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Uncanny (BBC Programme / Podcast)

brownmane said:
I may have misunderstood what he said about the phone on the wall. He said something about there being no cable.
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His exact words are: "I said that's impossible. There's no way. Then I literally pulled it off the wall and showed 'there's no cable here. There's no physical way for it to ring.' And I put it back on the wall. And no sooner than I put it back on the wall than the phone rings. "
 
brownmane said:
The second witness, did he not say that he took the phone off of the wall to show that it was not connected at all? I wanted this question answered while I was listening to the woman’s story and so I may have misunderstood what he said about the phone on the wall. He said something about there being no cable.
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I believe so, yes.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
It would be good to know the actual type of phone as some have no connection other than the cord you plug in but others have a wireless function, too.
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I did not think of that because I have never had a portable phone.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
It would be good to know the actual type of phone as some have no connection other than the cord you plug in but others have a wireless function, too.
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If by wireless you mean like wifi (as opposed to an old fashioned "cordless phone"), its not a direct answer but you can draw conclusions from two statements in the podcast. It happened in 2005. And she referred to it, and the other phones in the house, as "those big, like, Eighties business phones"

For completion's sake, here are the other precise comments about the phone itself:

"one of the first things I did was call the phone company and have dad's phone shut down"

"I just heard static. Hello. Hello. That's really strange. So I just hung up the phone. And then I punched the line, to listen again to see if somehow it was active...and there was just baseline. Silence. "

"They (the phone company) said that's impossible. The line is absolutely deactivated. And from other phones I would call the line and you would get the message "the number you have called has been disconnected or is no longer in service" So there was no way that line was active."


"I pulled the jack out. It is NOT connected."


Brian : "I literally pulled it off the wall and showed there's no cables here. There's no physical way for it to ring. And i put it back on the wall."

Brian: "I worked on avionics and electronics in airplanes . I KNOW there is no physical way this phone should be ringing. "
 
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This is a business phone from 1990 and it has battery powered electrical components:

s-l1600.jpg


https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/40441353...MIobSBoYeIhgMVm5JoCR2_JQ3nEAQYBSABEgKLYPD_BwE

Where there are electrical components there is the opportunity for interference from an external power source which needs to be taken into account. But it is still a good case, we could just do with knowing what type of phone.
 
New episode. Again not much to investigate or dissect from the outside. Poltergeist activity in a new house.

Only comment to make is to wonder how seriously Kieran and his stand ins take their own explanations. I know it's his job to suggest "something" down to earth but you do often get the impression he knows his proposal is nonsense or doesn't fit the details given....but how does he process that disconnect afterwards? Does he ever secretly believe?

Next week is the Bigfoot episode.
 
gattino said:
New episode. Again not much to investigate or dissect from the outside. Poltergeist activity in a new house.

Only comment to make is to wonder how seriously Kieran and his stand ins take their own explanations. I know it's his job to suggest "something" down to earth but you do often get the impression he knows his proposal is nonsense or doesn't fit the details given....but how does he process that disconnect afterwards? Does he ever secretly believe?

Next week is the Bigfoot episode.
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I thought it was a good episode, fairly classic poltergeist manifestation, even down to a doppelganger of one of the residents. I agree that Kieran often seems to be giving an explanation that does not match the witness statements - for example, when the apparition was seen from outside, wandering around the house, fiddling with the blinds and switching lights on, Keiran says "well maybe it was pareidolia from reflections off the windows". Really? Opening and closing the blinds? Turning the lights on?

Quite interesting in that the house is a new build on agricultural land. As usual, the conversation turns to the history of the land, expulsion of the Native Americans etc. There never seems to be any discussion that perhaps entities can wander and choose a place to haunt, or that perhaps the entity was never human in the first place (incidentally, I think both these things may be true in some cases).
 
It's off topic but on the subject of "other than the dead" a number of times ive read or heard apparitional stories and the thought has occurred to me ...ive no idea how unoriginal it is...that what people are witnessing might be someone else acting out their dreams. That the shadow figure in your house is someone dreaming of being in your house. And the footsteps over head too are a physical manifestation of your child or partner asleep and dreaming of walking that path.
 
gattino said:
New episode. Again not much to investigate or dissect from the outside. Poltergeist activity in a new house.

Only comment to make is to wonder how seriously Kieran and his stand ins take their own explanations. I know it's his job to suggest "something" down to earth but you do often get the impression he knows his proposal is nonsense or doesn't fit the details given....but how does he process that disconnect afterwards? Does he ever secretly believe?

Next week is the Bigfoot episode.
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I've often thought that Kieran sometimes sounds a bit tired of having to play the pantomime villain role of the skeptic who has to p*ss on the believers' bonfire.
 
