Dust and Echoes

What if the things you trust most...the deep silence of the woods, the familiar voice of a loved one, a desperate cry for help in the dark...were all just bait?

For this special Halloween episode, Dust and Echoes presents a triptych of terror. Three Original Tales of Terror from author James Cawley that explore the unsettling truth that we are never truly alone, and that something ancient is learning how to get closer.

These storie...

Seeking total solitude in the vast, silent corners of the Utah desert, a traveler believes he's finally alone. But the darkness is listening...and waiting. 

When a relentless siege begins against the thin fabric of his small tent, he is forced to remember the ancient, whispered rules of the night:

Don't speak,

don't whistle,

and never, ever tell the darkness your name.

This is a terrifying psychological battle against a patient ...

Under the searing Utah sun, where the San Juan River cuts through stone and silence, a quiet frontier life is set ablaze. When a brutal betrayal rips her world apart, Emma Hawthorne rises from the ashes...scarred, armored, and guided by something far older than the church bells that once tried to tame her.

Redemption is not your typical western. It’s a vengean...

After the funeral and the estate sale Thomas stays behind to spend one final night alone in his childhood home.  To say goodbye before it's sold. 

The rooms are now empty. But something still moves in the silence.

As he clings to fading memories, something within the house begins to respond.

A slow-burning tale of guilt, loss, and the dark things that wait in places we think are safe.

Written and performed by the Author, James Cawl...

Some roads lead to what people would rather forget.

In the backroads of Indiana, the corn grows high enough to swallow the horizon. Mile after mile of silent rows, where sound dies and even daylight feels heavy. Farmers tell their children to stay clear of the fields after dark. Hunters avoid them altogether. And still, the missing persons reports grow.

This is the story of what Jenson and Susan McBride stumbled into one late summe...

Three hundred years after the fall of the old world, the survivors live not in cities… but inside their skeletons.

High above the vine-choked ruins of what once was Manhattan, the Stone Tree Clan endures among the rooftops guided by firelight, memory, and the stories passed down since the first flames were lit. Stories that remind them of the sins that burned the world… and of the one law that has kept them alive:

Stay close to the...

Some places will never let you go.

Jeff Bauer thought he escaped his hometown of Burley, Idaho. He traded wheat fields for Hollywood lights, childhood ghosts for film scores and awards. But a phone call from an old childhood friend drags him back into the nightmare that he thought he'd escaped. 

Developers are unearthing the farmland where two kids once hid things that they hoped would always stay buried. Now, Jeff must confront th...

Long before covered wagons creaked across endless sagebrush and steam locomotives chased the horizon...something ancient arrived from the cold stillness between distant galaxies, and it buried itself deep into the red clay of Shoshone land.  And there, it waited for the old man and the girl. 

Generations later, Dzoon awakens it. The visions it brings are unlike anything he’s ever known...not memories, but omens. Fire. Ruin. A ghost...

Dust & Echoes is a fiction podcast blending horror, mystery, adventure and suspense in original short story form. Each episode is a cinematic, immersive experience drawing you into tales of the strange, the forgotten, and the haunted parts of being human.

Written and performed by author James Cawley, Dust & Echoes delivers a modern campfire experience, one story at a time.

Unheard. Unpublished. Until now. 

New episodes ever...

When neurosurgeon Garrett Goodwin boards the Celestia Maris with his family, he’s looking for quiet. But in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle, the ocean gives him something else: silence. The kind that feels… alive and watching. As strange orbs appear on the horizon and a boy in the ship’s medical wing whispers in someone else’s voice, Garrett is drawn into a nightmare of reality that science can't explain.

The Bermuda Meridian is ...

He took the deckhand job with no experience and no questions asked. Just a one-way ticket to somewhere quiet. A chance to disappear.

After years of bad choices and time served, Joey’s ready to leave everything he broke behind. But the further the small fishing boat he gets from land, the more dread builds inside Joey's mind.  

What begins as a quiet escape drifts, in thick fog, into darker waters. And as the isolation deepens, Joey...

In a remote desert canyon lost to time, a weathered archaeologist uncovers the final thread of a mystery he’s chased his entire life, a forgotten Indigenous city hidden beneath the stone.

But when a mountain lion encounter leaves him broken, bleeding, and alone, survival becomes a brutal reckoning. Blending myth, memory, and a fire-lit confrontation with the past, Library in the Desert is a visceral tale about what we choose to rem...

Out in the wasteland, something still ticks, a briefcase unshackled from a dead chief’s wrist, armed with codes from the old world. Now, a Tribal sheriff must race through a post-apocalyptic Vegas to stop a warlord wearing a stolen face. This isn’t hope. This isn’t redemption.  This is Humanity’s last stand, and it rests on the back of one man. The Fifth Number is an original story by James Cawley, host of the Dust and Echoes...

The world ended with a sound. Low, strange, and final. Entire cities froze. The Silent remained: breathless, wide-eyed, deadly if you fall asleep. A gambler, a swimmer, a rock star, and a physicist race toward a rumored safe zone as the last signal counts down. But what they find isn’t safety, it’s the truth behind the end.

The Silent is a gripping survival thriller where sleep isn’t rest, it’s a death sentence. Make sure to SUBSC...