Haunted UK Podcast: History, Hauntings and the Unexplained

A mother tucks her daughter in for the night in their Niagara Falls apartment, certain she'd just watched her standing silent in the bedroom doorway wearing a nightgown she doesn't own. In this Witness Files case, the ten-year-old explains it the next morning without missing a beat: "That's just Abigail. She used to live here when it was a farm."It's the first of several accounts from the same witness, spanning a decade and two countries. A slammed car door and running footsteps with no explanation, on the same afternoon her father dies in a road accident miles away. Unexplained footsteps outside a locked hotel room during a Highland dance trip to Glasgow. And, more recently, years of activity across a run of interconnected shops in Ontario, all built on the same patch of land: motion-activated toys switching themselves on one by one, a glass ornament hurled across an empty room, and a mezzanine floor no member of staff will go near alone.Hear the full witness statement, and find out how to submit your own story to The Witness Files, in this episode.

In Part Two of this Haunted UK Podcast: On the Road interview, Jamie Corstorphine of City of the Dead Tours picks up right where Part One left off, 1679, and the aftermath of the Battle of Bothwell Brig, when captured Covenanter prisoners were brought to Edinburgh and held in the conditions that built Greyfriars Kirkyard's grim reputation.From there, Jamie takes us into one of Britain's most infamous paranormal cases: the Mackenzie Poltergeist, the story behind the scratches, faintings, and unexplained encounters reported around one particular mausoleum in the kirkyard, and clears up some of the misinformation that's built up around the case over the years. The conversation then heads underground into the South Bridge Vaults, the network of chambers beneath Edinburgh's Old Town once home to illegal taverns and the city's poorest residents, now known for a very different kind of reputation.Jamie also shares what it's really like running haunted tours through these spaces night after night, and gives us his own quick-fire answers on Edinburgh's most haunted spot.Listen to the conclusion of our interview with Jamie Corstorphine now, and find out where to book a City of the Dead Tours night out in Edinburgh.

On his very first shift as a security officer at a fire station in South Wales, Dorian was asked the same question by three different firefighters before lunch: have you seen the ghosts yet? In this Witness Files case, the joke stops being a joke fast, once he learns exactly what the station was built on top of.The station sits directly on the site of a Victorian colliery, where an explosion in 1878 trapped over three hundred men and boys underground and ultimately killed 268 of them, many by drowning when the pit was flooded to control the fire. Firefighters posted there over the years describe knocking on doors with nobody behind them, appliance bay lights and doors found open on empty patrols, and crews who refuse to linger once the sun goes down.One colleague who dismissed it all as nonsense changed his mind within a single night shift, after seeing three figures crossing the mess room that he could only describe as looking like miners.Hear Dorian's full witness statement, and find out how to submit your own account to The Witness Files archive, in this episode.

Beneath Edinburgh's Old Town lie underground vaults and graveyards where visitors say they've encountered something they can't explain. In Part One of this two-part Haunted UK Podcast: On the Road interview, we sit down with Jamie Corstorphine, manager of City of the Dead Tours, to find out why Edinburgh has earned its reputation as one of Britain's most haunted cities.Jamie has spent years guiding visitors through Edinburgh's darkest corners, and here he takes us into the history of Greyfriars Kirkyard, one of Scotland's most famous graveyards, shaped by centuries of plague, poverty, and public execution. We hear about the Covenanters' Prison hidden within its walls, an unexpected piece of Greyfriars trivia involving a flag once flown over the White House, and Jamie's own take on why some visitors arrive as sceptics and leave convinced something strange is going on.Part One ends right on the edge of Greyfriars' darkest chapter, as Jamie takes us back to 1679 and the aftermath of the Battle of Bothwell Brig.Listen to Part One now, and join us for Part Two as we head underground into the Mackenzie Poltergeist and the South Bridge Vaults.

