Here Be Monsters
An independent podcast about fear, beauty and the unknown. Since 2012. Hosted by Jeff Emtman and others.
Episodes
HBM159: Final Haircuts
During a moment of personal turmoil, Rocky Villanueva gets an email from a long-time client. His client is in his final weeks of life, and is getting his last wishes taken care of. One of those wishes: to look like himself when he dies. Rocky says that many hairdressers and barbers have similar experiences: helping their clients through the last stages of life and letting th
The Thaw & Die Grenze
Jeff walks to the edge of Berlin and explains why the Here Be Monsters feed has been quiet for so long. On the way, Jeff talks about plans for upcoming episodes, looks at the ways that moving to Berlin has changed him, and discusses a pair of films featuring Tilda Swinton: Cycling the Frame (1988), and The Invisible Frame (2009). Both movies feature Swinton riding a bicycle around the entiret
HBM158: An Illusion
n the midst of a stressful move, HBM producer Jeff Emtman finds comfort in the phasing techniques developed by minimalist composer, Steve Reich. Note: this episode contains sounds that cannot be accurately represented by speakers. Please use headphones. Steve Reich compositions excerpted in this episode: Clapping Music, performed by Steve Reich and Wolfram WinkelViolin P
HBM157: The Raw Whatever
Allen H Greenfield is a UFOlogist and occult researcher. He’s also a father of three. His first child, Alex was the subject of HBM155: Ghosts Aliens Burritos. In that episode, Alex tells stories from his childhood of chasing strange phenomena with his father. In this episode, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman talks to Allen to get the “fatherly perspective” on UFOs, bla
HBM156: Heavy Load-Bearing Body
Berlin’s Schwerbelastungskörper is a massive concrete structure that, today, is hidden in plain sight between a railroad and an apartment building. It’s one of just a dozen remaining pieces of Nazi Architecture in Berlin. And it’s not much to look at. It was built in 1941 as a test structure for a triumphal arch that Hitler wanted to build in that spot. The Schwerbelastungskörper
The HBM Art Exchange is Back!
The Here Be Monsters Art Exchange is back!It’s a really simple and wonderful thing where you, gentle listener, can mail a piece of art to a stranger and get a piece of art in return. It’s open to artists of all experience levels from around the world. The deadline to sign up is November 10th, 2022. Sign up and more info here: https://www.hbmpodcast.com/artThe art exchange is made possible this y
HBM155: Ghosts Aliens Burritos
Content Note: pervasive language, brief mentions of bigotry.Alex Greenfield says that there was no such thing as a normal day when he was a kid. His dad (Allen H Greenfield) self describes as a “researcher in the shadow world.” And his mom soon grew tired of her husband’s lifestyle, which included a lot of time on the road: chasing rumors of cryptids, ghosts, and aliens. But after
HBM154: Ancient Roman Recipes
Sally Grainger was originally a chef, but in her 20’s, she was gifted a copy of an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius. Apicius is a bit of a fluke. It shouldn’t have survived the 2000-ish year journey into the modern era, but it did. And in this episode of Here Be Monsters, Grainger explains how Apicius persisted due to being a favorite text for monks-in-training to practice th
The Straight and Narrow
In 2012, a street preacher walking three small dogs tried to convince Jeff Emtman of his way of thinking about gender and the afterlife. In this Here Be Monsters brief, Jeff shares the short essay he originally wrote about the dinner party where they attempted to make an uneasy friendship. Jeff re-edited the essay in 2022 and gave pseudonyms to the main characters (“Cliff” and “Sophie”).
HBM153: Klänge from Berlin
The composer Pauline Oliveros thought there was a difference between hearing and listening. She defined hearing as a passive act, something done with the ears. But she defined listening as something active saying that listening happens in the brain. Sam Parker is a recordist who takes inspiration from Oliveros’ words and work. About six years ago, on an episode of Here
HBM152: Dirt Becomes You
What do you want to happen to your body when you die? It’s a touchy topic where tradition, religion and death denial all come into play. But across much of the world, there are just two options: burial and cremation, which both have substantial ecological impacts. In 2019, Washington State passed SB 5001, which legalized several new options for deathcare. In this episode, hos
HBM151: Blowgun Time Warp
Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours. Scenes from middle school dances, dawn bus rides, the basement, and ( most crucially), a late-night raffle at a hardware store.Do you like Here Be Monsters? Tell your friends, support HBM on Patreon, and have your boss sponsor an episode.Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: Serocell and Th
Season 10 is Coming!
