MonsterTalk
NewS06E06 🐈⬛Evil Cats and Revelatory Revenants👻
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- Nov 9, 2026
About the podcast
MonsterTalk: The Science Show About Monsters is a free audio podcast that critically examines the science behind cryptozoological (and legendary) creatures, such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or werewolves.
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Episodes 519
S06E06 🐈⬛Evil Cats and Revelatory Revenants👻
Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France who teaches the colony's history at Université Laval, for a seasonal visit to the winter of 1704. That year, a French and …
Show notes
Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France who teaches the colony's history at Université Laval, for a seasonal visit to the winter of 1704. That year, a French and allied Indigenous raiding party fell on the frontier village of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and marched more than a hundred captives north to Canada. Among them was the town's Puritan minister, the Reverend John Williams, whose memoir of captivity in Catholic Quebec was written as theological propaganda. But tucked between the sermons are three strange stories that caught Joseph's eye: a gray cat that crashed a dawn mass, a soldier's dream from purgatory, and a dead man with news from hell.
Joseph explains how a historian handles a tale with one teller and no corroboration, and why the most useful clue in a ghost story is often the dull detail nobody meant to include. It's an exemplary excursion into Holistic Monster Studies.
Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S06E05🎃 Live 2026 Halloween Show
Blake, Karen, and paranormal investigator Matt Baxter gather on Halloween eve for MonsterTalk's annual live show. The agenda: micro-horror, meaningful coincidences, a stranger who would not stop calling, and …
Show notes
Blake, Karen, and paranormal investigator Matt Baxter gather on Halloween eve for MonsterTalk's annual live show. The agenda: micro-horror, meaningful coincidences, a stranger who would not stop calling, and the most convincing ghost video on the internet.
When a woman in Queensland reaches out to Karen through eight different channels at once, the urgency turns out to have nothing to do with family business and everything to do with a house in Del Rio, Texas. Voices that learn your name. A photograph that appears from nowhere and disappears again. And a thread that runs straight back to the birth of rock and roll. Meanwhile, Blake confesses to a lifelong habit of collecting coincidences, and Matt opens the pantry door.
Extended notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S06E04 🍿Capturing Bigfoot Reaction
🍿 S06E04 - Capturing Bigfoot Reaction Last week Blake and Karen spoke with director Marq Evans before any of them had seen his film. Now they have. Karen Stollznow and paranormal investigator Matt Baxter join …
Show notes
🍿 S06E04 - Capturing Bigfoot Reaction
Last week Blake and Karen spoke with director Marq Evans before any of them had seen his film. Now they have. Karen Stollznow and paranormal investigator Matt Baxter join Blake to react to Capturing Bigfoot, the new documentary built around a reel of 16mm film that sat in a family safe for more than half a century, and the Patterson family story that turns out to be even bigger than the footage. The film arrived on Prime Video on October 20, 2026, and the Bigfoot world has not been quiet since.
The side-by-side stills circulating online are only a sliver of the story. The panel digs into the confessions, the money, the broken families, and the people who were there, then turns to the question every skeptic has been asking this week: if the most famous piece of Bigfoot evidence ever filmed folds, does anything actually change? Plus a horse turns out to be carrying a very strange coincidence.
🔗 Links and ReferencesCapturing Bigfoot - Prime Video 💵
Capturing Bigfoot - Official site
Capturing Bigfoot - Wikipedia
The Patterson-Gimlin film - Wikipedia
René Dahinden - Wikipedia
Jeffrey Meldrum - Wikipedia
A Guide to Identifying Year of Manufacture for KODAK Motion Picture Films - Kodak (PDF)
Freeze brand - Wikipedia
Freeze Branding Cattle - Oklahoma State University Extension
Livestock branding - Wikipedia
"Eastman Kodak" - James Layton, from Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification (FIAF, 2020)
Four walling - Wikipedia
Pious fraud - Wikipedia
Cognitive dissonance - Wikipedia
Sunk cost - Wikipedia
List of cognitive biases - Wikipedia
List of fallacies - Wikipedia
The five stages of grief - Wikipedia
The Fox sisters - Wikipedia
Marjoe Gortner - Wikipedia
The Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting - Wikipedia
The Loch Ness Monster and the "Surgeon's Photograph" - Wikipedia
When Prophecy Fails - Wikipedia
"Debunking 'When Prophecy Fails'" - Thomas Kelly, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Scie
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S06E03 🎥 Capturing Bigfoot with Marq Evans
Blake and Karen interview Marq Evans, directory of the new documentary Capturing Bigfoot - a new film that hits streaming October 20th, 2026 and features stunning new evidence that the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot …
Show notes
Blake and Karen interview Marq Evans, directory of the new documentary Capturing Bigfoot - a new film that hits streaming October 20th, 2026 and features stunning new evidence that the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot Film may depict a person in a suit!
