Here Be Monsters

A dying musician asks his hairdresser to make him look good one more time.

Jeff walks to the edge of Berlin while sharing news from the last two years.

Phased music for anxious minds.

Allen H Greenfield on UFOlogy, evil magick, and parenting.

Bigness, ugliness and beauty as it relates to Berlin’s Schwerbelastungskörper.

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The kid of a famous UFO hunter tells stories about the occult and food poisoning.

Can you taste the past?

A street preacher tries to convince Jeff of his views about the role of gender in Christianity.

Field recordings and discussions of sound and heart from across Germany (and a tiny bit from Czechia).

Body composting in the Evergreen State

Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours.

It'll be here March 9th, 2022.

Explaining my recent decision to remove Here Be Monsters from Spotify.

Julia found a solution in the ocean.

An episode from Jeff’s new project, Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast. This episode *should* update itself daily with new content. Delete and re-download to hear the latest version.

HBM149 requires explanation. So here’s a lengthy one.

Jeff tries to become the world’s first slumbering podcast advice columnist.

Cheap thrills from squeezing damp moss.

HBM146’s AI-powered speech bot nows offers strange advice several times daily at https://twitter.com/hypo_inspo

Can computers learn to speak with emotion and conviction?

A paranoid fruit punch expert meets an aspiring valkyrie.

Capturing the sonic fingerprints of important places before they’re gone forever.

Maybe you just need some odd animal sounds.

The effort to find intelligent extraterrestrial life is hampered by the slowness of light, the bigness of space, and some humans who don’t follow the rules.

Chance encounters in food waste bins.

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 into building a robust toolbox of paranormal detectors. Puget Sound Ghost Hunters have seen some turnover recently, and Ken and Donna are in need of new team members. They put an ad up on their website and on their Facebook group inviting would-be ghost hunters to join their team of volunteers. After a series of interviews, they narrowed it down to two candidates: Scott Harris and Tanya Routt, two people who seem to have what it takes to investigate reported paranormal activity with rigor and compassion. But before Ken…

If you’re getting this episode, it means you’re still subscribed to the Here Be Monsters! Good on you! We’ve been switching some technical things around behind the scenes, so if you have duplicate episodes in your feed, unsubscribing and re-subscribing should fix it. Also, Season 9 will be here soon! 10 more episodes about fear, beauty and the unknown. Check back on February 17th, 2021 for the start of the new season.

Here Be Monsters will continue production as an independent podcast, no longer associated with KCRW.

Black Tulsans record a rap album in a house that once belonged to a famous Klansman.

Is volunteering for pain an unnecessary cruelty? Or is it a fundamental part of being human?

New research suggests that Neanderthals did many of the things once thought to be exclusively “human.”

David Pearce wants to end all suffering.

Jacob Lemanski tries to write an unreadable book.

Amanda Provenzano says people are too afraid of death; that’s why she became a death doula.

Jeff makes blackout poetry with cassette tapes.

Is your body more of a machine, or a garden?

If there’s a pill that makes people less racist, should cops be forced to take it?

The smell of gasoline imparts nausea and a heartfelt nostalgia on HBM producer Bethany Denton.

New York City’s defender of maligned animals enacts “pigilante” justice while dressed as a nun.

Legends of an underground people on a small Baltic island.

A childhood loss leads Colby Richardson to meet a man who teaches him to see his dead mother’s aura.

Would you trade a month of your life to give a decade to a stranger? What if it were four strangers? Or thirty?

Most of the ocean floor has never been mapped in detail. Some scientists are trying to change that, using sonar to see what satellites can’t.

How to make the president say what he never said.

A cancer researcher grows tired of euthanizing monkeys.

What moves the rods of a water dowser? Is it magic, science or imagination?

Producer Bethany Denton wants to know if her meat-eater’s guilt is justified.

Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman climbs a tree, stops believing in God.

In the fall of 1989, in Vancouver, Washington, a short, 29 year-old man named Westley Allan Dodd raped and murdered three young boys. The boys were brothers Cole and William Neer, ages 10 and 11, and four year old Lee Iseli. Content Note:Sexual violence, suicide and capital punishment A few weeks later, police arrested Westley at movie theater after he tried and failed to abduct another boy. He quickly confessed to the three murders. The prosecution sought the death penalty, and Dodd pled guilty. Death penalty cases take a long time due to all the appeals built into the process. These appeals are designed to make sure the state hasn’t made any mistakes in the death sentence. They check for things like juror misconduct, incompetent defense lawyers, new evidence. Death penalty cases take years, sometimes decades. Westley Allan Dodd did not want that. Instead, he wanted to be executed as quickly as possible. In letters to the Supreme Court of Washington, Dodd urged the court to allow him to waive his right to…