Here Be Monsters

HBM051: Sister Bethany, Proxy for the Dead

Bethany Denton was about five years old when she learned that she was a Mormon. When she was eight, she learned that she was an eternal spirit destined for an eternal afterlife.  The idea of eternity terrified her, and made her afraid to stargaze into the boundless universe. When she got older, Bethany was allowed to enter the Mormon temple in Billings, Montana to act as the proxy in baptisms for the dead . The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was founded in 1830, and has practic...

HBM050: The Scientist is not the Angel of Death

What's a life worth? About $25, before shipping.  At least, that's the case if you want a high-quality inbred lab mouse, like the C57BL/6J  (in the biz, they just call them "black mice").  In this episode of Here Be Monsters, Jeff Emtman joins "The Scientist," an unnamed cancer researcher, for an after-hours trip to his lab, where they visit the hundreds of lab mice that he tends to.  The Scientist's job is to inject his mice with cancer cells, then attempt to cure them using...

HBM049: Sam's Japan Tapes

When Sam Parker went to Japan to celebrate his mother's 60th birthday, he brought along a handheld audio recorder.  For the next few weeks, he recorded every sound that he could find, attempting to capture as many audio snapshots of Japan as possible.  Sam doesn't really take pictures.  Without his glasses he's legally blind twice over.  So, to remember and share his trip, he created five beautiful audio postcards. On this episode, Sam Parker and Jeff Emtman discuss the merit...

HBM048: Barrie's Mental Tempest

Barrie Wylie has heard voices for as long as he can remember. Growing up on a small island in Scotland, the voices in his head were like secret best friends that he could play with. When he left school to become a fisherman at 15, his voices told him he was a disciple of Jesus.  He believed he could control the weather and prevent harm befalling his boat and his crew. As Barrie got older, his voices intensified. They became more aggressive, telling him to harm himself and others. He learned...

HBM047: Peacocks Without Tails

When Hippocrates noticed that the hair on the top of his head was falling out, he fought it by applying various ointments of opium to his scalp.  But none of them worked.  So he called it a disease and named it "Alopecia" (translated to "disease of the fox") after the mangy, hairless foxes that wandered Greece in those days.  His friends called it something different though, they called it a " Hippocratic Wreath ." He also tried sheep urine .  That didn't work either.  C...

HBM046: Crooked Skirts

HBM045: Deep Stealth Mode (How To Be A Girl)

Marlo Mack gave birth to a son.  At least, she thought she did.  As a toddler, her son crawled towards dresses, wanted to be a princess, asked to grow long blonde hair.  And at age 3, Marlo's son requested to return to her tummy so he could come back out as a baby girl.  Marlo thought it was a phase--it wasn't.  So she started learning how to raise a very young transgender daughter.  She started keeping audio diaries.  In this episode, Marlo sends her child to ...

HBM044: Distant Warfare

Bridget Burnquist was backpacking around Southeast Asia. After weeks of drinking cheap liquor on beautiful beaches, she was beginning to feel as though her experiences were merely superficial. She heard rumors that the nearby country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) was home to beautiful mountain villages that have hardly changed for centuries, accessible only by hiking for days in the Burmese jungles. So she headed west into Myanmar, despite (or perhaps, because of) warnings from the U.S. State...

Lying in a Stranger's Grave

Carlos Gemora loved the feeling of the dirt at the cemetary where he used to dig graves.  One day he climbed down into the loamy, silty soil and looked up at the sky.  It felt like a womb... a death womb.  This piece was produced by Alex Kime and Jeff Emtman, with support from Bethany Denton. Our editor at KCRW is Nick White. Music by  Nym  and  Lucky Dragons  ...

HBM043: Last Chance To Evacuate Earth

Marshall Applewhite met Bonnie Nettles in 1972, and together they built a religion. It was called Heaven's Gate , and it drew heavily from the bible, astrology, and Star Trek. Applewhite and Nettles believed they were placed on Earth to deliver a holy message. They were the leaders of their new religion, and they changed their names to Do and Ti (pronounced "doe" and "tea"). After Nettles' death, the group developed a larger, stronger following, its doctrine evolved—incorporating more and more e...

