History's Greatest Ghosts with Uncanny's Danny Robins

In this special episode of After Dark. Anthony and Uncanny’s Danny Robins delve into historical ghost stories and explore why our obsession with death and the paranormal remains an integral part of the human experience. Danny will be at the Crossed Wires podcast festival, which takes place between 2nd-5th July in Sheffield. All tickets, including Danny’s headline show of Uncanny Cold Cases and his free Uncanny Uncovered show, are available at CrossedWires. Live. Edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello After Darkers, now brace yourselves for a public service announcement.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  History Hit, the production company behind After Dark, also makes documentaries, and I'm talking beautifully shot, fantastically told, immersive histories on screen. There's hundreds and hundreds available to watch right now, online at historyhit.com, with a new release each week.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  There's a lot to digest there, but guys, take a deep breath because there is more. Antony and I have made two new History Hit TV documentaries. I have recently made one about London's most notorious haunting, the Cock Lane Ghost, based on my new book Hoax, that is releasing for Halloween.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  And I've got one following that, about the Great Irish Famine, which is coming soon.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  To see what's on offer and to subscribe, visit historyhit.com/subscribe to start exploring the past.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  A clanking chain echoes through a haunted house in ancient Rome. A headless queen runs screaming through the corridors of Hampton Court Palace. And, in the dead of night, Britain's wartime leader comes face to face with the ghost of an American president. From what may be the world's first recorded ghost story, to royal phantoms and presidential apparitions, we're investigating the encounters that have left witnesses asking one terrifying question: what if the dead never truly leave us? From the shadows of the past, this is After Dark.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to a very special episode of After Dark because today we are joined by, if you can ever forgive me this pun, but a kindred spirit on After Dark. He is a writer, broadcaster and producer, best known as creator for the hit paranormal franchise Uncanny and one of my favourite podcasts, The Battersea Poltergeist. We'll talk about that in just a minute. He is also, of course, the writer of the Olivier Award nominated West End staged thriller 222: A Ghost Story. Danny Robbins, welcome to After Dark.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Hello. Thank you for having me.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  No, it's our pleasure. And not only is it our pleasure, our listeners will be beside themselves with this crossover. This is, I see this commenting, can you get Danny Robbins on? Can you get Danny Robbins on? Now we've got Danny Robbins on. You have what you asked for. Danny, this is bizarrely, I suppose in one sense, despite the fact that I have a podcast, I'm not a big podcast listener. But the podcasts I do listen to, and probably the podcast that I loved one of the most, if certainly not the most, is The Battersea Poltergeist. I think it is such an incredible exploration of haunting and storytelling.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  And of course, those two things go hand in hand and we'll talk about that throughout this. But just talk to me a little bit about the experience of putting that show together specifically, before we get on to talk about more Uncanny things.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's a really interesting one. I think it's sort of something that felt quite defining in my life, really, and helped to kind of crystallise a lot of my thinking on how I wanted to hear stories, how I wanted to put stories together, you know, the nature of telling these real life ghost stories, really. And I think it was very inspired by my love of detective stories, my love of true crime. Podcasts and I fed that into the idea of processing this haunting like it was a crime, essentially, I guess. And so studying in that kind of forensic detail, the story fell into my lap really. I'd been making another show called Haunted, which was a kind of prototype for Uncanny, I guess, and had sprung out of the research for my play 222 A Ghost Story.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I just found I was accumulating these real life ghost stories as part of my research, trying to make sense of how it felt to be haunted, I guess. And it felt to me like these are stories that needed to be told. And as part of that story gathering process, I spoke to this guy, Alan Maddy, who's a very significant figure within the Society for Psychical Research, the world's oldest ghost hunting body. And he was chairman of the Ghost Club, another really kind of legendary body within this field. And he just said to me, there's this story that I've been looking at. There's a huge reservoir of documents, this kind of treasure trove of material from the original investigator, sitting in this woman's house. She was a teenager when this happened in the 1950s. She felt she went

• 5:07Speaker 02

  through this poltergeist experience, which lasted 12 years. And she's now in her 80s. Would you be interested in talking to her? And so I was like, you know, you had me at any one of those things. So, yeah, I talked to her and, you know, it was that sort of instant, very visceral feel, which I think I get with all of the kind of the best stories that people tell me. Where you feel that even after the decades that had elapsed, this person still felt frightened and I could feel that palpably talking to her. And yeah, and so low and behold, this story unfolded. And it was really, you know, here we are in a history themed podcast. It was really a very much a kind of a journey into a very

• 5:48Speaker 02

  particular slice of history, that post-war period, the haunting started the week that Elvis released Heartbreak Hotel, the dawn of rock and roll, the creation of the teenager is a very concept. And here we had a teenager at the heart of the case. It just felt it had so much to it. And this investigator, Harold Chibbit, who had been the person who documented the case, was a fascinating figure who moved in. Really interesting circles at that time and proved, you know, a great witness and chronicler of the case. And Shirley was a fantastic person at the heart of it, you know, kind of really emotionally profound person to talk to about these experiences. So yeah, I mean, it was gripping and, you know, I, I don't think I ever realised the impact it would have. I think, you know, like, you know, all

