Folklore is around every corner. Discover and collect the stories and legends that have shaped the communities around you.
Hauntings, legends, cryptids, saucers and more. Heretofore is an evolving atlas of more than 600,000 stories across the United States, presented with sources linked to individual claims made in the stories (wherever available), and narrated with dynamically orchestrated backing tracks.
Press Find a Story on the map to the rightabove to watch the clouds lift and to collect a badge, then scroll down for more.
What happened here? What came before? Find out more with Heretofore!
See and explore communities near you in a completely new way.
Exploring the history of your community should be fun. Heretofore is a folklore atlas resembling an old game map. As you walk around, your phone will collect the stories you pass by, clearing an antique watercolor map of your city and letting you know about history you have directly made contact with.
If folklore is what you seek, the color of the clouds themselves will tell you where to go. The wash of the reddish brass color tells you where stories lie. The more saturation, the more stories there are under the cloud. Watch the map to your rightbelow as a story is discovered.
A road trip through time.
Start a road trip and drive as you normally would, with your usual navigation app giving the directions. Heretofore follows along in the background and plays each story as you reach it, through whatever your phone is already playing to. The way you have driven is drawn behind you from the dot where you began, the clouds lift along it, and every story you pass is collected into your Library.
A host opens the trip with something about the city you start in, then carries a thread from one story to the next. The host is an agent on our service that listens along as you drive. Each transition it writes picks up what the last story left behind, so over a long drive the stops build into the themes and motifs you have been following. It tries to say how far off the next story is and which side it's on (the next story is on your right in 2 miles, say).
All of this is put together live. While one story plays, our backend writes the next hinge, finds the next story on your route and brings its narration down. A story with no narration yet is voiced when you reach it. Road trip mode comes with the Wayfarer subscription.
A journey from your couch.
You don’t have to be moving. Even without Heretofore collecting stories in the background as you travel, or narrating a road trip, you can take a journey around the United States from wherever you’re sitting. There are two ways.
Turn on audiobook mode and the narrator picks a set of stories around a folklore motif, then takes you from city to city, starting wherever you happen to be.
The narrator frames the set, carries the thread from one town to the next, and sets up each story before it plays. Leave the phone open and the map travels with the narration. It moves to each story as it begins and picks its pin out from the others. Press play below and the map follows the set as you hear it. Audiobook mode comes with the Wayfarer subscription.
The lantern doesn’t have to stay where you are. Drop it on any town in the United States, set the radius and press Find a Story, and Heretofore looks there as it would under your feet. The clouds lift, the pin drops, and the story is yours to read and hear.
Move the lantern again and look somewhere else. It is a way to look over the whole country from your couch, one find at a time, and any subscription can do it, starting with Explorer. Watch the map beside this onebelow search town by town.
Lift every cloud at once.
If hunting down folklore on foot or otherwise is too much for you, you can also peek under the clouds. Browse mode clears every cloud on the map and marks each story with a pin and its title, so you can scroll around and see what’s out there before you go anywhere (or instead of going anywhere).
Tap a pin and the story is yours. It goes into your Library like any other find, and nobody has to know you never put your shoes on. Watch the map beside this onebelow: the clouds go, the pins come up with their titles, and three stories get collected from the comfort of wherever you happen to be sitting.
Browse mode comes with the Explorer subscription, and the free trial has it too.
More than 600,000 stories on day one.
Heretofore is able to launch with more than 600,000 stories across the United States, and the atlas keeps evolving from there.
Stories are refined and updated over time, and as you use the app you’ll see more genres slowly appear, starting with Wild Places (a limited number of locations have it now). Now and then a story disappears too, when it’s marked as a duplicate or a later check finds its sources are poor.
We strive for accuracy (which is why the atlas evolves over time), but the app does use AI, which can make mistakes. Heretofore is for entertainment purposes and shouldn’t be taken as fact.
Every story carries its dossier, the claims it rests on and the sources behind each one, with what kind of support each source gives. Treat it as the research behind the story. If you require accuracy, open the dossier and follow the sources yourself.
How we have so many stories
Nobody could write 600,000 stories by hand, and we didn’t. We built a pipeline that does the research. It reads public sources across the whole country, finds the places with a story to tell, takes each story apart into claims it can trace back to a source, and writes those claims back up as a telling. None of it happens in one go. Every step is many passes through different pipelines, and they keep running as the atlas evolves.
Find
Traditional machine learning and AI agents search public sources to find where the stories are.
Sort
We pull the claims out of what they find, organize them, and track where each claim comes from.
Tell
Language models help compile those claims into a narrative written for the ear.
Keep what you find.
Stories you collect can be found in your Library, and your Folklore Passport keeps score of what you’ve gathered.
Collected stories are yours to come back to anytime, to read or hear again whenever you like.*
Search the Library by story title or by the words inside a story, and by the city, county or state. Sort it by place, by the day you collected, or by genre. Save the ones you love, hide the kinds you don’t, and keep the ones you haven’t heard yet in a list of their own.
* As mentioned above, stories can change as they’re updated, deduplicated or removed, so a story isn’t guaranteed to stay in your Library permanently.
Every city, county and state has a badge for each genre. You earn it with your first story of that genre there, and it climbs four more levels as you collect a quarter, half, three quarters and finally all of the stories of that genre in that place. A badge you’ve earned is yours to keep, and as new stories are added you can collect them to bring it up to date. Collect every genre in a place and the place itself earns a seal.
Choose a cryptid companion in the Passport. It keeps you company on the map, rising out of the clouds now and then and ducking back when the lantern’s beam comes around.
Start free. Subscribe for more.
Heretofore is free as it comes, with a one-time free trial of everything. Explorer lifts the clouds and the limits on collecting, and Wayfarer adds narration, road trips and audiobook mode.
| What you get | Free$0The app as it comes. | Free trial$0, onceTry everything, one time. It ends after 5 stories or a month, whichever comes first. | Explorer$19.99 a yearor $2.99 a monthBrowse the whole atlas and collect without limits. | Wayfarer$49.99 a yearA year for the price of two monthsor $24.99 a monthNarration, road trips and audiobook mode. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Map | Apple Maps | The watercolor atlas | Apple Maps | The watercolor atlas |
| The clouds | Clear as you move, until you’ve collected 5 stories | Clear as you move, for 5 stories | Clear as you move | Clear as you move |
| Collecting stories | 5 in all | 5 stories | Unlimited, in the background | Unlimited, in the background |
| Find a Story anywhere | — | Included | Included | Included |
| Browse mode | — | Included | IncludedEvery cloud lifted, every pin with its title | Included |
| Reading stories | The stories you’ve collected | The stories you’ve collected | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Audio narration | — | Your 5 trial stories, narrated | 5 stories a month | Up to 300 a month* |
| Road trip mode | — | 3 trips, each capped at 5 stories | — | IncludedCounts toward the 300 |
| Audiobook mode | — | 3 sets, each capped at 5 stories | — | IncludedCounts toward the 300 |
| Cryptid companions | The Jackalope | All seven | Four (the Jackalope, Nessie, Sasquatch and Mop) | All sevenThe dragon, Mothman and the Carta Marina serpent join |
| Lantern styles | The default | All of them | The default | All of them |
* Only first-time narrations count toward the 300. Replays, and stories already narrated for another user, are free, so most subscribers can listen to more than 300 stories a month.
Find out something more.
Heretofore is coming to the App Store.
Want to send us a suggestion, or a story we have not heard? Write to us