Episodes

  • The Petersburgh Snow Hole

    The Petersburgh Snow Hole
    Jan 14 2026

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast

    The Petersburgh Snow Hole: The Cold Chamber of the Taconic Range

    Available on: Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, and all major streaming platforms

    Episode Overview

    This episode examines the Petersburgh Pass Snow Hole, a naturally occurring cold-air trap in the Taconic range of eastern New York that has drawn scientific attention, local curiosity, and recreational visitation for more than two centuries. Formed by fractured bedrock and subsurface voids, the site maintains unusually low temperatures well beyond the winter season, challenging assumptions about how cold behaves in temperate landscapes.

    Through documented accounts, early scientific inquiry, and material evidence left behind on site, the episode explores how people have attempted to explain, record, and interact with this phenomenon. The Snow Hole becomes a case study in how natural features are interpreted over time, how knowledge is passed forward through inscription and observation, and how repeated human contact alters fragile places in ways that are often irreversible.

    Act I – The Cold

    Act I introduces the physical mechanics of the Snow Hole and explains how cold air becomes trapped beneath fractured stone. The Field Guide outlines the geological conditions that allow low temperatures to persist well into warmer months, separating measurable processes from folklore while grounding the site within broader patterns of cold-air pooling and subsurface insulation found across the region.

    Act II – Names Cut Into Stone

    Act II centers on the carved names, dates, and initials etched into the Snow Hole’s interior walls. These markings are treated as historical records rather than curiosities, offering insight into 19th-century outdoor culture, early tourism, and the impulse to document presence by leaving a permanent mark. The episode examines when inscription shifts from record-keeping to damage, and how cultural values influence where that boundary is drawn.

    Act III – What Remains

    The Field Guide explores how sites like the Snow Hole exist within a tension between access and restraint. As climate patterns shift and winters grow less consistent, cold-dependent landforms become increasingly vulnerable to disturbance. This act reflects on how visitation, documentation, and changing environmental conditions collectively shape what survives, and asks how responsibility is assigned when preservation depends as much on absence as it does on care.

    About the Series

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is an ongoing documentary series exploring hidden history, overlooked landscapes, and the material traces people leave behind. Each episode investigates how memory, place, and evidence intersect across time.

    Learn More

    Read more at restorationobscura.com or subscribe to the Restoration Obscura Substack for essays, restorations, and new field investigations. Field Guide to the Night is available worldwide in print and Kindle editions. Official merch is available at www.restorationobscurashop.com.

    Credits

    Written, Narrated, and Produced by: John Bulmer

    Sound Design and Mastering: Restoration Obscura Audio

    Copyright

    © 2026 Restoration Obscura Press. All rights reserved.

    Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or broadcast of this episode or any portion thereof is prohibited without express written permission. Restoration Obscura and The Restoration Obscura Field Guide are trademarks of Restoration Obscura Press.



    Get full access to Restoration Obscura at restorationobscura.substack.com/subscribe
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    18 mins
  • The Champlain Lake Monster

    The Champlain Lake Monster
    Dec 3 2025

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast

    The Champlain Lake Monster: A History of Deepwater Myths

    Lake Champlain has always carried stories. Its deep glacial trench, shifting weather, and cold, opaque channels create a landscape where memory and imagination overlap. Indigenous traditions described powerful beings in these waters, shaping how people understood the lake long before newspapers arrived.

    19th-Century Sightings — In the nineteenth century, sensational culture turned local tales into a regional phenomenon. Reports like the 1819 Bulwaga Bay account spread quickly, feeding an American appetite for marvels and establishing Champ as part of the region’s folklore.

    20th-Century Legends — Cameras, radio, and television pushed the legend into new forms. Families, campers, and fishermen shared sightings. The Mansi photograph traveled the country. Communities embraced the creature with festivals, statues, mascots, and stories passed down through generations.

    A Global Tradition — The episode places Champ among worldwide lake-monster lore, from Scotland’s Nessie to Iceland’s Lagarfljót worm to the water spirits of the Okanagan and the Great Lakes. Deep water, with its distortions and uncertainties, has always invited myth and speculation.

    Science and Belief — Scientific explanations account for many sightings, yet belief survives because the lake still feels unfinished. Champ endures as symbol, metaphor, and shared wonder, reminding us that even familiar water can hold the unknown.