This is the most exciting news to hit Bigfoot in a long while and we're excited to see the film ourselves.
Also - we say goodbye to frequent guest and real life friend, Dr. Brian Regal.
Extended notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S06E02 👻 Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War
Blake and Karen welcome historian Dr. Amy Laurel Fluker of Youngstown State University to discuss Haunted by Memory, an annotated anthology of ghost stories drawn from the newspapers, veterans' papers, and …
Show notes
Blake and Karen welcome historian Dr. Amy Laurel Fluker of Youngstown State University to discuss Haunted by Memory, an annotated anthology of ghost stories drawn from the newspapers, veterans' papers, and periodicals of the Civil War generation. The project began with her late mentor, Dr. John R. Neff, who stumbled onto his first Civil War ghost story while reading veterans' obituaries. When Neff died in 2020, his family asked Fluker to carry his work to the finish line.
These aren't the ghost lights and phantom hitchhikers of modern battlefield tours. They're stories that ran alongside battle reports and stock prices, told by the people who lived through the war. What did these ghosts want? Why did a Union veterans' newspaper print a tale of soldiers burying their enemy? And how did ghost lore become a weapon after the war ended?
Extended notes at Monstertalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S06E01 💀Taphonomy and All That Rot🧛
An interview with forensic anthropologist Evan Bird, creator of The Corpse Review.Extended show notes at Monstertalk.orgBecome a supporter of this podcast …
Show notes
An interview with forensic anthropologist Evan Bird, creator of The Corpse Review.
Extended show notes at Monstertalk.org
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.
Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E50 💀 REHUMANIZING PEOPLE OF THE PAST
In this episode, Blake and Karen welcome Dr. Kristin LaFollette, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana, to discuss her new book, *Rehumanizing People of the Past: Bioarchaeology …
Show notes
In this episode, Blake and Karen welcome Dr. Kristin LaFollette, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana, to discuss her new book, *Rehumanizing People of the Past: Bioarchaeology, Medical Museums and Archives, and the Human Remains Trade* (SUNY Press, 2026). The book illustrates how technical communication frequently dehumanizes the people represented by human remains, and offers guidance for adopting rehumanizing language to return dignity to these individuals. The conversation is not strictly paranormal, but overlaps meaningfully with MonsterTalk themes around science, storytelling, folklore, and how language shapes perception.
Extended notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E49 - 🌀 Cryptozoology Today with Daniel Alan Jones
Blake and Karen welcome back Daniel Alan Jones, investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and creator and host of The Vortex, for the second half of their conversation. Last week …
Show notes
Blake and Karen welcome back Daniel Alan Jones, investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and creator and host of The Vortex, for the second half of their conversation. Last week covered how Jones found his way into the field. This week the question is where the field has gone since he arrived, and where it might be headed next.
Jones has watched cryptozoology move from obscure online forums to social media feeds, streaming documentaries, and a festival in seemingly every state. Along the way, the creatures themselves seem to be changing. The talk ranges from AI-generated monster images to the rise of Dogman, from a lawmaker's Bigfoot bounty to the ethics of chasing mysteries you may never catch.
👤 About Our GuestDaniel Alan Jones is an investigative reporter and researcher based in South Texas, and the founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, a networking hub for people interested in cryptids and their lore. He is the creator and host of The Vortex, a YouTube channel and website covering cryptids, UFOs, and unexplained phenomena. He first encountered cryptozoology through an online forum in 2006 and has been active in the field since 2010. His fieldwork has taken him from the Piney Woods of East Texas to Bluff Creek, Death Valley, and Point Pleasant, and he takes an ethnographic approach to the subject, treating the community of monster hunters as part of what deserves study. His favorite cryptid is a hometown one.
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E48 🌀Traditional Cryptozoology with Daniel Alan Jones
Into the Field: A Conversation with Daniel Alan Jones, Part 1Blake and Karen welcome Daniel Alan Jones, an investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and the creator and host of The …
Show notes
Into the Field: A Conversation with Daniel Alan Jones, Part 1
Blake and Karen welcome Daniel Alan Jones, an investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and the creator and host of The Vortex, for the first half of a two-part conversation. Blake met Jones at the Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State in March of 2026, where an after-dinner conversation outside a restaurant, joined partway through by Jeb Card, led to the interview you are about to hear.
