Those skin-crawling scary stories that you may have heard over roasting marshmallows in the woods have nothing on the tales shared on the Something Scary podcast.
Backed by Snarled Entertainment, the three-year-old weekly podcast boasts chart-topping numbers with over 31 million downloads and 800,000 monthly podcast streams.
The show’s current hosts, Steffany Strange and Blair Bathory keep the oral storytelling tradition alive by diving into audience-submitted spooky tales that cover ghost stories, urban legends, and accounts of paranormal activity.
Strange is a Latina psychic medium who fell in love with folklore and ghost stories after spending her summers in El Salvador and hearing tales from her grandfather. She’s worked with Buzzfeed Unsolved and last month, appeared on The CW’s Mysteries Decoded.
Stange told LatinaMedia.Co that growing up, she’d heard lots of urban legends folklore – and it scared her. Bonding with her grandfather over storytelling taught her to face her fears and ultimately served as a bridge to her current career.
Bathory is a filmmaker who encourages inclusivity within the horror genre through her FEAR HAUS, a production company she launched in May 2015.
Strange and Bathory are making history not only as the show’s first ever co-hosts but also as women working in the horror industry.
As of 2020, only 21 percent of top-charting podcast hosts were women and while there aren’t exact numbers on the percentage of women working at the intersections of media and horror – as of 2018 only 5.9 percent of horror film directors were women.
There’s a clear gap in the number of women operating in both media and horror and to combat that, the Something Scary team (which includes script writers and animators) is primarily women.
“[Our staff is made up of] a female team except for one guy,” Bathory told LatinaMedia.Co. “That’s unique to us and I just think that’s worth mentioning. Everyone is just super talented and I feel honored to be a part of it.”
Together Strange and Bathory bridge their varying cultural backgrounds, bringing their passion for diversity and bravery to telling scary stories on a global stage.
In the near future, the duo will be recording the first ever live Something Scary podcast at the Rome, Georgia film festival.
