Uncanny · BBC Radio 4

Series 5: Case 2: Old Jim

November 4, 2025·28 min·2 clips

A biomedical scientist who works in a morgue and does not believe in ghosts describes a haunting that terrified her to the bone.

Louise starts in the morgue. She works with pathologists and post-mortems, so death, to her, is not a doorway. That is what gives the story its sting. The host presses on that contradiction, asking whether even a sceptic might reach a breaking point in the right house. Then the stairs take over. The case turns on repeated footsteps with the same route every time, moving upward toward one particular room, night after night. That detail does a lot of work. Ordinary explanations get proper space: old houses, pipework, bare floorboards, empty barns, and wildlife are all named aloud. Still, the pattern keeps coming back. The guest accepts that houses make sounds, but this sound seems to travel upstairs with intent. Then comes the voice. Louise hears a male voice that feels not just present, but almost conversational, which makes the room feel colder. Who is it answering? The expert angle leaves room for residual haunting, a moment replaying itself, while still wondering whether something else is in the house. The room makes that harder to brush away. Because the voice is tied to the brother's room, the discussion turns toward missing male figures in the family setup. Nobody treats that as proof. Bridget hears something psychologically suggestive in a young girl hearing a male voice, but the fear in the story stays very plain. Peter keeps pulling the case back to the building itself. His sceptical path runs through fabric and setting, because a strange house on the edge of a moor can make cracks and knocks feel personal. Danny gives both sides room. That is where the episode works best: a scientific witness, a haunting that starts at home, and noises that will not settle into one neat answer. No verdict lands cleanly. The case lingers on a nastier thought: certainty can hold right up until the wrong staircase starts answering back.

As heard by us

A morgue worker's ghost story that leaves a house in Ripon feeling deeply wrong.

The episode follows Louise, a biomedical scientist who works in a morgue, through an experience in a house in Ripon, North Yorkshire that still does not sit easily with her.

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Why you'd press play

You want a ghost story from a biomedical scientist who works in the morgue and does not believe in ghosts.

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