"Voodoo dolls are the one thing I'm always on my high horse about."

In this episode, Joanna is joined by author, filmmaker, anthropologist and initiated New Orleans Voodoo priestess Lilith Dorsey for a rich conversation that dismantles centuries of myth while exploring the profound spiritual philosophies at the heart of African diasporic religions.

Together, they trace how traditions such as New Orleans Voodoo, Haitian Vodou and Yoruba spirituality have survived colonisation, enslavement and systematic misunderstanding, not by remaining fixed, but by adapting while holding fast to their deepest truths. Lilith explains why these religions are "like fractals", capable of becoming as intimate as a family ritual or as expansive as a gathering of thousands, all while preserving their sacred energy.

From ancestor veneration and the true origins of zombies to the enduring misconceptions surrounding so-called "voodoo dolls", Joanna and Lilith explore how popular culture has distorted these traditions, and why those distortions persist. They also discuss the reclamation of powerful feminine figures like Lilith, the pioneering work of Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Deren, and what it means to document the sacred without diminishing its mystery.

Warm, generous and endlessly fascinating, this conversation invites us to reconsider not only what we think we know about Voodoo, but why societies so often demonise the spiritual traditions they cannot control, and what might become possible if we approached them instead with humility, curiosity and respect.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

☕ Help us to keep going!  buymeacoffee.com/mementomorbidpodcast  
💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production & Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley 

substack.com/@mementomorbid 

"I don't keep the most valuable things. I keep the things that sing to me." — Evan Michelson

What makes an object into a portal for memory, grief, beauty, and the sacred?

This week, Joanna Ebenstein is joined by Evan Michelson—collector, curator, television personality and co-founder of the legendary Obscura Antiques & Oddities—to explore a lifetime spent discovering meaning in the overlooked, the uncanny and the beautiful.

Known to many from the Discovery Channel series Oddities, Evan reflects on how collecting is, for her, far more than an appreciation of unusual objects. Together, she and Joanna discuss cabinets of curiosity, anatomical models, relics, mourning artefacts and the stories objects carry across generations. They consider why we're drawn to beautiful things that remind us of mortality, and how collections can become emotional maps of our lives rather than displays of monetary value.

The conversation wanders through the history of curiosity collecting, the blurred boundaries between science, spirituality and art, and the profound experience of encountering eighteenth-century Anatomical Venuses, objects that inspire wonder while confronting us with our own impermanence.

Evan also reflects candidly on her years in television, describing reality TV as "a poison and a pox," while exploring what can be lost when genuine curiosity is reshaped for entertainment, as well as what can be gained when niche worlds and overlooked histories are brought to a wider audience. 

Warm, insightful, and full of humour, Evan shares how learning to trust what "sings" to her has shaped both her collection and her understanding of herself. In doing so, she invites us to look differently at the objects surrounding us, not simply as possessions, but as companions in our lives. As she puts it, "It's sort of like a big memory box."

"Beauty can be a doorway into mortality." — Evan Michelson

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

☕ Help us to keep going!  buymeacoffee.com/mementomorbidpodcast  

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production & Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley 

substack.com/@mementomorbid 

"It's the death of organisms that creates the fertility of the soil."

When a storm in Mexico forces a last-minute change of plans, host Joanna Ebenstein is joined by Memento Morbid's Series Producer, Jess Gunasekara, for a special behind-the-scenes conversation reflecting on the remarkable first season of the podcast thus far.

Together they revisit the guests, books and ideas that have lingered long after the microphones were switched off. From John Troyer's writing on losing a sibling and the courage to speak honestly with the dying, to Pam Grossman's everyday rituals of creativity, Tiffany Hopkins' journey into mediumship, and Dylan Thuras' reflections on endings and creative rebirth, Joanna and Jess explore how the themes of these conversations have shaped their own lives as much as the podcast itself.

Along the way they discuss the strange comfort of recognising life's recurring cycles of loss and renewal, why fairy tales, horror and myth continue to offer space for mystery in an increasingly rational world, and the unexpected ways creativity grows from encounters with mortality. They also look ahead to Joanna's forthcoming book, The Art of Fairy Tales, and some of the guests and ideas waiting to be explored in the months ahead.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, and the unexpected beauties of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

☕ Help us to keep going!  buymeacoffee.com/mementomorbidpodcast  

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production & Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley 

substack.com/@mementomorbid

What happens when the project that defined your life suddenly no longer belongs to you?

