Scéaleenies

A stormy night folk tale about music, migration, and the pull west. 
This episode presents a spoken reading of The Emigrant Song, a literary folk-horror story set in Dublin on a stormy night near the equinox.
As a tune rises in a city pub, people begin to leave, calmly and irresistibly, drawn westward out of the capital and toward the Atlantic. The story unfolds as a meditation on Irish emigration, collective memory, and the unsettling possibility that departure itself is not always a choice, but a tradition with its own momentum.
Rooted in Irish history and myth, The Emigrant Song treats music as a force, migration as inheritance, and home as the place where leaving begins.
A restrained, atmospheric piece about Ireland, weather, and the long echo of goodbyes.
 Best heard on a stormy evening, in a warm pub, with half of your third pint glowing inside of you.

A wish, a loophole, and a Lidl car park. 
This episode presents a spoken reading of a modern folk tale set in a familiar and deeply unremarkable place: a supermarket car park in the Irish Midlands.
When an ordinary man encounters an ancient, shape-shifting being bound to grant a single twisted wish, he turns to the most contemporary authority available to him: artificial intelligence. What follows is a story about language taken too seriously, precision mistaken for safety, and the unsettling continuity between old supernatural bargains and modern systems of logic.
By placing folklore, legalism, and AI reasoning side by side, the piece explores how control, certainty, and meaning break down when faced with entities that treat words not as communication, but as rope.
A wry, unsettling short story about wishes, stillness, and the blink of a cursor that never stops.
Best listened to on a good sound system, in triplicate.

When the power goes out at sunset, the parish gathers to listen. 
This episode presents a full spoken reading of An Fear Glais, a contemporary Irish folk tale told through the voice of a child during a time when the nights go dark and communities gather indoors to listen again.
Set in a rural parish experiencing nightly blackouts, the story centres on the arrival of the Grey Man, a figure associated with darkness, attention, and old bargains renewed under modern conditions. As technology fails and silence returns, the story examines listening as ritual, fear as inheritance, and the uneasy comfort of rules being remembered.
Rooted in Irish oral tradition and shaped by present-day concerns, An Fear Glais is an atmospheric meditation on night, memory, and what watches when the lights go out.
 A quiet, unsettling piece of spoken word fiction, best heard after dark.

At Birr, the telescope was built to look outward. Something answered. 
This episode presents a spoken reading of The Observatory at Birr, a literary horror story rooted in Irish scientific history and theology.
Set around the great Leviathan telescope and a hidden programme of church transmissions into deep space, the story follows the discovery that the universe may have received the message, and understood it far too well. As signals repeat, archives whisper, and boundaries between sender and receiver blur, the narrator confronts a terrifying possibility: that faith, once broadcast, does not remain one-way.
A restrained and unsettling meditation on belief, transmission, and the fear that silence itself may already be a form of worship.

A pub tale of the Celtic Mist, the sea’s memory, and debts that don’t drown. 
This episode features a spoken reading of a contemporary Irish folk-horror story, told as a pub tale passed carefully from mouth to ear, with caution to pass on no further.
Set on the West coast of Ireland, the story centres on the night the Celtic Mist was escorted out of the Shannon, and what followed when mist rose, footsteps sounded on an empty deck, and the dead appeared to carry on their arguments without adjournment.
Blending dark humour, political memory, and maritime folklore, the piece explores debt, inheritance, and the unsettling idea that stories themselves can act as invitations. The sea is not silent, and some passages are made not just in water, but in words.
A quiet, unsettling listen, best taken in one sitting, over a well settled pint of stout.