    Mystery remains part of the landscape. Champ endures because the lake does.

    If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share. It helps the podcast reach more people and supports the work of bringing overlooked history back into the light.

    Copyright 2025 Restoration Obscura and John Bulmer Media. All rights reserved.



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    36 mins
  • When the Grid Failed

    When the Grid Failed
    Nov 18 2025

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast: When The Grid Failed: The Blackouts of 1965, 1977, and 2003

    Major blackouts have repeatedly reshaped the Northeast and shown how people respond when the systems that sustain daily life fail without warning. Through the events of 1965, 1977, and 2003, the episode follows the links between technology, civic trust, and the ways communities adapt when the lights vanish. These nights reveal the conditions that defined their eras, from postwar confidence to urban crisis to the vigilance of the early twenty first century. Taken together, they form a record of how darkness can expose what ordinary life keeps out of view.

    Act I – 1965: The Night the Stars Came Back

    This act explores the causes and cultural meaning of the Northeast Blackout of 1965, when a relay failure in Ontario triggered a cascading collapse across hundreds of thousands of square miles. The response that followed reflected a nation still rooted in cooperation and postwar belief in institutional stability, creating a moment remembered for calm streets and a sky that returned in full for the first time in decades.

    Act II – 1977: The Bronx Is Burning

    This act focuses on the July 1977 blackout in New York City, a night shaped by heat, fear, and a city already under strain from unemployment, arson, economic collapse, and unresolved tension. The failure of the grid acted as a release valve for years of pressure, revealing how fragile the civic fabric had become and how quickly fear could shift into widespread unrest.

    Act III – 2003: The Fragile Grid

    The Field Guide explores the largest blackout in North American history and the ways it reflected a world transformed by the events of 2001. This act follows the regional cascade that began in Ohio, the public uncertainty that followed, and the recognition that modern infrastructure can fail from smaller causes than many expect. The act closes with a broader consideration of vulnerability, resilience, and the lessons written across all three nights.

    About the Series

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is an ongoing documentary exploration of hidden history, cultural memory, and geography. Each episode investigates the stories that shape our understanding of the past and the traces that remain in the present.

    Learn More

    Read more at restorationobscura.com or subscribe to the Restoration Obscura Substack for essays, restorations, and new field investigations. Field Guide to the Night is available worldwide in print and Kindle editions.

    Credits

    Written, Narrated, and Produced by: John Bulmer

    Sound Design and Mastering: Restoration Obscura Audio

    Copyright© 2025 Restoration Obscura Press. All rights reserved.Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or broadcast of this episode or any portion thereof is prohibited without express written permission. Restoration Obscura and The Restoration Obscura Field Guide are trademarks of Restoration Obscura Press.



    Get full access to Restoration Obscura at restorationobscura.substack.com/subscribe
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    55 mins
  • The Body Snatchers of Albany, NY

    The Body Snatchers of Albany, NY
    Oct 31 2025

    The Body Snatchers of Albany - The Hidden History Beneath Washington Park

    Episode Overview

    Before Washington Park became the heart of New York’s capital city, it was a burial ground. The land that now welcomes joggers, dog walkers, and picnickers once held the city’s poor, the unnamed, and the unclaimed. In the early nineteenth century, this ground became the quiet center of a trade that helped shape modern American medicine

    This episode examines how Albany’s early medical community relied on grave robbing to supply its anatomy classrooms, how the creation of Washington Park buried that history, and how the legacy of those taken without consent continues to shape the city’s moral landscape. The story of the body snatchers is not a tale of ghosts, but of the uneasy bargains between science, society, and memory.

    Act I – The City’s Hidden Anatomy

    The episode opens on the grounds of Washington Park, tracing its transformation from the State Street Burial Grounds to a symbol of civic pride. Listeners learn how the growth of American medical schools created a demand for cadavers that lawful means could not supply. Albany, like other growing cities, became a quiet participant in an unspoken trade: the exchange of the newly buried for the advancement of medicine.