This week, Joanna Ebenstein is joined by her longtime friend Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura, to explore wonder, grief, creativity, and what it means to let go of the work that has shaped your identity.

Long before algorithms and influencers transformed the internet, Joanna and Dylan were part of a small community of writers, artists and explorers driven by nothing more than curiosity. Together they revisit that extraordinary era of blogs, hidden museums, and strange discoveries, tracing how those shared passions eventually grew into Atlas Obscura and Morbid Anatomy.

This conversation is also about endings. Dylan reflects on losing the company he helped build, describing the peculiar grief of becoming estranged from a project that occupied "an enormous part of your self, your soul." Together, he and Joanna consider why creative lives inevitably involve cycles of death and rebirth, and why stepping into uncertainty may be the only way something genuinely new can emerge.

Along the way they discuss spiritual curiosity, the limits of materialism, the strange beauty of mortality, and why the modern pursuit of immortality may reveal more about our fear of death than our passion for life.

Dylan answers Memento Morbid's closing question with an unforgettable reflection on eternal life, arguing that death is not simply life's ending, but the very thing that gives it urgency, meaning and wonder.

A thoughtful conversation about making things, losing them, and discovering what comes next. 

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production & Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley 

substack.com/@mementomorbid 

What if the dead are not gone at all, but woven into the fabric of everyday life?

Historian, scholar of religion and Black studies, and Sinners consultant Yvonne Chireau joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich conversation about African American conjure, hoodoo, ancestry, and the many ways we misunderstand the relationship between the living and the dead.

Drawing on decades of research into Black religious traditions, Yvonne challenges familiar ideas about magic, spirituality and the supernatural. Rather than seeing hoodoo as something sinister or sensational, she invites us to understand it as a living cultural tradition rooted in healing, memory, resilience, and the enduring presence of ancestors.

The conversation moves from childhood experiences of the sacred to the artistic power of ritual objects, asking why Western culture so often frames encounters with mystery through horror rather than wonder. Together, Joanna and Yvonne explore whether ancestors and ghosts are really the same thing, how material objects can become vessels of remembrance, and why keeping the dead close can be a profound act of survival.

Yvonne also shares the extraordinary story of becoming the historical hoodoo consultant on Ryan Coogler's acclaimed film Sinners, revealing how one unforgettable scene captures past, present and future collapsing into a single moment of ancestral presence.

"The charge is in remembering those who came before." — Yvonne Chireau

Finally, Yvonne reflects movingly on witnessing her father's death, how that experience transformed her understanding of mortality, and why her own spiritual practice has dissolved much of the fear she once carried.

This is an episode about memory as resistance, beauty as a spiritual language, and the possibility that death is far richer, stranger and more alive than many of us have been taught to believe.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production & Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley 

substack.com/@mementomorbid 

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Lee Unkrich—director of Coco, Toy Story 3, and longtime Pixar creative—joins Joanna Ebenstein for a deeply personal conversation about collecting, mortality, and the unexpected ways art can reshape our relationship with loss.

Long before Coco brought Día de Muertos to a vast global audience, Lee was fascinated by cemeteries, ghost stories, and the uncanny. In this interview, he reflects on how childhood fears, a life-long obsession with The Shining, and a passion for collecting taxidermy, anatomical models, and unusual artefacts all became part of a creative practice rooted in curiosity rather than fear.

The conversation explores the extraordinary research behind Coco, the responsibility of telling a story grounded in another culture, and how immersing himself in Mexican traditions fundamentally transformed his understanding of death. Lee shares why creating an annual ofrenda has become an essential ritual in his own family, opening up about the recent loss of his beloved dachshund, Waffles, and the comfort that remembrance can bring.

Along the way, Joanna and Lee discuss collecting as a form of storytelling, preserving fleeting moments through archives, and the enduring mystery of The Shining.

"The Shining isn't just a horror film—it's about what refuses to stay buried." 

Warm, thoughtful, and quietly profound, this episode is an invitation to consider how creativity, ritual and remembrance help us carry the dead with us—not as shadows of the past, but as continuing presences in our lives.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production & Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley 

substack.com/@mementomorbid 

What if mediumship and creativity trace back to the same roots?

In this episode of Memento Morbid, Joanna Ebenstein is joined by medium, researcher, educator and author Tiffany Hopkins for a wide-ranging conversation that moves between science, spirituality, and the porous edges of perception. From her academic background in cognitive science, computing, music, and international business, Tiffany traces an unexpected path into spiritualism—one shaped as much by data-driven thinking as by ritual, intuition, and inherited belief.

