MonsterTalk

In part one of our two-part interview with Owen Davies, we discuss the history of witch trials, accusations, murder, and other troubles bubbling up from post-Salem accusations in America. In part two, next week, we will continue the discussion with thoughtful considerations of the meaning of witch and how it can be an identity or an accusation.  Be sure and catch both parts of this fascinating chat. 

Some related viewing/reading:

A curious case of Black Magic in Norfolk

Blake’s article about the “PA Hex Hollow” murders (Skeptoid #996)

Books by Owen*:
Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History

Magic: A Very Short Introduction

Folklore: A journey through the past and present (with Ceri Houlbrook)

The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic 

America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem

*We use Amazon affiliate links for books when available

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s witchcraft.
I’ll say that right now.
You know, there are different factions of that.
West African-born couple have been found guilty of torturing and murdering a 15-year-old boy in a trial bedeviled by witchcraft possession and exorcism.
Nathan Miller is charged with capital murder.
He declined to appear in court.
Authorities say he believed the victims were practicing witchcraft.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
I’m so excited that we got to talk with Owen Davies.
His historical research into the history of witchcraft and magical practices have coincided with my abiding wish to better understand this complicated topic.
Witches are so many things to so many people, but there’s so much more to understanding this topic and its impact on history than the trite question of, is magic real?
One can be entirely skeptical of the existence of witches or even the efficacy or reality of magic and still be crushed in the gears of a witch hunt.
In part one of this two-part interview, we’ll be focusing on the content of Owen’s 2013 book, America Bewitched, which is a fascinating and elucidating look at how the United States handled witch accusations after Salem.
If you ever thought that after Salem, America probably realized the shameful miscarriage of justice and its regressive supernaturalism in witches, and moved on to an enlightened future where only the occasional hayseed or superstitious immigrant could possibly fall for such an idea, well, you could be really wrong.
The history of witch belief in America and the horrors unleashed with such accusations extends from Salem all the way up to probably earlier today in an unbroken line of hard feelings, recrimination, financial ruin, and sometimes even murder.
This week we will be looking at that history, and next week we’ll be stepping back just a little bit and looking at the broader persistence of witch belief around the world
Witches as a concept of fear, as a label, as a monster, as a liberating identity, and many other phases.
It turns out that the witch is a lot of things.
Today, we’re welcoming Owen Davies, and he is a British historian and leading academic authority on witchcraft, magic, and related popular beliefs in Europe.
He’s a professor of social history at the University of Hertfordshire, where his research focuses on how ordinary people used magic from cunning folks and grimoires to fortune-telling and folk healing, particularly from the early modern period through the 19th century.
His recent work includes The Illustrated History Art of the Grimoire from 2023, which looks beautiful.
I really need to get that.
And Folklore, A Journey Through the Past and Present from 2025, which he co-authored with Kerry Holbrook.
Currently, he’s the co-lead on the National Folklore Survey for England.
which is a major project launching to capture a snapshot of contemporary beliefs and traditions.
And I also heard that he served as the president of the Folklore Society before being replaced by a hook-handed stranger with a kidney missing and a wig full of spiders.
Is that fairly accurate?
Very accurate, yeah.
We’re here today to talk about witches and specifically about your book, America Bewitched, from 2013.
But talking about witches is so complicated.
We’ve struggled with it here on this show because it seems like a witch is…
a label that can be put on you by someone else, but it might also be a set of beliefs or an identity.
But you’re the expert.
How do you define what a witch is?
Yeah, I mean, you’re spot on.
I mean, the 20th century confused these things a lot because of the rise of witchcraft as a religion where people self-identify as witches or Wiccans or whatever.
But obviously, and I do work and write on that sort of phase in the mid-20th century almost, but…
for me you know the historical definition of a witch is a witch is a malign person it’s a malign person who uses magic um um to cause harm that’s pretty much simple that’s the simple definition that’s that definition works going right back into antiquity in different cultures and civilizations these are these are people who are motivated by spite and envy and use magic in harmful ways
Can I quickly follow up with that?
That actually struck me pretty hard while reading the book because I typically think of witches in these sort of categories, but I don’t typically think of witches as an explanation for a mystery.
And that’s what they often are, it seems like, that someone is having bad luck in particular or some health issues, whatever, and they’re looking for a cause.
And I had never thought about witches as being similar to…
the fair folk as is because by, you know, elves or goblins or whatever for, for the malady, you know, the cow milk comes out curdled, you know, that’s could be the fair folk, but could be a witch could be a bacteria, but they don’t know about that yet.
Yeah.
I mean, witchcraft essentially is an explanation.
It’s an explanation of something which is otherwise inexplicable within the culture in terms of knowledge or ideas and religion, et cetera, et cetera, of any culture.
The point is, it’s an explanation, but it’s an explanation that then leads to a possible remedy because you’ve got someone to blame.
And if you’ve got someone identifiable, then you can go and do something to the person who thinks caused it, and that will make you feel better.
So it’s that kind of very simple thing of, as you say, it works over and over, particularly with ill health.
I’m ill. Maybe someone’s got internal cancer.
It’s not visible or whatever.
And it goes on and on, and they spend all their money on a doctor.
It’s still not cured, and the doctor says it’s this and it’s that, but it doesn’t explain anything.
And you think, well, maybe it’s someone.
Maybe it’s a witch.
Escape ghost.
Yeah, exactly.
But the point is that once you’ve identified someone, then you can either cause them harm magically or physically go and assault them or kill them.
And that will make you feel better.
And fundamentally, that’s it.
And it’s worse.
Obviously, there’s a lot of witchcraft accusations which never go anywhere.
They just end up festering for years, decades.
But in the extremes, as in the book, when you’ve got dozens of people being murdered in America, that’s normally the trajectory.
With your book, America Bewitched, you primarily focus on cases of witchcraft in the post-Salem world.
And so…
following the time of those trials.
So were you surprised to find out how often a lot of these, a lot of other tragic witch encounters ended up in courts or in the mall long after the 1600s?
I mean, I’ve been working on continuation of witchcraft beliefs in Britain and also in France for years.
And, you know, quite a lot of my sources, two main sources, have been folklore collected in the early part of the…
20th century, late 19th century, and also newspapers and newspapers reporting court cases.
And having done massive amounts of systematic newspaper research in the days before digitization.
This is sitting with real newspapers.
The good old days.
Or with microfilm, one or the other.
And anyway.
you know, having done so much of that and British newspapers and French newspapers would report on American cases just as American newspapers report on European cases, you know, as a tidbits of, you know, tidbits of…
titillating, you know, news, superstition strikes again type headlines, you know, France, France, but which, blah, blah, blah.
So I knew there was a lot of material to be found in America.
And obviously the folklore sources bore that out because there were plenty of folklorists in the early 20th century who were picking up continued belief in witchcraft.
So I wanted to try and give it a history because it’s a kind of…
a kind of a frustration with the preoccupation with Salem, one trial, you know, in America.
Salem just dominates everything, even though obviously there were other witch trials at the time in America.
But also what was potentially this huge body of material about continued witchcraft belief and, you know, the headline fact that more people, you know, were killed as witches passed after Salem than were actually executed during the witch trials in America.
And surely that’s an important story for understanding the development of American culture and society.
And there’s a kind of sense to which the focus on Salem is, I think, almost nationally subconscious because it’s the idea that it finished, it stopped.
This is the beginning of the American Enlightenment.
For listeners, I’m nodding vigorously in agreement with it.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s right, exactly.
So it’s very comforting.
Let’s study Salem.
That would be the old days when these strange beliefs were held and tragedy and people accused things.
We can study it with dispassion and step back from it all.
How did that happen?
We’re at the same time, you know.
Why do you think that there is just such a focus on that period?
Do you think it’s got something even to do with Arthur Miller and the crucible?
Yeah, well, that’s part of it, I think.
I think that part of it because that was such a powerful,
piece of literature, mid-20th century literature.
You’re talking about Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, right?
I just want to make sure we’re…
I saw the right documentary.
Yeah, that cemented it.
So people, you know, it drew those relationships between, you know…
anti-communism.
But I mean, it continued.
You can see in the American educated history books right from the 19th century right through the 20th century playing with similar ideas about whether it’s the power or the evil power of religion to pervert people’s attitude to each other, etc.
But yeah, it’s just…
It’s just, I think, I mean, I’m not saying, I’m not singling out America for this because, you know, the sort of work I’ve been doing on Britain and France, very few people have been doing any, you know, there’s very few of us doing this sort of stuff because, you know, I know it from my students.
Over 30 years, I might say to a student, why don’t you do your dissertation on 19th century?
There’s loads of material out there.
It’s like, no, no, no, it’s got to be early modern.
It’s got to be the witch trials.
So it’s not just an American thing, but it’s a societal thing whereby…
Witchcraft is still associated with early modern, and that’s what serious history is about.
I’m not sure this is just my imagination or not, but the idea that because there was less technology in that period of time, it was a simpler time, so it’s easier to understand what was going on because there’s a smaller set of attitudes and stuff going on.
But I think that’s nonsense, but I think it’s a popular idea when you’re approaching these things.
It is.
And of course, what studying witchcraft belief in 19th and 20th century America shows is also the extraordinary multiculturalism of America, particularly in the 19th century, when millions are pouring into the country, the Europeans are pouring into the country, and not just Europeans, but mostly Europeans, and they’re all bringing their beliefs with them.
And one of the fascinating things about it is the ways in which different communities from different backgrounds have a shared set of ideas.
And those include indigenous, you know, the indigenous nations and their beliefs in witchcraft as well.
That these people from all over the place actually have these, you know, common belief in the witch figure.
And then you get these sort of fertilization of the different types of anti-witchcraft charms and traditions between different cultures, African-American,
indigenous american european you know they will draw upon them it becomes a pool pooling of cultural knowledge and that to me is absolutely fascinating it’s a fascinating thing of cultural uh exchange i i’m curious about when back to the research approach
When you are primarily using the historical documentation around court cases and newspaper articles, there’s like a built-in sensationalism.
And I think I know the answer to this question just on the way you’ve created the definition for which.
is would we know if there were any positive witches or any you know there’s something something equated to you know cunning folk but i guess the answer i’m already sort of answering my own question based on the definition it can’t be a good witch because witches are bad that’s that’s like definitionally true but i am curious about i guess still where do you go for any
non-sensational witch information.
It’s really difficult, it seems like, from a research perspective.
Any positive attitudes toward this at all would be undocumented, probably.
Yeah, there are no positives because you say we’ll talk about cunning folk.
I mean, there is a term that floats around for five centuries called white witch.
Funny enough, I was just reading a recent paper on Indian
folk magic, which was saying that I had made the term white witch popular, and I hardly ever use white witch, so I’m not sure what that’s coming from.
Anyway, the reason why I don’t use white witch much, even though it’s been used for five centuries, is it was originally an educated term, which basically white witch were those who were seemingly good, i.e.
cunning folk, but in fact were in a pact with the devil.
So they’re white witches, but that’s just a mask, a masquerade.
And the term white witch is hardly used at all in British and American folk culture, folk language, because of that.
I mean, what would be a white witch?
I mean, you do get it used, but that’s kind of a bleeding in, I think, of literary sources that takes place at some point.
This wasn’t in conjunction with us prepping to talk to you, but I’d just come across on YouTube a video.
It was an old BBC clip.
dating back to 1964, and it was a little video called A Curious Case of Black Magic in Norfolk.
Did you end up watching that, Blake?
I did.
And so I don’t know, I don’t think there were well-known reporters or anything that I can recall, but it was interesting.
They were talking about this, all of these voodoo dolls that had been pinned to… Puppets, yeah.
Puppets, yeah, had been pinned to the doors of this old church and just all of these other signs of people practising, you know, just…
various religions related to witchcraft and voodoo and Santeria and things like that.
So that’s clear evidence that…
even in the 20th century with computers and going to the moon, all of these things, it just has not stopped a fear of witchcraft or people practicing it in whatever ways they choose to.
But can you tell us a bit more about the public rise of people like self-identifying Satanists and satanic panic and how that shows the kind of duality of witches in America and, I guess, everywhere?
Yeah, I mean, it’s…
It’s a primarily kind of modern Western thing, you know, religious tradition.
And obviously, you know, the first sort of staging post of it is Wicca.
And Gerald Gardner, who founds it, is a retarded British colonial civil servant who…
Basically, he’s dabbling in Freemasonry.
He’s interested in Golden Dawn, middle class, magical occultism of the early 20th century.
He’s a nudist.
Freemasonry, free love.
He comes from a very straight-laced sort of background.
He was kind of counterculture before counterculture.
It arrived a decade later, really.
But anyway, you know, so he basically invents this.
Ronald Hutton’s written a brilliant book on it, you know, tracing where it all comes from.
It’s all invented, but that’s, you know, all religions are invented.
So, you know, they all have a foundation story.
So he created the foundation story about the coven that he was initiated in.
They had carried on centuries of church persecution, blah, blah, blah.
You know, every religion has these sorts of background stories to how they inform.
Anyway.
But, you know, as with, I’m not going to call Witton’s cult, but as with really religious grouping or modern cult, they all end up splitting and splintering into different other forms of groups with different leaders and government leaders.
So, you know, by the 1970s, you’ve got this, you’ve got a variety of different ways in which people are thinking themselves as witches.
And as you say, you’ve also got the rise of Satanism, although that’s more panic than reality.
There are still people, there are still people in the 1970s.
Anton LaVey’s, you know, that’s a very distinct contemporary sort of type of religion.
Arch, sorry, Arch.
He’s not a real Satanist, you know.
Yeah, it’s like punk.
It’s like, it’s performative.
Cult of personality.
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly, exactly.
So his version of Satanism is not actually about devil worship.
But of course, it gets, everything gets, particularly American evangelicalism, you know.
This is where things develop somewhat differently in the States and in Britain, more in Australia, is the ways in which the evangelical community in America reacted to this.
So you’ve got satanic panics and stuff, and the ways in which then witchcraft gets drawn into the idea of satanic worship, particularly.
Happens in Britain, but it’s the strong evangelicalism of America that turns perceptions into a different way.
I mean, obviously today, I mean, I’ve…
The internet is full of, you know, Christian nationalist Republicans talking about witchcraft still being a problem.
You know, that continues.
I live in the South.
Yeah, well, sorry.
It’s real as anything.
It’s real.
Exactly.
It’s airy and it’s real.
I don’t mean witchcraft.
I mean this inflated fear of a made-up version.
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
And, you know, that’s kind of a continuation of what we’re talking about with witchcraft down the centuries, you know.
I’m in Denver, Colorado, and we have botanicas everywhere.
So, Blake, I don’t know if you’ve got any out your way.
No, no, no, no.
What is it?
A botanica.
So it’s kind of like a Hispanic, I guess, apothecary, and you can go there and you can buy.
Oh, okay, like herbal medicine.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, so definitely folk medicine, but you can also buy candles.
Especially Santeria candles, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, and all kinds of, I guess, oils and things and just various spells and rituals if someone’s exacted something against you or if you want to do a ceremony against someone yourself for legal cases and all kinds of things.
But they’re, yeah, still around.
So, yeah, definitely not necessarily the same thing that people are being accused of doing, though.
No, but again, botanicals are classic resources for a whole range of medical, magical practices and purposes.
Exactly.
And it’s not just the Hispanic community who goes to them.
It’s those of European extraction who are engaged in various forms of occult or spiritual activities as well.
It’s like me.
I like those places.
They’re interesting.
Oh, yeah, and they smell great.
They do.
If they occasionally have a taqueria attached, I’m also interested in that.
We don’t have, yeah, there might be one or two in London like that, but it’s not a thing.
It’s not a thing.
We don’t have this.
size of Hispanic population that have set up and brought that culture with them.
I don’t want to lose track of this follow-up, but when we were talking about the rise of modern Satanists, I was surprised several times while reading your book, things, because, you know, I, I feel pretty well read on the topic, but you know, it’s always exciting to get new, new data, you know?
So, but you mentioned, and I had not had a chance to follow up on this myself, that the,
The numbers of witches who were actually killed during what’s commonly called the burning times is like has a mythical over inflation.
And that was surprising to me because.
I have often heard it described as a misogynistic holocaust.
I don’t want to diminish the significance of the loss of life, but I am curious about the diminishment of the actual numbers.
What do the real numbers look like versus the…
I’ll tell you what, this is…
I’ve given hundreds of talks on witch trials and I’ve taught it.
I stopped teaching it years ago because it got to a point, I think, where myself and other witchcraft historians around 2005, we thought, actually, I think we’re getting through to the public on this whole, you know, all the misnomers, including numbers about witch trials, you know.
And then the internet happened and social media happened and it just, all the misinformation about witch trials just flooded.
And it’s almost impossible to counter it now.
It’s just so much out there.
And then you get books like Federici’s One, which is based, she’s a political scientist, who’s a feminist political scientist, who then has, you know, is a really popular book.
But it’s full of rubbish, full of rubbish about the waste trials.
Anyway, so the actual numbers, if we took Europe, for example, I mean, the American numbers are pretty tight because the trials are limited.
There’s very unlikely to have been any trials that we don’t know about that weren’t recorded.
So those numbers are accurate.
The European numbers, which is where you see the figure of millions, as you say, the second wave feminism, we’re labelling it gynocide and things like that.
This was a holocaust of women, as you’re saying.
And that was based on complete false numbers.
I mean, it’s still terrible numbers, but they’re not millions.
I mean, that figure comes around fairly early on, so late 19th century, that figure.
So these sort of figures start getting bandied around, you know, the millions.
But the actual, if we try and extrapolate from actual sources of knowledge, we’re probably looking at around 40,000 to 50,000 executions, put it that way.
And then obviously trials, if we think about the fact that overall, you know, number of trials, say in Britain, for example, 75% of those brought to trial were not executed.
So the number that’s executed, you can then multiply, you know, a number of times to get to a figure of how many trials there were and how many people were tried.
But again, so 40,000, 50,000 executions, hundreds of thousands of trials, and that’s terrible.
These people are, this is terrible.
These people did not, by and large, did not commit anything.
There are people, some of them, so few of them were conducting harmful magic, but normally harmful magic against witches, you know.
So it’s a tragedy.
But let’s not over-inflate it, you know, because that just leads down further misinformation and misunderstanding.
And it’s still strong because second wave feminism picked up on this in the 70s and promoted this idea of mass, almost like a holocaust of women.
It was not helpful for public understanding of what the actual history is.
Well, yeah, I think that there are still enough concerns for feminists just within the figures, the factual figures that you’ve spoken about and just the internalised misogyny too and women reporting against women.
So I think there’s enough there too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
I mean, we are, you know, feminist history brought some really interesting perspectives and certainly some of the latest from 1980s and 90s, which actually historians who work on trial material rather than, you know, reading a few select books on the subject has really brought, you know, some really interesting insights into patriarchal societies and misogyny.
Yeah, for sure.
As drivers.
But it’s a very complex thing.
Again, you know, there’s a whole range of reasons why
women were accused uh and obviously underpinning its patriarchy but there’s all sorts of things to do with everyday society culture neighbors um some some of that is also about patriarchy some of it’s not you know some of it is about in just um you know um the ways in which people interact neighbors interact women or women young women see each other etc etc in different cultures
I was doing some research for something I’m working on and was coming across a lot of cases in the courts about kind of regarding sumptuary laws and women accusing other women of being witches because they were wearing finery that they shouldn’t be wearing.
It was rivalry for people who had more money and gossip and all kinds of personal factors that were coming into it.
And that was just, I think, an easy go-to to…
to blame and to victim blame.
Yeah, well, I mean, I place a lot of emphasis on what might call the spatial environment witchcraft accusations, whereby, you know, you’ve got a lot of women accusing other women in the material I looked at for America for Witches as well.
It’s just the same.
It plays out exactly the same as in France and Britain.
Because in the nature structure of society then, when misfortune happens in the home, whether it’s to do with children or butter making or dairying or whatever it happens to be,
Who were the other people around at that time?
It’s most likely other women.
So if you’re looking for explanations as to why something just happened, you know, why did my butter fail?
Why did my beer fail?
You know, why did my child stick her foot in the fire or whatever happens to me?
oh, so-and-so, didn’t she just come round knocking on the door, blah, blah, blah.
And that’s most, you know, so that’s just another one, another reason.
Literally, I don’t like the way she looked at me.
Yeah, yeah, well, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Because I see, I often tell students this, I think you’ve got to get into a mindset of the time where people constantly try to work out why things happened when they did.
And I give them an example of a today where we don’t think like that.
So I say to them, you know, if you break down in your car,
is your immediate thought, hold on, why did I break down just now at 12.01?
Why did I break down at this particular spot?
Right?
And you start looking around you.
You know, you go, oh, I’ve broken down, call the A, get on your mobile phone, call the A.
You don’t think about the where’s and why’s of these things.
But if your cart, you know, cartwheel falls off, it’s a natural thought to go, hold on, why did it fall off there?
Why did it fall off now?
Who’s there I just passed?
You know, what’s the nearest house?
You know, those are just perfectly normal ways of thinking about it, and we don’t think like that anymore.
So, you know, you’re trying to understand these, whether it’s in the early modern period or even mid-20th century America, why these accusations happen.
It’s because they’re thinking in different ways about… Yeah, it’s an epistemology, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That’s the right word for it, yeah.
Doing the best that they can with the information they have.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we’re going to do a halftime break here.
There’s not really a break.
I’m just going to cut some parts.
I wanted to have one final question for this section, which is, given…
your insight and understanding of the past, I’m not saying make a prediction, but just like, what’s your gut feeling about where things are headed specifically with which accusations in, in, in the 21st century?
Well, obviously there’s still happening in parts of the world today, um, in different cultures.
So it’s still a major problem.
And obviously there’s, there’s real problems with child witches.
It’s recognized by United Nations.
Um,
Women in particular, again, are being killed in India and parts of Africa in what are basically classic witchcraft accusation type scenarios, community mobs, etc.
So that’s one side that still carries on.
And again, that’s nothing to do with those countries being backward or anything else.
It’s about the nature of the culture.
It’s not about education or any of those things.
Ergo, therefore, I could see it perfectly likely that witch accusations could return to Europe, the West, America, as they obviously are in evangelical circles.
So, you know, I don’t think humans progress.
You know, we can get more and more educated and have amazing science and everything else.
It doesn’t mean we think…
Lots of people don’t think in those terms.
And I think, you know, with environmental collapse, societal collapse, I think it’s perfectly likely that we’d see a resurgence of people accusing others of witchcraft in traditional forms.
Yeah, I don’t see… We haven’t moved beyond the idea of this, and we still have all the same instincts.
As I say, it’s what triggers people to think…
in the ways I’ve just been talking about, in witchcraft ways.
And that’s about a fundamental change, degradation of the sorts of lifestyles we have.
Sadly, I have to concur.
And for our listeners, we’ll continue this conversation next week.
Stay tuned.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard part one of our two-part interview with historian Owen Davies discussing his book, America Bewitched.
I’ll put links to a bunch of Owen’s work in the show notes, and you should grab some of his books.
He’s a great writer, a great researcher, and has done serious and underappreciated work trying to demystify the complicated and legitimately dangerous topic of witchcraft.
Monster Talks theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
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We are joined by author and researcher Greg Skomal to talk about the mysterious and long-lived Greenland Shark. 

Books by Greg:

Chasing Shadows: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Great White Shark – Greg’s book about Great Whites 

The Shark Handbook 3rd Edition: The Essential Guide for Understanding the Sharks of the Worldby Greg Skomal

The Great White Shark Handbook

Additional online reading:

