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n the midst of a stressful move, HBM producer Jeff Emtman finds comfort in the phasing techniques developed by minimalist composer, Steve Reich.
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Allen H Greenfield is a UFOlogist and occult researcher. He’s also a father of three.
His first child, Alex was the subject of HBM155: Ghosts …
Berlin’s Schwerbelastungskörper is a massive concrete structure that, today, is hidden in plain sight between a railroad and an apartment building. …
The Here Be Monsters Art Exchange is back!
It’s a really simple and wonderful thing where you, gentle listener, can mail a piece of art to a stranger …
Content Note: pervasive language, brief mentions of bigotry.
Alex Greenfield says that there was no such thing as a normal day when he was a kid. His dad (Allen H Greenfield) self describes as a “researcher in the …
Sally Grainger was originally a chef, but in her 20’s, she was gifted a copy of an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius.
Apicius is a bit of a …
In 2012, a street preacher walking three small dogs tried to convince Jeff Emtman of his way of thinking about gender and the afterlife.
In this Here Be Monsters brief, Jeff shares the short essay he originally wrote …
The composer Pauline Oliveros thought there was a difference between hearing and listening. She defined hearing as a passive act, something done …
What do you want to happen to your body when you die? It’s a touchy topic where tradition, religion and death denial all come into play. But across much of the world, there are just two options: burial and cremation, …
Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours. Scenes from middle school dances, …
Season 10 is nearly here! The season starts on March 9th and episodes will be released on a rolling basis until all ten shows are published.
Want to …
I’ve decided to remove my work from Spotify. It’s not just their recent controversies around Joe Rogan, it’s a much bigger problem with the way that …
The origins of Julia Susara’s chronic fatigue are hard to pin down. She still doesn’t know exactly how it started but suspects that a deeply broken …
A short episode from the new show Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast. Each episode of Neutrinowatch changes a lil’ bit every day.
This episode, The Daily Blast, features two computerized voices (Wendy and …
Episode 149 is an odd duck for sure. It changes every day due to some coding trickery that is happening behind the scenes.
That episode is a part of a bigger project, a new podcast project that’s potentially the first …
As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM, a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses. One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences …
With much of the world shut down over the last year, HBM host Jeff Emtman started wondering if there were smaller venues where the world still felt open.
In this episode, Jeff interviews Chloé Savard of the Instagram …
A brief follow-up to last episode: you can now follow our AI-powered friend Theodora on Twitter! She tweets several times a day, giving bad advice, …
How does a computer learn to speak with emotion and conviction?
Language is hard to express as a set of firm rules. Every language rule seems to …
Like so many others, Amanda Petrus got a bit lost after college. She had a chemistry degree and not a lot of direction. But she was able to find …
HBM Host Jeff Emtman has always been afraid of losing his memories. Places he cares about keep getting torn down.
In this episode, Jeff bikes around Seattle recording the sounds of a popping balloon to capture the sound …
Animals sometimes make noises that would be impossible to place without context. In this episode: three types of animal vocalizations—described by …
1,420,405,751* hertz is a very important frequency. It’s the frequency that hydrogen radiates at, creating radio waves that can be detected far away. And astronomers can learn a lot about the history and shape of the …
When a group of broke college students start throwing lavish feasts, HBM host Jeff Emtman begins to wonder at the source of the food, initially …
Season 9 will be here soon! We’ll bring you ten new episodes about fear, beauty and the unknown.
We’ll see the fight for survival and beauty of the microscopic world. We’ll learn how balloons can be used to capture …
For the last five years, Here Be Monsters has been a part of KCRW. And in those years, we’ve put out a 100+ episodes under KCRW’s imprint.
However, moving forward, HBM will no longer be associated with the station, …
There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black …
Hedonism seems pretty appealing right now—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. On HBM137: Superhappiness, the hedonist philosopher, David Pearce imagined a future free of the systemic harms we currently experience: …
There’s a large cave in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan. It looks out over green and yellow fields and a river far below. Starting in the 1950’s, …
David Pearce thinks it's possible to end suffering. He’s a philosopher* who studies “hedonic zero”, the state of being which is completely neutral--neither good nor bad. He believes that, despite our momentary joys and …
In 2012, Jacob Lemanski started writing his autobiography a few words at a time when he signed his name on the digital card readers at the grocery store. He read somewhere that the credit card companies keep the …
We live in a culture of “death denial”. That’s what Amanda Provenzano thinks. She sees it when medical professionals use euphemisms like ‘passing …
Searching for something to do during government-mandated social distancing, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman recently digitized his cassette …
Bodies are odd. Anyone who can see their own nose will tell you the same. So will anyone whose diet changed their body odor. And so will anyone who’s ever felt their phone vibrate in their pocket only to later …
Natalia Montes was a teenager living in Florida when Travyon Martin was killed. She says his picture reminded her of her classmates, “It could have …
Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, …
Mother Pigeon says the wild animals of New York City are hungry. So she feeds them.