• 6:33Speaker 02

  great stories, it's something that felt very precious to not only the person telling it, but the people who received it. And I think that moment of lockdown, we were all cooped up in our houses. We felt haunted by our previously cosy dwellings. We suddenly felt oppressed by these buildings we lived in and we kind of very much identified with this story. It resonated, I think, across the ages.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  I think it's really interesting because, as you say, we're a history podcast and one of the things that I was listening to that particular podcast with the ears of was the ears of a historian. And I went, this is really good history. This brought to life, and what you described there, this, this idea of there's this trove of, of material. I mean, that historian is, is an archive. You know what I mean? It's, it's this, it's this wealth of, this is how we make history is through these things. And it's that that really brought me in and, and also informs some of our interest in the darker side, what is referred to very sometimes glibly as the darker side of history.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  But this idea that people have always believed that something else is at play. This, you know, this is something that goes back as far as humanity goes back. And we've talked about that a lot on this podcast with various different people. In terms of, and I kind of know this because I have listened to your podcast, so I do know the answer. But for those who are coming to After Dark who maybe haven't, what is it about your own story, Danny, that, that potentially lent your ear so easily to these histories of hauntings and these stories of hauntings? Because again, on uncanny, a lot of these things are histories that you are exploring in a very different way. So, so what is it about those types of stories that draws you in?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Well, it's interesting. I think, you know, as a historian, you can tell me this much better than I can articulate it probably. But I feel like in history, there's been a shift from events and maybe places towards people and more of a kind of, you know, person oriented, person centric, kind of wanting to tell the stories of real people. And I think, you know, for me, that absolutely mirrors what I've done. I think that paranormal broadcasting, paranormal TV shows, podcasts, whatever, for a long time, we're very place obsessed. They were talking about castles and stately homes and coaching inns and uncanny fantasy, poltergeist, all of these things I've made. The onus is on people and on telling personal histories. And you don't have to believe in ghosts to find those personal

• 9:04Speaker 02

  histories interesting. I think you can be a really resolute skeptic and find these stories fascinating, wanting to make sense of the psychology of it, the kind of, you know, the science around it, I guess, you know, why people have these experiences. The one thing that seems to me clear is that the question is not, you know, do ghosts exist? It's what are ghosts? People are having these experiences and it's totally possible that they are the products of our minds, those confusing, strange, dark labyrinths in our heads. Or it's possible that ghosts do exist and that the dead come back to life. And both of those possibilities are intriguing, I think, to study. So, yeah, I mean, you know, for me, I was drawn to it just because I'm fascinated by people, but also because

• 9:46Speaker 02

  I have a profound fear of death. I'm terrified of death and I hate the idea that we die and cease to be. And so the idea of ghosts is an incredibly appealing one to me, really. And I just, I love the idea of magic and of there being another layer of existence, another thing to ride towards the sunset in search of, you know, something to discover. I think, I often think about the Victorians, that period of immense discovery and invention. And I would love to think that we haven't discovered everything there is to discover about our existence yet.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things that drew me to history ultimately was the idea of death and dying, because I think when you place death and dying in the context of the expanse of history, and when you spend so much time, as I do, in archival material, literally in contact with the pieces of paper that those people have been writing on in the 1700s or the 1600s, that to me is a type of haunting. It is, it's as close as you come to time travel. And, and it, I don't know, it is definitely now, as a historian

• 11:06Speaker 01

  looking at these things, it has totally eradicated any fear of death for me, interestingly, because what it means is that at the end of this journey that I am on, I become the thing that I study, which is the past. And, or at least in my interpretation of what comes next. And so I think that there's been, I find history brings an incredible comfort to some of those ghost stories that you are talking about as well. I think it's really interesting. Now, I do know that you, one of your great, maybe not jealousies, but one of your great missing out moments from, from listening to Uncanny, is that you don't necessarily, or didn't, you can update me, didn't necessarily think that you have experienced

• 11:48Speaker 01

  any paranormal activity or haunting or ghostly things. Has that changed? Is that still the same? Do you still feel like you're missing out?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  No, no. I very definitely haven't. It's, yeah, it's something I think about and wrestle with a lot, really, that I, I feel I would like to, I mean, you know, clearly, if you're interested in this subject and you don't have a desire to kind of actually see something, you'd probably be pretty strange, really. I haven't, I haven't come even close to it, really, I think. I live vicariously through the stories that I'm told, really. And I guess. You know, I don't know, you think on one level, be careful what you wish for. I think that a lot of these stories people tell me are very frightening and definitely life changing. And I am a coward at heart. I don't know how well I would deal with actually

• 12:40Speaker 02

  witnessing something. But also, I think, you know, it is useful to be in the middle. It's not a kind of deliberate, tricksy, kind of conscious position to take some, to take some sort of, you know, BBC impartiality, you know, but it's just, it comes very natural to me. I'm an agnostic at heart, you know, I kind of, you know, I'm torn in both directions, I think. And I think, but I think it works for the show, you know, I think if I was really kind of consciously one thing or another, I would be blocking off routes, I think. I mean, if there's one message that comes out of uncanny, I think it's the importance and power of an open mind, you know, that in our times where we are so often encouraged

• 13:21Speaker 02

  to take these definite stances and refuse to give in, you know, I will not listen to you, I will not change my mind, you know, it's actually quite good to occupy a place of uncertainty, I think.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Terry Cottle died by suicide, but his heart lived on, transplanted into Sonny Graham. Years later, Sonny died the exact same way, same heart, same fate. But that wasn't the strangest connection between them. Sonny also married Terry's widow. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, this is Heart, an Apple original podcast produced by Plan B and Blanchard House. New episodes are available Mondays and Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

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  In a world where swords were sharp.

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  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

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  Me, Matt Lewis.

