The We Love Books podcast has a spooky season special for you with award-winning writer, broadcaster, journalist but most importantly, king of paranormal podcasting Danny Robins. It's here just in time to ask everyone the big question - do you believe in ghosts?
And that's the name of Danny's book too! Do You Believe in Ghosts? is a whistle-stop tour through some of the creepiest and most fascinating cases he has stumbled upon and investigated and, as he stresses, is spooky not scary, so has broad appeal across the spectrum of believers, non-believers, the paranormal curious and anyone just looking to hear a great story.
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When did Danny's phantasmic fascination start?
"It definitely began as a kid. I was that child who used to sit in the school library reading books about ghosts and I was really fascinated by them I think. I viewed them as a detective story, that was another thing I loved as a kid, detective stories, and I felt this was the biggest detective story of them all really – what makes us human? What happens to us after we are humans?
"I think it’s an incredible idea really. It’s the closest we get to time travel. We can’t travel back in time ourselves but if ghosts exist then they are potentially the spirits of long-ago people coming back to us and what an amazing idea if you could ask a Victorian or a Tudor what life was life back then."
With a thousand ghost stories up his sleeve, a hit BBC podcast Uncanny which has branched out into live shows and even a conference, books, merch and a play on the subject to his name, has Danny ever actually seen a ghost himself?
"You would think that somebody who had written a book called Do You Believe in Ghosts? might have seen one, right? But actually no, I haven’t and I’ve spent my entire life thinking I’d like to see one and I haven’t! It’s strange, I’m stuck very in the middle between Team Sceptic, thinking it could be maybe explained by science and Team Believer, you know, really wanting to believe these stories are real."
So, what kind of kid would love to get their mitts on Do You Believe in Ghosts?
"This is the book that I would have loved to have read when I was a kid really. I was so interested in ghosts and I wanted a book that made sense of them for me and I think that that’s really my aim, to try and help kids get into ghost hunting essentially! Maybe you’ve never thought about ghosts, and you’ve never realised just how interesting the subject is and how it takes us into all these different realms of history and science and how our universe works and these amazing, thrilling stories about strange experiences that people have so I think really this is a book that anyone will enjoy. I don’t think you have to be particularly interested in ghosts to start reading this, but I think by the end of it you will be!"
Danny's book is jam-packed with spooky stories including the terrifying tale of Stacey and the haunted toilet.
"This is a good one. Stacey wrote to me, and it was just in a toilet in a school in Birmingham… and she’s cleaning it one night, she’s the cleaner at the school. It started off with her just getting spooked and having a feeling but then she had lots of strange experiences. It culminates in her being shown some CCTV footage that seems to show the figure of a ghost in this toilet that she was cleaning where she had these spooky feelings and it’s great because it gets into the whole idea of can ghosts be captured on camera?"
Can they indeed…Find out more by listening to Danny’s interview on We Love Books wherever you get your podcasts.
For more great podcasts for young people visit rte.ie/jrpodcasts.
