Photographer and paranormal researcher Shannon Taggart joins JF and Phil to explore the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson. One of the most brilliant and successful musicians of the modern era, Jackson was also a liminal figure sans pareil, a shapeshifter who defied the binary categories through which we order the human world. His art and persona together enacted a transformation that can only be called shamanic.

About Our Guest:

Shannon Taggart is a photographer and author based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her photographs have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, and have been recognized by Magnum, Nikon, and the Alexia Foundation. Her monograph Séance was first published by Fulgur Press (2019) and reissued in a second edition by Atelier Éditions. Shannon is currently developing an illustrated history of SORRAT (the Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis) and hosts an annual symposium on the weird and the paranormal in Lily Dale, New York.

Image by Daniele Dalledonne, via Wikimedia Commons.

References

George Hanson, The Trickster and the Paranormal

Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow

Rogan Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show

Pier Paolo Pasolini (dir.), Teorema  

Phil Ford, “The View from the Cheap Seats at the UFO Show” 

Michael Jackson, Moonwalker: A Memoir

J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Miguel Connor, The Occult Elvis

Tim Powers, Last Call

Weird Studies, Episode 186 on The Wedge

Raymond Moody, Elvis After Life

Sub Rosa, Spectra Ex Machina: A Sound Anthology of Occult Phenomena 1920-2017 Vol.2

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Since 2020, Phil and JF have been creating an on-again, off-again series on the major trumps, or "arcana," of the tarot. In this episode, they continue the series with a discussion of the second arcanum: the High Priestess, also known as la Papesse, the female pope. One of the most enigmatic and powerful cards in the deck, the High Priestess symbolizes duality, contemplation, and manifestation.

REFERENCES

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

Plancia Magna, Roman priestess

Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth

Leigh McCloskey, The Tarot Revisioned

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Moina Mathers, French occultist

Sallie Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey

Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Yoav Ben-Dov, The Marseille Tarot Revealed

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In a rare surfacing in the contemporary world, JF and Phil discuss a film that has just been released. Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap is psychological horror in the tradition of Repulsion, Jacob’s Ladder, and Angel Heart. But it is more: a metaphysical film exploring the mystery of sound and the Otherworld of Faerie—an excursion into that weird country, so deftly explored by Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, where wonder and terror perform their eldritch duets.

Sign up for JF's new Henri Bergson course, starting September 18, 2025.

Support Weird Studies on ⁠Patreon⁠.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes ⁠1⁠ and ⁠2⁠, on Pierre-Yves Martel's ⁠Bandcamp⁠ page.

Visit the Weird Studies ⁠⁠Bookshop⁠⁠

Find us on ⁠⁠Discord⁠⁠

Get the T-shirt design from ⁠⁠Cotton Bureau⁠⁠.

Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, ⁠Cosmophonia⁠.

REFERENCES

Bryn Chainey, Rabbit Trap

Weird Studies, Episode 190 on “The Willows”

Alan Crosland (dir.), The Jazz Singer

Weird Studies, Episode 150 on “A Fragment of Life”

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable

Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

J. R. R. Tolkein, The Silmarillion

Giles Deleuze, Cinema II  

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth

Weird Studies, Episode 120 on Radical Mystery (story of the anti-sound starts at 52 minute mark)

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We're breaking up our late-summer pause with an audio extra originally recorded for our Patreon supporters. This episode also includes an essay JF wrote on the philosophy of Henri Bergson. A whole course on Bergson's philosophy begins on Weirdosphere later this month.

Weird Studies will be back with a brand-new episode on September 17th.

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Of all the flavors of horror, few are as dreadful as that of being lost in the wilderness. In this episode, JF and Phil revisit The Blair Witch Project, the classic 1999 found-footage film that inspired a thousand imitators. What makes this film so gripping, they argue, is the way it lingers over the subtle stages of disorientation in a hostile place, from blithe denial to devastating gnosis. The Blair Witch Project isn't a ghost story so much as a work of cosmic horror. Ultimately, the woods themselves—vast, indifferent, inescapable—are the monster.

