Are ghosts real? Indulging the idea has created countless powerful works of fiction exploring grief, terror and other dark quirks of the mind. Try to pin down the cold fact of the undead’s existence, however, and a story soon collapses. So it is with Uncanny, ostensibly a series in which the writer Danny Robins examines the claims of members of the public who have seen ghosts. It promises analytical rigour but it is pure showbiz.
Robins’ first case is brought to him by Kate, who grew up in the 1970s in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, in a rattly 19th-century semi-detached house that became a large detached when her dad bought next door and knocked through. Soon after, young Kate started to see a woman in Victorian garb, there one second, gone the next.