    Act II – The Resurrectionists

    The narrative follows the rise of the resurrectionists—those who dug by lantern light in unguarded cemeteries to meet the needs of medical colleges. Their work was cold, dangerous, and illicit, but essential to the expanding field of anatomy. Albany’s State Street Burial Grounds became a prime source, and local doctors, including Albany Medical College founder Dr. Alden March, found themselves entangled in this moral contradiction. The episode recounts how the Bone Bill of 1854 sought to end the practice by legalizing the use of unclaimed bodies from prisons and almshouses, formalizing exploitation rather than abolishing it.

    Act III – The Field Guide Explores the Ground Beneath

    The Field Guide explores what it means to live above forgotten history. As Washington Park took shape, thousands of graves were supposedly relocated, yet records show that many remained. The park became both memorial and erasure—a civic beautification built on disturbed ground. The episode reflects on how the city’s medical progress was built upon inequality and silence, and how its public spaces still hold the memory of those who were never meant to be remembered.

    Themes

    – Medical Ethics and the Origins of Modern Anatomy– Social Inequality and the Trade in the Dead– Burial, Memory, and Urban Transformation– The Uneasy Relationship Between Progress and Forgetting

    About the Series

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is a documentary exploration of hidden history, cultural memory, and place. Each episode uncovers the layers of the past that remain embedded in the present, revealing how landscapes remember even when people forget.

    Learn More

    Read more at restorationobscura.com or subscribe to the Restoration Obscura Substack for essays, restorations, and new field investigations. Field Guide to the Night is available worldwide in print and Kindle editions.

    Credits

    Written, Narrated, and Produced by: John BulmerSound Design and Mastering: Restoration Obscura Audio

    Copyright

    © 2025 Restoration Obscura. All rights reserved.Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or broadcast of this episode or any portion thereof is prohibited without express written permission. Restoration Obscura and The Restoration Obscura Field Guide are trademarks of Restoration Obscura Press.



    Get full access to Restoration Obscura at restorationobscura.substack.com/subscribe
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    18 mins
  • The Abair Bigfoot Incident

    The Abair Bigfoot Incident
    Oct 21 2025

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast

    The Abair Bigfoot Incident — The Story of the Adirondack Sasquatch

    Length: ~40 minutes

    Available on: Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Audible,, Spotify, and all major streaming platforms

    Episode Overview

    This episode of the The Restoration Obscura Field Guide examines one of the most discussed encounters in Adirondack folklore: the Abair Bigfoot Incident of 1976 in Whitehall, New York.

    This story is less about proof and more about how belief, doubt, and local memory intertwine. The episode explores how a rural night along Abair Road became part of regional identity, and how stories of the unknown evolve as part of our shared cultural record.

    Act I – Frame 352A look at the 1967 Patterson–Gimlin film and how a single minute of 16mm footage defined the modern image of Bigfoot. The act examines the film’s creation, its impact on popular culture, and why it continues to resist simple explanation.

    Act II – The Night on Abair RoadWhitehall, 1976. A quiet Adirondack road, a sudden sighting, and a story that would travel far beyond the town’s limits. Eyewitness reports, police involvement, and community retellings converge to show how legends begin and take hold.

    Act III – Living With the LegendThe Field Guide explores what happens after the story takes root. How Whitehall learned to coexist with its legend, how mystery becomes memory, and why people continue to search the dark edges of familiar places for meaning.

    Themes

    - The legacy of the Patterson–Gimlin film

    - Folklore and the psychology of the unknown

    - How collective storytelling becomes heritage

    - The enduring balance between skepticism and wonder

    About the Series

    The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast investigates the hidden intersections of history, landscape, and cultural memory. Each episode blends documentary storytelling with archival research to uncover the forgotten, the mysterious, and the stories that shape how we see the world around us.

    Learn More

    Read more at restorationobscura.com or subscribe to the Restoration Obscura Substack for essays, restorations, and new field investigations. Field Guide to the Night is available worldwide in print and Kindle editions.

    Credits

    Written, Narrated, and Produced by: John Bulmer Sound Design and Mastering: Restoration Obscura Audio

    © 2025 Restoration Obscura Press. All rights reserved.

    Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or broadcast of this episode or any portion thereof is prohibited without express written permission. Restoration Obscura and The Restoration Obscura Field Guide are trademarks of Restoration Obscura Press.