Support Weird Studies on Patreon.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.

Visit the Weird Studies ⁠Bookshop⁠

Find us on ⁠Discord⁠

Get the T-shirt design from ⁠Cotton Bureau⁠.

Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.

References

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez (dirs.), The Blair Witch Project

Gus Van Sant (dir.), Gerry

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Weird Studies, Episode 195 on John Keel

Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention

Georgio De Chirico, Italian artist

Arthur Machen, The White People

Jack Zipes, literary scholar

Weird Studies, Episode 150 on Arthur Machen's “A Fragment of Life”

“Schizophonia”

Stanislav Lem, Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris

Beyond Yacht Rock Podcast 

Shirley Clarke (dir.), The Connection

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

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This marks the third year that Weird Studies is honoured to open the Lily Dale Symposium, organized each summer by photographer Shannon Taggart in the upstate New York community famed for its roots in Spiritualism. While J.F. wasn’t able to attend this year, Erik Davis joined Phil on stage for a conversation about the life and work of John Keel, the iconoclastic writer and investigator best known for The Mothman Prophecies. They were later joined by Keel’s friend, the writer and musician Doug Skinner, for a candid discussion of Keel’s legacy and style.

If you enjoy Weird Studies, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Upper-tier goodies include exclusive writings, regular bonus episodes, and monthly hangouts with JF and Phil.

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In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation about animal songs. The phrase is intentionally slippery. Are we talking about songs about animals, or songs by animals? Both, as it turns out. Beginning with three very different human compositions—The Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Hovhaness’s And God Created the Great Whales, and Björk’s “Human Behavior”—the hosts discuss the roles animals play in human music, mythology, and mind. Along the way, they touch on Pink Floyd, the Beatles' trip to India, heroin addiction, the indeterminacy of singing and screaming, the messiness of inter-species communication, the discovery of whale song, the problem of (not) projecting humanness onto animals, the Book of Genesis, and the porous boundary between the human and non-human worlds. All that (and more) for two of the songs! Phil’s pick will be explored in a forthcoming episode.

Meredith Michael is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Indiana

References

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

Pink Floyd, Animals

Neko Case, "People Got a Lotta Nerve"

The Beatles, "Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and my Monkey"

Gavin Steingo, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity

Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"  

Alan Hovhaness, And God Created Great Whales

Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time

Weird Studies, Episode 181 on “The X Files”

Kate Altizer, Piano Dogs and Whale Theaters: Paranoid Relations and Affect with Nowhere to Go in the Study of Nonhuman Animals and Music 

David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Songs

Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug

King James Bible 

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Leonard Nimoy (dir.), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature

George Crumb, Vox Balaenae  

Terrence Malick (dir.), The Tree of Life

Image by Navin75, via Wikimedia Commons

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How do you become religious? What is a conversion experience? Does it happen all at once or gradually? What's the point of religion, anyway? These are questions that JF (a Catholic) and Phil (a Zennist) have often been asked since starting Weird Studies, and in this episode they attempt some answers.

Image: "Small Candle Flame" by Le Priyavrat, via Wikimedia Commons

Sign up to attend Shannon Taggart's Lily Dale symposium, July 24-26

REFERENCES

Ross Douthat, Believe  

Dogen, Shobogenzo  

New Atheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism 

Weird Studies, Episode 99 on “Wild, Wild Country”

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience  

George Steiner, Real Presences

Patrick Curry, Art and Enchantment

Max Picard, The Flight from God

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Richard Wagner, Ring Cycle

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

Weird Studies, Episode 183 on “Siddhartha”

Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher

Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”  

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

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Phil and JF first explored the mysteries of walking back in episode 59. That episode felt like a mere introduction—a tentative first step on a long and winding path. Now, 133 episodes later, they return to the theme as they prepare to lead a six-week course on the art of walking and its affinity with the Weird. This conversation touches on meditative walking, walking as dventure, psychogeography, wilderness mysticism, and more.

References

Weird Studies, Episode 59 on Walking

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

Kinhin, walking meditation

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

Randonautica, walking app

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

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