Episode #15
Colleen Coffman: The "Crazy Ghost Lady" Haunts Us with Creativity and Empathy
Colleen Coffman spent decades as a special effects and makeup artist, building monsters for haunted houses and horror films, working alongside actors like Wes Studi and Lou Diamond Phillips, designing wigs for the Kansas City Ballet. But on this episode of Ink vs Algorithm, she joins Mookie to talk about something stranger than anything she ever built for the screen: a lifelong habit of seeing entities most people don't, and the sketch diary she'd kept of them for years, which vanished during a move in 2014 and reappeared, completely out of nowhere, from a stranger on Facebook exactly one day after she found herself missing it. That diary became her book, The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, and Colleen walks through some of what's in it: sylphs, satyrs, and a genuinely unsettling personal encounter with a duende, a small, physical creature she watched steal a pair of socks from her late uncle's closet and knew, on instinct, not to follow. Mookie and Colleen dig into where these experiences might come from: Jung's archetypes, the idea of a "thinning veil," and whether these entities represent something genuinely external or a very old, very human way of processing the unexplainable. What ties all of it together, the entities, the art, the feeling that something else is present, is a kind of sensitivity most people have trained themselves out of. Mookie frames it as something that was never really about belief in the first place, but about lived experience, and the same creative openness that lets someone tap into and express what they're feeling, whether that's through art or through encounters like Colleen's. That same idea becomes the emotional center of the conversation once the topic turns to 2020. Colleen traces a direct line from pandemic isolation to a lasting breakdown in empathy, patience, and basic human contact, in her own family and everywhere she looks, and argues the same capacity, the willingness to actually feel another person's presence, drives both her entities and her fractured relationships. Mookie connects it back to why he started podcasting in the first place, a very Socratic argument that real understanding only happens face to face, never through a screen. They land together on something genuinely simple as the antidote: slow down, look people in the eye, and remember that everyone else is struggling too, the same open-hearted attention that let Colleen see sylphs and satyrs in the first place. The Guest Colleen Coffman is a semi-retired special effects and makeup artist for stage and film, and the author of The Adventures of a Sketch Diary, published by Hangar 1 Publishing. Her film work includes Nailbiter and The Stylist, and her stage credits include productions with the Kansas City Ballet. Get the book: https://hangar1publishing.com/products/the-adventures-of-a-sketch-diary Tap here to share your opinion! Be a guest on the pod! Mookie wants to hear from you...
