by Chris Harris
I’m a big fan of Uncanny, BBC’s brilliant TV and podcast/radio show on the paranormal and supernatural with the brilliant Danny Robins. In each episode, a case of paranormal activity is investigated. Importantly, they are not just, “oh, I saw a ghost,” they are cases of sustained paranormal activity, most of which are pretty impossible to explain away, and that’s where belief, or at least serious consideration, starts to feel reasonable.
Uncanny has ‘pundits’.Team Believer, someone who affirms and tries to explain the phenomenon. Team Sceptic, someone who counteracts, normally using science, and tries to introduce a logical explanation to prove there was no activity.
Unless you’ve seen something yourself, you probably won’t believe in ghosts. We trust our own senses above all else, what surprises me is not how few people believe, but how many quietly do.
The stories on Uncanny are compelling. They’re not just about a spectacle. They’re about accumulation. Repeated events attached to the same person, the same place. Footsteps heard again and again. Voices that don’t shout but persist. Objects that move not always dramatically, but insistently. Crucially, these things are often witnessed by more than one person, independently, without prompting.
That’s what makes them difficult to dismiss. Not impossible, but difficult. Throw into the mix the person reporting the incidents and the whole narrative, string of events, if you like, becomes a complicated phenomenon to disprove.
When Disbelief Becomes the More Imaginative Leap
In isolation, most of these things can be explained away. A noise can be pipes. A shadow can be light. A feeling can be anxiety. We can build a rationality around almost anything, that is not only normal but preferable. The sceptical position is healthy.
One explanation might account for a noise. Another for a shadow. Another for a feeling. But when the incidents begin to form a coherent pattern, scepticism starts to require increasingly complex explanations; that’s when people, even sensible, sceptical people, begin to soften.
Over the show each haunting becomes more resonant and different credible manifestations over time emerge, sure you can dispel one off sightings, but a collection of incidents, always explained in detail very well, and sometimes with a previous incident or death at the house that is commensurate with the story.
The question shifts from what was that? to why is it still happening?
That’s the hardest problem Team Sceptic faces, not explaining how something could happen once, but how it could keep happening in ways that feel coherent, almost intentional, without being anything at all.
Team Sceptic: The Grown Ups and the Ideologues
What’s interesting, and almost paradoxical, is the sheer range of insight and validity of the people who end up on, or representing, Team Sceptic. Many of them are thoughtful, intelligent, and genuinely curious. Their arguments are often good ones, rooted in psychology, physics, environment, or human behaviour. For a long time, those arguments hold. They explain a great deal away. They should be listened to. I quite often find myself nodding along with the sceptical position. I am open-minded and usually their dismissal of some events is more plausible than the events themselves.
That’s what makes the format work. When alternative explanations are strong, insightful, even unsettling in their own way, they sharpen the story rather than blunt it. They remind you how easily humans misinterpret experience. A lot of reported activity should be dismantled and often is. When that happens properly, it’s satisfying rather than disappointing. Something mysterious is becoming understandable.
The best sceptics do something deceptively simple. They say: “I simply can’t explain that.” The grown ups. Not “it didn’t happen.” Not “the witness is wrong.” Not “there must be something.” The ideologues.
The grown-ups cannot disprove it and say they cannot find an explanation, and in many ways, that is the most concrete proof that the manifestation or event really occurred. Team Sceptic, in these cases, completely vindicate the hauntings more than the person who encountered the activity or Team Believer, as the true sceptic is admitting, yes, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I cannot explain what happened, e.g., it was a ghost.
The problem comes with some of the other members of Team Sceptic, the ideologues. Faced with something that genuinely resists explanation, they don’t pause, hold their hands up and say they have no explanation like the grown ups. Instead, they double down. They reach for explanations so extreme, so wildly implausible, they frankly look stupid and pedantic, coming up with such wild excuses you need your own Team Sceptic to evaluate Team Sceptic! That is when scepticism stops being analytical and becomes ideological and sounds less credible than the witness.
Because Uncanny proves ghosts exist, but it isn’t solely about that. It’s about interesting activity in people’s lives, examined seriously, whether you believe in it or not. Every episode begins with a story that is, at the very least, believable in human terms: people describing what they experienced, often reluctantly, often without embellishment. The job of the experts is not to win an argument, but to interrogate that experience honestly to help the listener or viewer take a view themselves. When the view of the person on Team Sceptic is complete outlandish nonsense, “oh a motorway is three miles away” when the guest heard a horse and cart pull up outside their house as an explanation, that is something impossible to explain away, they frankly look like cranks.
#Uncanny #Paranormal #Ghost #Poltergeist #Supernatural
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