Danny Robins has never seen a ghost and it troubles him, even if, he says, he is torn “between wanting proof, and yet being terrified by what that would mean”. Instead, he lives vicariously – as we all do, those of us who are fans of his podcasts – through the people who tell him their ghost stories.
Robins has become Britain’s most famous collector of paranormal experiences; his 2021 podcast The Battersea Poltergeist, was a huge hit, and his latest, The Witch Farm, is a creepy investigation into a haunted remote farmhouse in Wales. He has made two series of Uncanny, in which he interviews people who claim to have had a paranormal experience and scrutinises their stories. There’s his West End play 2.22 A Ghost Story, and he is about to bring Uncanny to TV, with a BBC Two show, as well as a live tour. It’s quite a twist of fate – Robins likes the idea of fate – for the man who, not so long ago, was down to his last fiver.
This week sees the launch of his book Into the Uncanny, which investigates four new cases, including spirits that were unleashed when a man dug up his back garden, and a poltergeist who, rather than the violent havoc usually associated with such phenomena, liked to stack crockery neatly. To me, I say, that’s much scarier than plates smashing, or even kitchen knives flying through the air. Robins agrees. “When you know that there is no way any other human being could have done that, it becomes terrifying.”
We meet in a suitably gothic London hotel which, by coincidence, long before it was refurbished and filled with tourists, Robins had visited on a tour when it was eerily empty. “It had the quality of ghost-hunting,” he remembers. He is in his mid-40s, but seems endearingly boyish – he has the same Britpop-era haircut I imagine he had as a teenager – and he talks fast, with infectious enthusiasm.
There has been a rise in interest in the paranormal in the last few years, and, by a twist of fate, Robins’s timing was perfect. The Battersea Poltergeist, which told the gripping story of a girl in the 1950s who believed she was being haunted, and unearthed lots of compelling evidence, came out in January 2021, during the arduous third Covid lockdown. “There was something about that time when we became prisoners of our own house and when our previously cosy spaces became oppressive,” says Robins. “The idea of a haunted house really resonated, and I think particularly that story, because that really was about a family under siege.”
He draws parallels, “between the periods after the first and second world wars, when many people used the paranormal as a way of processing what was happening, and the chaos, the uncertainty and the death” and the present day, with the spectre of a potentially deadly global pandemic, the sense of impending doom around the climate crisis, and war in Ukraine, as well as fraught years, politically and economically. “If you look at the points in time when horror becomes very popular, such as the demon-filled drama of Jacobean times or the movies of the 60s, it’s like the more extreme that society gets, the more extreme it needs its art to be.”
The decline of religion may also be a factor in explaining why a belief in the paranormal has risen in its place, but it could be a reaction against the stridency of the New Atheists – Richard Dawkins and friends may have killed God, but they can’t kill (for some of us, anyway) the need to believe in something, even if it is a malevolent spirit in a remote Highlands bothy, a UFO, or a foul-smelling demonic beast in a French castle. If we live in a rational world, where everything can be explained, where’s the mystery, the magic? “Magic,” says Robins, “is the perfect word.”
When Robins was 20, and back from university for Christmas, he thought he was dying from a heart attack on the bathroom floor of his childhood home. It turned out to be a panic attack, but in that moment, it felt like the end. He even hallucinated angels. It still affects him more than 20 years later. “I went from being this fairly happy-go-lucky person to somebody who felt like I’d seen outside the curtain. Suddenly, I was aware of death in a way I hadn’t been before, and spent a lot of time scared after that. I felt haunted by that experience.”
He became depressed and anxious in the ensuing year. “It was debilitating,” he says. “I couldn’t socialise, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. I remember going to meet friends and actually vomiting because I was so overcome by this horrible fear. My life since then has been an attempt to keep it in the box, keep it locked down. If I find myself thinking too much about death, I have these moments where I have a bit of a wobble and it all swells up again. You wouldn’t have to be a great psychiatrist to have a field day with me and ghosts – that ghosts are the antidote, and I’m swilling pints of the antidote every day to try to ward off that dark fear of death.”
Robins had always been fascinated with ghosts. He grew up in Newcastle, where his mother was a teacher and his father a university lecturer. “They were definitely products of the 60s – they became vegetarian, atheists, leftwing. I remember being taken on marches for the miners’ strike and CND, those kind of things. They were very thoughtful and questioning, but belief just was not a part of our household.”
For his mother, especially, who had been raised a Catholic, it was a conscious rejection, but Robins was fascinated by his Irish immigrant grandparents’ faith. Visiting them, he would be thrillingly, frighteningly, fascinated by their books about martyrs, and pictures of Jesus with their graphic depiction of the sacred heart. “Catholicism is, it seems,” he writes, “the only branch of Christianity that takes its aesthetic from horror movies.” He wondered, almost optimistically, if his mum might have got it wrong. As a family, he says, it was like “we’d made this decision that there’s no greater magic, nothing outside the light, nothing hiding in the shadows”.
Robins is the sceptic who wants to believe; I’m the same, although I don’t really believe in ghosts. Except … his tales are so compelling, and his witnesses usually so rational and sceptical. Ken, of “Bloody hell, Ken” fame – Robins’s words in response to the story of a terrifying event at Ken’s halls of residence when he was a student, told in Uncanny’s The Evil in Room 611 episode – is a geneticist who appeared in disguise at one Uncanny fan convention.
