Here Be Monsters

Bethany Denton was about five years old when she learned that she was a Mormon. When she was eight, she learned that she was an eternal spirit destined for an eternal afterlife.  The idea of eternity terrified her, and made her afraid to stargaze into the boundless universe. When she got older, Bethany was allowed to enter the Mormon temple in Billings, Montana to act as the proxy in baptisms for the dead...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...