I suppose he's restricted by social constraints. He's aware that the two biggest get out of jail/explains everything weapons in the Sceptic's arsenal are ones he can't ever use in polite surroundings..... Fabrication and Delusion. Without being able to make such unprovable charges he's got one hand tied behind his back.
 
gattino said:
It's off topic but on the subject of "other than the dead" a number of times ive read or heard apparitional stories and the thought has occurred to me ...ive no idea how unoriginal it is...that what people are witnessing might be someone else acting out their dreams. That the shadow figure in your house is someone dreaming of being in your house. And the footsteps over head too are a physical manifestation of your child or partner asleep and dreaming of walking that path.
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I thought that once when I was temporarily living in my parents' house years ago, I've posted on the board somewhere, I returned to my bedroom and opened the door and a kind of invisible cat-like blur streaked out through the opening and down the stairs, as our cat often did. I went into the bedroom, and the cat was asleep on the bed - I wondered if it was dreaming or having an OBE or something.
 
Another strong case for me with an articulate primary witness.

On these forums and the IHTM pages of FT and the books we have had cases of toys moving on their own, vardøgers/doppelgängers and children seeing "bad" people in supposedly empty rooms and this case combines them all. What isn't made clear is how far Derek (?) her partner got into the house and whether it was him that turned on every light bar the garage one.

I felt the guest believer lacked criticality but then Ciarán doesn't appear to have listened to what the witnesses were saying (as @gattino has already highlighted). I suppose one possibility is that the blind was blowing in a breeze as the door to the house was opened but that is a pretty weak argument when you compare it to the actual testimony.

Another thing we don't know is why Derek thought there was somebody in the house: had he seen the figure in the window too or did he see something else when he went inside?

Then what happened after this, did they sit there in the car until the cops arrived? Or did they leave the scene? Is it possible a human intruder found a way out from the back of the house? In this scenario an intruder is aware the car has come back and wants to see what is going on outside but gets confused with the blinds. Then whilst Lisa and Derek are still outside the intruder makes their escape.

Finally, I feel we have to consider that there are some cases where creative writing is being passed off as fact in order to raise the profile of the aspiring author (or any number of other reasons). This case does include some horror fiction cliches: it starts in the basement, toys move on their own, a child sees the "bad man", lights switch themselves on, they find themselves outside the house looking at whatever is it inside watching them etc.
 
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I've just recalled one of the "more tales from my guests" I posted on here a couple of years ago was an American man who was nonchalant about paranormal stuff happening around his ( terminally Ill) wife in particular...he described poltergeist like activity in the house.

The relevance of this being that theirs too was a newly built house with no previous occupants to hypothesise were haunting it.
 
gattino said:
It's off topic but on the subject of "other than the dead" a number of times ive read or heard apparitional stories and the thought has occurred to me ...ive no idea how unoriginal it is...that what people are witnessing might be someone else acting out their dreams. That the shadow figure in your house is someone dreaming of being in your house. And the footsteps over head too are a physical manifestation of your child or partner asleep and dreaming of walking that path.
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I'm currently reading Ghost and Ghoul by T.C. Lethbridge and I've been giving thought to his theory of projection. While it was widely panned, I think it's worth considering in some cases, especially the "everything is creeeeeepy" crowd who can get themselves into a lather about the most mundane things.
 
gattino said:
It's off topic but on the subject of "other than the dead" a number of times ive read or heard apparitional stories and the thought has occurred to me ...ive no idea how unoriginal it is...that what people are witnessing might be someone else acting out their dreams. That the shadow figure in your house is someone dreaming of being in your house. And the footsteps over head too are a physical manifestation of your child or partner asleep and dreaming of walking that path.
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I have told of seeing my brother (I was about 7 or 8 and he would have been between 1-2) standing by my bed one morning and then him fading away when I spoke to him. I have wondered if it was an OBE. I never thought ghost because, of course he wasn't dead.
 
SimonBurchell said:
Quite interesting in that the house is a new build on agricultural land. As usual, the conversation turns to the history of the land, expulsion of the Native Americans etc. There never seems to be any discussion that perhaps entities can wander and choose a place to haunt, or that perhaps the entity was never human in the first place (incidentally, I think both these things may be true in some cases).
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I personally get tired of the built on a graveyard, burial grounds idea. Afaik, this idea came about from Poltergeist movie. Wherever civilization is, everything will have been built over something else.

The idea of elementals is more interesting to me. Though they are alien to us and modern people don't really have a reference point to understanding what an elemental is.
 
brownmane said:
I personally get tired of the built on a graveyard, burial grounds idea. Afaik, this idea came about from Poltergeist movie. Wherever civilization is, everything will have been built over something else.

