I decided to follow ‘The Black Tapes’ by Pacific Northwest Stories. This podcast is hosted by Alex Reagan who dives into the ideas of ghosts, paranormal activities, and more. She has worked on Pacific Northwest stories before, but decided to take her own path and work by her colleague Nick. Alex has many interviews with people throughout the show, some who strongly believe in ghosts and paranormal activity, and then also people on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, and the people in the middle oblivious ideas. Not to mention, she gives her own take on these ideas and phenomenon’s.
The first episode begins with her interview random people, asking them if they believe in ghosts. This is a great start to show that everyone has their own opinions on ghosts. Also, I really enjoyed the way these sounds of these interviews were created since the production made it so her asking the questions came in through one headphone, and the interviewees response came in through the other, really showing contrast. She includes conversations with her producer and how the rest of the show will go, which is nice to include the audience on the little details, and rationale for why they are deciding to talk about or focus on certain stories, in this case, the story of Dr. Strand. She begins to focus on Dr. Strand who is hated in the supernatural world since he is a ghost hunter who does not believe in ghosts, and spends his time debunking paranormal stories, giving a logical, scientific reasoning to support his ideas. However, things start to get complicated when Alex questions some black VHS tapes that are separate from all the white ones he has successfully debunk. She questions how he is not a believer, but has not completely solved all the mysterious himself yet.
During the episodes, she talks and gives her own opinions and is the main narrator for the podcast. However, the episodes are filled with interviews and the dialogue she has with the people. I have noticed a common format that she follows in which she gives a little snippet of their dialogue, and then she stops and gives some background on the character and never fails to describe their physical appearance. I think she does this to give a better idea about the kind of person she is talking too since there is only so much information a listener can get from a persons voice, what they say, and how they say it. It allows for further analysis of the character, their creditability, and their beliefs. Music is only really used when she is just talking, never when there is an interview going on, which then makes the interview seem more raw and all of the other things more produced. She also always gives her opinions on the stories, like in an initial interview and sitting in on an investigation, we can hear what is going on during the testing of the spirits, so as an audience we feel like we are sitting in too.
Altogether, I am excited to listen to more episodes to see how everything unfolds, and it has been interesting thinking about how this specific podcast compares to others in terms of certain elements and effects to make the podcast unique.
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After reading Jordan’s response to “The Black Tapes”, I notice a lot of parallels with the podcast serial that I listened to as well as some differences. The first thing I noticed that is similar is that the hosts tend to discuss the broader ideas before diving into interviews to give different perspectives on the subject being discussed. These interviews typically bring up new ideas and details that the hosts will elaborate on and give a little more insight. Just as the podcast in Serial, the interviews tend to be from people on completely sides on the topic. For example, one interview will be talking to the Adnan Syed who is in prison for the murder claiming he is innocent and the next interview will be with one of his friends telling a completely different story. This gives the audience a wide range of information to analyze and formulate their own opinions on what they believe or not. Also before interviews, Sarah Kaenig (the host from Serial) typically gives a description of what the person looks like and where they are from to give the audience more background information to visualize how credible this person seems and gets a better picture than just hearing a voice and knowing nothing about them. Some of the main differences I noticed from this podcast and the Serial podcast is that Serial only has one narrator whereas this podcast looks like there are two hosts that run the podcast together. It also seems as though the hosts in this podcast are much more opinionated and tell the audience what they think as opposed to in Serial where the narrator tends to remain neutral and let the audience interpret the information however they feel is fit. Neither is right or wrong but is just a different style of presenting the information to the audience. Both of these podcasts also include background music.
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