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‘Oh. Em. Bloody. Gee.” Danny Robins, “high priest of the paranormal”, has removed his trademark red anorak and is pacing around the London Palladium stage telling ghost stories. A phantom baby. A haunted Teams meeting. A … “hairy flasher”. He dissects each tale with parapsychologists Evelyn Hollow (Team Believer) and Ciarán O’Keeffe (Team Sceptic – he exposed Most Haunted’s medium, Derek Acorah, as a fraud in a rift Robins calls “the Biggie and Tupac of the paranormal”). The rapt audience – a harmonious mix of millennials, boomers and gen Z – are eager to share their own stories, too: a woman’s voice quivers into a microphone as she describes a skeleton that wanted to stab her sister. This is the enthralling world of Uncanny.

A lot has happened in the five years since Uncanny started life as a Radio 4 paranormal investigations podcast, with those spine-tingling opening lyrics, “I know what I saw.” In the first episode, The Evil in Room 611, Robins met scientist Ken, who recalled unexplained scares from decades ago in his university halls. Details of an evil dark figure and shaking doors were met with the reaction: “Bloody hell, Ken.” Two experts then shared their theories: parapsychologist Caroline Watt proffered hypnagogic hallucinations, while ordained minster Peter Laws claimed poltergeist activity.

This simple format created a smash hit. Within just two years, episodes were downloaded more than 8m times. It quickly morphed into a franchise of live stage shows, a TV series, a US spinoff, celebrity specials, books and UncannyCon. The podcast remains one of BBC Sounds’ most popular shows and it topped the charts at the end of last year.

Now, a brand new Uncanny YouTube channel is set to launch with a focus on classic cold cases (the black monk of Pontefract, the Barney and Betty Hill UFO incident). The platform could send this cult British podcast stratospheric – but does it have the power to spook the rest of the world?

A week after the sold-out Palladium show, Robins, Hollow and O’Keeffe are in the windowless Christopher Biggins dressing room in the Churchill theatre, Bromley. “When we started doing our first tour, we played the kind of theatres we’re doing now and there were maybe 250 people sitting in the 2,000 seats,” says Robins. “Now, they’re full.” This is their 44th performance of the Fear of the Dark tour and there are a handful to go. “The Palladium was totally surreal,” says O’Keeffe. For Hollow, the highlight happened in Guildford: “The bassist for the Jam queued for our autograph!”

Robins is used to celebrity fans: “I know that Simon from the Cure was touring with an Uncanny tote bag.” Reece Shearsmith, James Acaster, Diane Morgan, Daisy May Cooper and Bridget Christie love it so much that they have starred in specials. “How often does someone who works in the paranormal get to work with people who host 8 Out of 10 Cats or the bassist of one of the greatest goth bands of all time?” says Hollow.

Famous faces aside, the sprawling Uncanny fanbase is now in its millions. “We get kids as young as six coming up to us at shows,” says Robins. Families regularly tell him that Uncanny is the thing they’ve finally bonded over. “We live in this incredibly divided world where people are arguing about things constantly. There’s something quite beautiful about the way the Uncanny community are totally polarised, and yet they’ve found this way of enjoying it and agreeing to disagree.”

Why is everyone so obsessed? “A great Uncanny case is something that leaves this man on my left scratching his head, basically,” laughs Robins. O’Keeffe agrees and points to Harry Called as a perfect episode. In it, Will – who absolutely does not believe in ghosts – can’t make sense of terrifying events that happen after he has played with a Ouija board, including mysterious phone calls. “It’s very difficult for me to look at it and give one explanation,” says O’Keeffe. “But also, it’s the mundane things that happen: a phone that rings, a message that’s left, he looks through the window and sees somebody. These are things that everybody does.”

Until now, paranormal entertainment was a joke in the UK mainstream. Before Uncanny, Robins wrote the play 2:22 A Ghost Story: “I remember talking to a critic on the phone and I could almost hear him sniffing at it, like: ‘A play about ghosts?’ There was general sneeriness.” He also released a short-lived podcast, Haunted, in 2017. But Robins upturned the genre; the play had six West End runs, picked up Olivier nominations and, according to Robins, is heading to Broadway. In 2021, the BBC aired another of his podcasts, The Battersea Poltergeist, about a cold case from the 50s, which is when things really kicked off: “People started emailing me their experiences, saying: ‘I’ve never told anyone this before. I didn’t know where or how to tell it. I haven’t even told my partner.’”