Jones is part of the Texas Cryptozoology scene, hanging with (the late) Jim Marrs, Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern, Craig Woolheater and Lyle Blackburn (among others). He approaches the subject ethnographically: the people who chase monsters interest him as much as the monsters do. This first half of our interview covers the Piney Woods and its tangle of local Bigfoot names, a salamander hunt in the PNW, a failed search for giants in Death Valley, pluys a night camped out in Mothman country. Part two takes up the state of the Cryptozoology today, which will be S05E49 dropping next week.
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E47 MT Legend Tripping: Paranormal England
Karen and Matt are back from their trip to the UK and they share stories and photos from their whirlwind visit to a variety of (allegedly) haunted places. Blake makes jokes... and wishes he could go …
Show notes
Karen and Matt are back from their trip to the UK and they share stories and photos from their whirlwind visit to a variety of (allegedly) haunted places. Blake makes jokes... and wishes he could go himself.
Link to trip photos and Extended Show Notes
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E46 FLASHBACK: England's Most Haunted Village
Blake brings us a flashback to 2017, when he and Karen sat down withThe Spooktator's Hayley Stevens to talk about the (allegedly) most haunted village in England. Hayley is a British paranormal researcher who …
Show notes
Blake brings us a flashback to 2017, when he and Karen sat down withThe Spooktator's Hayley Stevens to talk about the (allegedly) most haunted village in England. Hayley is a British paranormal researcher who started out a believer and came around to skepticism the hard way - by actually investigating - and she now publishes the newsletter The Ghost Geek. She first appeared on MonsterTalk back in episode 37 to talk lake monsters. This time the subject is Pluckley, a small, film-set-pretty village in Kent that is considerably more famous for its dead than for its living.
Pluckley's ghost roster runs somewhere between a dozen and sixteen-plus, depending on who's counting and when - and the number has a habit of going up. There are two different White Ladies, a Red Lady, a highwayman, a phantom coach, and a stretch of woodland that screams. Where does a reputation like this actually come from, who benefits from it, and what happens to a place once the ghost tours arrive? Also - Blake goes looking for a famous piece of documentation that everybody cites and nobody seems to have seen.
Extended notes at monstertalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E45 - Circus Train Wrecks 🎪🚂
⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.⚠️ Blake …
Show notes
⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.⚠️
Blake and Karen discuss Circus Train Wrecks as an explanation for mysterious "real" animal sightings, as well as a source of folklore monsters of high improbability.
🚂 In This Episode- Why circus trains wrecked so often
- The economic event that ended the era - and why regulation wasn't the answer
- An inversion of survivorship bias, and the data set nobody has built yet
- A 1917 newspaper story about lions in a butcher shop that is not what it appears to be
- The 1931 wire story about a colony of Bengal tigers in the mountains of Mexico
- How armadillos actually got to Florida
- Gypsy the elephant, Tifton to Valdosta, November 1902
- Wallace the Lion, the Exeter mail coach lioness, and Christian the Lion
- Why the Beast of Gévaudan may be the oldest "it escaped from a menagerie" case on record
- How Gévaudan subverts myths about the Enlightenment
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.🐺 S05E44 - Darwin and the Monsters (with Dr. Brian Regal)
Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long …
Show notes
Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology. Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, and then spent more than a decade writing everything else instead. Karen is away in the UK promoting Beyond Words, so this episode is a two-hander between Blake and an old friend.
The book runs monsters forward from the classical world - Lucretius, Pliny, Aristotle, and a Sumerian hero fighting a monster in the oldest story we have - through the Middle Ages, the age of curiosities, and into the modern hunt for anomalous primates.
🔦 In This Episode- Why the book is priced the way it is, and Blake's advice to check the library before the bookstore - a small tangent on academic publishing and the old "priced to rent" sticker era.
- How Darwin and the Monsters almost became a doctoral dissertation, and why Brian wrote about Henry Fairfield Osborn instead.
- Brian's journey from student to author.
- The publish-or-perish treadmill: every new contract pushed the Darwin book back another few years.
- What the book is not: it is not a Bigfoot book, and Brian has notes for the critics who wanted more Bigfoot.
- Too many werewolves? Brian's 2009 paper for the British Society for the History of Science on how Darwinian thinking killed off the wolf-man - and how anomalous primates moved into the vacancy.
- The dogman problem - the most popular cryptid going is arguably a werewolf, which is arguably a medieval dog-headed man, which is arguably not an animal at all.
- Why the coelacanth is a bad advertisement for cryptozoology: no folkloric background, nobody was looking for it, and "living fossil" is not as accurate as people seem to think.
- Grover Krantz, missing Bigfoot bones, and the Pennsylvania records of bears that died without being hunted.