HBM042: Deers

Andy Wilson and Ryan Graves are best friends, despite having very different opinions on the hierarchy of human and animal life. The two come face-to-face with those differences after a fatal encounter on a frigid winter day in northeastern Idaho when Andy's dogs chase a deer into Lake Chatcolet. Today, Andy is happily married (celebrating his year anniversary next week), working as a fine woodworker at Renaissance Fine Woodworking, and living in Pullman Washington. He now has three brown do...

HBM041: Crossing the River, Feeling Watched

In his junior year of high school, HBM host Jeff Emtman left his home and everything he knew to live and study in a tiny village nestled in the Cascade Mountain range of Washington state. An outsider among outsiders in a tight-knit rural community, it wasn't long before Jeff felt the unmistakable feeling of being watched. This episode is the first in our 4th season of shows.  We recently joined KCRW.  If you'd like to know what that means for the show, you can read a little bit about o...

Fear of Silence

HBM producers Jeff and Bethany are having more and more trouble bearing silence. On this episode, Jeff calls back crow researcher Kaeli Swift and asks her what it was like to sit in silence with a stranger. And Bethany explains the differences in the anxieties that she and Jeff have towards silence. Music: The Black Spot Please note that there are some delicate tones in this podcast.  If you're listening in a noisy environment, you might miss them.  That's not necessarily a bad thing.....

Forty Monster Bites

Here's a little gift for you.  It's clips of every episode of Here Be Monsters.  You can use this page as a hub to your discovery of HBM.  As each clip plays, a comment will pop up in the bottom of the player.  Click that comment and a new tab will open with a link to the full episodes.  Pretty neat, right? Just because we're on break doesn't mean we don't want to hear from you.  Please, let us know what we're doing right and wrong, like us on facebook, and subscrib...

HBM040: The Reformation Bible Puritan Baptist Church

Eric Jon Phelps knows a lot of things.  He knows that the Pope controls the world.  He knows that it was the Jesuits who poisoned him in Tampa.  And he knows that we can avoid the Vatican's plans to incite global race wars is to keep the races separate. Eric is the pastor of rural Pennsylvania's Reformation Bible Puritan Baptist Church. Content Note: Explicit content including bigotry, historical inaccuracies and language. The strange thing about Eric is that he's completely open ...

HBM039: A Goddamn Missionary

HBM038: Do Crows Mourn Their Dead?

Crows have really strange habits around death. When a bird dies, crows gather, squawking loudly and gathering as many other birds as they can find to come and look at the dead body. Much of what we know about crow funerals comes from the work of John Marzluff , a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. He and Kaeli Swift (one of his grad students) are trying to get to the bottom of these strange phenomena using taxidermy crows and masks and Cheetos and raw peanuts. On this episode ...

HBM037: Uncertain Death

Recent episodes of Here Be Monsters have been largely about death.  So, on this episode David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg teach us about the exact opposite—immortality, living forever.  Their documentary film, The Immortalists, follows a small community of scientists who think of aging as a preventable disease, not an inevitable outcome.    Seeking immortality is nothing new, in fact, the oldest known text, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is largely about a king's quest to live foreve...

HBM036: Throw It In The Ocean

Eric Chase's memory of April 19th, 1989 is largely a blur. On that day, he was aboard the USS Iowa, a World War 2 era battleship, equipped with some of the world's biggest cannons, capable of leveling a city block with a single hit. Content Note: Explicit Content, namely graphic descriptions of dead bodies. But April 19th, 1989 was the day when one of the 16 inch guns aboard the ship malfunctioned and caused a huge internal explosion that claimed the lives of 47 sailors and caused a huge fire on...

HBM035: Spirits of the Past

It was a group of businessmen in the late 19th century who originally invented the Ouija Board . They sold them in toy shops and promising questions answered “about the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy.” Spiritualism was all the rage in the United States, and, while hiring a professional medium could be costly, the Ouija Board allowed ordinary people to communicate with the dead. In this episode of Here Be Monsters, freelance producer Mickey Capper attends a modern seance , condu...

