Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast

The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast The Petersburgh Snow Hole: The Cold Chamber of the Taconic Range Available on: Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, and all major streaming platforms Episode Overview This episode examines the Petersburgh Pass Snow Hole, a naturally occurring cold-air trap in the Taconic range of eastern New York that has drawn scientific attention, local curiosity,...

The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast The Champlain Lake Monster: A History of Deepwater Myths Lake Champlain has always carried stories. Its deep glacial trench, shifting weather, and cold, opaque channels create a landscape where memory and imagination overlap. Indigenous traditions described powerful beings in these waters, shaping how people understood the lake long before newspapers arr...

The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast: When The Grid Failed: The Blackouts of 1965, 1977, and 2003 Major blackouts have repeatedly reshaped the Northeast and shown how people respond when the systems that sustain daily life fail without warning. Through the events of 1965, 1977, and 2003, the episode follows the links between technology, civic trust, and the ways communities adapt when the l...

The Body Snatchers of Albany - The Hidden History Beneath Washington Park Episode Overview Before Washington Park became the heart of New York’s capital city, it was a burial ground. The land that now welcomes joggers, dog walkers, and picnickers once held the city’s poor, the unnamed, and the unclaimed. In the early nineteenth century, this ground became the quiet center of a trade that helped sh...

The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast The Abair Bigfoot Incident — The Story of the Adirondack Sasquatch Length: ~40 minutes Available on: Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Audible,, Spotify, and all major streaming platforms Episode Overview This episode of the The Restoration Obscura Field Guide examines one of the most discussed encounters in Adirondack folklore: the Abair Bigfoot Incident of 1976...

RO Dispatch: Exploring Albany's Underground: Ghost Routes Under New York's Capitol City This episode marks the debut of the Restoration Obscura Dispatch , a new series of short, focused explorations drawn from the fieldwork behind the Restoration Obscura Field Guide podcast. Each Dispatch opens a single file from the archives—self-contained stories that examine the hidden layers of history, archit...

Season 2 of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast Returns The Field Guide returns with a new season, and with it, a new way of seeing. Season 2 opens with an episode that serves as both companion and counterpart to my new book, Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night: History Hidden in Darkness . The two are connected by theme and intention, the book explores darkness through history,...

Season Two of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is here. In this new chapter, we go deeper into the histories that hide in plain sight—forgotten infrastructure, vanished towns, Cold War secrets, and the cultural echoes that still shape our present. Expect immersive stories, archival discoveries, and a closer look at how memory and place are tied together. Alongside the podcast, I’ve also...

Episode 6: Nuclear Sites of the Adirondacks Ghosts of the Cold War What if the most remote parts of the Adirondacks weren’t just quiet, but armed? In Episode 6 of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast , we travel deep into the forests of Upstate New York to uncover a Cold War legacy that was never meant to be seen. Hidden beneath the soil and scattered through remote clearings is a network o...

Episode 5: Albany Interrupted: The Lost Neighborhoods of the Empire State Plaza Episode Summary: The Empire State Plaza was built to showcase power, but its construction came at a steep human cost. Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s vision transformed the heart of Albany into a marble civic center meant to project modernity and control. But to build it, nearly 100 acres of working-class neighborhoods w...

Episode 4: After the Rain: The Storm That Dumped Radiation on Troy, New York Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast Written and hosted by John Bulmer In this episode of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide , we investigate one of the Capital Region’s most unsettling Cold War legacies—a radioactive rainstorm that quietly fell over Troy, New York, in the spring of 1953. Drawing on Bill Heller’s A Go...

Restoration Obscura Field Guide – Episode 3 The Bloody Pit: Hoosac Tunnel, Western Massachusetts Beneath the Berkshires, a nearly five-mile tunnel cuts through Hoosac Mountain—a staggering feat of 19th-century engineering. Officially called the Hoosac Tunnel, it’s more commonly known by its darker name: The Bloody Pit. This episode tells the full story, from the tunnel’s origins in the mid-1800s a...

Episode 2: The Thing in the Sky – The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings of the 1980s This episode of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast traces the mysterious wave of UFO sightings that overtook New York’s Hudson Valley in the 1980s. These weren’t fringe accounts or fantasy. Over a decade, more than 5,000 credible reports described massive, silent, triangular crafts gliding low over towns. Witne...

Introducing the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast I’m excited to share something new with you today: the launch of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast —an ongoing audio companion to the work I’ve been doing here with words and images. Each episode of the Field Guide is a standalone journey into forgotten, hidden, or overlooked history. Some episodes are solo explorations—narrative st...