Danny Robins (2023) Into the Uncanny: A Real Life Investigation into the Paranormal, BBC books.

I’d déjà vu reading Into the Uncanny. I felt that I’d read it before. Then again, I often pick books up, read a bit and put them down again. Danny Robins admits to being one of the lucky ones. One of the chosen. He was kicking around doing nothing very much with his life and trying to write a play about ghosts. Like me, he’d spent lots of time reading books about paranormal phenomena. Testing themselves by trying to bend my spoon by rubbing them in the tickly bit. A kind of Uri Geller for gullible kids. But we’d left it all behind and moved on. Kinda.  

Danny Robins tapped into something when he asked on social media for other folks’ stories. Here’s where I tell you mine. Aged 16, staying in an old church loft, with other kids. We heard footsteps on the stairs after lights out. I’m the daft one, Freddie, in Scooby Doo that’s got to investigate. You guessed it—a ghost. Well, I’m not sure if it was a ghost, but it happened a few times. Then I fell asleep and left the next day.

Danny Robins got tens of thousands of stories like mine. Unique and personal in their own way. He’d tapped into the zeitgeist during lockdown with his BBC podcast: The Battersea Poltergeist. He went on to make a television series on BBC. And here’s the book as part of the selling phenomena. Hence the déjà vu in which we’re all citizen journalists. And he offers a bonus chapter, as if he’s a rock star, with a number 11, chart-hit, returning to his fans for an encore, and ignoring the boos.  

His format is childishly simple. And he writes in a blokey manner. Team Believer. Evelyn Hollow is the resident expert. She explains all things spooky in a way we’ve come to recognise as making no sense, but satisfying as eating four jam doughnuts and calling it your dinner. Or as Edith Wharton puts it in the prologue: ‘I don’t believe in ghost, but I’m afraid of them’. Damn tooting.

Put it this way, I’m not for staying a second night, or any night in a haunted house. Look out for these signs and move quick.

‘Stage 1: A sense of presence.

Stage 2: Noises (as above).

Stage 3: Moving objects (that’s me moving out).

Stage 4: Apports and disapports.

Stage 5: Destruction.

Stage 6: Communication.

Stage 7: Physical violence or threat to life.’

Cocktails are good too. Put one adolescent into the mix. Right time. Right place. Or wrong time or wrong place, depending on your point of view. Contagion, watch the slick-sick spread. You’re on your own, pal.  

Resident and house cynic is Ciaran O’Keefe. He’s there to rip the ghost-mask off like Scooby Doo. Usually the villain is the ideomotor effect, electromagnetic waves or the human insistence in making patterns out of nonsense. Never rule out psychosis. Lack of sleep. Hallucinations, generally and specifically.  I do a lot of that in my writing. I did find some of the stories spooky. No way would you get me staying in an old English College in Rome. Read on.

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