    Get full access to Restoration Obscura at restorationobscura.substack.com/subscribe
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    34 mins
  • RO Dispatch: Exploring Albany's Underground

    RO Dispatch: Exploring Albany's Underground
    Oct 12 2025
    RO Dispatch: Exploring Albany's Underground: Ghost Routes Under New York's Capitol CityThis episode marks the debut of the Restoration Obscura Dispatch, a new series of short, focused explorations drawn from the fieldwork behind the Restoration Obscura Field Guide podcast. Each Dispatch opens a single file from the archives—self-contained stories that examine the hidden layers of history, architecture, and memory embedded in the world around us. They’re compact in length, but built with the same archival depth and documentary care as the long-form episodes that define Restoration Obscura.Beneath the noise of New York’s capital city, beneath the weight of marble and traffic, another Albany endures.It’s a city beneath the city: a network of stone corridors, sealed vaults, and forgotten service shafts that mirror the one above, holding the traces of every era layered into its foundations.For centuries, people have moved through this underworld for every imaginable reason, commerce, survival, secrecy, and control. Merchants once rolled barrels through hand-cut passages that linked riverfront and cellar. Abolitionists carved sanctuaries beneath ordinary homes, their hidden rooms forming a geography of resistance beneath the streets. Later, the same basements hosted rumrunners, card games, and coded conversations during Prohibition, when the city’s underworld was literal again.In the Cold War years, the underground took on new meaning. Bunkers and service tunnels connected the Capitol, the Executive Mansion, and the Plaza, designed to keep government functioning when the surface world failed. Even now, the modern concourse beneath the Empire State Plaza, bright and orderly, rests on the ruins of the neighborhoods it replaced.Some stories are real, some are fabricated, and others are impossible to prove but undeniably intriguing. Albany’s story has always been one of what lies beneath: hidden routes, buried architecture, and the persistence of memory in stone and concrete. Some tunnels are mapped and maintained; others exist only in rumor—a sealed archway beneath the South End, a forgotten stairwell in Lincoln Park, a hatch paved into the street. Each one marks a threshold between eras, a reminder that the impulse to dig beneath the world we know is deeply human. We build tunnels to connect, to escape, to endure. They reflect our desire to move unseen, to preserve what matters, and to leave behind something that outlasts the surface. In that sense, every city’s underground is a mirror—of fear, of ambition, of the quiet need to carve permanence into the earth.This new Restoration Obscura Dispatch explores those hidden layers: the real and imagined routes beneath New York’s capital city. It’s the first in a new series of compact, archival explorations drawn from the fieldwork behind the Restoration Obscura Field Guide podcast.Now Available: Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night by John BulmerStep into the dark.In this immersive history, John Bulmer traces how night has shaped human experience, from the first skywatchers marking the heavens, to cities plunged into wartime blackouts, to the shadow networks of Cold War surveillance. Field Guide to the Night explores darkness as both a physical reality and a cultural force, showing how the absence of light has altered memory, shaped belief, and guided survival.Part cultural history, part personal journey, the book invites readers to look past today’s artificial glow and rediscover what remains alive in the shadows.Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the NightPaperback $14.99 | Kindle $9.99368 pages | ISBN 979-8218702731Published June 1, 2025 by Restoration Obscura PressAvailable worldwide on AmazonAbout Restoration ObscuraRestoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another chance to be seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the chapters that slipped through the official record, the ones left in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.The name nods to the camera obscura, the early optical device that projected an image into a darkened chamber. Our work turns that metaphor inside out: drawing forgotten histories from the shadows and bringing them back into the light.This project examines what textbooks leave behind: Cold War secrets, lost towns, vanished neighborhoods, wartime experiments, strange ruins, and the lives woven into them. Each article, image, and episode rebuilds fragments of the past and holds them to the light, one story at a time.If you believe memory is worth preserving, if you’ve ever paused at the ruins of an old mill, or held a faded photograph and wondered about the world it came from, this space is for you.Subscribe to support independent, reader-funded storytelling: www.restorationobscura.comThe Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast streams on all major platforms.Every photo has a story...
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    17 mins
  • A History of the Dark

