UNCANNY'S DANNY ROBINS

The creator and host of the BBC's Uncanny series tells us about his most chilling experiences while researching the show, and writing a ghost book for children

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In 2021, Danny's podcast The Battersea Poltergeist made him a household name in paranormal broadcasting. Since then, his chilling BBC podcast series Uncanny, which investigates ghost stories and spooky encounters experienced by real people, has been televised, becoming a must-watch programme around Halloween.

Have you had anything close to a paranormal experience?

I've been to many allegedly haunted places and found myself willing something to happen – kind of going, please throw a plate at me or, you know, I want a grey lady to appear and walk across the staircase. I haven't had anything like that, but I think you would have to be fairly hardhearted to not be affected by the stories I'm told. The sheer volume of stories I hear, I think it's had an effect. I find myself in a place where I'm very open to the idea that this could all be real. Things like spending the night in Luibeilt, this haunted Scottish bothy [mountain shelter], which I did for the Uncanny Christmas special, that has an effect on you. It's a place that's seen a lot of sadness, a lot of strange things happened there over the years to a lot of people.

The guy I went with had had some very, very strange experiences there. And I think you soak it up. There's that idea of places recording events that happened in them, called stone tape theory, that I talk about in my book, Do You Believe in Ghosts? And it’s something a scientist will come out and say to you, this is flat out impossible. And yet, as a human being, walking into these kinds of places, it’s very easy to believe in this idea that certain places take on some kind of footprint, that kind of emotional baggage of things that have happened there in the past.