HBM034: The Grandmother and The Vine Of The Dead

Ayahuasca is one of the most powerful and most illegal hallucinogens in the world. It contains DMT. But, for as long as anyone can remember, it's been used by people who have wanted to know more about the universe. These people have traditionally been involved with shamanic tribes of the Amazon Rainforest, but in recent years, more and more people have had access to Ayahuasca through ceremonies lead by shamans in countries near the South American Equator. Ayahuasca (also called Iowaska, Yagé, Vi...

HBM033: What One Does

HBM032: Fugitives of the Blue Laguna

Back when David was a nerdy Oklahoman teenager, he fell in love with Stephanie. They both had angst towards their overbearing, conservative parents and they both wanted out. So, when the opportunity presented itself, they decided to run for it. They took David's blue 1976 Chevy Laguna and as much money as they could find and started driving to Portland to start a new life. Stephanie's mom found out and hired a private investigator. She told the PI to break David's arms if he ever caught up with ...

HBM031: The Roman Slug Death Orgy

In a strange, small, moss-covered forest in Bellingham, Washington, Jeff stumbled on to the most gruesome scene of hedonism he's ever seen. While it's not common for humans to witness slug death orgies, every once in a while, someone's there with a camera in the right time and place.  These slugs are most likely European Red Slugs ( Arion Rufus ), which were first noticed in the Western United States by a Californian biologist who found one in a lawn in Seattle . Now, the slugs are commonpl...

HBM030: Crickets, Cadavars, and Conventional Wisdom

This episode is a Grab-bag, it contains three segments that serve as follow-ups to the three most recent episodes of Here Be Monsters. Part 1: Crickets on Tape In this segment, Jeff takes apart his tape recorder and installs a knob to help him slow down the tape without using digital wizardry in attempts to de-muddy the waters after HBM029: Do Crickets Sing Hymns .  He bought some more crickets and slowed the cassette slowed down to 1/3 speed.  The results were telling, and surprising....

HBM029: Do Crickets Sing Hymns?

A bit of stunningly beautiful audio has surfaced online recently and it's riling up two different kinds of people--churchgoers and audio engineers. Some are saying that this music proves God's intention, others say it's a load of crap. The funny thing is that it's just recordings of bugs, crickets chirping, but with the speed turned waaaaaayyyy ddoooowwwnnn. Whatever it is, it's...undeniably "church-y". But some have argued that it's not just bugs in the recording, that there's voices or guitars...

HBM028: Jonathan's Cadaver Paintings

Jonathan Happ’s white lab coat and latex gloves make him look like a doctor when he stands in a room full of people. But he’s not a doctor…he’s an artist, and the people he shares this room with are all dead. In this episode, Jonathan takes a recorder into the University of Washington’s cadaver lab and reports on what he sees, and why he draws and paints images of the bodies. Sensitive listeners should note that this episode contains graphic (but mostly scientific) descriptions of the cadavers. ...

HBM027: Balancing Act

For thousands of years, Western Medicine thought it had itself figured out. Everything came in fours. There were four sensations, four fluids in the body, four kinds of people, and four elements making up the world. They were all related. There wasn’t one without the other. Everything was a balancing act, and it was called Humorism. In recent history, vaccines, sterilization, and other modern treatments have pushed Humorism out of the picture. But traditions ingrained in culture, science, and re...

HBM026: John Comes Down The Birth Canal

It was 40-odd years before John Hanneman figured out what the night terrors of his youth represented. In this episode, John describes the first trauma he experienced in life—something we all share. And he explains how he overcame it to become the person he is today. Check out some pictures of John Hanneman over on the HBM's Facebook If John’s voice sounds familiar, you aren’t imagining it. John appeared on the show waaay back on Episode 3: John Dips Below where he talked about his experiences di...

HBM025: The Sasquatch of Pumpkintown VS Motley Crue Jon Bon Jovi

Homemade Bigfoot costumes can get you in a lot of trouble. And in gun-toting community of Pumpkintown, SC, a fake Bigfoot costume might get you killed too. But when the recession caused a local outfitter’s store sales to sag, it was a risk he was willing to take. In the episode, Ben Becker tells the story of a disgusting hound dog named “Motley Crue John Bon Jovi”, a tobacco-juice soaked Sasquatch suit, and the world’s worst hot sauce. Sharp listeners should note that no one fact-checked a singl...