The terms, in plain words.

Heretofore is an atlas of local folklore made by Corvie, LLC. These terms cover the Heretofore app for iOS and this site. By using either, you agree to them. What we do with information about you is on its own page, Where your location goes.

• What Heretofore is
• Using the app
• Plans and subscriptions
• The stories
• Out in the world
• Your Library and Passport
• What is ours and what is theirs
• Suggestions you send us
• Changes and availability
• Governing law
• No warranty, limited liability
• Writing to us

What Heretofore is

Heretofore finds and tells stories near a place, from a catalog we research and write ahead of time: hauntings, legends, cryptids, saucers, wild places and more. Press Find a Story and the nearest story within your radius is yours. Walk with Explore as you go and the stories you pass are collected. Drive with road trip mode and a host narrates the way. Sit still with audiobook mode and the narrator takes you from town to town. Turn on browse mode and every cloud lifts at once, each story standing with its title for you to tap. Every story is told from sources and, wherever they are available, notes that say what kind of account each claim rests on, and may be narrated with music. What you find goes to your Library, and your Folklore Passport keeps score.

Heretofore does not research new stories on request. What lies under the clouds is what the catalog holds, and the catalog grows on its own schedule.

Using the app

• Heretofore is for your personal, non-commercial use.
• There is no account to make. Your installation is known to our server by a hashed identifier, and your Library lives in your own iCloud account, so Heretofore needs a signed-in iCloud account to run: until it can verify one, the Library, the Passport, search, Find a Story, collecting, road trips and audiobook mode stay locked. Apple’s terms for iCloud apply to that storage.
• Heretofore is not for children under 13. If you are old enough for it but not yet old enough to agree to these terms where you live, a parent or guardian must agree for you, and a subscription is theirs to buy and manage.
• The app is downloaded through Apple’s App Store, and Apple’s terms for the App Store apply to the download and to anything you buy in it, alongside these.
• Please do not script, scrape, bulk-download or otherwise automate the app or its services, interfere with them, take them apart, pass them off as your own, or try to have the narrator voice anything but what the app asks it to.
• Beyond what your plan includes, a few ceilings protect the service for everyone: up to 500 newly collected stories a day for each installation, a daily ceiling on new narrations, a search radius of up to thirty miles, and others the app tells you about when you reach them. They can change as the service grows.
• We may suspend an installation that breaks these terms.

Plans and subscriptions

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. The plans table on the front page says exactly what each includes; in short:

• Free is the app as it comes and never expires. The free trial is offered once per Apple account. It asks for no card and does not turn into a subscription; it ends when you have used all it includes or a month after it begins, whichever comes first.
• Explorer and Wayfarer are subscriptions bought through Apple’s App Store, by the month or by the year. The price shown in the App Store when you buy is the price you pay; it may differ by country and include tax. Apple charges your Apple account, and your receipt comes from Apple. A subscription belongs to your Apple account, not to a phone, so it comes with you to a new one, as your Library does through iCloud.
• A subscription renews itself at the end of each period unless you cancel it at least 24 hours before the period ends. Manage or cancel it in your Apple account’s subscription settings; the app has no switch of its own. Canceling stops the next renewal and keeps the plan until the period you paid for runs out. Refunds are Apple’s to decide, under Apple’s terms; we cannot issue them.
• Allowances are counted as the plans table says. Only the first time a story is narrated for you counts; playing it again, or hearing a story already narrated for someone else, is free. A revised edition is a new telling, so its first narration can count once more. A narration readied ahead of its turn on a road trip or in a set counts as one. Unused allowances do not carry over to the next month.
• When a subscription ends, your Library stays yours: the stories you collected remain there to read, and what you earned remains earned. Narrations already on your phone keep playing. What the plan added waits until you subscribe again: the watercolor atlas, Find a Story anywhere, browse mode, collecting without limits, new narrations, road trips, audiobook mode, and the extra companions and lanterns.
• We may change prices and what the plans include. A price change reaches you through the App Store before it applies to a renewal, and you can cancel before it does. If we end a plan partway through a period you have paid for, cancel it in your Apple settings so it does not renew, and ask Apple for a refund of what is left.
• There is nothing else to buy. The app sells nothing outside Apple’s App Store.