“The idea that to retain your credibility as a scientist, you have to disguise yourself and hide your name to be able to talk about this ghost experience feels sad to me,” says Robins. “Why do we assume that somebody loses credibility when they talk about these things?” Even many sceptics have different thresholds of superstition they are willing to indulge – he points to the experiment by the psychologist Bruce Hood, where he offers a reward of £10 to anyone in the audience who will put on a blue cardigan worn by the serial killer Fred West (it’s not really his, but that’s irrelevant). “Nobody in his lecture hall of science students will put it on because they feel it has this talismanic evil attached to it. But we all have those moments, all of us are susceptible to irrational thoughts, and yet we’re happy to judge others who talk about ghosts openly.”
Rather than the panto horror of shows such as Most Haunted, Uncanny is deliciously fun, but also informative – who knew sleep paralysis could explain so much? – and Robins has just about succeeded in legitimising the subject, even if the programme remains enjoyably dramatic (several academics have asked to use his research). “I think people who would not have felt comfortable going to the TV ghost-hunting shows have felt brave enough to talk about it [on Uncanny],” he says. For some, it may be the first time they’ve told anyone. “You try and explain it to people, and they laugh at you, but you need to talk about it because it’s so weird and you’ve got to process it. But people think you’re crazy.”
One of the cases that sticks with Robins most is the woman who was convinced she saw her friend who had just died. A few years later, at a schlocky medium show she had been dragged to and didn’t remotely believe in, the medium caught up with her as she was leaving and said that she couldn’t tell her this on stage, but that she had a message for her. “She said the exact words that this friend had said to her,” says Robins. “It’s not as attention-grabbing as Room 611, but it’s one of the ones I found hardest to explain. For me, that woman was the epitome of the person who did not believe in ghosts, didn’t want to believe, and yet she felt like she’d had this experience that she couldn’t explain.” He is empathic to her experience, but can’t contain the glint in his eye. “She thought it was a ghost.”
In an age of mistrust, Robins is careful to choose which stories to include and what information to cross-reference, and seeks out other witnesses. “You spend several hours with somebody, or sometimes several days, and you believe them. Ultimately, I trust these people, and I hope that my audience trusts me that I’ve made the right judgment.”
Is he wary of exacerbating conspiracy-theory and anti-science culture? “No, I think the way we talk about ghosts is so balanced.” There will be sceptics, he says, “who see what I’m doing as perpetuating a superstition, but I feel that’s simplistic. I feel as if I’m dealing with really complex moments in people’s lives, a life-changing moment. How can that not be fascinating? To explore it from both points of view, to be open to the idea that it could be a ghost while assessing all the possible rational explanations, I think is absolutely legitimate.”
If it breeds open-mindedness more generally, that would be a good thing, he says. “There’s a bit of me that would like Uncanny to be – this is going to sound egomaniacal – a model for how our world could be. If we can agree to disagree about ghosts, then maybe we can about other stuff. We are encouraged to take a position at all times now – you dig your trench and define yourself by it. I guess what the show’s saying is that it’s OK to not know what you think, to change your mind, and to keep an open mind.” We’re bad at letting people change their position, he says. “Somebody says something they shouldn’t, aged 18, and we have no ability for forgiveness. If we have a punitive society where somebody believes something at a certain point, but isn’t allowed to change their mind, that feels a terrible vision of how life could be.”
As a teenager, Robins had been gripped by theatre and joined a youth theatre group where he became friends with Ross Noble, who went on to become a successful comic. As teenagers, they would perform in clubs around the north east, with Robins as Noble’s support act. Later, Robins went on to do Edinburgh shows, including a spoof of Most Haunted in 2003, then wrote comedy for Radio 4, did stints on 6Music, and made a BBC Three show, The Bulls**t Detective, exposing psychics and “healers”.
After years as a self-described “jobbing writer,” he says, “I felt like a failure. I could taste failure in my mouth every day. We were very tight for money and I was getting to a stage in my life where I wasn’t the young hotshot any more.” He was not only unfulfilled, but uncomfortable with some of the work, including his writing for the TV panel show Mock the Week and others. “I did a spate of things where I thought the humour was quite cruel. It came to a point where I wanted to say something more about the world … I wanted to explore the world through more of an emotional lens, I guess. Maybe it coincided with having kids and feeling that emotional pockets within me were opened up.”
He had started writing more drama, though that wasn’t financially viable at first. Asking on social media for ghost stories, people wrote to him. Suddenly, he says, “I had a purpose in life as soon as I realised I was going to be a guardian, or receptacle, for these stories.” Instead of finishing the play that would eventually become 2.22, Robins made his first paranormal podcast, Haunted, which did moderately well.
Not long before he made The Battersea Poltergeist, he says, “I was literally down to my last fiver. I remember going on a stag weekend, and not being able to afford to pay for it and having to say, ‘I’m going to have to pay you later’.” He describes the podcast as “sort of the last roll of the dice”. It was a hit. “I think, now more than ever, people want authenticity, and they smell bullshit so quickly. I had spent so long trying to be an expert – ‘Maybe someone will commission a documentary on this, so I’ll read up on it’ – and actually, here was ghosts, this thing that I’ve been obsessed with all my life, that I kept coming back to.”
Has his work lessened his fear of death? He thinks for a moment. “I’d say it’s a constant. Not crippling in the way that it was when I was a student, but it’s still there.” He often lies awake at night, thinking of the stories people have told him. “More often than not, I find myself excited rather than scared,” he says. “The possibility they offer feels more positive than negative. The scares of ghost stories are oddly comforting because of the underlying hope that bubbles under them – that possibility, that optimism, of life after death.”
Into the Uncanny by Danny Robins (BBC Books, £22) is published on 14 September (BBC Books). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £19.36 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Robins is on tour from 10 October with Uncanny: I Know What I Saw.
