MonsterTalk

Into the Field: A Conversation with Daniel Alan Jones, Part 1 Blake and Karen welcome Daniel Alan Jones, an investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and the creator and host of The Vortex, for the first half of a two-part conversation. Blake met Jones at the Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State in March of 2026 , where an after-dinner conversation outside a restaurant, joined partway through by Jeb Card, led to the interview you are about to hear. Jones is part of the Texas Cryptozoology scene, hanging with (the late) Jim Marrs, Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern, Craig Woolheater and Lyle Blackburn (among others). He approaches the subject ethnographically: the people who chase monsters interest him as much as the monsters do. This first half of our interview covers the Piney Woods and its tangle of local Bigfoot names, a salamander hunt in the PNW, a failed search for giants in Death Valley, pluys a night camped out in Mothman country. Part two takes up the state of the Cryptozoology today, which will be S05E49 dropping next week. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Karen and Matt are back from their trip to the UK and they share stories and photos from their whirlwind visit to a variety of (allegedly) haunted places. Blake makes jokes... and wishes he could go himself. Link to trip photos and Extended Show Notes Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Blake brings us a flashback to 2017, when he and Karen sat down with The Spooktator 's Hayley Stevens to talk about the (allegedly) most haunted village in England. Hayley is a British paranormal researcher who started out a believer and came around to skepticism the hard way - by actually investigating - and she now publishes the newsletter The Ghost Geek . She first appeared on MonsterTalk back in episode 37 to talk lake monsters. This time the subject is Pluckley , a small, film-set-pretty village in Kent that is considerably more famous for its dead than for its living. Pluckley's ghost roster runs somewhere between a dozen and sixteen-plus, depending on who's counting and when - and the number has a habit of going up. There are two different White Ladies, a Red Lady, a highwayman, a phantom coach, and a stretch of woodland that screams. Where does a reputation like this actually come from, who benefits from it, and what happens to a place once the ghost tours arrive? Also - Blake goes looking for a famous piece of documentation that everybody cites and nobody seems to have seen. Extended notes at monstertalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.⚠️ Blake and Karen discuss Circus Train Wrecks as an explanation for mysterious "real" animal sightings, as well as a source of folklore monsters of high improbability. 🚂 In This Episode Why circus trains wrecked so often The economic event that ended the era - and why regulation wasn't the answer An inversion of survivorship bias, and the data set nobody has built yet A 1917 newspaper story about lions in a butcher shop that is not what it appears to be The 1931 wire story about a colony of Bengal tigers in the mountains of Mexico How armadillos actually got to Florida Gypsy the elephant, Tifton to Valdosta, November 1902 Wallace the Lion, the Exeter mail coach lioness, and Christian the Lion Why the Beast of Gévaudan may be the oldest "it escaped from a menagerie" case on record How Gévaudan subverts myths about the Enlightenment Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology . Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, and then spent more than a decade writing everything else instead. Karen is away in the UK promoting Beyond Words , so this episode is a two-hander between Blake and an old friend. The book runs monsters forward from the classical world - Lucretius, Pliny, Aristotle, and a Sumerian hero fighting a monster in the oldest story we have - through the Middle Ages, the age of curiosities, and into the modern hunt for anomalous primates. 🔦 In This Episode Why the book is priced the way it is, and Blake's advice to check the library before the bookstore - a small tangent on academic publishing and the old "priced to rent" sticker era. How Darwin and the Monsters almost became a doctoral dissertation, and why Brian wrote about Henry Fairfield Osborn instead. Brian's journey from student to author. The publish-or-perish treadmill: every new contract pushed the Darwin book back another few years. What the book is not: it is not a Bigfoot book, and Brian has notes for the critics who wanted more Bigfoot. Too many werewolves? Brian's 2009 paper for the British Society for the History of Science on how Darwinian thinking killed off the wolf-man - and how anomalous primates moved into the vacancy. The dogman problem - the most popular cryptid going is arguably a werewolf, which is arguably a medieval dog-headed man, which is arguably not an animal at all. Why the coelacanth is a bad advertisement for cryptozoology: no folkloric background, nobody was looking for it, and "living fossil" is not as accurate as people seem to think. Grover Krantz, missing Bigfoot bones, and the Pennsylvania records of bears that died without being hunted. Writing for an audience of one, and Brian's cheerful refusal to take criticism personally. What is next: a long-gestating novel about a historian of science who gets into wacky trouble, and the real-life model for its main character. Retirement, luck, and the case for going to a smaller school that will let you study monsters. The origin of The Monster of Newark , which started as notes toward an examined life and turned into an autobiography. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