The stories

• Folklore is folklore. A story is told from the sources we found. Where a story has notes, they say what kind of account each claim rests on, whether a documented account, a reported experience or a folklore account, and what each source does for it: supports the detail, records the account, adds a qualification or offers a different one. A source may document an account without establishing that it happened. A story’s location comes from its sources and may be approximate. We do not promise that any story is accurate, complete or current, and nothing in Heretofore is advice.
• The stories are made with AI. Our pipeline reads public sources, pulls out the claims it can trace to a source, and language models write them up as a telling. The narrator’s voice is a synthetic copy of one of our own, made with Inworld, and the words the road trip host and the audiobook narrator say between stories are written live by a language model from the facts of your trip or set. AI makes mistakes. Heretofore is for entertainment and should not be taken as fact; if you need accuracy, open the story’s sources and notes and follow the sources yourself.
• A location is a best-effort match from public sources and map data. Some stories cover a broad area; when a pin is shown, it gives the story a map reference, and that spot may not be where the events happened. A location may identify a business or a private residence. It is provided as context, not an invitation to visit.
• Going to see a place is your own choice. Respect private property, closed grounds, local laws and your own safety. Heretofore does not grant access to anywhere, and a story about a place is not a reason to enter it. A story never asks you to do anything at a place; if one seems to, don’t.
• Stories change. A telling may be revised as better sources turn up, merged with a duplicate, or withdrawn when a later check finds its sources poor. A story in your Library is yours to read while the catalog holds it. A revised telling reaches your Library as a new edition, marked Updated. A story the catalog withdraws, or merges into another, leaves your Library with it, without a notice; what you earned for it stays earned.
• Tell us when something is wrong, and we will look.

Out in the world

• On a road trip, drive as you normally would and let your usual navigation app give the directions. Heretofore gives none. Start the trip before you set off, let it run, and use your car’s or your headphones’ controls to pause and play. Do not read the app or handle the phone while driving; it is built to be heard, not watched. What the host says about how far off the next story is, and on which side, is an estimate. Stop safely before you touch the phone.
• Explore as you go uses your location in the background, which costs battery, and matches stories to the ground you cover. Watch where you are going, not the clouds.
• Narration and the host are for listening while you are free to listen.

Your Library and Passport

• The stories you collect are yours to come back to and to read; a narration already on your phone keeps playing, and new ones come as your plan allows. Your Library is kept on your phone and in your own iCloud account. You can delete a story, or the whole Library, in the app; the privacy page says what each deletion reaches.
• Passport badges count the stories you have collected in each place, by each story’s main genre, not visits you have made. A badge you have earned stays yours, with its date. As the catalog grows, it can fall behind until you collect the stories that came since. Finish every genre in a place and the place earns a seal.
• The passport number, the signature and the marks on the page are decoration, made on your phone.

What is ours and what is theirs

• The app, this site, the tellings and their notes, the narration recordings, the host’s and narrator’s words, the badges and seals, the companions, the lanterns, the clouds, the watercolor painted over the base map, the app icons and cover art, and the music and sound beds belong to Corvie, LLC. Some were made for Heretofore with generative tools, the music among them. The narrator’s voice is a synthetic copy of one of our own, made with Inworld and used with its owner’s blessing, and its recordings are ours. You may use them within the app and this site for your own enjoyment, and not copy, redistribute, sell or publish them elsewhere, or use them to train a machine-learning model, without our permission.
• Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, used under the Open Database License. The map is organized by the OpenMapTiles schema, licensed CC BY 4.0, a license that covers the schema and not Heretofore. The watercolor wash textures are © 2014 Stamen Design, used under the ISC license. A story’s place on the map was matched through LocationIQ, from OpenStreetMap data, and each story’s small print carries that credit. Land cover is from the USGS National Land Cover Database, and the world map at the smallest scales from Natural Earth, both public domain. The base map in the app is Apple Maps, under Apple’s notice beside its mark.
• The type is IM Fell English, digitized by Igino Marini and used under the SIL Open Font License. The demonstration map on this site is drawn with MapLibre GL JS, used under its own license.
• The sources a story cites belong to their publishers. A story links to them, and what you find there is theirs.
• The folklore itself belongs to no one. The places, the people and the tales are their communities’ own; what is ours is the telling.

Suggestions you send us

We love hearing about a story we have not heard. If you write to us with a suggestion, a correction or a tale, you let us use it in Heretofore without owing you anything for it, and you confirm it is yours to share.

Changes and availability

The catalog grows and changes, and so does the app. We may change, pause or end any part of Heretofore, including a plan, and on a given day what this site shows may run ahead of, or behind, what the app does. We will post changes to these terms on this page with the date they take effect; if you keep using Heretofore after that date, the new terms apply.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and any dispute over them or over Heretofore is heard in the courts of Pennsylvania, unless the law where you live says otherwise.

No warranty, limited liability

Heretofore is provided as it is and as it is available, without warranties of any kind, to the extent the law allows. To the same extent, Corvie, LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising from your use of Heretofore, from a story or a location in it, or from anywhere it leads you, and its total liability to you is limited to the amount you paid for Heretofore in the twelve months before the claim, if anything. Nothing here limits rights the law gives you that cannot be limited.

Writing to us

Questions about these terms, corrections to a story, or a tale we should hear: write to us.

In effect from October 14, 2026

← Back to the Atlas