Haunted house ambience
The haunted corridor runs the highest wander in the whole library — 90%. Why unpredictable timing is the entire effect, with the recipe.
A haunted corridor is ordinary sounds at extraordinary timing. Creaking wood every seven seconds, wails and a door at the far end, and wander set to 85–90% — the highest of any built-in environment in the app. The sounds are mundane. What makes them frightening is that the table cannot work out when the next one is coming.
What it sounds like
Everything about horror ambience is restraint, and this environment spends all of its restraint in one place. Look at the wander column: 90%, 85%, 90%. Across all 103 built-in environments there are only four layers set that high, and three of them are on this page.
That is the whole mechanism. The table hears something, works out roughly how long the gap was, and starts counting without meaning to. High wander breaks the count. The gap is the instrument; the sounds only mark where it begins.
The sounds themselves are deliberately cheap — creaking wood, a door, distant crying — and they sit quietly, between 30% and 45%, well under the levels on every other page here. The one extravagance is the echo: three or four bounces on both of the far layers, so each one arrives from somewhere down a corridor the party has not been down yet.
One rule: do not touch the volume during the scene. The temptation at the frightening moment is to push it up, and that is the one move that tells everybody it is a recording.
The recipe, dial by dial
This is the environment as it ships. Every layer is the same kind of thing — one sound from the library and a set of dials — so there is nothing special about which slot a sound sits in. The names are only names.
| Layer | Sound | How often | Wander | Volume | Distance | Reverb | Echo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Creaking wood | every ~7.0 s | 90% | 45% | nearby | medium | 2 bounces |
| Ambient | Dungeon air | loop | — | 50% | close | off | off |
| Accent | Distant wails & cries | every ~18 s | 85% | 35% | very far | large | 3-4 |
| Extras | Cell doors | every ~45 s | 90% | 30% | very far | large | 3-4 |
Master volume 80%. Every number above is read out of the environment that ships in the app, and printed in the words the app prints beside each slider.
- Rhythm — Creaking wood every seven seconds at 45%, wandering 90% — tied for the highest setting anywhere in the library. Quiet, constant, and impossible to predict.
Creaking wood - Ambient — Dungeon air at 50%. Barely a drone. It is silence with a shape, not a bed.
Dungeon air - Accent — Wails, very far, 35%, with three or four bounces of echo. The corridor they have not walked down yet.
Distant wails & cries - Extras — A door, very far, 30%, every forty-five seconds, wandering 90%. The one sound in this environment that implies a person.
Cell doors
What each dial does is covered once, properly, in Environments & layers.
Boards to load with it
The environment is the place; boards are the things that happen in it. These three ship built in and suit this one:
Load them, then press + New scene and the environment and the boards come back together next week in one tap. Scenes covers that.
Make it yours
A madhouse
Madhouse ships built in and is the loud version of the same idea: the horror is that there are people, not that there are none.
A house that is only old
Keep the creaking, turn both far layers off. An old house makes noises; a haunted one makes them at the wrong time.
Something arriving
Bring the wails from very far to nearby once, mid-scene, and leave them there. Do not announce it. Somebody will notice, and then everybody will.
None of this is destructive: the built-in environments cannot be overwritten. Change what you like, and press Save a copy as… when it sounds right.
The recordings
Every sound this environment uses, and who recorded it. Most of the library is public domain; the Creative Commons Attribution recordings are credited here because that is what the licence asks for. The full list is on Sounds & licensing.
- Creaking wood — creak1.ogg (RPG Audio) by Kenney (CC0)
- Creaking wood — impactPlank_medium_000.ogg (Impact Sounds 1.0) by Kenney (CC0)
- Dungeon air — Dungeon Air by Flamiffer by Flamiffer (CC0)
- Distant wails & cries — Groans and Screams by waxsocks (CC0)
- Distant wails & cries — More groans and screams by waxsocks (CC0)
- Cell doors — Cell door.aiff by kd_jack (CC0)
- Cell doors — G31-17-Rickety Metal Door.wav by craigsmith (CC0)
Related
Open Haunted Corridor in Thaumaturgy — it is free, there is nothing to install, and nothing to sign up for.
Updated 24 October 2026