⚠️ Content AdvisoryThis episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.⚠️ Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver's Peabody-Whitehead Mansion - the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill's old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected. What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history - a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning. Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Blake and Karen are joined by Dr. Ben Dodds , author of Myths and Memories of the Black Death to discover more about a disease which forever changed world history when it swept across Europe in the 1300s. The conversation runs from the mechanics of the disease - what a bubo actually is, what finally kills you, and why the textbook rats-and-fleas model spreads far too slowly to explain what medieval eyewitnesses described - to the harder question of how anyone in 2026 knows any of it. Along the way: the marmot hypothesis, the medieval physicians who were certain they had it figured out, the appalling 1348 pogroms whose victims were dug out of the ground in a Catalan town a short drive from where Dodds was sitting, why Monty Python understood the Middle Ages better than most historical novelists, and a closing answer about the aftermath that most listeners will not see coming. Blake's cold open, meanwhile, sets out to explain why we call it the Black Death at all - and reels in an unexpected monster. Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Blake and Karen welcome back paranormal investigator Matthew Baxter to sift through the latest government UAP release - the so-called PURSUE document dump - and work out what, if anything, is actually in it. Baxter took on the job of reading the paperwork so nobody else has to, and he returns with a skeptic's field report on what the government handed over, and what it quietly left out. From a Nevada billionaire's decades-long influence campaign to a $22 million taxpayer-funded hunt for the strange at a remote Utah ranch, the trio traces how fringe belief got bootstrapped into official policy - and asks whether the whole disclosure spectacle is meant to illuminate anything at all, or just to bury the question under an avalanche of unanalyzed data. Along the way: anglerfish, ice cream cones, and an epistemological war we didn't even know we'd been drafted into. 🎧 What's Inside🛸 What "PURSUE" actually stands for - and what the release did and didn't include 🏛️ AARO decoded: why "all-domain" is more than a rebrand 💰 The billionaire whose private money quietly seeded decades of official UFO research 👻 The "two agendas" baked into disclosure from the start (hint: it was never only about spacecraft) 🍦 A former government UAP chief's memorable verdict on the whole enterprise 🎣 The anglerfish test: what real extraordinary evidence actually looks like ⚔️ The "epistemological war" - and why skeptics feel like they brought a calculator to a shouting match 🪐 What some disclosure advocates are really hoping to find out there Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussion of animal death, carcass predation, and graphic descriptions of animal mutilation. Listener discretion is advised. Blake and Karen continue their conversation with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss on the cattle mutilation mystery. If you missed part one, wind your podcast player back an episode - this one picks up right where the panic peaked. At the center of part two is Emmy Award-winning reporter Linda Moulton Howe , whose 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest wrapped a decade of dead cows, black helicopters, and hypnotic regressions into a single package and delivered it to America. Lee walks through what happened next: the government's Rommel Report and its verdict of "Mother Nature," the tragic Bennewitz affair, cow parts arriving by mail in Alberta, a declassified CIA remote-viewing file, and how the whole phenomenon finally hardened into alien orthodoxy. It all ends with the big question - what's actually killing these animals? Extended show notes at Monstertalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of animal injuries and death. Both parts carry an explicit tag.⚠️ Blake and Karen welcome Lee Weiss, a religious studies scholar whose deep dive into the FBI's declassified cattle mutilation files grew into a sweeping study of one of America's strangest panics. Blake first met Lee at the Of Gods and Monsters conference in 2019, and the two reconnected at its 2026 sequel - both contributed to the academic volume Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous. (affiliate link) In part one of this two-part investigation, Lee lays out the anatomy of the "classic mute" - the missing eyes, ears, and soft tissue, the reportedly bloodless wounds, the absent tracks - and traces the phenomenon back to its 1967 case zero: Snippy the horse, found dead in Colorado's San Luis Valley. From Victorian sheep panics and escaped menagerie cats to the economic collapse of the 1970s American rancher, the picture that emerges is far stranger than dead livestock. And that's before the unmarked helicopters show up.Part two lands next week. Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Champ Across the Border: Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France and the French colonial period of North America, to talk about Champ - the famous monster of Lake Champlain. Most of the lake sits between New York and Vermont, but about 7% of it lies in Quebec, and Joseph's upcoming paper in the ethnology journal Rabaska asks a question almost nobody else has: how does the French-speaking side of the border see this most American of lake monsters? The answer involves a fabricated Samuel de Champlain quote, a five-foot fish that really was a monster in its own way, nearly 300 years of digitized Quebec newspapers, and a curious case of cross-border monster pride - because why borrow Champ when you already have Ponik and Memphré ? Plus hoax serpents, colonial werewolf panics, and how Nessie taught every lake monster what a lake monster is supposed to look like. Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Note: This episode deals with murder and goes into some detail, so we're putting the "explicit tag" for the mature content, perhaps not suitable for all audiences. MonsterTalk steps outside its usual territory for a true-crime case with a paranormal afterlife. Blake and Karen welcome Hallie, host of The Morbid Curiosity Podcast , to revisit one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in American history: the August 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the trial that acquitted Andrew's daughter Lizzie while leaving much of the public convinced she did it. Drawing on Hallie's background in anthropology and skeletal analysis, the conversation lays out the timeline, the forensic evidence, and the tangle of rumor and theory that has kept the case alive for more than a century - before turning to the crime scene itself, now run as "America's most haunted" bed-and-breakfast, and asking what, if anything, still lingers there. Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

