Here Be Monsters – Details, episodes & analysis

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 entirety of the Berlin Wall—or, in the case of the latter, where the Berlin Wall used to be. 

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Field recordings heard in this episode (starting around the 17:20): a former site of the Berlin wall in Marienfelde  ~  birds and insects near Portbou, Spain  ~  canoe paddling near the in Germany’s Spreewald  ~  geese and peacocks calling on Peacock Island (Pfaueninsel)  ~  dusk crickets near Locarno, Switzerland  ~  a massive pipe organ that was part of Italy’s submission to the 2024 Venice Biennale  ~  public transport boats in Venice revving their engines  ~  Jeff singing in a bathroom while a faucet drips  ~  Water splashing against cement in Banyuls-sur-mer, France  ~  Hiking the Walter Benjamin memorial trail on the France / Spain border  ~  Baby goat at the peak of a mountain on the France / Spain border  ~  A canal boat passing in Amsterdam, Netherlands  ~  An announcement bidding visitors to be quiet while visiting France’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg.  

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

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 Winkel

Violin Phase, performed by Jonathan Morton 

Pendulum Music, performed by Joan Cerveró, Víctor Trescolí, Isabel León, and  Estefanía Sánchez

Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast supported by listener donations.  If you’d like to make a small monthly contribution, visit patreon.com/HBMpodcast. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman

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 Emtman

Music: Serocell and The Black Spot

Sponsor: RadioLab

Are you curious about the world, but also want to be surprised, and even moved? Radiolab experiments with sound and storytelling allowing science to fuse with culture, and information to sound like… well, music. Join hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser for an experiential investigation that explores themes and ideas through a patchwork of people, sounds, and stories. Listen to Radiolab

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 varying interests, social skills, and gender identities share a single body, some things are tough.  It’s tough to live in a world that doesn’t understand you, doesn’t know your secrets, or just wants to diagnose you.

The system members refer to their living situation as being “plural” or “multiple”.  Psychiatry calls similar situations Dissociative Identity Disorder.  The system members don’t identify with this diagnosis, as it requires the multiplicity to be hinderance.  They say it’s the opposite of a hinderance--it’s what lets them survive. 

Another perspective on multiplicity can be found in the work of philosopher John Perry.  1978, he published a paper called A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality which critiques popular assumptions of personal identity.  This writing was brought to our attention by Barry Lam, the producer of a soon-to-be released philosophy podcast called Hi-Phi Nation.  

We mailed our spare recorder to the system’s home in the spring of 2016.  Over the course of several months, system members created diary entries and field recordings to share the world that Ari calls too “bright and loud”.

Producer Jeff Emtman did an interview with Jacqueline, where she also described the building process of the in-world, including the creation a spot of reverence within it--a grove of redwood trees modelled on a forest near Oakland. 

One day, Jacqueline hopes to move from the city to the wilderness and have dogs.  Jacqueline said that there are no current plans to integrate the system. 

We found out about Ari, North, Jacqueline et al because we asked for listeners to tell us their secrets.   If you have a secret you’d like to share, please get in touch. 

Content Advisory:  This episode contains a brief description of sexual violence (and casual swearing too, but we don’t usually warn you about that).  The description of sexual violence is short and mostly non-graphic.  If you don’t want to hear it,  you just need to skip ahead about two minutes when you hear us talking about the state of Georgia. 

This episode was produced by Jeff Emtman and Bethany Denton.  Nick White is HBM’s editor at KCRW.  

Music: The Black Spot

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 get daily.” And he’s tried to fix it in a lot of ways—bright lights suspended over his bed hooked to a timer, multiple alarms—nothing worked.  He lost jobs, missed flights, messed up personal relationships, all because he couldn’t wake up.

So for most of the last decade, Dylan’s hired someone to come to his house, and physically wake him up.  “Nothing weird or inappropriate about this, it’s just a job.” he says.  Dylan estimates he’s had ten people fill this job.  Most of them quit abruptly, or just stopped showing up.  But he likes his current guy, who doesn’t even come into the house.   Instead, he’s taken to knocking on Dylan’s bedroom window with a long stick (that way he doesn’t have to stand in the flowerbeds).  He knocks until Dylan gets out of bed puts on clothes and makes himself some coffee.

It’s $10 per day, five days per week, sometimes six.

Lisa Cantrell produced this piece.  She’s the host of An Inexact Science, which is a podcast about human psychology.  

Music: The Black Spot

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 Walters of HY-C Home Solutions

Evan Bruce of Heat Assault glycol bed bug products

Roger Johnson and Evan Church of Pest Routes

Sheree Swindle of Bed Bug Mutts with Lily Loo

Bill Robinson of B&G Curtis Dyna-Fog sprayers and foggers

Alan Huot of Wildlife Control Supplies outfitter for wildlife professionals

Jeff Emtman produced this episode with help from Bethany Denton and Nick White. 

Music: Serocell | | | Flowers

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 they could possess his body, if he allowed them.

Jacob felt deeply connected to his male friends when he was young.  As a teenager, he realized that what he felt was more than friendship. But Jacob’s church was, like most Pentecostal congregations, staunchly against homosexuality. Jacob’s parents, pastor, and peers all talked about homosexuality as if it was a terrible disease that could only be cured by God. For years Jacob tried to hide his attraction to other boys, and became increasingly involved in his church in the hopes that he could just work through ‘the problem’.

In his freshman year of high school, Jacob was feeling helpless against his gay attractions. Exasperated, he asked aloud for a demon to come into his body. He figured he was already evil, so he might as well “get something out of it”. 

