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  • 🦕 S05E38 - Champ Across the Border

    🦕 S05E38 - Champ Across the Border
    Jul 6 2026
    Champ Across the Border: Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France and the French colonial period of North America, to talk about Champ - the famous monster of Lake Champlain. Most of the lake sits between New York and Vermont, but about 7% of it lies in Quebec, and Joseph's upcoming paper in the ethnology journal Rabaska asks a question almost nobody else has: how does the French-speaking side of the border see this most American of lake monsters?

    The answer involves a fabricated Samuel de Champlain quote, a five-foot fish that really was a monster in its own way, nearly 300 years of digitized Quebec newspapers, and a curious case of cross-border monster pride - because why borrow Champ when you already have Ponik and Memphré? Plus hoax serpents, colonial werewolf panics, and how Nessie taught every lake monster what a lake monster is supposed to look like.

    Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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    46 Min.
  • 🪓 S05E37 - The Lizzie Borden Murders

    🪓 S05E37 - The Lizzie Borden Murders
    Jun 29 2026
    Note: This episode deals with murder and goes into some detail, so we're putting the "explicit tag" for the mature content, perhaps not suitable for all audiences.

    MonsterTalk steps outside its usual territory for a true-crime case with a paranormal afterlife. Blake and Karen welcome Hallie, host of The Morbid Curiosity Podcast, to revisit one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in American history: the August 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the trial that acquitted Andrew's daughter Lizzie while leaving much of the public convinced she did it.

    Drawing on Hallie's background in anthropology and skeletal analysis, the conversation lays out the timeline, the forensic evidence, and the tangle of rumor and theory that has kept the case alive for more than a century - before turning to the crime scene itself, now run as "America's most haunted" bed-and-breakfast, and asking what, if anything, still lingers there.

    Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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    1 Std. und 6 Min.
  • S05E36 - The Chinnery Backseat Ghost

    S05E36 - The Chinnery Backseat Ghost
    Jun 22 2026
    A skeptical look at one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken - the 1959 "backseat ghost" snapped by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in Ipswich, England. This episode is distilled from a recent MonsterTalk Live stream with Blake, Karen Stollznow, and special guest Matt Baxter, who brought fresh research (and one neat new idea) to a very old mystery.

    It's also a companion piece to our Newby Church Ghost coverage and the spirit-photography episode of Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1985), which examined the Chinnery photo alongside the Cottingley Fairies and the Newby ghost.
    Extended show notes at our Patreon site.

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    58 Min.
  • S05E35 The Newby Church Specter

    S05E35 The Newby Church Specter
    Jun 15 2026
    Blake, Karen and Matt discover that this famous ghost photo isn't as old as they expected, and perhaps not as mysterious either. Do we get it right? Do you have a different explanation? Let us know in the comments.

    👻 The Spectre of Newby ChurchIn one black-and-white photograph of a church altar, a tall, hooded figure stands where the photographer swore no one was standing. The "Newby Monk" has haunted paranormal books, websites, and late-night clip shows for decades, and it remains one of the most reproduced ghost photographs ever taken. In this episode we dig into where the image really came from, who took it, when it was actually shot, and how a clever photographer might have made it.

    Extensive show notes at monstertalk.org

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    59 Min.
  • S05E34 - Rakshasas

    S05E34 - Rakshasas
    Jun 8 2026
    Most Americans meet the Rakshasa in exactly two places: a 1974 episode of a beloved horror TV series and the pages of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Both versions give you a debonair, tiger-faced shape-changer with a taste for human flesh - but neither prepares you for how deep, how old, and how genuinely alive these creatures are. To dig us out of that pop-culture foxhole, we sat down with academic researcher Eric Zsebenyi for a tour that runs from the Rig Veda to the Ramayana, into Buddhism, through present-day Sri Lankan politics, and finishes at the tent-shaped tomb of a very naughty Victorian translator.

    🎙️ Our GuestEric Zsebenyi holds a master's degree from Naropa University (2000) and has pursued Buddhist studies as a lifelong avocation alongside a career as a civil servant. His path to the Rakshasas began with a Dharma protector named Vetali in his own meditation practice - which, as you'll hear, leads straight back to one of India's stranger monsters. Blake met Eric at the recent Gods & Monsters Conference, where Eric delivered a paper on the Vetala.

    You can find Eric's work here: Eric Zsebenyi on Academia.edu

    Extensive show notes at Monstertalk.org

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    53 Min.
  • S05E33 - The Devil Went Down to Devon

    S05E33 - The Devil Went Down to Devon
    Jun 1 2026
    On the morning of February 9, 1855, residents across south Devon, England, discovered strange hoof-shaped tracks in the snow. The prints - about 4 inches long, 3 inches wide, and spaced roughly 8 inches apart in single file - appeared to have been left by a biped with a donkey-like hoof. Reports came in from more than 30 locations across the county. Within days, the Illustrated London News published a letter from a correspondent calling himself "South Devon" that would define the legend for generations: a continuous 100-mile trail, identical prints in every parish, passage over rooftops and through haystacks, a crossing of the two-mile-wide River Exe. The Devil, some locals whispered, had walked through Devon.

    In this episode, Blake, Karen, and Matt dig into the original sources, trace how the story was embellished over 170 years of retelling, and examine the many theories - from wood mice to Romani conspiracies - that have been offered to explain the Great Devon Mystery.

    EXTENSIVE show notes at https://monstertalk.org

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    1 Std. und 8 Min.
  • S05E32 - Monsters of the Deep with Dr. Darren Naish

    S05E32 - Monsters of the Deep with Dr. Darren Naish
    May 25 2026
    Darren joins Blake and Karen to discuss his new article in Geology Today, which grew out of his work on the Monsters of the Deep museum exhibition. That exhibition originally opened at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall in 2020, traveled to two additional venues, and most recently ran at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Darren describes how each venue's unique architecture required a complete redesign of the exhibition, changing both the visual layout and the narrative flow.

    Extensive show notes at monstertalk.org



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    52 Min.
  • S05E31 - From Loup Garou to Rougarou (pt 2) with Louisiana Dread's Kyle Crosby

    S05E31 - From Loup Garou to Rougarou (pt 2) with Louisiana Dread's Kyle Crosby
    May 18 2026
    This is part two of our conversation with Kyle Crosby, creator and host of Louisiana Dread. In Part 1, we covered the history of the Acadians and how they carried the loup-garou legend from France to the bayous of Louisiana. Now, in Part 2, Kyle walks us through the transformation of the loup-garou into the Rougarou - from strict werewolf to all-purpose shapeshifting boogeyman - and takes us on a tour of Louisiana's other legendary creatures, from the Axeman of New Orleans to the feu follet to the Grunch.

    Extensive show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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    39 Min.