The season two finale of Uncanny, Emily’s Room, delves into a chilling paranormal case in Southport, where a family’s dream home turned into a nightmare, writes GAYLE FIDLER
Review of Emily’s Room, Uncanny
The last episode of season two of Uncanny, the BBC television series takes place in Southport, a coastal town in the north-west of England.
The witness is Angela, a conveyancer, who helps people buy their dream homes. A slightly ironic career path, as 25 years ago, Angela’s dream house turned out to be her worst nightmare.
In 1999, Angela and her husband bought a rundown Victorian house at auction. They renovated the property and moved in with two young daughters.
The family had not been living in the house long when strange things started to happen upstairs. One of the girls, Emily made friends with another little girl, who also lived upstairs. A little girl which Angela could not see. But she could sense and feel.
But this is not just the story of Emily and her invisible friend. The mysterious little girl was not alone. She was accompanied by something more sinister.
As always, Danny Robins consults the experts.
Team Sceptic, forensic psychologist Dr Ciarán O’Keeffe puts forward a possible explanation for the mysterious couple that share the house. O’Keeffe suggests there could be real people secretly living in the property. This is a term known as phrogging, where people live rent free by hiding in an occupied home.
Parapsychologist Evelyn Hollow disagrees. She explains this concept may be a popular in America. However, Hollow argues that spaces in houses in the UK are much smaller and not sustainable for people to live unnoticed.
Personally, I am not sure which of the two is the creepiest option. Ghosts or real people secretly living in my home.
Robins interviews the next witness. Emily, now grown up and herself a mother. Emily nervously recounts the childhood experiences. She says they still impact her life, believing her entire family were put at risk whilst living at the house.
Emily alleges a malevolent entity physically injured her and even threatened to kill her family. This threat became more sinister following the mysterious deaths of three pet hamsters. O’Keeffe of course, has rational explanations. Carbon monoxide poisoning, hallucinations and electrical wiring.
In order to investigate the electrical theory, Robins visits Hampton Court Palace, reputedly one of the most haunted places in Britain. He is armed with an electromagnetic field (EMF) meter and accompanied by a bemused tour guide to test it out.
As O’Keeffe expected, EMF readings are high in areas where people have reported the most supernatural activity. Could this be an explanation for the activity in Southport? It may explain some of it. But what about the dead hamsters and Emily’s physical injuries?
Robins speculates on other hauntings where people claim to have been physically injured. He briefly mentions the Mackenzie Poltergeist case from Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh and the Black Monk of Pontefract in Yorkshire.
Robins consults a historian from Liverpool John Moores University, who has uncovered reports of a real-life family who once lived close to Angela’s house. A family whose tragic existence seems to mirror that of the ghostly activity experienced by Emily and Angela.
However, they did not live in the same property. There are some surprisingly coincidental connections, but that is all it may be.
Angela and her family moved out after three years. They still live in fear of driving past the property and something attaching itself to them once again.
In this episode, both Team Sceptic and Team Believer struggled to provide many convincing arguments as to what happened in Emily’s room.
Some of O’Keefe’s rational explanations seemed to be less believable than a supernatural one. Although having born witness myself to extremely dodgy wiring in reputedly haunted places. The EMF experiment was not unbelievable.
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