Greenland Shark

Cookie Cutter Shark 

Ommatokoita – the eye parasite endemic to Greenland Sharks

New paper on the visual system of Greenland Sharks (Jan 2026) suggests the parasites don’t make the sharks blind, despite longstanding belief that they must.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
People are always asking me the same question.
You identify as a skeptic of monsters, but are there any monsters you think might be real?
And I’m always really iffy about terrestrial monsters.
But the ocean, it’s full of monsters.
H.P.
Lovecraft famously turned his fear of various sea creatures into the template for a menagerie of the monstrous.
Now, Greenland sharks aren’t monsters, but there’s some deeply weird things about them that make them mysterious, distinctive, and disturbing.
These animals seem to have open-ended lifespans, and as adults, they don’t have any obvious predators besides humans.
And they live beneath the ice in the darkness, and they eat dead things down there.
And they’re enormous, and they’re ancient.
And most of them have worms where their eyes should be.
I’m afraid you may not be able to unsee what you’re about to hear.
But wow, are these animals fascinating.
We’ve had so many requests for this topic to be discussed over the years, and Blake and I have both been interested in the Greenland shark.
I think I first heard about it a couple of years ago, maybe more than that.
I’ve always been a big fan of Tudor history, and I saw an article that said this shark was around since the time of Henry VIII.
And I thought, wow, that just sounds so bizarre.
And then there’s just, I think, so much interest in sharks in general.
Now, I grew up in Australia, I’m sure you can tell, and I have been hearing just over the past couple of days about…
a sudden spate of shark attacks around the area of Sydney that I grew up in, so the Manly area.
And so I think that people are always interested in sharks and are very fearful of them.
So I guess we wanted to talk about sharks, but particularly the Greenland shark, and maybe get you to tell us about some of the biology of these creatures and also to dispel some myths too.
But I guess to start with, could you…
Give us a little bit of an introduction about your work and what you do.
Yeah, absolutely.
First, I want to thank you for inviting me.
It’s nice to be with you and talk about monsters and get that opportunity.
Yeah, I’ve got many years of research under my belt.
I started…
studying sharks way back in the mid-80s.
And so while I was doing my master’s degree and then on to a PhD.
And so I’m particularly interested in life history, how these animals live from day to day, how they reproduce, what they feed on, those kinds of aspects of their biology.
I’m really interested in what we call movement ecology, where they go in time and space over multiple scales.
You know, so, you know, how they migrate, when they migrate, what they do when they migrate.
And then, you know, right down to some of their really fine scale behavior, you know.
So the kinds of research we do spans from what they do from second to second to what they do from year to year.
And that really fascinates me.
And then, you know, I’m also interested in their physiology.
You know, what makes them tick?
How does their body work?
You know, in particular, how does the working of its body relate to its environment?
You got to remember that sharks are fish and fish live in a three-dimensional environment.
And so I’m super interested in how their bodies tick.
And so I’ve been doing all kinds of research on a variety of species from the Greenland shark to tropical sharks to the great white shark and to planktivorous sharks like the basking shark.
So just one of these animals I’m super fascinated with.
And when people ask me how I get into it, I really just, how I got into it, I really just talk about how I was, like many kids, I’m fascinated by sharks and I just never outgrew it.
They are kind of spectacular.
I mean, I’m not sure how old you are, but I know people of my generation are in the, I guess, I grew up with Jaws.
It came out when I was eight.
So, you know, that really influenced, I think, a lot of…
sharks as monsters.
But I also grew up when Jacques Cousteau was, you know, constantly having specials on television.
So between that and PBS, you know, my fascination with them as just as animals was probably even greater than my interest in them as monsters.
So I’m thinking here, like, there are some really…
interesting and sort of monstrous aspects to these creatures.
But I think we should probably start with the more mundane.
And this will be a peculiar question, but what makes a shark a shark versus any other kind of fish?
Well, yeah, it’s a good question.
I mean, a lot of people don’t think of sharks as fish, you know, and just as a sidebar, you know, you mentioned your interest in these animals and, you know, mine really mirrors yours.
You know, the movie Jaws was inspirational for me, you know.
Talk about this in my book, Chasing Shadows, how Jaws kind of pushed me into the water.
And Jacques Cousteau, Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau was really big in my house and those kinds of things.
And so that really is what inspired me to.
to uh i realized after watching jaws that people there was an actual job out there where a guy was being paid to study sharks and that was matt hooper of course and uh and that’s how i got into it um but you know sharks are indeed unique creatures in terms of their you know what we call their morphology how they’re built you know and their physiology and i think the most conspicuous act you know aspect of this animal that differentiates it from
what we call the bony fishes, you know, the teleost fishes, it’s cartilaginous skeleton.
You know, all sharks have cartilaginous skeletons.
And that means that, you know, they’re very rubbery, so to speak, you know.
So when we think of cartilage, think about your ear or the tip of your nose, right?
And so it’s very plastic, elastic.
that provides support for the body of the shark, and it makes them truly unique.
There are other aspects as well.
They have scales that are very different from the scales that most fish have.
They have what are called dermal denticles, which are really tiny little teeth.
So we’ve all heard that sharks’ skin is like sandpaper, right?
And I guess that’s one of the monstrous aspects of them.
But, you know, these little scales are shaped like teeth and they can be sharp in one direction and smooth in the other.
And that’s another aspect that makes them unique.
Like a cat’s tongue.
Yeah, a little bit, I guess, a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
And when you talk about shark cartilage, it makes me think about the supplements for shark cartilage and how people, I don’t know if it’s still a popular thing, but how people were taking that for cancer as a kind of alternative medicine cancer treatment.
And I heard that that I think was affecting populations of sharks.
Is that true?
Yeah, yeah, Karen, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, so shark populations have suffered greatly over the last half century.
And, you know, for a variety of reasons, you know, one of them being shark cartilage was thought to, you know, protect people from getting cancer.
Because there is this thinking out there that sharks don’t get cancer.
And that’s actually not true.
I remember hearing that.
Yeah, yeah.
And so many sharks were killed to produce pills that…
really were ineffective, and there really hadn’t been much clinical work done to demonstrate that cartilage would protect you from getting some of these cancerous tumors.
But nonetheless, it took off, and for many years, shark populations were exploited for that purpose, among others, of course.
Very sad.
Well, so…
You’ve spoken about sharks being unique in general.
And from what I know, the Greenland shark is described as one of the most unique and mysterious sharks on Earth.
So can you tell us a little bit about what makes it so unique compared to the other species that we know more about?
Yeah, I mean, the Greenland shark is fascinating, absolutely fascinating shark.
And the opportunity for me to study Greenland sharks came up, well, 25, 26 years ago.
And one of the things I’ve done throughout my career is try to leverage.
different funding sources to get research done and this particular funding source was actually from you know put from a network and a production company and so we spent some time up in the arctic circle but the greenland shark is so cool because it is really one of the few species of of sharks that can live in under arctic conditions you know and so
The work we did up there way back when was under Arctic ice.
And a lot of people don’t associate, you know, fish living as living under ice, except for those of us who live in northern latitudes and occasionally do some freshwater ice fishing.
But, yeah, the Greenland shark is unique because it’s capable of living under Arctic ice, living at really, really high latitudes in extremely cold water, you know, on the order of, you know, minus one, minus two degrees Celsius, you know, so 28, 29, 30 degree water Fahrenheit.
And that’s really quite remarkable.
And it’s also, you know, at the time we did our research back in the early 2000s, we knew virtually nothing about this species.
And that, to me, from a scientific perspective, is really neat to be able to, you know, in the 21st century, study something we know very little about is an awesome opportunity.
um we’ve come a long way since that early research but you know we’ve discovered that they’re they’re incredibly long-lived you know estimates on the order of two three hundred years for some individuals um we still know very little about its basic biology in terms of reproductive biology
Even a growth rate.
We know longevity, but don’t have a good sense of its growth rate.
Size at maturity.
How many young do they have?
Where do they mate?
Those kinds of aspects.
One of the coolest things about, in my mind, about Greenland sharks, and maybe if you’re a Greenland shark, you don’t feel this way, is they’ve got this really unique parasite that bores into its eyeball.
He’s feeling Blake’s thunder here.
Oh, I’m sorry.
It’s okay.
If I’m talking too much and jumping ahead, just feel free.
No, no, no.
This is what we’re having you on.
Just wave your arms and say, I’ll get to that, Greg.
I’ll get to that.
Let my eye worms wiggle at you.
Yeah.
Karen has a real strong aversion to parasites.
So we’ve necessarily had to talk about them several times on the show because it falls under all sorts of monstrous concepts, body horror, et cetera.
But I was really surprised because the first thing I thought was, oh.
Well, if they’ve all got literally eye worms and we’ll put some pictures in the show notes.
These are really nasty looking.
But I was like, how are they navigating?
Are they all blind?
But I saw a very recent paper that suggested maybe they’re not blind, that even with the eye parasites, maybe they still have sight.
And I didn’t know if you’d read that paper or if you had what your thoughts were, because it’s very fresh.
And sometimes these things are controversial.
Yeah, to be honest, I haven’t seen it yet.
We’ve been really focused on some other species of sharks.
So every now and then I’ll dabble back in the Greenland shark world when a cool paper comes out.
So I’m very excited to see that one.
The early work that my colleague George Benz was doing with a pathologist by the name of Johanna Boruczynska out of Hartford University was looking at the cornea.
in these sharks resulting from, you know, the damage done from these eye parasites.
And virtually all of the ones that they looked at had corneal damage that would be scar tissue.
And so their conclusions were, you know, the animal is not blind.
You know, the Greenland shark, even if it’s had multiple infestations of this lovely parasite, is not rendered blind, but it doesn’t have the visual acuity.
um that an eye without those that scar tissue would have so you know their conclusions were along the lines of think of the eye as operating more like a a light meter you know as opposed to you know an an organ that would be used for uh with great visual acuity um but i’m i’m anxious to see that paper um
At least there used to be this creationist argument of like, what good’s half an eye?
And I think Richard Dawkins retorted, well, it turns out there’s lots of uses.
You know, being able just to see light versus dark is a huge advantage.
And so.
I had really not considered it.
I mean, this is a perfectly functional eye that’s been very severely damaged by a parasite.
But in the amount of darkness that they’re living in, I don’t know how much use an eye is exactly.
But I’m really curious about that.
Like, to what extent are their eyes part of their hunting ability to navigate, to mate, all the things that we do with…
with eyes, at least up in the surface world.
I wonder to what extent it impairs them, or does it impair them?
No, it’s a great question.
And the question we were trying to answer back in the early 2000s, when we went up to the Arctic Circle, drilled through the ice, captured these animals, did some diving with them.
which is horrifying unto itself.
And, you know, it was along the lines of, you’ve got this really large sluggish animal with, that’s virtually blind, you know, low visual acuity.
How is it, yet you’ve, in its stomach, we have found fast moving animals such as seals.
or some of the fishes that live up there.
So how does this animal do that?
And it’s living in a very deep water environment.
And for the most part, we were fishing in areas that were 300, 400 meters deep in order to capture these things.
So your point, Blake, is maybe these animals don’t need eyes.
You have very, very low light levels down there.
And when you look at the…
The nose of this shark, it really does look like, I mean, it’s not the most attractive shark I’ve ever worked with.
You know, it’s like a swimming cigar.
And it’s got just the biggest schnoz on.
It’s got a big nose.
It’s got a giant nose.
And it’s probably because the shark really relies quite heavily on that nose to seek out its prey.
And the great debate among the scientists who are interested in the species is, you know, is this an active predator or is it just a scavenger?
Using that big nose to find dead things on the bottom and to feed on them.
And I think the debate rages on.
Every time that kind of dichotomy comes up in biology, it almost always turns out to be, why not both, right?
And I think you’re right.
I think it is both.
I was wondering, though, you know, they’re famously long-lived, and it occurred to me, it was like, well, how do they know?
How do they know they lived that long to be in the time of Henry VIII?
Because when they did a dissection, I bet they found a codpiece.
I should have warned you about the puns and the jokes.
Yeah, that’s good.
It does make me wonder.
I mean, so many questions I have still, but they’re famous for their longevity.
What do we know actually kills these creatures if they can live for hundreds of years?
What finally makes them meet their end?
It’s a wonderful question, Karen, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who could.
who could answer it.
The reason we don’t know a lot about Arctic animals in general is because the conditions under which you are exposed to in order to study them are extremely difficult.
And that goes for terrestrial and it’s even more complicated when you start talking about subsurface, particularly when half the year the area can be frozen solid.
And so this animal has been shrouded in mystery because it’s been so difficult to study.
And it’s only because of the new technologies that have emerged that allow us to see how this animal lives in three-dimensional space.
And that’s slow to come back, and it’s difficult to do.
But it’s a great question.
What can take out a Greenland shark?
I mean, the skin on these animals is thick.
It’s sharp.
They’re very well protected.
They’re dark.
They’re difficult to see.
They live on or close to the bottom in hundreds of meters of water.
I don’t know what would take them out.
I mean, arguably, probably an orca.
could, but I don’t know how much orcas actually overlap with Greenland sharks.
I mean, let’s face it, the top predator of the Greenland shark historically is probably human beings.
Which is weird, right?
Because this is an interesting thing to me that they have, I want to say, do they have a high level of ammonia or is it just uric acid?
Something in them is pretty toxic to humans.
Right.
They’re high levels of a substance, you know, abbreviated as TMAO, which is a derivative of urea.
So it’s helped to balance their, allow osmotic balance, which I’m really not going to bore you.
With explaining what that means, unless you want me to.
But the bottom line is very high concentrations of that, which has rendered the meat poisonous to some extent.
And so, you know.
most locals do not consume, you know, Greenland shark.
They may be fishing for Arctic cod, other species, which are preferred.
If they catch a Greenland shark, it would not be unusual though, for them perhaps to feed it to their dogs, you know, and it sometimes would make the dogs like almost drunk.
And that was how it was characterized, like drunken dogs, because of the consumption of this meat.
And I guess if they dry it or or let it ferment, which is the way they always freak me out.
Yeah, it becomes less.
I imagine it becomes less, less poisonous and perhaps less palatable.
Well, I’ve heard, I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that Anthony Bourdain had tried eating Greenland shark and said it was the worst food he’d ever eaten.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be surprising to me.
And, you know, my nephew went to Iceland and he said it was served at a restaurant and he felt compelled to try it.
And I don’t believe he was…
I don’t think he liked it all that much.
Sometimes you have the restaurant for their ambience, sometimes for their ambulance.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that just makes it more of a strange creature, right?
It really does, yeah.
And the less we know about something, and you guys know this, the more it becomes a monster, right?
Absolutely.
That that level of so I was thinking, though, that’s another one of those strange things like the the the giant squid and the colossal squid.
You know, we we find them as occasionally washed up on the shore or maybe as bycatch or inside the belly of a sperm whale or something like that.
But.
They’re so big and yet so hard to find, at least alive.
And I’m wondering, so with those kind of difficulties, studying these animals, what can we say about their population?
Because I’m unclear on how one would make an adequate study of the population density.
Yeah.
It’s difficult to do.
There have been a couple of attempts.
There was one in particular for the Greenland shark where an individual, a scientific team, used what’s…
And the new technologies open the door for this, you know, so they used an abated underwater camera system.
And by counting the number that passed within an area over a certain amount of time, they came up with a rough population estimate.
Very difficult to do.
And I’m not convinced that it was.
The best science, I mean, but it’s probably the best available science in terms of numbers.
But I can tell you this, when you’re talking about animals that are slow growing, which is the Greenland shark, very long lived and likely like most shark species reproduces very low levels.
very slow rate.
You’re talking about animals that don’t deal well with any level of exploitation.
And probably the best example of that is historically what we’ve done to whale populations, right?
Whale populations are slow growing, low numbers of young, and it’s very easy to crush those populations.
So if you…
And there are estimates of the numbers of Greenland sharks that had been harvested or killed historically.
And those numbers are just massive, which would be indicative of probably a severe population decline that occurred because, you know, they just don’t bounce back.
You know, they’re just reproductive rates are likely extremely low for such a long lived animal.
It’s like forests on Greenland.
Yeah, they may have once been there, but they don’t snap back, right?
Right.
Yeah.
But that’s interesting, too, that slow, slow growth.
And I guess maybe their best defense is that they taste terrible.
And that’s weird, but kind of true.
I mean, because if we had any kind of really good use for them, they’d be gone, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, they absolutely would be.
And there was a time, I believe, where they were harvested.
I think some of the oil in the liver was of value.
Yeah.
So the meat may not have been, but the oil in the liver, like most species of sharks, they have very large…
very large livers and they yield high amounts of oil and the basking shark was exploited for that purpose um and you know that those kinds of fisheries can take out a population fairly quickly wow the question is of course is and those are the ones we’re trying to answer is you know what was it just a local population or these animals move great distances and therefore the larger population would be at risk
I mean, those are all the kinds of questions we try to answer by understanding their movement dynamics.
And do we know anything about their form of communication?
Do they use echolocation or is that more dolphins and whales?
Yeah, I mean, we don’t believe they use that.
We don’t know of any shark that uses echolocation.
Sharks are, for the most part, silent animals with very, very rare exceptions.
um it’s very creepy sounding yeah yeah um we we’ve been putting camera systems on on sharks and one of the things we’re adding to these systems is hydrophones to get a sense of what that animal might be perceiving from an auditory point of view what’s it hearing um and it’s really eerie because there’s very little sound very little sound um
Unless it gets into the shallow areas.
And so it’s like really eerie is the best way to describe it.
And so Greenland sharks probably communicate via…
olfaction, you know, and so chemical communication, you know, the secretion of hormones, those kinds of things.
Like most likely most species of sharks that there are species like the great white shark that will get combatant with its fellow white sharks.
And that communication is physical, you know, where it’s basically get the hell out of my neighborhood kind of stuff.
So they’ll bite each other.
And that does happen in some species of sharks.
We just haven’t seen that.
I mean, remember, we don’t know that much about this.
It’s mysterious.
It is.
But they’re so fascinating.
I mean, from a science fan perspective, it’s like when we run into animals that we don’t know much about, I’d be, oh, I wish I was a young student again.
You know, it’s like that’s exciting.
Right.
So the mysteries.
Oh, big time.
Yeah.
I mean, what I love is the fact that, you know, you write this paper, you do this research, you write this paper, you know, five people read it.
And it’s cool.
That’s wonderful.
But to me, it’s like it always opens the door to new questions.
Everything we publish opens the door to new questions.
Like, why is this?
Why is that?
Why are they doing this?
I mean, why did Greenland sharks spend their time doing this?
Why?
What’s to be gained from that?
I mean, that’s the fun part about science in my mind.
You know, I joked about it, but how did people find out how old these sharks live to be?
Like, what was the actual breakthrough?
Yeah, it was basically the eyes of the shark produced.
There were certain chemicals in the eyes, in layers of the eye, that the researchers were able to do dating on that allowed them to…
get a sense of how old that particular individual was.
We do similar things with muscle tissue and other parts of animals, particularly the vertebral column in other species of sharks.
It’s basically looking at carbon and nitrogen isotopes.
And that’s really…
boring stuff i’m not going to get into it no that’s okay this actually that i that makes sense someone something i read preparing for this said something about carbon dating the eyes of a living shark and i thought that doesn’t sound right but that it’s still a form of carbon dating okay exactly yeah exactly
So I think we have explained that before.
And at least with regular carbon dating, it’s like while we’re alive, we produce a certain amount of radiation.
And then when we die, we stop.
And then you can measure the half-life.
Is that roughly right?
That’s roughly right.
But in the case of…
long-lived marine animals what we really rely on is the the carbon signature put into the ocean during bomb testing that occurred in the 50s and 60s and so if you’ve got a shark that lived through that it’s basically um a marker that it put it puts in a carbon mark
so to speak, you know, in its eye or in its vertebrae that allows you to then count subsequent years after it.
If you know…
And we do know the degradation rate of that carbon isotope since the bomb, since that isotope entered the ocean during bomb testing.
And so it’s a really cool method.
It’s how we came up with longevity for the white shark, which is, you know, in excess of 70 years.
And it’s because we had specimens that lived through that period.
In the case of Greenland sharks, it was kind of easy because they’re so damn old that they lived way through that period and the period before that and before that and before that.
It’s like the K-T boundary for fish.
It’s amazing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It certainly is.
So I guess, Greg, from a conservation standpoint,
Are we worried about the future of the Greenland sharks?
Where do they stand?
And can you tell us a bit more about what you’d like the public to better understand about how to protect species like this?
Yeah, I mean, the…
the exploitation rates for Greenland sharks have diminished greatly since those early years.
And I’m talking about probably the mid to late 20th century.
And I suspect that’s probably led to the extirpation of local populations.
But, you know, we’re at a point, we don’t even have a starting point, unfortunately, for this species.
You know, it’s really hard for us to model fish populations for those animals that are heavily exploited for the last, you know, 75 years, you know, Atlantic codfish.
So imagine trying to count fish we barely know anything about in a very remote part of the world.
But, you know, for me, you know, it’s been a long time since those exploitation rates were up, you know, and, you know, it’s best to leave them alone and respect these animals and realize having these mysterious creatures is kind of fun, you know, because, you know, we don’t know much about them and there’s so much to be learned.
Since this species is really tightly linked to water temperature that is cold, low water temperatures, this is an animal also worth paying attention to from a climate change perspective.
In a changing climate, one of the things we were trying to do is figure out how a Greenland shark uses ice to its advantage from a survival and predatory strategy point of view.
And so we were specifically trying to study what these animals were doing under two meters of Arctic ice.
And we came up with this hypothesis and we talk about it a lot in the paper we published with regard to how does a Greenland shark that’s partially blind hunt seals?
And we figured that it would seek out the layers that these seals build.
in the ice, in the frozen ice.
So seals will give birth to their young and live in these ice layers.
And these layers are also subject to attacks from polar bears on the ice.
But we were hypothesizing maybe they’re subject to attacks from below as well from Greenland sharks.
Now, if that’s true…
And then we remove Arctic ice.
We’ve impacted, you know, the natural history of that animal.
So paying attention to these, this species is kind of an indicator species.
Yeah.
As it relates to climate change, I think is important.
I’m just fascinated.
I’m sitting here thinking about environmental DNA and it’s like, you know how you can tag an animal, you can radio tag it.
It’s like, it’d be interesting if you could somehow.
Isolate to a single individual and collect environmental DNA from its poop intermittently, you know, so that you can sort of get a profile of what it’s been eating without being invasive.
That’d be interesting.
Yeah, it’s a great question.
And there have been a couple of, again, they’re isotope-based techniques.
So basically the adage that we are what we eat is true, you know, and it manifests itself through isotopes of carbon.
and nitrogen.
And basically the ratio of those isotopes changes with each, what we call trophic level.
So a fish eats plankton, a larger fish eats that fish, a larger fish eats that fish.
We could tell what trophic level they’re at based on.
isotope levels um and then if you examine other constituents of the muscle and we can get those those ratios from the muscle so if you take a little muscle sample you can figure out the the shark’s trophic level and then if you also look at the fatty acids in that muscle you could start to pin down specifically what it might be eating and so that’s a really interesting way to look at the diet of an animal without having to cut it open and examine its stomach contents
Neat.
And when I started in this field, that didn’t even exist.
So this is really cool.
I mean, we would kill sharks and look in their stomachs, which is still, I hate to say it, the best way to see what they’re doing.
But we all try to avoid that kind of invasive sampling.
And that’s where the science is going.
And it’s just getting better and better.
you’ve given us so much, which we really appreciate.
And this has answered so many questions.
And I think in a fascinating way, raise some new ones, which is great.
I’ve just, just one more time, go back to the, the, the behavior of the sharks.
Are there any adaptations that the Greenland shark has made beside being able to swim around with worms for eyes that make it exceptional to that, that ecosystem, that niche that it’s in?
Yeah, I mean, I believe, first of all, I’ve already mentioned it’s basically a swimming nose.
Yeah.
Large olfactory bulbs, which would indicate that it’s heavily reliant on its nose.
And you would expect that.
We’d also expect there would be a correlated enlarged area of the brain for sensing smell, too, I’m assuming.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You would expect that.
And I’m not even sure if those, that kind of work has ever been done.
Let’s looking at the brains of these animals and that would certainly be useful work.
Yeah.
But you’ve got, yeah.
So it’s, and it’s dark.
It’s a very dark animal.
It is.
So, which means it’s very cryptic.
And, and one of the things that we did when we were up in the Arctic is we, we had a,
a seal a dead sea and it was from our guides it was basically his dinner and we bought it from him and we put it down on the bottom and we dropped an rov a remote operated vehicle with a camera system and we were able to capture the first ever footage of a greenland shark feeding on a seal carcass
And so what they have in these, it’s really cool.
It’s almost like we’ve all probably heard of cookie cutter sharks, which are able to take like a melon ball of flesh.
It’s basically a giant parasite is what it is, the cookie cutter.
And it’s able to take a ball of flesh out of a larger fish.
This greenling shark has a mouth very similar, jaws very similar to cookie cutters in that they have these cartilages that allow it to close its mouth fully around the carcass of the seal.
And its upper teeth are really sharply pointed needle-like.
And they sink its upper jaw into the flesh.
And then the lower jaw almost looks like a saw.
you know, the blade of a saw.
And the shark rotates its body slowly, holding its mouth onto the seal and cutting out a big hunk of flesh from the seal, you know, very slowly, methodically, and pulling that chunk of flesh out, consuming it, and doing it again and again.
And we were the first to actually see that, which was really cool.
But very unique feeding strategy, which we wouldn’t…
you associate with a scavenging shark, a shark that will take its time.
It’s got no place else to be, right?
It’s got lots of time, hundreds of years.
And so, you know, certainly the capacity to scavenge marine mammals that are on the bottom.
Wow.
Wow.
Well, I know what I’m going to be having nightmares about tonight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they are docile, you know, they are docile, you know, and I just think it’s because they’re living in such cold water.
They can’t react all that well.
Yeah.
Slow metabolism, but what’s the rush, right?
So.
Yeah.
They live in a different frequency, you know.
Well, I think I just have one more question before we ask our final question, and that was just about reproduction.
I know that you’ve said several times we don’t know that much yet, but I heard something on YouTube, and I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but when it comes to reproduction, the Greenland shark might not reproduce until they’re about 100 or even older.
Is that true?
It’s entirely plausible.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the hard parts is coming up with the growth curve for the Greenland shark.
And so if you have a growth curve and you know what its size is at various ages, you can come up with size.
And you know at what point it matures in terms of size, you can come up with an age at maturity.
That really hasn’t been established.
Much of it has been kind of guesstimated.
But if you’re talking about an animal that lives 200 to 400 years, in all likelihood, it’s not going to mature until much later ages.
We know that, for example, the white shark really doesn’t mature until it’s in its 20s.
And a lot of species of sharks, because they’re so slow growing, they have late ages of maturity when compared to other species of fish.
And in some cases, even mammals.
So the Greenland shark likely has very late age, ages of maturity.
It would not surprise me if they didn’t mature until they’re 100 years.
And that just blows my mind because, you know, how do species survive?
Well, they’re basically like elves, I think.
It makes me feel better about having a baby later in life.
Well, yeah, yeah.
So a lot of these poor sharks are fin cells.
They can’t, you know.
Well, thank you again so much for taking the time to talk with us today, Greg.
Oh, yeah, this has been wonderful.
We did give you a heads up that our final question is probably the hardest.
Yeah.
So what is your favorite monster?
You guys could probably guess, you know, because I spend so much time on the ocean or have my whole the last, you know, half century almost of my life.
You know, probably the scariest for me would be anything that could come out of the depths and engulf a ship.
And what would that be?
Of course, the Kraken.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Perfect.
The Kraken is definitely – and there are times where I’ve just been laying in my bunk on a ship, you know, 200 miles from the coastline wondering what was swimming below me.
And so, you know, and then you see the old drawings, the paintings, the carvings of the Kraken and the ship.
And then you see some of the movies with all the cool special effects.
And it’s like, wow, you know, imagine if that happened to you.
Oh, yeah.
I think the Kraken is probably it was second.
I mean, my second thought was the Loch Ness, because that to me is fascinating as well.
But, you know, the Kraken is definitely the monster that.
that I’d be most fearful of.
When you think about cryptids, although the conception of the Kraken has changed a lot over time.
Yeah.
But if you think of it as being a giant…
squid or octopus or something with tentacles, then it makes it one of the few sort of mythical creatures that turned out to be real to some extent, you know?
I mean, not to the scale that they usually show them or whatever, but just, it’s really neat that all those old images, woodcuts or whatever of giant squids or octopuses, you know, I don’t think we have much evidence that they reach up into boats and pull people out, but…
Just seeing one on the deck of your whaling ship had to be nightmare fuel of an extraordinary quality.
I mean, just wow.
Yeah.
And the fact that some ships just never came back, right?
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Oh, boy, it had to be the Kraken.
Yeah.
I mean, I was in the Navy on an aircraft carrier.
Yeah.
You think that’s almost as big as a city, but you get out in the ocean and it’s a tiny thing.
And it’s the tiny thing that’s keeping you alive.
And it becomes so precious and desperate.
So true.
So true, guys.
I’m telling you.
Greg, thank you so much for sharing some of your shark insights with us.
We really appreciate it.
That was really fun.
Really interesting.
Thank you for inviting me.
It’s great chat with you guys.
And Karen, thanks for running this to ground for us.
So glad that I found Greg.
That was fantastic and exciting to see what we find out in future as well.
Absolutely.
Hey, Greg, do you have any books or anything that you want to plug that we could link to in the show notes?
Yeah, sure.
I’ve got a few books.
One of them is called Chasing Shadows.
It’s more of a personal story of my work on great white sharks, my roots and the research we’re doing and the complexity of dealing with white sharks that occasionally bite people.
And so really how I morphed from a guy interested in sharks to actually having the role of the Matt Hooper in the film.
And then for those who are super interested in sharks, I’ve got two other books.
One’s called The Shark Handbook, which is kind of a, you know, everything you want to know about sharks with lots of cool pictures translated to digestible material for the average person.
And then more recently, The Great White Shark Handbook came out as well with everything you want to know about the great white shark.
So thanks.
I appreciate the opportunity to talk about those.
Not a problem.
We’ll put links in the show notes.
Check it out.
I think our listeners will be very interested in those.
Absolutely.
It’s funny.
Sharks fall right there around dinosaurs and things you can get really interested in.
Just pull out all kinds of cool goblin sharks and hammerhead sharks and mega mouth sharks.
There’s all these weird, crazy body types and features.
It’s just amazing.
Anyway.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right, Blake.
You’re spot on, man.
That’s why I love this.
I don’t know if I’ll ever retire.
I know I won’t, but that’s my mortgage.
Okay.
Yeah, but we’ll keep in touch and perhaps you can come back sometime.
Absolutely.
Tell us more.
Thanks, Karen.
Thanks, Blake.
I appreciate it.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with shark expert Greg Skomal discussing the fascinating, if somewhat disturbing, Greenland shark.
This is the extended commercial-free version of the show, exclusive for our premium listeners.
Thank you so much for your contributions, which literally keep the show going.
We couldn’t do it without your support.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post S05E16 – Greenland Sharks with Greg Skomal appeared first on MonsterTalk.

In this episode we talk with Dr. Alice Vernon about her fascinating look at the history of ghost hunting and psychical research, from the late 19th century to today. 

Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking (Affiliate Link)

Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories we Tell About It

Ghostwatch (wikipedia) – (our previous coverage)

The Society for Psychical Research (UK)

Most Haunted (wikipedia)

The Haunting of Borley Rectory – the text of this critical book appears to be on the Harry Price website.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature.
Part ape, part mass.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stolznow.
Alice Vernon’s book, Ghosted, came highly recommended to me late last year through a strange, posthumous connection with Joe Nickel.
That’s to do with some private matters, but because of the way the suggestion came to me, it felt a little bit like Joe himself had a hand in it.
I mean, he didn’t, of course, but I think he would have enjoyed this book very much.
I’ve read quite a lot about this subject, so sometimes I feel a little bit of trepidation when we’re taking up a volume that’s certainly going to cover stuff we already know, but I was delighted with Ghosted.
While the menu was familiar, the recipe was new, and Alice’s prose made the whole meal taste fresh and fulfilling.
You can find a link to her work in the show notes, but let’s waste no more time and just join Alice Vernon for some Monster Talk.
Today, we’re talking with Dr. Alice Vernon, author of Ghosted, A Social History of Ghost Hunting and Why We Keep Looking.
Alice is a British academic author and lecturer specializing in creative writing, 19th century literature, and cultural history.
She’s based at Bristol University, where she teaches creative writing and English and supervises research in areas including horror fiction and narrative practice.
Her research work bridges storytelling, history of medicine, sleep disorders, hallucination, and parapsychology, reflecting a deep interest in how humans narrate strange or liminal experiences, all of which is of interest to our listeners as well.
Oh, yes.
And us.
So you hold a PhD and you have published academic essays on topics such as gothic literature, another topic near and dear to me and us, and the psychological dimensions of storytelling.
And you had a book called Night Terrors, Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It, which was featured on BBC’s Book of the Week, which is awesome.
This show has been heavily influenced by sleep paralysis.
Blake especially.
I had a very intense haunting, I’m air quoting for the listeners, haunting experience, which was really troubling for a long time until I learned about sleep paralysis and really explained away a good chunk of the mysterious parts of it.
It really shaped you.
But it did.
And today we’re here to talk about your 2025 book, Ghosted.
So welcome to Monster Talk, Alice Vernon.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
So while this book is absolutely within topics that you’ve worked on academically, we still like to ask people what made you decide to tackle a book?
Because that’s no small thing, right?
So what was it about ghost hunting that drove you to actually…
Go for the book as the outcome, right?
Well, yeah, I suppose the really boring answer is that it’s part of my job to write books in academia.
But that’s not a very exciting answer.
A better answer is that I think Ghosted really came from my first book, Night Terrors, because I have all of the…
All of the sleep disorders, all at the same time.
It’s wild.
I have some really wild nights.
And I wrote Night Terrors to, I guess, understand that part of my life and kind of intentionally demystify some of it.
Because I used to feel like I was insane and that there was something wrong with me.
And once I started to actually do some research into things like sleep paralysis and hallucinations…
I realized just how common it was.
And so I wrote this book.
And of course, when you start to research things like sleep paralysis and nighttime hallucinations, you realize how similar they are to ghost stories and anecdotes of experiencing ghosts.
And that kind of led me down.
roots of looking at ghost stories and analyzing them from the idea of oh well it could just be sleep paralysis or that kind of thing and i started to look at ghost hunting societies like the society for psychical research and looking at some of the research that they did because they actually did some really groundbreaking research into sleep disorders because they wanted to be able to use them to explain away some ghost stories and anecdotes that they wanted to kind of you know
discount and dismiss so some of their research is really groundbreaking in the late 19th century and so i was thinking about um i guess the follow-up to night terrors and i’d been so interested in things like the society for psychical research and i’d grown up watching reality tv um ghost hunting shows in britain it was most haunted but in america it’s it’s you know ghost adventures and that kind of thing
So ghost hunting has been kind of something that I’ve been interested in.
And it just seemed like a natural progression from Night Terrors because that really looked at ghosts and ghostly experiences as just sleep disorders.
And so I wanted to look at a different side of it of, you know, could any of this actually be real and not actually be a sleep disorder?
So, yeah, that’s where Ghosted came from.
I wanted to say the sleep paralysis stuff is…
so fundamental to understanding so many ghost stories yet.
despite the fact that science is starting to get a kind of a handle on it, a lot of people just don’t know anything about it.
Like it’s, they suffer quietly because they think they’re being haunted or they’re being demon oppressed or any number of explanations.
But knowing that there’s a scientific explanation for those experiences, has that alleviated any of your own suffering through the sleep troubles?
Yeah.
Well, funnily enough, when I was writing Night Terrors, I actually made it all a lot worse because I was focusing on it more.
This is detrimental to my health, but I pressed on regardless.
But it’s interesting because I had so many emails and comments and messages from people who’d read Night Terrors or heard it when it was on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week being like, I have this and I didn’t realise it was a thing.
And so it helped a lot of people to…
I guess, to realise that they weren’t alone and that it wasn’t necessarily a ghost and also to give them a way of describing it and kind of explaining to people.
Because I found that that was something that people were saying to me was that they didn’t know how to explain it.
to their partner to their family to their friends whatever without sounding insane um but I had you know written it in a way that still sounded insane but at least they could say this person has it too and she’s written a book about it so uh yeah it’s interesting but what I found um fascinating when I was writing Ghosted was that the whole point of it is about ghost hunting and my sort of journey to try and find a ghost
But all of the things that I experience in sleep are very hallucinatory and weird and strange.
And I wondered if I did actually see a ghost, whether I would be able to trust my own perception because I have a propensity to hallucinate in the middle of the night.
So it was interesting for me to try and come to terms with that part of myself as well that might not actually be a very credible witness.
Yeah, that’s very open and honest.
I think a lot of people just wouldn’t kind of take that tactic in approaching this topic.
So certainly with the title as well, Why We Keep Looking, sounds very sceptical to me.
But you’ve mentioned Most Haunted and you talk in the book about the impact of this show.
This is great poltergeist activity.
That is really creepy.
That was like someone was walking down the steps right behind us.
God, this is a spooky place.
So it wasn’t as popular here in the United States as it was in the UK.
I grew up in Australia, though, where it was popular as well.
Oh, really?
Yes, yes.
So we get everything trickles down to Australia from the UK and the US.
But could you tell us a bit about that story and how in some ways it seems to capture a lot of the whole history of ghost hunting, only writ small?
Yeah, so Most Haunted was a whole cultural phenomenon in the UK around about sort of 2002 to about 2007 was its heyday.
It is still going in various forms.
They sort of moved to YouTube and then I think they’re on some sort of British online TV channel now.
But in its heyday, it was huge.
And it really came from a sort of spoof documentary that the BBC made in 1992
Don’t quote me on that.
It’s 1990, early 1990s called Ghostwatch.
And in America, you may not know the whole saga of Ghostwatch, but it was aired on Halloween night.
I think it was about 1992, 1993.
And it featured very respectable British TV icons.
So there was Michael Parkinson, who was a huge chat show host, a very respectable chat show host, and a couple of others.
There was a children’s TV presenter and another…
TV presenter just being themselves.
So it was Michael Parkinson in a studio and then it was two of these presenters at a house in London that was allegedly being haunted by this poltergeist.
And it was all set as this is happening right now.
This is real and this is happening right now.
And Michael Parkinson keeps cutting back to these presenters and chaos starts to ensue.
pictures are flying off the walls, the cameras start going weird.
It all starts going very much like sort of the Blair Witch Project, really terrifying stuff.
I should just interject quickly to say we did cover this show.
Oh, did you?
We had a British listener who wrote in and said, oh, have you watched this?
Because we talked about, what was it, Late Night with the Devil?
that was the devil yeah yeah yeah companion pieces yeah yes oh yeah and decades on but uh so we did a deep dive into that and we absolutely loved it it was really fantastic so listeners can go back and listen to that as well if they want to anything that’s sort of red dwarf adjacent that’s it yes yeah i was like if i mention red dwarf is anybody gonna know what i’m talking about is that just yeah excellent excellent crowd for sure yeah
Our listeners are, I don’t know if we’re all Anglophiles, but we certainly have inherited a lot of material from England.
Yeah, British comedy, yeah.
The language, just stuff.
Some parts of it.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s good, though.
Yes.
OK, so you can listen back and get the full deep dive of Ghostwatch.
That’s a great summary, though.
Thanks.
So, yeah, I think that’s where Most Haunted came from, because one of the presenters whose name alludes me was from Blue Peter.
And Most Haunted’s presenter was Yvette Fielding, another Blue Peter children’s TV presenter.
And I think that’s where it came from, that they saw Ghostwatch and they thought, well, what if we did this for real, you know?
And so Most Haunted, I started watching it, I think, in about 2006.
So it had been on for a few years and it was infamous in the UK for having lots of screaming.
So Yvette Fielding would just scream.
They’d have these night vision cameras that were very green.
And she would just scream.
And there was all these instances of quite obvious fakery with Most Haunted.
So it started.
I hadn’t actually seen the first episode until I started doing the research for Ghosted.
And I thought, let’s, you know, see where Most Haunted actually came from.
And the first episode is actually quite endearing because it’s so earnest where they’re kind of like, you know, well, if we see nothing, we’re not going to show you anything.
And so they start off in this position of, you know, we’re trying to be genuine.
We’re trying to document whatever we see.
And if we don’t capture anything, we’re not going to make something up.
But as entertainment demands and popularity demands, you can’t make a long lasting series of…
Just people sitting in a dark mansion or manor house or castle somewhere.
Something needs to happen.
Otherwise, it’s not going to be a very successful ghost hunting show.
So I think in some cases they were under pressure to produce phenomena and.
The more phenomena they produce, the more they were expected to produce next time.
So it gets increasingly bombastic.
And there’s tables flying everywhere.
There’s chairs.
There are some episodes where you can quite blatantly hear just some random stock audio of like a child’s giggle being placed over the top.
And, you know, they’re all pretending to freak out about this sound that they’re going to edit in later and things like that.
And they would have a medium.
that would be with them for quite a while.
And the most infamous of the mediums that they had was a man called Derek Okora, who his kind of party piece was to become possessed immediately by whatever ghost was allegedly haunting the place of the week.
Like he would just instantly, just instantly become possessed.
And there’s quite a famous YouTube clip of, I think it was a live show that they were doing.
So normally it was pre-recorded, but they did occasionally do these live, very much like Ghostwatch and Late Night with the Devil-esque format.
And they were filming it live and Derek gets possessed and he starts going, Mary loves Dick.
Mary loves Dick.
Mary loves Dick.
Mary loves Dick.
And he’s going on and on about Mary loving Dick.
And he’s going, she protects Dick.
She protects him.
She covers him up.
And then they think that they’ve gone back to the studio and that the presenter in the studio is now talking, only it’s still on them.
And there’s a pause.
And then they all just burst out laughing.
And they’re all just, you know, it’s all hilarious.
And they go, Mary loves Dick.
That’s hilarious.
And it’s quite an infamous moment in Most Haunted’s history.
The best bit of that was Mary loves Jake.
I cannot stop laughing.
And she protects him.
She covers him up.
But they did get criticised and pulled up officially by what’s known in the UK as Ofcom.
So the sort of ombudsman for TV shows and communications and media and that kind of thing.
And…
of com had received a number of complaints about most haunted as you might expect and it’s interesting because they’d never dealt with anything like that before and you can read the report the report is still up there um for you to access and read and you can see them kind of saying well you know we’ve never really had a tv show like this before is it real is it not real is it for entertainment purposes is it not
Is it like gambling in a way?
Because it’s not reflecting reality.
It was very strange.
And they’re trying to kind of work out what to do with Most Haunted.
And what they decided to do in the end was to force the producers to slap on this disclaimer that said, you know, this TV show is for entertainment purposes only.
And it’s interesting because when they were axed from British TV, they moved to YouTube and they just started kind of making proper episodes of Most Haunted just among themselves.
And they started putting a new disclaimer on that said, this show is definitely not for entertainment purposes.
We stand by the legitimacy of this investigation.
And it’s just the same old, you know, fraudulent…
Edited in audio and things on bits of string being pulled across rooms, things like that.
So, yeah, that’s most haunting.
But the effect that it had, I think, is quite profound because it really inspired all of these international kind of copycat shows like Ghost Adventures.
You can see there’s a whole international list of.
similar shows from the ukraine from brazil these places that even wales we had a welsh language version of uh most haunted yeah it was called oven and it was for kids weirdly it was a children’s it was on children’s tv um for for welsh language uh children and it was called oven which means fear or small
to be scared.
And it was like a group of kids that were just being led round a castle in the middle of the night going on a ghost hunt.
It was wild.
So yeah, it had a really profound effect.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but like having read the book, I couldn’t help but be reminded of our own journey through this material.
You cover…
from, well, really more than this, but a lot of your focus is from the Victorian and the spiritualist, rise of the spiritualist in the early 19th century into the 20th century and the ways that scientific inquiry has played out with sort of the foibles of people being people.
Did you see any particular patterns that you thought were notable about…
how this, because each generation of ghost hunters is kind of treading the same ground, but they’re theoretically doing it different ways, but coming to similar conclusions.
So, you know, I don’t know when we put this to bed, but maybe never.
But what did you find?
Did anything strike you there about that sort of cyclical nature of this stuff?
It is very cyclical.
It’s very much the more things change, the more they stay the same with ghost hunting.
I found in one instance, it seems to be that whenever there’s some sort of new groundbreaking technology, spiritualism and ghost hunting rises up again, because it’s as if to say, well, we never thought that photography would ever be real.
And now it is.
So…
Why not take photographs of ghosts?
And we never thought that radio technology could be possible and that we could speak to people thousands of miles away.
And yet it’s possible.
So why can’t we also speak to the dead, you know?
So I found that that was something that recurred often.
When you get a new form of technology, people seem to…
be drawn to try and use it to communicate with the dead in some way which I find fascinating and as well as that I found with moments of mass public grief that seems to be when people turn to ghosts and ghost hunting again so you get the rise of spiritualism in the 1840s is very kind of tied in with various diseases and the civil war and things like that and then you get a sort of
ebb of spiritualism and then it rises again in the first world war um because everybody’s grieving and nobody can come to terms with the most horrific ways in which their loved ones had died in the trenches and i remember as well um even though i wasn’t researching ghosted at the time but i remember when covid was happening that i was seeing in the news lots of reports of people saying
well, I’m stuck at home and now I realise there’s a ghost here as well because I’m actually spending time at home for the first time instead of being in the office, which I found really fascinating as well, was that ghosts seem to spike in these moments of, I suppose, social uncertainty.
It’s interesting that that’s when we become drawn to…
the idea of the afterlife.
Maybe it’s also because we’re considering death and mortality a little bit.
Either, you know, the people that we’ve lost or our own.
That seems to be when we start looking for evidence of ghosts again.
But yeah, it’s definitely, definitely cyclical, I think.
Yeah, that’s really interesting.
And I remember at the time, as you were saying of COVID, just a lot of articles coming out with people saying, yeah, there’s a ghost in my house.
And so, yeah, it’s really interesting.
Whatever your environment is, I think you’re very influenced by that.
But, yeah, that’s so interesting.
But with the struggle between the intellectual need to question honestly and the spiritual need for confirmation that there’s more out there than just this,
How did this play out in your conception of the topic and did your research change your views or confirm them?
Yeah, so I started writing Ghosted as a skeptic.
And I do think I am still skeptical.
But it was going to be a very lighthearted book because I’d grown up watching Most Haunted and Most Haunted is ridiculous as a TV show.
And so it was going to be kind of like, oh, look at these people hunting ghosts.
Isn’t this all silly?
And I started doing research and I started to find out things about the First World War
and the way that spiritualism really had a grip on society, particularly British society.
And there were all these books that were being written about this utopian spiritualist afterlife, and a lot of them are really sad.
The books around that time about ghosts and ghost hunting…
are absolutely bonkers and ludicrous, but that makes them all the more upsetting in some ways because they’re often written by grieving people saying, oh, I’m now in touch with my dead son who died in France or, you know, whatever.
And it’s, you know, it’s helping me process my grief.
There was one that I read where she’d been having these seances that she thought was putting her in touch with her dad’s son.
And because of that, she stopped dressing in mourning clothes and she kind of…
became social again and she started talking to people and doing things and and going out um a little bit more and so it was helping her to process her grief and that really changed my entire perspective of ghosts and ghost hunting and how important it is as a a way of dealing with grief but also of just a kind of a social activity as well because ghost hunting is very social i think um and i found that when i actually went on a ghost hunt
That it was really fun and I wasn’t expecting it to be as fun as it was just to experience a historic building late at night in a very different way.
You know, in the UK, we have things like the National Trust and it’s all very sedate when you go and look around a historic building and it’s all very lovely and there’s tea and scones and it’s all great.
And this was just a very different way of experiencing history was to kind of have this kind of immersive perspective of who might be haunting this place and what their life might have been like and, you know, trying to capture them in some way.
It was really fun.
So…
Yeah, I went from being a harsh sceptic to a more understanding sceptic, I think, which I think is good.
I think that’s important.
It enabled me to understand why people ghost hunt, that it’s not just something that’s really silly and, you know, a wild goose chase.
It is actually quite fundamentally important to…
what it means to be human, I guess, what it means to live and be mortal, I suppose.
Yeah, I think, I don’t want to put words in Karen’s mouth, but over the course of doing this show, I know I personally have grown far more compassionate about, I was never harsh anyway, but like just more compassionate about experiences.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, it’s, I think the phrase we’ve been using is,
We approach any of these stories with the presumption of sincerity on the part of the claimant.
You know, sometimes it’s a hoax.
Sometimes someone’s been tricked or fooled or confused.
There’s all kinds of explanations.
But keeping in mind that for many people, these are stories.
With a tremendous emotional weight, whether that’s grief or fear or something else, it’s just it’s they have a lot of weight to them.
So just sort of harshly questioning, is this true or is this not?
is fun when you first start out but it’s overly simplistic um and it’s more complex than that yeah yeah absolutely um yeah i and i thought your book did a really great job of tackling these questions but keeping that humanity uh as a as a core value i think throughout the entire narrative um but it’s funny that you mentioned that though because the um not haha funny but um
Along those same lines, one of the other things I’ve been toying with in my…
I’m exploring this idea around monster flaps.
These periods we have an ecosystem where suddenly lots and lots of stories are happening about something, whether it’s a ghost or a monster or UFOs or something.
We call them flaps, but I think they set up…
of what I’ve been calling an environment of narrative permissiveness.
Like because other people are bringing their stories out, suddenly people who might normally be afraid to talk suddenly feel like it’s okay.
And I think to some extent, these TV shows and similarly the spiritualism in the war, those created that sort of environment where…
We’re all thinking about these things all the time if we are not completely beaten down by regular life stuff.
At some point, what happens after this?
Where did Aunt Bessie go after she died?
These questions matter.
But being able to talk about that often means subjecting yourself to ridicule when you have ideas that don’t fit in with other people’s views.
And spiritualism especially…
I mean, there were wild disagreement ideas.
And I think I loved how you tackled the idea of multiple people talking about what happens next.
What is Summerland?
What’s going on there?
And they’re doing it like journalists or scientists or any number of things.
But the stories don’t agree.
And I thought you handled that very well.
Do you want to talk about some of those disagreements or disparity?
Because I thought that was, I don’t want to read the chapter out, but it’s, I’m going to just put this way.
It’s good.
It’s like, have you covered Summerland in an episode?
Because, you know, I don’t.
I don’t think we have.
I hadn’t come across it at all.
Like I had an approximate knowledge of quite a lot of the stuff that I was going to talk about.
And I was just kind of researching to fill in the blanks.
And I started to come across this Summerland and I’d never heard of it before.
And it’s a huge chapter of sort of ghost hunting history and spiritualist history.
And so Summerland, I guess, was the spiritualist answer to the Christian afterlife.
So spiritualism had some roots in Christianity, but it was so much more based on evidence and proof and science as well.
You know, there’s a lot of science in spiritualism and how it operated.
And I think they wanted…
an answer to heaven, sort of ideas of Christian heaven.
So they came up with this utopian afterlife called Summerland, which existed as a physical plane somewhere in the cosmos.
So it was quite linked to developments in telescopes and astronomy as well, as people were starting to kind of chart the universe a little bit more.
Again, with that…
new development in science they were like oh well you know we’ve got all this stuff above us and around us there’s probably somewhere up there where we go when we die and so they seem to agree on that they seem to agree that summerland existed in the cosmos somewhere in space somewhere in the milky way and then it all gets very muddled um and summerland really became popular
in the immediate aftermath of the first world war and i think it was because the idea of where these sons and brothers and husbands were dying was so horrible to comprehend you know it was muddy and chaotic and disgusting and just blood and guts everywhere
And I think it was unbearable to think of their loved ones dying in that situation and their last moments being in that environment.
And so you get a lot of books written sort of between like 1914 and about 1925 of the soldiers that had died and then were coming back in seances.
and giving these lavish descriptions of what this utopian afterlife looked like.
And yeah, they were all competing and all, you know, contradictory.
So there was one where this man had lost his brother in the war and he was managing to somehow astrally project himself into Summerland and be with his brother and kind of help his brother adjust to being in Summerland.
And they go on this very long walk that’s almost like through the stages of Earth’s history.
So at one point they’re being chased by pterodactyls.
And I’m like, does this mean that the dinosaurs went to heaven?
I don’t know, which is wild to me.
And then you get these books where…
They’re talking about these beautiful birds that are just local to Summerland and don’t exist anywhere else.
There’s another guy who talks about there being a zoo in Summerland, which I find mad.
He says something like, it’s not a very good zoo because all the animals can just magically phase out of their cages and they’re just running around and scaring people.
It’s like, well, why would people be scared if they’re already dead?
You’re not going to be scared of a lion coming.
Old habits die hard.
Yeah.
I know.
But there’s the one kind of prior to the First World War that was written by WT… Well, written.
I’m doing air quotes again.
Written by an Irish journalist called WT Stead, and he died in the Titanic disaster.
And then his daughter was doing a seance, and allegedly he came and talked to her about his idea of Summerland, which he called the Blue Island, where…
Everything is blue.
So you get all these different ideas.
Interestingly, though, when he was alive, he kept saying to people, I’m going to drown to death.
I feel it.
I know it.
I’m going to drown to death.
And he wrote this story about how the steam liner went down in the Atlantic or something.
And he talks about death.
I think at one point he wrote because he was a spiritualist and he wrote this article about what it is to what it means to die and go over.
And he said something like that.
It’s like being lost at sea and you find yourself in the waters of the Atlantic.
And I was like, but that’s how he died.
And it’s like he predicted it somehow, which I find really weird.
But, yeah, allegedly.
He contacted his daughter through a seance and he was like, write this down.
This is a great book.
And he told her all about this afterlife called the Blue Island.
And that’s where he was.
They seem to agree that it was in the cosmos and it was a utopian afterlife.
It was very socialist.
There was no idea of.
class or of money um everybody had a job or a role to do and so everybody’s kind of working together in summerland and it’s all very nice and everybody has everything that they could possibly need um but yeah you start to get these details which are so wild and so weird and contradictory and you think well if that was true why isn’t it featuring in this book that there is this beautiful green and purple bird called a grelon you know that you get in some you
this one book so yeah it’s a very interesting chapter of spiritualist history yeah that is interesting a british heaven where there’s no classism yeah or tea i would not want to go there yeah
So linked to the idea of spiritualism, you have a chapter on haunted houses and I would be remiss to not mention Harry Price.
You talk about him in the book.
He really features prominently.
And we often discuss him and Bally Rectory.
It’s a favourite story of ours and his weird mix of scepticism and showmanship as well.
He’s such a controversial figure.
Could you help us?
a little bit to unpack why.
Yes.
How do you feel about Harry Price before I offend anybody?
I’m very skeptical about it.
Okay, good, good, good.
Entertaining, disappointing.
Absolutely.
He was a character, wasn’t he?
Yeah, so I started to encounter Harry Price more and more.
And the more research I did, the more I was like, actually, I hate this guy, you know, really just.
And I’ve been to his archive in Senate House Library in London.
And it’s really interesting because there’s his stuff and then there’s quite a lot of stuff that was donated by his rival, Eric Dingwall.
And there’s so much gossip and so much drama.
And it’s kind of, you know, are you team Harry Price or team Eric Dingwall?
But yeah, so Borley Rectory and Harry Price, he loved publicity and he was a serial hobbyist, I think is how I describe him.
It’s like, you know, he’s just a professional hobbyist.
He has no job.
He’s just wealthy and he just does what he wants with that money.
And, you know, the story of Borley Rectory has been kind of done to death.
But what I found really interesting and that I don’t think has really been written about and talked about that much is, is that rivalry with Eric Dingwall and…
Also with Harry Price’s secretary and friend, air quotes again, Molly Goldney, whom I really started to read about when I looked into those archives, because there’s quite a lot of letters between Harry Price and Molly Goldney, but also between Molly Goldney and Eric Dingwall, because Molly and Eric were really good friends.
You know, they were kind of like brother and sister.
in that relationship that they had.
And in their letters, they’re just gossiping about Harry Price all the time.
There’s a really great letter from Molly to Eric where she’s talking about the publication of The Most Haunted House in England, which was Harry Price’s first book about Borley Rectory.
And I’m going to misquote this, but it’s so brilliant.
She says something like, I have not read it because I haven’t found anybody to borrow it from.
And it is not worth the paper that it is not worth the price.
It’s not worth the paper that it’s printed on.
So delicious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But then she was like, you know, she was his secretary and she was like directly helping him.
And, you know, she did a lot of work with him, not just on Borley Rectory, but also in his investigation of Helen Duncan, the medium Helen Duncan.
And yeah, so Molly and Eric and another man called Trevor Hall really started to question what…
harry said had gone on in borley rectory and they take both of his books and they take you know some of the um material that he um had sent to them and also molly had gone to borley rectory as well she’d gone and done a vigil there and she was like well yeah nothing happened it was there’s nothing going on there and about eight or so years after harry price’s death they wrote um the haunting of borley rectory
which was a book that was supposed to be an expose of both of Harry Price’s books, but also just of Harry Price in general.
And it was so scathing.
And, you know, they’re pulling apart everything.
They’re showing how his whole militaristic system of having all these investigators come and having these shifts in the building.
You know, the way that they were conducting their investigations was just completely meaningless and that there was no continuity to anything.
There was no quality assurance in anything that they were doing.
There was no kind of proper scientific rigor to anything.
They talk about that photograph, the famous photograph of the flying brick, which was selectively cropped so that you miss out the person throwing the brick.
It was really, really scathing, so much so that one of their friends who was in this whole circle of ghost hunters around the first half of the 20th century, one of their friends wrote to them and said about a week before the book was going to be published, he’d read an advanced copy of it.
And he said, please, can you not publish this book because it’s going to really upset Harry’s widow.
And then they did it anyway.
They had no qualms.
But it took them about eight years after Harry Price had died to then be like, aha, now we’re going to expose him.
Take that.
Yeah, but it’s interesting because I don’t think it had the impact that they wanted it to have because everybody knows Harry Price and everybody knows Borley Rectory, but nobody really knows Eric Dingwall.
And I really don’t think anybody knows about Molly Goldney, although I’ve come to love her.
I think on every podcast and every kind of interview that I’ve done, I’ve been like, let me tell you about Molly Goldney because she needs to be remembered, I think.
She’s very interesting as this kind of figure behind Harry Price.
Just…
tutting quietly at everything that he’s doing yeah so telling yeah yes yeah yeah i think that’s kind of where i really started to get a bit suspicious of harry price and then actually be like no i don’t like this guy because his his letters to molly goldney are really awful some of them he’s just like oh um because he was president of the ghost club for a while which was a big
ghost hunting society in britain it’s the oldest one and he was president of it for a while and he writes her this letter where he’s like oh i’m organizing a dinner for all of the members can you do it for tomorrow and everybody needs a three-course dinner thanks harry and he’s like yeah no wonder wow i have wow yeah
fits in with what we know about him so yeah i mean also you know i i don’t want to diagnose the dead but a little narcissistic you know just uh yeah just just a tad yeah yeah i think she she uses a phrase at one point where she calls it like the price publicity mill oh yeah yeah yeah well the personality
He’s a he’s a topic for his own show, for sure.
And we’re going to be coming back to Borley because that’s a case we both love.
We always do.
Yeah.
But I.
So.
At the end, your book left me thinking a lot about this, but these methods of inquiry, as you mentioned at the start of the interview, as technologies change, people have tried to use new technologies to engage with this material.
Where do you think things are heading in the 21st century?
I have a lot of thoughts about what I’m seeing with LLMs and that sort of stuff.
I’m just really curious as to where you think things are headed.
Yeah, my brain instantly went AI because I think that is going to pose such a problem to the nature of evidence and proof.
How can we trust any photographic evidence or any audio evidence when it is so easy to generate an AI photo that looks like a realistic ghost photograph?
So I think that’s really going to…
be problematic for people who rely on generating, you know, YouTube video, doing YouTube videos and being ghost hunters for audiences and that kind of thing, because anything that they produce, anybody can say, you know, oh, that was AI generated, things like that.
So I think that’s going to be a real problem.
You know, are we ever going to be able to…
create genuine proof of ghosts when you can’t believe anything that you see uh you know in a digital format these days i find that really interesting but the other thing as well is i wonder if things like llms are going to fundamentally change the grieving process as well and maybe that will
impact our experience of ghosts you know i know that um there are these weird startups there’s one called seance ai where it will create a chat bot of a dead loved one you can just keep chatting to them because that’s fine that’s normal um god so yeah i wonder if that’s going to sort of change how we grieve and actually you know maybe we won’t
be as inquisitive about ghosts in the afterlife because it’s the afterlife kind of meaningless when you can just chat to your loved ones via a chat bot.
So I find that really interesting.
But in terms of kind of…
ghost hunting in general and for ghost hunters, I think what will happen is that it will become a much more sort of intimate and closed hobby or occupation or whatever you want to call it, because I think people will stop…
putting stuff on YouTube and putting stuff on TikTok because it will just kind of become slightly meaningless in terms of generating proof.
I think people will just do it for themselves.
And I think the only proof that will be worth anything will be individual proof because I don’t think there will be any point in trying to convince anybody that ghosts are real because of this photograph I’ve taken.
I think it will just have to be, you know, well, I’ve taken this photograph and I now believe in ghosts and that’s good enough.
for me.
So I think, yeah, AI is going to be a real problem.
And I’m interested to see what happens with that and where the, where the conversation goes with it.
Yeah.
So are we, and I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere.
I think it’s certainly just going to continue to evolve and change, but Alice, we’ll have to start wrapping things up, unfortunately, but we’ve really enjoyed talking with you and you’ve written a wonderful book and like to urge our listeners to go out and grab a copy of Ghosted.
Yeah.
And so we just want to finish with our final signature question that we ask all of our guests when they come on the show for the first time.
And so that is, what’s your favourite monster?
Instantly, Godzilla.
It’s got to be Godzilla.
Classic choice.
Do you remember when you first started seeing Godzilla around and began noticing him?
Yeah, I think, well, unfortunately, I think it was with that terrible Matthew Broderick Godzilla film.
Unfortunately, I think that was the first time I encountered Godzilla.
But I love dinosaurs.
I’m obsessed with dinosaurs.
I think dinosaurs are just the coolest.
But they’re not technically a monster, whereas I think Godzilla is like, you know.
A monstrous…
I think so, yeah.
A dinosaur.
They call that… Maybe the ones in Summerland, maybe they’re…
Yes!
Is Godzilla in Summerland?
Of course, and he can just teleport around.
Yes!
They call that Broderick one, the monster people, Godzilla in name only.
So you’ll see it G-I-N-O in the fan pages, which is really funny.
Yeah.
I like the movie.
It’s fun.
It just kind of doesn’t fit in with the rest of the Godzilla ecosystem.
Godzilla minus one, though.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
mind blown it’s the best yeah i think that’s where my like i’ve always been interested i’ve always liked godzilla but i think when i watched that i was like oh this is the first one i cared about the people like i was like i can feel something taking over like suddenly i have this very intense interest in godzilla now nice well the sequel’s coming i just saw the poster for it yeah so oh really yeah okay
Oh, there we go.
It’ll be very exciting.
My son, my son is a complete Godzilla nut and he’s it’s, we may see something from that in the summer.
This, this, this.
christmas um one of the listeners sent me a um a cryptid themed uh advent calendar so i did like a everyday opening but i but i also received a godzilla advent calendar and i i didn’t have the energy to try to do both right but i think what i might do is christmas in july and then do the advent godzilla this summer that might be it’s what he would want it is it is so
Well, Alice, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and our audience today.
Yes, thank you.
That was fun.
It’s been really good, so thank you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stolznow.
You just heard an interview with Alice Vernon about her new book, Ghosted, a history of ghost hunting and why we keep looking.
Alice is also the author of Night Terrors, Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It, which deals with the topic of sleep paralysis.
Links to her work are in the show notes.
There you’ll find links to our Patreon page, as well as a donate button if you’d like to just make a one-time contribution.
A great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon wishlist.
These are books that directly help with our monster research.
We love used books very much, so don’t feel compelled to buy new ones.
And we’re also very fond of Kindle editions because of their easily searched content.
And without spending any money at all, you can support and raise the profile of the show by leaving a positive review at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes, which is a great way to help us find new listeners.
Finally, remember to share episodes you really like with your friends and family.
You can help make Monster Talk the nightlight that keeps monsters away from someone you love.
Monster Talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Lucy, the show’s pod kitty, says hello.
Well, it’s more of a squeak, but she’s turning into a little tween, and so pretty soon a real meow is inevitably on the way.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
The best bit of that was Mary loves Dick.
But me, I could not stop laughing.
And she…

