Earlier this year, The Skeptic magazine hosted The Ockham’s Award ceremony at QED 2025. Dr Cyriac Abby Philips, a doctor known for challenging harmful alternative medicine claims in India, received the Ockham Award for Skeptical Activism.
Then came the Rusty Razor Award, given to the person, group, or organisation judged to have been one of the year’s most prolific promoter of pseudoscience or unscientific ideas.
The shortlist raised a few eyebrows because among the familiar mixture of dubious health claims and conspiracy theories was Danny Robins, creator and host of the BBC’s Uncanny podcast, tv series, live tour, book.
Some people were surprised by this. Did a BBC programme about ghosts really belong in the same list as conspiracy theorists and far-right charlatans? To me, its inclusion made a certain amount of sense.
Uncanny presents itself as an investigation into people’s real-life supernatural experiences. Beneath the atmospheric sound design and serious tone, however, it works much like a lot of paranormal programmes before it: the ghost story comes first, while the attempt to understand what actually happened remains secondary.
That matters because the people sharing these experiences deserve more than to become characters in a spooky story. Their experiences may be frighteneing, confusion, or deeply personal. Taking them seriously should mean examining them carefully, not simply making them sound convincing.
Are you team believer or team skeptic?
This is the question around which Uncanny is built.
It’s a clever and easily marketable one, but it is also a misleading way of presenting complex human experiences.
The format divides everyone into two camps. On one side are the believers, willing to entertain the strange. On the other are the sceptics, often frames as the people trying to spoil the fun. There is little room between them for uncertainty, changing your mind, or saying “I don’t know,” or for asking “what else could explain this?”
And that uncertain middle is where most useful investigation takes place.
As I wrote previously for The Skeptic, balance does not mean treating every explanation as equally likely, regardless of the evidence sitting behind it. Placing an unsupported paranormal claim beside a well-researches alternative explanation can create the appearance of fairness while concealing the fact that the two are not equally well supported.
I say this as someone who has seen that format from the inside.
I contributed to the first season of Uncanny, offering skeptical perspectives and possible alternative explanations for the stories being discussed. At the time, I thought there was real value in the programme that listened to people without immediately deciding that they had encountered a ghost.
Ghost stories can tell us a great deal even when we do not accept them as literal acocunts of the supernatural. They can reveal something to us about memory, fear, grief, place, and expectation. I hoped the programme might explore that uncertain ground.
It gradually became clear that this was not really the direction in which the format was heading.
My researched contributions were presented alongside claims based on anecdotes, misinformation, or personal opinion. Often without making the difference between those forms of evidence clear. During live events, I increasingly felt that I was not there because of what I could contribute to an investigation but, instead, to play “the Skeptic”.
The believer and the skeptic had become characters in the show. My role was to provide resistance so that the ghost story could appear more persuasive by contrast.
Once I realised this, I stepped away from later seasons.
Skepticism is not a theatrical position or a personality type. It is a method: asking how we know something, looking for other explanations, and being willing to revise our conclusions. When it is reduced to a character in a debate, unsupported claims can borrow credibility simply by appearing beside it.
There is also a bigger reason to care about this. Beliefs do not always remain neatly confined to one subject. Paranormal belief can overlap with conspiracy thinking, and susceptibility to dubious health claims (though that does not mean everyone who enjoys a ghost podcast will suddenly begin buying miracle cures.)
The way programmes and the media model evidence and inquiry matters. I did not want my presence to help give the impression that a proper investigation was taking place when the structure of the programme made one almost impossible.
“The biggest investigation into the paranormal - ever”
Robins introduces Uncanny as a platform sharing the “real life stories of the supernatural told by the people they happened to”. He has also describes the show (and all that has followed it since its launch on BBC Radio 4,) as “the biggest investigation into the paranormal - ever.”
This is a claim that is difficult to defend.
People have been studying reports of paranormal experiences for centuries. In Britain, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in 1882 to conduct scholarly research into experiences that appeared to challenge contemporary scientific understanding. The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) followed in 1981, with a broader interest in investigating and educating people about unusual claims and experiences.
Both organisations still exist and continue to operate to this day with healthy memberships. They form part of a much longer and more complicated history of paranormal research.
Interestingly, one of the SPR’s most famous cases, the Enfield Poltergeist, may have also have helped shape the paranormal media we recognise today.
Steven Volk, the BAFTA-winning writer behind the infamous 1992 BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, has frequently cited the Enfield case as a direct influence on the show’s concept. Ghostwatch presented a faux live investigation from a suburban family home tormented by a poltergeist named “Pipes,” blending fictional horror with documentary-style realism.
That mix of horror and realism proved remarkably influential.
When Most Haunted arrived on Living TV years later, its format was immediately recognisable: a team roaming supposedly haunted buildings, night-vision cameras, on-site vigils, and whispered tension whenever something moved in the dark. Some episodes were broadcast live, strengthening in a way the impression that viewers were watching events unfold without a safety net.
Other shows followed, often adopting the same methods while promising a new or more serious approach.