Season 10 is nearly here! The season starts on March 9th and episodes will be released on a rolling basis until all ten shows are published.Want to advertise on an episode? Fill out the sponsorship request form. Want to support HBM with a small monthly donation? Become a patron on Patreon. Can’t wait to share the season with you. More soon. Producer: Jeff EmtmanMus
Leaving Spotify
I’ve decided to remove my work from Spotify. It’s not just their recent controversies around Joe Rogan, it’s a much bigger problem with the way that Spotify treats the medium. If you listen on an app other than Spotify, you don’t need to change anything, just stay subscribed, and you’ll get all the new episodes (Season 10 is coming soon!).If you do listen on Spotify though, you’ll
HBM150: Cold Water
The origins of Julia Susara’s chronic fatigue are hard to pin down. She still doesn’t know exactly how it started but suspects that a deeply broken heart had something to do with it. She spent about three years going through some excruciating physical sensations: immense chills, brain fogs, pregnancy nightmares and the feeling that her blood was about to boil through her skin.&nbs
![HBM149: The Daily Blast [Neutrinowatch]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/522f5dbee4b0ad0c9681b3a5/1623861362441-F6Y76J1WX5OD4X5EZQWC/HBM149.jpg?format=1500w)
HBM149: The Daily Blast [Neutrinowatch]
A short episode from the new show Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast. Each episode of Neutrinowatch changes a lil’ bit every day. This episode, The Daily Blast, features two computerized voices (Wendy and Ivan), who share the day’s news. To get new versions of this episode, you’ll need to either stream the audio in your podcast app/web browser, or just delete and re-do
So What Exactly is Episode 149?
Episode 149 is an odd duck for sure. It changes every day due to some coding trickery that is happening behind the scenes. That episode is a part of a bigger project, a new podcast project that’s potentially the first of its kind. It’s called Neutrinowatch, and every day, each episode is regenerated with new content. But this is a conversation between Jeff Emtman (Here Be Mon
HBM148: Early Attempts at Summoning Dream Beings
As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM, a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses. One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences with lucid dreaming. He’d learned how to conjure supernatural entities and converse with his subconscious. Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer knows they
HBM147: Chasing Tardigrades
With much of the world shut down over the last year, HBM host Jeff Emtman started wondering if there were smaller venues where the world still felt open. In this episode, Jeff interviews Chloé Savard of the Instagram microscopy page @tardibabe about the joy of looking at small things, and whether it’s possible to find beauty in things you don’t understand. Chloé also gives Jeff i
Theodora is @hypo_inspo
A brief follow-up to last episode: you can now follow our AI-powered friend Theodora on Twitter! She tweets several times a day, giving bad advice, good advice, and some strange poetry. Her account’s called Hypothetical Inspiration. Give her a follow.
