Uncanny · BBC Radio 4

Series 5: Case 10: The Priest Hole

December 30, 2025·29 min·1 clip

James says the Warhammer figure pushed back, sent a shock through him, and broke apart.

Danny Robbins opens by marking the end of the year and introducing one last voyage into the unknown. He takes the listener to an ancient house and a case that may involve a poltergeist. James is the witness. He says the email was hard to write because he had never properly unpacked the experience, prefers to hide things away behind mental walls, and comes across as visibly uncomfortable as he explains why the memory still feels terrifying, unnatural, and wrong. His background matters: he spent most of his career working for historic royal palaces, and that history-minded sensibility frames the house and whatever happened inside it. Robbins also folds in the personal question of ghosts. His son asks whether ghosts are real, and Robbins says no when he means the kind a child fears, while admitting that his own experience makes him believe his ghosts exist. That tension stays in place throughout the case. Ben is then asked for a sceptic explanation of a young man watching an object move across a desk toward him. He points to conviction, to phenomena experienced just before sleep, and to the possibility that some reports begin in that half-light. Even so, he says the vivid sense of pushback from the Warhammer model is hard to explain. The show then widens out to a 1970s Midlands case in which a housewife contacted investigators about poltergeist phenomena, and inquiry suggested she may have been doing things unconsciously rather than fraudulently. Ben says there are maybe five percent of cases that still leave seasoned researchers scratching their heads, and James's story sits close to that stubborn remainder. When Ben reaches for recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis to describe the idea that activity might be coming from within us, the episode keeps belief and scepticism uneasily side by side.

As heard by us

A final case that keeps belief and doubt in the same room.

The final Uncanny case opens in an ancient house and stays with one witness whose account feels heavy with years of guarded memory. James reads as someone who has built walls around the experience, and that gives the interview its charge.

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Why you'd press play

You want one last ghost case at year’s end, set in an ancient house and pointed at what might be a poltergeist.

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