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  So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I think before we started, my lovely producer Stu was chatting to us about, you know, these, these experiences and, and he's like, Anthony, have you had any of these experiences? Which I think I must have spoken about one or two of these on the podcast before. If not, it, it, this is a, this is a strange one for me because I, I, listen, I'm open to all possibilities, but I don't believe in an afterlife. I was very much raised Irish Catholic and I think as a, as a, as a reaction or rebellion to that and the total shirking away of it, I've gone so far away from it that maybe I'll find my way back to some middle ground eventually. Anyway, but I have had throughout my life, a number of significant,

• 15:44Speaker 01

  what people would see as, as hauntings. I suppose it's not how I understand them now. The first one that I remember was when I was a child, I was, was very lucky to grow up near a very ancient church and the ruins of a very ancient church. And I was playing in the ruins as one does, if you're in any way slightly gothically attuned. And I was probably only about eight at the time and from under a row of trees that was up on a slight mountain, I saw what I interpreted to be at the time of an eight-year-old, probably about six to eight pairs of red glowing eyes. Now, as you say, and I think it's a really good caveat to this, that happened. How I explain it, I don't know because I'd

• 16:25Speaker 01

  say I don't necessarily believe that it was a haunting in that sense, but, but it certainly happened. Another aspect was I was once, my friend Eva, if she's listening to this, she can attest to this. We had, we were renting a house. It was just after we were students and. There was a night, a very warm night, where the window was open in my room and she was next door and I, uh, and, and I saw what I, I thought I saw a person come through the window in the, in the, in the bedroom, in my bedroom, pass by the bed and out through my door and then heard them go down the stairs of the cottage that we were living in at the time. And so I was like,

• 17:05Speaker 01

  oh, my, my, I didn't think it was a ghost as we're being burgled. And I went to Eva's bedroom. It's like, Eva, you need to get up. Something is going on downstairs. Somebody's just come in my bedroom window. She got up and she was like, what the hell? And we went down and there was nobody there. There was nobody, um, had been there. Nobody had let themselves out because the doors were all still locked and bolted and everything like that. That also happened. There have been a couple of other things as well. Now, I, I have no way to explain these things. As I say, I don't believe in ghosts. So it is, and I have no rational explanation for that. But at the same time, it, it sticks with me as something that got to do with storytelling. Was it, I, I don't know. I really don't know, Danny, but it, I have always been fascinated in

• 17:48Speaker 01

  this world. And I suppose my outlet has become history in order to, I don't want to say rationalize, but, but to contextualize some of those, not necessarily personal experiences, but the, the experiences that people in the past are having. I mean, that's one thing that I, I kind of want to talk to you a little bit about, Danny, is, is this idea that you are situating yourself really in a very long tradition of ghost hunting or ghost storytelling, shall we say. And we can go back to the ancient world and beyond to, to, to try and contextualize some of this. And I, I think what we believe is you're going to tell us a little bit about

• 18:31Speaker 01

  the first ever haunted house story. So we're going back to the, the first to the second century BCE. So tell us a little bit about, um, Pliny the Younger.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, this is, this is interesting. I mean, I think the first ever ghost story is about sort of 3,500 years ago, this ancient stone tablet. But the first use of a haunted house seems to be this story, yes, as you say, by Pliny the Younger. And he tells the story of a philosopher called Athina Dorus, who is living in a house that appears to be haunted. And he hears rattling chains. So it's that classic ghost story trope now, really, isn't it? Something that we, that we associate with ghosts instantly, you know, you hear, you hear those. And it's a kind of Pavlov's dogs kind of moment, you know, you're being haunted. And what he does is he digs up and he finds a body wrapped in

• 19:23Speaker 02

  chains, somebody who'd been buried there, murdered, I think, and buried, wrapped up in chains in his cellar. And he buries this body properly, gives a kind of proper burial. And then the haunting stops. And this essentially invents every haunted house story that comes after this moment, I think. You know, now we kind of replicate this idea of wanting to make sense of it. You know, you were talking about being a historian, wanting to kind of make sense of these narratives. Here it is, absolutely in embryonic form, you know, that idea of something strange is happening, you go and find the source of it, it's the dead person who died in your house, you know, the reason you heard chains is because they were wrapped in chains and voila, bury them and it's all, it's all finished. And

• 20:05Speaker 02

  then, you know, that's, you know, pick me any haunted house story that doesn't kind of follow that model now, really. It's amazing, the kind of, you know, it's like the original tune that everything else is a cover version of. You know, I've been looking at the Bauli Rectory haunting recently for our Uncanny Cold Cases series, which, you know, many people will have found that was their kind of entree to being interested in the paranormal. This case that took place in the, you know, between the, well, really, kind of from the Victorian period right up into the 1940s, but the kind of during the kind of 20s to the 40s, it was like the most famous haunted house case in the whole of the UK, you know, front page news. And you see absolutely echoes in that of this Athina Dorus story. But wanting

• 20:48Speaker 02

  to make sense, you know, seeing in that case a phantom nun and then wanting To know who was the nun who died on the property. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, you know, as humans, we do crave narratives. We crave meaning. We want to explain things. You know, you're talking about your story of the person you saw walking through your house and you want to try and understand it, you know. Can we is the question, or do we as human beings have to accept that sometimes things don't make sense, you know, and that there is just the weird lurking out there?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  I mean, the other part of it is, I know that I shouldn't trust my imagination, you know, on a personal level. I know what it's capable of. It's capable of the most outlandish things. So why on earth would I necessarily think that I hadn't invented that to a certain extent? So I totally, I get what you're, that's not to say that maybe something else wasn't going on. I don't know. Um, okay, you talked there about the kind of, I don't want to, I don't want to be too flippant about it, but almost like a checklist of haunted things. And you, you mentioned about the chains rattling. There's some sounds. We know then if we fast forward to the 18th century, what we start to see is that there's this, and you see this in the Battle of the Poltergeist podcast as well, that there is scratching and sounds and you see it in Cock Lane.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And you, you're, there are definitely parallels between that 17th century, between that 18th century haunting and between the Battle of the Poltergeist case. So when you're listening to those cases that you, you come across in Uncanny or in the live shows, and we're going to be talking to Danny about some of the live shows that are coming up for him very shortly, which are really, really exciting. One of which is down the road from me, actually, so I might be able to make my way over there. But do you start to analytically, not dismissively, but do you, do you start to kind of go tick, tick, tick? As you're collecting these stories, are you going, yeah, there it is again. There it is. There's that formula coming in. There's a house. There's a this, there's a that. Or, or do you not notice that until afterwards?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Well, I think, you know, it's an interesting, I mean, yes, you notice these things, but not necessarily it's a negative, you're not kind of ticking them off as, oh, these are, these are things that mean the person imagined it. I think, you know, if you were describing anything, if you, you know, if you asked someone to go out and to describe a rainstorm, you know, or to describe, you know, a mountain, they would, they would use similar terminology, they would describe it in certain ways. So, you know, if these experiences are happening for real and are, you know, are genuinely the dead coming back to life, you would expect a similarity of approach in terms of how people describe it, you know, and maybe, you know, if looking at, for instance, poltergeist cases in particular, you know, maybe there is this kind of process, the way, the way it works, you

