MonsterTalk

⚠️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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

⚠️ 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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

⚠️ 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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

⚠️ 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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

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

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.