The Americal series Ghost Hunters, which began in 2004, was promoted as a more scientific alternative to the noisy and theatrical style associated with British ghost-hunting television.
And yet, Ghost Hunters helped popularise the use of “ghost hunting tech” with no real scientific merit: electromagnetic field meters, thermal cameras, laser grids, digital recorders, motion sensors…
Equipment which looks technical, and the numbers and displays create an atmosphere of measurement. But these devices were not designed to detect ghosts, nor is there an established reason to interpret their output as evidence of paranormal occurence.
It wasn’t science. It was science cosplay.
That aesthetic has become deeply embedded in modern ghost-hunting culture. Amateur groups across the country now use much the same equipment, often presenting it as evidence that their approach is rational and evidence-based.
The history here forms an interesting loop. Reports from a real family helped inspire fictional television. That fiction influenced later paranormal programmes, which then shaped the expectations and methods of real-world ghost hunters.
So when Uncanny brands itself as “the biggest investigation into the paranormal,” it overlooks that history. Its success rests partly on conventions developed by generations of researchers, writers, producers and ghost hunters before it, however flawed some of their methods may have been.
The Ghost Economy
At this year’s Rusty Razor ceremony, Skeptic editor Michael Marshall described the current revival of commercial ghost hunting:
“We’re seeing ghost hunting groups springing back up around the country, bothering old pubs and stately homes for the right to host sleepovers in the name of science. As well as the BBC commissioning copycat shows featuring comedians doing the same sort of thing. Genuinely, somewhere Yvette Fielding is dusting off her night-vision camera and saying a silent prayer of thanks to Danny Robins.”
The joke points towards a real economy.
For all its polish and prestige, Uncanny is not an entirely new form of paranormal media. It is a particularly successful version of a format that has existed for decades, and these programmes do not remain safely contained inside television screens or podcast feeds.
The stories can turn ordinary buildings into paranormal destinations. Listeners visit the places featured in episodes, commercial ghost hunts are organised, overnight stays are booked and haunted hotels gain another story to add to their advertising.
The effect is not always easy to measure, but the process is familiar. A strange experience becomes a story. The story attracts visitors, who arrive already knowing what they are expected to feel or notice. Some of them report new experiences, which are then added to the existing legend.
The lore shapes people’s expectations, and their experiences refresh the lore.
None of this means that witnesses are lying or inventing what happened to them. People can have sincere, unsettling experiences. It does mean that those experiences are interpreted within a social and cultural setting rather than in isolation.
A cold patch in an ordinary building may be dismissed as a draught. The same sensation in a room already associated with a murder, apparition or poltergeist is more likely to feel meaningful. Once reported, it can become further evidence that the room is haunted.
Over time, one uncertain anecdote can grow into a much larger collection of stories, reinforced less by independent evidence than by repetition.
A good investigation should help us untangle that process. Most ghost-hunting programmes are not designed to do so. They are designed to create suspense, maintain uncertainty and bring the audience back for another episode.
That is not necessarily a problem when a programme presents itself clearly as entertainment. The difficulty begins when entertainment is described as investigation and the techniques used to build suspense are presented as a serious way of establishing what happened.
A cliffhanger is useful storytelling. It is not a research finding.
Ghost stories remain a rich and valuable part of human culture. They allow us to talk about fear, memory, grief, injustice and identity. They can preserve the emotional history of a place long after the official version has been forgotten.
I am not arguing for a world without spooky stories. I have spent too much of my life studying them to want that.
But there is a difference between listening to a story and investigating a claim. When paranormal programmes blur that difference, audiences can be encouraged to confuse storytelling with evidence and scientific-looking equipment with scientific practice.
I have investigated paranormal reports for decades. Doing it properly requires far less glamour than television suggests.
It takes patience, careful listening and a willingness to follow ordinary explanations even when they are less exciting. It means checking what a witness remembers without assuming that memory works like a recording. It means examining the history of a location rather than repeating its folklore as fact. Most importantly, it means being willing to discover that your preferred explanation is wrong.
That is not a weakness in an investigation. It is the point of having one.
Paranormal media can still be enjoyable, moving and culturally interesting without being mistaken for science. A well-told ghost story does not need to prove that ghosts exist in order to matter.
In fact, the mystery becomes much more interesting when we move beyond Team Believer and Team Skeptic and begin asking better questions: What did this person experience? Why did they understand it in this way? What else was happening around them? How did the story change as it was retold?
We may not always reach a satisfying answer.
But admitting that is more honest- and far more curious -than pretending the investigation has already taken place.
The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.
Great to see you writing here again Hayley, and I'm glad you've tackled Uncanny head-on like this. I wondered if there was a reason for you not being involved beyond that first season, so it's reassuring to know you had similar misgivings to those of many of us listening. The repeated insistence that "if you're a skeptic then you need to provide a logical explanation for (insert phenomenon here)," drove me to stop listening to Robins and his output a year or two back out of sheer frustration. In some ways I guess it reflects the entire BBC practice of false equivalence, and it's troubling that this kind of paranormal programming is making such a resurgence in a time when even the basic tenets of objective reality are frequently rejected in the media.