HBM146: Theodora
How does a computer learn to speak with emotion and conviction? Language is hard to express as a set of firm rules. Every language rule seems to have exceptions and the exceptions have exceptions etcetera. Typical, “if this then that” approaches to language just don’t work. There’s too much nuance. But each generation of algorithms gets closer and closer. Markov chains
HBM145: The Juice Library
Like so many others, Amanda Petrus got a bit lost after college. She had a chemistry degree and not a lot of direction. But she was able to find work at a juice factory in the vineyards of western New York. Her job was quality control, which meant overnight shifts at the factory, tasting endless cups of fruit punch and comparing them to the ever-evolving set of juice standards that the
HBM144: Keeping A Place
HBM Host Jeff Emtman has always been afraid of losing his memories. Places he cares about keep getting torn down.In this episode, Jeff bikes around Seattle recording the sounds of a popping balloon to capture the sound of places he likes: Padelford Hall’s Parking Garage, The Wayne Tunnel in Bothell, his old house in Roosevelt, The Greenlake Aqua Theater, and his front porch on a snowy day.&nb
HBM143: Laughing Rats and Dawn Rituals
Animals sometimes make noises that would be impossible to place without context. In this episode: three types of animal vocalizations—described by the people who recorded them. Ashley Ahearn: Journalist and producer of Grouse, from Birdnote and Boise State Public RadioJoel Balsam: Journalist and producer of the upcoming podcast Parallel Lives. Joel co-created a photo essay for ESP
HBM142: The Vastness of the Universe
1,420,405,751* hertz is a very important frequency. It’s the frequency that hydrogen radiates at, creating radio waves that can be detected far away. And astronomers can learn a lot about the history and shape of the universe by observing this “hydrogen line” frequency with radio telescopesExtraterrestrial research astronomers also take a lot of interest in the hydrogen line...and it’s
HBM141: Filthy Riches
When a group of broke college students start throwing lavish feasts, HBM host Jeff Emtman begins to wonder at the source of the food, initially assuming it was stolen. But he’s soon corrected. Confronted with the shocking amount of food waste in the local dumpsters, he quickly turns into a freegan dumpster diving evangelist, but is often thwarted by an angry employee of a local produce
Season 9 = February 17th
Season 9 will be here soon! We’ll bring you ten new episodes about fear, beauty and the unknown. We’ll see the fight for survival and beauty of the microscopic world. We’ll learn how balloons can be used to capture the souls of doomed buildings. We’ll listen for alien transmissions on a reserved shortwave frequency. We’ll luxuriate in the scent discarded cocoa be
HBM Continues as an Independent Podcast
For the last five years, Here Be Monsters has been a part of KCRW. And in those years, we’ve put out a 100+ episodes under KCRW’s imprint. However, moving forward, HBM will no longer be associated with the station, instead continuing as an independent production. This departure leaves HBM entirely unfunded. So for our upcoming ninth season, we’re seeking community spons
HBM140: The New Black Wall Street
There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black Tulsans even owned airplanes. Booker T Washington called it “Black Wall Street.” Others called it “Little Africa” and today, most call it “Greenwood.” In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was prosperous and thriving, but Black Tulsans were still a
HBM139: Acceptable Pains
Hedonism seems pretty appealing right now—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. On HBM137: Superhappiness, the hedonist philosopher, David Pearce imagined a future free of the systemic harms we currently experience: poverty, oppression, violence, and disease. But David thinks that even an idyllic, egalitarian society wouldn’t ensure universal happiness. He thinks that the only way to make every
HBM138: Did Neanderthals Bury their Dead?
There’s a large cave in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan. It looks out over green and yellow fields and a river far below. Starting in the 1950’s, the American archaeologist Dr. Ralph Solecki led a team who excavated a trench in Shanidar Cave, discovering the remains of ten Neanderthals who died about 50,000 years ago. Dr. Solecki’s discoveries helped ‘humanize’ Neanderthals, a species of ear
HBM137: Superhappiness
David Pearce thinks it's possible to end suffering. He’s a philosopher* who studies “hedonic zero”, the state of being which is completely neutral--neither good nor bad. He believes that, despite our momentary joys and sadnesses, most of us have a set point we tend to return to. And that “hedonic set point” falls somewhere on the spectrum of positive to negative. For David, his set point is n
HBM136: Jacob's Lost Biography
In 2012, Jacob Lemanski started writing his autobiography a few words at a time when he signed his name on the digital card readers at the grocery store. He read somewhere that the credit card companies keep the signatures on file for seven years. He thought he might report his card stolen in 2019 so that some grunt at Mastercard would find the story of his life...or…more likely he thought it was