- Writing for an audience of one, and Brian's cheerful refusal to take criticism personally.
- What is next: a long-gestating novel about a historian of science who gets into wacky trouble, and the real-life model for its main character.
- Retirement, luck, and the case for going to a smaller school that will let you study monsters.
- The origin of The Monster of Newark, which started as notes toward an examined life and turned into an autobiography.
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.🏚️ S05E43 - The Peabody-Whitehead Mansion
⚠️ Content AdvisoryThis episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration …
Show notes
⚠️ Content AdvisoryThis episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.⚠️
Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver's Peabody-Whitehead Mansion - the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill's old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected.
What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history - a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning.
Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.☠️S05E42 - THE BLACK DEATH🐀
Blake and Karen are joined by Dr. Ben Dodds, author of Myths and Memories of the Black Death to discover more about a disease which forever changed world history when it swept across Europe in the 1300s.The …
Show notes
Blake and Karen are joined by Dr. Ben Dodds, author of Myths and Memories of the Black Death to discover more about a disease which forever changed world history when it swept across Europe in the 1300s.
The conversation runs from the mechanics of the disease - what a bubo actually is, what finally kills you, and why the textbook rats-and-fleas model spreads far too slowly to explain what medieval eyewitnesses described - to the harder question of how anyone in 2026 knows any of it. Along the way: the marmot hypothesis, the medieval physicians who were certain they had it figured out, the appalling 1348 pogroms whose victims were dug out of the ground in a Catalan town a short drive from where Dodds was sitting, why Monty Python understood the Middle Ages better than most historical novelists, and a closing answer about the aftermath that most listeners will not see coming. Blake's cold open, meanwhile, sets out to explain why we call it the Black Death at all - and reels in an unexpected monster.
Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.🛸 S05E41 - Government Disclosure
Blake and Karen welcome back paranormal investigator Matthew Baxter to sift through the latest government UAP release - the so-called PURSUE document dump - and work out what, if anything, is actually in it …
Show notes
Blake and Karen welcome back paranormal investigator Matthew Baxter to sift through the latest government UAP release - the so-called PURSUE document dump - and work out what, if anything, is actually in it. Baxter took on the job of reading the paperwork so nobody else has to, and he returns with a skeptic's field report on what the government handed over, and what it quietly left out.
From a Nevada billionaire's decades-long influence campaign to a $22 million taxpayer-funded hunt for the strange at a remote Utah ranch, the trio traces how fringe belief got bootstrapped into official policy - and asks whether the whole disclosure spectacle is meant to illuminate anything at all, or just to bury the question under an avalanche of unanalyzed data. Along the way: anglerfish, ice cream cones, and an epistemological war we didn't even know we'd been drafted into.
🎧 What's Inside🛸 What "PURSUE" actually stands for - and what the release did and didn't include
🏛️ AARO decoded: why "all-domain" is more than a rebrand
💰 The billionaire whose private money quietly seeded decades of official UFO research
👻 The "two agendas" baked into disclosure from the start (hint: it was never only about spacecraft)
🍦 A former government UAP chief's memorable verdict on the whole enterprise
🎣 The anglerfish test: what real extraordinary evidence actually looks like
⚔️ The "epistemological war" - and why skeptics feel like they brought a calculator to a shouting match
🪐 What some disclosure advocates are really hoping to find out there
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.🐂S05E40 - Cattle Mutilations: Part 2🛸
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussion of animal death, carcass predation, and graphic descriptions of animal mutilation. Listener discretion is advised.Blake and Karen continue their …
Show notes
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussion of animal death, carcass predation, and graphic descriptions of animal mutilation. Listener discretion is advised.
Blake and Karen continue their conversation with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss on the cattle mutilation mystery. If you missed part one, wind your podcast player back an episode - this one picks up right where the panic peaked. At the center of part two is Emmy Award-winning reporter Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest wrapped a decade of dead cows, black helicopters, and hypnotic regressions into a single package and delivered it to America.
Lee walks through what happened next: the government's Rommel Report and its verdict of "Mother Nature," the tragic Bennewitz affair, cow parts arriving by mail in Alberta, a declassified CIA remote-viewing file, and how the whole phenomenon finally hardened into alien orthodoxy. It all ends with the big question - what's actually killing these animals?
