Legends of the Hidden Horde is a dark folklore podcast for anyone searching the night for cryptids, mythical creatures, and the old warnings we stopped believing.
Hosted by Lance Martin, each short episode is an atmospheric retelling drawn from the record: oral history, older accounts, and the edge cases collectors usually skip. Not a monster-of-the-week joke. Not a hunt for proof. A lantern held up to the thing the village already knew by name.
Cryptids and folk monsters from every reach of the map. Skinwalkers and swamp things. Penanggalan and sluagh. Forest guardians, lake beasts, night birds, yokai, and the Appalachian stories that never made the tourist brochure. Bigfoot is in the woods. So are the names Bigfoot crowded out.
New episodes through the season. Come in if the dark already has your attention.
In episode 60 we stand on the west side of a house in the Hebrides, where the Atlantic has already taken the sun and the window is the only argument left. This is the Sluagh . The word is older than the monster. In Old Irish slúag means host, army, or crowd. In the Scottish Highlands and Islands it hardened into sluagh na marbh, the host of the dead. In Ireland the cousin-word is slua sí, the fairy host, a whirlwind of the Aos Sí that can lift a person and set them down somewhere they did not agree to go.
These are not the same telling, and they should not be nailed together to make a cleaner creature. What follows keeps the Scottish host of the unforgiven dead at the center, and names the Irish edge where the same word still means the Good People on the move.
SOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluagh
https://www.irishfolklore.com/creatures/sluagh/
https://spookyscotland.net/sluagh/
https://archive.org/details/carminagadelicah02carm
https://archive.org/details/superstitionsofh00camp
6 Oct 2026
Episode 59: Penanggalan
Tonight we go under the floor of a Malay house on stilts, where the night smells of river mud and woodsmoke. This is episode 59 the Penanggalan.
The name comes from tanggal, meaning to take off, or to detach. The Penanggalan is not a corpse that learned to walk. In the older Malay telling she is a living woman who has learned, or been forced, to leave her body behind.
These stories belong to Malay communities in what is now Malaysia, and they have cousins that must not be flattened into one monster: the Krasue of Thailand, the Kasu of Laos, the Ahp of Cambodia, the Leyak and Kuyang of the Indonesian islands, the Ma Lai of Vietnam, the Manananggal of the Philippines, all have the Same hunger, but they are not the same creature. What follows stays with the Malay Penanggalan, and names the edges where the tellings part.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penanggalan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikayat_Abdullah
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/monster-mythology-penanggalan
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvjk2ttc
https://thehorrorcollection.com/penanggalan-witch-who-detaches-head/
https://godsandmonsters.info/penanggalan/
1 Oct 2026
Episode 58: Leshy (Lesovik)
In Episode 58 we head deep into eastern Europe where the elders will tell you that the forest north of the last fence does not begin with trees. It begins with etiquette.
A woman from a Vologda parish, speaking to a collector more than a century ago, put it without poetry. You do not enter loud. You do not whistle. You ask. Bread and salt if you have them. A word if you do not. Les-lesochek, dai nam gribochok. Forest, little forest, give us a mushroom. Then you take what was offered and you thank the room you were allowed to stand in. The room has a landlord. In Russian he is most often Leshy
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leshy
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Леший
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leszy
https://ru.ruwiki.ru/wiki/Леший
https://bigenc.ru/c/leshii-cbc5e5
https://cultura-russia.ru/article/leshij
https://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ruwiki/357
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mythology_of_All_Races/Volume_3/Slavic/Part_1/Chapter_7
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15554120251397689
https://www.doi.org/10.1177/15554120251397689
https://oldfolklore.com/leshy-the-guardian-spirit-of-the-forest/
https://allthatsinteresting.com/leshy
https://occult-world.com/leshii/
https://www.thoughtco.com/leshy-4774301
https://wierni-ojczyznie.pl/artykuly/245-leszy-kim-byl-slowianski-wladca-lasu-i-dlaczego-budzil-lek
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