Haunted Talks

What if a ghost is not only something we encounter in the dark, but something we may, in some mysterious way, participate in? In this special episode of Haunted Talks, Jim presents a manifesto for reimagining the paranormal. Moving beyond the familiar debate between “spirits of the dead” and “tricks of the mind,” he explores...

Off the coast of Venice sits an island no one will approach. Poveglia carries centuries of dark history, and the scale of what happened there is nearly impossible to comprehend. Today, it sits abandoned, overgrown, and rarely visited. But that does not mean it is empty. Boat captains refuse to moor there, even in storms....

Most fairy tale monsters keep their distance. They wait in towers. They haunt the edge of the forest. You can, in theory, avoid them. The one in this story sits at the dinner table. The Juniper Tree is widely considered the most disturbing tale the Brothers Grimm ever published. Not the most violent. Not the...

You know these stories. A lost girl in the woods. A puppet who lies. A chicken convinced the sky is falling. You’ve known them since childhood. What you don’t know is what those stories were before someone decided they belonged in the nursery. What we found is not charming. A puppet hanged from an oak...

On the morning of February 9th, 1855, the residents of Devon woke to a nightmare pressed into the snow. A single-file line of cloven hoof-prints, stretching over miles of frozen English countryside. Across thirty towns. In six hours. Made by something walking upright, one foot precisely in front of the other. The prints didn’t go...

Jim steps out from behind the microphone to share a talk he gave at the Modern Language Association conference in Toronto, where he was invited to speak on a panel about Gothic scholarship, podcasting, and public humanities. It’s a conversation about what we’re really doing when we tell ghost stories. Not just entertaining, but shaping...