• 23:24Speaker 02

  know, we talk about this kind of scale of activity that starts with a sense of presence, maybe, and then you hear noises and it moves to objects moving and it sort of seems to build. I mean, maybe that is just the way poltergeist hauntings work, you know, but certainly, you know, if you look at it from a skeptic point of view, you could also see that, you know, people are observing previous incarnations and taking on board stuff and that, you know, it's impossible to kind of separate yourself from the baggage of future, of previous accounts and previous generations describing stuff. But, you know, I think, you know, very interesting, I think what I've learnt, I guess, going through this recent series, Uncanny Cold Cases, and looking at these classic

• 24:07Speaker 02

  hauntings like Cock Lane, this famous Georgian haunting that, you know, kind of was, it just, you know, it's hard to say how big it was in its day, it dominated the national discourse, really, in the way, in the way that probably Bally did and the Enfield haunting did in the seventies, maybe, you know, that kind of, these huge things that generated debate and split people. I think there's a reason why these cases stick around, you know, they're not open and shut, you know, there are things that you can explain, things that you can say, point to an obvious human hand, but there are mysteries that still remain and, and things that do feel hard to explain, do feel inexplicable in most of these cases. And I think that's exciting, you know, I love a bit of uncertainty. I, I, I welcome the fact that we might never be able

• 24:52Speaker 02

  to make sense of this because, you know, it's fun. I love detective stories and the moment you get tired of a detective story is when you know who done it, you know, and these are the cases that keep on giving.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Do you, do you see yourself, well, you probably don't necessarily see yourself, so I'm going to say it, I see you then in, in this kind of legacy of, of almost like Arthur Conan Doyle slightly for, for the 21st century, where it's like, you know, he, he was genuinely interested in trying to find, now, sometimes he didn't necessarily have that, that, that, what shall we say, impartial removal that you are saying that, that is very useful for you when you're doing Uncanny, sometimes Conan Doyle was right in there in the middle of it and, and stirring it up to a certain extent, but, but it is a historical legacy of, of what you're doing, and you talked before about this idea of people being haunted and, and people being very drawn to, to, to people specifically, but historically,

• 25:46Speaker 01

  as you pointed out, there's often this link between certain areas, so let's talk a little bit about one of the ones that often comes up in all of these, you know, haunted shows that people go and investigate scary things with green cameras and all this kind of thing, and that is Hampton Court Palace, I don't know if you've covered, have you covered that on, on Canny?

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we went to Hampton Court for the Uncanny TV series, actually, really interestingly, to do a very specific experiment there, actually, there was a really big investigation of Hampton Court, I, I think it's early 2000s, led by Richard Wiseman, who some people will be familiar with, a really kind of very highly respected psychologist with a real strong interest in the supernatural, somebody also with a background as a magician, you know, so kind of very aware of a lot of the kind of, the, the tricks that can be used to, to generate things that feel magical, you know, and he, he led this investigation and Dr. Kieran O'Keefe, who's one of our Uncanny experts, was part of that, and it was looking

• 26:46Speaker 02

  specifically at the idea of EMF, electromagnetic fields within Hampton Court, as being a possible source of generating people feeling haunted, and there's this one place in Hampton Court, I think it's called the Haunted Corridor, I think it's called, it's this one stretch of corridor up at the top of the palace where so many people have experienced haunting experiences and people believe that it's one of the wives of Henry VIII running down there pleading, begging for her life after the king has found out details about her potentially having an affair. And you hear her screaming, incredibly poignant haunting. And people have fainted up there. People often feel dizzy. People have all these kind of strange experiences. And there is

• 27:31Speaker 02

  this belief amongst skeptics and scientists that it's linked to these EMF fields and that there's something about the walls in this corridor that generates this electromagnetic activity and that can have a tangible effect on us. So I went there for that. And you know, it's just fascinating, the idea of this building having an effect on people and possibly making us feel these things, these very physical things. The counterpoint to that, of course, is that this is this amazing place where there has been so many human dramas over the centuries, you know, and so many deaths connected to that place as well. If you believe in ghosts, why would they not appear there? I mean, it feels like a place that would absolutely generate that idea. You know, if we're talking about ghosts

• 28:15Speaker 02

  as trauma recurring, think about all the traumas generated by that place by these kind of, you know, these monarchs who killed people at a whim, you know. So yeah, a really interesting kind of petri dish, if you like, for kind of testing lots of theories about the paranormal.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  I love that you're bringing science into it now as well. So we've gone from hauntings to petri dishes. Excellent, excellent combination.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Taking off the curriculum there for any children listening.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, next to English literature. No, it's, no, we've done that with Art of Conan Doyle. No, the thing about that is, so yes, I think it's the haunted gallery, right? And this is supposed to be the ghost of, I think it's Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII. And you know what that says to me, as well as the fact that the building itself retains these things, it says something about, and I'm always preaching about this on this podcast, historical facts are one thing, right? That is, it's important, they're our bread and butter. We deal with them. We have to be able to go, yes, Catherine Howard did exist. Yes, this was her tragic downfall. Yes, all of this. Here's the historical fact. But what's even more important to members of the public, I think, is historical feeling,