The idea of elementals is more interesting to me. Though they are alien to us and modern people don't really have a reference point to understanding what an elemental is.
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I don't think I've ever believed that ghosts are the conscious or otherwise spirits of the dead and have never got excited about plague pits or whatever. For me, so many hauntings and poltergeists are linked to disturbances/alterations to the structure of buildings or the land itself that there has to be some element of stone tape going on (just not as literal as recordings being made in iron).
 
Have to say that Uncanny USA has had a quite lukewarm reception on the Uncanny Fans Facebook page (and I think a few of them are actually in love with Danny)

Re episode 2:

"Absolute rubbish. America is huge… I mean huge… and this was the best they had… a crackling phone…
Should have stuck to the uk."

"Kept waiting for something much more interesting to happen but it didn’t! Scant detail, lack of atmosphere, and revering of someone who seemed pretty controlling. The first one was a bit more interesting to listen to, but just seemed so far-fetched. And I’m Team Believer!!"

"Im not sure how they managed to make ‘woman receives phone calls’ last 30 minutes "

https://www.facebook.com/groups/uncannyfan/
 
Paul_Exeter said:
I don't think I've ever believed that ghosts are the conscious or otherwise spirits of the dead and have never got excited about plague pits or whatever. For me, so many hauntings and poltergeists are linked to disturbances/alterations to the structure of buildings or the land itself that there has to be some element of stone tape going on (just not as literal as recordings being made in iron).
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Having lived in a house haunted after a murder-suicide, the sense of a conscious presence trapped there was palpable. Likewise, my run-in with a hostile ghost at a church makes me think there is something more going on than stone tape/timeslips.
 
SimonBurchell said:
Having lived in a house haunted after a murder-suicide, the sense of a conscious presence trapped there was palpable. Likewise, my run-in with a hostile ghost at a church makes me think there is something more going on than stone tape/timeslips.
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Really good point you have made there, hadn't factored that in. How did it manifest beyond the palpable presence?
 
SimonBurchell said:
Sounds of crying, sounds of activity from the (empty) kitchen, misplacing objects.
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Crikey!

There was a case in the Andy Gilbert Police hauntings book where a house was unoccupied and locked up following a suicide. Neighbours reported sounds of a violent break in and the Police attended. Two officers could hear the banging and crashing from outside as they made their entry. As they entered the living room every object was a couple of inches above the floor/surface and then crashed down.

I will dig it out.

So we have 'video replays' of people and events from the past AND trapped souls
 
Having seen hundreds of quite convincing videos of alleged ghosts/activities gathered on youtube channels like Nuke's Top Five, I accept that there is a "thing" happening but the consistencies in its nature and behaviour raise so many questions. One that bugs me a lot is why are "ghosts/poltergeists/whatever" so obsessed with opening and closing doors?

If you apply the door obsession mystery to the Uncanny episode, you have to wonder what to make of the invisible presence repeatedly trying to open the door of the bathroom, as reported. What would you infer from that? If the house is newly built then the door and its handle would not have been there before - so no replay of/overlap with the past can be suggested. If some pre-modern inhabitants of the land are haunting the place, how would they even know what a door handle is? And if they're immaterial/elemental.. and come to that navigating the house as they appear to be...how would a locked door stymie them at all?

What you're left with is the impression that whatever "it" is, its aware of scary movie tropes and is actively - like the fairground owner in any episode of Scooby Doo - trying to theatrically scare the occupants.
 
gattino said:
Having seen hundreds of quite convincing videos of alleged ghosts/activities gathered on youtube channels like Nuke's Top Five, I accept that there is a "thing" happening but the consistencies in its nature and behaviour raise so many questions. One that bugs me a lot is why are "ghosts/poltergeists/whatever" so obsessed with opening and closing doors?

If you apply the door obsession mystery to the Uncanny episode, you have to wonder what to make of the invisible presence repeatedly trying to open the door of the bathroom, as reported. What would you infer from that? If the house is newly built then the door and its handle would not have been there before - so no replay of/overlap with the past can be suggested. If some pre-modern inhabitants of the land are haunting the place, how would they even know what a door handle is? And if they're immaterial/elemental.. and come to that navigating the house as they appear to be...how would a locked door stymie them at all?

What you're left with is the impression that whatever "it" is, its aware of scary movie tropes and is actively - like the fairground owner in any episode of Scooby Doo - trying to theatrically scare the occupants.
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Food for thought...!

I know there is a lot of folklore about all manner of paranormal creatures and ghosts etc and bridges, eg not being able to cross them etc. Do doorways present a similar barrier?
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Crikey!

