S06E01 💀Taphonomy and All That Rot🧛

Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France who teaches the colony's history at Université Laval, for a seasonal visit to the winter of 1704. That year, a French and allied Indigenous raiding party fell on the frontier village of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and marched more than a hundred captives north to Canada. Among them was the town's Puritan minister, the Reverend John Williams, whose memoir of captivity in Catholic Quebec was written as theological propaganda. But tucked between the sermons are three strange stories that caught Joseph's eye: a gray cat that crashed a dawn mass, a soldier's dream from purgatory, and a dead man with news from hell.Joseph explains how a historian handles a tale with one teller and no corroboration, and why the most useful clue in a ghost story is often the dull detail nobody meant to include. It's an exemplary excursion into Holistic Monster Studies.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.

Blake, Karen, and paranormal investigator Matt Baxter gather on Halloween eve for MonsterTalk's annual live show. The agenda: micro-horror, meaningful coincidences, a stranger who would not stop calling, and the most convincing ghost video on the internet.When a woman in Queensland reaches out to Karen through eight different channels at once, the urgency turns out to have nothing to do with family business and everything to do with a house in Del Rio, Texas. Voices that learn your name. A photograph that appears from nowhere and disappears again. And a thread that runs straight back to the birth of rock and roll. Meanwhile, Blake confesses to a lifelong habit of collecting coincidences, and Matt opens the pantry door.Extended 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.

🍿 S06E04 - Capturing Bigfoot Reaction 🫈Last week Blake and Karen spoke with director Marq Evans before any of them had seen his film. Now they have. Karen Stollznow and paranormal investigator Matt Baxter join Blake to react to Capturing Bigfoot, the new documentary built around a reel of 16mm film that sat in a family safe for more than half a century, and the Patterson family story that turns out to be even bigger than the footage. The film arrived on Prime Video on October 20, 2026, and the Bigfoot world has not been quiet since.The side-by-side stills circulating online are only a sliver of the story. The panel digs into the confessions, the money, the broken families, and the people who were there, then turns to the question every skeptic has been asking this week: if the most famous piece of Bigfoot evidence ever filmed folds, does anything actually change? Plus a horse turns out to be carrying a very strange coincidence.🔗 Links and ReferencesCapturing Bigfoot - Prime Video 💵Capturing Bigfoot - Official siteCapturing Bigfoot - WikipediaThe Patterson-Gimlin film - WikipediaRené Dahinden - WikipediaJeffrey Meldrum - WikipediaA Guide to Identifying Year of Manufacture for KODAK Motion Picture Films - Kodak (PDF)Freeze brand - WikipediaFreeze Branding Cattle - Oklahoma State University ExtensionLivestock branding - Wikipedia"Eastman Kodak" - James Layton, from Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification (FIAF, 2020)Four walling - WikipediaPious fraud - WikipediaCognitive dissonance - WikipediaSunk cost - WikipediaList of cognitive biases - WikipediaList of fallacies - WikipediaThe five stages of grief - WikipediaThe Fox sisters - WikipediaMarjoe Gortner - WikipediaThe Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting - WikipediaThe Loch Ness Monster and the "Surgeon's Photograph" - WikipediaWhen Prophecy Fails - Wikipedia"Debunking 'When Prophecy Fails'" - Thomas Kelly, Journal of the History of the Behavioral ScieBecome 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 interview Marq Evans, directory of the new documentary Capturing Bigfoot - a new film that hits streaming October 20th, 2026 and features stunning new evidence that the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot Film may depict a person in a suit!This is the most exciting news to hit Bigfoot in a long while and we're excited to see the film ourselves.Also - we say goodbye to frequent guest and real life friend, Dr. Brian Regal.Extended 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.

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 died in 2020, his family asked Fluker to carry his work to the finish line.These aren't the ghost lights and phantom hitchhikers of modern battlefield tours. They're stories that ran alongside battle reports and stock prices, told by the people who lived through the war. What did these ghosts want? Why did a Union veterans' newspaper print a tale of soldiers burying their enemy? And how did ghost lore become a weapon after the war ended?Extended 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.

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.

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 conversation is not strictly paranormal, but overlaps meaningfully with MonsterTalk themes around science, storytelling, folklore, and how language shapes perception.Extended 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.

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 state. Along the way, the creatures themselves seem to be changing. The talk ranges from AI-generated monster images to the rise of Dogman, from a lawmaker's Bigfoot bounty to the ethics of chasing mysteries you may never catch.👤 About Our GuestDaniel Alan Jones is an investigative reporter and researcher based in South Texas, and the founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, a networking hub for people interested in cryptids and their lore. He is the creator and host of The Vortex, a YouTube channel and website covering cryptids, UFOs, and unexplained phenomena. He first encountered cryptozoology through an online forum in 2006 and has been active in the field since 2010. His fieldwork has taken him from the Piney Woods of East Texas to Bluff Creek, Death Valley, and Point Pleasant, and he takes an ethnographic approach to the subject, treating the community of monster hunters as part of what deserves study. His favorite cryptid is a hometown one.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

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