Memento Morbid

About Memento Morbid

Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries. Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid- including death, grief and spirituality. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New York Times bestselling authors, a practicing witch, Hollywood actors, and a former crematorium worker- all exploring the rituals, stories, and delightfully strange ways humans confront the unknowable. Each episode is curious, insightful, and often striking, revealing the beauty, humor, and meaning we can find in life by confronting death head on. 📢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). 🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com ☕  buymeacoffee.com/mementomorbidpodcast 📘 UK   uk.bookshop.org/shop/MementoMorbidPodcast 📕 USA bookshop.org/shop/MementoMorbidPodcast (http://bookshop.org/shop/MementoMorbidPodcast) 💀 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

Publisher

Memento Morbid

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

15 Apr 2026

Latest episode

13 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

13 of 18 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   13 Aug 2026TRANSCRIPT

   17: ‘Spiritual Gumbo’ - Lilith Dorsey

   Host Joanna Ebenstein interviews author Lilith Dorsey, exploring the resilience and profound philosophies of African diasporic religions like New Orleans Voodoo.

2. 

   6 Aug 2026TRANSCRIPT

   16: Reality TV: A Poison and a Pox?

   Joanna Ebenstein interviews collector and television personality Evan Michelson about finding meaning in overlooked objects and the impact of reality TV on genuine curiosity.

3. 

   30 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   15: ‘The Deathosphere’ – Joanna Ebenstein & Producer Jess

   Host Joanna Ebenstein and Series Producer Jess Gunasekara reflect on Memento Morbid's first season, exploring profound conversations about life, death, and creativity.

4. 

   23 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   14: ‘Death Makes Creativity Possible’- Dylan Thuras

   Joanna Ebenstein interviews Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura, exploring how grief and endings fuel creativity and the profound meaning found in mortality.

5. 

   16 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   13: Yvonne Chireau- Hoodoo: Healing & Harm

   Historian Yvonne Chireau and Joanna Ebenstein explore African American conjure, hoodoo, and the enduring presence of ancestors, revealing how memory and resilience shape our understanding of life and death.

6. 

   9 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   12: From Pixar to Peculiars - Lee Unkrich

   Filmmaker Lee Unkrich shares with host Joanna Ebenstein how his fascination with collecting and mortality shaped his creative process, offering insights into art's power to transform our relationship with loss.

7. 

   2 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   11: Tiffany Hopkins – ‘Living Persons Guide to the Dead’

   Host Joanna Ebenstein interviews medium Tiffany Hopkins about the surprising connections between mediumship, creativity, and the history of Spiritualism.

8. 

   25 Jun 2026TRANSCRIPT

   10: Sparkling Skeletons and Costumed Cats - Paul Koudournaris

   Photographer and author Paul Koudounaris shares his global exploration of death traditions and human remains with host Joanna Ebenstein, revealing the beauty and stories found in mortality.

9. 

   18 Jun 2026TRANSCRIPT

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

   Photographer Shannon Taggart and host Joanna Ebenstein explore spiritualism, séance culture, and spirit photography, revealing the enduring human connection to the deceased.

10. 

    11 Jun 2026TRANSCRIPT

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

    Religious scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal and host Joanna Ebenstein explore mysticism, sexuality, and the nature of reality in this interview.

11. 

    4 Jun 2026TRANSCRIPT

    7: ‘Impossible Bodies’ - Asti Hustvedt

    Independent scholar Asti Hustvedt and host Joanna Ebenstein explore hysteria's historical medical diagnosis and its connection to gender, spiritualism, and the limits of scientific explanation.

12. 

    28 May 2026TRANSCRIPT

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

    Death scholar John Troyer shares with host Joanna Ebenstein how a lifetime studying mortality intersects with personal grief, offering insights into funeral culture and living fully.

13. 

    21 May 2026TRANSCRIPT

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

    Writer Pam Grossman and host Joanna Ebenstein explore how embracing darkness and creativity as magic enriches our lives and spiritual practices.

14. 

    14 May 2026

    4: ‘Death isn’t a problem to fix’ - Oliver Burkeman

    What does it mean to live well, knowing our time is finite? Author Oliver Burkeman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about time, mortality, and what it means to live well inside finite lives. Best known for Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman reflects on his shift from scepticism about self-help and productivity culture to a deeper engagement with anxiety, limitation, and acceptance. Together, they explore why the drive to “do everything” so often leaves us more overwhelmed—and what changes when we stop treating finitude as a problem to solve. The conversation moves through Stoicism, Zen Buddhism, medieval imagery of death, Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality, and the enduring mystery of consciousness. Burkeman speaks openly about fear—of loss, impermanence, and non-existence—while Joanna reflects on how death contemplation can reshape a life’s trajectory and our ideas of what is important. At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: meaning doesn’t arise in spite of limits, but because of them. Death, rather than diminishing life, provides it with meaning, poignancy, and value. Together, they ask what becomes possible when we stop trying to outrun time—and start living within it. 📢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 Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid (https://substack.com/@mementomorbid)

15. 

