The Bayou Monster (Peremalfait):
Actor Richard Kiel makes back-to-back monster appearances here in "The Spanish Moss Murders" as "Peremalfait" and in the previous episode #8 "Bad Medicine" as "Diablero".

Capt. Joe Siska:
Keenan Wynn makes his first of two appearances as "Capt. Siska". The second comes in #16 "Demon In Lace". He's the only actor playing a police captain to appear more than once with the same name.

Carl: (opening narration) Maybe you have to brush with death before you can really reflect on life, on the people and times that really meant something to you, like childhood, dreams of sailing on the silver seas and wooden shoes, visions of sugar plums dancing. Silver seas, sugar plums. The visions, the nightmares of a child are perhaps the most frightening and horrifying. Some people who were in Chicago during the first stifling hot weeks of July would say that were so...if they were still alive.

Tony: (reacting to Kolchak's fuzzy photo of the monster) What is that, Salvador Dali's bar bitzvah picture?

Carl: How could it possibly happen? Well, they say that the mystics of India, while in a trance, can grow back severed fingers and move boulders with the power of their mind. It's documented. Somehow, Paul Langois, in his special dream state, did even more than that. He created a palpable horror

Pepe LaRue: Did I come to Chicago in '38 to uh... dance on the street? No. I came to get into organized crime.
Carl: Were you successful?
Pepe LaRue: No, I didn't make the height requirement. But I learned some things from those guys. Like, don't give information to somebody who might really have dark blue underwear and a badge.

Carl: The chef was put on a level with Debussy and Gauguin, but now he'd been murdered, and he looked just as dead as any short-order cook in any greasy spoon.

Debussy and Gauguin
Carl compares the chef of French restaurant Chez Voltaire to these two men. Claude Achille Debussy was a French impressionist composer who lived in the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries; Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (usually just Paul Gauguin) was a French post-impressionist painter who lived mostly in the nineteenth century. Both men were French; both men were and are regarded as leading lights in their respective fields.

Examining one of Carl’s awful photos, Vincenzo asks if it is Salvador Dali’s bar mitzvah picture. Salvador Dali was a Spanish surrealist painter who lived from 1904 to 1989. Among his best known works is certainly The Persistence of Memory featuring several melted pocket watches. No doubt Carl’s poor composition and photographic skills produced an image that reminded Vincenzo of surrealistic paintings such as this.