Monsters Among Us

There’s an episode in The Office when Pam mentions an encounter she had years ago with a ghost. Her husband, Jim, is shocked that his wife believes in ghosts and spends the episode trying to show her the lack of logic in such a belief. The entire office takes sides, and I’m still not sure where I stand. On the one hand, I’ve never seen anything in the ghostly category, but I also love a good horror story and recognize that they come from every corner of the world.

From boogie men to ghosts to aliens, Derek Hayes has stepped into the dark closets of your mind to face the boogie man with you on his show Monsters Among Us.

Monsters Among Us is a call-in show about monsters but, more specifically, about the people who see them.”

As an artist by trade, Derek has spent a lot of his time listening to podcasts, particularly the paranormal genre. However, over time, he recognized a pattern in the way the existing shows approached the cases they heard about.

They were all on the believer side, there was no skeptic voice. The majority of them were, I don’t want to say total believers, but that’s kind of how they came across with every single case. And I thought ‘there’s gotta be a way to examine these cases… not every single paranormal event can actually be paranormal.’

But Derek didn’t want to just burst in and start calling everyone a liar. He was just looking for a slightly more balanced approach to the stories so many people have about a supernatural experience.

My thought was, ‘if I can tell the story in the person’s own voice and then have a rational conversation about it after, just to discuss what else it might have been. Because it can’t always be aliens, it can’t always be bigfoot…’ So, [the show’s] an exploration of the truth.

While at the beginning there was a bit of difficulty in finding people to tell their stories, as the show has gained popularity more and more people want to talk through their experiences and share them with the audience. Which is great for Derek, whose absolute favorite part of making the show is hearing stories.

Everybody has a story… there have been things that have come up that I never would have in a million years imagined anyone coming up with or experiencing… So we’ve got people with some weird stories that you normally wouldn’t expect to hear. And that is by far my favorite part.

With that kind of passion, it makes sense that Derek is excited to keep growing the show to hear more and more stories, with hopes of eventually moving to a more visual medium for the show. So, if you’ve brushed elbows with the supernatural or wish you had, Monsters Among Us is the show for you.

Chasing Pods is a Podchaser blog series dedicated to letting our readers know about podcasts they may not have heard of or provide a sneak peek into the making of their favorite podcast. We talk to podcast creators about their journey into podcasting, the creation of their shows, the ups and downs of the work, and what they’re looking forward to for their podcast

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