A skeptical look at one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken - the 1959 "backseat ghost" snapped by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in Ipswich, England. This episode is distilled from a recent MonsterTalk Live stream with Blake, Karen Stollznow, and special guest Matt Baxter, who brought fresh research (and one neat new idea) to a very old mystery. It's also a companion piece to our Newby Church Ghost coverage and the spirit-photography episode of Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1985), which examined the Chinnery photo alongside the Cottingley Fairies and the Newby ghost. Extended show notes at our Patreon site. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Blake, Karen and Matt discover that this famous ghost photo isn't as old as they expected, and perhaps not as mysterious either. Do we get it right? Do you have a different explanation? Let us know in the comments. 👻 The Spectre of Newby ChurchIn one black-and-white photograph of a church altar, a tall, hooded figure stands where the photographer swore no one was standing. The "Newby Monk" has haunted paranormal books, websites, and late-night clip shows for decades, and it remains one of the most reproduced ghost photographs ever taken. In this episode we dig into where the image really came from, who took it, when it was actually shot, and how a clever photographer might have made it. Extensive show notes at monstertalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Most Americans meet the Rakshasa in exactly two places: a 1974 episode of a beloved horror TV series and the pages of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Both versions give you a debonair, tiger-faced shape-changer with a taste for human flesh - but neither prepares you for how deep, how old, and how genuinely alive these creatures are. To dig us out of that pop-culture foxhole, we sat down with academic researcher Eric Zsebenyi for a tour that runs from the Rig Veda to the Ramayana, into Buddhism, through present-day Sri Lankan politics, and finishes at the tent-shaped tomb of a very naughty Victorian translator. 🎙️ Our GuestEric Zsebenyi holds a master's degree from Naropa University (2000) and has pursued Buddhist studies as a lifelong avocation alongside a career as a civil servant. His path to the Rakshasas began with a Dharma protector named Vetali in his own meditation practice - which, as you'll hear, leads straight back to one of India's stranger monsters. Blake met Eric at the recent Gods & Monsters Conference, where Eric delivered a paper on the Vetala. You can find Eric's work here: Eric Zsebenyi on Academia.edu Extensive show notes at Monstertalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

