the whole series while two voices carry it. The material changes a great deal from one story to the next. 'Despectus' reaches back to a Saxon army that abandoned plans for a hilltop fortress in the 7th century, then turns to Robert Dalton, a man whose name stood for conquering impossible odds, and a new home where someone has scratched the faces out of his treasured portraits. 'A Dying Art' is set around the broken-down Voychek Theatre and a new opera, The Fourth Key, whose composer, Hugh Shelley, vanishes after its celebrated debut. 'Superstitions' is built from folk belief: mirrors covered on stormy nights, salt thrown over the shoulder, magpies saluted, and a mother's warning never to walk home through the cemetery at twilight, when the veil is thinnest. Michael walks that route anyway. 'The Trade' follows Fergus, an opium dealer running a secret den beneath Delaney Street as the rain begins. 'Exiles' moves into the present tense and the first person, with a narrator far from their children, hunting knife at hand, watching the dark for a beast that walks on two legs. Then there is The Outsider, which its credits call a five-part Penny Dreadful novella. In 'THE OUTSIDER - PART 5 | Let the World Think Me Dead', a narrator is dragged through freezing water by a creature, then steps out of a grave into a churchyard to find the town torn apart by waves and a great fissure. That serial sits beside the one-off tales, so the feed offers both standalone stories and a multi-part arc to follow. What connects them is texture. The prose lingers on weather and light: mist above the headstones, crows calling from the trees, sickly candlelight, grey cloud stretching like an ocean. Dread gathers through accumulated detail. It suits a listener who wants horror as a told story, not a discussion of one.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants horror as narrated fiction rather than discussion, with dread built from mist, rain, candlelight and graveyards, and room for both one-off tales and a multi-part novella.
What sets it apart: Andrew Bate writes the stories and composes their music, so one writer shapes material as varied as creature hunts, folk superstition and a theatre mystery, with Chloe Gorman reading some episodes. A five-part novella runs alongside the standalone tales.
From Moth Sanctuary Productions’ creative team comes a series of terrifying short stories that explore all styles of the horror genre. Each eerie episode tells an all-new tale complete with an original score.
An abbey watches your window, and suddenly your excellent view feels like a terrible bargain.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A manor's ruined portraits lead toward a strange refuge below.
Despectus follows Robert Dalton as he tries to force the Piltor Hills into the shape of a grand manor, despite woods and a river difficult enough to have defeated earlier Saxon plans for a fortress.
A sunlit coastal room turns hostile as gothic fear gathers around an abbey, a churchyard, and one shaken narrator.
Solitary work has left one city woman frayed, and a seaside room that should offer rest begins to feel hostile. Bright weather and a clear view give way to a chill she cannot place, pulling her attention toward the abbey on the hill, the churchyard near the cliff, and the…
One story a night. Stay spooky.
Patient narration for long, strange nightmares.
Horror stories read aloud, then a spooky, scary goodnight.
Creepypastas read aloud, then judged on the spot.
Robert Dalton, a Crimean War general turned wealthy landowner, buys the Piltor Hills and builds the manor Despectus on the site where Saxons once tried and failed to raise a fortress.
Alicia Ford, an opera diva absent from the stage for nearly ten years, accepts the lead in Hugh Shelley’s mysterious new work, The Fourth Key.
“The Trade” follows Fergus, an aging opium dealer operating beneath Delaney Street as England’s laws begin shutting down his profession.
In "Exiles," a banished soldier enters a grey, rain-soaked village where young people disappear into a nearby forest.
I gripped the haft tightly in my palm, then drove the point into the creature's neck.
Chloe Gorman reads Andrew Bate's The Outsider, Part 4, "The Emissary," in which the narrator wakes after a dream of being "the storm" and finds her room key missing.
Chloe Gorman reads Part 2, 'Grave Concerns,' of Andrew Bate's Penny Dreadful novella 'The Outsider,' in which narrator Miss Dutton walks the dog Tatum up 200 steps to the churchyard to learn whether she really saw a figure there during the storm.
Moth Sanctuary Productions’ The Outsider, Part 1: Tempest Tossed, follows a London office worker sent by Mr Finneran to Wales Arch in Yorkshire after a breakdown marked by spiders under the skin and noises in her room.
A man describes his visits to a cozy inn and his observations of the landlord, setting the scene for a horror story.
A woman moves into an apartment above a mortuary and experiences eerie tranquility while unpacking in the dark.
A doctor in 1894 recounts his obsessive love for a wealthy woman, setting up a gothic horror tale.
A young woman narrates her tragic story of being buried alive at sea and becoming a local legend.