Extended show notes at Monstertalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.🐂S05E39 - Cattle Mutilations: Part 1🛸
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of animal injuries and death. Both parts carry an explicit tag.⚠️Blake and Karen welcome Lee Weiss, a religious studies scholar whose deep dive into …
Show notes
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of animal injuries and death. Both parts carry an explicit tag.⚠️
Blake and Karen welcome Lee Weiss, a religious studies scholar whose deep dive into the FBI's declassified cattle mutilation files grew into a sweeping study of one of America's strangest panics. Blake first met Lee at the Of Gods and Monsters conference in 2019, and the two reconnected at its 2026 sequel - both contributed to the academic volume Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous. (affiliate link)
In part one of this two-part investigation, Lee lays out the anatomy of the "classic mute" - the missing eyes, ears, and soft tissue, the reportedly bloodless wounds, the absent tracks - and traces the phenomenon back to its 1967 case zero: Snippy the horse, found dead in Colorado's San Luis Valley. From Victorian sheep panics and escaped menagerie cats to the economic collapse of the 1970s American rancher, the picture that emerges is far stranger than dead livestock. And that's before the unmarked helicopters show up.Part two lands next week.
Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.🦕 S05E38 - Champ Across the Border
Champ Across the Border: Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France and the French colonial period of North America, to talk about Champ - the famous monster of Lake …
Show notes
Champ Across the Border: Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France and the French colonial period of North America, to talk about Champ - the famous monster of Lake Champlain. Most of the lake sits between New York and Vermont, but about 7% of it lies in Quebec, and Joseph's upcoming paper in the ethnology journal Rabaska asks a question almost nobody else has: how does the French-speaking side of the border see this most American of lake monsters?
The answer involves a fabricated Samuel de Champlain quote, a five-foot fish that really was a monster in its own way, nearly 300 years of digitized Quebec newspapers, and a curious case of cross-border monster pride - because why borrow Champ when you already have Ponik and Memphré? Plus hoax serpents, colonial werewolf panics, and how Nessie taught every lake monster what a lake monster is supposed to look like.
Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.🪓 S05E37 - The Lizzie Borden Murders
Note: This episode deals with murder and goes into some detail, so we're putting the "explicit tag" for the mature content, perhaps not suitable for all audiences.MonsterTalk steps outside its usual territory …
Show notes
Note: This episode deals with murder and goes into some detail, so we're putting the "explicit tag" for the mature content, perhaps not suitable for all audiences.
MonsterTalk steps outside its usual territory for a true-crime case with a paranormal afterlife. Blake and Karen welcome Hallie, host of The Morbid Curiosity Podcast, to revisit one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in American history: the August 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the trial that acquitted Andrew's daughter Lizzie while leaving much of the public convinced she did it.
Drawing on Hallie's background in anthropology and skeletal analysis, the conversation lays out the timeline, the forensic evidence, and the tangle of rumor and theory that has kept the case alive for more than a century - before turning to the crime scene itself, now run as "America's most haunted" bed-and-breakfast, and asking what, if anything, still lingers there.
Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E36 - The Chinnery Backseat Ghost
A skeptical look at one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken - the 1959 "backseat ghost" snapped by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in Ipswich, England. This episode is distilled from a recent MonsterTalk Live …
Show notes
A skeptical look at one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken - the 1959 "backseat ghost" snapped by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in Ipswich, England. This episode is distilled from a recent MonsterTalk Live stream with Blake, Karen Stollznow, and special guest Matt Baxter, who brought fresh research (and one neat new idea) to a very old mystery.
It's also a companion piece to our Newby Church Ghost coverage and the spirit-photography episode of Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1985), which examined the Chinnery photo alongside the Cottingley Fairies and the Newby ghost.
Extended show notes at our Patreon site.
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E35 The Newby Church Specter
Blake, Karen and Matt discover that this famous ghost photo isn't as old as they expected, and perhaps not as mysterious either. Do we get it right? Do you have a different explanation? Let us know in the …
Show notes
Blake, Karen and Matt discover that this famous ghost photo isn't as old as they expected, and perhaps not as mysterious either. Do we get it right? Do you have a different explanation? Let us know in the comments.
👻 The Spectre of Newby ChurchIn one black-and-white photograph of a church altar, a tall, hooded figure stands where the photographer swore no one was standing. The "Newby Monk" has haunted paranormal books, websites, and late-night clip shows for decades, and it remains one of the most reproduced ghost photographs ever taken. In this episode we dig into where the image really came from, who took it, when it was actually shot, and how a clever photographer might have made it.