Each morning, a flock of about 150 pigeons waits for her at her local park in Bushwick. She feeds them twice a day if she can afford …
Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer claims his red hat is mere coincidence. He wears it because his mother-in-law knit it for him 15 years ago and he quite …
Colby Richardson’s mom got leukemia when he was young. He has trouble remembering her. Soon after her death, Colby and his siblings wound up at a …
Most of us want to help. But it can be hard to know how to do it, and not all altruistic deeds are equal, and sometimes they can be harmful. …
How familiar are you with the shape of the continents? What about the shape of the seafloor?
If you’re unfamiliar with the contours of our planet’s underwater mountain ranges and plateaus and valleys, then you’re not …
There’s a beautifully written speech that was never delivered. Written for President Richard Nixon by Bill Safire, the speech elegizes astronauts …
“Gene” says it started because he wanted to be a veterinarian. So he took a job as a research associate at a vivarium that studied cancer drugs. He was often alone in the lab at night with hundreds or thousands of …
Some time in the 90’s, Kathy Emtman received a gift from her husband, Rick. It was a pair of bent metal rods, each shaped into long ‘L’. Nothing special, not imparted with any kind of magic, just metal rods. …
Mike Paros lives in two worlds. In one world, he’s an animal welfare specialist and mixed animal vet, meaning he works with both “companion” animals like cats and dogs, and large animals like horses, cows, goats, and …
Angels saved Here Be Monsters’ host Jeff Emtman once. They picked him up and took care of him after a bad bike crash. It was just one of many times that Jeff felt watched over by God.
Jeff used to think he might be a …
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 …
The end of our seventh season draws near! Just one more episode until we hang up our podcasting hats for a few months. We don’t want you to miss us too much though, so on this episode, we’re tying up some loose ends, …
Life on earth began in the oceans. And it used to be simpler. For the first few billion years, life consisted of microbes that didn’t really swim or hunt; they mostly floated and, if they were lucky, bumped into …
Sudan has been involved in ongoing civil wars since 1983. The wars were about religion, culture and resources. By 2005, approximately two million …
Mar 21, 1919 - NEW YORK CITY
An anonymous writer for the New York Tribune stands at 154 Nassau. The writer asks passers-by a simple question: “Do you think this is a good world?” It’s just four months after Armistice …
A highway robber with many aliases lay on his deathbed after contracting a bad flu. He dictated his life story to his captors before succumbing to …
In a warm and dark room in the winter of 1987, people lay on the ground with their eyes closed. A facilitator from the Shanti Project guides those assembled on an intimate visualization through the process of dying …
Bethany Denton’s been thinking about grief a lot lately. In 2017, two of her friends, a mother and a daughter, died unexpectedly just two months apart. Since then, Bethany’s started seeing grief in just about …
Back when HBM host Jeff Emtman was a photographer, he used to solve his problems with walks in the woods. There, he’d see the ways that branches …
Motherhood always seemed non-negotiable for Bethany Denton. Her upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints certainly instilled this. Mormons believe in what’s called a “premortal existence,” a place …
For two thirds of his life, HBM host Jeff Emtman has been thinking about the distance to The Moon in terms of corn snacks. Bugles specifically. It was a factoid written on the packaging that purported to convey …
HBM host Jeff Emtman travels to New York City in an effort to fulfill open-ended recording assignments issued from afar by Tim Hinman for an episode …
Angeline Tubbs may have been as old as 104 when she died alone in the woods, in a hut she made with her own hands. She came to America with a …
Carlo Nakar spent more than twenty years in the United States before he was called by God to return to the the Philippines. It happened during one of …
This is a special two-part episode, in which Kryssanne Adams describes the many times where she’s seen death or inflicted it upon animals.