A few months later, just as he was about to fall asleep, he heard a voice in his ear. Jacob was frozen in fear. He could not speak. The voice was dark, gravelly, and spoke a language he’d never heard before. Jacob knew in that moment that it was the demon he’d invited into his body.  It left only once he spoke the word “Jesus.” He woke up his father and they prayed together. 

The next day, Jacob signed up for “spiritual boot camp”. It was a three day retreat for members of the congregation who hoped to make a life change, led by Jacob’s father. For three days, Jacob joined fellow congregants in prayer and worship, hoping this would be the beginning of his healing from gayness. After the weekend, Jacob didn’t feel “cured”, but he did feel like he was closer to becoming the man God intended him to be.

That was 13 years ago. Jacob has since stopped going to church and believing in God and Satan. He eventually came out to his family once and for all, and this time, he was met with open arms. Today he lives in Seattle and studies fashion design. And as of the time of this episode release, Jacob and his boyfriend have been together for almost three years.

This episode was produced by Bethany Denton. 

Music: Serocell | | | AHEE

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 opportunistic eaters, and they like the things we like: grains, bacon grease, leather, silk scarves, books, carpets.  And as early humans traveled, the beetles came with, colonizing across the globe. 

The majority of humans’ relationship with these beetles is and has been contentious, as they tend to wreak havoc on human possessions.  They’re often exterminated as pests.  

But several species of the dermestidae family have a taste for dead flesh. Including dermestes maculatus, aka. “The Hide Beetle”.  And for this reason, curators have enlisted their help as “museum volunteers.” 

At least, that’s what Chris Stinson of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, British Columbia calls them.  He’s the Curatorial Assistant of Mammals, Reptiles, and Amphibians and he approximates that he has 20,000 of these volunteers to prep the museum’s collection.  

In this episode, Here Be Monsters producer Jeff Emtman smells the beetle tank, listens to them eat an owl skull, and holds a real flesh-eating beetle.*

Jeff Emtman produced this episode, with help from Bethany Denton and Nick White. 

Music: The Black Spot

Happy Birthday Paul.  We don’t know when your birthday actually is, but we hope it’s a good one...this year and every other. 

*Due to dermestes maculatus’ preference for dead foods, they’re perfectly safe to handle, unless you’re a wild turkey (and if you’re actually reading this, you probably are).

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.  Bethany moved to Washington State and Erin to Indiana for college. They fell out of touch, observing each others’ lives mostly through the distance of a Facebook news feed.  

And there, Bethany began to notice changes in Erin.  She looked thinner, but also more hollow.  Her eyes sank into her head.  Bethany was ashamed that she felt jealous.  She also thought her old friend might be gone...turned into a shrinking shadow of her former self. 

On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Erin explains how she developed her obsession with exercise and her intense desire to lose weight.  She explains how she descended into a dangerous place with her eating disorder.  She would later understand her symptoms of anxiety, insomnia and irrationality to be typical of starvation, as observed in a 1940s experiment known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

After losing over 100 lbs, Erin hit rock bottom the summer after graduating from college. Her anxiety became intolerable, she was constipated, and her hair was falling out. After months of living with every characteristic of anorexia nervosa, she was given an official diagnosis once she became underweight. 

In 2014, Erin sought treatment. The first step in her recovery was a process called re-feeding. It's the process of replenishing a calorie deficit, providing a starving body much-needed energy to repair internal damage. 

Erin has since made nearly a full recovery. Today she lives in Portland, Oregon and works at a bakery. She keeps a blog about her experiences with anorexia.

If you are suffering from an eating disorder, you can get help today. A good place to start is Eating Disorder Hope. Erin also recommends the website Performing Woman; she personally found it inspiring to her recovery.

This episode was produced by Bethany Denton, and edited with help from Jeff Emtman and Nick White.  

Music: The Black Spot

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." Regardless, he doesn't give out his real name.

For the purpose of this story, let's just call him "Malibu Ron." Malibu makes his living selling trinkets supposedly imbued with spirits: sex demons, werewolves, mermaids, djinn, vampires, etc. They aren't. Malibu sells his intangible beings and spells online for as little as $5 and as much as $11,000.

Malibu got into the business of internet mysticism about 10 years ago while he was very sick. He had to take extended medical leave from work. In his months of recovery, he read a lot online and discovered Etsy Witching. As a joke, he posted a cheap ring imbued with a sex demon. It sold for $12. He decided not to go back to his old job and instead focus on becoming a full-time witch. He now manages many (he won't tell us how many) identities and stores online.

Malibu feels no guilt about his scam. He has a moral line and he doesn't cross it. No death curses, no sex enslavement of real people, and no spells to heal the terminally ill. He doesn't sell things that could make him feel guilty. And further, he says his clients are mostly rich. And he says his clients believe in magic because it protects them from realizing their cosmic insignificance. Malibu doesn't believe in magic (except for God, and maybe aliens).

Malibu says that he lives well, but that he's no Donald Trump-- he's not rich. He spends his money on shoes. He values his personal collection of Nike Dunk SBs and Air Jordans at over $20,000. Several of his pairs are one-offs, meaning he's the only one in the world who owns them. But his home, his clothing, and all of his other outward appearances (apart from the shoes) are modest.

Most of his clients are happy with his services, though Malibu does receive occasional death threats when his spells don't work. He says many of his clients would likely benefit from therapy and that, for some, magic rings may take on that role.

 Jeff Emtman produced this episode with help from Bethany Denton and Nick White.

Music: Serocell ||| The Black Spot

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