Skeptifying BBC's Uncanny

by Brian Dunning
March 24, 2026

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Uncanny is the title of a BBC radio show and podcast. It’s a fun show, and I very much enjoy it. Host Danny Robins — who is a fantastic storyteller — interviews people who have experienced hauntings, often dramatic ones; and then he has a pair of experts on to give their perspectives on the tale: one from Team Believer, and one from Team Skeptic. The unusual thing about it, and part of why I like it so much, is that the skeptic is a real skeptic, who is given ample opportunity to suggest the real science-based possible explanations for the event. This is in contrast to most shows that feature a skeptic, which are almost always little more than lip service with hardly a single shred of actual skeptical analysis. (Plus, some of the skeptics that Danny features happen to be friends of mine, so I can vouch for their skeptical bona fides.) However, the reason I decided to do this show today was a rare instance of Danny dropping the ball. Episode 8 of series 5 was a revisit of each of the cases featured on that season so far, usually with updates, but the skeptical perspective was omitted entirely; leaving each segment as essentially an unchallenged infomercial for the ghosts. So I’m here today to fill in the missing skepticism.

Now it can be argued that the skeptical angle had already been presented for each of these cases when the episode for each was initially released; however, this does not cover updates and new information offered by the suffering eyewitness. Omitting the skepticism from the updates, and from each case overall, leaves the show as simply a credulous ghost storytelling session.

Here are the segments, with my comments on each, in the order they were told:

Case 4: Road Ghosts

This episode called back to a group of women who had a ghostly experience while driving along Bluebell Hill, a road with a ghostly past involving a bride killed in a crash in the 1960s. After the episode aired, listener Andy wrote in and described an experience he’d had on a nearby road 27 years previously, when he had been 20 years old. While driving at night, what appeared to be a woman in an old-fashioned wedding dress ran out in front of his car, but just as he would have struck her, she vanished. There was no impact and no evidence she’d ever been there. Only later, “years later,” when recounting this at a pub, did he learn of the old story of the bride, and figured he must have seen the same ghost.

The missing skepticism: As with some of the other stories in this episode, these events happened decades earlier; and the one thing we know for a certainty about how memories work is that Andy has some of the major details about his own experience flat wrong. Where did this happen? When did this happen? What did he think it was at the time, and did whatever that experience was even seem mysterious then? How many years later did he hear the story that today he remembers being about the bride? This is the case for all of us for the majority of our strongest memories. Research shows that this applies to about half of the details from our most vivid memories — and also that 100% of people believe their current flawed memory is more accurate than whatever they reported soon after the event. So, when all I can know about Andy’s story is that what he tells today probably bears little resemblance to what happened on that night, I recuse myself as unable to offer any kind of informed perspective. This may sound like a cop-out, but it is an aspect of old memories that must be taken into account.

The next person to write in was Michael, who had been a constable in the Bluebell Hill area more than 50(!) years ago. Michael had forgotten all about this story until he heard the Uncanny show. They’d gotten a call from a driver who said he had struck and killed a young woman, and covered her with a blanket until the constables arrived. Michael’s partner lifted the blanket — and there was nobody under it!

The missing skepticism: Let’s assume this happened exactly as Michael remembers. How is this even a ghost story? At best, it’s a story of some guy pranking the cops, or having been high or incredibly mistaken or god knows what when he put a blanket down in the road. I’m not convinced that Michael’s recollection forces us to admit the reality of ghosts.

We then heard from Angie, who offered pareidolia as the cause of Andy’s ghostly bride. She had seen some clouds reflected in the rear window of a car ahead of her once, and they looked just like the face of a screaming boy. Well, maybe. Off the top of my head I can’t think of what kind of white object the height of a person might have come blowing across the road in front of Andy’s car, but if there was something there, yes it’s possible that our brains could turn the image from a fleeting glance into a fully-formed bride.

Case 3: The Devil’s Den UFO

In this story, a pair of friends saw a triangular UFO one night. But the mysterious part of the story was that later one of the men, Terry, had a pain in his leg and got it X-rayed. The X-ray showed a strange metallic object, like a little microchip with two long wires leading away from it. He made arrangements to have a surgeon remove it. But then, before that could happen, he woke up again in the middle of night with more pain, and found a small wound in his leg! He returned for another X-ray, and the object was gone! Had the aliens returned and retrieved their device from his leg?

The missing skepticism: Uncanny posted the X-ray photo to their Instagram account, so I took it and showed it to a radiologist friend. He quickly reported back that it’s the edge of the film cassette, and a relatively common artifact. Older X-ray machines, before the current ones that are all digital, could be upgraded to use a phosphor plate that was placed in a cassette holder. So, of course the artifact wouldn’t appear on a subsequent X-ray, as it was never in Terry’s leg to begin with. As for the wound? I’m not surprised at all that a man who believes he has an alien implant would be scratching at the area, particularly during the night. Later I went and read the comments on the Instagram post: At least ten other radiologists all said it was an artifact from the plate, with at least four of them also identifying it as the edge of the film cassette. This was solved by asking a single question to a single person who knows something about X-rays.

We then heard from listener Kathleen who also reported having watched a triangular UFO with her dad — 56 years ago.

The missing skepticism: Those 56 years encompass nearly the entire modern history of UFO lore. I would love to have heard her tell the story right after it happened; but unfortunately her memory now has likely been completely overwritten by imagery and prompts from the history of UFOs.

Danny suggested that perhaps she’d seen a secret military aircraft. But as I’ve said many times, I believe this is among the worst of all the typical explanations for UFOs. There are two properties of every single military aircraft that was ever secret, and they are (1) that their appearance and flight characteristics are generally in the same ballpark as conventional aircraft, none has ever been consistent with a gigantic hovering triangle; and (2) they are never tested at low altitudes above heavily populated areas, in plain sight of countless people. So how anyone could ever presume to have found a match in this identification is beyond me.