HBM135: Dying Well
We live in a culture of “death denial”. That’s what Amanda Provenzano thinks. She sees it when medical professionals use euphemisms like ‘passing away’ instead of ‘dying’. She sees it when funeral parlors use makeup to make it look like a person is not dead but sleeping. Most often she sees it when her clients’ loved ones insist their dying family member is going to pull through, despite all evide
HBM134: Questionable Hobbies of the Socially Isolated
Searching for something to do during government-mandated social distancing, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman recently digitized his cassette collection, and re-edited them into blackout poems and proverbs. While in the process of doing this, Jeff re-discovered a mixtape he made in 1999, the product of endless hours of waiting by the boombox in the basement with a hand hovering over the 🔴 but
HBM133: Prey of Worms
Bodies are odd. Anyone who can see their own nose will tell you the same. So will anyone whose diet changed their body odor. And so will anyone who’s ever felt their phone vibrate in their pocket only to later realize it was a phantom ring. Our bodies make stuff up constantly and do plenty of questionable things without asking our permission first. It can feel disorien
HBM132: Moral Enhancement
Natalia Montes was a teenager living in Florida when Travyon Martin was killed. She says his picture reminded her of her classmates, “It could have happened to any one of us.”The Trayvon Martin shooting, as well as subsequent high profile police shootings and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, sparked an interest in Natalia for trying to understand one of the most difficult el
HBM131: A Cure for Carsickness
Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, when she was four years old, her carsickness was so bad that she made her dad take a detour to look for a cure at the grocery store.At the time, they were driving through Central Idaho, visiting all her dad’s favorite places from childhood. The
HBM130: Mother Pigeon / Sister Marta
Mother Pigeon says the wild animals of New York City are hungry. So she feeds them.Each morning, a flock of about 150 pigeons waits for her at her local park in Bushwick. She feeds them twice a day if she can afford it, and once a day if she can’t. Peas, lentils, millet and other grains, and corn in the winter to keep them warm. “When you go out to feed birds, you’re treate
HBM129: The Underearthlings
Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer claims his red hat is mere coincidence. He wears it because his mother-in-law knit it for him 15 years ago and he quite likes it. However, it also makes him visually match the mythical underground people he spent three years studying on the Danish island of Bornholm. Bornholm folklore sometimes references “De Underjordiske”, a kind of people that live under the man
HBM128: Seeing Auras
Colby Richardson’s mom got leukemia when he was young. He has trouble remembering her. Soon after her death, Colby and his siblings wound up at a house in Hope, BC where he met Santo, a childhood friend of his mom’s. Colby remembers that Santo’s voice to be soft and extremely calm. Santo told Colby that he had a beautiful, green aura, a glow that surrounded his body. Back when his mother was
HBM127: QALYs
Most of us want to help. But it can be hard to know how to do it, and not all altruistic deeds are equal, and sometimes they can be harmful. Sometimes glitzy charities satisfy the heart of a giver, but fail to deliver results.That’s the paradox: motivating people to give often demands glitz, but glitzy causes often don’t provide the improvement to people’s lives than their less glamoro
HBM126: Sounding the Deep
How familiar are you with the shape of the continents? What about the shape of the seafloor? If you’re unfamiliar with the contours of our planet’s underwater mountain ranges and plateaus and valleys, then you’re not alone. No one really knows what’s down there; at least, not in any great detail. That’s because, well, the water is in the way, and that makes it hard for our m
HBM125: Deepfaking Nixon
There’s a beautifully written speech that was never delivered. Written for President Richard Nixon by Bill Safire, the speech elegizes astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11, who’d become stuck on the moon, and were left to die there. In reality, Buzz and Neil made it home safely, but this contingency speech was written anyways, just in case. Sometimes it’s called The S
HBM124: Banana Softies
“Gene” says it started because he wanted to be a veterinarian. So he took a job as a research associate at a vivarium that studied cancer drugs. He was often alone in the lab at night with hundreds or thousands of research animals around him. The monkeys were his favorite, especially the rhesus macaques. He loved to give them treats, play movies and Celine Dion for them. And sometimes he’d l
HBM123: Water Witches
Some time in the 90’s, Kathy Emtman received a gift from her husband, Rick. It was a pair of bent metal rods, each shaped into long ‘L’. Nothing special, not imparted with any kind of magic, just metal rods. Colloquially, these rods are called “witching rods” or “dowsing rods”. HBM producer Jeff Emtman (child of Rick and Kathy) remembers a scene that took place the night of that gifting: each
HBM122: Should Cows Have Names?