On the morning of February 9, 1855, residents across south Devon, England, discovered strange hoof-shaped tracks in the snow. The prints - about 4 inches long, 3 inches wide, and spaced roughly 8 inches apart in single file - appeared to have been left by a biped with a donkey-like hoof. Reports came in from more than 30 locations across the county. Within days, the Illustrated London News published a letter from a correspondent calling himself "South Devon" that would define the legend for generations: a continuous 100-mile trail, identical prints in every parish, passage over rooftops and through haystacks, a crossing of the two-mile-wide River Exe. The Devil, some locals whispered, had walked through Devon. In this episode, Blake, Karen, and Matt dig into the original sources, trace how the story was embellished over 170 years of retelling, and examine the many theories - from wood mice to Romani conspiracies - that have been offered to explain the Great Devon Mystery. EXTENSIVE show notes at https://monstertalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Darren joins Blake and Karen to discuss his new article in Geology Today, which grew out of his work on the Monsters of the Deep museum exhibition. That exhibition originally opened at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall in 2020, traveled to two additional venues, and most recently ran at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Darren describes how each venue's unique architecture required a complete redesign of the exhibition, changing both the visual layout and the narrative flow. Extensive show notes at monstertalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

This is part two of our conversation with Kyle Crosby, creator and host of Louisiana Dread . In Part 1, we covered the history of the Acadians and how they carried the loup-garou legend from France to the bayous of Louisiana. Now, in Part 2, Kyle walks us through the transformation of the loup-garou into the Rougarou - from strict werewolf to all-purpose shapeshifting boogeyman - and takes us on a tour of Louisiana's other legendary creatures, from the Axeman of New Orleans to the feu follet to the Grunch. Extensive show notes at MonsterTalk.org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

This is part one of a two-part conversation. Blake and Karen are joined by Kyle Crosby, filmmaker, historian, and founder of Louisiana Dread , a multimedia project dedicated to documenting the dark history, folklore, and culture of the Pelican State. Kyle is a native of Larose, Louisiana, who grew up in Lafourche Parish and on Grand Isle . He spent years working in the film industry before returning home to preserve the stories he felt were being lost to time. Through his popular YouTube channel and social media platforms, he bridges the gap between scholarly history and regional folklore - covering everything from the legend of the Rougarou and the Honey Island Swamp Monster to the real-life mysteries of the Cajun Coast. Kyle is currently adapting his historical deep dives into a scripted horror anthology series, with one episode in the festival circuit and a second in pre-production. Blake met Kyle at the second Gods and Monsters conference at Texas State University , where Kyle's presentation on Louisiana's history and folklore inspired Blake and Karen to finally tackle the Rougarou as a proper episode. In this first part, the conversation digs into the history of the Acadian expulsion , the cultural forces that produced Cajun and Creole Louisiana, and the Old World roots of the Rougarou legend. In part two, they'll get into what the Rougarou actually became - a shape-shifting boogeyman with regional variants, plus feux follets, and a monster that might have been born from a traveling circus. Extensive show notes at MonsterTalk.Org Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

Neuroscientist Dr. Melissa Maffeo joins Blake and Karen to discuss her new book Science of the Supernatural: Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Melissa is an associate teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Neuroscience Program. In this episode, Melissa talks about using paranormal topics as an accessible entry point for teaching psychology and neuroscience, and shares her view that most supernatural experiences can likely be explained by what's happening in our brains - even if we don't yet have all the answers. The conversation covers a wide range of topics from the book, including the God Helmet experiments, the neuroscience of out-of-body experiences, how parasites can hijack behavior, and whether prior belief shapes what we experience. Extended show notes at our website. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support . Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.