Extensive show notes at monstertalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E34 - Rakshasas
Most Americans meet the Rakshasa in exactly two places: a 1974 episode of a beloved horror TV series and the pages of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Both versions give you a debonair, tiger-faced …
Show notes
Most Americans meet the Rakshasa in exactly two places: a 1974 episode of a beloved horror TV series and the pages of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Both versions give you a debonair, tiger-faced shape-changer with a taste for human flesh - but neither prepares you for how deep, how old, and how genuinely alive these creatures are. To dig us out of that pop-culture foxhole, we sat down with academic researcher Eric Zsebenyi for a tour that runs from the Rig Veda to the Ramayana, into Buddhism, through present-day Sri Lankan politics, and finishes at the tent-shaped tomb of a very naughty Victorian translator.
🎙️ Our GuestEric Zsebenyi holds a master's degree from Naropa University (2000) and has pursued Buddhist studies as a lifelong avocation alongside a career as a civil servant. His path to the Rakshasas began with a Dharma protector named Vetali in his own meditation practice - which, as you'll hear, leads straight back to one of India's stranger monsters. Blake met Eric at the recent Gods & Monsters Conference, where Eric delivered a paper on the Vetala.
You can find Eric's work here: Eric Zsebenyi on Academia.edu
Extensive show notes at Monstertalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E33 - The Devil Went Down to Devon
On the morning of February 9, 1855, residents across south Devon, England, discovered strange hoof-shaped tracks in the snow. The prints - about 4 inches long, 3 inches wide, and spaced roughly 8 inches apart …
Show notes
On the morning of February 9, 1855, residents across south Devon, England, discovered strange hoof-shaped tracks in the snow. The prints - about 4 inches long, 3 inches wide, and spaced roughly 8 inches apart in single file - appeared to have been left by a biped with a donkey-like hoof. Reports came in from more than 30 locations across the county. Within days, the Illustrated London News published a letter from a correspondent calling himself "South Devon" that would define the legend for generations: a continuous 100-mile trail, identical prints in every parish, passage over rooftops and through haystacks, a crossing of the two-mile-wide River Exe. The Devil, some locals whispered, had walked through Devon.
In this episode, Blake, Karen, and Matt dig into the original sources, trace how the story was embellished over 170 years of retelling, and examine the many theories - from wood mice to Romani conspiracies - that have been offered to explain the Great Devon Mystery.
EXTENSIVE show notes at https://monstertalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E32 - Monsters of the Deep with Dr. Darren Naish
Darren joins Blake and Karen to discuss his new article in Geology Today, which grew out of his work on the Monsters of the Deep museum exhibition. That exhibition originally opened at the National Maritime …
Show notes
Darren joins Blake and Karen to discuss his new article in Geology Today, which grew out of his work on the Monsters of the Deep museum exhibition. That exhibition originally opened at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall in 2020, traveled to two additional venues, and most recently ran at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Darren describes how each venue's unique architecture required a complete redesign of the exhibition, changing both the visual layout and the narrative flow.
Extensive show notes at monstertalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E31 - From Loup Garou to Rougarou (pt 2) with Louisiana Dread's Kyle Crosby
This is part two of our conversation with Kyle Crosby, creator and host of Louisiana Dread. In Part 1, we covered the history of the Acadians and how they carried the loup-garou legend from France to the bayous …
Show notes
This is part two of our conversation with Kyle Crosby, creator and host of Louisiana Dread. In Part 1, we covered the history of the Acadians and how they carried the loup-garou legend from France to the bayous of Louisiana. Now, in Part 2, Kyle walks us through the transformation of the loup-garou into the Rougarou - from strict werewolf to all-purpose shapeshifting boogeyman - and takes us on a tour of Louisiana's other legendary creatures, from the Axeman of New Orleans to the feu follet to the Grunch.
Extensive show notes at MonsterTalk.org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E30 - From Loup Garou to Rougarou with Louisiana Dread's Kyle Crosby
This is part one of a two-part conversation. Blake and Karen are joined by Kyle Crosby, filmmaker, historian, and founder of Louisiana Dread, a multimedia project dedicated to documenting the dark history …
Show notes
This is part one of a two-part conversation. Blake and Karen are joined by Kyle Crosby, filmmaker, historian, and founder of Louisiana Dread, a multimedia project dedicated to documenting the dark history, folklore, and culture of the Pelican State. Kyle is a native of Larose, Louisiana, who grew up in Lafourche Parish and on Grand Isle. He spent years working in the film industry before returning home to preserve the stories he felt were being lost to time. Through his popular YouTube channel and social media platforms, he bridges the gap between scholarly history and regional folklore - covering everything from the legend of the Rougarou and the Honey Island Swamp Monster to the real-life mysteries of the Cajun Coast. Kyle is currently adapting his historical deep dives into a scripted horror anthology series, with one episode in the festival circuit and a second in pre-production. Blake met Kyle at the second Gods and Monsters conference at Texas State University, where Kyle's presentation on Louisiana's history and folklore inspired Blake and Karen to finally tackle the Rougarou as a proper episode. In this first part, the conversation digs into the history of the Acadian expulsion, the cultural forces that produced Cajun and Creole Louisiana, and the Old World roots of the Rougarou legend. In part two, they'll get into what the Rougarou actually became - a shape-shifting boogeyman with regional variants, plus feux follets, and a monster that might have been born from a traveling circus.