    7 May 2026

    3: 'Grave Dirt & Mud Pies' - Leila Taylor

    Grave dirt makes the best mud pies… Leila Taylor, writer, designer, cultural critic and Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library, joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the Gothic as both a cultural form and a lived sensibility—one that moves through memory, history, music, and space. Drawing from her acclaimed books Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul and Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread, Taylor explores how Gothic feeling is not confined to aesthetics or subculture, but emerges through lived experience: in architecture that unsettles, in histories that refuse resolution, and in the emotional residue of place. She reflects on growing up as a “spooky kid” in Massachusetts, playing funeral in a cemetery with friends—lying in open graves, performing rituals of death, and making mud pies from “grave dirt.” These early encounters with mortality become a lens for understanding how we learn to live alongside death, even as children. The conversation moves through Black Gothic traditions, literary and musical influences—tracing back to  Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit and moving into Joy Division, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—as well as Gothic literature from Frankenstein to Wuthering Heights. Taylor also reflects on haunting media, brutalist architecture, and theories of residual memory, sound, and haunting. 📢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%20). 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Robleto 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)

16. 

    30 Apr 2026

    2: 'I'm a Monster Now'- Paul Giamatti

    What Does It Mean to Become Someone Else? Award-winning actor and producer Paul Giamatti joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging, eerie, and often amusing conversation about monsters, performance, and the porous boundary between life and death. From childhood fascinations with werewolves and classic horror to the uncanny psychological states accessed through acting, Giamatti reflects on a lifelong obsession with transformation—of bodies, identities, and consciousness. He recounts a genuinely unsettling ghostly moment during a production of Hamlet, explores the idea of acting as a form of possession, and considers why theatre can feel more spiritually charged than film. The conversation weaves through late-night radio and the hypnotic voice of Art Bell, Giamatti’s cult television series Lodge 49, esoteric book collecting, and the strange intimacy of voices in the dark. Thoughtful, curious, and quietly uncanny, this episode asks what it really means to inhabit other lives—and what those experiences might reveal. 📢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%20). 💀 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)

17. 

    23 Apr 2026

    1: 'Corpse Girl' - Caitlin Doughty

    What Happens to a Body After Death? Mortician, author and death care reformer Caitlin Doughty joins Joanna Ebenstein for a candid, curious and surprisingly funny conversation about what really happens to our bodies after we die and why modern Western culture would rather not think about it. From Caitlin’s early days working in a crematory to founding Order of the Good Death, they explore death positivity, funeral industry myths, human composting, bone rituals and the strange ways we hide mortality from view. Are we the weird ones in history when it comes to death? And what might change if we looked at it directly? 📢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%20). 💀 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)

18. 

    15 Apr 2026

    Welcome to Memento Morbid….

    Memento Morbid Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries. Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New York Times bestselling authors, a practicing witch, Hollywood actors, and a former crematorium worker- all exploring the rituals, stories, and delightfully strange ways humans confront the unknowable. Each episode is curious, insightful, and often striking, revealing the beauty, humor, and meaning we can find in life by confronting death head on. 📢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%20). 💀 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

Inside a recent episode

17: ‘Spiritual Gumbo’ - Lilith Dorsey

Published 13 Aug 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] So it was able to, as I mentioned with the saints, you know. On the one hand, somebody could see a giant statue of St. Michael and think, oh, okay, well, that's just the Archangel Michael for protection. But if you were a Santo practitioner, you would see St. Michael as being a representation of Ogu, which when we go back to Africa is Gu, the spirit of iron. So the spirit of both healing and also healing. protection and the military and things like that because it's metal right like and almost in a way it takes on this character of technology because it's metal so when we learned how to make metals that was our first magical foray into creating something with technology right we had the ability to transform with the alchemy of metals and make something new and that makes me think too of the myth of the the watcher angels right who came down and taught mankind the arts of metalwork and jewelry and weapons. […]

Who has been a guest on Memento Morbid

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Lilith Dorsey
• Evan Michelson
• Jess Gunasekara
• Dylan Thuras
• Yvonne Chireau

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.5 / 5

46 ratings

Contact Memento Morbid

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about Memento Morbid