• 29:20Speaker 01

  what the past makes you feel. And when you're told the history of these tragic women in this grand surroundings that's, you know, attached to this man who was in so many ways a tyrant and despotic and abusive, but a king of England nonetheless, then the feelings of that history become, you were talking about this earlier, Danny, I think, become somewhat magical for some people. And that can manifest itself in a haunting. It can manifest itself in a, in a stage show called Sixth the Musical. I think that, that these are all kind of hauntings in a way. And I don't want to rule out the fact that they

• 30:01Speaker 01

  are potentially also maybe experiencing something, well, they are by definition paranormal, and well, could be ghostly, but there are also something about, there's something about the, the tangibility of how strongly somebody feels about these things in the past.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's how we understand our world now, isn't it? We understand our world for emotions. We've, you know, we've invented a visual language of emotions, emojis, that we, you know, now we send each other messages which don't feature words, they just feature emotions, you know, little, little icons that say how you feel. And, you know, I think, I think there's a really good book, A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke, which I would really advise people to read if they're interested in studying the kind of history of the paranormal. But he, he talks in that about how, you know, each age has its kind of version of how it interprets hauntings. You know, in the 18th century, ghosts were very much about kind of coming back to deliver information. It was about, you know, where the money was buried essentially, you know, where the codicil

• 30:59Speaker 02

  on the will was, you know, because that was very important to people at that time, you know, you know, in the wake of the American Civil War and the You know, the First World War, people were obsessed with trying to make sense of that mass grief, you know, that they wanted to kind of process that and have that sense that they could make contact with their loved ones. But also, you know, it was very much a science, you know, it was this era of discovery and the idea of communicating with the dead was something that respectable scientists would consider worthwhile. It was a sort of another way of kind of trying to master your universe. The Victorians wanted to have everything in a glass cabinet or kind of pinned to a board, didn't they? They wanted to make sense of their world. You know, now, you know, we're so dominated by emotions about articulating our emotions. We've never been more in touch with our emotions.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  So that idea of emotions resonating down the ages and a ghost being an emotion, if you like, a ghost being a scream, you know, or a kind of, you know, a last gasp of love, you know, I think that that really makes sense to us now, I think. And, you know, there are theories to do with poltergeist activity, for instance, about it coming from within us, you know, this idea that it's an emotion that bursts out of you, you know, and, you know, anyone who's seen the film Matilda or read the book Matilda by Roald Dahl will know that idea of, you know, these kind of pent up things within her that make objects move around her. We kind of understand that. It makes sense to us.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  It is this idea that we need, I think, even if we are agnostic or we are, you know, not necessarily believing in an afterlife in the most traditional religious sense, shall we say, there is still a need in us, for whatever reason, and this is fascinating in itself, and this has always been there, to believe that something else is at work and that we almost need that story to help us make sense of things. So like even you will hear people talk about the universe now, the universe is at work there, or that's something else is intervening, basically. But something that is unquantifiable. And

• 33:04Speaker 01

  in that area of grayness and unquantifiability, anything is possible, including

• 33:10Speaker 01

  I suppose time slips. Tell us a little bit about how, I can't believe I'm saying this, Winston Churchill met Abraham Lincoln. Now, for the historians, don't panic. There's timelines are not crossing strangely here.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Well, this is a very interesting one. You know, is this a haunting or a time slip? A time slip for anyone not familiar with that concept is that idea of essentially parallel streams of time, I guess, that time is not linear, that, you know, watch Spider-Man Into the Multiverse for a kind of take on this. But, you know, that idea that you're literally witnessing the past come to life in front of you. You know, there are some particular places like Bold Street in Liverpool, which is famous for this, the idea of people walking down the street and seeing the street come to life in the 50s or the 60s around them. So, you know, let's keep an open mind on this particular one. But this is basically Winston Churchill spending the night in the White House whilst visiting an American president at the time. And he was apparently very partial, and maybe there are people listening who

• 34:09Speaker 02

  also enjoyed this, but very partial to taking a bath and having a cigar at the same time. So there he was in the bath, having his cigar, gets out and walks entirely naked into the bedroom, where he sees the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, or Abraham Lincoln, standing there in front of him. And Winston, ever, ever quick with his quips, says, Mr. President, you seem to have me at a disadvantage. And then quickly kind of grabs a towel or something that to hide his manhood. And Lincoln sort of smiles and disappears, apparently. But yeah, I mean, it's a lovely idea, isn't it? This kind of meeting of these two great figures from history. It's a kind of like, you know, that game you play where, you know,

• 34:53Speaker 02

  if you could have a dinner party of anyone from history, who would you choose? And there it is happening with a naked Winston Churchill, meeting Abraham Lincoln. I don't know, it's a really nice story. I mean, you know, it's one of those ones about Churchill that. It's very hard to pin down if it's a genuine thing or apocryphal, but yeah, you know, is it literally these two people meeting or is it this kind of echo of Lincoln lurking around? I don't know. I mean, Lincoln was a president at a time of, you know, huge, huge interest in the paranormal. That moment of the kind of the awful trauma of the American Civil War was a time when, you know, so many people were reaching for the paranormal as