At the heart of the conversation is Lily Dale, New York—the historic centre of Spiritualism—where Tiffany spent eight years living in a community dedicated to communicating with the dead. She describes a place where grief, curiosity, and connection coexist openly; where talking about the dead is as ordinary as ordering coffee; and where belief is less about doctrine than lived, shared experience.

Together, Joanna and Tiffany explore the history of Spiritualism, from its 19th-century origins in upstate New York revival culture to its entanglement with abolitionism, women’s rights movements, and questions of voice and authority. They ask what it means to “receive” information—whether from spirit, subconscious, or imagination—and how creative practice might overlap with mediumship in ways we don’t yet fully understand.

The episode also becomes experiential: Tiffany guides us through a grounded exercise in attention, sensation, and imaginative connection, offering listeners a way to explore perception without losing the anchor of the body.

Across the conversation runs a shared curiosity: how do we live alongside mystery without collapsing it into certainty or scepticism? And what happens when we treat death not as an ending, but as a different kind of relationship?

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production & Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley 

substack.com/@mementomorbid

What happens when a lifelong fascination with mortality leads you into crypts, catacombs, pet cemeteries, and skull festivals across the world?

Photographer, writer, and art historian Paul Koudounaris joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging conversation about death, beauty, human remains, and the stories we tell through the dead. Best known for his acclaimed books Empire of Death, Heavenly Bodies, Memento Mori, A Cat’s Tale, and Faithful Unto Death, Paul has spent decades documenting extraordinary death traditions and sacred remains around the globe.

Together, Paul and Joanna explore why some people are drawn to mortality from an early age, the role death has played in shaping Paul's creative life, and what it means to spend years in the company of thousands of skeletons. Paul reflects on his journey from art historian to author and photographer, revealing the painstaking process behind some of his most iconic images, including the jeweled skeleton saints of Heavenly Bodies.

The conversation journeys from Baroque-era relics and bone churches to pet cemeteries, famous feline heroes, and the surprising story of how Paul's cat Baba became the star of her own bestselling history book. Along the way, Paul shares stories from his travels through Peru and Bolivia, where communities maintain living relationships with ancestral skulls, blurring the boundaries between remembrance, devotion, and daily life.

With characteristic humour and warmth, Paul reflects on mortality, creativity, and the profound equality found in death.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com   

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine 
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley

substack.com/@mementomorbid

What happens when a photographer spends 25 years documenting people who believe they can speak with the dead?

Photographer Shannon Taggart joins Joanna Ebenstein for a fascinating conversation about spiritualism, séance culture, spirit photography, and the enduring human desire to remain connected with those who have died.

Best known for her acclaimed book Séance, Taggart reflects on how a mysterious message received by a family member at Lily Dale — the world's largest Spiritualist community — first drew her into a lifelong exploration of mediumship and the paranormal. What began as a photographic project soon became an investigation into belief, perception, history, and the limits of what we think we know.

Together, Shannon and Joanna explore the forgotten influence of spiritualism on art, science, photography, and social reform movements. They discuss ectoplasm, spirit photography, the strange overlap between séance rooms and stage magic, and why some of the most influential artists and thinkers of the modern era were fascinated by communication with the dead.

The conversation also examines the tension between scepticism and belief. Shannon shares some of the most uncanny experiences she has witnessed while documenting séances, reflects on the role of mystery in creative practice, and explains why she remains committed to holding uncertainty rather than seeking definitive answers. Along the way, they consider ancestor relationships, near-death experiences, and why death itself may be what gives life its meaning.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine 
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley

substack.com/@mementomorbid

Is Reality Stranger Than We’re Willing to Admit? 

Religious scholar and author Jeffrey J. Kripal joins Joanna Ebenstein for an engrossing conversation exploring mysticism, sexuality, death, and the edges of what we call “real.”

Kripal reflects on his early years in a Catholic seminary, where fasting, faith, anorexia, and psychoanalysis shaped his understanding of religion as far stranger and more psychologically complex than it first appears.

He discusses his argument that mystical traditions often encode forms of queerness and fluidity that resist fixed identity, and suggests that paranormal phenomena—UFOs, abductions, synchronicities—belong to the same instability in reality.

He also recounts an unexplainable experience in Calcutta during Kali Puja, which reshaped his intellectual life and thinking about death as an opening onto “larger reality.”

Together, Joanna and Jeff explore what it means to take the impossible seriously—not as metaphor, but as part of reality itself.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley

substack.com/@mementomorbid