UKC

For those who like a supernatural thrill series 2 starts Wednesday, April 5th on BBC Sounds. I shall tune in tucked up in the dark listening to the wind in the trees ...

Thanks for the heads up. It’s a great radio show. 

Room 611 was seriously disturbing. 

Sorry, not many programs make me turn R4 off but this is one.  I love a good ghost story but this faux factual podcast style really irritates me.  

The constant repetition of the breathless ‘could this be evidence of the supernatural?’ then moving on to the next massive assumption as though it really was is little short of dishonest.  No Danny, it really isn’t and there are already more than enough people out there who struggle to distinguish between fact and fantasy without you encouraging them.

Know what you mean, but I think you’ve just got to embrace your inner (scared) child with this one. Despite being a massive skeptic, I love a good ghost story and these tick a nice box for me. 

Well, that's just Danny's style of presentation. It's entertainment and particularly apparent in the live recordings in front of an audience. I quite enjoy it, the way he interviews guests and involves the audience. I'm a natural sceptic but what I find interesting is the way the people being interviewed come across as genuinely scared/confused/bemused etc even if they proclaim their own scepticism. I think the format of using real people works better than the two recent dramatised productions Danny has put out. I've had one or two 'odd' experiences myself but nothing like the frightening stuff on Uncanny.

Exactly my approach! It's guff, but an entertaining insight on the human psyche.

When I was younger I would have agreed. Nowadays I find ghost stories very tame. I recently re-watched some classic M R James on YouTube and was completely unmoved. I knew it was just 'made up' so was not a threat to me. The Uncanny material is on the face of it true (people lying through their teeth apart). What that truth actually is has to be the most fascinating/terrifying thing to me.

I listened to Uncanny and must admit that some of the experiences resonated with me as we experienced some very weird things in a house my daughter rented. In fact, it got so bad she had to move out. I personally experienced some of them and it was definitely not an overactive imagination. There's a lot out there we don't fully understand. 

Indeed, but it is definitely not dead people tapping or going 'wooOoo' in old houses.

I lack your certainty. Although I have a scientific/engineering sceptical outlook I know that not everything about supernatural experiences is currently so easily brushed aside. It may well be one day. None of what I've heard so far is  hard 'proof' of an afterlife but something inexplicable has happened to these people. If you listen to the multiple witnesses involved in the first episode (several spoke in later episodes after hearing the first) you will hear from credible, sensible people with respectable scientific backgrounds who can't explain what they experienced. Ghosts may well turn out to have a completely rational explanation but the 'team sceptic' experts explanations often seem to be more unrealistic than the alternatives. The only occasions I've encountered anything 'odd' I wasn't terrified or overly mystified since I could think of alternative explanations which weren't completely unlikely. I lived a year as a student in what sounds like a carbon copy of Allanbrook Hall (ep 1), a sixties tower block with lifts, lots of young male occupants, a cleaner who came in each week etc. The only mysterious thing I encountered was who put the toilet rolls in the bog. (I suspect the floor above us, not the ghost).

For me it is a mystery of the mind rather than an external phenomena. 

I listened to Danny's "Witch Farm" podcast and as an English kid growing up in a reasonably remote farmhouse just outside Deiniolen in the 1970s, when Welsh nationalism was (understandably) rife, and eclectic artist-types were two a penny, it resonated deeply.

But my conclusion on the Witch Farm was that it was fundamentally a problem of mental health, not ghosts.

Bloody hell, Jim!