The post S05E15 Ghosted with Alice Vernon appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We talk with journalist Lana Hall about her piece The Dead Mall Society, which details her journey to decaying malls in the Toronto area in search of Liminal Spaces.

Liminality (Wikipedia)

Victor Turner: Liminality and Communitas (PDF)

The Liminality Project (blog)

Liminal Space (Wikipedia)

The Backrooms CreepyPasta (Wikipedia)

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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In today’s episode, we’re going to be discussing a couple of esoteric concepts you may not have heard of.
First up, liminality.
From the Latin leman, meaning threshold, the word entered modern scholarship in the early 20th century.
French ethnographer Arnold Van Gannep used it to describe the culturally consistent ways people move from one state to another, transitioning from childhood to adulthood or single to married.
If you haven’t heard of Van Gannep, you’ve certainly heard the title of his most famous work, which has become an idiom, The Rites of Passage.
In the 1960s, British anthropologist Victor Turner focused on that in-between phase.
He gave us the framework for the liminal, a state of being between identities.
It’s a period of expectation and possibility, disorienting yet essential.
But the concept eventually escaped the surly bonds of academia.
It filtered through coffee shops and online message boards, becoming a beloved staple of paranormal discussions in pop psychology.
Today, the idea of liminal spaces has exploded in popularity.
Across Reddit and YouTube, people are obsessed with creepypasta stories and eerie photography that seeks out more than just doorways and hallways.
They’re looking for the evocative, the dead mall, the deserted airport, or the brightly lit office building at midnight.
By crossing the line between the fandom for abandoned ruins and the safer world of under-traveled retail, the indoor shopping mall has become a fascinating nucleation point for exploring liminality in our modern urban setting, which brings us to the second esoteric concept, shopping malls.
What the hell is it?
It looks like a shopping center, one of those big indoor malls.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stolznow.
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
Today we’re going to be talking with Canadian journalist Lana Hall about a piece that she wrote for Hazlit titled The Dead Mall Society.
It’s a beautiful piece discussing the ideas of liminal spaces and the people who seek to explore them.
As we talked, I kept finding myself ruminating on the nature of these places.
I couldn’t stop myself from wondering the metaphorical landscape that these places hold in my mind.
Like that little clip from Dawn of the Dead hinted, big indoor malls were still novel and new in the 1970s, peaked in the 1980s, and then began a slow slide into irrelevance soon after.
And you have to know that the sad parallels between this and my own biography is noted.
Malls have become a nexus for nostalgia, even as some still manage to keep anchor stores open.
More often, they end up like the giant skeletal remains of a long extinct dragon in a fantasy novel or the rusting hulk of a Star Destroyer in the background of some Star Wars tale.
Malls were real enough, but the vibrant representation of them in movies like Night of the Comet or Mallrats or Terminator 2 clashes with the decaying ruins or barely sustained ICU patients that are littering suburbia today.
In her piece, The Dead Mall Society, Lana Hall describes joining a tour group called Liminal Assembly to visit such places.
And Karen and I really enjoyed talking with her about this piece and about this experience.
And I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation.
So, Lana, I’m pronouncing your name with an Australian accent.
I hope that’s okay.
Yes, that is exactly how it’s pronounced, actually.
Perfect.
Great.
So I came across your article, The Dead Mall Society, and that was on Hazlet.
And that was just a couple of days ago.
And I was really excited to read your article because so it’s about liminal spaces.
And my 10-year-old is obsessed with this kind of thing.
So it’s very cute to hear a 10-year-old talking about liminal spaces and, in particular, the back rooms from Creepypasta.
And there’s another place called the Valley View Mall that’s in Dallas and other places anyway that he’s found on YouTube.
And so we wanted to bring you on the show because we’re talking more and more about liminal spaces.
And I’ve just realized we haven’t done an introduction.
So I wonder if at first you could tell us just a little bit about who you are and what you do, and then we’ll get into the topic.
Sure.
That’s a great idea.
So I’m Lana Hall.
I’m a writer and a reporter based in Toronto in Canada.
And I specialize in long form journalism for newspapers and magazines.
And I’m very fortunate in that I get to write about a lot of interesting things.
But I do tend to write primarily about cities and sort of the social and behavioral and political forces that shape them over time.
Yeah, so Lana, you had written an article about the liminal appeal of places like abandoned malls and empty schools and playgrounds at night and so other places like that too, especially when they’re devoid of people and activity.
But it seems like there is, I guess, a lot of confusion over the definition of liminal spaces or a lot of different views, a lot of subjectivity.
So could you tell us a bit about liminal spaces, what they are and why?
What is this hard to name sensation?
Yeah, I mean, I can try.
I think there are a lot of different definitions about liminal spaces and also a lot of misinformation about what they are.
But based on the research that I put together over the years,
course of researching this article it seems like the most accepted definition is is that a liminal space is is a kind of space that for one reason or another is kind of transitionary so these are spaces that either link to destinations but they aren’t really a destination unto themselves so that would be like a highway or like a long hallway or something
Or they are spaces that kind of straddle two worlds or two different experiences, almost like they’re sort of sitting in purgatory.
And I think a lot of the confusion comes because that is, in fact, a really broad definition.
And within that, there’s all kinds of spaces that could meet that criteria.
Right.
You know, if you go on some of the social media communities or the digital platforms, you’ll see people sharing all kinds of photographs about liminal spaces.
And they range from like, you know, abandoned parking lots to houses that have been kind of paused in the middle of demolition or schools in the summer when there’s nobody in them and they’re kind of just sitting there between seasons.
And then there’s also this, this is sort of the subsect that I was writing about in this piece is the idea of abandoned shopping malls, which many of many of which look as though they haven’t been touched since the 70s or 80s or the 90s.
And yet they also haven’t been turned into whatever is going to be their next iteration.
So they are kind of straddling those two worlds.
And
As I was researching this, I became really curious about what the appeal of these spaces were.
I don’t think I had quite realized what a strong and almost protective cult following these spaces had.
So I started sort of asking the question, you know, what is the appeal of these liminal spaces?
Why are there people that seek them out?
And why are there people that will spend their spare time…
you know, walking around in them or experience them?
What is it that they’re getting from this?
And the answers were also complex and surprising and thoughtful.
But what I kept hearing consistently is that.
sometimes when people are in these liminal spaces, they have this feeling of being a little bit unsettled, a little bit disquieted.
And it’s not like the same kind of feeling, like a jump scare feeling.
It’s not as though these people really think a zombie is going to jump out at them from like a abandoned mall bathroom or something.
It’s more that there’s just, it’s almost as though your body knows something is not quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it.
And I gather because of that, it sort of calls you to be really grounded in your body and the way you feel and the way you respond to these spaces.
And I think because there’s also a little, you know, a little thrill of the unknown of this, you know, this world that maybe came before you.
It’s, you know, there’s a bit of an appeal to it.
And then the most fascinating thing I heard from an anthropologist on Reddit was that
Because these areas, these liminal spaces indicate, you know, an in-between or a transitionary phase that on some kind of a cellular level, our bodies know we’re not supposed to be dwelling in them.
They’re not destinations.
They’re places that sort of link destinations.
So that’s another reason that we kind of feel unsettled because we’re like, no, no, no, we’re not supposed to be.
stuck here we’re supposed to be moving through this space so when you purposely and intentionally force yourself to be in a space like that you know it’s it’s your body’s way of saying like something’s not quite right here something’s you know a little out of the ordinary there’s a lot of poetic gravity to a place like that i mean it’s it’s it seems like
These are places that were once thriving, you know, and then now they’re not.
And when I was preparing for this, I couldn’t help but think about this in terms of how the space of the shopping mall.
is somewhat akin to the way that there are abandoned cathedrals and abbeys in England, where after the fall, after the split, after the Reformation or after the… Oh, disillusion of the monasteries.
Yes, exactly.
These places were left.
They were the sort of skeletal remains of this former cultural center.
And in some ways, the mall is sort of the sort of skeletal remains of a religion of materialism, of commerce.
And it’s like heavy.
It’s like heavy with nostalgia.
It’s heavy with memories for me, for my age.
But my kids love it, too.
And they love going to these places, especially when they’re not quite dead, when they’re like on life support, like held together by weird little stores instead of the big anchor stores.
And this is not really a question, but I guess I wanted to say that, that like as I was reading your piece, this was what I was thinking about.
But these people that you’re covering, they’re going out and exploring these places, experiencing them, but yet not solo.
This is a curated group.
Like, it’s a group activity.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Like, what is it you think they’re getting from that?
What’s the appeal?
I mean, I know my appeal, but I want to know what you thought the appeal was to those people.
Yeah, that’s a really good question.
I mean, I’m sure there are lots of solo adventurers that seek out these places on their own.
But this particular…
organization does this as a group and i think there’s a certain appeal of that i think for those folks there is something about doing it as a communal activity because you know as unsettling as it is you are then with other people that are also sharing that same sensation as you are and when i was talking to um aria who’s the the organizer of this tour that i went on
he told me that the sort of unsettled feeling that people get in liminal spaces kind of seems like a universal feeling, like people all over the world report it and don’t always have a way to describe it.
And then they meet this community of people and they find out there’s a name for it.
And they’re like, Oh, thank God.
I thought I was losing my mind.
So I think that the idea of being with these like-minded people is, is definitely part of it.
I mean, we all we had such a great time on the bus, like just, you know, shuttling around between these malls.
And there was something that was kind of fun about, you know, we’re all like roughly the same age group, I’d say maybe like late 20s to early 40s.
And so we were experiencing these malls together and also just having a good time sort of talking about the nature of change and nostalgia and, you know, how weird it feels to be a millennial sometimes as we
You know, we entered different eras and it’s for many of us, these malls are like really markers of our childhood.
So it was a way of revisiting that communally.
So I think that was like, it’s a different experience than it would have been, you know, if I had just been walking around this mall by myself with a camera.
Well, Blake and I have been interested in things like ghost hunting for decades.
And on this show, we talk a lot about paranormal claims.
from a sceptical perspective, but it seems to me like this whole idea of liminal spaces is intertwined with the idea of ghost hunting and that strange feeling that you get when you go into a spooky-looking house or an abandoned hospital or a church or a cemetery or a place like that.
Is there a connection, do you think, between ghost hunting and…
uh liminal spaces and does this have anything to do maybe with the the start of this trend um that’s an interesting question too i mean i can see why there would be i can see why people do make that connection but i feel like the true die hard liminal space fanatics if you can call them that um
They’re very, like, protective of the term, and I don’t think they do like to associate it with that.
I think there’s a bit of, like, derision on their part, because they’re like, oh, it is spooky, but it’s not spooky in, like, a sort of cartoonish, you know, ghost-huntery, Halloween-like way.
It’s spooky in more of a, I don’t know, like a psychological and a sociological way.
More Henry James than Scooby Doo, is that what you mean?
Exactly.
More intellectual.
When you were comparing the idea of these semi-abandoned mouths to cathedrals, or the ruins of cathedrals, which I’m sure that’s like a totally egregious comparison for some people.
But there was a theory that I came across when I was researching this.
I didn’t really include it in the essay because I wasn’t sure how well accepted it was, but…
Someone else was saying that the reason we do feel unsettled in liminal spaces.
is because, again, on some cellular level, our bodies look at these sort of, you know, this wreckage and thinks, oh, my God, something terrible must have happened here.
Like a civilization must have been wiped out.
As opposed to just thinking like, oh, I guess there was a Walmart here and it closed 20 years ago and no one replaced it.
That’s not how our bodies react.
Our bodies are like, oh, my God, a plague must have come through here or some terrible war occurred.
and entire civilizations were decimated and we have to leave right now we can’t be here it’s not safe and so that feels a little more aligned with the ghost hunting theory right because that’s a little bit more about residual energy perhaps and maybe our
are conscious reacting on some level to that kind of sensation.
Yeah, I don’t know why, but for some reason, I’m having these really poetic responses to this tonight.
Normally, I don’t feel this way, but I can’t help but think combining ghost hunting with these liminal spaces.
I’m thinking about the movie Poltergeist and how…
There’s this point during a housing development when you can see what’s coming, like you can see they’re building the structures.
There’s these skeletons of things that shall be right.
And then later, this is the other end of that is the the neighborhood that’s falling into disrepair or, you know, it’s falling.
It’s falling apart.
It’s abandoned.
People are selling it off.
They’re going to destroy it, whatever.
There’s this whole lifespan, this life cycle of human occupancy.
And at.
from a chronological perspective, there’s a liminal segment of that from when you’re transitioning from there is nothing there to there is something there to then there’s nothing there again.
So that whole transitional phase is not just merely about entering and leaving physical spaces.
It’s leaving psychological spaces, entering psychological spaces and that cognizance of it.
And so I thought your piece kind of captured that.
But the idea of people combining that with a group
mentality of tourism and that sort of communal experience was really interesting.
So what made you decide to write about this, though?
I mean, it’s it is a it’s a little bit an unusual topic, I guess, for a journalist to tackle.
Yeah, I think it is unusual to go this deep into a topic like this.
But I got really lucky.
I was just doom scrolling on Instagram one day and I got this ad.
advertising a party that was going to be held at this like 70s era retail complex in one of the neighborhoods in downtown Toronto.
And it’s kind of a weird retail complex.
It’s been there for a long time.
It’s kind of mostly been empty for the past like decade or two.
Yeah.
And yet I think it’s still a landmark unto its own because people walk through it all the time and are probably like, what’s up with this weird mall that has like three stores, one that sells pantyhose, one that sells sheet music and one that sells fake 16th century Chinese pottery.
Why has it not been demolished yet?
And so I guess what had happened was that it finally was going to be demolished.
And Aryeh, who was the same tour guide I was speaking about before, he wanted to throw kind of a celebration for it because it was still open to the public.
So the idea was that he would fill it with people the way it may have looked in its heyday in the 70s and 80s and, you know, just sort of usher off into its next era.
And I was like, oh, that sounds kind of fun and quirky.
I know that building.
So I decided to go and I sent off an email to an editor I know at the Toronto Star, which is our largest daily paper.
And I said, hey, I’m going to go to this thing.
What do you think if I write a short like 700 word article just about the event and, you know, people’s memories, I guess, of the retail complex, which is known as Cumberland Terrace?
And she said, sure, that sounds great.
So I did that.
I went to the event, you know, walked around a little bit.
And then I think a couple days later or so when I was writing the piece, I called Arie just to ask him some follow-up questions.
And one of the questions I said to him was like, why do you think people like to come to these spaces so much?
What would be the appeal for folks to come and walk through this weird 70s mall once again?
And by this time, I knew that he actually…
he did a lot of events like this.
He, he would organize like day long tours and take people around to multiple different semi abandoned shopping malls.
So I knew that he had quite a lot of experience with these kinds of spaces.
And I asked him that question and I thought he was just going to say like,
I don’t know, people are nostalgic.
They can’t get with the times.
90s kids, you know, want to revisit like some marker of their youth.
And he kind of did say that, but he also said something that surprised me, which is that people go to those spaces because they’re craving that sensation that we talked about earlier, that sensation of like, you know, feeling a little bit unsettled and just really feeling the weight and the heaviness of…
you know, this once grand, once vibrant space that is now kind of sitting like a skeleton.
He said that is the same kind of feeling people sometimes get once they’ve heard a really powerful piece of music or a really like impactful piece of literature or something.
They want that feeling because it’s…
you know, we don’t get those sensations when we’re immersed in our phones and we’re dealing with technology and we’re seeing things like through the screen.
We don’t have those same grounded in body feelings.
And he said, I think in people search for that, they end up at these places because they give them those sensations.
And I was like, whoa.
What are you even talking about?
What does this even mean?
This is like way above my pay grade for this piece.
And so I filed the piece that I was writing and I was like, oh my God, okay, I have to go on one of these tours.
I have to talk to these people and I need a huge word count and a publication that’s gonna give me like the freedom to explore this with sort of the depth and the nuance that I think it needs.
Cause this is unexpectedly becoming very, very weird.
So that’s kind of how that happened.
Yeah, I really enjoyed the piece so much.
And one of the first things that made me think of is that a lot of people are doing this kind of thing, but visiting sites like this illegally, trespassing and breaking into places and that this can obviously be illegal and very dangerous too.
So you went on a tour that this was all legit.
What’s the right way?
to do this kind of thing.
I’m wondering with Arye how he set up these tours because it’s just such a very specific thing.
Yeah, that’s a good question.
I mean, we do have a problem here with people, you know, trespassing in buildings that are maybe unsafe or not open to the public.
So Arye, by this point, Arye has developed a pretty strong community.
And so I think he gets a lot of suggestions for different ways
places, especially malls that should be on his list.
I know that he has at least three separate routes that he does.
One is in sort of the sort of a bit West of Toronto.
One’s a bit East of Toronto and one’s a bit North of Toronto.
And he curates the list pretty carefully.
Like all of the malls that we went to are in fact open to the public.
They’re just.
not used like there’s nobody there’s really no customers in them there’s maybe one or two stores that are open they’re sort of sitting in limbo like awaiting their next iteration whether that’s like a condo development or a fancy or a mall or something so there’s you know there’s no concern about like trespassing or anything like that um
But I think he really is relying on the people that live in those communities who are maybe like, oh, there’s this weird mall in my neighborhood that totally meets that criteria.
And it seems like the liminal space community is so broad and so enthusiastic about this that it seems like they’re always on the hunt for these kinds of spaces.
And they’re always eager to share that information with other people who are also seeking out those spaces.
So interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah, it really is.
You mentioned, you literally mentioned zombies.
And it’s like, when these places were at their peak, they were such an important part of culture.
They were showing up in movies and all sorts of things.
But like for me, Dawn of the Dead, which is all really, you know, it’s a zombie movie, but it’s really about consumerism gone, you know, gone crazy.
And…
Chopping Mall, 1986.
Night of the Comet also has a big section of people.
There’s this sort of fantasy people had in the 80s, which is really indicative of how important consumerism was.
So this idea of what if everybody was gone, but all the stuff was still here, right?
I sometimes call it a libertarian apocalypse where you could just, you know, you could go out with a little bit of grit and a whole lot of leftovers.
You could really have a great life.
But in that past, I think like, for example, Stranger Things has a very big nostalgia play.
I don’t know if you watch Stranger Things, but Starcourt Mall.
That’s all filmed in Georgia.
I’m from Georgia.
So like that’s a real mall that I used to go to.
Right.
And so I took my kids on a big tour of all these places.
And, you know, there’s just real.
odd experience of being able to go and see the exteriors and you can sort of see how Hollywood or Netflix in this case constructs a reality based on a real reality celebrating
maybe a nonsense reality.
Like, you know, there’s like all these layers of recursion and weirdness all filmed on the cheap to avoid tax costs and other things in real abandoned spaces that failed, you know, economically, yet we celebrate them as though they’re really great.
There’s so many layers of meaning and it’s really complicated.
Totally, totally.
Even with like 3,000 words, there were so many layers that I couldn’t even get into with this piece about like consumerism and like why in fact we are nostalgic for consumerism and is that problematic?
And also just like how kind of wasteful it is that these spaces still exist and that someone…
You know, someone’s paying cleaners to like dust off these plastic palm trees every day and scrub the tiles and keep them pretty meticulous looking, even though no one’s in them.
Like they could be used for so many useful things.
Housing.
I don’t know.
All kinds of infrastructure.
Like there’s all kinds of things.
And instead they’re kind of just sitting there like these weird, fenty.
Yes.
And if you try to get into them, the rent’s still very extraordinarily high, which is really weird.
I bet.
Yeah.
There’s a place called North Lake Mall near here, which is really down to just like five or six stores.
A portion of the mall has been carved off and turned into a health facility.
And big chunks of the stores are just blocked off with like drywall.
But there’s a few really interesting spaces in there where there’s a comic book shop where it has a huge, interesting community that comes there to play games and buy comics and interact, which you can’t get at a normal retail outlet.
And there’s a few specialty places.
But every time I go into one of these malls that’s not completely abandoned, I keep thinking this amazing space with great parking, good central location.
But they keep trying to recreate that 80s place where you’d go there for things you could get now online.
And it feels to me, and this is really not the point of this conversation, but it feels to me like if you want to get these spaces to come back, you need to provide something that can only be had in the real world.
Live performances, really great, unique restaurants, you know.
It’s a great place.
You could have live music and great food.
There’d be a reason to go.
You could have specialty shops that don’t sell the same things you can buy online.
I don’t think we all need to go drive to basically buy stuff we could get at Timu for $3.
It seems kind of dumb.
I think that’s the question that most retailers are grappling with.
How do you make the brick and mortar experience something you wouldn’t get from…
the online experience, if it’s the same product, right?
That’s why, you know, some like higher end boutiques now have like espresso bars in their store.
Just, you know, trying to get people to come back in person and kind of linger.
But what I do keep hearing, which makes me laugh, is that like, you know what, eventually…
Amazon is just going to be like, what if there was online shopping, but in real life?
Yes.
Yes.
It does feel like that often.
It’s all like the cycle of life.
It does.
What goes around comes around.
I have to say I’m in Colorado now.
I have been for quite some time, but in Australia, we’ll turn anything into a coffee shop, whether it’s a bank.
or a surf shop, there’ll be a coffee shop in there.
And I’m seeing more and more of that here in the States, but that’s very much a thing.
But I wanted to ask too, we’re focusing a lot on abandoned malls and that seems to be a kind of prototypical liminal space.
But if you go and look on YouTube…
you’ll see lots of images of people’s personal interpretations of liminal spaces.
And I’m just wondering, are they all real places or could they be invented as well?
I’m not too sure about the back rooms, if that’s based on an office, based on an actual place or not.
But can any place potentially be a liminal space or is it only certain types of places?
That is an interesting question.
I feel like there probably are some people who, as you say, they have their own interpretations of things and perhaps to them based on their own memories or their own life experiences, they feel as though something’s a liminal space.
But I feel like I spent so much time on like ARB slash liminal space on Reddit.
Spicy debate about what is a liminal space and people get really angry when someone puts a photograph of something in and someone else is like, that’s not a liminal space.
So I think the generally accepted theory is that no, there are certain criteria that have to be met.
But it is interesting to think about who owns the term liminal space?
Who makes that criteria up?
Disney?
Soon enough.
So, Karen, you brought this up and I have to say one of the most fascinating and I guess it’s actually relevant here experiences is something that I’ve seen here in the Atlanta area.
And I’m sure there are other places, too.
I’m sure there are.
I haven’t even gone to look, but I’m sure there are.
And these are pop up goblin markets.
And so they are.
events where people plan to come and meet, but you’re meeting almost like a combining a cosplay fantasy event with a shopping event.
So the retailers are selling again, things you wouldn’t find in a normal store.
These are not, you know, cookie cutter, Amazon stuff.
It’s handcrafted things, but people are also.
dressing up as though they’re going to a Ren fair or, or some sort of fantasy event.
And there’s fairy lights everywhere and weird live music and, and interesting smells.
And chitlins.
No, it’s, but, but I think that, that, that probably emerges from that sort of merging of the merging of that desire to have a magical experience.
And a social experience.
But with the need.
to take home something when you’re done.
And I think it really happened.
Yeah, it really happened.
And it wasn’t just me going to Dragon Con or, you know, it’s a little different and it’s unique.
It’s a one-time thing.
You only see it once.
It’s only there.
Then you won’t see the same experience twice.
And again, it’s why people go to live music.
It’s, it’s, there’s, it’s caught in time for this brief moment.
You get this really strange experience.
That’s.
That’s, you know, how you get your experience points.
I think Lana spoke about that too in your article talking about people taking away souvenirs.
So I’m not sure if they’re things that people just grabbed on the fly or if they purchased them at those few stalls that were left.
Yeah, that is an interesting concept.
The idea of like…
Did it really happen unless I have physical proof?
But yeah, so one of the assignments we got at the beginning of the tour was that Arye had asked us to try and pick a souvenir of some kind.
And so people were…
trying to find things throughout the various tours.
There was one mall that had this whole bank of, you know, those machines where you put in a coin and like it spits out a little plastic gumball and inside the gumball, there’s like a little toy.
People had lines over those because we hadn’t seen them in so long.
So a bunch of people took some of those.
One woman, I guess she had grown up not too far from one of the malls.
And so she went through a phone book, a actual real phone book that we found.
that had clearly not been replaced since the 90s.
And she found her actual home address in it.
And so she ripped the page out and that was her souvenir.
That’s cool.
Other people were just buying like random things.
Like there was one mall that had this really strange department store in the basement.
Like one of those stores that just sells everything from like bedsheets to like construction uniforms to like…
perfume and I don’t know, cutlery sets.
So people were, you know, buying knickknacks sort of from there and stuff.
But it was funny because I was so busy talking to people and writing things that I alone did not even think to, to get a souvenir.
And I’m like, Whoa, did that even happen?
I don’t know.
Maybe it didn’t.
I have no proof.
You’re off.
Cool.
Maybe I hallucinated at all.
I don’t know.
So what do you think about the future of these physical spaces?
Like, what do you think they signal?
I mean, I think they signal that we try to be so organized and strategic as humans.
And ultimately, we’re just kind of like clumsy and stupid.
And we’re kind of just like doing the best we can, you know, while the winds blow around us, you know.
So many people want these malls to become…
you know, these master plan communities, they have these grand plans for them, you know, beautiful luxury towers.
But things just don’t always pan out the way we want them to.
And I think that there’s, you know, some like kind of beauty in that, you know, that despite our best efforts, sometimes we just have to like,
bumble through and see what life throws our way.
I think there is like one of the malls in particular, actually, I thought was really interesting because it clearly is awaiting demolition or, you know, something.
But it had kind of in the interim become what I think its neighbors probably really needed it to be.
It had, there was a church that had taken over one of the upper floors.
There was a bunch of like cash only noodle joints on the bottom floor that seemed to be really well utilized by people in the community, by some nearby construction workers.
And then all the stores were selling things that I would consider to be kind of strange.
like bootleg DVDs and like discount vacations to the Philippines and stuff.
But I just had this sense that like, that’s what the people who live in that neighborhood want to buy.
So now, you know, unconnected from all the big chains that usually we see in malls, it had kind of like,
been reverted to a really strong community resource and I think that’s like kind of lovely and organic when that happens and I secretly love it that it you know somehow it is succeeding despite all these plans yeah
Neat.
Well, yeah, I think this is just such a deep topic.
And I know that you needed more than 700 words, 3,000 words.
I think I’d love to see you write a book about this because I think this is just becoming more and more popular.
And again, really enjoy the article and would urge our listeners to go and check it out.
But we need to wind down the interview.
And we’ve got a final question that we’d like to ask all of our guests the first time that they come on the show.
And that is, what’s your favorite monster?
Okay, well, fortunately, I feel like that’s an easy answer for me.
My favorite monster is the Sasquatch, of which I have also written about.
Now, we’ve not heard of this before.
What is that?
Hundreds of times.
Many aliases.
I kind of don’t believe that this, I don’t like, I don’t see how the Sasquatch could possibly exist, but I hope that it does.
And I wish that it did.
I love this idea that there’s this like mysterious entity in the forest and somehow we’ve never come across it.
And then it’s just like living its life deep in the woods somewhere.
um it it’s um it is a liminal creature in a lot of ways because exactly it only in theory it could hypothetically live anywhere but we only see it where we interface with nature at that boundary level you know so i had not considered that but you’re right yeah yeah yeah and also also on the liminal the liminal side of things like
I feel like we are always going to be in limbo with the question of the Sasquatch, because unless we can definitively prove it doesn’t exist, we’ll never know.
And we can’t, right?
So it’s just going to always be this unanswered question that kind of just hangs there in the void.
And I sort of love the mystery behind that also.
Schrodinger’s Squatch, right?
That’s why we have this show still.
It’s true.
We never get tired of talking about Bigfoot, Sasquatch, monsters.
You know, they don’t have to literally be real to be important.
And they obviously, they do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to meaning.
Absolutely.
A lot of things.
Well, golly, thank you so much for talking with us tonight about your article, your work, these ideas.
So interesting.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for inviting me.
This has been so fascinating.
I love talking about this.
It’s a really complicated and rich topic, I feel.
It is.
They just give us a good treatment because we’ve just been mentioning the topic more and more.
It comes up a lot, I think, philosophically, psychologically, spiritually.
This whole idea of these liminal is getting a lot of cultural cachet, I guess.
It’s really becoming a popular concept and people are starting to recognize it.
I don’t think it’s going to be one of those things where liminal’s over.
Like, no, it’s an important psychological thing to recognize and realizing when you’re entering a space like that.
Whether that’s all in your head, you know, that’s something that as a skeptic, I tend to think it is, but it doesn’t matter.
These subjective experiences are powerful and important to you.
Yeah, it’s true.
Well, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
Thank you.
Yeah, happy holidays.
Indeed.
And good luck up there in Canada.
I hope your winter is mild.
Thank you.
It’s not looking that way so far, but who knows.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stolznow.
You just heard an interview with journalist Lana Hall about her Haslit piece, The Dead Mall Society.
A link to that is in the show notes, along with some further links for additional reading.
Thinking about this topic and preparing for the show, I considered a lot of clips and references, but honestly, Dawn of the Dead seems to be my go-to mall cinema.
it somehow captured the essence of malls, including what they’ve become today.
And while it may have a few more exploding heads and cannibally frenzied disembowelings than, say, I don’t know, Wall Street, it still is an apt commentary on humanity, and especially on consumerism, as anything I’ve seen or read.
You’re still here.
They’re after us.
They know we’re still in here.
They’re after the place.
They don’t know why.
They just remember.
Remember that they want to be in here.
What the hell are they?
They’re us, that’s all.
There’s no more room in hell.
What?
Something my granddaddy used to tell us.
You know Mukumbo?
Furu.
Granddad was a priest in Trinidad.
Used to tell us…
When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
They broke into the mall for the wildest all-night party of their lives.
Dead meat.
But you’re never alone in the Chopping Mall.

