MonsterTalk

Blake and Karen welcome historian Dr. Amy Laurel Fluker of Youngstown State University to discuss Haunted by Memory, an annotated anthology of ghost stories drawn from the newspapers, veterans' papers, and periodicals of the Civil War generation. The project began with her late mentor, Dr. John R. Neff, who stumbled onto his first Civil War ghost story while reading veterans' obituaries. When Neff...

An interview with forensic anthropologist Evan Bird, creator of The Corpse Review . 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.

In this episode, Blake and Karen welcome Dr. Kristin LaFollette, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana, to discuss her new book, *Rehumanizing People of the Past: Bioarchaeology, Medical Museums and Archives, and the Human Remains Trade* (SUNY Press, 2026). The book illustrates how technical communication frequently dehumanizes the people represented by human remains...

Blake and Karen welcome back Daniel Alan Jones, investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and creator and host of The Vortex, for the second half of their conversation. Last week covered how Jones found his way into the field. This week the question is where the field has gone since he arrived, and where it might be headed next. Jones has watched cryptozoology move from o...

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 restau...

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...

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...

⚠️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...

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...

⚠️ 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 i...

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 medieva...

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 Nev...

⚠️ 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...

⚠️ 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...

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...

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 hi...

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 Gh...

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 ha...

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...

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 publish...

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 req...

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...

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 returni...

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 top...

To announce (and celebrate) the Spanish language release of Chet Van Duzer's beautiful and informative book on map monsters, I'm re-releasing episode S01E69! Grab your copy in Spanish here: SPANISH LANGUAGE : Monstruos marinos en mapas medievales y renacentistas by Chet Van Duzer Or snag it in English here: Sea Monsters on Medeival and Renaissance Maps Extensive show notes here! Become a supporter...