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Uncanny (BBC Programme / Podcast)

I watched the Bearpark episode today with my wife. She has absolutely no Fortean leanings but says she enjoyed these last two episodes as they are a lot more interesting than the silly capers you see on the ghost hunting programmes.
Knowing I listen to the podcast, she asked if anyone experiencing a current haunting has ever been in touch with Danny and on the show, or is it always people claiming something happened decades?
That got me thinking!
 
Tempest63 said:
Knowing I listen to the podcast, she asked if anyone experiencing a current haunting has ever been in touch with Danny and on the show, or is it always people claiming something happened decades?
That got me thinking!
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The only one I can think of is series 2 case 12 (The Ghost That Followed Us Home) if I've remembered correctly. I think that's the one with the awful 'selfie' from the mobile phone which made me go 'oh f*ck no'... and I say that regardless of whether it's real or fake. I was really hoping we might get a ongoing case for the last episode but I don't think that's going to happen.

In other Uncanny related news I went to see 2:22 recently and it was excellent. I'm also going to see Uncanny live soon and I can't wait! I'm planning on reading the book before I go, and I'm currently listening to all the podcast episodes again too. I think my favourite is Harry Called, although I do quite like The Return of Elizabeth Dacre for the very odd dinner party time slip incident alone.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
One thing that struck me as highly incongruous was the presence of room bells and a bell-box in a house built in the late 1930s.
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They didn't look very Victorian though well not the ones I've seen. I suspect that the first owner /builder being a mine owner was aspirational and that's why they were included. But yes I agree it did seem a bit of a surprise. The wiring would have been quite old and I imagine that's why they went off at odd times but unless I missed it I didn't say that being commented upon.
 
Cloudbusting said:
The only one I can think of is series 2 case 12 (The Ghost That Followed Us Home) if I've remembered correctly. I think that's the one with the awful 'selfie' from the mobile phone which made me go 'oh f*ck no'... and I say that regardless of whether it's real or fake. I was really hoping we might get a ongoing case for the last episode but I don't think that's going to happen.
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Yes, that case (the one with the supposed ghost of the little girl 'Nicole' who was thought to have followed Carly & Simon home from France) was described as being an on-going (or 'live') haunting. I really hope that there will be an update on happenings. Certainly the series of creepy photos that were put up on the BBC "Uncanny" website could use some constructive and objective consideration.
 
Id have to rewatch the show but I thought that the bell box was illustrative and not necessarily the ones in the house. I don't think the current owner showed us them?

As for the dubious photos in the Carly Simon case, they received a fair amount of critical scorn on the Facebook uncanny fans page which surprised me. I thought it would be full of ****-licking sycophants.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
...One thing that struck me as highly incongruous was the presence of room bells and a bell-box in a house built in the late 1930s.
The house me and my wife first rented when we were married had that very same feature, but it was a Victorian house converted into maisonettes. Amazingly the bells were still functional and we were amused to have a hangover from the "Upstairs Downstairs" epoch when servants would be summoned by ringing a bell...
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We had them in the house I grew up in. They still worked (much to the annoyance of my parents). It was an Edwardian property, and they were operated by a system of wires which physically pulled the levers on a set of bells by the kitchen.

I have seen bell systems - or evidence of them - in later properties (1920's / 1930's), in houses much more modestly sized than those hulking Victorian villas, but still originally marketed at upper middle class households, who - at the time - might still employ a maid or cook (although generally, I suspect, on a more modest and possibly part time basis than the previous generation).

I also once stayed in a 1920's built mansion flat in London which still had an old control panel hanging off the wall; I don't think they were uncommon in such apartments, but by the time these places were built I'm pretty sure they were generally wired in to the electrical ring circuit.
 
Spookdaddy said:
We had them in the house I grew up in. They still worked (much to the annoyance of my parents). It was an Edwardian property, and they were operated by a system of wires which physically pulled the levers on a set of bells by the kitchen.

I have seen bell systems - or evidence of them - in later properties (1920's / 1930's), in houses much more modestly sized than those hulking Victorian villas, but still originally marketed at upper middle class households, who - at the time - might still employ a maid or cook (although generally, I suspect, on a more modest and possibly part time basis than the previous generation).

