732 - William Seabrook

The Dollop dives into the bizarre and controversial life of William Seabrook, a 20th-century American writer and adventurer whose obsession with the exotic, the taboo, and the occult defined his career and personal life. Born into a privileged but emotionally distant family, Seabrook's early trauma—abandoned by his father and bonded with his heroin-addicted grandmother—shaped his lifelong fascination with power, pain, and transformation. He reinvented himself as a globe-trotting ethnographer, publishing sensational books on Haiti, the Middle East, and Africa that popularized Western ideas of zombies and voodoo. His work, while groundbreaking in its time, relied heavily on cultural appropriation, exploitation, and fabricated or exaggerated accounts of rituals, including claims of eating human flesh and participating in blood rites. His personal life mirrored his professional excesses: a series of affairs, open marriages, and increasingly extreme kink-driven behaviors, culminating in self-inflicted harm like boiling his arms to quit drinking. After a stint in a psychiatric asylum and a failed attempt to reinvent himself through experimental 'time travel' experiments in a barn, Seabrook spiraled into depression and died by suicide in 1945. The episode critiques his legacy not as a hero of exploration, but as a cautionary tale of ego, privilege, and the dark side of cultural fascination.