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Some spoilers below

Demonic stalkers in the Big Apple

“I grabbed my stuff and I legged it out of there.”

As the atmospheric Lanterns on the Lake theme tune goes, Charli Howard knows what she saw. She sounds no-nonsense, but for me this case continues to threaten my entrenched status as a believer – and for quite a sinister reason.

Several environmental factors are clarified at the outset of the episode: the apartment is in a rough area, in an unfamiliar city, in a ‘railroad’ style apartment, with little light and air. And a hostile boyfriend of the resident. When Charli sees a black shadow (‘but more solid’) out of the corner of her eye and at first, thinks it’s Matt, that tracks in the context of her description of him. The projection of her fears onto what she believed she saw is plausible, as Deborah Hyde, our sceptical expert this week, describes. Charli was clearly living in a place that some part of her found threatening in more than one way.

The sinister element for me isn’t the demon, but Matt and the impact of his behaviour on Charli. As Evelyn Hollow, our paranormal expert, sadly clarifies, every woman has tales she could tell about a man and some form of threatening behaviour, for example harassment or assault. I certainly do, and such encounters stay with you for a long time. Yes, we know ‘not all men’, but that misses the point. Enough are sadly out there with this type of behaviour, unchallenged, for it to be a genuine threat. We don’t need to ‘invent’ poltergeists harassing us – it happens anyway.

Yet once again, the ‘logical’ explanations posited don’t add up for me. Banging on an external wall, moving across said wall, well above street level? A hand print appearing on the mirror in the steam? Haunted tech? There can’t be anything that explains all of that. Can there? I’m looking for something.

I’m staring shame-facedly at my precious Team Believer badge when, ever ready to throw a spanner in the cognitive works of his listeners, Danny throws us the curve ball. A statue in the apartment building stairwell of Our Lady – aka Mary, the one that your mate got to play in your school nativity play while you got stuck as one half of the donkey – gets smashed into dust. Not just shattered, smashed into dust. Everything except the face. Chaos ensued. Charli herself acknowledges the stresses that she was living under, and how this might have influenced her, but – that’s not the end of her testimony.

My take on case 5: It seems Matt was ‘masculine and threatening’ to Charli, I’m sad to say. But… you know that phrase ‘never poke a sleeping dragon?’ Well, never mess with a demon – masculine, threatening, or otherwise. I’d have legged it the minute it smashed the statue of Mary. Charli’s a braver woman than me!

Verdict: Stalkers are unpleasant, but a supernatural one increases the creepy factor exponentially. 7/10

Claire Smith