Case 1: The Haunted Street in Bath

This was a poltergeist case in the town of Bath, where a woman named Virginia was plagued by all kinds of mysterious things happening in the house whenever she was around, primarily water faucets turning on by themselves, and things moving around. The episode prompted a call from a paranormal investigator who was aware of a very similar case, in the same neighborhood, but all the way back in 1963. The taps would constantly turn themselves on, despite the house’s entire plumbing system being replaced three times in an attempt to fix it. But still, whenever Mrs. Heidi was in the house, the water kept coming on, objects might fly about the room, things would spontaneously catch on fire, water would even flow out of an upright bucket and creep up the walls. Might the two cases have been connected?

But before we add the missing skepticism, let’s also revisit:

Case 2: Old Jim

After the breakup of their family, preteen girl Louise lived with her mother in an old farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales. Shortly after they moved in, Louise reported frightening male voices, loud footsteps, and other ghostly experiences; and after a while, these escalated into items like ornaments and potted plants constantly tumbling off the shelves. There was loud banging and crashing, until finally Louise’s mother couldn’t stand it any longer and they moved out.

The missing skepticism: Something that even the skeptics who appeared on the original broadcasts of these stories failed to mention was how textbook-perfect all three of these cases were, the cases of Virginia, Heidi, and Louise. They follow the pattern of the typical poltergeist case, in which a home is turned upside-down by inexplicable disturbances centered on a single person in the household, almost always a young girl, and almost always following some traumatic family breakup. In many cases, paranormal investigators have even moved in with the families and documented the events around the young girl. And in every one of these cases that’s been solved, some investigator eventually caught the girl causing all of the disturbances herself. E.g., she would throw an item and quickly turn away and act like she hadn’t, then pretend to be as surprised as everyone else when it crashed at the opposite end of the room. Or bang on the walls herself and act frightened when Mom would rush in, or just make things up.

Omitting this well-known explanation for poltergeists was, in my opinion, the biggest hole in this episode of Uncanny. The child feels emotionally abandoned as a result of the family breakup or other trauma, and creating a situation where she becomes the center of attention and sympathy fulfills an important emotional need. Being the victim of a ghost brings this attention while also being psychologically safer than being seen as merely disobedient, needy, or traumatized. It also serves to “punish” the parents, without being blamed herself. And, as with the cases presented in Uncanny where later life information was provided, the disturbances always cease when the girl matures, leaves the toxic environment, or finds stable emotional support elsewhere. This is important stuff, and framing it as a creepy ghost story to be exploited does a real disservice to these victims — they may also be the perpetrators, but more significantly they are the victims of whatever real harm was done.

Case 5: The Goth Poltergeist

The final case covered on the Uncanny roundup is from about 25 years ago, so it is, unfortunately, yet another case where the only thing we know for sure is that the way its witnesses tell it today is not what happened. So we start from a pretty rough place.

This was a four-story Victorian flat in Brighton Grove that was occupied (sort of informally) by a group of mostly Goth teens. From the beginning, there were ghostly episodes. The house made all manner of strange noises at all hours. Doors would be locked from the wrong side. Things would fall or move around or crash. Figures were seen through windows in empty rooms. An oppressive atmosphere, inexplicably dimming lights, cold winds, and all kinds of creepy things characterized everyday life. The kids had all named the presumed resident ghost Fred.

In the followup episode, one former resident tells how one night three of them were lying on a bed together when they watched the window mechanism operate itself, apparently impossibly, then open and slam itself repeatedly before latching itself back up. At that point they all ran away.

The missing skepticism: We presume everyone here is giving their honest assessment of what they remember — although that in itself is a leap that’s not really justified. This was a complicated system. Such a group of young men and women with a big rambling house all to themselves would have been an exciting situation on multiple levels. There were romantic tensions, arguments, general adolescent volatility, Goth teens who were already heavily invested in dark aesthetics and horror media (though the guest on the followup episode stated he had not personally been a Goth), all packed into an incredibly creepy building. The surprise would have been if they hadn’t believed the place was haunted.

This placed everyone into the mindset of expecting something ghostly to happen; even being excited for it. Magnifying this was that giving the ghost the name Fred brought an accepted narrative into play. When anything unusual happened, which you or I might shrug off, here it became part of the haunting narrative. Suddenly nothing is random; every little thing becomes agency by Fred, and bolsters and strengthens this narrative. Everything becomes part of a pattern, among a group who expect nothing less. This even has a name, it’s called Haunted Person Syndrome, which it sounds like every resident was in the throes of.

Who knows what actually happened during the window episode, with the ghost-operated mechanism? The three were on that bed because they’d just fled other parts of the house and were scared out of their wits. A gust of wind or anything may have slammed the window shut, and in one of their hyperactive imagination’s recall, they thought they saw the mechanism move. The memory conformity effect — which this group was in a prime position for — took over from there, and as soon as they ran away, talking about what just happened, well, then, there’s your consistent memory of all three remembering the exact same thing; a thing which probably never happened.

All of these psychological and perceptual phenomena are super cool. They’re fascinating to learn about. It’s amazing what the brain can do to itself, and I could listen to cases like this all day. However, in Uncanny’s haste to make an exciting episode of their ghost show the easy way, they shortcutted this and denied us the much more interesting true explanations, leaving us only with pulp fiction ghost stories that aren’t worth the electrons the podcast was transmitted with.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and my own experience doing this show for almost 20 years now certainly confirms that. It’s often harder to get to the truth than to a cheap paranormal anecdote, but I think it’s always worth the extra trouble.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning