Here Be Monsters

HBM079: The Tingles

Devaan describes it as a pulsing, tingling feeling on the back of his neck.   His preferred stimuli are whispers, shuffling cards, scissors, tapping noises, anything that makes a crisp enough sound to trigger his ASMR.  These sounds make him feel relaxed, euphoric and drowsy.   Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response  is a physical reaction experienced by some unknown percentage of the population (to varying degrees).  Due to being only recently recognized and named , ASMR ...

HBM078: Sagittarius Has $45

Sagittarius has been good for the last year.  That’s what he told us.  He told us that the cage that Luna designed for him is working.  She controls his money, his businesses, can read his email, can see his bank accounts, and can track the location of his phone. Please Note: This episode contains frank discussions of sexual addiction and desire.  All names in this episode are pseudonyms. He says that the next time he messes up, Luna will leave him, and take the kids wit...

HBM077: Snow on Date Trees, then on Pines

Muhammad Tariq still doesn’t know who the men with guns were.  They wore masks on their faces when they came into the teachers’ lounge.  His small, gender-integrated school in Panjgur had been anonymously receiving literature that scolded them for teaching girls.  Tariq and the other teachers didn’t take it seriously until the six men showed up. While they beat the maintenance worker with the butts of their guns and smashed the office’s computers, one of the masked men mentioned t...

HBM076: Griff's Speech

As a baby, Griff Eldridge was quieter than most.  But he slept well.  He fed.  He played with his big brother Ira. And he smiled easily.  For a long time, his parents Luke and Davinia didn’t worry, because he was so happy and healthy. When Griff became a toddler, Luke and Davinia started to compare his speech to the speech of  other children and to the standards laid out in the Personal Child Health Record , a book issued to new parents by the UK government.   Griff...

HBM075: The Weight of Science

Anita Woodley  went to the Rhine Research Center  for scientific confirmation.  Since childhood, she’d dreamt the future, able to predict imminent murders in her neighborhood.  She prayed away her abilities for a period of her early adulthood, but they returned unexpectedly after the birth of her first child.  Her psychic abilities troubled her.  Going to the Rhine Center was her doctor’s suggestion.  Her doctor said she wasn’t alone, that there were others wit...

HBM074: Benedict Arnold Makes People Nervous (Rumble Strip)

There is an unusual piece of carved grey stone in the hills of upstate New York .  It depicts the boot of a notorious American villain who was shot in the leg during the Battle of Saratoga.  Major General Benedict Arnold’s name is nowhere to be found on the inscription.  Instead, it refers only to the "most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army”.  The rest is implied. Steve Sheinkin thinks that we can’t—and don’t—talk about Benedict Arnold’s actual history because it serv...

HBM073: A Trial Ghost Hunt

Ken Arnold and his wife Donna have opposite work schedules, but they are lucky to share a hobby. For the last nine years they have operated an all-volunteer group called the Puget Sound Ghost Hunters . They spend nearly every weekend together, along with a handful of other volunteers investigating paranormal activity in residential homes and notoriously haunted buildings all across western Washington. They don’t get paid for the work they do and over the years they have invested their own money ...

HBM072: Ant God

As far as gods go, Jacob Lemanski is more tepid than most.  Despite his omniscience, he feels unequipped to deal with the ethical decisions required of him. Content Note: this episode contains a description of a domestic assault. Jacob is the owner of AntLife , a company that makes large ant farms.  In one of his prototype farms, he was experimenting with different soil types.  One of his formulations caused a problem: tunnel collapse.  And during a cave-in, one of his ants b...

HBM071: The Evangelists of Nudism

Growing up Mormon in Montana, Bethany Denton had a phrase drilled into her mind from an early age: “modest is hottest.”  To her, it became a mantra even while many of her friends, especially other girls, struggled with Mormonism’s strict modesty standards . But never Bethany–she was fat enough to know that no one wanted to see that anyway. By the time Bethany moved to Washington State for college, she had rejected the church and was looking for new, broader experiences.  She got a job ...

wet-slop-plop.wav (Among Other Sounds)

There are about 10,000 files in the Here Be Monsters sound library.   HBM producer Jeff Emtman has been recording, synthesizing and downloading them since way back before this show started.  And of these thousands of sounds, there’s a tiny subset of them that just keep winding up on podcast episodes. On this interstitial episode, Jeff plays back some of these heavily-used sounds and asks whether they occur because of an inherent goodness, a force of habit, or some kind of weird nostalg...

HBM070: The Way The Blood Flows

“I used to think you were brilliant” Evan Williamson’s dad wrote to him in a letter.  Evan was in treatment for chemical dependency at the time.  His father asked if they could meet in Alaska to continue a family tradition of fathers and sons who fished together.   The Alaskan waters were teeming, and two spent entire days ending lives together.  Evan’s dad, amid all the death, explained that he too was dying.   The Way The Blood Flows a short story written and read by E...

HBM069: Redwoods of the In-World

Ariadne, Jacqueline, North, and others unnamed are all part of the same system.  They share a single body.  They take turns “fronting” the body, controlling it.  And when they’re not fronting, the system members are free to roam an infinite landscape, a pocket reality that they call the “in-world”.  Together, they go to work every day, spend time with friends and lovers, go to shows, play video games, and live many aspects of a typical life. But when multiple people with vary...

HBM068: The Wake Up Stick

When Dylan Wright placed his first Craigslist ad back in 2006, he called himself a “nice and genuine person with waking up problems.”  He was looking for someone to help him in the mornings.  First it was phone calls, but those didn’t work, so he moved on to something more personal. Content Note: Language Dylan’s problem is that, left to his own devices, he sleeps and doesn’t stop sleeping: “Seventeen hours was the longest I ever slept...that’s like four times as much as some people ge...

HBM067: Dispatches From PestWorld 2016

Feeling anxiety about the American presidential election, HBM host Jeff Emtman took a trip to a place he hoped to be insulated from politics: PestWorld 2016 , the largest American gathering of pest management professionals. Jeff has always liked bugs and pest animals, so it was a miniature vacation.  He talked with the following attendees about the tools and the philosophy of pest management: Rose Eckhart of ZappBugg bed bug heaters  Carlita Turk of TAP Pest Control Insulation David Wa...

HBM066: What Jacob Heard

Jacob Sutton loved going to church when he was a little boy. He sang in the choir, and when he got older he led Bible studies and helped teach Sunday school classes. Eventually he learned to speak in tongues . Jacob grew up Pentecostal , the oldest son of a deacon. His father used to work with people who believed they were possessed by demons, and would use prayer and Bible readings to cast the wicked spirits out. All of his life, Jacob knew that demons and The Devil were very real, and that the...

HBM065: We Pay Them In Meat

Walk through any natural history museum and you’ll see rows of effortlessly clean animal skeletons.  Chances are you're looking at a strange form of human/insect symbiosis happening in the museum’s back rooms.  Preparing an animal’s skeleton for display is incredibly labor intensive for human hands.  So curators have turned to a family of beetles with millennia of experience.  The dermestidae family of beetles have followed humans since our early history.  They’re opport...

HBM064: A Shrinking Shadow

Erin was fat as a kid. Since middle school, she tried all different methods to lose weight. From a young age she developed the idea that the most important thing she could do with her life was lose weight. That's part of why she and HBM producer Bethany Denton were such good friends in high school. They were both fat, nearly the same size. Both tried and failed to lose weight since childhood. Together they felt safe to enjoy food without judgment. But they parted ways after high school.  Be...

HBM063: The Art of the Scam, by Malibu Ron

Presumably, any given mystic falls into one of two categories: true believer or scam artist. It's foolish to think that this is a categorization that can be made at first glance. Spotting a good scammer is near impossible, unless they tell you outright. Content Note: Explicit Content On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Jeff Emtman has a conversation with an internet mystic who identifies as scam artist. Vice would call him an " Etsy witch "; he calls himself a "haunted demon seller." ...

HBM062: The Near Death of Sir Deja Doog

Before Doog could walk, his family gave him a guitar to hold and encouraged him to play music. By the time he was twelve, he'd started writing songs as a way to make sense of the confusing world around him. Back then he was just Eric Alexander, the friendly weird kid who dressed like a punky cowboy.  In college a fellow musician asked Eric what his middle name was. "Douglas," Eric replied. "Douglas? Doug, Doug... Doog... I'm going to call you Doog." The name stuck, and eventu...

HBM061: The Natural State of Hitchhiking

HBM060: The Predators of McNeil Island

Your Last Memory Of Being Free

HBM059: When Cthulhu Calls

The most notable monster created by Howard Phillips Lovecraft was completely omnipotent, yet completely uncaring.  A massive, tentacled being that sleeps in the depths of the ocean--Cthulhu.  A creature that will one day rise again from its watery home to reclaim the Earth for itself. In this episode of Here Be Monsters, we team up with Eric Molinsky of the Imaginary Worlds Podcast from Panoply Studios.  Eric speaks with Sheldon Solomon , a psychologist who co-founded the study of...

HBM058: Kelly Is Cold

It was early in the morning of New Years Day and Kelly had just bought a purse-load of psychedelic mushrooms from Laramie Wyoming's local "druggist."  Kelly handed them out to the assembled company and took some himself.  He felt a bit apathetic about the world.  He was wearing thin shoes,, a t-shirt and a pair of jeans.  But when he went outside to look at the stars, he realized what he wanted more than anything else in the world...a book on combinatorics . Suddenly, Kelly f...

HBM057: Impostor in a Pink Pinstripe Suit

Growing up in small-town Montana, Bethany Denton's parents and teachers told her what she knew already: she was brilliant.  Bethany couldn't help but feel destined for something big, even though she often skipped her school readings and phoned it in.  Why try hard when you already know everything? Content Note: Explicit Content In high school, Bethany joined the speech and debate team and started winning medals in an event called Serious Oral Interpretation.  One afternoon Bethany...

HBM056: It Works Better in Movies

When Lina Misitzis was a teenager, she told people she was dying.  She wasn't.  But, an entire genre of " dying girl gets the guy " movies  taught her that landing a boyfriend required a certain brevity on this planet.  She only lied to men, men she wanted to be with.  Content Note: Explicit Content That was more than ten years ago, but the guilt of exploiting imaginary illness for (failed) romantic gain stays with her to the present.  Julia Wallace, her therapist, ...

HBM055: Ghost Tape Number Ten

All is fair in love and war... even mind games. The United States military employs psychological warfare in nearly every war it's part of. From creating a " ghost army " of inflatable tank fleets in World War II, to blasting heavy metal music toward enemy territory during the Gulf War, the purpose of these tactics is to decrease morale and inspire enemy combatants to surrender or defect. The US Military calls these tactics "Psychological Operations", or "PSYOP". The Vietnam War was no different....

HBM054: Flaming Sword of Truth

Patti Negri is a witch who lives in a house buried deep in the Hollywood Hills.  Here Be Monsters producer Jeff Emtman and performance artist Lenae Day went to visit her one day in October 2015, audio recorder in-hand, in an attempt to better understand the mechanisms behind her magic.  One of Patti's tools is astral travel (or astral projection), a form of controlled out of body experience where the travelers eschew their flesh and bone bodies for ones made of souls, or energy, or som...

HBM053: Eleven Trips to Dreamworld

In 2014, Jeff Emtman mailed tape recorders to people around the world.  He asked them to keep the recorders by their beds and flip them on early in the morning as their dreams were still fresh in their minds.  Once the tape was full, they mailed it back to Jeff.    Until now, the dreams remained private.  But, on this episode of Here Be Monsters, you'll hear a small collection of the first set of dreams.  In the coming months, more dreams will be uploaded to the Dre...

HBM052: Call 601-2-SATAN-2

Christian prayer hotlines are common in the United States. Less common are prayer hotlines for the other guy.  Since 2012, the Satanic Missionary Society in Olympia, Washington has managed a Satanic prayer line  on their blog and receive prayer requests from people all over the country.  They ask for help with things like miscarriage, a romantic affair with a mother-in-law, a successful rap career, and more. Content Note: Explicit Content. Among those callers is Tyler Higgins, a y...