MonsterTalk – Details, episodes & analysis

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MonsterTalk

Blake Smith

Science

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/12d. Total Eps: 514

MonsterTalk: The Science Show About Monsters is a free audio podcast that critically examines the science behind cryptozoological (and legendary) creatures, such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or werewolves.

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Data updated on 06/10/2026

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https://factormeals.com/monstertalk50
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https://sciencecomedian.com/
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http://www.strangemag.com/strangemag/strange21/thunderbird21/thunderbird1_21.html
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Score global : 69%

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S06E01 💀Taphonomy and All That Rot🧛

Season 6 · Episode 1

Monday, October 5, 2026 • Duration 01:01:05

An interview with forensic anthropologist Evan Bird, creator of The Corpse Review.

Extended show notes at Monstertalk.org

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S05E50 💀 REHUMANIZING PEOPLE OF THE PAST

Season 5 · Episode 50

Monday, September 28, 2026 • Duration 47:48

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.org

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S05E49 - 🌀 Cryptozoology Today with Daniel Alan Jones

Season 5 · Episode 49

Monday, September 21, 2026 • Duration 38:30

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.

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S05E48 🌀Traditional Cryptozoology with Daniel Alan Jones

Season 5 · Episode 48

Monday, September 14, 2026 • Duration 27:56

Into the Field: A Conversation with Daniel Alan Jones, Part 1

Blake 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.

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S05E47 MT Legend Tripping: Paranormal England

Season 5 · Episode 47

Monday, September 7, 2026 • Duration 54:46

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 Notes

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S05E46 FLASHBACK: England's Most Haunted Village

Season 5 · Episode 46

Monday, August 31, 2026 • Duration 01:16:35

Blake brings us a flashback to 2017, when he and Karen sat down withThe Spooktator's Hayley Stevens to talk about the (allegedly) most haunted village in England. Hayley is a British paranormal researcher who started out a believer and came around to skepticism the hard way - by actually investigating - and she now publishes the newsletter https://www.theghostgeek.com/The Ghost Geek https://hayleyisaghost.co.uk/. She first appeared on MonsterTalk back in episode 37 to talk lake monsters. This time the subject is Pluckley, a small, film-set-pretty village in Kent that is considerably more famous for its dead than for its living.

Pluckley's ghost roster runs somewhere between a dozen and sixteen-plus, depending on who's counting and when - and the number has a habit of going up. There are two different White Ladies, a Red Lady, a highwayman, a phantom coach, and a stretch of woodland that screams. Where does a reputation like this actually come from, who benefits from it, and what happens to a place once the ghost tours arrive? Also - Blake goes looking for a famous piece of documentation that everybody cites and nobody seems to have seen.

Extended notes at monstertalk.orgBecome a supporter of this podcast: .Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

S05E45 - Circus Train Wrecks 🎪🚂

Season 5 · Episode 45

Monday, August 24, 2026 • Duration 53:15

⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.⚠️

Blake and Karen discuss Circus Train Wrecks as an explanation for mysterious "real" animal sightings, as well as a source of folklore monsters of high improbability.

🚂 In This Episode

Why circus trains wrecked so often
The economic event that ended the era - and why regulation wasn't the answer
An inversion of survivorship bias, and the data set nobody has built yet
A 1917 newspaper story about lions in a butcher shop that is not what it appears to be
The 1931 wire story about a colony of Bengal tigers in the mountains of Mexico
How armadillos actually got to Florida
Gypsy the elephant, Tifton to Valdosta, November 1902
Wallace the Lion, the Exeter mail coach lioness, and Christian the Lion
Why the Beast of Gévaudan may be the oldest "it escaped from a menagerie" case on record
How Gévaudan subverts myths about the Enlightenment

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🐺 S05E44 - Darwin and the Monsters (with Dr. Brian Regal)

Monday, August 17, 2026 • Duration 42:15

Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology. Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, and then spent more than a decade writing everything else instead. Karen is away in the UK promoting Beyond Words, so this episode is a two-hander between Blake and an old friend.

The book runs monsters forward from the classical world - Lucretius, Pliny, Aristotle, and a Sumerian hero fighting a monster in the oldest story we have - through the Middle Ages, the age of curiosities, and into the modern hunt for anomalous primates.

🔦 In This Episode

Why the book is priced the way it is, and Blake's advice to check the library before the bookstore - a small tangent on academic publishing and the old "priced to rent" sticker era.
How Darwin and the Monsters almost became a doctoral dissertation, and why Brian wrote about Henry Fairfield Osborn instead.
Brian's journey from student to author.
The publish-or-perish treadmill: every new contract pushed the Darwin book back another few years.
What the book is not: it is not a Bigfoot book, and Brian has notes for the critics who wanted more Bigfoot.
Too many werewolves? Brian's 2009 paper for the British Society for the History of Science on how Darwinian thinking killed off the wolf-man - and how anomalous primates moved into the vacancy.
The dogman problem - the most popular cryptid going is arguably a werewolf, which is arguably a medieval dog-headed man, which is arguably not an animal at all.
Why the coelacanth is a bad advertisement for cryptozoology: no folkloric background, nobody was looking for it, and "living fossil" is not as accurate as people seem to think.
Grover Krantz, missing Bigfoot bones, and the Pennsylvania records of bears that died without being hunted.
Writing for an audience of one, and Brian's cheerful refusal to take criticism personally.

Become a supporter of this podcast: .Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

🏚️ S05E43 - The Peabody-Whitehead Mansion

Season 5 · Episode 43

Monday, August 10, 2026 • Duration 01:00:06

⚠️ Content AdvisoryThis episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.⚠️

Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver's Peabody-Whitehead Mansion - the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill's old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected.

What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history - a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning.

Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

☠️S05E42 - THE BLACK DEATH🐀

Season 5 · Episode 42

Monday, August 3, 2026 • Duration 54:38

Blake and Karen are joined by Dr. Ben Dodds, author of Myths and Memories of the Black Death to discover more about a disease which forever changed world history when it swept across Europe in the 1300s.

The conversation runs from the mechanics of the disease - what a bubo actually is, what finally kills you, and why the textbook rats-and-fleas model spreads far too slowly to explain what medieval eyewitnesses described - to the harder question of how anyone in 2026 knows any of it. Along the way: the marmot hypothesis, the medieval physicians who were certain they had it figured out, the appalling 1348 pogroms whose victims were dug out of the ground in a Catalan town a short drive from where Dodds was sitting, why Monty Python understood the Middle Ages better than most historical novelists, and a closing answer about the aftermath that most listeners will not see coming. Blake's cold open, meanwhile, sets out to explain why we call it the Black Death at all - and reels in an unexpected monster.

Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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MonsterTalk – Details, episodes & analysis

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MonsterTalk – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

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