Conspiracy, Ghost Hunting, and Graverobbing w/ Colin Dickey
Spirits: Mythology, Legends, & Folklore
Multitude
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 May 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join us as we talk with writer and academic, Colin Dickey, and discuss hot takes of ghost hunting shows as reality TV, the banality of evil, and how haunted architecture reflects what society is most afraid of.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of death, the Satanic Panic, ableism, gun violence, toxic masculinity, murder, Flat Earth and conspiracy theories, anti-semietism, sexual assault/abuse, infanticide, and assassination.
Guest
Colin Dickey is a writer, speaker, and academic, and has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories all over the country. He’s the author of multiple books, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained. A regular contributor to the New Republic and Lapham’s Quarterly, he is also the co editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. Check out his upcoming book, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.
Housekeeping
- Recommendation: This week, Julia recommends The Bright and Breaking Sea by Chloe Neill
- Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests’ books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
- Call to Action: Check out Join the Party, a collaborative storytelling and roleplaying podcast co-hosted in part by Julia and Amanda. Search for Join the Party in your podcast app, or go to jointhepartypod.com.
Sponsors
- BetterHelp is an online therapy service. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/spirits
- Unthinkable with Jay Acunzo, available in your podcast app now or at jayacunzo.com/unthinkable-podcast
Find Us Online
If you like Spirits, help us grow by spreading the word! Follow us @SpiritsPodcast on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. You can support us on Patreon (http://patreon.com/spiritspodcast) to unlock bonus Your Urban Legends episodes, director’s commentaries, custom recipe cards, and so much more. We also have lists of our book recommendations and previous guests’ books at http://spiritspodcast.com/books.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm |
| 0:02.0 | M. |
| 0:05.0 | The Welcome to Spirits podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. |
| 0:33.1 | Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. |
| 0:36.5 | I'm Amanda. |
| 0:37.2 | And I'm Julia. And I'm |
| 0:37.6 | Julia. And today we are so excited to be joined by Colin Dickey, a writer. Both of us have enjoyed |
| 0:43.5 | someone whose work we have quoted in previous episodes with just Julia and me. Finally, we get to |
| 0:49.3 | talk to the person himself. Colin, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks so much for having me on. It is our pleasure. |
| 0:55.7 | Colin, for our listeners who might not know who you are, can you tell us a little bit about who you |
| 1:00.3 | are, what you do and what you talk about? Sure. My name is Colin Dickey. What do I do? Lately, I think |
| 1:07.2 | what I do is best summarized by sort of trying to sort of understand a kind of invisible |
| 1:14.1 | world, which in the past has taken the form of ghosts, cryptids, you know, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness |
| 1:20.1 | monster, people like that. My new book is on secret societies and sort of the fear of kind of hidden |
| 1:26.4 | conspirators, be they freemasons or the |
| 1:29.4 | Illuminati or Satanists or lizard people or what have you. So that's kind of what I do in a nutshell. |
| 1:36.8 | Wonderful. Well, I am so stoked for that new book. I have to pick it up. And I am really curious to |
| 1:44.0 | kind of, I guess, begin at the |
| 1:46.3 | beginning and ask you kind of, how did you begin to explore the world of ghosts and death and |
| 1:54.0 | haunting? Like, what was the inciting incident? Or was it something that you were always really |
| 1:58.8 | interested in? Oh, I don't think there was an inciting incident. |
| 2:02.6 | I mean, I, you know, I've said this before, but I grew up down the street from the Winchester |
... |
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