Extensive show notes at MonsterTalk.Org
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E29 - Science of the Supernatural with Melissa Maffeo
Neuroscientist Dr. Melissa Maffeo joins Blake and Karen to discuss her new book Science of the Supernatural: Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Melissa is an associate …
Show notes
Neuroscientist Dr. Melissa Maffeo joins Blake and Karen to discuss her new book Science of the Supernatural: Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Melissa is an associate teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Neuroscience Program.
In this episode, Melissa talks about using paranormal topics as an accessible entry point for teaching psychology and neuroscience, and shares her view that most supernatural experiences can likely be explained by what's happening in our brains - even if we don't yet have all the answers. The conversation covers a wide range of topics from the book, including the God Helmet experiments, the neuroscience of out-of-body experiences, how parasites can hijack behavior, and whether prior belief shapes what we experience.
Extended show notes at our website.
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.FLASHBACK BONUS: S01E069 The Key to the Legend of the Map Monsters
To announce (and celebrate) the Spanish language release of Chet Van Duzer's beautiful and informative book on map monsters, I'm re-releasing episode S01E69!Grab your copy in Spanish here:SPANISH LANGUAGE …
Show notes
To announce (and celebrate) the Spanish language release of Chet Van Duzer's beautiful and informative book on map monsters, I'm re-releasing episode S01E69!
Grab your copy in Spanish here:
SPANISH LANGUAGE : Monstruos marinos en mapas medievales y renacentistas by Chet Van Duzer
Or snag it in English here:
Sea Monsters on Medeival and Renaissance Maps
Extensive show notes here!
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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.S05E28 The Cottingley Fairies
Blake and Karen are joined by Matt Baxter to discuss the strange case of the Cottingley Fairies. https://www.monstertalk.org/?p=2706Hosts: Karen Stollznow, Blake SmithGuest: Matt BaxterIn this episode, the …
Show notes
Blake and Karen are joined by Matt Baxter to discuss the strange case of the Cottingley Fairies.
https://www.monstertalk.org/?p=2706
Hosts: Karen Stollznow, Blake Smith
Guest: Matt Baxter
In this episode, the MonsterTalk crew tackles one of the most famous photographic hoaxes in history - the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917, two young cousins in West Yorkshire produced five photographs that appeared to show real fairies dancing in the garden behind their home. What began as a bit of childhood mischief spiraled into a worldwide sensation when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society championed the images as proof of the supernatural. The team explores how layers of credibility - authentic negatives, expert validation, retouched reproductions, and celebrity endorsement - created a blueprint for how misinformation gains legitimacy. More than a debunking, this is a story about two girls swept up in forces far beyond their control, and the adults who used them.
🧚 The Five Photographs1. Frances and the Dancing Fairies (July 1917) - The iconic first image. Frances gazes past four dancing fairies, one playing a pipe.
2. Elsie and the Gnome (September 1917) - Elsie reaches toward a gnome who looks suspiciously like Rowan Atkinson.
3. Frances and the Leaping Fairy (August 1920) - Taken with the new Cameo cameras and marked plates provided by Gardner.
4. A Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie (August 1920) - Featuring a fairy with a very fashionable 1920s bob haircut.
5. Fairies and Their Sun Bath (August 1920) - The most blurred and "ethereal" looking image. Frances maintained to her death that this one was genuine. Matt suspects the camera simply wasn't stable.
🔍 The Story in BriefIn the summer of 1917, cousins Elsie Wright (15, turning 16) and Frances Griffiths (9) were living together at 31 Main Street, Cottingley, West Yorkshire. Frances and her mother had returned to the UK from South Africa because Frances's father, Arthur Griffiths, had gone to serve on the Western Front. The girls played constantly at the beck (stream) behind the house, and when scolded for getting wet, claimed they went there to see fairies.
To prove it, they borrowed Elsie's father Arthur Wright's Midg quarter-plate camera - a glass-plate camera from around 1912 - and returned within the hour with one of the most iconic images in paranormal history: Frances gazing past a group of four dancing fairies, one playing a pipe. A second photograph followed - Elsie with a gnome (who, Karen notes, bears a striking resemblance to Rowan Atkinson).
