Bafflegab and Uncanny Media for BBC Radio 4; BBC Sounds now 

“Everywhere around the house, I’d feel like I was being watched.”

The case on the examination table this week is a shocking one, and it will chill you to the bone.

As the sensible Milly, in the picturesque Cotswolds, describes the poltergeist phenomena that haunted her youth when she lived in a remote 17th century house, the sound effects will not be kind to your heart rate. Within the first few minutes, when Milly describes the fear that drove her to tears at the thought of going up into the loft, you’ll feel yourself sympathising.

The pacing of Danny Robins’ delivery is so consistently even-handed, that just when you begin to think that he may be leading the witness, m’Lud, he’ll finish a sentence on a twist, ensuring that we look at the events being relayed from all available angles. Expert Chris French, as a sceptic, makes an interesting distinction that hadn’t occurred to me before: while he doesn’t believe a place can be haunted, he accepts that Milly’s home was ‘spooky’ with its emotionally charged history and an adolescent female who has experienced some difficult changes. Even those of us with only a passing interest in hauntings will be familiar with the concept that the focus of the activity is often a girl.

Then another expert, Battersea Poltergeist’s Evelyn Hollow, takes to the stage, and the crowd goes wild. There’s such a high level of activity being described, and the sceptical theories just don’t seem to hold the dice – or the mice, even, unless as Danny suggests, they’re Disney-style creatures equipped with tiny scissors for cutting headphone cords rather than chewing them. Who says there’s no room for a little light humour in a podcast about ghosts, eh?

Then we’re hit with it. The event that makes this tale so very disturbing. I had to pause the podcast and get my breath back because it felt as though I’d been punched in the middle of my chest, my heart lurched so much. The experience, retold from her own point of view, that Milly describes is nothing short of terrifying. She’s brave to be able to talk about it. It’s important to remember that the witnesses we meet here are real people, and that they of course have a right to their own views, but I found myself with quite strong feelings about them as that even-handed presentation of the personal witness statements continued. A clear sign of a well-crafted documentary is that it can provoke feelings and reactions in its audience, and Uncanny nails it. Blimey, and we’re only at the second episode.

My take on case 2: Some people may be more attuned to the supernatural than others, leading to strikingly different points of view, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something trapped in the attic of an old home, reliving its darkest hour.

Verdict: Belief becomes fear as a traumatic past comes back to haunt us. 10/10

Claire Smith