The post S05E13 – Liminal Space Invaders appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Friend of the show Dr. Joe Laycock returns to talk about LIZARD PEOPLE with us. He also has a new book: The Penguin Book of Cults

Joe’s Books:
Penguin Book of Cults (publisher) (amazon affiliate link)
The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief (affiliate link)

Other topics of discussion:
Shadow Kingdom
Brotherhood of the White Temple
Shaver Mysteries
Kull
Dark Shadows (Soap Opera) “Leviathan” storyline
The Naga who wanted to be a priest
Serpent People
Aum Shenrikyo Japanese death cult
Skeptoid looks at famous rumor that Aum Shenrikyo had a nuclear bomb
The Secret Rulers of the World – Jon Ronson (YouTube)
V – the Mini Series

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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In 1983, there was an exciting sci-fi miniseries that aired on television called V. The story follows the arrival of seemingly friendly aliens who come to Earth and seem to want to cooperate and benefit humanity.
At some point, there’s a shocking reveal when we discover, along with actor Mark Singer’s character Mike, that the aliens are not what they seem.
They look human, but actually they’re rodent-eating lizard people and they’re not here to help us after all.
The whole thing’s a thinly disguised metaphorical warning about fascism and the lack of humanity which that political approach inherently conceals.
I say conceals, at least until it can get away with not having to hide its nastier components.
In other words, V’s very clearly based on the premise that fascism is bad.
Thus, it was extraordinarily ironic to see these same story beats of V being used as a framework for online conspiracy theories like those used in QAnon.
The reversal, of course, being that instead of the lizards being the fascists in the conspiracy theories, these lizard people are coded to be Jews.
On the surface, to a rational, educated person with at least a modicum of biology training, the idea of lizard people is laughably naive and impossible.
but conspiracies don’t really thrive in an ecosystem of fact-checking and slow, deliberate consideration.
The story of lizard people is older than the 1980s, and it’s more complex than this single example, but being a child of the 1980s, when I think of lizard people, I can’t help but remember the alien Diana swallowing a whole guinea pig.
I re-watched that segment while prepping this intro, and it holds up pretty well.
at least as well as her big 1980s hair.
Honestly, now I want to go rewatch that whole show.
But first, let’s stop and have a chat with return guest in front of the show, Dr. Joe Laycock, who’s going to share some of his research into the fascinating and often troubling topic of lizard people.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
All right, today we’re joined again by friend of the show and master of the monstrous in the academic world, Dr. Joe Laycock.
Joe’s an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University.
He holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston University.
He’s the co-editor of the journal Novo Religio and the author of several essential books for any Monster Talk library, including The Exorcist Effect and his latest book, The Penguin Book of Cults.
I’m pretty sure this is Joe’s eighth appearance on the show, and he’s here today to help us peel back the skin on his latest research, the fascinating, bizarre, and often troubling world of lizard people.
Monster Talk.
We’re glad to have you back.
Yes, very, as always.
It’s always fun to do Monster Talks.
I’m glad to be back.
When you told me you were researching lizard people, I got simultaneously really excited and also worried because it’s one of those topics that’s got some darkness in it, but it’s got some good stuff.
So I’m really interested to talk to you.
We actually were just talking about you because…
we had just covered sort of the rip from the headlines, Morgan Geyser updates about the Slender Man attacks.
And so if listeners want to hear that, that was episode 10 of season five, which was just a few weeks ago.
But yeah, so, but that was, you came up because you and Natasha had talked to us and that was the episode where we also discussed the real history of Tulpas versus how they’ve been sort of
repurposed in pop culture um new age thinking etc so yeah yeah but but lizard people joe lizard people what’s up with lizard people why dear god why yeah the lizard people conspiracy theory it’s become kind of metonymy for everything insane uh on the internets
And it’s been covered, you know, kind of in passing in books on conspiracy theories or books on cryptozoology.
But no one has ever really kind of done the history of this idea from beginning to end.
And it’s an old idea because Michael Barkun traced it back to the story The Shadow Kingdom, published in 1929 in Weird Tales by Robert E. Howard, which means this is almost 100 years old.
We’ve had 100 years.
of lizard people.
David Icke was actually extremely late to the game coming in the late 90s, and he was kind of the Paul the Apostle of lizard people, right?
He made it a global phenomenon, but it had been around for a long time before that.
So I wanted to kind of see how we got from Robert E. Howard to kind of where we’re at today, especially with…
this bombing that happened Christmas morning 2020 in Nashville, where this guy blew up an AT&T tower, or he tried to, and left this manifesto that he was out to fight the reptilian shapeshifters.
So that’s another piece of it, is that the more I’ve kind of looked into newspaper archives, I’ve found about 20 crimes, including…
bombings and attempted bombings and murders and suicides connected to this conspiracy theory and of course the irony is i start to sound like a conspiracy theorist myself right where i have all these clippings about crimes and i’m saying no one sees the pattern but me this means something
So anyways, I’ve got this book project I’ve been working on.
I would like to do it as a trade book.
I would like this to not be a university press book that costs like $50 and you can only order online.
But getting my foot in the door with a trade press is difficult.
It’s a new process for me.
And it’s just hard to get your foot in the door with lizard people.
People see lizard people and they just assume you have nothing serious to say.
This is not anything that anybody is going to want to hear.
Why is there this connection then between these stories, these cases that you’re finding and lizard people?
What’s the link there?
Well, I mean, a lot of these people seem to have symptoms of schizophrenia and so forth, right?
So it is one thing to read about lizard people on the Internet and say, you know, I wonder if there’s something to this.
Who knows?
Those are some pretty spooky YouTube videos where they zoom in really close on somebody’s eye.
It’s another thing, though, to say, I can see people shapeshifting around me, right?
So one of these people who was arrested for stabbing his brother with a sword when he was being interrogated by the sheriff’s department said, I can see you turning into lizards right now, right?
So there are places where kind of mental illness intersects with other things going on in the culture, right?
But I don’t think this is reducible to mental illness.
I think there’s other factors here.
One of the things that I started looking at when I was trying to see if this is an older pattern is things like, well, your listeners may have heard of Bridget Cleary in Ireland who was set on fire by her husband who thought that she was a changeling.
I know we’ve talked about that case at least once.
Yeah, of people killing other people because they think you’re not who you say you are.
You’re some sort of supernatural creature.
And this is a place where folklore kind of fills in the nature of people’s sort of delusions or anxieties.
So even though there’s a medical dimension to this, there’s also a cultural one.
Yeah.
So let’s assume that some of our listeners may not be as read into this material as we are.
How would you introduce the shape-changing lizard person to someone who is monster curious, but not conspiracy defined?
That’s a weird question.
Yeah.
I think it helps to begin in the beginning.
It’s a very good place to start.
Robert E. Howard, famous for creating Conan the Barbarian.
He writes this story in 1929.
Some people have said this is the first true sword and sorcery story.
Because it’s in entirely fictional settings.
And it’s not a Conan story.
It’s a Call the Conqueror story, who I think is vaguely Conan’s ancestor from Atlantis.
And terribly played by Kevin Sorbo.
Oh, don’t even get me started.
Very forgettable film.
But Cull the Conqueror has conquered this kingdom called Volusia, and it’s explained to him that there’s these ancient snake people, and they sort of fought a war against humans at the beginning of time, and they lost, and everyone thought they were extinct, but they’re not.
They can shapeshift, and they’ve used their shapeshifting powers to take over the kingdom, and so they rule the kingdom by proxy.
And since this is a Robert E. Howard story, when his character finds out about this,
He just kills everybody and that solves the problem, right?
Lovecraft characters all just faint and go insane.
Robert E. Howard characters just kill everything with weapons.
But this is a really successful story.
They lead by example, right?
That’s right.
This makes Howard kind of one of the best writers or most famous writers in Weird Tales at the time.
And we actually went out to Cross Plains, Texas, where Robert E. Howard is from.
And this sort of cult of Robert E. Howard went and found the writing desk.
A cult of cults, if you will.
They found the writing desk that he used to write on, and it’s at his old house.
So we could see this is the room where serpent people were unleashed onto the world.
And then Howard was friends with…
Lovecraft and this whole circle of pulp writers.
And so other people begin writing stories about ancient serpent men from Atlantis and this kind of thing.
And it becomes almost a kind of meme.
And this story keeps showing up again and again in pop culture.
So in the 1960s, there was this cult soap opera called Dark Shadows.
They did a season with these antagonists called Leviathans, who are vaguely serpent themed.
That was Dan Curtis’s show, right?
I think that was Dan Curtis.
Yeah.
Yeah, these extra-dimensional entities, and they were banished in an ancient war, but they’re coming back, and they have this device called the Naga Box that they can use to mind-control people.
Even the 80s cartoon G.I.
Joe…
Did an episode where there are these snake people that live in the Himalayas.
Tibet comes up a lot in this lore, and they lost a war against humanity thousands of years ago, but they’ve been ruling from the shadows, and they’re going to take it back.
I mean, you could argue Cobra is all snake people.
Sure.
They’ll fight for freedom wherever there’s trouble.
G.I.
Joe is there.
G.I.
Joe.
A real American hero.
G.I.
Joe is there.
Right, yeah.
But now we know, well, they’re not just snakes because they’re deceptive or venomous.
It’s because they’re literally controlled by snake people who were wiped out in the Ice Age.
Are You Afraid of the Dark on Nickelodeon did an episode about this called A Tale of the Hatching.
Even South Park had episodes with the crab people who live underground in the Hollow Earth and were banished thousands of years ago and sort of corrupting human culture.
So even if you’ve never read The Shadow Kingdom, you’ve encountered this idea through all these different places.
So what happens next is someone says, this isn’t just a story.
This isn’t just fiction.
This is real.
This is an occult secret.
And that is this figure called Maurice Dorial, who starts a group out in Colorado called the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
Sorry, Colorado.
That group still exists, by the way.
And if you look at their website, it says, yes, we’re called the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
We promise it doesn’t have anything to do with white supremacy.
Wow.
You need that disclaimer.
In the 30s, it wasn’t such a controversial name.
But during the Great Depression, you had a lot of these kind of mail order occult groups, right?
And you could kind of send away and they would mail you the secrets of the Rosicrucian order and things like this.
Actually, in Weird Tales, in the 1929 issue where The Shadow King was published, in the margins, it says, you know, do you want to learn…
Ancient occult secrets we’ll send away to the Rosicrucians, and we’ll give you a correspondence course on the occult.
So there were a lot of groups like this, and Maurice Dorial tries his hand at it, and the kind of special sauce that he gets to make his group stand out is, serpent people are real.
And it’s this kind of ancient occult secret.
And people have gone through some of his writings and they found references to not only the Shadow Kingdom, but to several other pulp stories, all of which were published in Weird Tales in 1929.
So we have kind of this image of this guy sort of going through the pulps and thinking, oh, this could be an ancient secret from Atlantis.
And then he even gets through Ray Palmer crossover with the Shaver Mysteries.
Oh.
Wow.
Yeah.
So he writes in to Ray Palmer and Ray Palmer says, gosh, this sounds so much like the Darrow.
You know, do you think the serpent stuff means the Darrow are real?
And there’s this kind of cross pollination that goes on there.
So I found everything I could find archivally.
on the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
And it was actually a pretty successful group.
It went from being a mail order group to having a physical building and finally to having its own community.
Maurice Dorial began saying that the end of the world is going to come.
There’s going to be a nuclear war and everybody has to go and live in this valley in Colorado.
And he said the…
These mountains contain a lot of lead, which is going to shield us from the radiation.
And then they even got a bunch of dynamite and they said, if we need to, we can blow up the pass into the valley so that, you know, post-apocalyptic warlords or whatever cannot come in here and get us.
And this whole community was built.
And then he passed away in the early 60s and the community kind of continued to limp along.
And actually one story I found, which was pretty interesting, was from the 70s.
And the community had like an OK relationship with the town.
And they had some Halloween party for the kids out in one of their empty buildings.
And one of the guys from town is trying to fill up a bucket for bobbing apples.
And the water is switched off.
So he goes down to the basement to see if he can switch it back on.
And he finds piles and piles of dynamite in this room where they’re about to have a children’s Halloween party.
Holy moly.
Oh, that’s right.
That’s where we put the dynamite that we had to make sure that we could blow up the pass if we need to.
We forgot about that.
And listeners, remember, if you’re storing dynamite, first don’t.
And over time, it starts to sweat nitroglycerin.
It’s not really great.
Yeah, so.
It’s worse than raisins and apples, yeah.
Yeah, quite a bit worse.
So, I mean, of course, nothing bad happens, and eventually they get the ATF out there, and they confiscate the dynamite, and they dispose of the sticks that had gotten sweaty and deemed dangerous.
No children were harmed, but it’s a pretty kind of…
interesting item to find, right?
Historically, it’s interesting in a lot of ways because you have all these elements that would later be a sure indicator that somebody’s going to get shot or blowed up real good.
And none of that happens.
That’s amazing.
Right.
Yeah.
I love stories like that, right?
Where I have to ruminate over something tragic that happened.
And so the Brotherhood of the White Temple is sort of what puts this idea out there in the public consciousness as being something that could be real.
And it’s still framed in kind of an occult register of these are these ancient beings and they’re extra dimensional and the Atlanteans knew about them.
And then after 1947, we get UFOs, and very quickly it shifts from they are coming from deep inside the Earth, they’re coming from another dimension, to these are aliens, right?
These are shape-shifting aliens coming from other planets.
And so there’s just a lot of layers to this.
And then in the 80s and early 90s, we get the…
The mythology of the Dums, the deep underground military bases, and legends about things like a base in Dulce, New Mexico, where lizard people and the U.S. Air Force kind of work side by side.
The Montauk Project lore kind of sticks a finger in this.
They say, oh, I remember talking to reptilians working at Montauk, and they would drink bleach.
I don’t know, it was ammonia or something like this.
That was sort of this peculiar habit attributed to them.
And then the question sort of forms of what do they want?
And at first it’s, you know, they want to eat us.
And then it’s they want to drink our blood.
It’s kind of a adrenochrome type of thing.
And where the conspiracy theory has evolved to now is that they actually feed on human pain and suffering.
And that’s really what they want.
And so they do all these terrible things and they orchestrate wars and they do all of this to create more suffering.
And eventually this has become almost a complete Gnostic religion where there are people online claiming that the whole universe as we know it is this sort of…
you know, farm designed by the lizard people to harness all the drama and suffering of human existence.
And there are even people online who say, you know, when you have a near-death experience and you see a light, don’t move towards the light.
That light is a reptilian trick to kind of recycle your soul back into this physical universe so they can, you know, harness more of your pain and suffering.
And so out of this, I have found people claiming that
Reptilians are causing meth addiction because that leads to more suffering.
That reptilians are causing unrequited love.
They’re sort of programming you to fall in love with someone knowing it won’t be requited.
That they are changing people’s sexual orientations.
Not because one sexual orientation is necessarily better than another, but because the reptilians understand this is a homophobic society.
And so therefore, if they can make you gay, you’ll have more suffering that they can feed on.
So it’s really interesting to see how we’ve kind of got a mythology where now everything bad in the whole world…
is coming from these reptilians.
And even the bad things that we do, that’s not really our fault either because they would claim, well, we have this reptilian brain and that comes from the lizard people tampering with our evolution thousands of years ago.
So…
Were it not for them, we would be this totally lovely, peace-loving species.
So everything bad that happens is their fault.
It’s a comforting idea, but the cost of this is that some people are not really people.
And that can lead to all kinds of problems.
But in extreme cases, such as one of the ones I’ve looked at, actually killing people.
Actually killing people you know of being a reptilian.
Oh, wow.
I just can’t believe this story.
I mean, what a tangled web and just so many questions about all of this.
But earlier you name dropped and Blake and I were talking about this earlier.
How do we pronounce his name?
We’ve heard David Ikey, David Ike.
We’ve kind of settled on David Ikey, I think, instead.
But can you tell us a bit about him and his involvement in all of this and why his beliefs and theories have taken off?
so much more than other ones.
Sure.
I’m 99% certain it’s Ike.
Not Icky.
We’ll stick with that.
Icky is how he makes us feel though.
So David Ike, he was a footballer in the UK.
He developed arthritis.
He became an announcer and then he became a politician.
He was involved in the Green Party for a while.
He got interested in sort of holistic medicine, looking at ways to improve his arthritis and met a psychic who I think had worked actually with a lot of football players.
And this kind of sets him on this sort of mystical journey.
He begins kind of…
hearing inner voices and things like this.
He goes on the Terry Wogan show during a period where he was wearing only turquoise because he said turquoise is, I guess, a positive frequency that keeps away negative energy.
So it goes on Terry Wogan and, you know, begins talking about how he is the Godhead and there’s this kind of imminent disaster that’s coming and everybody begins laughing at him.
And he says, well, you know, laughter is a really good way to keep away negative energy.
And Terry Wogan kind of doubles down and says, yes, but the audience isn’t laughing with you.
They’re laughing at you.
You know, the best way of removing negativity is to laugh and be joyous.
So I’m delighted that there’s so much laughter in the audience tonight.
But no, it’s a…
But just let me say this.
They’re laughing at you.
They’re not laughing with you.
So pretty brutal.
And to what you said later, I do feel bad about how I treated David Icke on my show.
And supposedly this had been one of his greatest phobias for a long time was sort of public ridicule.
So he kind of disappears from public view for a while.
And when he comes back, he’s pretty much begins writing these books on conspiracy theories and rapidly becomes probably the most famous conspiracy theorist in the world.
with the possible exception of Austin, Texas’s own Alex Jones.
But his genius, if you call it that, is simply voraciously absorbing every conspiracy theory that exists and weaving it into this kind of grand tapestry where it’s all true.
And so in 1999, he puts out this book called The Biggest Secret, where he explains that reptilian aliens basically control the world.
But if you read the book, it has consequences.
kind of every bizarre conspiracy theory you can think of.
Bigfoot shows up at one point.
Elvis being alive is mentioned at one point.
There’s also this kind of bizarre contrarianism to it where everything that we take as a fact in history just has to be wrong.
And at one point he says, you know, most Americans won’t know this about the Boston Tea Party, but most of those people throwing a tea into the water, they weren’t even really Indians.
They were colonists dressed up like Indians.
Shocking.
He’s not an American.
I thought, well, that’s actually true, but it’s not the biggest secret or even a tiny secret.
But the way that he really sold this was he would travel, he would give these basically PowerPoint presentations that could go for up to 12 hours.
I mean, there’d be like a lunch break and some bathroom breaks, but he would keep people there for 12 hours and was an engaging speaker.
The people who showed up were really impressed by this.
And he would start off with kind of talking about films like The Matrix and John Carpenter’s They Live.
And sort of get his foot in the door that way and gradually kind of lead to don’t you feel like there are forces in the world screwing you over?
Haven’t you noticed that you work so hard, but your money never seems to add up and your health never gets better?
And then finally, around hour 10 or so, we get to it’s because lizard people control everything.
Say what you want about him.
He does have a type of charisma.
He does have a way to kind of reach people and make his ideas accessible to him.
The other thing that’s interesting about David Icke is some of his followers are straight up neo-Nazis who have said, oh, this is great.
You just call these people lizards.
And then you can say the kinds of things that we’ve always wanted to say in public.
And now we can finally do it.
And then he has other people who are on the far left and they’re saying, you know, it’s clear that Monsanto and corporate greed, this is all environmental devastation.
This is all the lizard people.
And those people will be in the same audience.
both kind of cheering on what he’s saying.
And David Icke has insisted that he’s not an anti-Semite, that he loves all people, including Jews, but that some of the people who present as Jews aren’t really people.
They’re actually reptilians.
And he has included in his publications the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
which is this very famous anti-Semitic hoax created in Russia.
And he said, well, this isn’t really written by the elders of Zion.
This is actually written by the reptilians.
But one interpretation of that, which actually Aaron Agulias from the podcast The Saucer Life noted this about people like David Icke, is it seems like he is trying to get the widest audience possible.
And and so he would still like to have neo-Nazis buying his books and coming to his shows.
And by including the protocols there, he can he can still have that.
And he can kind of cover his butt a little bit by saying, well, this is this isn’t really a Jewish conspiracy.
It’s a reptilian conspiracy.
But he could have just as easily said this was a hoax put out by the reptilians to make us hate Jews.
He didn’t do that.
He said it’s a real document.
He’s got something for everyone there, hasn’t he?
Yeah, so the best spin I can possibly put on him is pretty irresponsible.
And the worst is openly anti-Semitic.
Yeah.
I remember watching the Secret Rulers of the World documentary.
And that’s John Ronson’s book, like his first big blow-up book about that stuff.
You know, he’s following Ike around Canada and sort of like trying to get him to answer the question, are these really, are you really talking about the Jews?
Like, it’s pretty obvious you’re talking about the Jews.
But I found that fascinating.
But Ike got, I mean, I guess in my opinion, this is a statistics thing.
If you keep saying enough things, one of them is bound to come out to be true eventually.
But the one that he kept saying was that there was a secret cabal of child molesters.
And then when Prince Andrew, formerly, the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, when it came out with his relationship with the Epstein stuff, you know, Ike was like, I was right.
I was right.
So he’s been very excited about all of these.
revelations about that sort of stuff and and it is it’s frustrating to know that rich and powerful people do get together and collaborate on stuff but that doesn’t mean they’re secretly in charge right like it is it’s a it’s kind of a jump right well well they’re you know they’re
there are incredibly powerful billionaires in the world who have way more control over elections in the media than they ought to.
That’s a fact.
And some of these people are involved with the kind of stuff that was going on with Epstein.
But the more that I look into the Epstein revelations, and we’re getting a little bit off topic from lizard people, but it seems to me that this wasn’t that much of a secret.
It’s more that in the 1990s, we kind of had an attitude that…
If you’re wealthy, it’s okay for you to groom 15-year-old girls, right?
And then we got this kind of collective amnesia that that was our attitude.
And so in that collective amnesia has become this kind of –
sense of, you know, it’s this hideous secret that we’ve discovered, you know, and it proves all these conspiracy theories are true.
It’s hideous, but I think that’s the reason that we kind of chose to forget about it.
You know, and one kind of off the cuff remark Trump made at one point is, well, people don’t remember what it was like in the 90s.
Which is not a defense, right?
But I do think that kind of – I don’t think Epstein proves these conspiracy theories were right.
I think it more so it just demonstrates that we kind of changed the way that we talk about things that have always been horrible but that were once more or less kind of accepted.
Yeah.
And a lot of these people are from that when they were at their peak in the 90s and they’re aging out now, the stories that are coming out are across the board pretty crazy.
And yeah, I don’t I don’t want to say this is not an excuse.
It was a different time.
But, you know, every decade is a different time from the previous decade.
So I don’t know.
But that.
Anyway, that that aside, I, you know, I think he’s an interesting combination of charisma and mental illness and lucky timing, because if we didn’t live in the Internet age, you know, he would just be that guy who wrote those pamphlets, you know, you know, but we do.
He isn’t.
Although I don’t know what his footprints now.
I don’t I haven’t heard anything from him in a while.
Whereas Alex Jones, even with his show being canceled, is still out there, you know, so.
Yeah, as far as I know, David Icke is still writing books.
He’s still productive.
I think his audience has moved into kind of increasingly niche spots on the internet.
But I think if you go to like Rumble or something like that, you’ll still see a lot of people talking about David Icke’s latest books.
The other thing that’s interesting with Alex Jones is he initially said that David Icke was a turd in the punch bowl.
Those were his words.
That is sort of…
saying things that are so patently ridiculous that no one will believe a conspiracy theorist who’s hardworking like Alex Jones.
That’s before they found out about the frogs being turned gay, though.
But after a while, he just figured, you know what, I don’t really care.
He started having David Icke on his show and just figured, I could use the extra fans, too.
If you want to talk about extra dimensional aliens controlling the Illuminati, fine.
Content is content.
when you’re tackling this, we’ve got this century of lizard people, but in the bigger picture, there’s other historical lizard people from mythology that I would call, I think of it as big M mythology.
I don’t know how you deal with that in religious studies, but versus like current myths or, you know, evolving beliefs.
And then there’s also the cryptozoological lizard people like the Bishopville lizard, swamp lizard person.
So how do you do you treat those as a subset?
Are they completely separate or like how are you breaking that material?
Because they don’t seem exactly related.
Yeah, so you have mythology about humanoid lizard people who are often shapeshifters all over the world.
And so that is a big talking point for someone like David Icke, who will say, look, our ancestors knew about these things, right?
So the Naga in India comes up a lot.
Nagas are these kind of serpent people.
They often live underground or underwater, and they are shapeshifters.
And so we have Buddhist texts where if you wanted to go become a Buddhist monk, one of the questions they would ask you is, are you a human being?
And that was an actual part of the procedure.
You have to tell.
And if you ask them, well, how come I have to answer I’m a human being?
I say, well, one time somebody joined and they turned out to be a naga.
And we went into their cell while they were asleep and they had turned into this gigantic snake and we had to kick them out of the monastery.
It’s interesting, too, because in the story, the Naga is like crying that he can’t be a monk and has to leave.
And I’m like, why can’t you just let him be a monk, right?
He’d be cool.
And in China, when I was in China most recently with my wife, Natasha, we saw an image of Naga attending a sermon by the Buddha.
And he looks exactly like…
the drawings of reptilians that I see on sort of contemporary conspiracy theory websites.
And then you have a story that folklorists sometimes call the serpent woman and the holy man.
And we think this story probably originated somewhere in the Punjab, but we have versions of it in China, where we have an opera about a white snake woman.
It’s actually a snake who, through kind of intense Taoist practices, learns to shapeshift, is going to marry this young man.
And then this Buddhist monk says, you can’t marry her.
That’s a snake.
And there’s kind of different versions of the story.
But in one version of the story, the monk actually becomes the bad guy.
And it’s sort of like love conquers all.
If you want to marry a snake, you can marry a snake.
There’s a version of the story in ancient Greece where the philosopher Apollonius says that’s a Lamia.
That’s a shape-shifting serpent woman.
And then there’s a version of it in France and Europe where you have – it’s called like –
You’ll have to look it up later.
Joe was trying to remember Melusine, and for patrons, I’m going to drop in a mini-history of that fascinating monster of folklore and marketing.
But the Starbucks logo is actually a shape-shifting serpent woman.
She’s not a mermaid.
That’s why there’s two serpentine tails.
So there’s stories like this all over the place.
In fact, I was in Hawaii this summer, and just on a lark, we took a folklore tour, and I just asked…
Are there stories about reptile creatures?
And the woman giving a tour opens up her binder and shows me this picture of what looks again like something from these conspiracy sites.
And so we call them mo’o, and they’re lizards, and they can shapeshift.
And one of them had helped Kamehameha or some Hawaiian hero in the past.
So it was actually quite common.
And so what interpretation is, well, obviously they’re real, and that’s why everybody knows about them.
I think another is I could probably pick any animal that exists on all continents and say, are there any folklore about these animals being sentient or shape-shifting?
I would probably find that, yes, there are.
Humans are fairly creative creatures.
But it is interesting kind of collecting all the serpentine folklore from around the world.
But I’ll tell you, the trick is that they work at scale.
Boy, well, so you’ve spoken a little bit, Jo, about what you’re wanting to do with all this research.
You’re wanting to put it into a book.
But do you have any idea at this point where these stories and these legends are going and what this could potentially lead to in future?
Yeah, I mean, it could be that it sort of sputters out and we move on to something else.
I mean, if you look at, you know, the Shaver Mysteries and the Darrow, that was very, very big in the 50s.
Not too many people are still talking about…
darrow today so it could take that kind of turn um but i’m seeing on on you know social media a lot of people are now making uh ai videos of uh you know what the reptilians look like um i am hearing kind of weird podcasts with rumors of did you know the reptilians and the bigfoots are at war
And they’ve been fighting each other.
So I think there’s still lots of kind of further mutations that are going to take place in the reptilian folklore online.
Wow.
Amazing.
Which means good stuff for Monster Talk, maybe bad stuff for society.
Lots for us to talk about.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I should give a shout out to Natasha because when she was on and we talked about Tulpa, she also, I think if I’m not, I might be mistaken, but I think she said her favorite monster was the Naga.
So I believe that’s true.
I mean, you have to pick when you’re on the spotlights.
You got to say something.
What else is going on monster-wise in your life?
Because I know, I mean, monsters is only a tiny part of the world’s religions, but it’s one of my favorite parts.
Well, we could talk about the conference in the spring, or we could talk about the Penguin Book of Cults.
Tell us about that.
Let’s talk about the Penguin Book of Cults.
I’m sure I’ll be yakking about the conference more.
But yeah, what you got?
Yeah, so the Penguin Book of Cults, it’s my second reader that I put out with Penguin Classics.
They do this whole series, the Penguin Book of Vampires, the Penguin Book of Witches, and so forth.
I was a little anxious to do this because in my field, I try to kind of…
unpack the label of cult, right?
Not because I think that some groups are not doing really awful, abusive things, but because I think that the label cult has led to a lot of bad things and has become kind of a cudgel that people use against their enemies.
So I decided I was going to do the book.
I was going to call it The Penguin Book of Cults.
But I also wanted to kind of show how throughout history we have been scared of other people with weird religions.
So the first text is actually from the Roman Republic.
And they’re saying, you know, did you know the cult of Dionysus, they do these weird sex orgies and they’re corrupting the youth and they’re probably poisoning people.
And we’ve got to give a lot more power to the government to regulate religion, right?
And so that’s before Christianity.
And then I have texts where they’re describing Christians, you know, murdering babies.
And then I have texts with Christians burning heretics and so forth.
And then as we get into more modern times, I was able to find some original documents about what in my field we call the big five.
The big five are…
Let’s see if I can name them all.
People’s Temple, 1978.
The Branch Davidians, 1993.
The Order of the Solar Temple, 1994, 1995.
Aum Shinrikyo, 1995.
Heaven’s Gate, 1997.
The UFO guys got in there.
Yay.
That’s right.
So when you ask people to name a cult, they usually name one of those five.
And so it gives the impression that sort of the destiny of every cult is to commit mass suicide or to have some really violent episode.
Actually, those are all very rare kind of unique incidents.
Generally, if you start a cult, what’s going to happen is a few people will join and then it’ll kind of die out and no one will ever know it ever existed.
It’s
Statistically, that’s what’s most likely to happen.
But those are the cases that people want to read about.
So I tried to get some new things.
So Texas State University actually has 10 linear feet of government documents from the Waco siege.
So I went through those and found some things that the public has never seen before, including this really chilling memo from an FBI…
a psychiatrist who says, you know, if we screw this up, a bunch of children are going to die and no one will ever forgive the FBI.
So I found things like that.
For Aum Shinrikyo, I actually was able to tap a colleague who reads Japanese and get some court documents from the sentencing hearing that describe this kind of…
weird idiosyncratic version of Buddhism that Aum Shinrikyo taught that said it’s actually compassionate for us to poison people on the Tokyo subway.
For the People’s Temple, I am…
co-workers on the journal with someone who lost her two sisters in Jonestown.
And so there is a document called The Death Tape, just called The Death Tape, that was the recording of the final moments of Jonestown.
And so we included that in the book and we annotated it.
And I consulted with Rebecca Moore on the annotation.
And for the audio book, they actually, I understand, they were able to get multiple actors to read it.
And it’s macabre stuff, but it’s worth listening to because these people do not appear to be mindless and brainwashed.
There’s actually a lot of debate about why are we going to do this?
I don’t want to do this.
Let’s do something different.
And I think that’s important because people get so dismissive when saying that anyone that they disagree with has simply been brainwashed and there’s nothing here to talk about.
This is topical.
You know how people say, you know, you drank the Kool-Aid and it’s really changed meaning.
I mean, it generally is inclined.
People think it means, you know, you’ve you’ve you’ve accepted the marketing.
You’ve joined the group, you know, and it’s like in a lot of people don’t.
I mean, obviously, we’re older.
I know I am.
A lot of people don’t even really remember the original case.
You know, I remember when it happened from watching it on TV unfolding and.
But I was at work in one of my jobs in the early 2000s, and I was in a meeting, and I said something to the effect of, you know, they’ve drank the Kool-Aid.
And one of my coworkers got very upset.
And took me aside and said, don’t ever say that in front of me again.
My parents died at Jonestown.
That was closer to the time as well.
Yeah, it was.
And, you know, it’s sad, but I was, even back then, I was pretty freaking skeptical.
And I went and fact-checked him.
He totally was telling the truth.
It’s like, you know, it’s just, you never know.
Anyway, that’s not really…
Super important.
But it is one of those things where we get desensitized over time to the significance of some of these events.
And, you know, they especially some of the big ones, they’ve got really lasting impact.
We should all stop saying that.
Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah.
It doesn’t mean what, I mean, language, if we had a language, I’m sure they could confirm it.
We have no control over that as a group.
We sort of make things mean whatever.
But yeah, it’s really not a great phrase.
Certainly over time, we lose that connection to what it originally meant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if you’re listening to this, it’s it’s it’s it’s not a cool thing to say.
For one thing, there was never any Kool-Aid.
Absolutely.
It was it was flavor aid.
They had to use the off brand.
But also people were not drinking it willingly.
And there are survivors.
This was not a suicide.
This was a murder suicide.
Exactly.
You know, the.
Some people drank it willingly, but only because they had been told you have moments until, you know, the CIA and mercenaries arrive here and kill all of us and torture your children.
Or they had just seen their children murdered.
Right.
And some people were reportedly injected with it.
Yes.
They didn’t drink it at all.
So it is.
And as you point out, people, you know, people who were at Jonestown are still alive today.
you know, I just heard an interview with one of Jim Jones’s sons.
So it wasn’t that long ago.
So it’s, you know, I think most people just don’t really know much about Jonestown, but it’s a, it’s a slogan that we should try to get out of our, out of our.
Yeah.
Doesn’t work like that though.
But I think we’re gonna have to bring you back on Joe to talk about this book.
Has it come out?
Yeah, it came out in October.
So, you know, I can’t normally say this about my books, but I think you can get this anywhere books are sold because it’s from.
And it’s also on audible.com or wherever you get your audio books.
That’s really cool.
Really important book.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Karen’s not wrong.
We probably should have you back soon because you’ve done so many cool things and are interested in so many topics that completely overlap here.
So, yeah, I want to hear more about this book.
Yeah.
And we should talk more about the conference.
Maybe you and Natasha come on together and we’ll talk about the conference sometime in the time.
Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’d be a lot of fun.
So.
Jo, thank you so much for coming back to talk to us.
Thank you.
Always good to talk to you.
We’ll put links to your books in the show notes.
And I have to say, I’m super hopeful you find a really good venue for your Lizardman research stuff because it’s so fascinating.
And you’ve gone further than me.
And I love being able to chat with you about stuff that I don’t have to.
You can explain stuff to me.
It’s a real release of the cognitive load.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, well, if there’s any editors out there who are looking for an exciting conspiracy theory book, please hit me up.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Let’s wind up.
Say good night to you, Joe.
Thank you so much for coming back.
Get my regards to Natasha.
Happy holidays.
Yes, please do.
Thanks so much.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Joe Laycock of Texas State University talking about his research into lizard people.
Check out the show notes for links to Joe’s books and lots of stuff that we talked about in today’s discussion.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete’s Dealing Monkeys.
Here’s wishing you a happy new year and a very sincere wish that next year will be better.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
When you told me…
Hold on a second.
Good for the podcast there.
There’s something for the patrons.
Monster.
With 70% more phlegm.