• 35:35Speaker 02

  a way of trying to make sense of things, you know, it was the kind of the sort of dawn of spiritualism, really, the Fox sisters, who were kind of often credited as the kind of originators of spiritualism in the 1840s, you know, they'd started coming out, they were the first ever people to be paid as mediums, you know, and by the 1860s, there was this kind of fervor around it, which just kind of grew and grew in the wake of that war. And you see things like the Ouija board being created for the first time in that era, you know. So if there was a kind of precedent to embody an interest in wanting to come back from the dead, then Lincoln feels very much like the right person for that. And of course, you know, dying in a very tragic, public, dramatic way himself, you know, so if there's going to be an echo from the past, he would make sense.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  He would. And I suppose it's worth pointing out, from a historical perspective, Churchill is not the only person that thinks he saw or says he saw Abraham Lincoln return to the White House. This is somebody apparently who frequents the White House relatively frequently over the centuries and the decades. So this is, you know, it's interesting that even if it's a case that it's not a ghostly appearance, as we understand ghosts in the most plain sense, it is still interesting that people are choosing Lincoln, if that's what's happening, to be the person that reappears. As you say, it's linked to that dramatic ending. It's in a way, again, it's that crossover of history and feeling, isn't it, where something big is happening?

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Totally, and it kind of gets to the nub, I guess, of one issue with the paranormal, which is about how we interpret things. You know, if you live in a Victorian house, as I do, and you see a strange shadow at night, you will naturally assume that is a Victorian coming back to haunt you. It just kind of makes sense to you, doesn't it? You know, and so, you know, it's sometimes hard to separate all the baggage we bring as human beings to these cases from, you know, what is actually there, kind of the facts of the case. And, you know, interestingly, we see a lot of Victorian ghosts. I get a huge amount of people emailing me about Victorian ghosts. What kind of ghosts did the Victorians see? Do you know the answer to this?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Um, no. What kind of ghosts did they see?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  They saw Tudors, you know, so, you know, it's interesting. They were processing a lot of their paranormal experiences, seeing Tudors, interpreting it in that way. You know, is that literally that the Tudors were coming back to them and then there was a kind of sell-by date on ghosts from Tudor periods and they kind of stopped coming and now it's Victorian ghosts appear? You know, fascinating. You could debate that till the cows come home, but I certainly think that, you know, if paranormal experiences are something strange, something that we can't explain, then, you know, it is possible that sometimes we are projecting onto these things, you know. And if you're staying in a bedroom in the White House and you see a strange figure, you see a strange shape, you know, your mind will run to certain places and Abraham Lincoln would of course be one of those.

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• 39:22Speaker 01

  I live in, not to dox myself, but I live in Howarth in West Yorkshire, which is the Bronte village, and it is very, very Gothic and very, very supposedly haunted. And sometimes I will wander through that churchyard, hoping for some kind of an encounter that is more deliberate to potentially convince me, but alas, I have not had that encounter yet.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  You know, in all of us, we're all haunted in certain ways, aren't we? I think, you know, wherever you live, you are haunted by the people who've been there before you. You know, just purely in a house, you know, by their DIY choices, by, you know, the things they did, the decisions they made in the past, you know, I think we live on top of layers. There's all these layers of the people who came before us. I think that's incredibly true in the UK, you know, where most of us live in old houses and prefer to live in old houses, you know, you pay a hell of a lot more for a Victorian house, don't you? And, you know, people choose, they kind of fetishize these things, you know. When I did my Uncanny USA series, I thought, you know, maybe that would be less true, you know, Americans live in modern houses, you know, there's less history in America, you think?

• 40:29Speaker 02

  And actually, of course, you're totally wrong, there's this incredible history to America, stretching back, you know, to prehistoric times, people find dinosaur skeletons there. But, you know, the land there, you know, the stories of the Native American people that preexisted. And it leads you into all of these interesting conversations about, you know, these kind of chicken and egg conversations, I guess, about what does a haunting stem from? Is it literally the bricks of the building you're living in? Is it the land the building sits on? Is it the people who were there? You know, fascinating.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  I mean, the other thing, this just occurred to me as I'm listening to you talk there, is of course, the living can also haunt buildings. And I would potentially argue that the current occupant of the White House is doing his own type of haunting and is, and I know you need to remain partial in this, impartial rather in this, but I don't. And like, he is haunting that building in so many different ways and trying to leave that mark. So anyway, look, that's for a different podcast on a different day, but it just occurred to me, gosh, the living can do it too. Danny, you work across so many media, media, rather, and you do your podcasts, you do TV, you do live shows. Do these, do, do different hauntings show up or I don't want to say work better, but you know, you know what I'm trying to say. Do they, do they work differently

• 41:43Speaker 01

  across the different media that you work in? Is there certain things that work in a live show more than work on the podcast, for instance, or vice versa?

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think yes is the answer to that. And I think, you know, there are some stories we're told that are incredibly powerful, but the person wants to remain anonymous, you know, for all sorts of different reasons, really. You know, sometimes it's to do with the job they do. Sometimes it's to do with the fact that, you know, there are still people living in that house where it happened and they don't want to upset those people and scare them, you know, and those stories where somebody wants to be anonymous have to be on the podcast. We couldn't tell those on television. You can't, you can't have that anonymity on TV. You know, and I just, yeah, I think, you know, sometimes there's a story that revolves around a kind of really beautiful, small one moment, you know, and it feels like it works really well in audio, but it wouldn't

• 42:33Speaker 02

  be quite sort of lively enough and energetic enough for television, maybe. I think, yeah, I mean, you know, on, on the live tours, what's been absolutely lovely for me is, is hearing stories from the people in the audience as well. You know, these, these amazing moments where you throw it open and you have this theatre full of 2000 people and you get someone saying, I've never really told this story before. Maybe I've not even told my wife, who's sitting next to me, but I'm going to tell it to you now. And they articulate it in front of this audience of people. And that idea of creating a safe space with Uncanny that, that makes people feel comfortable telling their stories is lovely. I, yeah, I think what I've always sought to do is, is tell different stories in the different