Mike Paros lives in two worlds. In one world, he’s an animal welfare specialist and mixed animal vet, meaning he works with both “companion” animals like cats and dogs, and large animals like horses, cows, goats, and sheep. He spends much of his time as a veterinarian working with animals that eventually become meat, and most of his human clients are farmers that lean right politically.In the othe
HBM121: True North
Angels saved Here Be Monsters’ host Jeff Emtman once. They picked him up and took care of him after a bad bike crash. It was just one of many times that Jeff felt watched over by God.Jeff used to think he might be a pastor someday. And so, as a teenager, he made an active effort to orient his thoughts and deeds towards what God wanted. In this episode, Jeff tells four short
Season 8 = October 2
HBM120: Own Worst Interest
In the fall of 1989, in Vancouver, Washington, a short, 29 year-old man named Westley Allan Dodd raped and murdered three young boys. The boys were brothers Cole and William Neer, ages 10 and 11, and four year old Lee Iseli. Content Note:Sexual violence, suicide and capital punishmentA few weeks later, police arrested Westley at movie theater after he tried and failed to abduct another boy. He qui
HBM119: An Episode of Pebbles and Twigs
The end of our seventh season draws near! Just one more episode until we hang up our podcasting hats for a few months. We don’t want you to miss us too much though, so on this episode, we’re tying up some loose ends, answering some questions, and sharing ways that you can stay connected with us even when our podcast feed is quieter.Content Note:Sexual references and bodily injuryFive ways to help
HBM118: Mountain Seabed
Life on earth began in the oceans. And it used to be simpler. For the first few billion years, life consisted of microbes that didn’t really swim or hunt; they mostly floated and, if they were lucky, bumped into something they could engulf and digest. But that changed during the Cambrian period. Over a relatively short period of time known as the Cambrian Explosion, organisms started be
HBM117: Grave Oversight
Sudan has been involved in ongoing civil wars since 1983. The wars were about religion, culture and resources. By 2005, approximately two million civilians had died. In 2011, the southern part of the country voted to secede from the north, creating the new country of South Sudan. But there were still three regions that were claimed by both north and south: Abyei, Blue Nile, and South Kordofa
HBM116: Finest and Most Rotten (Going Forward)
Mar 21, 1919 - NEW YORK CITYAn anonymous writer for the New York Tribune stands at 154 Nassau. The writer asks passers-by a simple question: “Do you think this is a good world?” It’s just four months after Armistice Day, and on the tail of a flu pandemic that killed 55 million worldwide. The writer publishes five answers, ranging from “damned rotten” to “the finest”. Mar 21, 2019
HBM115: Bound in Walton et al.
A highway robber with many aliases lay on his deathbed after contracting a bad flu. He dictated his life story to his captors before succumbing to his illness in July of 1837. His captors published the highwayman’s story posthumously with the title: Narrative of the life of James Allen, alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman. Be
HBM114: Envisioning AIDS
In a warm and dark room in the winter of 1987, people lay on the ground with their eyes closed. A facilitator from the Shanti Project guides those assembled on an intimate visualization through the process of dying from AIDS. Content Note: Visualizations of death and language.This took place at the Interfaith Conference on AIDS and ARC for Clergy and Caregivers in San Francisco.