The post S05E12 The Secret History of Lizard People appeared first on MonsterTalk.

It took a minute but I finally managed to read one of these “live” to my own family for the holidays.

This is such an evocative story that I wanted to add a little art to the mix. I really want to put together a slow but detailed “animated gif” that goes through the cycles of the print as described in the tale – and maybe I’ll get around to that at some point. But for now here is some really nice artwork that captures the ideas of the tale in gothic majesty.

This piece is by Catherine Gogerty. (link to her work)

In 1986, the BBC ran a series featuring Robert Powell reading ghost stories. The episode featuring The Mezzotint included creepy illustrations such as this:

I’ve been unable to track that series down, but the illustration is quite chilling.

Artist Richard Svensson produced this remarkable and evocative work – which is available in his self-published collection of M. R. James inspired images. Some previews from that set look really great over at DeviantArt.

Finally – UK artist Rich Johnson has a lovely set of James inspired images that generally aspire to haunt without beating you over the head with explicitness.

You can get most of the BBC’s adaptations of these works via DVD (affiliate link)

This is a close approximation of the full transcript from my notes.
——————–
It’s the thirteenth year of doing our GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS specials here on MonsterTalk.  I’ve been meaning to talk to you folk about procrastination for some time.

Thirteen years of MEANING to do this tradition in real life.  FINALLY – I actually got my kids together and sat down by the christmas tree in front of the fireplace and read this year’s selection to a live audience.

So normally when the audio quality is iffy I feel the need to say something apologetic about it but I’m so unabashedly delighted that I finally got my family to join me in my madness that I’ve no regrets about the sound design. 

One thing that absolutely delighted me was that there are points in the story where the author is making a joke in the driest British style, and my kids got the joke.  I honestly didn’t know if this humor would translate for the kids these days but it did and I couldn’t have been more delighted. 

One tiny additional annotation for this episode. This story was published in 1904 and the author makes many references to lightly fictionalized locations and institutions. These would have been very clear nods to his original audience and would have doubtless have induced giggles of recognition. At one point in the story the narrator speaks of a PHASMATOLOGICAL SOCIETY – this was a real group that met at Oxford from 1879 to 1885 and is considered by some to be the first formally organized psychical research group. 

I’m BLAKE SMITH and you’re listening to MonsterTalk… 

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medieval scholar, manuscript expert, and long-serving Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and later Eton College. Although his professional life was academic, he is now best remembered as the most influential writer of English ghost stories of the early 20th century.

James did not initially write for publication. His ghost stories were first composed to be read aloud to a small circle of friends at King’s College as part of informal Christmas Eve gatherings of the Chit-Chat Club. Only after their enthusiastic reception did he begin publishing them, starting with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904. That origin — stories designed to be heard, in company, during Christmas — strongly shaped their tone, pacing, and precision.

The BBC’s association with M. R. James began in 1968, with the television adaptation of “Whistle and I’ll Come to You,” directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Michael Hordern. 1971 saw “A Ghost Story for Christmas” officially launched as a strand with The Stalls of Barchester. Its success established what became the long-running “A Ghost Story for Christmas” tradition.

From the early 1970s through the late 1970s, the BBC produced a definitive series of James adaptations. While the strand went on hiatus for many years, it was recently revived to great acclaim, including Mark Gatiss’s 2021 adaptation of ‘The Mezzotint.’ Typically broadcast on Christmas Eve or Christmas night, these productions have emphasized restraint, implication, and atmosphere over spectacle, closely aligning with James’s own stated rules for effective supernatural fiction.

A mezzotint is a printmaking technique developed in the 17th century, prized for its ability to produce deep blacks and subtle gradations of light and shadow. Unlike line engraving, mezzotints excel at tonal richness, making them especially popular for portraits, reproductions of oil paintings, and dramatic nocturnal scenes.

By the time James wrote “The Mezzotint” (published in 1904), the art form was already in decline. Photographic reproduction had largely replaced mezzotints for commercial purposes by the mid-to-late 19th century. Original mezzotints were still encountered — framed in libraries, college rooms, and inherited collections — but they were increasingly old-fashioned objects, associated with the late Georgian and early Victorian past.

This aligns closely with James’s own advice that the most effective ghost stories are set about thirty years before the present: close enough to feel familiar, but distant enough to allow forgotten practices, obsolete technologies, and inherited objects to carry unease. In “The Mezzotint,” the print itself functions as a relic — an artifact from a slightly earlier world, preserved but no longer fully understood — which makes it an ideal vessel for slow, creeping horror.

Some time ago I believe I had the pleasure of telling you the story of an adventure which happened to a friend of mine by the name of Dennistoun, during his pursuit of objects of art for the museum at Cambridge.

He did not publish his experiences very widely upon his return to England; but they could not fail to become known to a good many of his friends, and among others to the gentleman who at that time presided over an art museum at another University. It was to be expected that the story should make a considerable impression on the mind of a man whose vocation lay in lines similar to Dennistoun’s, and that he should be eager to catch at any explanation of the matter which tended to make it seem improbable that he should ever be called upon to deal with so agitating an emergency. It was, indeed, somewhat consoling to him to reflect that he was not expected to acquire ancient MSS. for his institution; that was the business of the Shelburnian Library. The authorities of that might, if they pleased, ransack obscure corners of the Continent for such matters. He was glad to be obliged at the moment to confine his attention to enlarging the already unsurpassed collection of English topographical drawings and engravings possessed by his museum. Yet, as it turned out, even a department so homely and familiar as this may have its dark corners, and to one of these Mr. Williams was unexpectedly introduced.

Those who have taken even the most limited interest in the acquisition of topographical pictures are aware that there is one London dealer whose aid is indispensable to their researches. Mr. J. W. Britnell publishes at short intervals very admirable catalogues of a large and constantly changing stock of engravings, plans, and old sketches of mansions, churches, and towns in England and Wales. These catalogues were, of course, the ABC of his subject to Mr. Williams: but as his museum already contained an enormous accumulation of topographical pictures, he was a regular, rather than a copious, buyer; and he rather looked to Mr. Britnell to fill up gaps in the rank and file of his collection than to supply him with rarities.

Now, in February of last year there appeared upon Mr. Williams’s desk at the museum a catalogue from Mr. Britnell’s emporium, and accompanying it was a typewritten communication from the dealer himself. This latter ran as follows:

Dear Sir,—

We beg to call your attention to No. 978 in our accompanying catalogue, which we shall be glad to send on approval.

Yours faithfully,

J. W. Britnell.

To turn to No. 978 in the accompanying catalogue was with Mr. Williams (as he observed to himself) the work of a moment, and in the place indicated he found the following entry:

“978.—Unknown. Interesting mezzotint: View of a manor-house, early part of the century. 15 by 10 inches; black frame. £2 2s.“

It was not specially exciting, and the price seemed high. However, as Mr. Britnell, who knew his business and his customer, seemed to set store by it, Mr. Williams wrote a postcard asking for the article to be sent on approval, along with some other engravings and sketches which appeared in the same catalogue. And so he passed without much excitement of anticipation to the ordinary labours of the day.

A parcel of any kind always arrives a day later than you expect it, and that of Mr. Britnell proved, as I believe the right phrase goes, no exception to the rule. It was delivered at the museum by the afternoon post of Saturday, after Mr. Williams had left his work, and it was accordingly brought round to his rooms in college by the attendant, in order that he might not have to wait over Sunday before looking through it and returning such of the contents as he did not propose to keep. And here he found it when he came in to tea, with a friend.

The only item with which I am concerned was the rather large, black-framed mezzotint of which I have already quoted the short description given in Mr. Britnell’s catalogue. Some more details of it will have to be given, though I cannot hope to put before you the look of the picture as clearly as it is present to my own eye. Very nearly the exact duplicate of it may be seen in a good many old inn parlours, or in the passages of undisturbed country mansions at the present moment. It was a rather indifferent mezzotint, and an indifferent mezzotint is, perhaps, the worst form of engraving known. It presented a full-face view of a not very large manor-house of the last century, with three rows of plain sashed windows with rusticated masonry about them, a parapet with balls or vases at the angles, and a small portico in the centre. On either side were trees, and in front a considerable expanse of lawn. The legend “A. W. F. sculpsit” was engraved on the narrow margin; and there was no further inscription. The whole thing gave the impression that it was the work of an amateur. What in the world Mr. Britnell could mean by affixing the price of £2 2s. to such an object was more than Mr. Williams could imagine. He turned it over with a good deal of contempt; upon the back was a paper label, the left-hand half of which had been torn off. All that remained were the ends of two lines of writing: the first had the letters—ngley Hall; the second,—ssex.

It would, perhaps, be just worth while to identify the place represented, which he could easily do with the help of a gazetteer, and then he would send it back to Mr. Britnell, with some remarks reflecting upon the judgment of that gentleman.

He lighted the candles, for it was now dark, made the tea, and supplied the friend with whom he had been playing golf (for I believe the authorities of the University I write of indulge in that pursuit by way of relaxation); and tea was taken to the accompaniment of a discussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves, but which the conscientious writer has no right to inflict upon any non-golfing persons.

The conclusion arrived at was that certain strokes might have been better, and that in certain emergencies neither player had experienced that amount of luck which a human being has a right to expect. It was now that the friend—let us call him Professor Binks—took up the framed engraving, and said;

“What’s this place, Williams?”

“Just what I am going to try to find out,” said Williams, going to the shelf for a gazetteer. “Look at the back. Somethingley Hall, either in Sussex or Essex. Half the name’s gone, you see. You don’t happen to know it, I suppose?”

“It’s from that man Britnell, I suppose, isn’t it?” said Binks. “Is it for the museum?”

“Well, I think I should buy it if the price was five shillings,” said Williams; “but for some unearthly reason he wants two guineas for it. I can’t conceive why. It’s a wretched engraving, and there aren’t even any figures to give it life.”

“It’s not worth two guineas, I should think,” said Binks; “but I don’t think it’s so badly done. The moonlight seems rather good to me; and I should have thought there were figures, or at least a figure, just on the edge in front.”

“Let’s look,” said Williams. “Well, it’s true the light is rather cleverly given. Where’s your figure? Oh yes! Just the head, in the very front of the picture.”

And indeed there was—hardly more than a black blot on the extreme edge of the engraving—the head of a man or woman, a good deal muffled up, the back turned to the spectator, and looking towards the house.

Williams had not noticed it before.

“Still,” he said, “though it’s a cleverer thing than I thought, I can’t spend two guineas of museum money on a picture of a place I don’t know.”

Professor Binks had his work to do, and soon went; and very nearly up to Hall time Williams was engaged in a vain attempt to identify the subject of his picture. “If the vowel before the ng had only been left, it would have been easy enough,” he thought; “but as it is, the name may be anything from Guestingley to Langley, and there are many more names ending like this than I thought; and this rotten book has no index of terminations.”

Hall in Mr. Williams’s college was at seven. It need not be dwelt upon; the less so as he met there colleagues who had been playing golf during the afternoon, and words with which we have no concern were freely bandied across the table—merely golfing words, I would hasten to explain.

I suppose an hour or more to have been spent in what is called common-room after dinner. Later in the evening some few retired to Williams’s rooms, and I have little doubt that whist was played and tobacco smoked. During a lull in these operations Williams picked up the mezzotint from the table without looking at it, and handed it to a person mildly interested in art, telling him where it had come from, and the other particulars which we already know.

The gentleman took it carelessly, looked at it, then said, in a tone of some interest:

“It’s really a very good piece of work, Williams; it has quite a feeling of the romantic period. The light is admirably managed, it seems to me, and the figure, though it’s rather too grotesque, is somehow very impressive.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Williams, who was just then busy giving whisky-and-soda to others of the company, and was unable to come across the room to look at the view again.

It was by this time rather late in the evening, and the visitors were on the move. After they went Williams was obliged to write a letter or two and clear up some odd bits of work. At last, some time past midnight, he was disposed to turn in, and he put out his lamp after lighting his bedroom candle. The picture lay face upwards on the table where the last man who looked at it had put it, and it caught his eye as he turned the lamp down. What he saw made him very neatly drop the candle on the floor, and he declares now that if he had been left in the dark at that moment he would have had a fit. But, as that did not happen, he was able to put down the light on the table and take a good look at the picture. It was indubitable—rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o’clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all-fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.

I do not know what is the ideal course to pursue in a situation of this kind. I can only tell you what Mr. Williams did. He took the picture by one corner and carried it across the passage to a second set of rooms which he possessed. There he locked it up in a drawer, sported the doors of both sets of rooms, and retired to bed; but first he wrote out and signed an account of the extraordinary change which the picture had undergone since it had come into his possession.

Sleep visited him rather late; but it was consoling to reflect that the behaviour of the picture did not depend upon his own unsupported testimony. Evidently the man who had looked at it the night before had seen something of the same kind as he had, otherwise he might have been tempted to think that something gravely wrong was happening either to his eyes or his mind. This possibility being fortunately precluded, two matters awaited him on the morrow. He must take stock of the picture very carefully, and call in a witness for the purpose, and he must make a determined effort to ascertain what house it was that was represented. He would therefore ask his neighbour Nisbet to breakfast with him, and he would subsequently spend a morning over the gazetteer.

Nisbet was disengaged, and arrived about 9.30. His host was not quite dressed, I am sorry to say, even at this late hour. During breakfast nothing was said about the mezzotint by Williams, save that he had a picture on which he wished for Nisbet’s opinion. But those who are familiar with University life can picture for themselves the wide and delightful range of subjects over which the conversation of two Fellows of Canterbury College is likely to extend during a Sunday morning breakfast. Hardly a topic was left unchallenged, from golf to lawn-tennis. Yet I am bound to say that Williams was rather distraught; for his interest naturally centred in that very strange picture which was now reposing, face downwards, in the drawer in the room opposite.

The morning pipe was at last lighted, and the moment had arrived for which he looked. With very considerable—almost tremulous—excitement, he ran across, unlocked the drawer, and, extracting the picture—still face downwards—ran back, and put it into Nisbet’s hands.

“Now,” he said, “Nisbet, I want you to tell me exactly what you see in that picture. Describe it, if you don’t mind, rather minutely. I’ll tell you why afterwards.”

“Well,” said Nisbet, “I have here a view of a country-house—English, I presume—by moonlight.”

“Moonlight? You’re sure of that?”

“Certainly. The moon appears to be on the wane, if you wish for details, and there are clouds in the sky.”

“All right. Go on. I’ll swear,” added Williams in an aside, “there was no moon when I saw it first.”

“Well, there’s not much more to be said,” Nisbet continued. “The house has one—two—three rows of windows, five in each row, except at the bottom; where there’s a porch instead of the middle one, and——”

“But what about figures?” said Williams, with marked interest.

“There aren’t any,” said Nisbet; “but——”

“What! No figure on the grass in front?”

“Not a thing.”

“You’ll swear to that?”

“Certainly I will. But there’s just one other thing.”

“What?”

“Why, one of the windows on the ground-floor—left of the door—is open.”

“Is it really? My goodness! he must have got in,” said Williams, with great excitement; and he hurried to the back of the sofa on which Nisbet was sitting, and, catching the picture from him, verified the matter for himself.

It was quite true. There was no figure, and there was the open window. Williams, after a moment of speechless surprise, went to the writing-table and scribbled for a short time. Then he brought two papers to Nisbet, and asked him first to sign one—it was his own description of the picture, which you have just heard—and then to read the other which was Williams’s statement written the night before.

“What can it all mean?” said Nisbet.

“Exactly,” said Williams. “Well, one thing I must do—or three things, now I think of it. I must find out from Garwood”—this was his last night’s visitor—”what he saw, and then I must get the thing photographed before it goes further, and then I must find out what the place is.”

“I can do the photographing myself,” said Nisbet, “and I will. But, you know, it looks very much as if we were assisting at the working out of a tragedy somewhere. The question is, Has it happened already, or is it going to come off? You must find out what the place is. Yes,” he said, looking at the picture again, “I expect you’re right: he has got in. And if I don’t mistake there’ll be the devil to pay in one of the rooms upstairs.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Williams: “I’ll take the picture across to old Green” (this was the senior Fellow of the College, who had been Bursar for many years). “It’s quite likely he’ll know it. We have property in Essex and Sussex, and he must have been over the two counties a lot in his time.”

“Quite likely he will,” said Nisbet; “but just let me take my photograph first. But look here, I rather think Green isn’t up to-day. He wasn’t in Hall last night, and I think I heard him say he was going down for the Sunday.”

“That’s true, too,” said Williams; “I know he’s gone to Brighton. Well, if you’ll photograph it now, I’ll go across to Garwood and get his statement, and you keep an eye on it while I’m gone. I’m beginning to think two guineas is not a very exorbitant price for it now.”

In a short time he had returned, and brought Mr. Garwood with him. Garwood’s statement was to the effect that the figure, when he had seen it, was clear of the edge of the picture, but had not got far across the lawn. He remembered a white mark on the back of its drapery, but could not have been sure it was a cross. A document to this effect was then drawn up and signed, and Nisbet proceeded to photograph the picture.

“Now what do you mean to do?” he said. “Are you going to sit and watch it all day?”

“Well, no, I think not,” said Williams. “I rather imagine we’re meant to see the whole thing. You see, between the time I saw it last night and this morning there was time for lots of things to happen, but the creature only got into the house. It could easily have got through its business in the time and gone to its own place again; but the fact of the window being open, I think, must mean that it’s in there now. So I feel quite easy about leaving it. And, besides, I have a kind of idea that it wouldn’t change much, if at all, in the daytime. We might go out for a walk this afternoon, and come in to tea, or whenever it gets dark. I shall leave it out on the table here, and sport the door. My skip can get in, but no one else.”

The three agreed that this would be a good plan; and, further, that if they spent the afternoon together they would be less likely to talk about the business to other people; for any rumour of such a transaction as was going on would bring the whole of the Phasmatological Society about their ears.

We may give them a respite until five o’clock.

At or near that hour the three were entering Williams’s staircase. They were at first slightly annoyed to see that the door of his rooms was unspotted; but in a moment it was remembered that on Sunday the skips came for orders an hour or so earlier than on week-days. However, a surprise was awaiting them. The first thing they saw was the picture leaning up against a pile of books on the table, as it had been left, and the next thing was Williams’s skip, seated on a chair opposite, gazing at it with undisguised horror. How was this? Mr. Filcher (the name is not my own invention) was a servant of considerable standing, and set the standard of etiquette to all his own college and to several neighbouring ones, and nothing could be more alien to his practice than to be found sitting on his master’s chair, or appearing to take any particular notice of his master’s furniture or pictures. Indeed, he seemed to feel this himself. He started violently when the three men came into the room, and got up with a marked effort. Then he said:

“I ask your pardon, sir, for taking such a freedom as to set down.”

“Not at all, Robert,” interposed Mr. Williams. “I was meaning to ask you some time what you thought of that picture.”

“Well, sir, of course I don’t set up my opinion again yours, but it ain’t the pictur I should ‘ang where my little girl could see it, sir.”

“Wouldn’t you, Robert? Why not?”

“No, sir. Why, the pore child, I recollect once she see a Door Bible, with pictures not ‘alf what that is, and we ‘ad to set up with her three or four nights afterwards, if you’ll believe me; and if she was to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying off the pore baby, she would be in a taking. You know ‘ow it is with children; ‘ow nervish they git with a little thing and all. But what I should say, it don’t seem a right pictur to be laying about, sir, not where anyone that’s liable to be startled could come on it. Should you be wanting anything this evening, sir? Thank you, sir.”

With these words the excellent man went to continue the round of his masters, and you may be sure the gentlemen whom he left lost no time in gathering round the engraving. There was the house, as before, under the waning moon and the drifting clouds. The window that had been open was shut, and the figure was once more on the lawn: but not this time crawling cautiously on hands and knees. Now it was erect and stepping swiftly, with long strides, towards the front of the picture. The moon was behind it, and the black drapery hung down over its face so that only hints of that could be seen, and what was visible made the spectators profoundly thankful that they could see no more than a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs. The head was bent down, and the arms were tightly clasped over an object which could be dimly seen and identified as a child, whether dead or living it was not possible to say. The legs of the appearance alone could be plainly discerned, and they were horribly thin.

From five to seven the three companions sat and watched the picture by turns. But it never changed. They agreed at last that it would be safe to leave it, and that they would return after Hall and await further developments.

When they assembled again, at the earliest possible moment, the engraving was there, but the figure was gone, and the house was quiet under the moonbeams. There was nothing for it but to spend the evening over gazetteers and guide-books. Williams was the lucky one at last, and perhaps he deserved it. At 11.30 p.m. he read from Murray’s Guide to Essex the following lines:

“16½ miles, Anningley. The church has been an interesting building of Norman date, but was extensively classicized in the last century. It contains the tombs of the family of Francis, whose mansion, Anningley Hall, a solid Queen Anne house, stands immediately beyond the churchyard in a park of about 80 acres. The family is now extinct, the last heir having disappeared mysteriously in infancy in the year 1802. The father, Mr. Arthur Francis, was locally known as a talented amateur engraver in mezzotint. After his son’s disappearance he lived in complete retirement at the Hall, and was found dead in his studio on the third anniversary of the disaster, having just completed an engraving of the house, impressions of which are of considerable rarity.”

This looked like business, and, indeed, Mr. Green on his return at once identified the house as Anningley Hall.

“Is there any kind of explanation of the figure, Green?” was the question which Williams naturally asked.

“I don’t know, I’m sure, Williams. What used to be said in the place when I first knew it, which was before I came up here, was just this: old Francis was always very much down on these poaching fellows, and whenever he got a chance he used to get a man whom he suspected of it turned off the estate, and by degrees he got rid of them all but one. Squires could do a lot of things then that they daren’t think of now. Well, this man that was left was what you find pretty often in that country—the last remains of a very old family. I believe they were Lords of the Manor at one time. I recollect just the same thing in my own parish.”

“What, like the man in Tess of the D’Urbervilles?” Williams put in.

“Yes, I dare say; it’s not a book I could ever read myself. But this fellow could show a row of tombs in the church there that belonged to his ancestors, and all that went to sour him a bit; but Francis, they said, could never get at him—he always kept just on the right side of the law—until one night the keepers found him at it in a wood right at the end of the estate. I could show you the place now; it marches with some land that used to belong to an uncle of mine. And you can imagine there was a row; and this man Gawdy (that was the name, to be sure—Gawdy; I thought I should get it—Gawdy), he was unlucky enough, poor chap! to shoot a keeper. Well, that was what Francis wanted, and grand juries—you know what they would have been then—and poor Gawdy was strung up in double-quick time; and I’ve been shown the place he was buried in, on the north side of the church—you know the way in that part of the world: anyone that’s been hanged or made away with themselves, they bury them that side. And the idea was that some friend of Gawdy’s—not a relation, because he had none, poor devil! he was the last of his line: land of spes ultima gentis—must have planned to get hold of Francis’s boy and put an end to his line, too. I don’t know—it’s rather an out-of-the-way thing for an Essex poacher to think of—but, you know, I should say now it looks more as if old Gawdy had managed the job himself. Booh! I hate to think of it! have some whisky, Williams!”

The facts were communicated by Williams to Dennistoun, and by him to a mixed company, of which I was one, and the Sadducean Professor of Ophiology another. I am sorry to say that the latter, when asked what he thought of it, only remarked: “Oh, those Bridgeford people will say anything”—a sentiment which met with the reception it deserved.

I have only to add that the picture is now in the Ashleian Museum; that it has been treated with a view to discovering whether sympathetic ink has been used in it, but without effect; that Mr. Britnell knew nothing of it save that he was sure it was uncommon; and that, though carefully watched, it has never been known to change again.

The post Christmas Ghost Story #13 – The Mezzotint appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake and Karen visit again with Colorado author of paranormal and true crime, Richard Estep.

