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.
Kate somehow knew the ghost’s name: “She just WAS ‘Miss Howard’,” she tells Robins. “I just knew she was.” Miss Howard would appear at night, sit on the girl’s bed and lay a cold, heavy hand on her. Brrr! The adult Kate is still haunted by the haunting, which makes interviewing her in a cavernous, spookily lit room arguably a little insensitive.
With the core claims laid out, it’s time to consult the experts. And because nobody is allowed to investigate anything any more and everything has to be a debate between two equally valid sides, it’s also time to split the audience into factions. Are you “Team Skeptic”? Psychologist Ciarán is here for you. Or are you “Team Believer”? Evelyn, a parapsychologist, argues your corner. Robins oscillates merrily between the two.
Skeptics gain their first succour from a fun segment in which our host visits a derelict house to meet Geoff, an expert on the threat to health and sanity posed by mould. Geoff confirms that demolishing musty old walls can release dangerous spores. Kate’s ghostly experience could have been the result of her breathing psychotropic dust.
Or could it? Uncanny is based on the podcast of the same name, and it retains the classic podcasting trick of stringing us along until a well-timed rug pull. Robins may have the air of someone we trust to be quietly, persistently rational – there are notes of Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson – but as you’d expect from the author of the hit play 2.22: A Ghost Story, he has a theatrical bent. He likes to pause emphatically, like Kevin McCloud telling a campfire tale. “Is this mould? Or is it …” – piercing look to camera - “ ... genuinely something paranormal?”
The first twist sees Robins track down two sisters who have never met Kate but spent their childhoods in the same house a decade earlier … and had eerily similar experiences. They also saw a Victorian woman whose name they somehow knew to be Miss Howard. “It’s proof, isn’t it?” says Kate. Respectfully, no it isn’t, but soon we’re meeting a local historian who confirms that a Howard family did live in Melbourn in the 1910s. There are photos. One woman is ID’d by Kate as the person she saw.
Robins, goggling, takes this mounting circumstantial evidence back to the boffins. Then, at last, Ciarán the frustratingly unassertive psychologist steers the presenter towards what many of us will have been screeching at the screen for a full 20 minutes. Kate and the sisters already knew about Miss Howard! Our brains, particularly when we’re children, are unreliable. The girls could have forgotten learning this information but retained it in their subconscious. These are waking dreams!
“It’s an interesting theory,” says Robins, scooting off to recreate the “Philip” experiment, a famous stunt conducted in Toronto in 1972 which showed the power of suggestibility: we see ghosts when we want to see them. There might have been a chance to treat Kate’s trauma, which certainly is real, more seriously by looking at the way she and the sisters both experienced Miss Howard encouraging them to sleep when their parents had left them alone for the night. But soon Robins rolls out his stage whisper again, to deliver the bombshell that Kate was also visited by an apparition of a man who was startled when he saw her.
Evelyn the parapsychologist identifies this as an “active phenomenon” and Robins calls it “a potential gamechanger”, on the basis that a ghost that responds to you is more real than one that doesn’t. Wait, what? It makes no difference! If the ghost is imaginary, it can be imagined doing anything. But in Uncanny the obvious rejoinder to a specious argument is rarely heard.
A final revelation is presented as corroborating Kate’s belief when really, logically it points the other way. Team Skeptic and Team Believer are urged to email in with their contrasting theories. The show goes on.
• Uncanny airs on BBC Two and is on iPlayer.