I also once stayed in a 1920's built mansion flat in London which still had an old control panel hanging off the wall; I don't think they were uncommon in such apartments, but by the time these places were built I'm pretty sure they were generally wired in to the electrical ring circuit.
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A few months ago, I posted about our stay in the allegedly haunted 16th century Bear Hotel in Devizes.
I just revisited my photos and one, showing the corridor leading to our room, shows a bell-box on the wall.
I doubt it had been used since Edwardian times, but IIRC it looked almost identical to the one in the Uncanny episode.

bells.png
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
One thing that struck me as highly incongruous was the presence of room bells and a bell-box in a house built in the late 1930s.
The house me and my wife first rented when we were married had that very same feature, but it was a Victorian house converted into maisonettes. Amazingly the bells were still functional and we were amused to have a hangover from the "Upstairs Downstairs" epoch when servants would be summoned by ringing a bell.
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I thought that was odd too. Servants had mostly died out by the 30s (WWI a lot of people found out they could get better jobs in factories) also the house wasn’t very big even if they did have servants, they could just call them.

Why did the insist the boy was Victorian? Those clothes could be from early 1800s to 1950s. Lower class men’s/boys clothes didn’t change much.

I’ve heard of the figures in sleep paralysis but never levitation. But he was certain he was awake anyway.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
A few months ago, I posted about our stay in the allegedly haunted 16th century Bear Hotel in Devizes.
I just revisited my photos and one, showing the corridor leading to our room, shows a bell-box on the wall.
I doubt it had been used since Edwardian times, but IIRC it looked almost identical to the one in the Uncanny episode.

View attachment 70705
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There's one just like this one on the first floor of The Red Lion Hotel in (sorry mods) Cromer. Someone called 'Billy the bellboy' used to operate it according to a medium who was with a small group I showed around. According to her, Billy was "a rock"/supportive kind young man to a woman during the time her husband had gone off to France to fight during WW1, this now ghost woman was now confusing me for Billy back then so was following me around but now in 2007. That's what the medium said anyway and I hadn't told her about my shadow woman sightings.
 
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MorningAngel said:
I thought that was odd too. Servants had mostly died out by the 30s (WWI a lot of people found out they could get better jobs in factories) also the house wasn’t very big even if they did have servants, they could just call them.

Why did the insist the boy was Victorian? Those clothes could be from early 1800s to 1950s. Lower class men’s/boys clothes didn’t change much.

I’ve heard of the figures in sleep paralysis but never levitation. But he was certain he was awake anyway.
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There were still girls going into 'service' right through into the 50's, a couple of my mum's friends and one aunt were in service in big houses even after WW2. And if you had a maid or cook, then you'd use a bell - it is very lower class to raise one's voice, darling.
 
catseye said:
There were still girls going into 'service' right through into the 50's, a couple of my mum's friends and one aunt were in service in big houses even after WW2. And if you had a maid or cook, then you'd use a bell - it is very lower class to raise one's voice, darling.
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I was thinking of Blithe Spirit (wasn’t that set in 1930s?) and they definitely had a maid. It did become rarer going forward, and less live in.
 
Just watched the latest episode, after a failed attempt last night after a decent day's hiking (I fell asleep!). I really enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed how terrified Danny looked when Ian first described the levitation incident.

There is an instant jump to the apparition of a boy being a child miner. There were fields there before the house was built. Assuming the apparition is the ghost of a boy, could he not have been a farm hand? I think his form of dress in that era would have been the same... generic Victorian poor boy.

However, given that this is a poltergeist, there is one thing to bear in mind, which is that poltergeists have mimicked people using apparitions before, including living persons, family members, and former residents... it could be something imitating a boy who used to live locally!

Also, the servants' bells are a relatively minor point to get hung up on, a minor anecdote in the overall tale. If it weren't for the other goings-on you could even attribute it to rodents knocking against the bell-pulls.
 
MorningAngel said:
I was thinking of Blithe Spirit (wasn’t that set in 1930s?) and they definitely had a maid. It did become rarer going forward, and less live in.
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Oh yes, there was definitely a move away from 'servants' after WW1 but there were definitely still houses that had 'help' right through probably into the 70's, usually occupied by people who were born before WW1 and wanted to keep up appearances. They'd have bells, even for non-live-in staff, because it was what they had grown up with and were used to.
 
catseye said:
Oh yes, there was definitely a move away from 'servants' after WW1 but there were definitely still houses that had 'help' right through probably into the 70's, usually occupied by people who were born before WW1 and wanted to keep up appearances. They'd have bells, even for non-live-in staff, because it was what they had grown up with and were used to.
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Believe it or not, there are still some houses in the UK today that still employ domestic staff... Relatively few, aristocracy and oligarchs, but they are there.
 
SimonBurchell said:
Believe it or not, there are still some houses in the UK today that still employ domestic staff... Relatively few, aristocracy and oligarchs, but they are there.
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Yes, I know - there's one near me - but these days the staff go into these jobs as professionals. You can train as a butler or housekeeper etc and the cleaners tend to have other jobs too. It's not quite the same as being forced to go into service for girls with no real education or prospects as it used to be. It's an actual career path nowadays.