Still, it is true that most paranormal TV shows of the 90s and 00s were “very pantomime-y”, Robins says, defined by ghost hunts with lots of screaming and night vision cameras. I offer the term “prestige paranormal” for how Uncanny sets itself apart. “I like that,” says O’Keeffe, who is also a university professor. “It’s a detective story as well. Viewers are watching it unfold and trying to work it out. We’re not just opening the door to a haunted house.”

Academics across the world are gripped too, says O’Keeffe: “I find myself in online meetings with colleagues in France, Spain, Portugal or the States and somebody will say, ‘Ciarán, can we ask you a question about Uncanny now?’” They’re not the only overseas fans already tuning in – the US audience makes up 11% of the podcast’s listeners, according to Robins (the BBC did not confirm specific download figures outside the UK). He also plans to tour the live show in Australia.

Clearly, the world wants spooky scares. During the pandemic, when Uncanny launched, there was a spike in reported paranormal engagement. Since then, economic downturn and an imminent third world war are a perfect storm for seeking something more. “You can’t expand your life outwards and you start to look inwards,” says Hollow. “It’s about control; people can’t believe this is it.” Plus, adds Robins, there’s the escapism of it: “Ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot … all these things are exciting adventures. The more frightening our world feels, the more we seek another world outside it.”

Uncanny’s particular appeal might be down to its Britishness, much like, say, Downton Abbey or Paddington. “The well-made ghost story stretches back to MR James and Charles Dickens,” says Robins. “And my desire was to create something that had the rhythms of the classics.”

Then again, not all cultures engage with the paranormal in the same way. “If you’re Christian you might look at having a house exorcised or blessed,” says Hollow. “But in other cultures that’s not what you would do at all.” The most interesting thing about this “supernatural sociology”, she adds, is how people respond. Robins gives a shocking example: “We made the US series and then I realised that in at least three episodes, people tried to shoot ghosts.” In one of those cases, The Flood, Robins met Marcus, who used a Ouija board with his cousin in a rural Georgia house. He recalls a blackout and a figure at the window saying, “I can see you both.” Marcus found an old rifle and, for the first time in his life, pulled the trigger on a gun – but it failed to fire.

It makes sense, then, that when Sweden bought the first international rights to Uncanny, they also made their own TV version. “I’m married to a Swede – I was quite pleased about that,” he says with a smile, of the show, retitled Kalla Kåarar, and presented by Swedish host Jack Werner, rather than Robins.

YouTube, more watched today than the BBC, is a huge opportunity to find fans in new ways. Robins has already embellished the format for TV: he conducted hilarious experiments – from trying to get his toilet to flush itself (the plumber had to be called in) to gasping for air in a wind tunnel – and fleshed out research that created genuinely stirring discoveries, such as in an orphanage graveyard (“Children were dying”). But there is competition, too. Ghost Theory is a wildly popular paranormal YouTube channel: I recently found myself scared stiff on the sofa watching a live ghost hunt with thousands of others. It doesn’t sound as if Uncanny will stray too far from its roots, though. “It’s a cross between drama and true crime,” confirms Hollow. “For us it’s still about staying true to the essence of the podcast.”

Where next for Robins and his red anorak after world domination? The fourth convention later this year is set to be the biggest yet at the ICC Birmingham, while Germany is the next country to get its own Uncanny TV series. There’s also a BBC drama on its way: Robins has adapted The Witch Farm, his 2023 podcast about a haunted farmhouse in Wales, for a four-part series starring Gabrielle Creevy and Michael Socha. But its destiny will always depend on the fans willing to share what they saw. “We’re by no means short of stories,” says Hollow. “There’s, like, tens of thousands. We just have to continue to pick cases that we think are challenging or resonate with people.

“But it’s at the point where it’s listened to more than the news. I mean, how much bigger can you possibly be?”

• Uncanny Cold Cases will air weekly on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds from 7 April, and will be available to watch on the Uncanny YouTube channel