Regular Episode
#180 – GHOSTS, GEARS, GADGETS AND GOLEMS
Blake notes upfront that this episode is a preview of deeper dives to come — MonsterTalk isn’t done with ghost-hunting gear and EVPs. Consider this the overture.
🧱 The Golem: Prague, Kabbalah, and the Limits of the Formula
Peter walks through the two major currents of golem tradition. The more widely known is the legend of the Golem of Prague — a clay figure animated by a rabbi to defend the Jewish community from pogroms, brought to life via the Hebrew word emet (truth) inscribed on its forehead, and destroyed (sometimes fatally for the rabbi) by erasing a letter. This story made its way into the 1915 German silent film Der Golem, into the Brothers Grimm, and into lasting metaphors about hubris — a thread connecting it directly to Frankenstein and later to cybernetics via Norbert Wiener‘s 📚 God and Golem, Inc. 💵
The second current is more esoteric: within Kabbalistic teaching, the mystic can theoretically create a golem by reciting permutations of Hebrew letters — in some formulas, 42,000 repetitions while fasting and in a deep trance. Peter notes, with some amusement, that the formulas seem almost deliberately impossible, a quality Blake compares to the similarly impractical recipes for the homunculus in alchemical texts. The Kabbalistic framing treats Hebrew letters as the divine programming language of creation — a metaphor Peter finds resonates strongly with modern software thinking.
🔮 Spirit Photography: From Mumler to Shannon Taggart
The conversation traces spirit photography from its Civil War–era origins to contemporary practice. Boston photographer William Mumler famously produced an image of Mary Todd Lincoln with the apparent spirit of Abraham Lincoln standing behind her — a period when spiritualism was filling an emotional void that conventional religion couldn’t address for a nation traumatized by mass death.
Peter profiles contemporary photographer Shannon Taggart, who photographs mediums in trance states and deliberately “misuses” her camera — leaving the shutter open for thirty seconds to a minute — to produce strange, unmanipulated images that frequently correspond to what the medium described. Whether that’s confirmation bias, apophenia, or something more poetic is, Peter suggests, precisely the right question to sit inside rather than resolve too quickly.
Peter also attended a Victorian-style séance with Taggart, complete with a spirit cabinet, bound medium, glow-in-the-dark trumpet, and alleged ectoplasm. His verdict: the medium was a skilled stage magician whose technique occasionally undermined the mystery — an assessment illustrated memorably by the appearance, in Taggart’s photographs, of a slide whistle that had never been introduced to the audience.
📻 Frank’s Box, Ghost Radios, and the Voices of the Dead
Karen shares her firsthand account of Frank Sumption, the Colorado inventor of the ghost box (also known as Frank’s Box) — a modified AM radio that scans continuously, producing white noise and fragments of broadcast audio that practitioners interpret as spirit communication. Sumption, who originally built the device to contact aliens, redirected it toward the deceased after apparently hearing the voice of his late son. Karen met him at a diner in Littleton, Colorado, where he gave her one of his numbered boxes (she received #64, complete with a hand-drawn creature and crystals inside). She describes him as earnest and non-commercial — he never sold his devices — though clearly operating within a framework of deeply personal grief.
Peter contextualizes ghost boxes within a longer history: 19th-century inventor John Murray Spear claimed spirits of deceased scientists — self-styled “electrolyzers” — were feeding him schematics for a perpetual-motion machine. The recurring idea, Peter notes, is that spirits are technologically ahead of us and simply waiting for human invention to catch up enough to serve as a carrier medium. He finds EVP research the least satisfying of the technologies he investigated precisely because most practitioners resist the ambiguity that makes the other practices interesting — captioning YouTube videos of ghost-box audio, for instance, collapses the imaginative space the noise might otherwise open.
💡 Dream Machines, Monroe, and the Consciousness Hackers
Peter traces the Dreamachine back to artist Brion Gysin, whose experience of flickering sunlight through roadside trees while riding a bus induced vivid hallucinations and inspired him to build a stroboscopic device from a cardboard cylinder, a record player, and a light bulb. Research into binaural beats and photic stimulation confirms that light and sound at certain frequencies do alter brainwave states — the mechanism is real, even if the magical interpretation layered on top of it is not scientifically established.
This thread leads to Robert Monroe and the Monroe Institute, whose patented audio technology for inducing altered states — described in the USPTO filing in terms of consciousness change rather than out-of-body travel — sits at the intersection of legitimate psychoacoustics and elaborate cosmology involving pyramid-shaped rooftops and visiting alien entities. Peter connects all of this to maker culture: for under $25 in parts from Adafruit, anyone can now build a flicker-light device capable of inducing similar states, democratizing what was once the province of shamans and expensive retreat centers.
⚙️ Chaos Magic, Technomancy, and the Maker as Magician
Peter profiles Joshua Madara, a self-described technomancer who uses microcontrollers and maker electronics within ceremonial magic rituals — motion sensors that trigger effects across the room when he gestures, electronic triggers embedded in consecrated circles. Madara’s position is that the automated nature of the effect doesn’t diminish its magical function; the technology is part of the ritual, not a substitute for it.
The discussion broadens into chaos magic’s use of sigil magic and the idea — shared with Kabbalah — that written language carries generative power. Peter also profiles Italian stage magician Ferdinando Buscema, who uses occult aesthetics in performance and argues that the truly interesting challenge isn’t convincing the credulous, but producing a genuine sense of wonder in someone who refuses to suspend disbelief.
Blake draws a parallel to professional wrestling’s concept of the “smart mark” — the fan who knows the outcome is predetermined but still gets lost in the performance — and both hosts land on the same idea: the state of enchantment doesn’t require a prior commitment to literal belief.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Strange Frequencies 💵 by Peter Bebergal
– 📚 Season of the Witch 💵 by Peter Bebergal (rock music and the occult)
– 📚 Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood 💵 by Peter Bebergal
– 📚 The Faith Between Us 💵 by Peter Bebergal and Scott Korb
– 📚 God and Golem, Inc. 💵 by Norbert Wiener
🔗 Related Links
– Golem of Prague (Wikipedia)
– Spirit Photography (Wikipedia)
– William H. Mumler — the Boston spirit photographer (Wikipedia)
– Ghost Box / Frank’s Box (Wikipedia)
– Dreamachine — Brion Gysin’s stroboscopic device (Wikipedia)
– Monroe Institute — Robert Monroe’s consciousness research center (Wikipedia)
– Davenport Brothers — the spirit cabinet originators (Wikipedia)
– Dion Fortune — occultist who refined Crowley’s definition of magic (Wikipedia)
– The Devil Rides Out (1968, Hammer Films) — the Christopher Lee film both hosts admire
– “Cloudbusting” — Kate Bush’s song about Wilhelm Reich, featuring Donald Sutherland
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Peter Bebergal studied religion and culture at Harvard Divinity School, and is the author of the new book Strange Frequencies, which chronicles many of the ways people have sought to use technology to transcend the mundane to reach the numinous. We talk about the ways people have used (and continue to use) technology in fringe research, art, entertainment, and in pursuit of revelation.
LINKS RELATED TO THIS INTERVIEW
Books by Peter Bebergal
Additional
- Interview with Frank Sumption (video). This interview was by Bill “Fact or Faked” Murphy and is from his DVD about The Stanley Effect…a theory around the piezoelectric effect which, to the best of my knowledge, relies on geology not present at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park CO. That being said, it is a lovely hotel and in the fall the Elk in the parking lot are amazing. And real. —Blake
Music
- Intro Music: Glow in Space by Sergey Cheremisinov from Free Music Archive.
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
MTArchivist
0