Content Note: Animal slaughter and other descriptions of death
Kryssanne is a …
Before Kryssanne Adams was old enough to understand death, she found a dead mouse and carried it around with her in a plastic Easter egg shell. She …
Max Turnquist advises against wearing shorts while dumpster diving for used lab equipment. Almost every day, Max visits a university parking garage, where there are several small mountains of discarded equipment, some …
Somewhere in Maritza Gulin’s basement, there’s a typewritten notebook that belonged to her father, Reynaldo. The notebook contains essential advice …
Archer Mayo has always loved finding lost things. He grew up on several navy bases and spent much of his childhood swimming and looking for human detritus–sunglasses, teacups, glass bottles. That’s why he takes such …
Growing up, Jeff Emtman had a hard time balancing his piety for the One God with his piety for the Gnomish lord Berwyn. Generally, he deferred to the latter, though he lost favor eventually with both.
Jeff’s …
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 …
There’s currently an invisible, supernatural pandemic affecting the world, or so claims HBM host Jeff Emtman. What else could explain the …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
…
Natural history museums are art galleries. Scientifically focussed art galleries, but art galleries nonetheless.
Ian Tattersall, of the American …
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 …
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 …
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.
There’s an office in every church of Scientology dedicated to the founder. It’s a full reconstruction: desks, chairs, books and memorabilia. The …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
On a hot summer day in 2014, HBM host Jeff Emtman received a bit of amateur, backyard surgery from a fish biologist.
It was for the KCRW 24 Hour …
Remi Dun enjoys her job. She's good at it, she makes good money, and she generally enjoys her clients’ company. And although her job rarely gives her sexual pleasure, one client with a curious tongue gave her two …
Devaan describes it as a pulsing, tingling feeling on the back of his neck. His preferred stimuli are whispers, shuffling cards, scissors, tapping …
Sagittarius has been good for the last year. That’s what he told us. He told us that the cage that Luna designed for him is working. She controls …
Muhammad Tariq still doesn’t know who the men with guns were. They wore masks on their faces when they came into the teachers’ lounge. His small, …
As a baby, Griff Eldridge was quieter than most. But he slept well. He fed. He played with his big brother Ira. And he smiled easily. For a long time, his parents Luke and Davinia didn’t worry, because he was so …
Anita Woodley went to the Rhine Research Center for scientific confirmation. Since childhood, she’d dreamt the future, able to predict imminent murders in her neighborhood. She prayed away her abilities for a period …
There is an unusual piece of carved grey stone in the hills of upstate New York. It depicts the boot of a notorious American villain who was shot in …
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 …
As far as gods go, Jacob Lemanski is more tepid than most. Despite his omniscience, he feels unequipped to deal with the ethical decisions required of him.
Content Note: this episode contains a description of a …
Growing up Mormon in Montana, Bethany Denton had a phrase drilled into her mind from an early age: “modest is hottest.” To her, it became a mantra even while many of her friends, especially other girls, struggled with …
There are about 10,000 files in the Here Be Monsters sound library. HBM producer Jeff Emtman has been recording, synthesizing and downloading them since way back before this show started. And of these thousands of …
“I used to think you were brilliant” Evan Williamson’s dad wrote to him in a letter. Evan was in treatment for chemical dependency at the time. His …
Ariadne, Jacqueline, North, and others unnamed are all part of the same system. They share a single body. They take turns “fronting” the body, …
When Dylan Wright placed his first Craigslist ad back in 2006, he called himself a “nice and genuine person with waking up problems.” He was looking for someone to help him in the mornings. First it was phone calls, …
Feeling anxiety about the American presidential election, HBM host Jeff Emtman took a trip to a place he hoped to be insulated from politics: …
Jacob Sutton loved going to church when he was a little boy. He sang in the choir, and when he got older he led Bible studies and helped teach Sunday …
Walk through any natural history museum and you’ll see rows of effortlessly clean animal skeletons. Chances are you're looking at a strange form of human/insect symbiosis happening in the museum’s back rooms.
Preparing …
Erin was fat as a kid. Since middle school, she tried all different methods to lose weight. From a young age she developed the idea that the most …
Presumably, any given mystic falls into one of two categories: true believer or scam artist. It's foolish to think that this is a categorization that …
Before Doog could walk, his family gave him a guitar to hold and encouraged him to play music. By the time he was twelve, he'd started writing songs …
The most notable monster created by Howard Phillips Lovecraft was completely omnipotent, yet completely uncaring. A massive, tentacled being that …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
What's a life worth? About $25, before shipping. At least, that's the case if you want a high-quality inbred lab mouse, like the C57BL/6J (in the biz, they just call them "black mice").
