Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. Today we’re going to talk about “The Giggling Granny,” a woman who baked prune cake, read romance magazines, giggled at her own arrest, and murdered at least eleven people—most of them her own family.

Her name was Nannie Doss. The press called her the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Bluebeard. She was a small, cheerful, grandmotherly woman from Alabama who seemed like the last person in the world you’d suspect of anything. Which, of course, is exactly why she got away with it for so long.

Her weapon of choice was arsenic—rat poison, mostly, the kind you could pick up at any hardware store in the American South in the 1920s through the 1950s. She put it in whiskey, in coffee, in stewed prunes, in prune cake. She put it in the food of husbands, grandchildren, her own mother, her sister, her mother-in-law. She did it over and over again for nearly thirty years, and nobody suspected a thing—until the very last one. Because Nannie Doss was always smiling. And you don’t suspect the woman who’s smiling.

This is her story. Narration provided by Wondervox.

This week we present “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1852 in Household Words, the celebrated literary magazine edited by Charles Dickens. A young Englishman in Paris visits a disreputable gambling house, breaks the bank at Rouge et Noir, and makes the mistake of accepting a bed for the night. What follows is one of the most gripping sequences in Victorian fiction—methodical, claustrophobic, and chilling in the way only the best suspense can be.

Wilkie Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but this early story reveals the master at work long before those landmarks. He thought enough of it to adapt it for live readings later in his career. Once you’ve heard it, you’ll understand why.

No ghosts. No monsters. Just a room, a bed, and the slow, silent certainty of something descending.

Narrated in the Fearsome Fiction tradition—atmospheric, unhurried, faithful to the original text.

Story: “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (1852) — Public DomainSubscribe for new episodes every week.

I recently interviewed Rick Gualtieri, the bestselling New Jersey author behind the Tome of Bill series, for Fearsome Fiction. Rick has built one of indie horror-comedy’s most beloved franchises around Bill Ryder, a dateless gamer who gets turned into a vampire and becomes the undead world’s most reluctant savior—more than a dozen novels deep and still going strong.

We talked about his origin story, his writing process, the art of making horror funny without defanging it, and why comedy and horror belong together. It’s a great conversation for fans of the genre and anyone curious about what it takes to build a long-running indie series from scratch.

Listen wherever you get Fearsome Fiction.

There’s a particular kind of horror that doesn’t announce itself with screams or spectacle. It arrives slowly—a thought that isn’t yours, a memory you couldn’t possibly have, a garment that reappears where it shouldn’t be. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman knew this kind of horror intimately, and in “The Southwest Chamber,” first published in 1903, she deployed it to devastating effect.

The story follows the Gill sisters, who inherit a New England boarding house along with one deeply problematic room—the southwest chamber, formerly occupied by a recently deceased and apparently still-present aunt. One by one, guests are installed in the room, and one by one they flee it, shaken by experiences they can barely articulate. Freeman, one of the finest American ghost story writers of her era, understood that the most frightening hauntings aren’t about what a ghost does to you—they’re about what it makes you feel.

This episode of Fearsome Fiction brings you Freeman’s full story, read aloud and ready to unsettle your afternoon.