• 43:16Speaker 02

  forums, I think. And so, you know, you won't hear us repeating the same cases. We won't be talking about cases that were on the podcast on TV. We won't be talking about any of those cases in the live thing and my book, you know, all these things are different. I want people to feel that each one is a

• 43:34Speaker 02

  A little unique moment, a unique chance to sample these stories and we're not just kind of rehashing things. It's not a sort of attempt to kind of do spin offs and cash in. I guess, you know, the common thread through all of it for me is that it's a conversation and I am one half of that conversation. I tell you this information, I give you some of the the kind of building blocks to do your own research and then people seem to love going off and diving into it, you know, doing this kind of, you know, Googling the stories, researching stuff, trying to find places. People go on these kind of pilgrimages, these paranormal pilgrimages to the place. People track out to the wilds of Scotland, to this boffy Louis belt that we told about in Uncanny, you know, and I love that, you

• 44:18Speaker 02

  know, I love the fact that it's like a little kind of club of sleuths, of supernatural sleuths. Everybody enjoys being a kind of armchair detective trying to solve these cases.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  It also, when it comes to the live expression of Uncanny or any of the other iterations that you're working with, the other thing that happens in live scenarios, and I know this from personal experience, because this is one of the hauntings that I left off of my list at the top, things can also happen live, that you are, that I was in a, I went to a book event in, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, this is maybe four or five years ago now, and the book event ended in a mausoleum in Greyfriars Kirkyard, in what is the closed covenanters' part of the graveyard, just as a historian, that was the reason I was there, because I wanted to go into the closed part of the graveyard, because I'd never been in there, where the covenant were kept during the 17th

• 45:13Speaker 01

  century. And what, I won't go into it now, because there's a lot of detail in it, but what I experienced in there, in that moment, with this small group of people, for a period of time, Made me think I needed to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about life and therefore the afterlife. Now, I talked myself down after, you know, 24 to 48 hours. There are voice notes that I have sent to my usual co-host on After Dark, Maddy Pelling, after that incident. That is a little archive in itself of what my initial feelings were. But give me, you know, 24 hours later, I had, I totally tried to talk myself down from them. But it was the most remarkable thing. So not that I'm promising that if people are going

• 45:57Speaker 01

  to your live shows, they're going to have remarkable paranormal experiences. But I'm just saying it could possibly happen.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Totally. You know, and you hear these things unfold in live shows, you know, people telling these stories and maybe having people with them who also experienced stuff there and kind of, you know, we've definitely had moments at live shows where suddenly you get this thing unfolding and people learning things from each other in real time. Um, yeah, I, I, you know, also you're performing in these theatres that have these incredible histories to them. And, you know, you know, every theatre we've come across pretty much as a theatre ghost story linked to it, even some of the modern theatres. Um, so yeah, totally. I mean, you know, interesting, you talk about the covenant as prison. I mean, you know, so many stories associated with that. I've had several people message me about that. And definitely there are certain cities you go to where you get more ghost stories. Edinburgh,

• 46:47Speaker 02

  absolutely one of those, you know, Liverpool, another one, you know. Um, but there's definitely areas of the country that feel like they are just kind of immersed in ghost stories. And is that because they are places that have experienced more pain and suffering and tragedy than some other areas? You know, there are, you know, definitely areas that have been through the wringer in terms of, you know, battles and massacres and, you know, just, you know, kind of awful industrial disasters, whatever, you know. And if you are a skeptic, you'll believe that ghost stories are how we process those things. And if you're a believer, you'll believe that death spawns ghosts. And the more death that there has been, so the more likelihood there is of ghosts.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Now, and I think either way, the answer is fascinating, right? Whichever, whichever one of those.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Totally, totally.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  That's so, so interesting regardless. Now, if people were interested in experiencing one of those live shows themselves, listen, they can go and find Uncanny, there is amazing episodes there to do. I really recommend Battle of the Poltergeist 2. I know it's been there for a while, but if you haven't discovered it yet, you need to go and listen to that. It's incredible. In terms of your books as well, in terms of live shows, Danny, do you have anything coming up that people might be able to go and see you in?

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Yes, totally. I would heartily encourage you to come to the Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield, which is not too far from where you live. Is that right?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. I was like, well, now, listen, I'm not great with geography, but I think it's near me.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  We're gonna, we're gonna be doing a live recording there of Uncanny Cold Cases, our series, which hopefully some people listening have heard. You know, we've been looking at all of these classic hauntings from history and we are now tackling one of the biggest ever, basically, the Enfield Haunting, which interestingly, we're doing this as a summer special and Enfield is a summer haunting. You wouldn't think of it particularly, but it starts in August. It's a case that kicks off in the hot days of summer in Enfield in North London. And, you know, most people probably have heard of the Enfield Poltergeist case now. It's featured in TV programmes, you know, The Conjuring 2 was based on it. It's certainly one of the most documented hauntings of all time. You know, it was a

