Glynn Washington's tips for telling a truly scary story

What is it about a good scary story that creeps in our subconscious and keeps us awake at night? Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked is a podcast that shares deeply spooky tales. Now that the show is about to wrap up its second season, host Glenn Washington joined Podcast Playlist's Lindsay Michael from his underground studio in Oakland, California, to share his take on what makes scary stories so compelling. 

LINDSAY MICHAEL: What made you interested in producing a podcast that featured scary stories? 

GLYNN WASHINGTON: Well it's one of those things that we kind of accidentally slipped into. Every year we did a Halloween special and the idea was let's treat the stories of the supernatural, stories of the dark, the eerie, the unexplained, the parapsychology-type stories, let's treat them the same way we treat the other stories that we do on Snap Judgment. We take people at face value, and that was the basic idea behind the show, and it ended up being really really popular every year. People kept asking us, "Give us more, give us more, give us more." We decided we had launch a podcast that featured just that type of story. 

LINDSAY: So it was really kind of an audience-driven project.

GLYNN: It was. I mean some of us like it more than others here at Snap Judgment Studios but I've always loved these stories. I've loved these stories because of the sort of dichotomy even with myself. I consider myself to be a really scientific evidence-based person. But I've seen some things that I can't explain. 

LINDSAY: What is it do you think that appeals — because It's obviously not just you. What is it about the unexplained that you think we're all so attracted to?

To tell these unexplained stories...they get to the larger question of who we are and why we're here. Where are we going after we leave here?- Glynn Washington, host of Snap Judgment and Spooked

GLYNN: To tell these unexplained stories...they get to the larger question of who we are and why we're here. Where are we going after we leave here? "Is there no balm in Gilead," as Poe says.

But what are we doing here? What's important here? What remnant do we leave behind? What do we owe the next generation? Who are we, really? What are we when we strip down? What do we really believe, when everyone else goes away? It gets at all those big questions in a way that, oftentimes, it's really hard to do in another context. So the stories end up meaning something and we're always looking for meaning.

LINDSAY: There's also something weird and magical about hearing these stories in an audio format. There's something about hearing somebody tell a scary story that happened to them that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. What do you think it is about hearing these stories in audio that's so appealing?

GLYNN: Well I think the big thing is these aren't actors. We're asking real people what really happened to them and there's no special effects. There's no sound magic. We're just saying what went down. You hear it sometimes in their voice. The best, the very, very best eerie stories always start off with someone saying, "You know I didn't really want to tell anybody this story. But..."

LINDSAY: Right. 

GLYNN: "But, I have to get this off my chest. This is my truth. And for whatever reason I'm just going to go ahead and tell you what happened to me." That reluctant storyteller. What you don't oftentimes want is the person coming in saying, "I saw a [ghost] coming up from the sky and it was terrible with the thunder and the lightning." Stuff like that, it's like...man. Just like, you know just, you need to go. I just love when you hear the emotion in these storytellers' voices...this is not like watching a horror movie on TV. We can think up all kinds of scary things that might scare us. But real stories, real people. "This really happened to me." Shhhhhhh. You better back up. 

LINDSAY: Oftentimes when I listen to the show, [the story] is from somebody who seems really reluctant to share their stories. How do you find them?

GLYNN: Well, we ask people! Laughs. You know most people, most families, there's somebody who's got a story somewhere. "You better go talk to Jimmy or Susan. I don't know if Susan's gonna tell you. But maybe I'll call for you and see if she'll speak." The idea that we are not...I'm not here to make fun of you. I'm not here to point fingers. I genuinely want to know what happened. I think, it gives people the license and the freedom to maybe get something off their chest that they didn't know that they wanted to tell.

LINDSAY: How do you fact check these stories — or do you just let people express their own truth? How do you approach the balance between telling a story that's true and letting someone just express what happened to them? 

GLYNN: You know for these stories, we don't want to have liars on our show. That doesn't do anybody any good. So yes, we do do basic fact checking, like time and place and things of that nature. In the same way we do with anything else. I can't feature someone who was an obvious liar. I do have to say, you know, most of the stories that we tell it's not fact checkable in the same way that a news story might be.

But this is kind of interesting. Last season we did a story. It's really one of my favourite stories. It's called Time Warp Saloon, and it's about a woman's encounter in a bar in Wisconsin with a mural that she thinks is mirroring the real life situation around her. And she tells this story and it's a wonderful story. And so, a few months later I started getting e-mails and pictures of people who tracked down that story who, I don't know, triangulated out through the Internet or something like that. [They] went and found the saloon and took pictures of themselves in front of the very same mural that she was speaking of. It was great seeing these pictures. It was hilarious. This was the actual mural from the story and stuff. It was great, it was great.

LINDSAY: You spend so much of your time thinking about storytelling. What are the elements that make a great scary story? 

At the end of the day, a ghost story is just like any other story. They're all about the person that's telling them and not necessarily the phenomenon that you're witnessing.- Glynn Washington, host of Snap Judgment and Spooked

GLYNN: A great scary story is not going to happen on Mars. It's going to happen here right in this chair, and this place, and this time. Really, really familiar, and not everything is going to change. One aspect is going to change. You know a great scary story isn't like, "I saw a ghost!" It's, "I saw whatever supernatural phenomenon I saw and it and I reacted in a certain way and I reacted over time." At the end of the day a ghost story is just like any other story. They're all about the person that's telling them and not necessarily the phenomenon that you're witnessing. So I want to know how this phenomenon changed you. It's just not the ghost in the closet. You develop a relationship of some sort. Some aspect of otherworldliness. Those are the best stories. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To listen to more scary podcasts, including Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked, click here.