Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 3 days 3 hours 31 minutes
Producer Bethany Denton found a box in her basement storage room with two old cassette tapes inside. It took her a moment to realize what they were. Content Note: Descriptions of disordered eating Bethany has been fat her whole life, even when she was a kid. She ate hidden stashes of food when she felt anxious. By the time she was eleven years old, Bethany’s parents worried she would have health problems as as an adult, and they thought weight-loss hypnotherapy could help...
Robert Larson does not have an easy job. He searches for missing people with his dog Captain Dexter as a K9 search and rescue volunteer. Robert often travels across the Midwest, and he does this work pro bono, relying on donations from his supporters to pay for gas, lodging, and dog food. Content Note: Death of a child, a mention of suicide, and language Robert does not work with law enforcement. He’s not certified to do this work by any professional agency...
In school, Divya Anantharaman used to get teased for having long skinny fingers like ET. But now she sees them as valuable asset for the intricate work she does. Divya runs Friends Forever Taxidermy in Brooklyn, New York. Content Note: Fleshy sounds In this episode Divya carries a recorder with her while as she slowly disassembles a deceased pet parrot: snipping joints, scooping brains, removing eyes, separating the skin from the body...
In the nearly 20 years that Susan Randall’s been working as a private investigator, she’s seen Vermont’s most disadvantaged people struggling to have life’s most basic amenities. Sometimes her job is to interview people addicted to crack, to help determine whether they’re suitable parents. Sometimes her job is to examine blood spatter at gruesome crime scenes. She recently helped defend a client who murdered a DCF worker in broad daylight...
Not all migratory bats migrate. We don’t know why some choose to stay behind at their summer roosts. But according to the University of Washington’s Sharlene Santana, the bats that stay tend to die. Content Note: Fleeting language In this episode, HBM host Jeff Emtman attempts to make a metaphor about bats and humans. Perhaps it’s anthropomorphic, perhaps it’s unnecessarily poetic, or perhaps it’s a fair one. Jeff leaves his home in Seattle to move cross-country to Boston...
Here Be Monsters is almost 100 episodes old. It’s grown a lot since Jeff was a scared 22 year old learning audio editing in his basement. So as we approach the milestone, we take a look back, check in with some of our memorable guests, and take the chance to answer some listener questions while we’re at it. Content Note: Recreational drug use, deaths (intentional and accidental), eating disorder, language, and sex...
In the Westfjords of Iceland, people wait for birds to come ashore so that they can gather the feathers they leave behind. These birds, called Eider Ducks, are the source of eiderdown, a ridiculously expensive and rare stuffing for bedding. This has landed the Arctic Fox in the crosshairs (quite literally). These relatively common foxes are opportunistic eaters who snack on eider ducks if they get the chance...
The Victoria Bug Zoo is home to dozens of species of insects and arachnids, and two leaf cutter ant colonies. There's the new colony, with a three year old queen whose kingdom grows every day. If all goes well, she is expected to live to the age of fifteen, laying an egg approximately every three seconds. Her colony is teaming with a healthy population of soldiers, gardeners, and foragers with the potential to reach more than a million ants...
There’s currently an invisible, supernatural pandemic affecting the world, or so claims HBM host Jeff Emtman. What else could explain the wide-ranging malaise of our current times? He thinks that the most logical conclusion is that astral energy vampires are draining humans of their lifeforce en masse. Jeff’s never encountered one of these beasts, but that’s probably because he’s developed an elaborate spell to trap them in an alternate timeline...
Anna Klein thinks that tea tastes better on the Faroe Islands. She thinks the water’s more pure there, and the Northern Lights let the sky be whatever color it wants to be. She often thinks about moving there. Content Note: Violence (momentary) and Language But she also worries that her fantasies of running away to the remote corners of the world may be a familial urge to isolate herself, the same way her father did...a tendency that ultimately contributed to his early death...