Sometimes, it’s not the stories we’re told that haunt us, but the ones we inherit without question. The prayers whispered in the dark. The trinkets worn without asking why. Belief can be a comfort… until it isn’t. Because when something is passed down for too long, you stop knowing where faith ends and fear begins. First, mirror marks won’t fade Followed by inherited horror Finally in our last story, you’re getting blurry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What stories do we inherit that haunt us?
Written by at user xdarkwolf. Hi, I'm Blair Bathory, and this is the Something Scary Podcast. Thank you so much for being here, whether this is your first time or you're one of the brave souls who join us every week. Sometimes it's not the stories we're told that haunt us, but the ones we inherit without hesitation. The prayers whispered in the dark. The trinkets worn without asking why.
Chapter 2: How does grief shape our beliefs?
Belief can be a comfort until it isn't. Because when something is passed down for so long, you stop knowing where faith ends and fear begins. First, mirror marks won't fade, followed by inherited horror. Finally, in our last story, you're getting blurry. So, wanna hear something scary? Grief makes ghosts of us all.
Chapter 3: What happens when we confront our past?
Sometimes the scariest thing isn't what you summon, but what becomes of you afterward. Like in this story written in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month by Sarah. The apartment smelled like old wax and peeled onions, familiar and vaguely rotten.
Chapter 4: How does a family tragedy affect faith?
Leah Klein hadn't been back in almost four years, not since she walked away from her seminary program and traded Talmudic texts of Jewish studies for molecular biology. Science makes sense, she told her father. Miracles don't. She hadn't argued. He just said, when the world stops making sense, you'll miss miracles. She used to roll her eyes at that.
Now sitting, Shiva for her dead dad, alone in the empty apartment. She wanted to throw a chair at the wall just to hear something crash. No one had come. No awkward neighbors. No Minya. Just her. Her father had died alone, slipping in the bathtub of all places. No angels, no divine plan, just cracked tiles in the irony of a rabbi who drowned just like anyone else could have.
Chapter 5: What secrets does a mysterious manuscript hold?
The university gave her a two-week leave. She hadn't touched a breaker or attended rounds since the call. But grief doesn't care about rational systems. It drags you down like a tide. For Leah, it pulled her to her father's office, where yellowed books leaned like tired old men and the wax from forgotten Shabbat candles formed strange, melted figures looking like monsters standing on the desk.
She found the manuscript behind a stack of unopened mail, wrapped in oilskin that left a bitter smell on her hands. Tied with red thread, no label, no title. She almost tossed it, but when she opened the first page, the air in the room was sucked out, like someone had just stopped breathing.
Chapter 6: How do rituals connect us to the supernatural?
Inside, she saw a hand-bound book, thin as skin, brittle edges, a name across the top in her father's script. Shafir Harazim. She remembered hearing that name. Whispers through half-closed doors. Her father's voice low and tense. Part prayer, part warning. A book of angelic secrets. Curses. Blessings too strange to be holy.
The scientist in her, fluent in nerve signal pathways and how to sterilize a scalpel, snorted. Another relic from a world she'd left behind. until she saw the margin notes in her father's handwriting. Symbols marked, names circled. One of them was hers, Leah, next to a passage in Aramaic she couldn't fully translate. But she caught enough, a ritual to summon wisdom, to speak to angels.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of the handprint in the mirror?
She blamed it on exhaustion at first, or the way silence starts to hum if you sit in too long. But the air had weight now, like the room was holding its breath, like it was watching. She waited until night to try it. Not because she believed, but because doubt, left too long in the dark, curls into curiosity. She drew the circle in shock, shaky, uneven lines, like her hands had forgotten geometry.
She lit seven candles, the wax spitting angrily as they caught. She fasted, as the notes instructed. Didn't speak a word until the hour turned, just after 3.07 a.m. She spoke the names as best she could. Her voice cracked. She stumbled over consonants, one syllable she had to say three times. The moment she finished, the room seemed to exhale.
Chapter 8: How does doubt influence our relationship with faith?
The candles pulled inward, flames bending toward the center, then stillness. Leah blinked. Nothing. She stepped out of the chalk circle, brushing at the wax on her arm. And when she saw it, a handprint on the mirror, small, smudged, like a child had pressed their palm into the glass and waited. She wiped it away, heart thudding. The next morning, it was back. So were the dreams.
Her father silent at the kitchen table, his mouth moving. But no sound came. His hands were coated in gray ash. The room around him pulsed, shadows dancing at the edge of her vision. When she woke, her sheets were damp, and her arms bore red marks shaped like letters she didn't know. She stopped sleeping. She stopped eating, but she kept reading.
The book grew warmer, at first subtly, like it had absorbed her body heat. But then it pulsed under her fingers. The brittle pages softened. Symbols began to make sense. Words she didn't know spilled from her mouth when she read aloud. And then the voice began. It came from behind the mirror. Not Hebrew. Not Aramaic. Just thought. It whispered the same thing every time. At first, she ignored it.
Then one night, she whispered the name back, half a dare, half a prayer. That night, the handprint on the mirror doubled. Two palms, pressed side by side. She called Lila, her father's old assistant, and asked her if she was working on anything. Weird. Lila hesitated. She had been different than last year. He was working on a correction. He stopped teaching. Even stopped going to shul.
Leah asked if he ever mentioned the chauffeur. Lila's voice dropped. Only once. He said he'd opened something, and couldn't close it. Leah flipped back to the book. Finally, she found a page folded over twice and crusted with old wax. A correction ritual. No blood, no flesh, just a sacrifice of belief. She had to give something up, something she believed completely, speak it aloud, let it go.
She sat in a circle again, didn't bother with candles, just the book, just the dark. She whispered, There is no God. The whisper behind the mirror laughed, then silence. Then every candle in the apartment blazed to life. Then a wind tore through the study, knocking over books. But the chalk circle held. The mirror shivered, warped, then melted to black. From inside, something looked out.
No face, no figure, just presence. It pressed on her chest like deep water. She couldn't move. Could barely breathe. Then she heard her name. Not in the whisper. Not in her father's voice. In her own. Leah. She looked down. The book had changed. New words curled across the page. Lines that hadn't been there before. Fresh ink, still wet. Her name beside it. Mikor Amunah. Source of faith.
And beneath that, her father's last note. To believe is to fear. To fear is to understand. The next morning, she wiped away the chalk circle. She didn't return to school. She went to shul, sat in the back, buried under layers of incense and murmured prayers and whispered Kedesh, not just to her father, for herself.
When the service ended, an older man approached, didn't speak, just handed her a folded note inside a drawing of a handprint and beneath it, in her father's handwriting. The door can be opened by doubt, but only faith can close it. She looked up. The man was gone. But in the reflection on the synagogue's last door, she saw a pale palm, gentle, pressed against her own, just for a moment.
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