There was a case in the Andy Gilbert Police hauntings book where a house was unoccupied and locked up following a suicide. Neighbours reported sounds of a violent break in and the Police attended. Two officers could hear the banging and crashing from outside as they made their entry. As they entered the living room every object was a couple of inches above the floor/surface and then crashed down.

I will dig it out.

So we have 'video replays' of people and events from the past AND trapped souls
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I love those 2 Andy Gilbert books, I just read them again a couple of weeks ago. I remember that one where every object was a couple of inches above the floor for a split second. There was another one as well about a police man who was alone in a station when he went to investigate some noises on the floor above, I forget the details but basically he was going back down the stairs when he felt a hand on his arm gently holding him back and then he had an overwhelming sense of gratitude from this invisible someone as if they were very grateful that he had acknowledged their presence, and he had the sense that the 'spirit' had been making the noises to try to get his attention and be acknowledged. I'm probably not explaining it very well but it's well worth reading again if any one has those books.
 
gattino said:
What you're left with is the impression that whatever "it" is, its aware of scary movie tropes and is actively - like the fairground owner in any episode of Scooby Doo - trying to theatrically scare the occupants.
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Maybe this is the answer to the question 'why don't we see many modern ghosts' it's because they're following a Hollywood script
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Have to say that Uncanny USA has had a quite lukewarm reception on the Uncanny Fans Facebook page (and I think a few of them are actually in love with Danny)

Re episode 2:

"Absolute rubbish. America is huge… I mean huge… and this was the best they had… a crackling phone…
Should have stuck to the uk."

"Kept waiting for something much more interesting to happen but it didn’t! Scant detail, lack of atmosphere, and revering of someone who seemed pretty controlling. The first one was a bit more interesting to listen to, but just seemed so far-fetched. And I’m Team Believer!!"

"Im not sure how they managed to make ‘woman receives phone calls’ last 30 minutes "

https://www.facebook.com/groups/uncannyfan/
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The number of comments about how much better the UK stories are... There were a few "UK" stories that were not that interesting. I liked the first US story because it was well told by the guest. Is it paranormal? Probably not, but a weird one anyway.

I think that people are forgetting that not all of the stories were interesting. I also think that the Uncanny brand is spreading its host too thin. He is doing a weekly podcast, currently in US as well as doing live shows. Who is doing the research for the podcast? How much time is given to research stories? I think that the US stories will only have come from people who are familiar with Uncanny and so the range in the US for contributions is limited.

The skeptic and paranormal sided guests don't sound enthused to even give relevant opinions. This is a weak spot on the program as well.

I would like to hear more discussion regarding the stories. We don't have to question if the person's perception is valid or not, but I would like to hear more of "did you think of this" questions - a little more give and take.
 
I think it's just a combination of proprietorial claims that always happen to a show one watched/listened to before it became more popular......its always like that. People who were with it from the start will always claim it used to be better, back when i was there and you weren't. And a British snobbery about all things American. A kind of defensive affectation of superiority. We long for Americans - not French, not Russians - to find our comedy shows funny so we can then announce proudly they can never get "our" humour. Or whatever.

As far as I can tell there is no drop in quality or change in format in the US version...just a different accent in the witnesses, who are as sincere and articulate sounding to my ears as anyone on the previous series. The expectation that it would be dumbed down or hollywoodised seems to have been unfounded. If other paranormal shows from the states created that expectation it reflects the outlook of US tv stations and program makers, not the American public at large. I'm sure there are plenty of gullible nut jobs in both countries.
 
brownmane said:
The number of comments about how much better the UK stories are... There were a few "UK" stories that were not that interesting. I liked the first US story because it was well told by the guest. Is it paranormal? Probably not, but a weird one anyway.

I think that people are forgetting that not all of the stories were interesting. I also think that the Uncanny brand is spreading its host too thin. He is doing a weekly podcast, currently in US as well as doing live shows. Who is doing the research for the podcast? How much time is given to research stories? I think that the US stories will only have come from people who are familiar with Uncanny and so the range in the US for contributions is limited.

The skeptic and paranormal sided guests don't sound enthused to even give relevant opinions. This is a weak spot on the program as well.

I would like to hear more discussion regarding the stories. We don't have to question if the person's perception is valid or not, but I would like to hear more of "did you think of this" questions - a little more give and take.
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Perhaps it is the format that has become tired:

Danny: So this terrifying event happened to our witness

Expert Believer: This is a classic example of [insert type of paranormal activity]

Expert Skeptic: It was all ultrasound/pareidolia

Repeat.

Ciarán in particular has begun to sound rather jaded. I guess the live shows have the energy of the audience interacting.

But how would you refresh it?
 
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