Richard’s Books discussed in this episode:

Ghostly Encounters

The Horrors of Fox Hollow Farm

Mothman: Sightings and Investigations of the Iconic Flying Cryptid

Help is on the Way (pre-order for Feb 2026 Richard’s memoir of being a paramedic)

Monsters: Myths, Legends and Real Encounters(pre-order March 2026)

Additional Links:

The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts (affiliate)

The Haunting of Borley Rectory: The Story of a Ghost Story by Sean O’Connor (affiliate)

The World’s Greatest Ghosts book that Karen remembered from her youth

BBC’s 2025 Ghost Story for Christmas

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This week, we’re sharing an interview with Karen and Matt’s fellow Coloradan, paranormal author and investigator Richard Estep.
When he’s not saving people in his work as a paramedic, he spends his time researching the paranormal, going on investigations, working as a TV presenter, and clearly also spending a lot of time in front of a keyboard.
My apologies for the quality of my voice in this interview.
I was struggling through this one with yet another round of COVID, but I’m feeling better already thanks to good meds, lots of rest, and my family helping out with all the chores.
So thanks for the kind well wishes on social media.
Karen and my wife both passed those along, and I really do appreciate them.
Okay, let’s hop into the Monster Talk.
Well, golly, I’m excited to welcome back Richard Estep.
So we’re here today to talk about ghostly encounters, terrifyingly true hauntings.
And wow, you’ve crammed a lot of haunted places in here.
How did you, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you pick these cases?
When I was a kid, I’m a child of the 70s, Blake, and I used to get for Christmas the most wonderful treasury books.
Are those a thing here in the States or in Australia?
It would be like I had the Hamelin Book of Hauntings, for example, by Daniel Farson.
And these were the kind of books you would get on Christmas morning, and there would be just enough in them about different ghosts and hauntings and legends and so forth that it would entice you to go read a full-length book on the subject, hopefully.
And so when Visible Inc. asked me what I’d wanted to do next, I said that’s what I would like to do.
I’d like to get my take on some of the classic cases, maybe look at the updates, you know, and this is hopefully the kind of book I would like to have gotten when I was eight years old one Christmas.
Well, I think we had a series like that when I was growing up in Australia, not by the same name, but it was put out by all places target.
had a series in the world’s greatest ghost stories, world’s various different topics of kind of spooky and strange phenomena.
But, yeah, so we had something like that.
But, yeah, I think we wanted to bring you on the show because you have published a number of books over the past couple of months, and I seem to be getting emails from your publishers.
every other month saying, oh, do you want to talk to Richard about this book or this book?
So we thought we’d touch upon a couple of them.
And so Blake has introduced us to the Ghostly Encounters book.
And, yeah, you talk about some of our all-time favourite stories like Bally Rectory, the Enfield Polk Geist, and Jeff the Talking Mongoose.
So we wanted to talk a little bit about these stories that have been around for so long and why they have…
such staying power and how they continue to capture people’s imaginations.
Oh, yeah, and I have a bone to pick with you, Stolzno, because you made it to Borley before I did.
I’m an Englishman who lived there half my life, the quintessential English ghost story, and you made it there.
I thought you had been there, and I get people coming to me all the time and saying, have you been to Uluru or have you been to this place in Australia?
No, I haven’t.
I think that’s what happens.
You tend to move to another country and see more of that.
So I’ve seen it.
Yeah, that’s fair.
I mean, there’s nothing – I know there’s nothing to see now.
It’s the church, right?
But it’s just – I’ve been to Essex.
I just have never made it as far as Borley.
But that story is I think arguably the one that most influenced me as a kid growing up because it had everything, at least at face value, right?
It had the Phantom Nun and the Haunted Manor House.
It’s the archetypal haunted house, isn’t it?
And then, of course, the kind of – I call it the James Dean ending, you know?
It died young, consumed, so no one can ever go back and disprove it, although some researchers have done a great job of digging into the ashes, as it were, and challenging some of the claims.
So how do you approach these stories then when the place is no longer there or it’s inaccessible?
So what to you still feels unexplored about these places?
I feel like Borley is essentially done to death now.
And the only reason, honestly, that I put Borley in this book was that it was king of my bucket list.
It influenced me so much growing up.
And people were so pro-Borley and so pro-Harry Price for the longest time, at least in Britain.
And it was only later on that researchers started to get a little bit more skeptical and evaluate some of the human factors involved.
And, you know, now some of the truth has has come out.
And so I feel like even so, Borley has been, I would say, 80 percent debunked.
And yet you look at the fact that there was still legends of hauntings surrounding the rectory before the Foysters moved in, while the Bull family was in residence, before Harry Price, the showman, you know, ever got in there.
But I think the book that really puts the best nail in that coffin, as it were, is Sean O’Connor’s book, The Haunting of Bully Rectory, which came out in 2023.
And that book is not kind to some of the parties involved, I would say.
Yeah, and I think a lot of the stories are coming from the church as well.
I mean, we could go into this further, but it’s funny you should say that it’s been done to death because I just wrote something about it recently.
And I think I’ve uncovered some new bits and pieces, but I think we’ll be talking about this in another show soon.
It’s tricky, isn’t it?
Because, I mean, like the classic sceptical thing to say is, well, look.
You know, there’s some interesting stories, but then we caught someone cheating or tricking or hoaxing, and therefore everything is suspect, right?
So it’s like one bad apple destroys the whole pie, or it seems to.
And, you know, I guess that’s not really fair because I think when we’re doing our own investigations, one of the things we’ve learned is, you know, try not to lump everything together into a giant thing and call it a haunting.
You know, try to figure out what the individual phenomena are that are being reported and treat them separately and investigate them separately.
Absolutely.
And I kept coming back to the fact that, again, you know, the rectory was reputed to be haunted long before it was on any kind of national stage, let alone the international stage.
So how much credence you put in those stories varies with the individual, I think.
But I still think there is a kernel of something there long before the main show began.
Oh, a kernel and a nine.
This is…
It was Harry Price in the library with the candlestick.
That would be the best game of Clue, Haunted House Clue, right?
Yeah, how’s that not been done?
I don’t know.
That’s actually a good question.
So just cut that out.
We’re going to be rich.
Well, I guess, Richard, I’ll continue.
How do you manage to visit so many sites?
And what does that process look like?
I’ve discussed this with you a little bit.
just in personal correspondence, but how do you do things like planning and networking with property owners and just dealing with research and investigation?
And do you tend to choose places to visit yourself or do they choose you?
Do you have people approaching you to come and visit their haunted house?
I’m usually wary when someone approaches me, honestly, because we already introduced that bias if they have something to gain by the place being haunted.
Not that I would ever, you know, the idea that you might declare somewhere officially haunted is kind of silly to me or certify or whatever.
But to give you a very recent example, I just got back from California and the Poltergeist House, you know, from Spielberg’s movie, was recently, I believe August, was opened up as an Airbnb.
And so I know we can just name names here, right?
So Ghost Adventures had done an episode there.
Yeah.
and shockingly declared it to be haunted.
And so I did not find anything on that episode remotely credible at all.
But I am that kid, again, that grew up with the movie Poltergeist.
It came out in 82, which, you know, I was 9, 10 years old in 1982.
movie scared the pants off of me.
So purely for the opportunity to sleep in that house, to live in that house, to be in the kid’s bedroom, you know, with the clown doll, I outright rented the place, which normally when I’m writing a book project, and I do not have a book project in the works yet for that house, but normally when I have a book project, I try and avoid money changing hands at all if possible.
It’s not that I’m cheap.
It’s simply that I don’t want there to be the accusation, you know,
I’ve preached for many years that when somebody is getting paid, there is, by definition, a vested interest and a reason to be skeptical, you know?
But in the case of that place, I did take the opportunity to visit, to not just live in that house, but also to go visit the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
That has sent me down the rabbit hole of…
Rudolph Valentino’s ghost and his haunted property which is up in the Hollywood Hills and it turns out neighbors the Manson family it’s in Cielo Drive in that same canyon so what’s weird is these books kind of they snowball and I’ll go do some research and literally they won’t surface again for three or four years and then they will fit into a future project if that makes any sense
And since you’re a local, I wanted to ask you about the melting pot.
Have you ever been there, the fondue place?
I think it’s in Luton.
I have a point.
There’s a method to my madness here.
I don’t know if you’ve been there, Richard, but they state out and out that they are haunted.
There’s something incredible that happens when people share fondue.
My name is Kevin Sampron, and I’m the president of Spirit Paranormal Investigations, and we find the melting pot to be one of the most actively haunted buildings in the state of Colorado.
Okay.
I mean, I’ve been once, I think, yeah, for fondue quite a few years ago, and I’d heard of their reputation.
I know some events have happened there, but I don’t know any further than that.
Can you enlighten us?
Well, I’d heard that there wasn’t quite as much activity lately, that there’d been a real dip.
Yeah, haunted cheese.
I’m not too sure about the claims.
All I know is that they reach out to people and people that I know and have said, oh, we’re haunted, come and investigate us.
Wow.
I think that’s fine, actually, as long as there’s not an expectation that you’ll find something or else.
With The Poltergeist House, there was no expectation of that at all.
And so I’m not selling a TV show where I have to find something, you know?
And so exactly one thing happened that was odd in all that time.
The rest of it was just a cool experience to be in, you know, Hollywood’s iconic…
haunted house uh and i was just kicking myself my inner 10 year old was just giddy with glee being at that house haunted um other than the fact that my bedroom door opened itself um in the night um there there was really nothing beyond that you know how that goes right one uh one one swallow does not make a summer as the old saying goes so um i wasn’t able to debunk it
But I also don’t see why the house would be haunted.
There’s been exactly one death in it.
Well, was the swimming pool scene with the real bodies filmed on site or was that on a lot?
So that’s a great question.
And elements were filmed in multiple places because a lot of what looks like the house was in fact recreated in the studios, you know.
But they did a whole bunch of that stuff there.
They sent the whole street to Hawaii for a week while they blow up their street.
Wow.
If you look at the end of the movie, you know, where literally the gas mains are exploding, fire hydrants going off, coffins coming out of the ground.
Spielberg sent the entire street to Hawaii for a week and said, don’t worry about what we’re going to do.
We’ll clean everything up by the time you get back.
Have a nice vacation.
Yeah, that neighborhood is amazing.
And, you know, in many ways, it has not changed all that much.
I am enough of a child that they have a remote control.
You know, that scene at the beginning of the movie where the guys are watching a football game and the neighbor.
Yeah, the neighbor is watching.
Oh, gosh.
Mr. Rogers.
It’s the football game going back and forth.
Yes, exactly.
And it’s the war of the remote controls.
I was standing there zapping the neighbor’s house with the remote control just so happy I cannot tell you.
That’s fantastic.
You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!
You only moved the headstones!
How did they get the house back out of that dimensional portal, though?
Yeah, good question.
Yeah, and more to the point, what does that do to property taxes?
Yeah.
Well, let’s shift gears just a little bit and move on to another book that came out, I think, roughly around the same time as Ghostly Encounters, and that’s your book Mothman, Sightings and Investigations to the Iconic Flying Cryptid.
So I believe you did a trip out to Point Pleasant, and I’ve seen the photographs.
So could you tell us a little bit about maybe what your investigation unearthed that earlier investigators might have missed?
And also, are there still witnesses who are coming forward?
And how do you differentiate between things like folklore and misidentification and genuinely anomalous reports?
Great question.
Yeah.
So one of the things, because I did not just want to rehash John Keel, although you have to talk about Keel whenever you write about Mothman and Gray Barker as well.
Obviously, that’s been done and it’s been it’s it’s iconic in many ways.
So not only did we go to Point Pleasant, we cast a wider net and we looked at how much broader the phenomenon is.
So it took us to places like Van Meter in Iowa.
You know, the Van Meter Visitor.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, you know, again, you’ve got this strange flying creature there.
It took us to Chicago and to the suburbs, Rockford, where we had a bunch of urban sightings of Mothman, Chicago O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world.
So we wanted to go beyond Point Pleasant, but…
To answer your question directly, Karen, I wanted to talk to some primary sources, and there is no shortage of people there that remember the original flap, I guess we can call it.
And I say that with no joke because UFO flaps, of course, is something we’re all familiar with.
Yeah.
Was this big concurrent lights in the sky UFO flap going on at the same time as the Mothman?
Yeah.
uh sightings were taking place in the late 60s so i was talking to locals and one of the things that fascinated me the most was um i really have not like has not sit well with me this link between the silver bridge collapse this tragedy that claimed i believe it was 47 lives um and mothman you know um and the blame for that lies in the way the story has been told um
And I talked to multiple people and they all told me the same thing.
They said, those of us that lived in Point Pleasant at the time of the collapse did not in any way, shape or form associate the Mothman weirdness, the high strangeness with that bridge collapse.
That only happened after the books came out, you know, Gray Barker’s book and John Keel’s book.
And I don’t mean to speak ill of another writer, but I’ve come to the conclusion that if you read the Mothman prophecies, without that bridge collapse being tied in, you almost have no ending to that book.
You know, you have no climax.
And the movie adaptation, really, that’s kind of the big set piece in the movie, isn’t it?
Yeah.
So I thought that did a real disservice.
And I wanted to see what the locals thought of that.
And they said, yeah, we we never even heard of Mothman at the time.
Most of us called it the big black bird, which fascinated me.
You know, they described it as this big black bird the size of a Cessna.
And so that was pretty fascinating, just hearing it directly from local people.
And I asked one of them, point blank, I said, without Mothman, what do you think Point Pleasant would be like?
And she said, with no hesitation, nobody would come here.
This town would not be on the map, even though it has this crucial historical role.
Arguably, the first conflict of the US Revolution took place there.
In fact, the Battle of Point Pleasant.
Nobody goes there for that.
So they all go to see this big, shiny statue and stick quarters into its butt crack.
Yeah.
Mothman has more drawing power, apparently, than Chief Cornstalk, right?
Well, you know, I mean, just to stick with that same theme, Atchison, Kansas, the Sally House, you familiar with that case?
Yes, actually, I was going to ask you about that.
Yeah.
One of the quietest demonic houses I’ve ever slept well in.
I went to the visitor center in Atchison and had a candid conversation there.
Now, Amelia Earhart’s birthplace is in Atchison also.
That house is a museum.
It’s a wonderful place to visit.
And I was told, talk about a perfect soundbite.
I was told, hey, Sally brings way more tourism to Atchison than Amelia does.
Wow.
Amelia Earhart, perhaps you’ve heard of me?
And this is a pioneer of aviation, let alone the fact that she’s a female pioneer of aviation.
But regardless of that, she deserves her place quite rightly in the field of great aviators and great explorers and is overshadowed by this imaginary, some would say completely made up little girl.
I almost died leaving the Sally House, actually.
Yikes.
I was writing my book, In Search of Demons, for Llewellyn, and I do tell this story at the end of the book, but many, many people had warned me, you know, if you delve into this subject, you should beware, you should, you know, bathe in Himalayan salt and all that kind of stuff.
And I don’t mock because belief is a powerful thing.
And so people, meanwhile, I was leaving the Sally house and we did have something odd happen when we left.
A good friend of mine, we just left at about three in the morning, separate cars.
And they realized they’d left some food in the fridge and didn’t want to be those people, those bad guests.
So he turned around to go back and throw it in the trash.
And my friend, Mike, who’s a police officer.
So, you know, pretty grounded, pretty down to earth guy.
He goes in the house and…
immediately his wife who’s sitting in the car outside sees an upstairs light go on he never goes upstairs he goes in he hears a door closing in the house uh takes the pizza throws it in the trash and leaves and was a little unnerved by this you know um because we knew there was no one in that house we locked it up securely uh and the light switched itself off
Which I thought was quite cool, you know.
But then I’m maybe 30, 40 minutes out of Atchison.
I’m heading back to Colorado at exactly two miles over the speed limit on cruise control.
And there is this colossal bang.
And all of a sudden, my car is in a ditch.
Yeah, one of my brand new tires experienced…
what they call a zipper failure, where essentially it just completely comes apart.
You know, it’s not a flat tire.
It’s a complete catastrophic rupture.
It’s a tread separation kind of thing.
I looked into it and talked to some experts and they said, well, these are pretty rare, especially for new tires.
It could be a manufacturing defect, but it’s very odd that you would see something like this, you know, especially as I had driven out
to Atchison from Colorado with no issues.
It all of a sudden failed on the way out of town.
And…
I mean, not to make light of your bad situation there, but Kansas is known for being flat.
Good enough.
Yeah.
But, you know, there’s, of course, that completely rational part of the brain that says ties fail, mechanical failures happen.
Of course they do.
And then there’s that other part that says, but the timing seems very interesting.
And, you know, I’ve been warned by a number of people about approaching houses in cases like this.
So I talked to another investigator who about the same distance from Atchison hit a deer and totaled her car.
Now, again, people hit deer all the time.
It happens.
And it comes back to that as skeptics, of course, you know, you’re probably ready to make the point, look at all the people that left that house and didn’t have time for it yet.
But it’s these, okay, when people go to these places and they have these heightened…
And then something unusual happens.
It can be transformative.
And I’m not, I mean, I’m laughing about the puns, but I’m not laughing at these people’s lived experiences.
Are yours?
You know, it’s just things happen.
And, you know, it’s some of this that comes down to what meaning do we ascribe to these events, right?
Right.
And bias.
I mean, I was very aware that I was writing a book and there was, even as I am skidding off the highway at 70 miles an hour, there is a tiny part of my brain that’s going, this is going to look great in print.
If I live, this is going to be awesome.
You’re a true journalist.
Yeah, yeah.
Like I need some kind of ending and here we go.
You know, 80,000 words, I didn’t find any demons, or at least not that I’m aware of.
But we have to be aware of our own biases.
And I think, you know, paranormal tourism, we’re still kind of on track with this subject, aren’t we?
When you pay money to rent a place and you give up your weekend and you travel, gas, you know, maybe lodgings as well, there’s a part of you, I think, that’s like…
Well, I better get something for all this because I feel like a right idiot if I’ve wasted my money and my time.
Yeah.
That desire to make every creaking floorboard and every, dare I say, self-closing door, you know, into something more than it actually is.
It’s good to say I’m a weird, but you don’t want to end up with your haunted version of Frank Sinatra has a cold.
I have to ask, though, looking at the books that you’ve written recently, you’ve dipped your toes into true crime, which is up my wife’s alley.
She has before, though.
He has before.
Well, I’m sure.
Yeah, but I was specifically going to talk about Fox Hollow Farm.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So can you tell us?
I don’t know that case, but I wanted to tell my wife about it.
So what’s this book about and what happened at Fox Hollow Farm?
Yeah, I wrote that book six years ago.
But the reason I added this book is because of the TV series that came out earlier this year and that this is a continuing story.
So…
Yeah, Karen’s absolutely right.
It’s the connection to this year.
But I still want to tell my wife about it, so…
It’s kind of rare that a book has this kind of afterlife.
So, yeah, thanks for putting that in there, Karen.
Essentially, I wrote the book six years ago.
The house was home to a serial killer called Herb Baumeister who murdered anywhere between 11 and 19, maybe more men, in his house while his wife was out.
You know?
And…
Herb would troll the gay bars of Indianapolis.
He would bring these men.
He would look for vulnerable young men that were perhaps couch surfing.
We’re talking about now the early 1990s, so, you know, very much ostracized members of the gay community from their own families, from their own communities.
And so he would tell them, hey, you know, I’m a construction worker and I’m working on this house with a pool in the basement.
And, hey, how would you like to come back and party?
I’ve got some drink.
I’ve got some, you know, fun pharmacological accessories.
We could have a good time.
Creepy mannequins.
We’ll get to that, but yeah, definitely.
So that probably sounds like a great deal if you are, you know, a little down on your luck or just looking for a party night.
So they will go back with him to Fox Hollow Farm.
And Herb, before he left, it’s the only house I’ve ever been in where the basement is actually a big swimming pool.
Wow.
He would turn the heat all the way up.
He would roll the pool cover across.
Think of it like a saucepan, you know, simmering away on the range.
And then when he brought his intended victim home, he would roll the pool cover back.
He would open these big French doors to let in the cold air and the pool would fill with steam.
As Karen just alluded to, mannequins were positioned all around the pool wearing beach attire, you know, so bikinis and swimsuits and trunks.
And it looked like there was essentially the beach party, the pool party from hell was going on in there.
Herb was very much into autoerotic asphyxiation, so he would engage in some strangulation with his victims, usually after having plied them with drink and or drugs, we’re told, and then would just not stop, would strangle them to death and then dispose of their remains in the woods directly behind the house.
So…
Long story short, Herb Baumeister is believed, there is some question over this, to have taken his own life when he was discovered.
And the house was bought by a couple called Rob and Vicky who moved in, both very skeptical people, both very scientific.
And they quickly started experiencing paranormal phenomena.
So I was given the opportunity to basically move into Fox Hollow several times and see what was what, you know, see what I could uncover.
And so I enjoyed that case quite a bit, but it was also very dark, very macabre.
And I was happy to be shot of the place.
It’s the kind of place where…
I don’t know that I would want to live there.
It’s luxurious, but you just know what happened down there and in the woods behind it.
You need to be a very specific person to be able to live in a house like that.
Very depressing.
Yeah, and then Hulu made a miniseries called The Fox Hollow Murders.
They bought the rights to the book, and so they used it as a partial basis for that series.
And the main thing I am most proud of, I can’t take credit for this.
It goes to Mr. Jellison, the local coroner, but they’ve been working diligently to identify some of the human remains, the bones really is all that’s left, from DNA samples.
And after the show aired,
hundreds of volunteers came forward with missing family members from the Indy area, gave DNA samples.
And so the work is now progressing and they are putting names and faces to some of these lost men.
That’s wonderful.
And it sounds like there’s more, the story’s continuing.
I don’t know if you can tell us about that at all yet.
You know, I can tell you that the series did very well and that there is a second part coming, which I chose not to be involved with because I was asked to do something I did not consider appropriate.
Yeah, so I walked away from that because there are some lines I don’t believe in crossing.
But I’m very proud of the fact I’m very…
I’m thrilled with the fact that the series has promoted the work of the local authorities that are working diligently to bring these men, you know, some kind of closure.
Closure is so important in those cases.
It just really, you know, there’s no justice to that community.
That community is so vulnerable, especially back at that time.
My God, like with the AIDS crisis going on.
Yeah, quite, quite.
But we can follow on from that and just chat a little bit about paranormal tourism.
I mean, that is just – we should start to wind down soon too.
We’re at that point.
But what do you make of – it seems like another surge of paranormal tourism and just the trend of people making pilgrimages to sites like cemeteries and movie-related properties.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes, yeah.
And it’s one thing for you to do that.
You’re writing books.
You’re doing research and investigations.
But what do you think of the interest for the average, the general public?
Yeah, and we can tie it into a case, I think.
I believe paranormal tourism is definitely the ultimate double-edged sword.
On the one hand, locations like Fort Mifflin, which I’d written about, is known as the fort that saved America, the fort on the Delaware, which essentially held up the British in
during the Revolutionary War and bought crucial time for Washington to mobilize his forces and strike back.
So the fact that people go to learn about the ghosts of Fort Mifflin, and as I like to say, go for the ghosts, stay for the history, you know?
that your dollars can support historic sites, I think is a wonderful thing.
So long as there is no misrepresentation going on.
And the case which I think I’m angriest about that I put in Ghostly Encounters is Enfield.
which I know you’re both very familiar with, the Enfield-Poltergeist case.
Because you mentioned Guy Playfair earlier, who wrote the definitive account, I would say, because he was embedded with that family, along with Morris Gross, and was there through thick and thin.
And then we have The Conjuring 2 comes along.
yeah and puts the warrens um center stage sidelines guy and morris the guys that did you know years of work and i understand it’s a controversial case and whether you believe it was genuine or not what we can say for sure is that they were there through thick and thin the warrens were there for less than a day yeah guy play fair said openly before he died ed warren took him aside and said you know if we play this right we could make a lot of money
And we now, if you don’t take the time to read the literature on Enfield, you may watch The Conjuring 2.
You know, the first Conjuring movie is equally problematic with what it did to the memory of Paul Bathsheba Sherman.
Yeah.
And there’s a danger that people take what they see in 95 minutes of Hollywood drama as being the actual truth, the history.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
So…
That angers me incredibly.
And so I think it’s paranormal tourism.
We do see people, Enfield, people are stopping outside their house regularly.
And still the residents don’t like being known as the Enfield Poltergeist House.
Well, you know I did that.
When I was there, we stayed in Ponder’s End in Enfield.
We went along to the place, and obviously you cannot enter the property.
There were lots of looky-loos around there, lots of tourists.
I’ll tell you, mate, I would have done it because I read that book when I was 14.
I just, it’s one of the great cases for me.
Oh, it is, yes.
I would have done the same.
You didn’t go knock on the door, though, right?
Oh, didn’t.
So, yes, you understand propriety.
But, yeah, you told me, too, that the new owner just doesn’t look kindly upon visitors.
They do not get that they want their privacy respected.
Fair enough.
And the same is true, by the way, with Fox Hollow Farm.
Like when the series aired, they had a police guard on the house for days because of so many trespassers swarming the location, feeling that they had the right to know more by going on to private property.
So that is kind of the darker flip side, I think, of paranormal tourism.
And especially the cases which are being deliberately misrepresented in order to make money.
Yeah, we’re in agreement there.
Yeah, because, I mean, you know, the money factor, but, you know, I…
It’s also these are really I still think these are very important mysteries.
Right.
I mean, these these even if I suspect most of them have a rational explanation, I just these are the places where the normal world and the supernatural kind of overlap.
And, you know, that’s what we want.
We want to see that proof.
We want to hear those stories.
We want to have those experiences, you know.
I don’t think anybody would be doing all the dark tourism and ostention and traveling to these places if we didn’t have a little bit of hope that maybe there’s still some magic there to be had, you know?
Yeah, I mean, you went to the Black Monk House on East Drive also, right, Karen?
Oh, gosh.
How long do we have?
And, you know, that tourism at its finest.
And I co-authored a book on that location.
I moved into that place.
Again, as long as you are as honest as you can possibly be about the history and the experiences, I think it’s terrific.
We don’t all have to agree as long as we’re being honest.
as diligent as we can.
But I think we’re seeing some cases of paranormal tourism in which, you know, now it’s become a thing that you can buy a ramshackle old building, call it the something house.
Yeah.
Effectively invent this story, but with the words, it is said, it is said that magic rituals there, it is said there were animals, you know, who’s it said by Jeff down the pub, probably.
Yeah.
And suddenly you’re charging three, four hundred bucks for people to come investigate your demonically infested shack.
You know, there might be actually a legitimate opportunity for some case studies here, because we’ve been talking a lot about community having embracing these things like Point Pleasant.
small community festivals around monsters, ghosts, whatever.
Oh, like the Loveland Frog.
We were talking about that recently.
a bed and breakfast, like the, those rentals are sort of more trackable.
You can like literally see how much revenue is coming in from those rentals.
Right.
So in a way that maybe you, you know, it’s kind of obscured when you have a festival, you can say how many people came, but how much money was generated is, is sort of hidden, but.
And then there are the individuals that, naming no names, but, you know, they’re putting the faces of murder victims on backpacks with bloody hatchets on them.
Oh, I know what you’re talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, there are some people utterly devoid of conscience.
Yeah.
And they’ve turned the tourism is dependent upon tragedy and it’s a necessary byproduct.
It demeans the dead.
I always thought that was actually the worst thing about Amityville.
Not that there’s any tourism with the house, but with the movie and the sequels and the vast juggernaut that Amityville became in the entertainment world, most people forget that this was built on the tragic, horrific murder of a sleeping family.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
The goo and the noises and all that other stuff is far more well-known than the real tragic family’s murder.
Ghost Hunters never used to be told to get out until Rod Steiger got yelled at by them, right?
Yeah.
But, yeah, we’ve been delving into this kind of thing a lot more of late, talking about the history and folklore and just culture behind a lot of these stories too and how there’s the human side and how important that is.
And how they change.
Like, you know, Mothman, as you said, was originally a bird, you know.
And now it’s, you know, a humanoid with wings.
And, you know, it’s changed.
Like, even Kiel starts out by calling it the year of the Garuda, right?
But then by the end of it, you know, like now, I think people expect Mothman to look much more like a human than a bird, you know.
Well, do you know where the name actually came from?
Well, I don’t know specifically who, but someone riffing on Batman 66 called it Mothman.
Exactly.
Move over, Batman.
Here comes Mothman.
Yeah, and it worked.
Yeah, it did.
But the fact that we’re still going with that 40 years later is just amazing.
Sorry, 50 years later.
Yeah.
And just to further your thought, I love that you’re delving into some of these cases.
One of the things I would love to emphasize is, you know, folklore, the absolute boost of a multi-billion dollar movie franchise.
Yeah.
You know, whether you’re looking at The Conjuring verse, whether you’re looking at the Amityville movies.
you cannot compete with that with research.
You know, there are those honest researchers that are out there saying, well, it didn’t quite happen like this.
And then you have, you know, on the big screen, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, you know, doing back forces of darkness.
The pop culture war is going to be won by Warner Brothers.
It’s not going to be won by the honest, diligent researchers.
And that’s a great tragedy.
Yeah, it is.
That is true.
Well.
Thank you so much for joining us, Richard.
Can you tell us what you might be working on next, or is that all hush-hush at the moment?
No, it’s not.
The next book I have coming out is probably the one I’m most desperate for people to read.
It is my paramedic autobiography.
It comes out February 11th.
Oh, your memoir.
My memoir, yeah, it is called Help is on the Way.
So it’s my most deeply personal book going from 9-11 until 2024.
So emergency medicine as I’ve lived it.
But stepping into the monster talk realm, I have a book that I’m working on at the moment called In Search of Bigfoot.
Nice.
Where I’m looking at, shall we say, the less biological and more esoteric aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon.
So, no spoilers, but do you think that the more liminal, supernatural Bigfoot is winning out?
Because it feels that way to me.
I feel like when you have shows, not just thinking on Finding Bigfoot, but any of those shows where you have multiple seasons and you really don’t find whatever it may be you’re looking for, either it isn’t there or you have something stranger going on than simply a living, breathing, eating, pooping biological organism.
That’s what I think.
Yeah, I think it is a sort of special pleading to kind of account for that.
People still see it, but it doesn’t leave footprints, doesn’t leave bones.
And I know you guys have done that on the show and you have great expertise in this field.
One thing I’m noticing is that there are more claims of what I’m calling the trifecta.
When I started investigating haunted places in the mid-90s,
We were the ghost people, air quotes, and we didn’t talk to the monster people, air quotes, or the UFO people.
Now that we all talk together, not least because of shows like yours where we all compare notes, it’s starting to seem like there are more commonalities than differences between these disparate phenomena.
Yeah.
And so I’m looking at identifying places which claim to be haunted with claims of Bigfoot sightings and UFO UAP.
And I’m finding several.
I just was investigating one in Virginia, in fact, which is quite near the army base Fort Hood.
And it has all three legs of the tripod there.
And I tracked down a case report of a Marine unit on exercise at Fort Hood that claims that the perimeter of their training camp was invaded by a Bigfoot in the trees above them.
Interesting.
I am fascinated by the commonalities between these three, what we thought were totally separate faces of the triangle.
Yeah, I have several colleagues who are looking into the commonalities there.
Exactly.
That’s a good way of putting it.
So I think a lot of really interesting research is going to come out over the next five or six years.
So I’m looking forward to that because finding a way to explain.
why these peculiar stories have so much overlap when you get, if you don’t, what is it Joshua Cutchin calls it?
Weird washing.
Like when people take out the weird stuff, it doesn’t sound quite so strange, you know?
Oh, I love Josh.
In fact, he’s going to be one of my interviewees for the book.
And I’m spending some time up in Bailey, Colorado.
So Karen, if you ever feel like squatching, skeptical squatching.
I’ve been to the Bigfoot Center there before.
It’s good fun.
So there are these, it is, it’s a great museum.
There are these stories of there being kind of a Bigfoot portal in the woods up there.
I’ve been out there a couple of times.
By all means, consider yourself and your family invited.
Oh, thank you.
I think you can guess how I voted when I went there.
I also think you could probably outrun me.
So you’re quite safe if Bigfoot.
Right.
Always try and go with someone that you can outrun.
You only have to be faster than your friends.
That’s right.
Well, I fear that my voice is failing me now here at the end of this.
You sound pretty bad.
We need to go and rest.
But thank you so much for joining us, Richard.
And it sounds like you’ve got lots of other books that we need to talk about in the new year.
And I love your selection of cases for your ghostly encounters book.
This is a fun one.
It is fun.
our listeners need to go out and purchase all of his books.
That’s right.
Check this show notes for a link.
You can, you can get these books from your local library and or from your local independent bookstore as well.
And they probably could use your support.
Absolutely.
For sure.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, have a great night, everybody.
Feel better soon.
Yep.
Happy holidays.
And yeah, we’ll be in touch soon.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a chat with author Richard Estep about some of his books, some new, some old, and some just about to come out.
Check the show notes for additional reading, links to his books, and more.
Hopefully my voice will clear up soon, but going back to the archives, it seems like getting sick in time to record ghost stories at Christmas is shockingly common for me.
Hey, but it looks like Mark Gattis is doing yet another adaptation this year, and it could be very good.
This one is The Room in the Tower by E.F. Benson.
That’s not my favorite Benson story, but it’s a solid choice, and I look forward to seeing what Gattis and the Beeb do with it.
Tonight, if the weather’s clear, we’re going to sit socially distanced in my backyard and see if we can enjoy some hot cocoa and watch a meteor shower.
I have no idea what the visibility will be like, but I’m hoping we see some good ones and enjoy some warm drinks and cold air.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Our goal here is to bring you the best in monster-related content with a focus on scientific skepticism and critical thinking.
If you enjoy our show and want to support our mission, start out by visiting monstertalk.org forward slash support.
That’s monstertalk.org forward slash support.
There you’ll find links to our Patreon page as well as a donate button if you’d like to just make a one-time contribution.
A great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon wishlist.
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Happy holidays, everybody.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post S05E11 Ghostly Encounters with Richard Estep appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Episode Summary: In this episode, hosts Blake Smith and Dr. Karen Stollznow catch up on recent headlines and new literature. First, Blake discusses a “ripped from the headlines” update regarding the 2014 Slender Man stabbing case. We revisit the tragic story of Morgan Geyser, her recent escape from a halfway house, and the media’s handling of the mental health and transgender aspects of the story.

Later, Karen reviews a pre-publication copy of the upcoming book How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines. Does the book provide a blueprint for creating ghosts, or is it a cultural tour of famous haunts? Karen breaks down the architectural history, the folklore, and where the book lands on the spectrum of skepticism.

Key Topics
• Shout-outs for the Cryptid and Godzilla Advent calendars.
• Slenderman Segment:
    • Recap of the 2014 Waukesha stabbing (MonsterTalk Ep #86).
    • Morgan Geyser’s conditional release and subsequent escape attempt.
    • A critical look at the prison industrial complex, mental health care in the US, and the current moral panic surrounding transgender individuals in media coverage.