    A History of the Dark
    Oct 7 2025
    Season 2 of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast ReturnsThe Field Guide returns with a new season, and with it, a new way of seeing.Season 2 opens with an episode that serves as both companion and counterpart to my new book, Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night: History Hidden in Darkness. The two are connected by theme and intention, the book explores darkness through history, art, and memory, while the episode invites you to hear that history as a living conversation.The episode stands on its own. You do not need to have read the book to follow it. Instead, it’s an entry point into the same constellation of ideas that shaped Field Guide to the Night: how darkness has shaped the stories we tell and the worlds we build.This premiere moves through personal memory and cultural inheritance. It explores how our ancestors looked to the stars for order, how cities learned to live without light during blackouts, and how our relationship to night has shifted from instinctive fear to technological control. The night once held both danger and discovery, an time for reflection and the unseen work that daylight forbids.Today, the spaces between streetlights are thinner. We have filled the dark with screens and noise, yet the impulse remains—to look outward, to wonder what lives just beyond the visible. Field Guide to the Night was written to recover that sense of continuity, to remind us that the night sky above us is the same one seen by those who came before.The podcast expands that vision through. Together, episode 7 and the book form a map of how darkness has shaped belief, invention, and imagination.Season 2 continues what Restoration Obscura has always aimed to do: to recover the layers of meaning that remain hidden in plain sight. Darkness, after all, is where we first learned to see.Darkness was our first fear, and our first teacher.It was the canvas against which imagination took shape, the space where memory and invention learned to share a language.We once built fires to keep it back, then telescopes to study its depths.Both acts were the same gesture: a desire to understand what we could not see.That search continues here.Welcome back to the Field Guide.Now Available: Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night by John BulmerStep into the dark.In this immersive history, John Bulmer traces how night has shaped human experience, from the first skywatchers marking the heavens, to cities plunged into wartime blackouts, to the shadow networks of Cold War surveillance. Field Guide to the Night explores darkness as both a physical reality and a cultural force, showing how the absence of light has altered memory, shaped belief, and guided survival.Part cultural history, part personal journey, the book invites readers to look past today’s artificial glow and rediscover what remains alive in the shadows.Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the NightPaperback $14.99 | Kindle $9.99368 pages | ISBN 979-8218702731Published June 1, 2025 by Restoration Obscura PressAvailable worldwide on AmazonAbout Restoration ObscuraRestoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another chance to be seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the chapters that slipped through the official record, the ones left in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.The name nods to the camera obscura, the early optical device that projected an image into a darkened chamber. Our work turns that metaphor inside out: drawing forgotten histories from the shadows and bringing them back into the light.This project examines what textbooks leave behind: Cold War secrets, lost towns, vanished neighborhoods, wartime experiments, strange ruins, and the lives woven into them. Each article, image, and episode rebuilds fragments of the past and holds them to the light, one story at a time.If you believe memory is worth preserving, if you’ve ever paused at the ruins of an old mill, or held a faded photograph and wondered about the world it came from, this space is for you.Subscribe to support independent, reader-funded storytelling: www.restorationobscura.comThe Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast streams on all major platforms.Every photo has a story. And every story connects us.© 2025 John Bulmer Media & Restoration Obscura. All rights reserved. Educational use only.Restoration Obscura Provenance StatementRestoration Obscura draws on a range of materials, including public archives, institutional holdings, and privately preserved collections. Many images and documents have uncertain or incomplete provenance; when possible, sources are identified and credited. While we work to preserve and interpret these materials with care, not all rights of ownership reside with Restoration Obscura.Permissions StatementRestoration Obscura may not hold copyright for all images featured in its archives or publications. For uses ...
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    39 mins
  • Season Two: The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast Returns

    Season Two: The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast Returns
    Sep 25 2025

    Season Two of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is here.

    In this new chapter, we go deeper into the histories that hide in plain sight—forgotten infrastructure, vanished towns, Cold War secrets, and the cultural echoes that still shape our present. Expect immersive stories, archival discoveries, and a closer look at how memory and place are tied together.

    Alongside the podcast, I’ve also released my book, Field Guide to the Night—an exploration of darkness as both a physical reality and a cultural force, from skywatchers and wartime blackouts to Cold War surveillance.

    Subscribe on your preferred platform and be the first to hear new episodes as they’re released. Step into the dark, and uncover what the past has left behind.



    Get full access to Restoration Obscura at restorationobscura.substack.com/subscribe
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    2 mins