Loading...

PODCAST

MonsterTalk

MonsterTalk: The Science Show About Monsters is a free audio podcast that critically examines the science behind cryptozoological (and legendary) creatures, such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or werewolves. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

science natural sciences

All Episodes

61:05

S06E01 💀Taphonomy and All That Rot🧛

MonsterTalk ·

2026/10/05

An interview with forensic anthropologist Evan Bird, creator of The Corpse Review.Extended show notes at Monstertalk.orgBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

en

47:48

S05E50 💀 REHUMANIZING PEOPLE OF THE PAST

MonsterTalk ·

2026/09/28

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, and offers guidance for adopting rehumanizing language to return dignity to these individuals. The

en

38:30

S05E49 - 🌀 Cryptozoology Today with Daniel Alan Jones

MonsterTalk ·

2026/09/21

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 obscure online forums to social media feeds, streaming documentaries, and a festival in seemingly every

en

27:56

S05E48 🌀Traditional Cryptozoology with Daniel Alan Jones

MonsterTalk ·

2026/09/14

Into the Field: A Conversation with Daniel Alan Jones, Part 1Blake 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

en

54:46

S05E47 MT Legend Tripping: Paranormal England

MonsterTalk ·

2026/09/07

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 NotesBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

en

76:35

S05E46 FLASHBACK: England's Most Haunted Village

MonsterTalk ·

2026/08/31

Blake brings us a flashback to 2017, when he and Karen sat down withThe 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

en

53:15

S05E45 - Circus Train Wrecks 🎪🚂

MonsterTalk ·

2026/08/24

⚠️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 oftenThe economic event that ended the era - and why regulation wasn't the answerAn

en

42:15

🐺 S05E44 - Darwin and the Monsters (with Dr. Brian...

MonsterTalk ·

2026/08/17

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

en

60:06

🏚️ S05E43 - The Peabody-Whitehead Mansion

MonsterTalk ·

2026/08/10

⚠️ 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

en

54:38

☠️S05E42 - THE BLACK DEATH🐀

MonsterTalk ·

2026/08/03

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:

en

39:04

🛸 S05E41 - Government Disclosure

MonsterTalk ·

2026/07/27

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

en

37:43

🐂S05E40 - Cattle Mutilations: Part 2🛸

MonsterTalk ·

2026/07/20

⚠️ 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

en

39:52

🐂S05E39 - Cattle Mutilations: Part 1🛸

MonsterTalk ·

2026/07/13

⚠️ 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

en

45:38

🦕 S05E38 - Champ Across the Border

MonsterTalk ·

2026/07/06

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

en

65:51

🪓 S05E37 - The Lizzie Borden Murders

MonsterTalk ·

2026/06/29

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

en

58:04

S05E36 - The Chinnery Backseat Ghost

MonsterTalk ·

2026/06/22

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),

en

58:48

S05E35 The Newby Church Specter

MonsterTalk ·

2026/06/15

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

en

53:28

S05E34 - Rakshasas

MonsterTalk ·

2026/06/08

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

en

68:07

S05E33 - The Devil Went Down to Devon

MonsterTalk ·

2026/06/01

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

en

52:12

S05E32 - Monsters of the Deep with Dr. Darren Naish

MonsterTalk ·

2026/05/25

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

en

105 results

Similar Podcasts

Beyond the Divide

Koala Moon

Planetterrian Daily

Patrick · Nerra Network

NSF’s Discovery Files Podcast

U.S. National Science Foundation

Curious City: Exploring Science and Wonders

Synthetic Universe

Science Busters Podcast

Martin Puntigam, Martin Moder, Florian...