Strange stories, held close to the room.
Here Be Monsters follows ordinary rooms to uncanny places. A haircut, a border walk, Roman recipes, or a concrete relic can become a careful study of memory, fear, family, and perception.
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Here Be Monsters has the shape of a long conversation remembered after dark. It begins with places and objects. A park at the southern edge of Berlin. A railroad fence beside the Schwerbelastungskörper. Lovage and rue pulled from nursery pots and tasted in a parking lot. A wheelchair, a table of haircutting tools, and the request to feel like oneself one more time. From there, the show lets the ordinary become porous. Death is not handled as a headline, but as a room with someone still in it. Sound is not only decoration, but a way of steadying the nervous system or making chaos approachable. Family stories drift toward UFOs, swamp lights, science fiction, and the odd inheritance of being raised around people who treated mystery as daily work. History arrives through concrete, old recipes, bombed landscapes, medieval scribes, and Alpine valleys where beauty and violence occupy the same ground. The pacing is patient. Scenes are allowed to breathe before they explain themselves. Interviews stay close to lived detail, especially when the subject is difficult, embarrassing, tender, or impossible to verify. The show is comfortable with process: microphones being tested, episodes thawing after a long silence, a feed being reopened, an art exchange held together by spreadsheets and trust. It does not sell the unknown as a thrill ride. It notices how the unknown already sits inside bodies, families, cities, rituals, dreams, and sounds. Some episodes are narrative essays. Some are field recordings. Some become intimate conversations with guests, parents, artists, historians, or people who have built unusual relationships with death, belief, or making things by hand. The result is less a paranormal show than a careful practice of attention. It suits people who like strange stories grounded in real texture, and who do not mind when an answer arrives slowly, indirectly, or not at all.
Made for: For listeners drawn to intimate audio essays, field recordings, family memory, uncanny stories, and reflective interviews that move at a human pace. It especially suits people who prefer texture and uncertainty over tidy explanations.
What sets it apart: Here Be Monsters grounds the eerie in practical, tactile detail: haircuts, herbs, borders, microphones, concrete, recipes, and weather. Its strength is the way it lets ordinary life accumulate until the mystery is already in the room.
An independent podcast about fear, beauty and the unknown. Since 2012.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Here Be Monsters makes strange subjects human through intimate narration, precise interviews, and an enduring curiosity about belief, memory, bodies, and family.
Here Be Monsters turns unusual questions into intimate audio stories, often beginning with Jeff Emtman's own uncertainty before widening into interviews, memories, and carefully built scenes. Death becomes a practical conversation about human composting.
This is the show that makes human composting oddly tender, if your curiosity can handle the worms.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A haircut becomes a quiet study of identity, care, and the clues people leave at home.
Here Be Monsters treats a haircut as a way to notice care, identity, and the small traces people leave behind. The house-call setup gives the episode its edge: in a home, the setting can suggest how someone lives, how orderly or cluttered they are, and whether pets, children, or…
A father-son conversation moves from childhood fear to UFOs, occult reading, and the long reach of memory.
This Here Be Monsters episode centers on Jeff Emtman and his dad, and that frame gives the conversation its shape. It moves from a question about fatherhood into memory, upbringing, and the kind of childhood fear that can stick around for years.
A swamp-lit family story about a father, a split, and the folklore that grows between them.
The episode plays as a family story about a father who worked the system, cobbled together a living, and sold adventure and spiritual searching as a way of life.
A plant tasting leads into a clear-eyed look at Roman food and the manuscript that preserved it.
Here Be Monsters starts with a bike ride to a plant nursery and a parking-lot taste test, which is a neat way to make ancient Roman cooking feel immediate. Lovage comes across as bitter and celery-like, while rue is bitter in a more memorable way, even numbing the tongue.
A careful look at burial, decomposition, and the rituals around natural organic reduction.
HBM152 begins with a blunt question about what should happen to a body after death, then moves into ritual, disgust, and the practical work of natural organic reduction.
A small-town memory piece where fear, embarrassment, and retail clutter share the same aisle.
Here Be Monsters treats fear as a lifelong project, folding it into a personal account of teenage awkwardness, a border-town store, and a Christmas raffle built around surplus goods.
A cold-opened season wrap gives way to a candid account of fatigue, neglect, and family rupture.
The episode starts with a careful cold-water ritual and then turns into a season-nine wrap-up. The host calls the season challenging and rewarding, notes that this was the first return to independent release in a long time, and credits 10 new episodes, independent sponsors, more…
A daily-changing podcast turns redownloading into part of the experience.
The Daily Blast is presented as a dynamically generated episode that shifts from day to day, so deleting it and downloading it again should surface audio that is slightly different.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey narrate overlooked history, from Courbet's realism to IUD regulation.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Berlin-based hairdresser Rocky Villanueva tells Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman about one of the four final haircuts he has given in 15,000–20,000 career sessions: a dying musician client in 2015 who asked, from a wheelchair with an oxygen tank, 'to feel himself once more.' Rocky narrates the hour-long session in present tense — sectioning the hair, moving around the chair, trying to 'find the person's spirit' in a changed face and body — and receives an email six days later from the client's wife saying the haircut had helped his final days.
Host Jeff Emptman returns after a hiatus, walking to the edge of Berlin to reflect on borders, the Berlin Wall, and personal updates.
The host discusses using Steve Reich's phasing technique to create a calming sound piece during a stressful move, explaining how simple sounds can evolve into complex patterns.
Jeff calls his dad.
The host explores Berlin's Schwerbelastungskörper, a massive Nazi-era concrete structure, delving into its history and the ethical complexities of finding beauty in oppressive architecture.
The Here Be Monsters podcast announces the return of its Art Exchange, a program that pairs listeners to mail original artwork to each other, with sign-ups open until November 10, 2022.
Alan Greenfield works in a shadow world.
Host Jeff Emtman explores ancient Roman cuisine by tasting herbs like rue and lovage, then interviews historian Sally Granger about the Apicius cookbook.
A street preacher named Cliff spends his days on the sidewalks of Boulder, Colorado, handing out pamphlets and preaching what he calls the straight and narrow, including that remarriage is forbidden and women cannot be preachers.
Host Jeff Emtman interviews sound artist Sam Parker about field recordings, deep listening, and approaching new environments, while reflecting on his own trips to Germany and the podcast's funding through Patreon.
A person asks a plain question.
Jeff begins with the show itself.
The host of Here Be Monsters shares updates on season 10, discussing his creative process with sound, the uncertain release schedule, and listener engagement through sponsorship and Patreon.
Host Jeff Hentman announces he's removing his podcast Here Be Monsters from Spotify, explaining his decision through a critique of how Spotify's exclusive distribution deals and handling of controversial content like Joe Rogan's show have compromised podcasting's original open ethos.
Cold water marks a small before-and-after.
Episode 149 keeps moving.
May 26th, 2021, the host walks and thinks.
A microbiology student in Montreal who gave up a career in music due to Crohn's disease finds unexpected meaning by sharing the invisible world through her microscope on Instagram.
The host introduces a Twitter bot named Hypothetical Inspiration, created from the character Theodora, which posts a mix of advice and poetry.
Jeff Entman introduces Theodora, an AI trained on GPT-2 and transcripts from about 900 TED Talks.
In this Here Be Monsters episode, producer Jeff Entman opens with a phone call to his parents Rick and Kathy Entman about which of their childhood homes are still standing, then narrates a solo essay about using 'impulse response' audio recordings -- capturing a space's acoustic fingerprint by popping a balloon -- to preserve places in Seattle before they disappear.