Regular Episode
#111 – THE BEST LAID PLANS
It’s a reminder that MonsterTalk exists in a slightly odd niche: a show staffed by people who genuinely love folklore, ghost stories, and cryptid lore, but who also want to know whether any of it holds up. As Blake puts it, paranormal topics get enormous TV real estate — but almost always without the critical examination. MonsterTalk is, in his words, “the inverse view of those topics.”
🎪 Dragon Con, the Skeptics Track, and Going Undercover
Blake is heading to Dragon Con — his first time attending primarily as a fan rather than a volunteer panelist — and plans to spend time lurking in the Paranormal track rather than the Skeptics track. He’s interested in talking to believers directly rather than only to fellow skeptics, reflecting a broader point about how paranormal topics tend to be siloed away from serious investigation.
Karen flags that magician and theatrical séance performer Aidan Sinclair — a self-described skeptic who blends historical storytelling with stage magic — will be appearing at Dragon Con. Sinclair has an ongoing residency at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (yes, that Stanley Hotel), where he performs shows several nights a week for guests who’ve made the pilgrimage to one of America’s most famous allegedly haunted buildings.
👻 Haunted Hotels and the Art of Being Primed
The Stanley Hotel prompts a detour into ghost-tourism psychology. Blake recalls an early investigation there — before MonsterTalk launched — working with Kylie Sturgis on a cemetery ghost video. Karen recounts a later visit with investigators who spent most of the night explaining to guests that orb photographs are not photographs of ghosts, and that the “phantom cigar smoke” everyone was smelling turned out to be a guest cooking bacon burgers on a personal barbecue outside — a tidy example of olfactory pareidolia in action.
The Driscoll Hotel in Austin gets a mention too: no haunted signage out front, but ask at the desk and a printed ghost-story sheet materializes. The consensus: old hotels are very good at priming guests to interpret ambiguous stimuli as supernatural.
📋 Episodes in the Works
Blake and Karen run through a substantial slate of upcoming episodes:
– Demon Dolls / Robert the Doll — An interview is planned with Corrie Convertito of the Key West Art and Historical Society, curator and keeper of Robert the Doll. The hosts are particularly interested in the tradition of visitors writing letters of apology to the doll after allegedly offending it — a pattern they note appears in many paranormal traditions (see also: the Hawaiian lava-rock curse).
– Folklore as a Field — A conversation with an academic folklorist to dig into how folklore is actually studied systematically — something the hosts feel has been a gap in the show’s otherwise wide coverage.
– Fairies and Archaeological Sites — A crossover episode with the Archaeological Fantasies podcast, exploring the surprising connections between fairy folklore and real archaeological sites.
– Archaeological Hoaxes — Ken Feder, beloved returning guest, comes back to talk frauds and fabrications in archaeology. (Blake promises to bleep him. Karen promises to leave a few in.)
– The Enfield Poltergeist — Blake is deep in Guy Lyon Playfair‘s book This House Is Haunted and would love to get Playfair himself on the show. He’d also like to bring back Richard Sugg, whose poltergeist research he admires even where conclusions differ.
🩺 A Personal Update: Blake’s Health
Blake shares that in January he underwent gastric sleeve surgery — a permanent stomach reduction — at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, performed by Dr. Paul Massick. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes around 2008 and, facing escalating blood sugar levels and a possible insulin prescription, decided to research bariatric options. He’s careful to frame this as his own story rather than a general recommendation: results vary, the surgery is irreversible, and behavioral change still has to follow. At the time of recording, he’s at the lowest medication dose of his diabetic life and targeting full remission by year’s end.
Karen notes her own, non-surgical path: over five years she lost more than 100 pounds through a combination of daily walking and switching to a predominantly pescatarian diet — cutting out meat while keeping seafood. Both hosts cite Penn Jillette as an inspiration; Jillette lost a comparable amount of weight through a strict plant-based dietary overhaul and wrote about it in 📚 Presto! 💵.
🤝 Listener Support and Future Plans
The episode closes with a warm round of thanks to listeners who sent books from the show’s Amazon wish list. Blake notes that used copies and Kindle editions are equally welcome — a Kindle book can be shared with Karen, meaning one copy serves both hosts. For those with no budget at all, an iTunes review or a word-of-mouth recommendation is genuinely useful.
Blake floats a Patreon idea: a monthly newsletter covering monster mini-profiles — cases interesting enough to mention but perhaps not substantial enough for a full episode — with the possibility of bundling several into an audio roundup for subscribers. He’s deliberately not launched it yet; he wants to have something concrete to offer before asking for support.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 This House Is Haunted 💵 by Guy Lyon Playfair
– 📚 Presto! 💵 by Penn Jillette
– 📚 Hits and Mrs. 💵 by Karen Stollznow
🔗 Related Links
– Robert the Doll — Wikipedia
– Enfield Poltergeist — Wikipedia
– The Stanley Hotel — Wikipedia
– Archaeological Fantasies Podcast
– eSkeptic — Free Newsletter of the Skeptic Society
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode of MonsterTalk, Karen and Blake thank listeners for their amazing support, and discuss upcoming episodes in the works.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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