New iHeart Podcast Thriller ‘Light House’ Provides Comfortable Chills

“Just click your heels together three times and say there’s no place like home there’s no place like home.” – Glinda the Good Witch

There’s a certain tradition in horror of the haunted house story that subverts the traditional notion of home being a safe place and where the heart is. From its earliest screen beginnings in 1927 with the silent film The Cat and the Canary about murder in an old mansion after the reading of a will to today’s more emotionally dense translations like the tv show The Haunting of Hill House where the house itself retains a collective vestige of the feelings of its former residents, haunted houses have never lost their hold on the collective consciousness of storytellers that want to put a chill in the hearts of their audiences.

And now with a new release from Bamfer Productions and iHeartRadio that tradition continues in audio form with the ten-part fiction thriller podcast Light House about a family that inherits and moves into a mysterious house with a haunted past. It debuted at number #1 on the fiction podcast charts for Apple and its combination of strong storytelling and spooky vibes should make it a winner for a broad audience and independent fiction podcast fans alike.

It was written and directed by Jeff Heimbuch, who has previous experience with making podcasts that explore spooky places and the concept of home with the long-running comedy/horror series Return Home. Also “returning home” to this series is the audio engineer from Return Home, Kori Celeste, who’s provided a sparse audio framework upon which to tell this tale that doesn’t overwhelm the audience with too many sound effects or unnecessarily dramatic music.

Overseeing the project on iHearts end is Holly Frey who hosts the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast and cheerfully tweeted this out about the show last week, “It’s here! It’s here! Get ready to be creeped out.”

As often happens in horror tales about strange places, this story takes place over portions of a few different years. Our story begins with a prelude tale of a doctor in 1938 interviewing a young girl who hears and talks to invisible friends who want her to do bad things. The rest of the episode, as well as all of the second one, is set in 1963 as narrated by our protagonist 15-year-old Tara Hollis, voiced by actress Aly Trasher, who is telling us this tale from sometime in the future and looking back on what happened.

Aly’s strong capable voice carries the show as the narrator without any other voice actors for much of the time giving the production the feel of a hushed campfire tale. Her descriptions of what she sees in the house and the ache in her voice set the stage for her many encounters with the presence in the house that she calls “the man in the hat.”

Relying on old tropes can sometimes be both a blessing and a curse, and Light House might be a little of both. The setup all sounds incredibly familiar of course from a girl who talks to ghosts, to the family connections, and the scary house, but at the same time these strands of old tales if done right can come to feel comforting, like being home.

Writer and director Jeff Heimbuch knows that feeling well. He says that some of his earliest memories are hearing ghost stories. “We like to be scared while also being in the comfort of our own home,” he says. “It’s strangely comforting.”

For Tara Hollis, on the other hand, it is not. “Home isn’t a place. It’s a feeling,” she says, setting the scene for what’s coming. “I don’t have a home. I have heartbreak.”

And that heartbreak is part of the layers of foreshadowing and world-building in this intimate haunted house story that make it at once feel familiar, but fresh at the same time.

The mysteries will be revealed one episode at a time. New episodes premiere on Tuesdays.