A lonely road cuts through the darkened landscapes of East Anglia, passing heathland, forest, ancient trackways and places long associated with folklore.But along the A1075, witnesses have reported something far stranger than shadows at the roadside.In this atmospheric investigation, Haunted UK Podcast travels into the eerie borderlands of Norfolk and Suffolk to explore a series of unsettling encounters with large, hair-covered creatures seen near Thetford Forest, Wayland Wood, Peddars Way and the surrounding countryside. From a towering ape-like figure said to have drifted across the road in front of a startled driver, to reports of grey, long-snouted beasts, silent woodland apparitions, and a possible encounter with the legendary Black Shuck, these accounts form a strange and persistent pattern across decades.Rooted in local history, ancient routes, East Anglian folklore and modern witness testimony, this episode examines the stories of those who saw something they could not easily explain - and the lasting fear, confusion and fascination that followed.Featuring research compiled by Edward Oliver, with witness reports edited and inserted by Lucy Spirit, these accounts are presented with permission on behalf of those who came forward to share their experiences.Whether these sightings are misidentified animals, the influence of folklore on lonely night journeys, or something more difficult to define, the mystery of the Beast of the A1075 remains one of East Anglia’s most intriguing roadside legends.

A bonus episode arrives ahead of the Season 8 finale, which heads into eastern England's A1075 for years of reported beast sightings there. It got us thinking that cryptids aren't just a British story, so this one leaves the UK behind for one of the best documented cryptid cases anywhere: The Mothman of Point Pleasant.Four young people described it first, on a freezing night in November 1966: six or seven feet tall, grey, wings folded against its back, and eyes that didn't reflect the light but burned. It made the front page of their local paper by the next morning, and what followed over the next year ended in tragedy, inspired a Hollywood film, and left a small town on the Ohio River with a legend it's never shaken.Two young couples driving past an abandoned wartime munitions site watched the creature rise vertically off the ground and keep pace above their car at over a hundred miles an hour. Within two days, two more separate groups nearby described the same grey, winged, red eyed figure, including one that followed a young mother onto her porch. A local reporter took five hundred phone calls in a single weekend, and thirteen months later, tragedy struck the town in a way nobody has ever fully explained.The episode follows the sightings, the writer whose own life turned strange while chasing the story, and the folklore, including the legends wrongly attached to Chernobyl, that grew up around Point Pleasant afterwards. A bonus episode to hold you over before Season 8's last case drops. Listen now.

An empty college corridor. A supermarket aisle at 2:30 a.m. The top floor of a tired high-rise. A village pub just before closing.In this Fright Bites collection, four listeners share short accounts from ordinary places after dark - the moments when work, routine and familiarity give way to something harder to explain.A teacher sees a silent girl standing at the windows during a sixth form open evening. A night-shift worker finds a customer trolley where no trolley should be. A tenant on the twenty-second floor hears footsteps passing a door with nowhere to go. And in a village pub, a stranger arrives for last orders, takes his usual seat, and leaves behind a full pint.Compact, personal and quietly unsettling, these are brief encounters from the Haunted UK Podcast archive - stories where the ordinary world feels almost unchanged, except for one detail that refuses to fit.

Power leaves its mark on the places that hold it.Across royal palaces, castles, chapels, staircases and private chambers, stories have endured of monarchs, queens, servants, soldiers and courtiers who seem unable to leave the world behind.This episode explores some of the most atmospheric royal hauntings from Britain and beyond, from Anne Boleyn’s ghost at the Tower of London, Blickling Hall, Hever Castle and Windsor, to the haunted galleries of Hampton Court Palace, where Jane Seymour, Catherine Howard and Sybil Penn are said to remain.The journey moves through the darker edges of royal history: the Princes in the Tower, the murder of David Rizzio at Holyroodhouse, the restless spirits of Glamis Castle, the Romanov tragedy, the haunted legacy of Versailles, and ghostly accounts connected to palaces in France, Mexico, China, Sweden, Denmark, Russia and Austria.Blending historical storytelling with witness accounts and enduring folklore, this documentary-style episode asks why royal residences so often become places of haunting. Are these apparitions echoes of trauma, glimpses into the past, or something more personal - a final trace of those who lived, ruled, suffered and died behind palace walls?Episode Written by Melissa West