A brand new Uncanny stage show, Uncanny: Fear of the Dark for a UK tour from September 2025 – March 2026. The first Uncanny live stage show I Know What I Saw was one of the best-selling paranormal shows in theatre history. Now, Danny Robins and his team of experts are back with all-new, thrillingly terrifying, real-life stories and witness accounts that will have audiences utterly gripped. We sat down with Danny to discuss his upcoming tour.
You’re heading out on tour again with a brand new show off the back of the massive success of the podcast, two seasons of the TV show, a book, and more. I’m sure your fans will all return for this newest iteration, But for the benefit of those who are new to Unanny, what should they expect?
Uncanny is real people telling me their ghost stories. And, the more I’ve told, the more people have sent me. It’s this beautiful thing now that we have thousands and thousands of stories coming to us in the wake of the TV series, and some of them are just absolutely sensational. So, the tour is brand new stories that have not been heard anywhere before, not on television, nor on the podcast. A selection of stories, some ghosts, some to do with all sorts of different aspects of the paranormal, including even cryptozoology, the idea of beasts that might be out there, lurking, like Bigfoots and yetis and Loch Ness monsters.
In terms of the cases this time around, what stage are you at in terms of choosing which case studies will be featured in the new show? Any hints?
We’re going through stories at the moment and the great thing is there’s just a huge amount of brilliant stories out there really. And I think the thing that I always feel is really powerful with Uncanny is that these are stories that quite often haven’t been told to anyone else before; that people just haven’t known how to talk about them, or where to talk about them. Sometimes I am the first person they feel comfortable telling them to. They haven’t even told their own partners about it. So, I always feel really privileged and honored to have these stories in my possession and to try and help people make sense of them. And I think it says something quite powerful about the Uncanny audience actually that people feel comfortable sharing these stories with them as well.
That’s one of the lovely things about the show, that it’s built up this great community around it. And all of us, whether we’re skeptics or believers, are all here for the same purpose: to try and listen to these stories and try and make sense of them. And as we go out on tour, just in the same way as with the podcast or TV series, we’ll be asking the audience to ask us their questions or share their theories on the night. You’ll be part of this audience trying to work out what the hell’s going on with these stories. If you want, you can actually tell us your stories as well. There’ll be a section of the show where you can tell us your own ghost stories. The stories that always set my pulse racing are the ones that come from somebody who says, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I think I might have seen a ghost.”
There’s something quite powerful really about somebody who’s forced to reassess their entire world view, their whole concept of the universe because of something they have seen or experienced. That’s something I feel keenly because I’ve always wanted to see a ghost and yet I hear these stories and think ‘be careful what you wish for ‘ because once you do have an experience like this, whether it’s a ghost or a UFO whatever it is, I think it totally changes you as a person and you can’t step back from that. Maybe you felt a level of fear you’ve never felt before but certainly you it leaves you having a different understanding of the way the world works.
If the dead really can come back to life and appear in front of you,…then that fundamentally rewires our whole understanding of the universe. It’s a simultaneously frightening and exciting thing.
With all of this material,…how do you choose?
It’s very simple. It’s the ‘shiver down the spine’ test. and people often ask me, “How long does it take me to decide on the story?” And normally it’s instant. I read an email and there’s just something about it that sends a little frisson of fear through me. And then you talk to the person who it happened to and you see the whites of their eyes, and you hear that little tremble in their voice, and you realize that they are still frightened often after maybe as long as 50 years. And for me, that’s a mystery I want to solve.
I want to try and understand what could make an ordinary person, someone like you or me, who lives in an ordinary house, experience that level of fear in a place they should feel safe and comfortable. So I am drawn to these mysteries but I’m drawn particularly to try and make sense of fear because I think all of us as human beings fear fear, if that makes sense. Yet fear has kept us alive throughout the ages. It’s the thing that makes you outrun a predator. It’s the thing that sort of stops you from going into situations that might be the end of you. But then when you experience that kind of incredible level of fear in a normal domestic environment, where does that come from? What is it in your house that is doing this? Is it that incredibly powerful thing the human imagination? Is it something to do with your environment? Or is it that it is genuinely paranormal, something that sits outside of normal, that is in your house. and if so, how the hell do we explain that?
The Uncanny live show isn’t just a podcast on stage. Can you tell us a bit about what makes it so different from other live podcast experiences that some people may have experienced?
I think the average podcast show is people sitting around talking on stage and this is definitely not that. It’s kind of an ‘all singing and dancing’; not actual singing and dancing, that would be terrible, I can’t sing or dance, but it’s an explosive burst of theatricality live on stage. I’m somebody who grew up loving the theatre. I love the magic of theatre, I love what you can do in a darkened auditorium with lights and sound and sets and props. I remember very clearly going to see The Woman in Black as a teenager and just being blown away by how exhilarating and frightening theatre could be. I’ve created my own frightening play as well, 222 A Ghost Story, so I’m drawing on all of that tradition and that love of the theatre. Uncanny is bringing stories to life, basically. These real life stories of the potentially paranormal. I evoke these stories through a mixture of storytelling and video projection and lights and amazing soundscapes and illusions that make scary stuff happen in front of you on stage. The aim is to create something that feels genuinely exciting and adrenaline-filled.
