Into the Field: A Conversation with Daniel Alan Jones, Part 1Blake and Karen welcome Daniel Alan Jones, an investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and the creator and host of The Vortex, for the first half of a two-part conversation. Blake met Jones at the Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State in March of 2026, where an after-dinner conversation outside a restaurant, joined partway through by Jeb Card, led to the interview you are about to hear.Jones is part of the Texas Cryptozoology scene, hanging with (the late) Jim Marrs, Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern, Craig Woolheater and Lyle Blackburn (among others). He approaches the subject ethnographically: the people who chase monsters interest him as much as the monsters do. This first half of our interview covers the Piney Woods and its tangle of local Bigfoot names, a salamander hunt in the PNW, a failed search for giants in Death Valley, pluys a night camped out in Mothman country. Part two takes up the state of the Cryptozoology today, which will be S05E49 dropping next week.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.
Karen and Matt are back from their trip to the UK and they share stories and photos from their whirlwind visit to a variety of (allegedly) haunted places. Blake makes jokes... and wishes he could go himself.Link to trip photos and Extended Show NotesBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.
Blake brings us a flashback to 2017, when he and Karen sat down withThe Spooktator's Hayley Stevens to talk about the (allegedly) most haunted village in England. Hayley is a British paranormal researcher who started out a believer and came around to skepticism the hard way - by actually investigating - and she now publishes the newsletter The Ghost Geek. She first appeared on MonsterTalk back in episode 37 to talk lake monsters. This time the subject is Pluckley, a small, film-set-pretty village in Kent that is considerably more famous for its dead than for its living.Pluckley's ghost roster runs somewhere between a dozen and sixteen-plus, depending on who's counting and when - and the number has a habit of going up. There are two different White Ladies, a Red Lady, a highwayman, a phantom coach, and a stretch of woodland that screams. Where does a reputation like this actually come from, who benefits from it, and what happens to a place once the ghost tours arrive? Also - Blake goes looking for a famous piece of documentation that everybody cites and nobody seems to have seen. Extended notes at monstertalk.orgBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.
⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.⚠️ Blake and Karen discuss Circus Train Wrecks as an explanation for mysterious "real" animal sightings, as well as a source of folklore monsters of high improbability. 🚂 In This Episode Why circus trains wrecked so oftenThe economic event that ended the era - and why regulation wasn't the answerAn inversion of survivorship bias, and the data set nobody has built yetA 1917 newspaper story about lions in a butcher shop that is not what it appears to beThe 1931 wire story about a colony of Bengal tigers in the mountains of MexicoHow armadillos actually got to FloridaGypsy the elephant, Tifton to Valdosta, November 1902Wallace the Lion, the Exeter mail coach lioness, and Christian the LionWhy the Beast of Gévaudan may be the oldest "it escaped from a menagerie" case on recordHow Gévaudan subverts myths about the EnlightenmentBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.
⚠️ Content AdvisoryThis episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.⚠️Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver's Peabody-Whitehead Mansion - the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill's old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected.What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history - a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning.Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.orgBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.