HBM113: The Last Ones
Bethany Denton’s been thinking about grief a lot lately. In 2017, two of her friends, a mother and a daughter, died unexpectedly just two months apart. Since then, Bethany’s started seeing grief in just about everything, including a caribou at Woodland Park Zoo that dropped her antlers after a miscarriage. Content Note: Death and LanguageBethany’s good friend, Jesse Brenneman has also been thinkin
HBM112: Negative Space
Back when HBM host Jeff Emtman was a photographer, he used to solve his problems with walks in the woods. There, he’d see the ways that branches frame the sky. As an artistic concept, negative space gets hogged a lot by the visual arts. In this episode, Jeff attempts to wrestle the concept into the sonic world; address his current problems by listening to the spaces between words and
HBM111: Waiting for Earth
Motherhood always seemed non-negotiable for Bethany Denton. Her upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints certainly instilled this. Mormons believe in what’s called a “premortal existence,” a place up in heaven where the eternal souls eagerly wait their turn to be born on Earth so they can prove their faith to Heavenly Father, and then return to glory in the afterlife. Fo
HBM110: Big Numbers
For two thirds of his life, HBM host Jeff Emtman has been thinking about the distance to The Moon in terms of corn snacks. Bugles specifically. It was a factoid written on the packaging that purported to convey information about the distance to the moon. The number itself has been long forgotten, but the taste of degermed yellow corn meal lingers. Content Note:LanguageIn this ep
HBM109: Untitled Noises of New York (Sound Matters)
HBM host Jeff Emtman travels to New York City in an effort to fulfill open-ended recording assignments issued from afar by Tim Hinman for an episode of Bang & Olufsen’s Sound Matters podcast. It should be noted that in this episode, Tim incorrectly states that Jeff is from the “lentil capital of Washington State.” In fact, Jeff is from the self-proclaimed lentil capital of the world. Thi
HBM108: Witch of Saratoga
Angeline Tubbs may have been as old as 104 when she died alone in the woods, in a hut she made with her own hands. She came to America with a British officer who fought in the Battle of Saratoga (see HBM074: Benedict Arnold Makes People Nervous). Content Note: LanguageIt’s uncertain what happened to the officer, but soon after the battle, Angeline began living a hermit’s life, on the outskir
HBM107: Carlo Surrenders
Carlo Nakar spent more than twenty years in the United States before he was called by God to return to the the Philippines. It happened during one of his first classes of grad school at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. He looked into the rafters and asked, “Lord, what would be the hardest thing that you could ever ask me to do?” He received a verbal answer: “You should work wit
HBM106: Beautiful Stories about Dead Animals (part 2)
This is a special two-part episode, in which Kryssanne Adams describes the many times where she’s seen death or inflicted it upon animals. Content Note: Animal slaughter and other descriptions of deathKryssanne is a writer in Bellingham, Washington, where she also helps run the Bellingham Alternative Library, sings in a Threshold Choir, and works at a museum.We turned these episodes into a book,
HBM105: Beautiful Stories about Dead Animals (part 1)
Before Kryssanne Adams was old enough to understand death, she found a dead mouse and carried it around with her in a plastic Easter egg shell. She talked to it and gave it water. Content Note:Descriptions of death/dismemberment, language.This is a special two-part episode, in which Kryssanne describes the many times where she’s seen death or inflicted it upon animals. Soon, this will
HBM104: Scrapheap Reactor
Max Turnquist advises against wearing shorts while dumpster diving for used lab equipment. Almost every day, Max visits a university parking garage, where there are several small mountains of discarded equipment, some of it quite rare. Content Note: LanguageIt’s where he found his ion pump, and a lot of his rack-mounted monitoring gear and power supplies. He’s building a small nuclear fusion
HBM103: Fate's Notebook
Somewhere in Maritza Gulin’s basement, there’s a typewritten notebook that belonged to her father, Reynaldo. The notebook contains essential advice and warnings to Reynaldo, his wife Flora, and their five children.Content Note: Suicide, mental illness, animal sacrifice, language.In his younger life, Reynaldo’s atheism was strong and biting. But chronic migraines would often flatten him for days at
HBM102: Breath Holder
Archer Mayo has always loved finding lost things. He grew up on several navy bases and spent much of his childhood swimming and looking for human detritus–sunglasses, teacups, glass bottles. That’s why he takes such delight in searching for old lead weights in the murky waters of the Columbia River in Washington state. Archer is a free diver and uses no breathing apparatus when he dives. He just h
HBM101: Much Corruption
Growing up, Jeff Emtman had a hard time balancing his piety for the One God with his piety for the Gnomish lord Berwyn. Generally, he deferred to the latter, though he lost favor eventually with both.Jeff’s scoutmaster, a retired surgeon with a habit of collecting unusual boats, was always trying to get Jeff outside, away from the computer where he spent most of his free time playing a game
Season 7 Soon!