It’s a night out that will have you jumping out of your seat and hopefully chatting long into the night, debating the question: ‘Do ghosts exist?’ We get to do this together in a theatre every night. We get Ciaran and Evelyn,, our team skeptic and team believer experts together with an audience and we try to solve these mysteries.
Tell me a bit about your audience experiences. Would you say they are majority believers, or is there a good, healthy skeptic contingent?
I think it’s very divided, and I like that. And I think Uncanny is unusual. Most paranormal shows almost always cater to one or the other. you either kind of have those shows that very much preach to the converted and have people camping out in stately homes and castles trying to sort of spot ghosts and getting mediums channeling spirits on command, the flip side of it is that idea of debunking the paranormal and pouring a huge tub of cold water on it, the skeptic approach. And so the idea of sitting in the middle and getting skeptics and believers together and actually just listening to these stories in a non-judgmental way and not jumping-to-conclusions way, and saying that it’s okay to be unsure. I think that’s really important.
It’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’ and to be in that kind of gray space between, black and white. The uncertain nature of this whole thing, I think, is so important. And so, yeah, I mean, we’ve got the people who turn up and buy the team skeptic t-shirts and the people who turn up and buy the team believer t-shirts, and they’re often couples, or close friends. One’s a believer, one’s a skeptic. I just love it and I think, if we can agree to disagree, that’s a pretty good thing. We’re encouraged to be very opposed to each other at the moment. If you step out on social media, you will always see people arguing, taking one side or another. you’re encouraged to define yourself by what you disagree with, what you hate, who you’re opposed to. And actually, you don’t have to always be like that.
So these are detective stories and if you’re a skeptic it’s a ‘how done it?’ If you’re a believer it’s a ‘who done it?’ Who is the ghost? and long may that continue.
Do you have any memorable anecdotes from the previous two live tours of Uncanny Spooky going on in theaters, or chilling audience member stories you want to mention?
The beautiful thing was that we did a kind of survey of haunted theaters. Every single theatre we went to seemed to have a ghost story attached to it and we collected these as we went around and I just became fascinated by theatre ghosts. So, I absolutely love that. But also the ghost stories that audience members told us as well, there were some great ones. I remember a woman in Southampton who told us that when she opened her cereal cupboard in the morning to get her cornflakes out saw the floating disembodied head of her late neighbour, that’s one that sticks out. She seemed completely unfazed by it. Didn’t bother her. There was a Geordie we met who claimed that the ghost of his gran had eaten his Doritos. That will live long in the memory as well. But amongst all of that, there were some really powerful stories as well. There were some really really emotionally raw stories about people who felt that they’d connected with people that they had loved and lost. A woman who felt that she’d seen the ghost of her dad in the backseat of her car warning her to slow down just at the moment that she would have been about to have an accident. Stories like that, really really powerful moments where somebody felt that they had this little moment of contact that changed their lives. So, you feel very privileged that people are comfortable enough to share these stories with you really.
Uncanny has captured the public’s imagination. How would you explain such a diverse community’s fascination with it?
I think there’s something about the times that we live in that make us particularly interested in this subject right now. We’ve lived through this very strange unsettling era. We have the threat of climate change, we have war creeping ever closer to us. All these things make us question our mortality and think about the idea of what happens to us when we die. I think that just living in strange chaotic times makes you think about these things as well. I think the more frightening our own world becomes the more we look to find another world beyond it.
And you definitely see, in times of unrest, a real interest in the paranormal. You saw it back in the 1960s. You see it right back to Jacobean times, and certainly in the wake of the second world war. A huge boom of interest in the supernatural, people wanting to contact the dead, the invention of the Ouija board, the kind of era of mediums who were rock stars. There’s a hunger and a fervor I think for trying to understand this subject at the moment and I think what Uncanny does is treat the subject with a seriousness and intelligence, but. It’s also fun. It’s entertaining. But it’s not just there to entertain you. The greatest detective story, the greatest mystery of all, asks ‘What happens to us when we die?’
I always think that Uncanny is one half of a conversation and…whether it’s on the podcast or the TV series where we’re inviting people to send in their questions and theories live and in an auditorium it only makes sense when we are with our audience and otherwise I would just be a crazy bloke sitting in the shed at the bottom of his garden. obsessed by ghosts. Getting out there and actually having real contact with fans and sitting in a theatre full of people and just getting to talk about this subject together. I really get off on that. And also, to be able to travel around with Kieran and Evelyn and take that sense of a team really, that the three of us have become a lovely team over doing the show.
Whether you’re seeing us sitting in The Ship pub on television talking about this subject kind of trying to bash out and solve these mysteries, or whether we’re doing it live in a theatre, I think all three of us feel really excited to be kind of living out our passion All three of us are kind of ghost junkies. We’re obsessives. We’re people who’ve been into this subject since we were kids and have never ever been able to kind of scratch this itch, basically. It’s the kind of obsession that’s dominated our lives. It’s just a thrill, basically, to go out and do this every night.
Uncanny: Fear of the Dark tours the UK from September 2025 to March 2026. Tickets are available here.