Talk-Spawned Fears Running Wild

27 Oct, 2025

Mostly out of a decision to do something concrete, rather than sit and lament the inevitability of the climate crisis’s march of destruction, I went out to a county forest preserve yesterday and helped clear brush and invasive species. It was a Sunday well spent, but hours-long proximity to controlled burn piles and getting good and scraped up by a lot of chopped-up buckthorn meant I was in no state to do anything after getting back home. So I aired out my clothes and washed the smoke smell out of my hair, and uncharacteristically sat and vegged out and listened to a new-to-me podcast.

I’d discovered Danny Robins’s Uncanny the night before, thanks to (again uncharacteristically) following a winding path of YouTube recommendations.¹ It all started with a 1975 BBC documentary, whose host was talking to a few self-described paranormal researchers clad to the hilt in the worst of the era’s garish polyester.² Maybe it was one of those eccentric upper-class things, but even a posh accent and gig with the venerable BBC couldn’t save said host from seeming, with his disheveled hair and weird man-blouse, like he fit right in with the people he evidently (and sometimes a bit combatively) considered curiosities. In the end, the show was an unintentionally wacky bit of historical social study, which I appreciated for its refusal to make everyone look beautiful or other than they were, or to go in for melodrama, as most contemporary US television does. But from there, I got sucked into the infinitely more distressing, and not remotely kooky, documentary on Jimmy Savile, the longtime freakshow BBC host whose distinguished employer and other players prevented anyone from getting to the bottom of or holding him accountable for his decades-long sexual predations, often of children.³

Well, I couldn’t end my day on that note, and too tired to read, I thought, sure, I’ll check out this ghost story/interview thing with this other BBC guy. I’ll pause here to say that although I’m usually a wimp, albeit a fascinated one, when it comes to paranormal tales, British ghost stories usually don’t faze me—hence feeling unconcerned about tuning in. I’m still not sure why, but anything from Henry James (OK, he was British out of affinity) to M. R. James or even Nigel Kneale often feel so high-cultured or straitlaced that any ghost you might come across with these guys would be too filled with politesse to send you into fits. Plus, not really going in for podcasts or YouTube conversations in general, I was fully prepared to give up in boredom or have to force myself to make it the whole way through. This particular episode involved a live interview with a Dr. Who writer, and the host-audience-guest interaction was warm and engaging: people exchanging and weighing in on stories with each other. So I looked up and bookmarked Uncanny’s page; it deserved further investigation. When I got home yesterday, then, tired and stuffy-nosed, I lay on the couch and tuned in to the first five half-hour episodes.

Each involves Robins having an interviewee tell him about a strange (usually ghost-related) encounter, getting some brief input from experts of one sort or another to try and explain it, and then issuing a call for listeners to write in with their thoughts. Said thoughts and follow-up are related in a future episode (hence, my listening to five; the fifth circled back to a story told on the first). It was all fine—better than that. Robins is obviously interested in talking to people and examining shared enthusiasms; there's nothing about him of the self-impressed star or aggressive ghost hunting bros of the Travel Channel et al. And although a spooky musical strain might wend its way in every now and then, and although it is edited, the podcast really just involves an everyday person telling their own story. Being the inheritor of radio, the only thing that’s seen with a podcast is what your mind creates out of the words you hear; there are no visual special effects to bully your reactions in one direction or another. And because this particular show is largely the stuff of conversation—the very sort you might have sitting around with people telling your own tales—it’s eminently relatable; you feel included, welcome.

And there’s the problem. Because even though these were tales of things that just don’t take place in the normal world, because the whole scene itself felt so comfortable, the people so relatable, those stories then somehow felt more possible, too, especially since the images they presented were ones dredged up by your own mind. So there I was trying unsuccessfully to sleep with the light on, listening intently to the absolute silence that reigns at 2 a.m. on a suburban school night, unable to get my emotions in line with my reasoning that told me this was all absolutely absurd, that there was no blacker-than-black shadow hovering in my doorway and wishing me harm. The true sources of fear and evil, I tried to remind myself, were out there right now and very concrete: ICE agents, dictators and their minions, cruel villains like Jimmy Savile, industrial polluters,… Why weren’t they stealing my sleep and sanity?

Maybe it’s because presentation and discussion of all of those real-world actors comes via media that give every indication that their prime mission is entertainment. The booming newscast music, the social media shouting matches and pissing contests, the empty bombast and assurance of wonks and commentators, all the attempts to turn policy and legislation, etc., etc., into drama that’ll pull our attention from TikTok while (for the broadcasters) not offending sponsors or anyone with say-so: instead of heightening or even making palpable the terrifying nature of it all, the sensation just acts as a mask, a way of not acknowledging or attending to the things that keep us little people in a continual state of anxiety, like lack of healthcare or clean air or any means of support after our working years are over. No one I know speaks or acts or apparently thinks like any widely known media figure or politician, none of whom seems prepared to engage in real, open conversations about anything I’ve mentioned above, and more. Try to receive an uncanned, unevasive email response from your representatives, and the possibility of exchanging even the briefest face-to-face greetings with them becomes laughable. Although we’re quite aware that policy and official pronouncements and the like do have very definite consequences, none of the public talk or presentation about it feels at all real. Senators and anchormen and interviewers: they might as well all be out there with the insufferable Zak Bagans, making heavily coiffed, self-glorifyingly staged demands of ghosts of pundits past.⁴ Looking and acting like they live on a sound stage, there’s nothing to fear from these people or the situations they present.

Have a conversation with an average person, though, and listen to the unstaged fear in their voice, not only at the memory of what scared them, but at the chance they’ll be taken as nutters or outright idiots, targets for online abuse and ridicule because of what they’re saying. Even just overhear that discussion, and a previously fantastical source of terror might begin to seem possible, anything but ridiculous.

The only thing that got me back to fitful sleep sometime before dawn was, I’m sure, sheer exhaustion. I forced my bleary way out of bed berating myself—I knew how susceptible I was to this madness, and had gone in for ghost tales anyway. I certainly won’t be headed back to the Uncanny playlist any time soon, but I know myself well enough by now to accept that I’ll return at some point in the future, after my overactive imagination has quieted down and I can laugh and find it all silly. Even now, though, even as I feel ill and dimwitted from sleep deprivation, I want to go back, just to listen to what’s become all too rare these days: people talking to each other, people listening to each other—people engaged in and eager for conversation, not shouting matches or competitive arguments or photo-sharing or likes as substitutes for chatting with or confiding in each other. I want to go back because one of the true terrors hiding behind all the supernatural creeps is the more worrisome prospect: that we’ll finally forget how to sit down with each other and share what excites or scares or concerns or interests us, how to ask someone else what they want or need to have heard. Much like the potential of finding a poltergeist messing up your room, it seems preposterous—but even if it’s not keeping me up at night, I harbor the anxiety that eventually, more than being too busy or uninterested to exchange a few unmediated words with each other, we’ll just get so out of practice that we’ll be too scared to make the attempt at all.

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