Here Be Monsters

Boy Scout Leadership Camp was a bad fit for Jeff Emtman.  He was a meek 13 year old who didn’t eat meat and talked to animals with his mind. Regardless, Jeff wound up in the dry forests of Eastern Washington, with a group of other boys and a young scout leader, Nick, whose leadership style was...let’s just call it “eclectic”. Content note: language and drug use...

John Barner spent his entire childhood fiddling with his dad’s shortwave radio, picking up transmissions from all over the world. He like the way the sounds crackled, and the voices speaking foreign languages, and the eerie whine of transmissions coming in and out of static. One night John got a phone call from one of his friends who also had a shortwave radio. “I think I just found spy stuff,” John’s friend said, “come over...

Ryan Graves thinks that store-bought asparagus is as flavorless as potatoes.  But that's just because he's spoiled on the really good stuff.  His preferred crop grows wild among the tombstones at Clinton Cemetery, hidden on an old gravel road between the towns of Pullman, Washington and Moscow, Idaho.  Most who are buried there died over 100 years ago.  That intervening century left the cemetery mostly forgotten and overgrown...

Chrissy was having trouble remembering who she was when she woke up.  First she thought it was early-onset dementia, then she thought it was schizophrenia.  She had recurring hallucinations about being stalked by a beast that would talk to her while she slept.   Content note: language A doctor eventually told her she was waking up frequently throughout the night, some 30+ times per hour...

There’s an office in every church of Scientology dedicated to the founder.  It’s a full reconstruction: desks, chairs, books and memorabilia.  The church says these offices are traditional, a way of honoring the memory of L. Ron Hubbard, who died back in 1986.   L. Ron Hubbard’s office in Copenhagen, Denmark sits on a busy street.  There’s a big window that allows passersby to speculate on its utility.   Elisabeth Pedersen heard a rumor that the office was more than traditional...

In HBM085: Ascended Fiction, we explored a rumor about Scientology and whether there exists a belief that founder L. Ron Hubbard will return to Earth. Content note: language and substance abuse. Sources we talked to within and outside of the Church of Scientology gave different answers, and it's hard to know the actual truth, because the church's most sacred texts are kept secret. It got us thinking about hidden knowledge, and whether it's moral to withhold information...

It hasn’t been easy for Ashley Fryer to let go of her faith. For thirty years, she dedicated her life to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. She grew up attending church multiple times a week, and dutifully studied her scriptures. Over the years, she found inconsistencies in church doctrine, and would pile these up on what she calls ‘the shelf’.  She’d pile it higher and higher, thinking, “well, I’ll deal with it later.” For Ashley, her shelf broke on November 5, 2015...

A riptide recently pulled Ariana into open water off the shore of Santa Monica.  She thinks it’s her closest brush with death thus far.  A lifeguard rescued her. Even before the incident in Santa Monica, Ariana had a deep fear of water and drowning—so deep that she wondered if some previous version of herself sunk in a shipwreck.   The are different kinds of panics, some more helpful than others.   Music: The Black Spot Episode produced by Jeff Emtman with help from Bethany Denton...

Natural history museums are art galleries.  Scientifically focussed art galleries, but art galleries nonetheless.   Ian Tattersall, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is a paleontologist who sometimes oversees the construction of models for the museum.  Of personal interest to Here Be Monsters producer Jeff Emtman are reconstructions of very lifelike early humans, one with an arm draped over the other...