Elsie's father Arthur, a keen amateur photographer with his own darkroom, immediately suspected a prank. But Elsie's mother Polly believed the photographs were genuine. In 1919, Polly attended a lecture on "Fairy Life" at the Bradford Theosophical Society and shared the images. That brought them to the attention of https://theosophy.wiki/en/Edward_L._Gardner, president of the London lodge of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society, and eventually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was already writing an article on fairies for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strand_Magazine.
Gardner had the negatives examined by photographic expert Harold Snelling, who declared them "genuine" with "no trace of studio work" - technically true, since the trick was all done in-camera with cardboard cutouts and hatpins, not in a studio. Snelling then produced enhanced copies from the original negatives for publication - transforming evidence into what Matt calls "presentation artifacts," though they continued to trade on that original credibility claim.
In 1920, Gardner returned to Cottingley with two Cameo cameras and secretly marked photographic plates. The girls produced three more photographs: Frances and the Leaping Fairy, A Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie (featuring a conspicuously fashionable 1920s-bobbed fairy), and Fairies and Their Sun Bath. These were again sent to Snelling for enhancement before publication.
Both Kodak and Ilford examined the photographs. Kodak found no proof of fakery but refused to certify them as genuine, noting that fairies aren't real. Ilford said they were fake. Believers interpreted the ambiguity as validation.
Doyle published his article in the Christmas 1920 Strand, and followed it with https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47506 in 1922. The reaction was brutal - the creator of Sherlock Holmes was widely mocked. Gardner sold prints at lectures, and the rights became tied to the Theosophical movement. The girls and their families received little or no money.
In 1921, Gardner returned to Cottingley with more cameras and an occultist named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hodson. The girls were no longer present - both had moved overseas and married. No new photographs were produced, but Hodson claimed to see fairies everywhere.
The case languished for decades until 1978, when it was attacked from multiple angles at once. Fred Gettings - a prolific British author of some 59 books on art, occultism, astrology, tarot, and esoteric symbolism - was researching early illustration for his book https://amzn.to/41Onnlu (Harmony Books, 1978) when he stumbled across fairy drawings in https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39592/39592-h/39592-h.htm (1915, illustrating a poem by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noyes called "A Spell for a Fairy") and recognized the unmistakable similarity to the Cottingley fairies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi noted in https://amzn.to/4tZQzlB, is that Gettings was himself an avowed believer in spiritualism and spirit photography - Gettings wasn't looking to debunk anything. He was simply honest enough to publish what he found. The single most damning piece of evidence against the Cottingley photos came not from a skeptic but from a believer.
That same year, Randi enlisted Robert Sheaffer - a skeptic experienced in investigating UFO claims - and https://archive.org/details/ground-saucer-watch-news-bulletin/Ground%20Saucer%20Watch%20Bulletin%20-%201976%2006%20-%20June/ in Phoenix, Arizona, to perform computer-enhanced image analysis on the photographs. Spaulding's scanning technology, originally developed for analyzing satellite and UFO photographs, confirmed the fairy figures were flat (exactly what you'd expect of paper cutouts) and turned up what appeared to be a thread support in photo number four. Randi initially reported these findings and promoted the "string" theory of how the fairies were supported. According to at least two independent sources, Elsie Wright - by then in her late seventies and still not confessing - responded via New Scientist, sarcastically asking what part of the sky the strings were supposed to be attached to. By the time Randi wrote up the case in chapter 2 of https://amzn.to/4tZQzlB (1980), titled "Fairies at the Foot of the Garden," he had reconsidered: he captioned the computer enhancement image as "doubtful evidence" and wrote that no support was even necessary for the figures. Randi included Gettings's Princess Mary's Gift Book discovery in the chapter but disappointingly did not provide a proper citation for Ghosts in Photographs.
The hoax remained officially unresolved until the early 1980s, when pressure mounted from two directions simultaneously. Journalist Joe Cooper, who had been working directly with both women for years, secured Elsie's first public confession for The Unexplained magazine in 1982. Concurrently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, was publishing a thorough ten-part forensic investigation titled "That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies" (1982-1983). Crawley's work prompted Elsie to write him a detailed confession letter dated 17 February 1983, now held at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. The combined weight of Cooper's journalism and Crawley's photographic analysis finally brought the truth out after more than sixty years: the fairies were cardboard cutouts drawn by Elsie, copied from illustrations by Claude Shepperson in Princess Mary's Gift Book (1914), with wings added by the girls. They were held upright in the grass with hatpins - the very mechanism that Randi's string theory had tried and failed to identify. Frances maintained to her death that the fifth photograph - Fairies and Their Sun Bath - was genuine.
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