I suspect they use mobile phones to summon the staff too, rather than bells.
 
MorningAngel said:
What do we make of the different identifications of Miss Howard? I was wondering if Norah looked more like her mother as she got older. We don’t know what age the ghost appeared as.
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Personally i think the photo ids were completely worthless, if not laughable. I say this because the ages of the sisters especially makes the idea that they retained or retrieved an accurate recall of facial appearance into their sixties of a face they encountered fleetingly when they were toddlers is just nonsense. The fact they might think they did is likely a result of recalling occasional conversations about the experience over the years made them individually carry around a mental notion of a look in the same way we do when reading about characters in a novel.

Even the idea that they remember the original incident rather than subsequent discussions with their mum about it is highly dubious. On the show the younger sister says she doesn't know how old she was, but guesses 3, maybe 4. Can you remember detailed facts, let alone the faces of individuals you saw at 4 with no photos to later jog/reconfirm your memory? But its even more unlikely than that because she may not remember her age, but their mother did. In her original written account she tells us precisely "Miss Howard 'appeared' to both my daughters at different times, when they were 18 months old and 3 years old". So now we have to imagine a facial recall from a time when even walking and talking are at best new!

Of course you could interpret the mums words to mean they had an earlier previous encounter than the ones they do remember and are describing. But the girls were different ages so that would require the words "when they were 18 months and 3 years old" to refer to four sets of encounters, each girl having them at each age.

Leaving that mystery to one side we could, i suppose, speculate that an apparition having a psychic aspect to its nature might embed itself more firmly in the mind of the percipient than a material experience does. But even being that generous I think the photographic "test" was a poor one. Surely instead of showing them two Howard women and saying pick one, they should have mixed them with photos of other women from the same period to see if they went straight for one of the Howards.
 
Both my wife and I independently dismissed the photo ID as worthless. We said that the photos should have been put to the ladies, separately, and asked "is there anyone here that you recognise?" rather than telling them in advance who the photos depicted.
Then when both witnesses had done their scrutiny, their comments could be reconciled.
 
I think with the first episode we have a decent and interesting reality that two families - if we have total faith in Kate to not just be riffing on what she read about the first family - had childhood experience of an apparent apparition in the same house. If we trust them then that's story enough. Its the claim of discovering by detective work corroborative objective evidence that appears to be a lot of hooey and allows mistrust to slip in.
 
gattino said:
I think with the first episode we have a decent and interesting reality that two families - if we have total faith in Kate to not just be riffing on what she read about the first family - had childhood experience of an apparent apparition in the same house. If we trust them then that's story enough. Its the claim of discovering by detective work corroborative objective evidence that appears to be a lot of hooey and allows mistrust to slip in.
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As someone who has studied History I like to try and get to the bottom of things.

While I’m here can I just get something off my chest? ‘Old houses make noises’. No they don’t houses with central heating make noises. Our 1920s houses doesn’t make a peep (well until we had the roof replaced and now the plastic boards between the house and the roof make a clunking sound when heating up in the sun.) as we don’t have CH. I remember staying over at my grandparents 1960s house with CH and that used to make noises like no bodies business.
 
MorningAngel said:
While I’m here can I just get something off my chest? ‘Old houses make noises’. No they don’t houses with central heating make noises. Our 1920s houses doesn’t make a peep (well until we had the roof replaced and now the plastic boards between the house and the roof make a clunking sound when heating up in the sun.) as we don’t have CH. I remember staying over at my grandparents 1960s house with CH and that used to make noises like no bodies business.
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Ha! I just read this and then opened up Facebook. This was the second thing on my feed:

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MorningAngel said:
As someone who has studied History I like to try and get to the bottom of things.

While I’m here can I just get something off my chest? ‘Old houses make noises’. No they don’t houses with central heating make noises. Our 1920s houses doesn’t make a peep (well until we had the roof replaced and now the plastic boards between the house and the roof make a clunking sound when heating up in the sun.) as we don’t have CH. I remember staying over at my grandparents 1960s house with CH and that used to make noises like no bodies business.
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No central heating here, and I'm over on the Minor Strangeness board reporting on the occasional bang/thump noise that comes from my bedroom, just under the window. Previous big, ancient house had central heating but nobody could afford to run it, so was always cold, and that place knocked, creaked, banged and rattled (but the fact that the windows didn't fit and the place was full of animals probably had a lot to do with this).
 
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