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Uncanny · BBC Radio 4

Cold Cases: Case 1: The Black Monk of Pontefract

April 7, 2026·28 min·1 clip
Reverend Davey sees a candlestick rise toward his face after suggesting subsidence.
Uncanny returns with a brand new Cold Cases series and opens with a famous British haunting. Danny Robbins presents the Pontefract case as one of the most notorious poltergeist hauntings in British history, set in West Yorkshire. A terrified family describes years of apparent paranormal activity. Objects moved, furniture shifted, and the house carried a sickening feeling that something was watching. Robbins treats it as a case worth testing rather than a story already settled. He brings in forensic psychologist Dr. Kieran O'Keefe for Team Skeptic and writer-parapsychologist Evelyn Harlow for Team Believer. That setup keeps the episode moving and the tension steady. The testimony is vivid enough to feel physical. A bedroom becomes a place of fear. A landing becomes a place where the family listens while crashes and bangs continue behind a shut door. The family’s dad, a miner and salt-of-the-earth Yorkshireman, finally drags the family out and slams the door shut as if he could trap whatever is inside. The episode keeps circling the problem of how people can describe something so alarming. O'Keefe presses the possibility of fear, panic, misinterpretation, and memory reshaping what happened. Harlow pushes back on whether that explanation is enough. Robbins keeps the conversation brisk and unsettled. The result is not a tidy debunking. It is a case full of dread, contradiction, and lingering doubt, with ordinary domestic details making the haunting feel even more intimate and wrong.

As heard by us

A notorious haunting becomes a tense, well argued clash of fear and explanation.

Uncanny Cold Cases starts with one of the most notorious poltergeist hauntings in British history, set in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, and keeps its tension grounded in the long trail of reported activity: flying objects, moving furniture, and a family convinced something is…

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Why you'd press play

A Pontefract poltergeist case that turns a family home into a place you would not want to stay alone in.

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