9: ‘Ectoplasm? It looks like cheesecloth’ – Shannon Taggart

9: ‘Ectoplasm? It looks like cheesecloth’ – Shannon Taggart

What happens when a photographer spends 25 years documenting people who believe they can speak with the dead? Photographer Shannon Taggart joins Joanna Ebenstein for a fascinating conversation about spiritualism, séance culture, spirit photography, and the enduring human desire to remain connected with those who have died. Best known for her acclaimed book Séance, Taggart reflects on how a mysterious message received by a family member at Lily Dale — the world's largest Spiritualist community — first drew her into a lifelong exploration of mediumship and the paranormal. What began as a photographic project soon became an investigation into belief, perception, history, and the limits of what we think we know. Together, Shannon and Joanna explore the forgotten influence of spiritualism on art, science, photography, and social reform movements. They discuss ectoplasm, spirit photography, the strange overlap between séance rooms and stage magic, and why some of the most influential artists and thinkers of the modern era were fascinated by communication with the dead. The conversation also examines the tension between scepticism and belief. Shannon shares some of the most uncanny experiences she has witnessed while documenting séances, reflects on the role of mystery in creative practice, and explains why she remains committed to holding uncertainty rather than seeking definitive answers. Along the way, they consider ancestor relationships, near-death experiences, and why death itself may be what gives life its meaning. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1] 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine  Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

8: Jeffrey Kripal- Mysticism, Sex, and the Impossible

Is Reality Stranger Than We’re Willing to Admit?  Religious scholar and author Jeffrey J. Kripal joins Joanna Ebenstein for an engrossing conversation exploring mysticism, sexuality, death, and the edges of what we call “real.” Kripal reflects on his early years in a Catholic seminary, where fasting, faith, anorexia, and psychoanalysis shaped his understanding of religion as far stranger and more psychologically complex than it first appears. He discusses his argument that mystical traditions often encode forms of queerness and fluidity that resist fixed identity, and suggests that paranormal phenomena—UFOs, abductions, synchronicities—belong to the same instability in reality. He also recounts an unexplainable experience in Calcutta during Kali Puja, which reshaped his intellectual life and thinking about death as an opening onto “larger reality.” Together, Joanna and Jeff explore what it means to take the impossible seriously—not as metaphor, but as part of reality itself. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468. 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

7: ‘Impossible Bodies’ - Asti Hustvedt

In this episode of Memento Morbid, Joanna Ebenstein speaks with independent scholar, historian, and author Asti Hustvedt about hysteria, gender, spiritualism, and the uneasy territory where medicine meets the uncanny. What happens when the body refuses to behave according to science? Beginning in nineteenth-century Paris, the conversation explores hysteria as a once-dominant medical diagnosis — one that produced real and often devastating symptoms while resisting all attempts at biological explanation. Together, Joanna and Asti trace how figures like Jean-Martin Charcot, founder of modern neurology, took hysteria seriously as a neurological condition even as it destabilised the era’s growing faith in scientific materialism. The discussion moves through decadence and its rejection of positivism, the birth of psychoanalysis, and the surrealists’ fascination with hysterics as figures who existed beyond ordinary rationality. Asti reflects on how many famous mediums — long dismissed as frauds, performers, or curiosities — were also diagnosed as hysterics, and how leading scientists including Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Charles Richet investigated paranormal phenomena with genuine seriousness. Moving between séance rooms, hospitals, photography archives, psychoanalysis, and occult history, Joanna and Asti ask what these “impossible” bodies reveal about gender, trauma, consciousness, and the limits of rational explanation itself. At the centre of the episode lies a provocative idea: that hysteria was never simply about illness, but about bodies and minds that refused to conform — exposing the fragility of the boundaries between science and superstition, reality and imagination, inner life and external truth. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared — you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [http://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

6: ‘I've never not known death’ - John Troyer

What happens when a lifetime spent studying death collides with personal loss? Death scholar, writer, and educator John Troyer joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about mortality, grief, funeral culture, and the sometimes uneasy relationship between intellectual understanding and lived experience. Best known for his book Technologies of the Human Corpse and his work with the Centre for Death and Society, Troyer reflects on growing up around the American funeral industry, where encounters with death were part of everyday life from an early age. Together, he and Joanna explore the cultural history of deathcare, and the strange ways modern societies simultaneously hide from and obsess over death. The conversation moves through death studies as an academic discipline, the enduring influence of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, and how conversations about mortality can offer clarity, intimacy, and meaning in everyday life. Troyer also speaks candidly about the deaths of his sister and parents, and the profound realization that even decades spent thinking and writing about death cannot truly prepare us for grief when it arrives personally. Joanna and John reflect on why people are instinctively drawn to conversations about mortality, how pre-death planning can become an act of care, and what it means to live fully while knowing life is finite.  📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1] 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine  Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

5: ‘Darkness is Healthy and Holy’ - Pam Grossman

What happens when we recognise creativity as a form of magic? Writer, curator, and cultural critic Pam Grossman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about witchcraft, creativity, death, and the unseen forces that shape our lives. Best known for her books Magic Maker and Waking the Witch, Grossman reflects on her lifelong relationship with magic — from childhood fascinations with mythology and divination to publicly embracing witchcraft as both a spiritual and creative practice. Together, she and Joanna explore how modern witchcraft honours darkness, shadow, and mortality without equating them with evil, and why rituals of remembrance and ancestral connection remain vital in contemporary life. The conversation moves through pagan traditions, tarot, artistic process, justice magic, and the cultural stigma surrounding witches. Grossman speaks candidly about anxiety, creative doubt, and the pressure to “make meaning,” while Joanna reflects on how death awareness can sharpen our sense of purpose and deepen our relationship to creativity. At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: that making art is itself a magical act: a collaboration between intention, imagination, and something larger than the self. Whether understood as spirit, ancestry, the unconscious, or creative intuition, both Joanna and Pam ask what becomes possible when we stop treating creativity as pure productivity, and begin approaching it as devotion, ritual, and transformation. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1] 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine  Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]