HBM100: Faraway Minds
Anna Klein thinks that tea tastes better on the Faroe Islands. She thinks the water’s more pure there, and the Northern Lights let the sky be whatever color it wants to be. She often thinks about moving there.Content Note: Violence (momentary) and LanguageBut she also worries that her fantasies of running away to the remote corners of the world may be a familial urge to isolate herself
HBM099: Spell for the Repulsion of Astral Vampires
There’s currently an invisible, supernatural pandemic affecting the world, or so claims HBM host Jeff Emtman. What else could explain the wide-ranging malaise of our current times? He thinks that the most logical conclusion is that astral energy vampires are draining humans of their lifeforce en masse. Jeff’s never encountered one of these beasts, but that’s probably because he’s devel
HBM098: Feed the Queen
The Victoria Bug Zoo is home to dozens of species of insects and arachnids, and two leaf cutter ant colonies.There's the new colony, with a three year old queen whose kingdom grows every day. If all goes well, she is expected to live to the age of fifteen, laying an egg approximately every three seconds. Her colony is teaming with a healthy population of soldiers, gardeners, and foragers with the
HBM097: Fox Teeth
In the Westfjords of Iceland, people wait for birds to come ashore so that they can gather the feathers they leave behind. These birds, called Eider Ducks, are the source of eiderdown, a ridiculously expensive and rare stuffing for bedding. This has landed the Arctic Fox in the crosshairs (quite literally). These relatively common foxes are opportunistic eaters who snack on e
HBM096: Are We Still Afraid?
Here Be Monsters is almost 100 episodes old. It’s grown a lot since Jeff was a scared 22 year old learning audio editing in his basement. So as we approach the milestone, we take a look back, check in with some of our memorable guests, and take the chance to answer some listener questions while we’re at it.Content Note: Recreational drug use, deaths (intentional and accidental), eating disorder, l
HBM095: The Bats that Stay
Not all migratory bats migrate. We don’t know why some choose to stay behind at their summer roosts. But according to the University of Washington’s Sharlene Santana, the bats that stay tend to die. Content Note: Fleeting languageIn this episode, HBM host Jeff Emtman attempts to make a metaphor about bats and humans. Perhaps it’s anthropomorphic, perhaps it’s unnecessarily
HBM094: The Fatigue of Violence
In the nearly 20 years that Susan Randall’s been working as a private investigator, she’s seen Vermont’s most disadvantaged people struggling to have life’s most basic amenities. Sometimes her job is to interview people addicted to crack, to help determine whether they’re suitable parents. Sometimes her job is to examine blood spatter at gruesome crime scenes. She recently helped defen
HBM093: The Brain Scoop
In school, Divya Anantharaman used to get teased for having long skinny fingers like ET. But now she sees them as valuable asset for the intricate work she does. Divya runs Friends Forever Taxidermy in Brooklyn, New York. Content Note: Fleshy soundsIn this episode Divya carries a recorder with her while as she slowly disassembles a deceased pet parrot: snipping joints, scooping b
HBM092: Carry the Scent
Robert Larson does not have an easy job. He searches for missing people with his dog Captain Dexter as a K9 search and rescue volunteer. Robert often travels across the Midwest, and he does this work pro bono, relying on donations from his supporters to pay for gas, lodging, and dog food.Content Note: Death of a child, a mention of suicide, and languageRobert does not work with law enforcement. He
HBM091: Hypnosis of Hunger
Producer Bethany Denton found a box in her basement storage room with two old cassette tapes inside. It took her a moment to realize what they were.Content Note: Descriptions of disordered eatingBethany has been fat her whole life, even when she was a kid. She ate hidden stashes of food when she felt anxious. By the time she was eleven years old, Bethany’s parents worried she would have health pro
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