In this episode of Here Be …
When Sam Parker went to Japan to celebrate his mother's 60th birthday, he brought along a handheld audio recorder. For the next few weeks, he …
Barrie Wylie has heard voices for as long as he can remember. Growing up on a small island in Scotland, the voices in his head were like secret best …
When Hippocrates noticed that the hair on the top of his head was falling out, he fought it by applying various ointments of opium to his scalp. But none of them worked. So he called it a disease and named it …
Marlo Mack gave birth to a son. At least, she thought she did. As a toddler, her son crawled towards dresses, wanted to be a princess, asked to grow long blonde hair. And at age 3, Marlo's son requested to return to …
Bridget Burnquist was backpacking around Southeast Asia. After weeks of drinking cheap liquor on beautiful beaches, she was beginning to feel as …
Carlos Gemora loved the feeling of the dirt at the cemetary where he used to dig graves. One day he climbed down into the loamy, silty soil and looked up at the sky. It felt like a womb... a death womb.
This piece was …
Marshall Applewhite met Bonnie Nettles in 1972, and together they built a religion. It was called Heaven's Gate, and it drew heavily from the bible, …
Andy Wilson and Ryan Graves are best friends, despite having very different opinions on the hierarchy of human and animal life. The two come face-to-face with those differences after a fatal encounter on a frigid winter …
In his junior year of high school, HBM host Jeff Emtman left his home and everything he knew to live and study in a tiny village nestled in the …
HBM producers Jeff and Bethany are having more and more trouble bearing silence.
On this episode, Jeff calls back crow researcher Kaeli Swift and asks her what it was like to sit in silence with a stranger. And Bethany …
Here's a little gift for you. It's clips of every episode of Here Be Monsters. You can use this page as a hub to your discovery of HBM. As each clip plays, a comment will pop up in the bottom of the player. Click …
Eric Jon Phelps knows a lot of things. He knows that the Pope controls the world. He knows that it was the Jesuits who poisoned him in Tampa. And …
Crows have really strange habits around death. When a bird dies, crows gather, squawking loudly and gathering as many other birds as they can find to come and look at the dead body.
Much of what we know about crow …
Recent episodes of Here Be Monsters have been largely about death. So, on this episode David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg teach us about the exact opposite—immortality, living forever. Their documentary film, The …
Eric Chase's memory of April 19th, 1989 is largely a blur. On that day, he was aboard the USS Iowa, a World War 2 era battleship, equipped with some of the world's biggest cannons, capable of leveling a city block with …
It was a group of businessmen in the late 19th century who originally invented the Ouija Board. They sold them in toy shops and promising questions …
Ayahuasca is one of the most powerful and most illegal hallucinogens in the world. It contains DMT. But, for as long as anyone can remember, it's …
Back when David was a nerdy Oklahoman teenager, he fell in love with Stephanie. They both had angst towards their overbearing, conservative parents and they both wanted out.
So, when the opportunity presented itself, …
In a strange, small, moss-covered forest in Bellingham, Washington, Jeff stumbled on to the most gruesome scene of hedonism he's ever seen.
While it's not common for humans to witness slug death orgies, every once in a …
This episode is a Grab-bag, it contains three segments that serve as follow-ups to the three most recent episodes of Here Be Monsters.
Part 1: …
A bit of stunningly beautiful audio has surfaced online recently and it's riling up two different kinds of people--churchgoers and audio engineers. …
Jonathan Happ’s white lab coat and latex gloves make him look like a doctor when he stands in a room full of people. But he’s not a doctor…he’s an …
For thousands of years, Western Medicine thought it had itself figured out. Everything came in fours. There were four sensations, four fluids in the body, four kinds of people, and four elements making up the world. …
It was 40-odd years before John Hanneman figured out what the night terrors of his youth represented. In this episode, John describes the first trauma he experienced in life—something we all share. And he explains how …
Homemade Bigfoot costumes can get you in a lot of trouble. And in gun-toting community of Pumpkintown, SC, a fake Bigfoot costume might get you killed too. But when the recession caused a local outfitter’s store sales …
Shoppingspree Clark showed up on the side of the road outside the “Friendliest Town in Texas” with nothing more than a sketchpad and the burnt-out …
For lucha libre wrestlers, masks are everything. They wear them in the ring, they wear them to the grocery store, they wear them any time they appear in public. No one knows what face lies under that mask, so it makes …
David Blackshire Key has been called a douchebag more times than he can count. It's probably because he used to wear big sunglasses--day and night, indoors and out. He wasn't a movie star, he just had brain cancer.
…
Season 2 of Here Be Monsters begins.
The reasons why I bike at night are diverse. It’s partly because I don’t feel graceful anywhere else, it’s partly …
Here Be Monsters is a podcast about strange and unusual and beautiful and sometimes dark things.
Jeff Emtman started Here Be Monsters in 2012.
Here are …
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