• 48:57Speaker 02

  place where a film crew and radio crews and newspaper journalists turned up almost instantly. You know, you had SPR, Society of Cycle Research, investigators turning up there very quickly. It's incredibly well documented. We are going to be speaking to one of the witnesses from the case at this live recording, Graham Morris, the photographer for the Daily Mirror, who was there, who took the iconic photographs.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Stop it. Are you actually, oh my god.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Google now, type in Enfield Poltergeist, you'll see his photographs.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  That's so exciting. I didn't realise. Oh my God, I'm going to have to get in the car now.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  So July 5th, we're doing that at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. And July 4th, I'm doing a Q and A at the festival as well, talking about Uncanny. So on the Crosswise fringe. So yeah, do that. And definitely. And the other thing I would say come to if you can is UncannyCon, which is our fan convention that we are doing at the ICC in Birmingham, this enormous 3,000 seater venue, the biggest place we've played with Uncanny so far. And it's just a day of getting together and we'll have, you know, witnesses from the series. We will have experts, we'll have the Uncanny Versity Challenge that we do, which is a sort of quiz about the show.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  It's, you know, we've done two of these before and they've kind of grown each year. It's got bigger and bigger, but it's, it's a really fun day of uncanniness. It runs for about sort of eight hours from the afternoon till evening. We'll do a live recording again of the show at the end of the day. But November 21st in Birmingham and we would love to see you there.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  You are a busy man, Danny Robbins, but I will say this, just as a, just as a little caveat, the theatre that you are doing your live recording with the Enfield Poltergeist one in Sheffield is also reportedly very haunted. So I, when I promised that there were going to be an event, I didn't know this, but now I'm telling you it's more likely than ever.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Well, there you go. I think that, yeah, we've been to the Lyceum a few times. It's a lovely atmospheric theatre. And I can't remember the specific stories about that one, but you know, every time we rock up in a place, you know, you do hear these great stories. And what I love is when you meet people who work there, who've had these experiences and suddenly it moves from being this kind of abstract thing of like, oh, did you know that theatre is haunted by the ghost of Santa? To like, it, you know, I saw it, I was there. And, you know, I spoke to somebody in a theatre in Worthing, I think it was, who had to take two weeks off work after witnessing the theatre ghost. He was so traumatised by it, you know, these things are impactful.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  You know, and when you can find evidence, it's wonderful. Like the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Is said to be the most haunted theatre in the world. We performed there. And, you know, and again, you sort of hear these stories and then speaking to an actress friend of mine. She was saying, I smelt the smell of lavender just before I went on. It was tangible. I could, I could smell it. And then you read up about this and it's like the smell of lavender is connected to Dan Lino, who was the musical star, originator of the pantomime dame. The smell of lavender is apparently a perfume that he wore. And if you smell it, then it will bring you good luck in your show, you know? Here's somebody I know who I trust, you know, who, who smelt that lavender, you know?

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Was that her imagination or was that Dan Lino appearing next to her in that moment going, have a good show? Go on, do it, do it for me.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  And I love that. I think it's, and it's a lovely note to end on, I think, because it gives us this thing of respecting these people's experiences regardless of what they are, right? Because, because whatever manifestation, to use that word deliberately, that they take, they are real experiences that real people are having. And, and very often, probably most often than not, they're not necessarily something that's a deliberate hoax. As you're saying, that, that even that man who had to take two, two weeks off work, that, that's a real life impact for somebody there, you know? So they're important.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  And I think, yeah, and I think, you know, it's also about the reason for telling these stories, you know? People do not benefit from telling these stories and they, they sometimes, you know, I think, all right, okay, I'll qualify that. They, they benefit, I think, in, in the sense that it's cathartic. I think everybody who's been on Uncanny finds it therapeutic. And, you know, certainly some people have found it profoundly therapeutic. I think about one of the cases we did on the TV series Shadow Man, where the, the guy Julian walked into the studio, this kind of almost broken man by these experiences he's had, which had terrified him. And I think, you know, he got this kind of, you know, this monkey off his back, you know? He, he, he got, you know, an incredibly cathartic experience, I think, by telling his story and felt better for doing that, you know?

• 53:33Speaker 02

  But these people aren't benefiting in the sense of like, you know, you're not getting like magazine deals and making loads of money out of it, all that kind of thing. People often have these suspicions of people, oh, they're just doing it for the attention. And the publicity, you know, and you think, you know, why, why would these people put themselves out there for that, you know, another, another story we told this guy who was a senior teacher at a school, you know, why, why would he risk ridicule from students and colleagues and stuff to tell their stories? Because people have to get it out. They've, they've got to tell these stories. They're kind of consumed by it. It's, it's bothering them. It's this itch that they've got to scratch. So I think, you know, all of these stories, people tell it because it's something they want to make sense of. And that's the aim of Uncanny, to try and help you make sense of

• 54:15Speaker 02

  it. And, you know, we will offer you various suggestions, you know, some will be from a team believer point of view, some will be from a team skeptic point of view. We will never seek to debunk and, and say you're crazy and you made it up and you're a fool or whatever, you know, we'll never at the same time tell you, it's definitely a ghost, you know, well done, you know, it was sold it, you know, we occupy that middle ground, I think. And, and you get that lovely thing of people who are totally polarized in their opinions, being supportive of these people, you know, really resolutely skeptical people, being incredibly lovely and supportive of people who have had these experiences, you know, and championing them. And I think, you know, you don't have to believe in ghosts to be frightened by them. And you don't have to

• 54:58Speaker 02

  believe in ghosts to, to appreciate the, the huge impact on these people, I think. But then, if you do believe in ghosts, and if you've had experiences yourself that you feel were ghostly, then it's incredibly vindicating, I think, hearing people talk about these things. And I think there is a power to it, you know, and I think, you know, I, I love the possibility that it could be real. I love that idea. I find it a deeply optimistic one. And so every story I hear takes me a little bit further down that path to thinking, well, you know, just maybe it is all real.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Well, listen, if you want to explore some more just maybes with Danny and the Uncanny team, then he is returning to Crossed Wires, which of course is the world's biggest podcast festival for a live show at Sheffield's haunted, as I said, Lyceum Theatre. It is apparently the home of the lavender lady, so more lavender and the grey man.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So now you know, we can watch out for them. Uncanny Cold Cases will be a spine tingling live recording and paranormal psychologist Evelyn Hollow and Dr. Kieran O'Keeffe will also be there. Danny Robbins, thank you so much for joining us on After Dark.