Kaidankai: Ghost, Supernatural, and Dark Short Fiction
The Kaidankai is a short fiction podcast featuring strange, supernatural, and dark stories across horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the uncanny. The Kaidankai presents original short stories from experienced and emerging authors that explore the unsettling edges of human experience. These tales can be touching, scary, gruesome, funny, and even heartwarming. From ghostly encounters and supernatural revenge to speculative futures and uncanny moments, the stories span genres while sharing a common atmosphere of mystery and unease. The Kaidankai is narrated with a focus on mood, pacing, and immersion. Whether a story leans toward horror, fantasy, science fiction, or something harder to define, each episode invites listeners to step into a world just slightly off-kilter.
Episodes
The Kaidankai Podcast features original short fiction exploring horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the strange.
...
Set against the mundanity of everyday life, "Negative Space" uses slow-dripping dread to expose a presence and its terrifying warning. Is there a way to counter the impending tragedy that is predicted?
Jennifer Peaslee is a dark fiction writer with an affinity for fairy tales and folklore. She lives in Atlanta with her cat, Trouble, and runs bleedingtypew...
Blending psychological horror with speculative dread, "Torn" uses the uncanny device of a doppelgänger to explore a world where the past, present, and future collide. The story asks whether foreknowledge is a gift—or just another form of cruelty.
Melissa Miles is a writer based in Aotearoa/New Zealand and...
Told with restraint and dark humor, What Comes Next explores the thin boundary between life and whatever waits beyond it. This is a story about endings--life, relationships, our existence in a world we belong to, and what happens if that wo...
This is not a story about monsters from the outside, but about what it means to inherit a world you didn’t choose. Told with brutal honesty and dark humor, it explores witchcraft as culture, survival, and generational oblig...
In this haunting story, justice is not delivered by courts or institutions, but by something older and wilder. La Loca is no innocent, but neither is she deserving of her fate. What follows is a reminder that some legends endure because they speak truths society would rather igno...
In “Polydactyl Aboard,” a retired sailor recalls his years at sea and the extraordinary ship’s cat whose talents went far beyond catching rats. The bond between sailor and animal becomes something deeper after death.
Set against the rhythms of life aboard ship, the story explores loyalty, instinct, and the quiet persistence of the past.
Thomas Koperwas is ...
Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS News Correspondent. His writing has appeared in more than thirty publications including the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Garfield Lake Review, Backchannels Journal, the San Antonio Review, the Bosphorus Review ...
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Linda
The Kaidankai Podcast features original short fiction exploring horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the strange.
New episodes every Wednesday.
Subscribe on Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Read the stories at kaidankaistories.com
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Have a story you'd like...
This story appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of SPOOKY Magazine.
Chad Gayle’s short speculative fiction has appeared in DreamForge Magazine, Inner Worlds, and Cosmic Horror Monthly.
You can read "Dead Man's Posse" at https://www.kaidankaistories.com.
Website: kaidankaistories.com
Please feel fre...
Bio: Daniel Stride has a lifelong love of literature in general, and speculative fiction in particular. He writes both short stories and poetry; his stories have appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Tales to Terrify Podcast, and Eternal Haunted Summer. His first novel, Wise Phuul, was published ...
Rick McQuiston is a 57-year-old horror fanatic with over 400 publications, including three novels. A new novel is due for publication in 2026. McQuiston spends his time working on new full-length and short stories.
You can read "The Patience Factor" at https://www.kaidankaistories.com.
Website: kaidankaistories.com
Please f...
Nathan Perrin (he/him/his) is a writer and Anabaptist pastor in Chicagoland. He holds an MA in Quaker Studies, and is a doctoral student studying Christian Community Development at Northern Seminary. His doctorate work centers on creating a writing program for nonprofits and churches to use to help under-resourced communities proce...
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over four hundred fifty stories and poems published so far, and nine books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of eight review editors, a...
Paul Walter is an Irish-born, recently retired illustrator, art teacher, and occasional author. He has had two children’s books published by Penguin; Grandpa’s Big Adventure, and Grandpa’s Space Adventure. His literary novel, Fin Rising, was originally published by Really Blue Books in 2012 and was re-published in 2022 by Púca...
A life-long resident of Melbourne, Australia, Rick is retired after 42 years in the transport industry. His stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies and podcasts and he has several books on Amazon. He hasn’t been owned by a cat for decades and must resort to talking to next door's white tom who sometimes condescends to talk b...
Helen Gallegos Evans has taught Los Angeles students for 24 years. She enjoys writing, photography, reading, walking, and engaging conversations. Her works have appeared in Gingerbread House Literary, Acentos Review, The Amaranth Review, Papercuts, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and elsewhere.
You can read "The Rodadora"...
Salem Savage-Cutcher strives to spark whimsy in the world. They write experimental and just plain weird fantasy, horror, and magical realism. They have previously been published in the Iris Review. You can find them at salemsavagecutcher@neocities.org.
You can read "Brainworm" at https...
David Corisis is a born-and-raised Idahoan and graduate of Gonzaga University. He lives the exciting life of a programmer by day and aspiring writer by night. When not sharing a keyboard with his cat, David enjoys running, brewing mead, playing Magic the Gathering, camping, and worrying about the ever-marching hand of time stealing e...
L.N. Hunter’s comic fantasy novel, ‘The Feather and the Lamp,’ sits alongside works in anthologies such as ‘The Monsters Next Door’ and ‘Best of British Science Fiction 2022’ as well as Short Édition’s ‘Short Circuit’ and the ‘Horrifying Tales of Wonder’ podcast. There have also been papers in the IEEE ‘Transacti...
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