• Book Review Segment: How to Build a Haunted House (Coming April 2026).
    • A review of the book for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).
    • Analysis of the Myrtles Plantation, Borley Rectory, and the Winchester Mystery House.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————

Monster House presents.
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And while we have done what we can to avoid ads that are divisive, the system that injects them sometimes ignores our preferences and always seems to ignore our efforts to not interrupt the conversational flow.
While we understand this can be disruptive, we’re trying our best.
Patreon remains the best way to enjoy commercial-free listening to our content.
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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
This week, Karen and I are going to discuss a couple of topics.
I’m covering the latest news around Morgan Geyser, the young woman who we discussed back in 2014 when she was involved with an attempted murder conducted in the name of the fictional internet entity Slenderman.
That episode was very informative and an important episode of our show, so I’ll put a link to it in the show notes if you’d like to go back and catch it.
I believe in this episode I mispronounced the victim’s name as Lautner, but I realized during editing that it was probably Peyton Leutner.
I’m not quite sure.
Families do vary the way they say their names.
I just misread in my notes.
Due to the content of my segment, I do need to drop in a warning that we will be discussing murder, attempted murder, and self-harm in this episode.
I know sometimes folks roll their eyes when they hear stuff like that.
Perhaps they’re in a strong mental place and feel like such warnings are silly.
But let me say from personal experience…
When you’re having recurring thoughts of self-harm or have just come through terrible trauma, such warnings are really helpful to avoid nasty surprises.
I know sometimes we have to cover sensational stories as part of this show, but I never want to do it for the sake of being sensationalist.
I just think that this show needs to be about digging deeper, checking premises, getting past the hype, and hopefully finding empathy for our fellow humans.
And that’s not the whole episode.
Karen’s also bringing us a pre-publication review of the new book, How to Build a Haunted House, that she covered for the Society for Psychical Research.
So thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom in this episode.
But especially this time of year, whether it’s the holidays or the weather or economics, a lot of people do get downspirited.
And if you’re feeling lost or alone and you’re in the United States, you can dial 988 on your telephone.
That’s 988 on your telephone to reach compassionate people who are there to help.
And besides, Karen and I want you to stick around for many more episodes of Monster Talk.
You know, December is a hard time to get guests lined up for recordings because the holidays tend to fill up people’s social calendars, whatever.
Exactly.
Everyone’s dance cards are full and everyone’s traveling.
So, yeah, this is tricky.
But we I mean, we’re always working on something.
So it wasn’t terribly difficult to come up with a topic or two.
No, no, not at all.
And in fact, there’s what I wanted to cover today for my half of this conversation is relevant to a previous episode because we had a little ripped from the headlines sort of true crime story that’s tied into Slender Man.
Sounds interesting.
It is.
It is.
It’s complex, interesting, and, you know, because it’s dealing with Slenderman, not particularly positive, but, you know, that’s how that goes.
But I did want to mention for patrons, James Matthew Neeland, longtime supporter of the show, sent me a cryptid advent calendar.
Which is extraordinarily cool.
I didn’t know there was one.
Not only that, but another listener, this is where I suck as a human being.
Another listener sent me a Godzilla calendar, but I can’t find the packaging and I don’t remember who sent it.
And that sucks.
I feel so bad about that.
But my son is an absolute Godzilla fanatic.
And so he’s going to do a little video series where he introduces the advent calendar for Godzilla, which is very cute.
Yeah, that’ll be fun.
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
And then I’m doing a daily advent calendar for the cryptids, which is cool because when I got it, all the cryptids were like they had slipped out of their packaging and got into a bundle.
So I’m not sure what the order is supposed to be.
Oh, well, that’s a shame.
My lovely wife, Kathleen, she reorganized them into daily slots.
Oh, great.
She pasted it together.
Yeah, she pieces together.
So I’m every day I’m dropping a video for patrons with that day’s cryptid.
And we’re going to do something similar with Godzilla for my son to run that.
But I get another reason to become a patron.
Yeah, I mean, it’s fun.
Golly, it’s nifty.
I’ve got this really lovely reading chair that I put in my bedroom that my grandmother gave me.
Oh, lovely.
I say she gave it to me.
She died and I took it.
That’s not exactly a gift.
Anyway, I’m very happy to have it, and it’s nice to have a reading chair, and I’m trying to get some reading done.
The only book by my bedside right now is Bits, The Journey of a Word.
The only book that you need beside your bed.
Exactly.
That and Gideon’s Bible, and I am good to go.
But I’m trying to get through that because I you and Brian Regal have both asked me to to to put a review out.
And it’s like I I cannot.
There’s something wrong with my character as a friend.
I suck because it’s like I won’t issue a review unless I’ve read the entire book.
And it’s like so hard for me to get through stuff.
Look, we’re only one and a half years into the book being available.
So you’re doing well.
You’re killing me.
You’re killing me.
You’re killing me.
Anyway, it will get done.
But for listeners, I’m enjoying the read.
So I can say, even though I haven’t finished it.
I do want to say that it’s only part of it is on etymology, which is word origins, because I think that was the impression that some people had.
Oh, it’s a book about etymology.
But it’s also about context and how the word has changed meaning over time.
Absolutely.
And gender and insults.
I talk about a lot of different insults and
It’s so topical that you said gender because that’s going to come up in my story.
So, yeah.
Cool.
And in terms of etymology, it’s really only the first chapter.
And it’s a kind of overview of the word origins.
But other than that, it’s a deep dive into the word.
A deep, deep dive.
Yeah, absolutely.
So for my part of this episode, we’re going to be flashing back all the way back.
to 2014, episode 86.
Seems like just yesterday.
It does.
Honestly, I swear my memory is like a flat.
My time is my time since is all screwed up.
But back in episode 86, we had a pretty important episode where we talked about Slenderman and Tulpas.
And we had on Joe Laycock, who will be coming in a new episode soon.
And Natasha Michaels, who is now his spouse.
I believe at the time they were just dating.
But anyway, I think so.
Yeah.
That was about Slender Man and a news story relevant to Slender Man.
But in the episode, which is, again, I’ll put a link in the show notes, well worth going back to listen to.
One of the classic ones, I think.
It really is.
Yeah.
Well, it was a big news story around Slenderman.
But also Natasha kind of dug in.
Her background is in she does religious studies work and she has done a lot of work in Buddhism.
And the concept of tulpas has been sort of hijacked by Westerners.
Thought forms.
Thought forms.
Exactly.
And so it has a very specific meaning within Buddhism.
which she goes into in great detail in that episode.
But what happened is Alexandra Neal…
if I remember correctly, from Theosophy, wrote about tulpas as a non, let’s call it a secular version of a thought form.
Right.
Where you could, if you believed in something enough, you could make something manifest in the physical world.
And so…
Which we see in a lot of different theories too.
I think even through to the law of attraction is based on that as well.
Willing something to happen.
Willing, the human will, and which is all tied into chaos magic and the idea that like your will, exerting your will and manifesting your will, which ties into prosperity gospel, the same idea.
Yeah.
Looking for endorsement from.
Everything old is new again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For real.
Right.
And this idea of syncretism, the idea of like.
taking pieces you want to have in your religious views from other religions and sort of blending it all together.
Nothing is quite as syncretic as theosophy.
And most people don’t know what theosophy even is, but I would say it is the secret…
binder tying like the ancient world’s religions together with modernity in in a most interesting way well you’re making me even think of uh sylvia brown and she used to to say take what you like and leave the rest behind so very much a kind of new age
of just taking bits and pieces of what you like.
And I think that’s, yeah, very spiritualism today, new age, that those ideas are still around and they just keep evolving.
You may recall, so back in 2014, two 12-year-olds, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weir, were 12-year-olds in Wisconsin, Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Now, Geiser had been diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia.
And even her mom described her as floridly psychotic.
So she’s definitely mentally ill. Yeah, it is very young.
In fact, schizophrenia often doesn’t emerge until later in life.
Yeah, for my world, the developer of the Macintosh hardware, a guy named Burl Smith, is like one of the most, he really rings, his world looms large in my mental landscape because he was this really important hardware engineer who then slipped into schizophrenia.
I believe he’s being taken care of now, but ultimately, like, you know, his brain is tragically fractured by schizophrenia, even though, like, he was, like, this real genius at developing computer hardware.
Well, I’ll just add, too, that, I mean, it’s, you know, a neurodiverse condition, and not all people who have it actually experience hallucinations.
audio and visual hallucinations uh it’s it’s a i think maybe 20 of people who do so i think that there are a lot of stereotypes associated with it and i do know people who have been diagnosed and have it well maintained uh and they’re finding out a lot more about it too so it’s i i think we just don’t want to you know panic people into thinking that it can’t be treated because it can oh there’s all kinds of interesting treatments in all kinds of meds but um but morgan was uh
fascinated or captivated by the online creation of the Slender Man.
And that was, again, an entirely fictional horror character created for the Something Awful online forum.
So it was an art project, if you will.
But they took it very seriously.
And we talked a little bit about the concept of folia due, the idea of like two people sharing a hallucination.
And we also talked about how in a human relationship it’s possible for.
Two people to sort of slowly push each other forward into acting on things they probably should know better.
And maybe they wouldn’t even do it by themselves.
So that friendship between Morgan and Anissa ultimately ended up with a girl being…
Yeah, so Lautner gets stabbed 19 times with a kitchen knife by Geyser.
Yeah, no, and she’s millimeters away from her heart.
I mean, she literally escaped death by just the tiniest fraction of attack angle, which is terrible.
So the girls, the two girls who perpetrated the crime, fled the scene, ultimately were captured.
And Geyser in particular was institutionalized because clearly something was amiss with her mind.
Now, the reason I’m bringing this up is because.
this year geyser had gotten conditional release i remember she was not even 13 yet when the crime took place and so she had been put into a like a halfway home or juvenile center or something yeah well so she’s now in her early 20s she’s a 23 year old person so um still a youth yeah
Still very young.
I mean, now that I’m older, I’m like, everybody in their 20s, sorry, guys, you seem like kids to me because I’m ancient.
Children, yeah.
It’s a relative thing.
It is a relative thing.
But I mean, also, like, science seems to be suggesting that your brain’s not really even fully formed until you’re in your early 20s, right?
If ever.
If ever.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, one hopes that, or at least the way I look at the world, it’s like you’re constantly seeking new experiences, trying to learn new things.
I know I am.
And so, you know, we have words for this.
Some people would call it wisdom.
I don’t know.
Experience points is how I think about it because I’m a nerd.
But, you know, like if someone could say, would you like to be 19 again?
Well, not if I have to give up all my XP.
No.
Yeah, there’d be some definite pros and cons to that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I would love to go back in other ways.
I love the energy.
I wish my knees worked like they did back then.
You know, you know, but yeah, I would not want to give up the experience points right at all.
But yeah.
So this strange news voice popped out a couple of weeks ago where Geyser was caught.
fleeing her halfway home.
So she left and fled, okay?
With an older person.
She became friends with…
a person who is 43-year-old that they met at church together, a person named Charlie Mecca.
Well, so if you go look at the crime photos or whatever, it’s one of those situations where I think the news is really making a lot out of the fact that Charlie Mecca is a trans woman.
Oh, dear.
It doesn’t sound like that probably has anything to do with it.
It sounds like it’s more…
This is more of a deeply entwined illness, personality thing going on.
And it’s problematic in a lot of ways.
Okay.
So Geyser and Mecca were trying to get to Nashville for some reason.
It’s a little unclear why.
Music.
The music.
They were probably going to start a country band.
That’s exactly.
That’s probably what it is.
Well, you know, it’s one of those situations where someone has moved from the prison system into a halfway home.
And the United States.
does not have a good record for health care, for mental health care, for their rehabilitation in the penitentiary system, the prison industrial complex.
Sure, that’s the best environment to rehabilitate someone who clearly has a psychiatric disorder.
Let me step back and say, hey…
morgan committed a terrible crime and nearly killed someone right so i don’t want to i don’t want to forgive that but clearly also mentally ill and this system that we have yeah and a minor the system that we have is not really set up for that so but but the way the news is covering this story is uh
That a trans woman and this this person who is trying to work their way out of the penitentiary and the system blew off the halfway house and tried to escape.
Right.
So it’s a.
I guess it sounds like what was happening was at the halfway house, they were going to deny Mecca access to Geyser.
Which would make things worse, I think, to do that.
Geyser is messaging Mecca that she’s suicidal.
She wants to drink bleach.
The idea of not being able to spend time with Mecca is killing her, right?
And she’s going to…
do something terrible to herself so so she basically convinces charlie mecca to help her escape so they’re going to grab a bus and they’re heading to nashville well on the journey they get caught um and now um
They’re both in trouble.
So Geiser’s going to be going back into the prison system, most likely.
And Nelmeca, who, again, is a trans woman, is in the media spotlight at a time when we have what I would describe as a…
Very hostile society.
A trans-moral panic, right?
The whole question of…
Being trans is now a political hot potato.
And in the United States and in other parts of the world, it’s being used as a cudgel.
These people are having their rights taken away.
And it’s definitely a moral panic, right?
And so this has been going on since the satanic panic.
Yeah, it’s always a new shifting topics.
You know, and it bugs me.
OK, so, you know, every now and then we’ll cover a topic that ties into politics.
Right.
And we’ll get some of our listeners are bothered by this because they don’t want us to have a political view or they don’t want to hear our side or whatever.
That’s, you know, but I.
This is so clearly a situation where a moral panic has made it OK to abuse a segment of the population.
It just really bothers me.
And we don’t have to name parties.
I mean, I can, but it’s not just the United States and other parts of the world.
It’s become OK to attack trans people.
And we’ve had.
friends of the show, fans of the show, contributors to the show who are trans.
I have friends in real life who are trans.
I have family members in real life who are trans.
And to see them scapegoated and victimized through the same nonsense that was used in the height of the satanic panic in the 80s and 90s is killing me.
It’s like it just breaks my heart.
Yeah, portion of society.
And it really is a biological matter and it’s a social matter and just should not be brought into politics.
But they’re being scapegoated now.
Yeah, they absolutely are.
And, you know.
Again, I read my kids the Harry Potter books.
So having J.K. Rowling coming out so hard against trans people after writing these beautiful books where inclusion and support for the underling is so important just freaks me out, you know?
Oh, what a massive blind spot and just not something she should be talking about, especially when she has such a platform and can influence people so negatively and so dangerously.
You don’t know how dangerous it is to go to the bathroom when you’re a billionaire.
You know, you never know.
You never know, Karen.
Anyway.
I see what you’re saying.
And this is really turning this into a separate matter.
And this is really a difficult issue, very complicated and difficult to tease apart the different issues.
And it’s just a shame that this is becoming such a media circus and that it’s so ongoing too.
It bugs me.
I mean, again, going back to the Slenderman angle, I don’t even know if this story would be in the news, relatively speaking.
Like, I don’t know, like, if it weren’t for the Slenderman piece of the story, right?
then this would probably be a different kind of story.
I don’t know the facts around Charlie Mecca, right?
Charlie is in all of the news coverage, all across the board, the news coverage.
They’re using Charlie’s dead name, okay?
And referring to her as a he, right?
Okay.
It doesn’t help things.
It doesn’t help things.
It makes it more about the trans angle.
I don’t even know who the victim is here exactly.
Because we know Geyser has already used…
her mental illness to lure other people to complicity and in bad situations, you know, she may legitimately be trying to keep a friendship.
I don’t know.
Or she may be manipulating Mecca or maybe Mecca’s manipulating her.
I don’t know.
I just read an article for psychology today about favorite people.
And it’s a concept from personality disorders where often, and there are lots of different,
personality disorders from antisocial through to borderline and narcissistic and a lot of kind of pop culture understanding of these things and a lot of it’s wrong too but this does sound like one of these kind of relationships where you have two people and they’re very or one person’s very attached to another person and emotionally dependent upon them and I think that this is probably underpinning a lot of relationships like this so I think that there’s so much going on but
I’m sure the media is just turning it into something above and beyond that.
And I just don’t think these people will get the help that they need.
No, exactly.
And they’re focusing on the weirdness of the whole thing, right?
And so, yeah, it is weird, but only because society has not made a place for people who are mentally ill. Society has not made a place for people who don’t fit into binary categories.
Oh, yeah, it’s one of those kind of final frontiers, I think, when it comes to discrimination and prejudice dealing with disability and mental health.
But, yeah, well, they should have gone to Nashville and started that blues band or…
They like both kinds of music, country and Western.
But I, you know, I don’t know what will happen with them.
The the Slenderman angle is actually being underplayed compared to the trans angle, which is, you know, a sign of the times.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very sad.
It’s a bummer.
It’s a bummer.
I wish that the United States had a system where they actually not to reward the criminal.
But a lot of these people are criminals because they’ve had bad circumstances because the system is against them.
And it’s like it’s so easy to be a person who, you know, follows the rules and has advantages.
And to look at these people who are trying to get by out on the outskirts of the society and just marginalize groups and crush them, marginalize them, crush them, never excuse them, utilize them in the prison industrial complex, et cetera.
So I don’t know what will happen here.
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like they stand a chance, really.
They really don’t seem to.
And again.
Geyser committed a crime, almost committed a murder.
So I don’t want to excuse that.
But, you know, it clearly had mental illness at the root of this.
Absolutely.
But it did give us a chance to talk about the fact that Slender Man is simultaneously not a real thing, yet exemplifies this concept of the…
the monster that comes forth from our minds and becomes real.
And even though as a skeptical person, I know that’s practically not true.
Like how much of our world or how much of our lives are controlled by
complying with or are participating in structures that are all social constructs like you know like how much we do during the day how much that we live under or abide by are are things that we might not be behaving the same way if we didn’t live in these
you know, large communities where we have to find some way to work within a shared mental framework, which is really interesting.
It’s deep and not the sort of thing that a news article would cover.
But I find it fascinating because these shared mythologies of monsters.
So anyway, that’s our Slenderman update.
It looks like presently Geyser is rolled back into the American penitentiary system.
I’m sure there will be hearings and other things.
I don’t know that she posed a threat.
I don’t know that Charlie Mecca posed a threat, but she definitely broke her probation.
And that’s what it’s become about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So maybe this is.
Right.
And I just, you know, again, I don’t know enough about Charlie Mecca.
People are like trying to dig up dirt.
And there are stories that like maybe maybe Mecca had, you know, tried to do something negative with a previous.
There are stories that are just allegations that are coming out in this media coverage.
And it’s like you would be able to sue somebody in a normal world just for the allegations being out there.
But the truth is that.
People in the trans community right now are at the heart of a moral panic.
And, you know, I don’t know that I trust anything that’s being said in the media about trans people because I just everything is right now.
It’s like there’s a permissive ecosystem to criticize the trans community.
It sucks.
No, I absolutely agree.
And just as for regarding legal matters, it’s a.
It’s a legal system, not a justice system.
I’ve heard that said before.
That’s true.
So really complicated.
And I guess we’ll just try to keep up with the news and find out what happens.
But it’s all around a very sad story.
And no one’s getting it.
Well, it is appropriate.
It is.
But remember, the forum that gave birth to Slender Man was called Something Awful.
yes it’s all come full circle living up to that living up to that all right well bring the room up a little bit because i’ve brought it down i apologize so so oh i think i’m gonna probably keep the mood down a little bit
So, yeah, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me.
I’ve got a lot going on.
But one thing that happened was I received an email that came through to my website and it was just from Nemo.
And I’m just thinking, I don’t know.
Who this is.
The fish or the captain?
Well, that’s what I was thinking, finding Nemo.
And the email said, dear Dr. Karen Stolzner, I’m the content manager for the website maintained by the SPR.
And so I just thought, oh, this is a joke email or something like that.
And I investigated things a little bit further in the email address that was supplied and found out, no, this is real.
This person does exist.
And they were wanting me to do a review for the SPR website on a very interesting book.
It’s a new book, but it’s not actually out yet.
It’s coming out, I believe, April of next year, so 2026.
Oh, this is a pre-publication review.
Okay, cool.
It is.
So a good publisher who’s actually, I guess, ahead of the curve and promoting a book months before it comes out, which is not what academic publishers do.
This is novel.
A trade publisher.
So anyway, the book is absolutely up my alley, and it’s called How to Build a Haunted House, The History of a Cultural Obsession.
And the author is Caitlin Blackwell Baines, and I believe she has a PhD.
She’s an art historian, and she specialises in Gothic art and architecture.
So I thought this is a really interesting background and expertise to have to be writing about this topic.
And I thought I wonder how that could contribute to the conversation and the discussion about
hauntings and haunted houses.
And so anyway, I read this book and I did this review and I just thought, oh, we should talk about this a little bit.
Now the review is available now.
So you can go to the SPR website.
It’s a strange URL.
It’s spr.ac.uk.
And they have a whole section where you can go and look at reviews in general.
And there are lots of reviews there on topics that our listeners would be interested in.
But it’s a really interesting book.
And I think a lot of our listeners would be interested in this topic.
But it wasn’t quite what I expected.
So initially, I thought that this was going to be a kind of blueprint for a haunting.
So a book of this nature with the author having this background, I thought it’s going to be a kind of breakdown of the ingredients that make a house feel haunted.
And I have spoken about this kind of thing myself in the past, going back to
talks that I’ve done at the amazing meeting, Tam and Skepta Camp.
I’ve talked about haunted history and the role that particular houses will play in
hauntings and claims of hauntings.
And so I thought that’s what the book was going to be about.
It’s going to be looking at kind of architectural details of houses and certain atmospheres and tropes as well that we see appear in hauntings across time and across culture.
So I was really excited about that and I thought this is going to be at the intersection of folklore and history and psychology and architecture.
But the book is, I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet, but a bit more like my book, Haunting America.
So it is a kind of guided tour of haunted places.
And so I can see why Nemo got in contact with me and wanted me to review this book because the author does look at a number of places that I’ve researched before.
So in particular, the Myrtles Plantation and the Winchester Mystery House.
And so she looks at these haunted locations and looks at the, explores the legends of each site.
And so it’s not really a book that debunks these stories.
And it’s even more than just telling the folklore too.
It’s really digging into the cultural anxieties that are woven into the folklore.
So she’s looking at not so much did this really happen, but why do we tell these stories?
Why do we tell these stories in these places?
So it’s a lot of familiar stories that our listeners are going to have heard about or that we’ve talked about on this show, predominantly in the United States and the UK, although there is one chapter on…
Japanese hauntings and I thought it was going to be a bit more global and maybe look at other cultures and it kind of dips its toe into other cultures but doesn’t really explore that very much but it is interesting.
So for example we’ll look at the Myrtles Plantation.
And, again, I think another reason they reached out to me is because of that Netflix show that I did a couple of years ago, three years ago.
And when we did that interview, what was interesting to me is that they really wanted to delve into the history.
of the place because it was a plantation.
And to look at the legacy of enslavement that is just not talked about when you go on tours.
I mean, they do talk about enslavement, but they don’t talk about the history of the place with regards to that.
I mean, that’s just left out because I went on one tour, I think the first tour I ever went on, and they talked about the enslaved people as being servants.
didn’t sit too well with me and some of the other people on the tour.
But that is the kind of whitewashed perspective that you get on these kinds of tours.
Yeah.
And so when I did this interview for Netflix, we really kind of delved into that, and I thought this is a really important angle.
And I think that this book does look at that angle and similar angles for other places as well.
So, like, there’s a chapter on the Borley Rectory.
And we’ve talked about that before and we’ll be talking about the place again soon.
Yet again.
Yet again.
I mean, it’s just one of those classic stories, but they…
It’s a really important story.
I don’t know.
I was looking for the right word.
It was not coming to me, but it’s…
I don’t want to say foundational because it’s too new, but it’s just one of those go-to stories that has been really… Its relevance has been elevated by…
by the amount of work that was done on it by serious researchers and maybe people who weren’t quite as serious.
Well, I really do think it’s a seminal story.
And with Harry Price interwoven into it, and I really do think that’s kind of set the foundation for our expectations for…
hauntings nowadays not only with what a place should look like but what kind of history should be behind it but instead of going into the usual stories and and that was an interesting thing with the book too it didn’t really tell all of the folklore and it didn’t even really tell all of the history and i found some inaccuracies unfortunately uh there was some some of the retellings were uh wrong and some of the descriptions of of various things were inaccurate and so
Again, the copy that I received, it was a proof.
So it’s a possibility that they’ll go back and fix some of these things.
So you admit it, the proof of hauntings exists.
Yeah.
Not in that sense.
But there were some inaccuracies there in some of the retellings, and I think some of them were fictionalized a little bit too.
So that was a bit disappointing.
But instead of just telling the usual story of Borley Rectory, and if that’s all it was doing, it really missed the mark in quite a few ways, but instead was talking about the real drama being the lives of the Rectors and the families, the people who lived there from the Bulls through to the Smith family.
No relation, I take it?
No relation, exactly, right.
The Foysters as well.
And so talking about the showmanship of Harry Price and it is the stories behind the story.
And even though the place is long since gone, it really delves into the aspects and ancient history too that is underpinning a lot of these stories.
And when she talks about the Winchester Mystery House, she…
talks about Indigenous people as like an embodiment of past atrocities.
And I thought that was interesting, but I’m just not sure how related that is.
I really wish because her background is in architecture that she would have talked more about the…
are the influence that the current owners have on the building, on the architecture and all of the things that they’ve done.
She didn’t really go into a lot of the kind of oddities of the house being a result of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
And she didn’t talk about the Brown family coming in and adding really strange features to the house.
And I thought, well, that should really have been dealt with since that’s her expertise.
Right.
Exactly.
With an architectural background, you would think that these angles and that sort of facade would be like critical to the support.
Right.
So, yeah.
And I think it explains a lot, too.
And so she states that she’s not wanting to.
debunk these stories um and that’s fair enough but i think that if you do delve into the history and you find that people didn’t exist or that things didn’t take place then you really don’t have that foundation there for the haunting of course you can still explore the the folklore but the very reason for its existence falls apart
Well, and you can you can always include those details and then include also that those are not actually supported by any evidence.
Right.
So, yes, this is a story.
Yeah, I think so, too.
Right.
I think that’s part of honest reporting.
You tell the story, but also, hey, it turns out there’s nothing to support.
This doesn’t stop the story from being interesting or continuing because that’s what stories do.
The further we get away from evidence-based reporting, the more we slide into mythology and folklore, right?
Oh, yes.
It all folds in on itself.
Absolutely.
So she does tend to be skeptical at times, but then finishes the book with a personal encounter that she had at the Myrtles plantation.
So as I read this personal experience, I immediately thought this is an episode of sleep paralysis.
And she does name drop that as well.
So I was pleased about that.
But then she and she talks about some of the underlying reasons why she could have had that.
She had a bout of gastroenteritis and she’d been eating very rich Cajun and Creole food and she’d been drinking a lot of alcohol and she was traveling.
So she was jet lagged.
So, of course, we’ve spoken with.
Brian Sharpless, Dr. Sharpless before about these kinds of factors underlying sleep paralysis.
Probably a lot of haunted people in New Orleans because you go for carnival or whatever, and then you’re traveling, you’re in a different time zone, you’re eating super rich food, you’re drinking, you’re sleeping, you’re constantly being bombarded with stories about the spiritual ghostly history of the city.
And then you go to sleep in a strange place.
Yeah.
And you have an experience.
Yeah, you have an experience.
So I was pleased that she was skeptical in that regard.
But then she kind of ruined things by consulting Frances Kameen.
So I’m not sure if you’ve heard of her before, but she was one of the earlier owners of the Myrtles Plantation.
And she wrote a book in the early 1990s, and it’s called The Myrtles Plantation, The True Story of America’s Most Haunted House.
So as we know, based on a true story series,
something purports to be the true story, then it’s suspicious.
And so this book is, I think, really set up to look rather like Harry Price’s book to kind of set this precedent, you know, for this place is haunted and to lead everyone to believe that it is and to make some money.
And so anyway, the author consults Miss Frances Kameen and she says, oh, yes, of course, this really happened to you and this would have been a paranormal experience.
And I’ve had similar experiences and so many of my guests have had these experiences.
So she just really doubled down on this being.
paranormal experience and so she kind of ends on that note very much that that kind of vein of well i’ll leave it up to you to decide and it’s not a matter of whether it’s true or not it’s just personal experience so i had mixed feelings about the book and uh a saying or a quote kept coming to mind as i was reading the book and that is one that joe nickel used to talk about a lot that’s a quote from the psychologist robert a baker where he talks about there are no haunted
places only haunted people and i think that yeah had she invoked that quote i really think to start with that quote would have been a very strong beginning uh but they’re just i don’t know big gaps in the history of these places and oversights and errors and the references were so thin too now i think she did a lot of good historical research and a lot of good architectural
research too and again that’s her background but if you go and look at the references she’s referenced two or three books for each chapter and I thought that’s just very thin and with all the information that’s out there I think that
had there been more of a leaning into those aspects, I think the book would have been stronger.
But it’s still a very good read.
And it’s a topic that we’re interested in, our listeners are interested in.
So it’s right up our alley, up our collective alleys.
But it’s just a little bit disappointing in some regards.
Yeah, well, that’s a bummer because although…
how many people are going to approach such a sensational topic with this sort of journalistic rigor or skeptical detachment?
I guess the path to a sensational book is an easier walk, right?
And since this is a trade book as well, I think if it had been academic trade or an academic book, I think it…
probably would have lent itself better to the theme of the book.
But I think under the circumstances, it’s still a good read, but I think you’d really want to supplement your reading and your research with other books about these subjects because it doesn’t quite have that sceptical punch that we like.
Right.
And I think our listeners will be probably a little bit more excited about an upcoming interview we have in January with the author of a book called Ghosted.
So we’ll talk about that soon and that’ll get us back to Borley Rectory again.
Oh, yeah.
I think it’s so interesting, too.
We’re going to be talking with another author.
this week as well and probably touch upon all the directory.
So it’s just showing how our interest in these places is maintained and it just endures to this day and it’s just very entertaining.
Well, and again, I still love this stuff.
You know, the sort of my need to have it like to know what’s supported by evidence and what isn’t.
I know that’s not a universal, but I appreciate that our audience likes that, too.
And I’m really glad that there are people out there doing fact checking, that sort of thing.
But I do love a good story, too.
And I really find often, even though, like, for example, I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t literally believe in Bigfoot, but I enjoy Bigfoot.
I enjoy talking to people who’ve had interesting experiences and they think they’ve seen a Bigfoot and all that sort of thing.
I go to Bigfoot conferences.
I like that.
And my goal there is not to tell everybody they’re wrong.
is to try to understand the human experience of cryptids and the supernatural and the paranormal.
I just, I want to know, I want to understand.
I feel exactly the same way and the same way about, you know, paranormal claims and hauntings.
I mean, how many times have we discussed these topics and just how we, we love the stories.
We love the folklore.
I think I love the history just a little bit more.
I think it gives us an additional layer of understanding when we try to contextualize it in
Is this supported by, you know, a materialist view, a rational view?
Does the evidence make sense?
That sort of stuff.
So, you know, it’s another lens to examine the stories, but I can still enjoy the stories, you know.
So, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And it’s a great book, too, for, you know, legend trippers and people because she does go to these places and does more than armchair research.
All right.
Well, that’s this week’s episode in a nutshell.
Yeah, all over the place.
Thank you.
Yeah, a little bit all over the place.
And, you know, sorry for the negative content.
But, you know, this is stuff I thought it was necessary to do a follow-up because I saw several news stories that were tied into Slender Man.
And it’s like, hmm.
Oh, yeah.
The story’s not over yet.
Hmm.
Yeah.
And I hope that ultimately ends up with a positive outcome for, you know, the people involved.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
What in the world is our culture doing?
Something crazy.
Strange times.
Indeed.
All right.
Well, thanks, Karen, for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Still good to talk about these things.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a discussion with me and Karen about the latest news around the Waukesha Slenderman attacker, Morgan Geyser.
Plus, a pre-publication review of How to Build a Haunted House by Caitlin Blackwell-Baines.
Check the show notes for a link to Karen’s review.
Did you know that our theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys?
Every now and then, I think about changing the music, but darn it, I still like it after all these years.
This has been a Monster House presentation

The post S05E10 Slenderman Update + How to Build a Haunted House appeared first on MonsterTalk.

FLASHBACKWe’re looking back at October 5, 2011 this week and an interview with Valerius Geist (February 2, 1938 – July 6, 2021) about the myths and reality of wolves.  How dangerous are they? There’s complexity and nuance here.  Some people fiercely believe wolves are just peaceful misunderstood beautiful animals that would not hurt a person.  Others believe they’re fierce and dangerous predators.  Internet debates will happen but history – and Valerius Geist – suggest using extreme caution if you find yourself in close proximity to these beautiful predators in the wild. MonsterTalk Live (Disco Edition)

—-FLASHBACK—-

ON NOVEMBER 8, 2005 Canadian geological engineering student Kenton Carnegie went for a walk. He told people that he’d be back by 5 pm. When he hadn’t returned by 7 pm, a search party went out and discovered his remains in the woods. In this episode of Monstertalk (a follow-up to last week’s), we interview professor Valerius Geist about the true cause of Kenton Carnegie’s death. Some people thought he was killed by a bear, but more likely he was killed by a myth.Todd Svarckopf confronting a habituated wolf, four days before the Kenton Joel Carnegie wolf attack. (Photo by Chris van Gelder at North Point Landing Saskatchewan)Further Reading

Music

Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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On the afternoon of November 8, 2005, a geological engineering student named Kenton Carnegie went for a walk in the woods of Saskatchewan. It was supposed to be a 90-minute excursion. Later, as the sun set, he hadn’t returned. A search party was formed, and what they found in the woods was horrifying. A beast, or beasts, had torn the young man to pieces. But what animal was responsible? The answer has been surprisingly controversial with two camps emerging. One side believed it was a bear and the other that it was wolves. One thing seems clear. If you go into the woods with wolves believing that they won’t harm you, there’s a chance you’ll find yourself dead wrong.

It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. A giant hairy creature. Part ape, part man. In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland. It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.

MONSTER TALK

But if that’s true, then why don’t we see those kinds of behaviors in North America? I think that question’s answered pretty well in our interview today, but it’s worth noting that since 2005, we’ve had at least two probable cases of wolf predation on humans. The case we’ll be talking about in this interview is that of Kenton Carnegie, but in 2010 in Alaska, Candace Berner was such a victim as well. And in Russia, India, Afghanistan, and many other places in the world, wherever wolves and humans intersect, there’s a risk of such attacks. I don’t want to be lurid. The subject matter of this episode is gruesome and frightening. The warning here is not that wolves are fearsome man-killers, but remember that we humans are made of meat. And when it comes down to it, as far as the wolves are concerned, we’re no different from elk or deer or, for that matter, sheep. We’re not magically protected by our status as intelligent creatures. Rather, we’re damned by our soft bellies and lack of natural defenses. To understand what causes wolves to attack people, we need to understand their behavior. And the study of animal behavior is the job of an ethologist.

Today on Monster Talk, we’ll be talking with ethologist and professor emeritus of environmental science from the University of Calgary, Canada, Professor Valerius Geist, who has extensively studied the case of Kenton Carnegie and what makes wolves eat people.

Blake Smith: So you’re Valerius Geist, and you’re an ethologist and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Calgary?

Valerius Geist: Yes.

Blake Smith: Okay. And I came across your name while researching wolf behavior and wolf violence. And specifically about the case of Kenton Carnegie, who was killed in an animal attack in 2000.

Valerius Geist: That’s right. Yes, I was very much involved in that because his family asked me to investigate this, and I was one of three scientists who totally independently investigated the case and came to the conclusion that it was wolves that killed him. And, of course, prepared ourselves to go to court on that. And it was Mark McNay from Alaska who was chosen by the court to be the speaker. I don’t want to tell you the circumstances, but he did an absolutely first-rate job. And Mark McNay also left a large, very large… which was not published. My report was not published either, incidentally, but mine has been circulating at least in the Internet.

Blake Smith: That’s true. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Now, before we talk about the case, how did you come to study the aggressiveness of wolves?

Valerius Geist: Very simply. You see, I’m a zoologist. I retired, and we have an acreage on Vancouver Island. We moved to this acreage in 1955, and this was a wild-back paradise. We had trumpeter swans in the meadows. Canada geese, pheasants, and about 120 deer also scattered through the meadow systems back of our house. And so for the next four years, being a zoologist, of course, and a hunter, I sensed these, and we had about 30-some deer per square mile at that time point. And only once I saw a wolf track, and I was very excited by that because I had seen and observed wolves when I was doing my studies of stone sheep and mountain goats. It’s in Northern British Columbia in 1961 to 65. And I had wolves visiting my area quite commonly, about once every two weeks. And there was a group of seven that repeatedly came, and they were very visible because they were out in the open above Timberline. It was an ideal situation, much better than anything my good friend David Meach, for instance, had. And so my views of wolves were then formed by observing these very shy, very beautiful, very large animals, etc.

Now, I did work, of course, with large mammals, but only with the hoofed large mammals, with the prey of wolves, basically, and wrote in 1988 a book about deer, in which I basically offered the opinion that various species differed by their anti-predator strategies, although I had not really studied the predators myself to an extent, but I had studied the prey in detail. And then, in 1999, on the 8th of January, in fact, my son was here, and we went out after a snowfall, and lo and behold, we discovered tariff wall tracks further back into an area where there were quite a few deer. And I said to my son, by golly, maybe we’re going to have a pack this summer. Well, that’s what we did. And within three months, we had no more deer. They were gone completely. There were snowfalls in November, and I was out there sentencing, and there was not a track available. So the wolves then settled themselves around our neighbor’s place because he had sheep. They were very attracted to these animals. He had five dogs, and the wolf pack and the dogs developed a deer-enemy complex because they met roughly at 5.30 at an old railway grade. One pack on one side, the dogs on the other, and they howled and barked at each other. And this was a ritual you could set your clock by for a while. So these wolves then ran basically out of food and began targeting people. And I reported on that at a meeting of the Wildlife Society and described in some detail the seven steps by which you can recognize that wolves are targeting people. And it turns out that six years earlier, two scientists in California had described exactly the same steps for coyotes when they were targeting children in urban parks. So this is how I got into it. And I was, because we suddenly were confronted with wolves, and wolves were behaving here in a manner that nobody had ever written about in North America. But they were behaving very much like Russian wolves. And so one thing led to the next, and I began to study wolves from the perspective of when do wolves become dangerous to people. And it’s an incredible story in many regards. But that’s how it began.

Blake Smith: So the Carnegie case in particular was very tragic.

Valerius Geist: Oh my God, was it ever tragic. Horribly tragic.

Blake Smith: Yeah, it was really frustrating to read about the struggle between people who wanted it to not be a wolf killing and those who said it was. So how did that play out?

Valerius Geist: Well, the way it played out was the following. The people that wanted to make sure that it was not a wolf—It was basically Paul Paquette. Paul Paquette is a scientist whom I have known since he was a graduate student. I knew him as a professor as a graduate student. He was a fairly good man, but he has become not a scientist nowadays, but an advocate. You see, from the perspective of the wolf people in those days, it was unthinkable that wolves would attack humans because there was no history of that in North America. Later on, I’ll tell you why there wasn’t a history. There’s a very good explanation for that. But let’s stay with Paul Paquette.

So as it started out, shortly after Kenton was killed, two people that are of similar importance came to inspect the location. One was a lady. She was the coroner. She was also the information officer for the tribe, basically. And this lady had been raised in northern Saskatchewan until she was 14 years of age in the bush. And she was raised by her father as a hunter and a trapper and a fisher. In other words, she was very, very, very familiar how to make a living in the bush as a child, as a teenager. In other words, she had a very, very good education in tracking. The second person was the constable. He was also a native from Northern Bridge Club, Saskatchewan, and he was also raised as a hunter and trapper. These people were on the spot, and the RCMP officer… the native RCMP officer still saw the wolves there. He fired the shotgun to scare them away, and they inspected the area in detail, and between these two people, they wrote a very good report about what has happened. Now, when this report went to the coroner of Saskatchewan, the man probably didn’t realize the significance of the people that had investigated this tragedy, and he wanted to have it hardened up by doing it via the scientific route. And so he got two scientists involved from the University of Saskatchewan. The other one was Paul Paquette.

Well, Paul Paquette came, and all that Paul Paquette had to work with is what the rest of us had to work with after the fact. And that was the pictures taken by the constable of the tragedy and the scene. And I can tell you the pictures of the body is something the most horrible you can imagine. They are not available. God thanks. The family has withdrawn them, and they’re keeping them under lock and key, basically. And I don’t have them either. I returned my copies to them. But when Paul looked at the pictures, he saw there was a lake, and there were very large holes in the snow. And he said, this couldn’t possibly be wolves. It must be a bear. Well, what he made a mistake of was so elementary, particularly in the coroner’s hearing that it came out, was so embarrassing, is that if you live in the North Country and you travel across a lake, you know very well that the lake ice buckles, and that there are going to be lenses of water standing on the ice covered by snow, and you are going to break through those things, guaranteed. And so if you walk across it, it’s going to be your footsteps in the snow, very nicely, and all of a sudden, boom, you break through into the water below, which is usually about six inches or something like that. Normally, these overflows are quite shallow, yeah? And you’re going to have a huge footprint as a consequence. And that’s elementary tracking. Everybody who has worked to any extent in the North Country, like I have, knows right away that if anything runs across the lake, you’re going to have these big things as well as the tracks. What counts was, of course, the tracks on land as they came out from the ice. And so we then took the pictures, and I know that Mark McNay took his to four colleagues in Alaska, and they examined everything. They could find only wolf tracks and a fox track, incidentally. And I sent mine to some colleagues in Finland. Not that I cannot interpret. I can. And I interpreted what I saw in front of me as being wolf tracks. And they also came up, which is very cute, with a fox track.

Blake Smith: There’s no bear tracks anywhere. There are human tracks, wolf tracks.

Valerius Geist: Yes, but no bear tracks. And besides, there was fresh snow on the ground. So that was a group of scientists that examined the fox tracks. But after the coroner and the officers had examined them, the Saskatchewan government sent up two game wardens. They came a day late, and they also examined the scene, and they also could find nothing else except the wolf tracks. And remember, if a bear had gone into the area, no matter how much trampling had occurred in the spot where Kenton Carnegie was killed, all you had to do was go a little bit further to see where… if the bears, if they were entering, were coming, you would see the track. And bear track is utterly unmistakable. None of that was happening. So we had two native people that examined the track. We had two very competent hunters, incidentally, also examining this area, only found wolf tracks. We had two game wardens examining this. They also found nothing else. And we had, looking at the pictures, four scientists from Alaska and two scientists from Finland and myself and Mike McNay and another gentleman from Ontario, another scientist from Ontario. All we saw was wolf tracks. Now, the only way a bear could have been there is if he had wings, he was flying, and his feet never touched the telltale snow.

Blake Smith: Which is very unusual for bears, right?

Valerius Geist: It would have been a touch unusual for bears. There we go. That’s right. I have written a lengthy article about that, just to clarify it, and there’s been another article, a good one, that came out on it as well. They’re available, and I can send them to you if and when you need them. But what was more interesting to me was to then investigate why, what were the circumstances that led to this huge tragedy, and why did it happen, and why, for that matter, did we have wolves behave in one way globally, and quite another one in North America. And it was crystal clear that here on the island, I had the situation where the wolves were behaving globally. I called them, they behaved like Russian wolves. And the conditions of these were that they run out of food, basically, that they are in close proximity to habitations, that they then take down dogs and cats, then they turn on to livestock, and eventually they target human beings. We’re the very last in line, mind you, but we are still on the menu. That very last point, mind you.

So what’s the difference between here, Russia, oh my God, in France, there’s a book out where the historian describes over 3,000 deaths. 3,000 people killed in France. And in Italy, something similar. In Germany, anyway. Why the difference? Well, the difference is very simple. From 1920 onwards into the 30s, 40s, 50s, ending in the 60s. We had a situation where in the heartland of wolf distribution in North America, which is Canada, northern Canada, there were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of impoverished men, trappers, which were trying to make a grub stake catching fur and making less than $500 a winter, incidentally. And desperately poor men, particularly in the 1920s and 30s. And that was virtually the only thing to have. There was no social assistance or anything of this nature. If you wanted to eat, you better have money. The only way you got money was you went trapping. And so we had, in Alberta alone, 5,000 trappers, licensed trappers. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and so on and so on and so forth. You can see there are tens of thousands of trappers. Now, these trappers had no loves for wolves. Guaranteed, because for two reasons. Whenever wolves show up, game disappears, and the men have nothing to hunt and kill for themselves and their dog teams. And that was very bitter when that happened. There was nothing to sneeze about. I have followed the writings of some of these trappers. They escaped starvation, sometimes by a hair. It was so important for them to have wildlife available to kill and to shoot for themselves. So when wolves showed up, gone was the wildlife. The second reason is that wolves followed their trap lines, which were very long, and wolves could travel a long ways, and the wolves would destroy the fur that they had caught. So they had absolutely no love for wolves, and with every means, legal or illegal, they were trying to capture these wolves on the trap line. Now, they were, on top of that, encouraged by a bounty. And the bounty was set in such a fashion that it was worth while bringing in the wolf for bounty than selling the fur. And this was recognized, the worthlessness of the fur, in other words, was recognized. So all they had to bring in at Alberta was just simply the scalp of the wolf, and they were getting their full payment there.

So, first of all, the trappers, encouraged by a bounty and the misbehavior of wolves, were trying to kill every wolf possible. Then there were native people, which were also participating, but which we know very, very little. On top of that, we had predator control officers, which were operating in the livestock zones, and they were killing every wolf in sight. Then it was taken as good behavior and good form for wardens, I know that in British Columbia, to go out after the season poisoning wolves. On top of that, you had an open season on wolves for anybody to kill them anytime, anyplace, wherever you want to. From the bounty records, we know that the trappers brought in for bounties roughly in Alberta about 1,000 wolves a year at peak periods. And it turns out that there was roughly one wolf killed for every five trappers. It means it’s not that easy to do so. Well, in addition to that, a rabies breakout in the early 1950s in the north led to fairly massive wolf poisoning from the air by horse meat being thrown out of aircraft. and onto lakes and along river systems and so on and so forth. And that was terminated in 1961. And that’s when I went to the wilderness, incidentally, in 1961. And we had wild back coming out of our ears at that point because of the severe reduction in wolf populations which had taken place.

But the most important thing is that everybody who knew wolves in Canada, myself included, knew them only when they were at low concentration, absent in most areas, very very shy and these wolves were of course no problem they didn’t kill livestock because if they did they were dead in a very short time killed by livestock by federal control officers and the wolf is in fact some of the most remarkable observations were made in that period because we had height of rabbit concentrations which happened every 10 years and the wolves were taking advantage of those and when they were on rabbit feed they ignored everything And so my good friend, the late Reinald Eben Ebenau, describes how wolves are hunting rabbits right in amongst wintering moose, and the wolves don’t give a damn about the moose, and the moose don’t give a damn about the wolves. Remarkable observations of that kind. So when the wolves are at very, very low number, when they’re being controlled by one of the most murderous machines that has ever existed in controlling wolves, of course, there are no attacks on humans. There are no attacks on livestock to speak of. Wolves are very shy indeed. It’s only when they run out of feed, when they are in close proximity of humans, that they become a totally different animal. And so everybody who has studied wolves ignored what I have just told you. They were not aware of that. And they thought the kind of wolves that they met was the natural behavior of wolves. It wasn’t. It was the most unnatural behavior because it was an artifact of extreme control.

Blake Smith: What are the signs that wolves will hunt humans?

Valerius Geist: The signs are that they begin to observe humans. They sit down and watch and watch and watch and watch humans. And eventually they come closer and closer to humans. My wife and I have experienced a wolf coming to within about 10 faces of us, standing there, watching us. wolves are observation learners. We know that from studies carried out by colleagues that studied wolves. They’re observation learners and they learn, I don’t want to go into detail, but the point is this is how you know that the wolves are targeting you because they keep on watching and watching and following you and watching you. And then comes the preliminary attacks which were beautifully described for the Kenton Carnegie case because four days before he was killed, two wolves attacked two Men from the camp, one a pilot, the other one a physicist. And the two young men grabbed hold of little trees growing in the bog and smashed them towards the wolves and kept the wolves away and thought it was a lark, basically, and returned to camp. But they took beautiful pictures of the wolves and thought this was an exploratory attack. And that’s totally predictable.

Blake Smith: So it sounds like in India, from my research, as well as in Russia,

Valerius Geist: Oh, my God, yes, India and Russia and Japan and Korea and Turkey, Finland, Germany, France, Italy, all of those places. If you had the time, I could send you the articles I’ve written about that. And my originals have all the references in it. Look at that.

Blake Smith: Yet there seems to be this sort of myth that wolves don’t harm people.

Valerius Geist: That’s a myth. And by the way, this myth has killed not just Kenton Carnegie. It killed three people that I know of.

Blake Smith: Well, that is very helpful. I really appreciate your time on this.

Valerius Geist: Okay. I have to run, actually.

Blake Smith: Yeah, I know. I know. So thank you so much for talking to me. I really appreciate it. And we’ll put links to your material on the website.Valerius Geist: Thank you.

The post S05E09 – Flashback: Bad Wolf appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We’re joined by Sydney Davidson – student of Dr. Jeb Card (IRO) – to discuss her research into Frogmen Festivals, and to discuss monster festivals and some of the reasons people report they attend. (And it’s not all about the plushies and t-shirts.)

Darren Naish on The Loveland Frog

The Myth of Disenchantment

Frogman Festival 2026

Close Encounters at Kelly And Others of 1955 (affiliate link)

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————-

Monster House presents.
This is the ad-supported version of Monster Talk.
We’re dependent upon the revenue from these ads and from the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash monster talk to continue making this show.
As a disclaimer, your hosts are unable to control what ads you will hear.
And while we have done what we can to avoid ads that are divisive, the system that injects them sometimes ignores our preferences and always seems to ignore our efforts to not interrupt the conversational flow.
While we understand this can be disruptive, we’re trying our best.
Patreon remains the best way to enjoy commercial-free listening to our content.
Plus, you generally get extended coverage of the subject.
We’re working on other ways to consume our content as well, so please stay tuned.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
In 1954, the last of the great universal film monsters was born when a scaly gill man emerged from the swampy waters of the Black Lagoon to terrorize Julia Adams in 3D.
Science couldn’t explain it.
But there it was, alive in the deep, deep waters of the Amazon.
A throwback to a creature that had existed a hundred million years ago.
Immensely strong and destructive.
A woman’s beauty, the bait that brought it out of its lair.
In 1955, two peculiar American water monsters appeared.
In Evansville, Indiana, a mysterious green-clawed beast was alleged to have attacked Naomi Johnson.
She never saw the furry thing that grabbed her, but it stained her leg green.
Was it a mossy limb combined with a misunderstanding of what was happening beneath the water?
It made the papers, but a week later, all the monster fuel went to the Kelly Hopkinsville Goblin attack, which had guns and UFOs and a carnival-like atmosphere that might be more than coincidence.
The other watery monster appeared earlier in 1955 when Robert Honeycutt said he saw three humanoid figures beside the road off the Madeira Loveland Turnpike.
The encounter has an eerie dreamlike quality as Honeycutt first thinks the beings are praying and then realizes they’re not even human.
And he’s curious, not much afraid for much of the encounter.
And there’s lots of details to this story, all captured by investigator Lynn Stringfield and written up in the book, Close Encounters at Kelly and Others of 1955.
Look, I have a lot of monster books on my shelves, but authors Isabel Davis and Ted Bledger really did incredible amateur journalism work on this volume, and it’s a pity that their efforts aren’t more widely recognized or cited in places like Wikipedia.
The Loveland Frog entry for Wikipedia is decidedly bare of details and focuses much more on the quite strange 1970s sighting, which, in my opinion, has a lot of the hallmarks of tomfoolery.
But the Davis and Bletcher book is an account of the Kelly Hopkinsville case, yet has extensive context about the incredibly diverse but widespread sightings of little men all around the world in this 1950s flying saucer scare context.
And the thing that I find fascinating is the way this little spaceman idea was rampant.
It was in the air.
And with radio shows like Long John Neville’s Party Line, I guess you could say it was on the air as well.
As a culture, America was primed for little men from outer space, or maybe from fairy lore, or even from other dimensions, as Jacques Vallée and John Kill would later suggest.
Well, that was 70 years ago, and we still haven’t turned up frogmen, or gillmen, or goblins, yet these monsters live on in our cultural memories and our social behaviors.
Today, we’re going to talk with Sydney Davidson, a student of my friend and colleague, Dr. Jeb Card, who did some anthropological work looking at the people who come to monster festivals inspired by these stories.
Monster Talk.
Our guest tonight is Sydney Davidson, who did some research into the Loveland Frog and the Loveland Frog Festival.
And we’ve asked her to talk about an anthropological look at this monster and how the community of Loveland has engaged with the story culturally.
But you’re not really just talking about one festival, are you?
And we should also probably let you introduce yourself.
So why don’t you tell us who you are and then talk about festivals around the Loveland Frog?
Yeah, so I’m Sydney Davidson.
I recently graduated.
I did my senior research project on the Loveland Frogman.
So this is…
kind of exciting to get to talk about it on this kind of a mode.
I’m in grad school right now.
I’m getting my Master’s of Library Science.
Sydney, can you tell us a little bit about your interest in this topic, how you discovered this topic and what led you to research Frog Boy, Frog Man?
So it’s like not like a very straight, you know, answer because I’ve always kind of been interested in this.
My parents watched Finding Bigfoot when I was a kid and had me sit in the room with them.
So I always kind of knew about this stuff.
But it was just like I met Dr. Card, Jeb Card, who you do in research of with.
Blake does.
And I don’t know why we would just talk sometimes and we talk about cryptids.
And then he just came up to me one day and he’s like, are you doing anything next year?
And I was like, I mean, probably doing at least something.
And then he was like, well, they asked me to talk at the Loveland Frogman and I get a booth and like, I wouldn’t sell anything.
Like I don’t have anything to sell.
So you could do like research there.
And I was like, okay, that sounds good.
But I thought he would mention it and then like never talk about it again.
And then he was like, and he was like, and then like, like a month later, he’s like, okay, well, we need to start planning your research.
And I was like, okay, so they’re like, this is happening.
So and I live kind of near Loveland.
I honestly had never really heard that much about the Loveland Frogman before I started doing the research.
But because it’s like kind of like a niche, like it’s, it’s a niche cryptid, like not a lot of people know about it even.
like in Loveland or like in the bigger cryptozoological community.
But yeah, that’s just kind of how I got here.
And then it’s been a wild two couple of years trying to, you know.
bring everything together and kind of go into a bunch of different festivals um I went to one that was kind of it’s a like it’s on the leap year which is a fun pun right but it’s put on by the city of Loveland I know right it took me a minute I’m not not big on wordplay so
And it’s literally called return of the love, like return of the frog man.
So it’s a like put on by the city themed frog man festival.
And then I went to cryptid con, which is in, Oh, what is it?
Lexington, Lexington, Kentucky.
So I went down there and then I went, which was, and those were all kind of preliminary just to kind of get an idea of what these festivals might look like.
And the main one I did is the Loveland frog man festival that’s in March.
of every year.
It’s a weekend long event.
Well, you mentioned that it’s not a well-known cryptid.
And in fact, I think we’ve only really dedicated one episode to it.
And that was back in 2020 with Ryan Haupt, which I think also introduced me to Skyline Chili, which was, yeah.
So obviously really important findings.
Yes.
Well, I do think that we’ve name-dropped the Loveland Frog a few times.
And
Years and years ago I wrote an article about the Loveland frog.
I’m living in Denver, Colorado, and we’ve got a local legend.
There’s a Loveland around here.
So I’ve always believed that the Loveland frog story from Ohio was transplanted, transported here as a legend.
And, yeah, so that’s why I slipped up earlier and said the frog boy because that’s sometimes what our local version is called.
It’s the frog boy.
It’s this kind of hybrid frog.
boy or frog man depending on uh who’s telling the story but it’s been around for maybe about 40 years as as far as i know so yeah it’s inspired so it’s inspired lots of uh legends i think in in other places too
It spawned them, I think.
What are you going to do with me?
What are you going to do?
But do you want to briefly remind listeners what the Loveland Frog story is before we get into the festival stuff?
I realize your research was not about the monster.
It was about the festivals.
But what is the Loveland Frog story in Ohio?
So it all started in 1955.
So what, this is, yeah, it’s been 70 years.
So it kind of started there.
It’s a maitre d’ and he’s driving towards Branch Hill, which is like towards Cincinnati, which most people probably have no idea where Loveland, Ohio is, which is totally fine.
It’s Ohio, but it’s in Southwest.
It’s in the Southwest, Ohio.
It’s in the greater Cincinnati area.
So Branch Hill would be towards going south towards Cincinnati.
And so, of course, it’s at night because every sighting is at night.
And this guy, he’s he’s driving.
He stops.
He sees like this group of like three guys.
One of them has like a weird like lump on its back.
It’s holding a stick.
It, you know, puts the stick in the air, sparks fly out of the stick, he calls the stick a wand, and then they disappear into the night.
But the most important part is that when he was describing it, he said that their mouths were frog-like.
Who really knows what that means, but that’s what he called them.
And then nothing is seen until 1972 when a police officer is driving along the Little Miami River, which is a tributary of the Miami River.
And then and he sees the frog like creature on the side of the road and it kind of like is standing there.
It’s bipedal.
And then it kind of jumps over a barrier and goes towards the river.
And then two weeks later, a police officer sees a figure that looks like it, or it may be the same figure, we don’t know.
And he shoots it and they think that they’ve caught it.
It’s like a weird, we don’t even really know what he shot.
We don’t really know what he found, but he says that he shot it and got rid of the figure.
And now…
And there have been other sightings, but these are like the three big ones is all of like those three sightings.
And that’s really the story of the Loveland Frogman.
I wish it was like kind of more exciting.
It’s a little strange, but we got that bit of mystery.
Yeah.
so you’ve taken an anthropological approach to understand the Loveland frog.
Can you tell us a little bit about your research and how you engage with the topic and also the people who engage with this sort of thing as well?
Yeah.
So I, which is us too, right?
I mean, like, right.
Cause like, that was like, well, like to like do a branch off here, but like, that was like also part of the problem of like, or one of the hardest part was like, this is like kind of,
autoethnographical at the same time like dr card had to keep reminding me he’s like you’re interacting with this too like you’re going to the festival like so that kind of made it difficult to like trying to take an anthropological approach but i really was just kind of looking out like the people that went to these festivals and kind of why they went to the festivals um
And so I had like some surveys, which was like the basis of my research was I had people answer questions.
And mostly they were about they weren’t so much about the Loveland frog as they were about why like they’re there.
What got them into the paranormal?
How much do they know about the paranormal?
Like.
we use the Mothman, the infamous Mothman as kind of a branching off point too, of being like, this is what we consider to be like the pinnacle cryptid.
So how much do you know about this versus how much do you know about the frog man?
And why are you here?
What brought you here?
What are you most looking forward to?
And so by like kind of talking to people, we were trying to, you know, get the, the why, get to the heart of the why.
And yeah,
What else did we do?
We did all like it was there.
It was a lot to course through all of the data.
It was a lot of because it was mostly short answer responses.
So there was a lot hidden in there.
Well, I just really recently got back from I don’t know if you can see this or not.
This is from the Green Ice Festival, which is the second year they’ve done this in Georgia.
Similarly, tiny.
not well-known monster, but I want to say the kids who put it together, they’re young.
They’re in their, I think they’re in their twenties, but they, you know, it’s not a well-known monster, but it is a legit piece of folklore and has pulled together a really nice little festival at the North Georgia.
And there’s not much going on up there.
It’s a, it’s a very rural, just, there’s not a lot of people there.
Right.
But a lot of people come from around the area from all over to, to go to these festivals.
So I,
It’s like knowing why.
I mean, I know why I go, you know, but I may have different reasons than the average person.
So I think it’s interesting that you were trying to look at their motivations.
And you were also looking at how they got interested in this stuff at all, right?
Yeah.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
You divided it into their interest into media driven and impersonally driven, right?
When I was looking through, so I like literally just asked the question, what got you into the paranormal?
And it was like open ended.
People could write in anything and people did write in anything.
And so.
It’s a survey to an open event.
People always write crazy stuff.
So it was people mostly said TV shows.
I think The X-Files was the number one TV show that people cited being important to them.
But then also people said podcasts and YouTube, BuzzFeed Unsolved, those shows.
But then other people were like…
like I saw a ghost when I was six in my bedroom.
Like, so it was like people being like, I had personal experiences.
Like I’ve seen Bigfoot, like they’ve, I’ve seen a UFO.
Like they were like, I have a personal experience with the paranormal or with cryptozoology.
And that’s what got me into this.
So it was either they saw it on TV or they saw it personally.
And I thought that was like an interesting divide because it was literally like right down the middle.
It was like 50% of people that answered the question said.
I saw a TV show or I saw like something on YouTube or I listened to something.
And then 50 people were like, I saw it myself.
I saw it with my own two eyes, which was like, I, we thought was very interesting.
Your findings touch upon a paradox too, that the primary purpose of the event appeared to be purchasing merchandise.
And yet survey respondents expressed a strong interest in cryptozoology itself.
Yeah.
We thought, cause like the whole event, like there were speakers, of course,
There were like some like like events for kids to go to.
But like you walk in and it’s just like booth after booth of selling stuff.
And a lot of it wasn’t it was like T-shirts, like silly T-shirts that were like.
you know, I went, I saw the Loveland Frogman and all I got was this, you know, stupid t-shirt.
Like that was kind of like, like that kind of merch.
Like none of it was like what you would consider to be like serious.
Like it’s kind of like almost making fun of cryptozoology, which I thought was interesting because people spent real money to go to this event and you would think that they would want to take it seriously.
But then a lot of the survey responses, like merch was one of the things that people talked about.
But it wasn’t like the thing.
People were like, I wanted to come and I wanted to talk about this.
I wanted to learn more.
Like I am interested in the paranormal.
And so I kind of we kind of saw it as, you know, I kind of called it like a double edged sword when I was trying to describe it to people was like, you know, being into the cryptozoology is maybe not the most popular thing.
And some people there is a stigma associated with it.
And I recognize that.
And so by going there and saying, oh, well, I just wanted to buy like a silly T-shirt, it kind of makes it easier for people to actually go what they’re there for.
We talked a lot about like Baudrillard, which is like his idea of simulacra, where it’s something hidden inside of something else.
And so it was, I’m really interested in the paranormal, but I’m going to pretend that I’m only interested in the merch and that this silly T-shirt is the only reason why I’m here.
Yeah, that’s interesting.
Oh, did you question or did you survey any of the children?
I actually was not allowed to because IRB internal review board, because it was a university.
It’s okay.
But I was just thinking, if you ask the kids questions, it could be a tadpole.
Oh, I wish it would have been interesting because there were some people that came up and they were like 16.
And I was like, I want to know what you have to say.
Yeah, well, no, that’s true.
But yeah, the IRB puts limits on these things.
But so your contention is that they could all say they were there for the merchandise, but some people were there to engage with the monstery side of it.
Some people were there for the stories.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I find it interesting.
You mentioned the stigma associated with cryptozoology.
Did that kind of come out in the surveys at all?
Did people express that?
You know, some people said it to me, maybe not necessarily like…
in the actual survey they were just we were kind of like just chatting and they were like you know kind of talking about like you know like oh like i’m really glad you’ve asked about this people don’t ask about it very often but then i think one of the bigger like things was that like we did have quite a few people who didn’t answer seriously and based off of the things that they said i could tell that like they thought that my questions were
not to be taken seriously like I was like you don’t think that this like has value and that’s okay that happens with every survey but I kind of saw it more with the things that people said or rather than the thing than people saying like outright like oh like I get made fun of this but I get made fun of for believing in this and maybe a type of bravado too where they don’t want to be seen as being crazy for being interested in this sort of thing
Yeah, that’s probably not limited to just monster festivals.
I know like down in Atlanta, we have this big media event called Dragon Con, which is grown from being, let’s say, a Star Trek, Star Wars type fandom thing to being this mass media culture event or pretty much any type of show.
I think maybe they don’t have, you know, I was going to say maybe they don’t have like Spanish language soap operas.
But other than that, like they do have K-dramas.
So it’s really, I may just not know because they have so many things there.
But there will be people there who are like clearly engaging with this stuff in a deep level of fandom, you know, putting on cosplays.
And, you know, seriously, you know, trying to show not just their craftsmanship, but their their I don’t know, what would you call it?
Their tribe, you know, like who they represent.
But at the same time, there’s people who are like rolling their eyes.
I’m just here because my boyfriend’s here or my girlfriend’s here until they get to the merch room.
And then all of a sudden they’re buying all kinds of things conspicuously about one topic.
So it’s like they’re secretly fans of something, you know.
Right.
Yeah.
Don’t want to admit it.
We probably have not really covered this for Monster Talk.
We’ve lived it.
But, you know, being an enthusiast of the paranormal does put you on the outside in some ways.
Yet, at the same time…
weird stuff has this huge cultural footprint and clearly is a massive moneymaker.
So it’s like, but I, some people seem to like to mock it from the outside, even though clearly the world is living it.
We’re in it.
You know, when I was talking like Dr. Card was like, don’t forget, like you’re there too.
Like, even if you think that you’re like, not as weird and I’m putting weird in air quotes as other people, like you, you,
are here like you’ve dedicated a weekend of your life to going to this event and i think that’s something i’d like to remind some people while they’re there like i’m trying to think there’s a word for that in anthropology when you’re studying something from the outside versus the inside i can’t remember what it is
Emic is internal, etic is external.
You were kind of emic, right?
Yes.
And we in linguistics talk about the observer’s paradox.
So I think you probably would have experienced that too, where it’s one thing to go along and be a participant and just observe things.
But then if you start handing out surveys, people are going to react to you differently.
Yeah, no, it definitely was like because there would be some times where I would because I had like I had some like of my classmates there who agreed to come with me just to like, you know, have other people at the table.
And my mom was there, too, just because she’s also interested in this stuff.
But I when I would walk around like it was like I was like.
you know just a regular observer like i didn’t have anything on me saying like oh i’m like here as a researcher so like getting to talk to people outside of that like outside of the booth versus behind the booth was also very interesting yeah different perspectives yeah yeah i think that comes up uh a lot in religious studies where
Especially because there’s a orthopraxy side to religion.
So by being there, there’s a perception that you ought to be there as a participant and as a believer, you know, and then when you’re there studying it.
there’s a concern that maybe you’re in some way mocking it or deconstructing it, you know?
And, and I, I think that that’s really interesting to me how different fields of human study have to deal with this same sort of concept.
So also I like monsters and t-shirts.
So I, you know, I, I get it.
See things from both sides.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Coming up to my booth, you might be skeptical.
You’re like, oh, this is a college student.
She doesn’t care.
I could get it.
She’s doing this as a research project.
She…
you know, like she may make fun of me in this, but yeah, exactly.
But I did try to wear like, you know, frog related t-shirts.
So I hope people like you do.
Yeah.
You got to wear like, I was like, hopefully like I look like a little bit more in the crowd.
We’ve talked a little bit, and this is maybe a little open-ended, but we’ve talked a little bit on the show before about re-enchantment.
And you said in your paper, or what is that called, by the way?
I know what I see is a one-sheet PDF.
I don’t know what that’s actually called, though.
Like, is that…
That’s a graphic.
But is that actually like what what did you do with this?
How did you present this?
What have you done with this work?
I guess that’s a good question to ask.
Yeah.
So it was for my honors project, which meant that, you know, like I turned it into Dr. Card and he gave me a grade.
Gotcha.
So it was like an actual school project.
But then at Miami, we have it’s called the Undergraduate Research Forum, which is a poster presentation.
Oh, OK. That’s why it looks like an infographic.
OK. Yeah.
So like when I would stand in front of the poster and people would come up and ask me questions about the Loveland Frogman.
Oh, that was the most interesting poster there, of course.
Well, I would imagine so.
I mean, who’s going to compete with the Loveland Frog?
That’s right.
So re-enchantment.
So I think for a long time, I just sort of took the re-enchantment concept at face value that because it’s such a compelling argument, right, that we live in a world of materialism and science and that’s pushing out, you know, these other ideas and pushing out folklore.
And I think it was only fairly recently that we had on
um an author who kind of questioned that and said wait a minute maybe that’s not true you know i think was it weber i think who came up with this idea at the turn of the last century right yeah um but
It’s a great way of thinking about this because people want magic in their lives.
But at the same time, as we were just discussing, it’s everywhere.
It’s simultaneous.
People want to reject it, but it’s everywhere.
People have sort of categorized, I don’t believe in that.
I don’t believe in that.
But at the same time, the books sell, the movies sell, the stories are told.
So how did you…
engage with this re-enchantment concept here?
And what do you think about it ultimately?
Cause I mean, it seems to fit, but you know, where do you come down on that?
I’m really interested.
I, I think it would be interesting to listen to who you brought on your podcast.
Talk about how it may like, and I’m guessing, was it just about what you said?
Like that there’s enchantment like everywhere.
Is that kind of what their argument was?
I feel bad.
Let me, let me look his name up because I feel bad that I can’t.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I just think that’s really interesting.
Yeah, he wrote an entire book on this concept that re-enchantment itself is the myth of disenchantment.
I really like this guy, Jason Josephson Storm.
Cool name.
Totally goth professor, right?
That’s the most goth professor.
Yeah, that was back in, that was, golly, that was only a year ago?
2025 has been a million years.
But anyway, that was Season 3, Episode 31, The Myth of Disenchantment.
And basically, he made the argument that, yeah, this concept is really compelling, but also, look at the world.
There’s enchantment everywhere.
It’s all around us all the time.
And if people are struggling against it or trying to recapture enchantment, they don’t have to go very far because there’s stories of enchantment all around us.
But yet, again…
And the concept that people are pushing back and because I literally hear people saying it, talking about the ivory tower academics and how they reject everything.
And they all are these closed minded skeptics.
And, you know, they have got no magic in their life.
They’re godless atheists.
They’re baby eaters is what they are.
We all know this.
So, in fact, my baby’s almost done upstairs.
I got to get up there and eat.
But anyway.
So I just find it really interesting to engage with the concept.
But the model works so well because people do reject disenchantment and want enchantment.
So, yeah.
I may have lost the question at this point.
What do you think?
Like, like I see it like kind of both ways now, like it is everywhere, but I guess I was kind of looking at it like more on like an individual, like versus like in community level, rather than like a re-enchantment of the world.
It’s kind of like trying to tap in to your community because I find, and I mean, this is such like an anthropological way, like,
like thing to like way to look at community, but like folklore really makes a community.
And so I think that a lot of times, especially because now that we’re in such a digital age where everything feels so connected, that it’s kind of hard to separate yourself from other people.
And so having like a cryptid that’s like yours.
kind of brings you together, but then it also makes your community feel like just a little bit more magical.
And that it’s not so much that you want the whole world to feel magical or you want it to feel enchanted, but you want your life to feel enchanted.
And that may not look the same for everybody.
Like you may really believe in the Loveland Frogman, but you don’t think UFOs have a chance of existing.
And so I like to think of it more individually, I suppose.
Yeah, I think we see that a lot with blind spots where people believe in one thing and think something else is entirely preposterous when it’s really much of a muchness.
But I think your work is really interesting and has it whet your appetite to do more research into cryptozoology?
you know, yes.
And also no, just because like, you know, in my, like in my grad school work and I work at a library, so that doesn’t give me much option to kind of look into cryptids and then like library school, you don’t do really much research.
Look at this.
What are you talking about?
I know.
I like work at like a public library, like our shelves are not,
We have like one shelf dedicated to that.
It’s two, I think, but we have two shelves.
It’s your duty to fill those shelves with monsters.
I wish I had that kind of say, but I don’t.
But, you know, I do still like think about it a lot.
And I, you know, like I’ll be with Blake at the Gods and Monsters conference.
Oh, cool.
March 2.
Yes.
Yes, I will.
Yeah.
And Dr. Card will be there.
So I’ll be I’m still talking about it.
Like, I wish it could have gone longer.
And I think, um,
I think some of my classmates that were like a year younger than me, they may be going back to the Loveland Frogman Festival this year.
So I may like tag along with them, but I’ll probably just go for fun anyway.
Well, Sydney, it’s been wonderful to talk with you and to hear about your work.
We have a final question that we like to ask all of our guests on Monster Talk, and that is, what’s your favorite monster?
You know, I’ve been pondering this and I could only, is it okay if I say two and I give reasons why?
Oh, sure.
Okay.
So one, I’d have to say.
Are you using pondering?
Is that because it’s got pond and this is about frogs?
Oh, this was going to happen like months ago.
I’ve been pondering it since.
I was like, Oh my God, what am I going to say?
Um, so my first, my first one would have to be the Loveland Frogman, right?
Because like, who would I be if I didn’t say that?
But then, like, I feel like my real answer would probably be vampires, which is so completely outside of anything that I’ve talked about.
But it’s kind of what got me into the paranormal.
I watched Twilight way too young.
Wow.
Yeah.
And since then, I, you know, like, have, like, I’ve watched vampire things.
I’ve learned, like, I’ve been like, oh, I need to learn what a werewolf is.
Like, I need to, like, and that has led such a life.
And it just brought me here.
So your gateway to this monster world was Twilight.
Isn’t that just so sad?
Well, you know, no.
If it gets you to the right place, your first steps can be ignored.
I don’t, you know, it’s fine.
I still do love Twilight.
It holds a special place in my heart.
You read a book.
I mean, at this time and place, I’m just excited.
People are reading.
You know what I mean?
I’ve already said I worked at a library.
It’s not shocking.
I’ve read a book.
Well, not you in particular, but I mean, for all the joking and mockery for sparkly vampires, it got kids to read.
So it’s a big pass for me, even though I from what I’ve read of it without having read it, it doesn’t sound like it would be to my taste.
But, you know, I can’t imagine.
But reading is so important.
I’m just excited that, you know, whatever gets people there.
Right.
we try not to bag what other people like because people have different tastes individuals and and uh yeah it’s just cool that you found an interest in this at all and if you saw me at a twilight fan festival i’m just there for the merch i’m not i’m not a fan what are you talking about if you buy like a weird edward shirt i won’t say anything right no no exactly we won’t judge yeah
I mean, of course I’m team Jacob, but I mean, that’s not the point.
He knows the lingo.
Well, Sydney, it was so good to see you again.
Yeah.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I look forward to hopefully seeing you in San Marcos in the future.
That’d be great.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Have a good night.
Yeah, you too.
See you guys.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Sidney Davidson about her field work looking at the Loveland Frog and other monster festivals.
A link to her report is in the show notes.
And if you’re a Patreon supporter, I’ve attached a copy of her report to the episode.
You know, it’s worth remembering that the Green Clawed Hand attack of Evansville happened just a few days before the Kelly Hopkinsville goblins’ case.
And the family at the center of that attack had members who worked in the carnival.
And I’m not mentioning that because I think they were pulling a hoax or trying to fleece the rubes.
I mention it because they had just left Evansville before the alleged goblins’ attack and surely must have been primed for monsters given all that was going on with UFOs and with little people in the news and in the zeitgeist.
In fact, several of the Goblin witnesses had to head back up to Evansville the next day after the events of that outrageous night.
And now, Hopkinsville has also returned to the Monster Festival business with GoblinCon as of October 2025.
So many monsters, so many festivals.
I’m glad people like Sidney are asking serious questions about what it might all mean.
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These are books that directly help with our monster research.
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This has been a Monster House presentation.
Yeah, because if you had pretended otherwise, I’m messing this up, but there was some solid you amphibian joke there somewhere.
I’m just going to have to clip that out.
Oh, yes, I am living.
I’m an amphibian, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s not going to make the final cut of anything.

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