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No ancient hills tonight, no distant centuries. Tonight Grim takes you somewhere far more frightening: a pebble-dashed council house in north London, in nineteen seventy-seven. The kind of house your nan lived in. And for eighteen months, something was in there with the family.

This is the Enfield Poltergeist — one of the most witnessed and best-documented hauntings in British history, and one of the most fiercely argued-about. Which is exactly why Grim and Mark do it properly: both sides, like grown-ups, and you decide.

A skint single mother, Peggy Hodgson, and her four children. A chest of drawers that slides across the floor and won’t be pushed back. A police constable who signs a statement saying she watched a chair move on its own. Two investigators who practically move in — with tape recorders running and a camera firing every fifteen seconds. Flying objects that land hot and don’t bounce. The famous photograph of eleven-year-old Janet, caught mid-air. And the growling voice of a dead man that came out of a little girl — a voice that named itself as Bill Wilkins, who really had died in a chair in that very house, years before she was born.

Then the other side, at full strength: the girls’ admitted fakery, the investigator who caught Janet cheating, the “levitation” that might just be a kid bouncing on a bed, the ventriloquism verdict. The sceptics land real punches here — and we don’t flinch from them.

But strip away everything they can touch, and a stubborn residue remains that “probably” can’t quite cover. And underneath the puzzle is the bit everyone forgets: a terrified family who never asked for any of it, and a little girl who got a lifetime of being “the Enfield girl.”

Every thread, explainable. The whole knot, for eighteen months, in front of thirty witnesses? That’s where even the clever money goes quiet.

From the shadows. Check the landing before you go up — and if a growling voice answers back, don’t engage it in conversation. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time...

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The Witching Season runs every Saturday through October — and the big one lands on the 31st. Follow so you don’t miss it.

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Last week, the cosy one — the sweets, the turnips, the dead nan in the yard. Tonight, Grim takes you somewhere much colder and much more real: a wet hill in Lancashire in 1612, to watch the state hang ten people for a crime that does not exist, well, not in this case.

Because here's what nobody tells the children in the pointy hats: the witch was real. Not the broomstick — the person. Poor, frightened, mostly elderly country folk, dragged to a gallows on the word of a nine-year-old child.

Grim and Mark walk the whole terrible machine, step by step, from the documented record. Two feuding families of village "cunning folk" — Old Demdike and Old Chattox, both ancient, both half-blind, both scraping a living from other people's superstition. A pedlar who collapses on the road seconds after a young woman curses him. An ambitious local magistrate who smells a career. A king — James the First — so obsessed with witches he literally wrote the manual. A grief-stricken family dinner reframed as a satanic sabbath. And at the centre of it, little Jennet Device: nine years old, stood up on a courtroom table and used to send her own mother, brother and grandmother to the rope.

Ten were hanged on Gallows Hill in the August of 1612. Not witches — just the powerless, destroyed by the powerful, on evidence that proved nothing, before a court that had already decided. And the whole triumphant story comes to us through one book, written by the men who did the hanging. The accused never get to write the book. They just get the rope.

So this Halloween, when you see the pointy hat — spare a thought for who it really was.

From the shadows. Be kind to the frightened old women in your life — and never let them put a child on a table. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time.

🎧 The Evident Conspiracy Files · TheECF.co.uk · Follow us on X

The Witching Season runs every Saturday through October — and something big is coming on the 31st. Follow so you don't miss it.

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Welcome to The Witching Season. For four Saturdays this October, Grim takes the reins of the show — and on the first night, he reveals what you're actually celebrating when you carve that pumpkin and knock on a stranger's door.

You think Halloween is American. It isn't. You think it's about sweets. It isn't. You think it was invented to sell greetings cards. It wasn't. Halloween is one of the oldest surviving festivals in the Western world — and most of the things you still do every October are the fossilised remains of ancient rituals to protect yourself from the dead. You just forgot that's what they were.

Tonight, Grim and Mark trace the real story: the Celtic fire-festival of Samhain, and the night the veil between the living and the dead was believed to thin. Why we light bonfires and wear costumes. Where "trick or treat" really comes from — mumming, guising, and the medieval soul cakes given for prayers. Why the first jack-o'-lanterns were carved from turnips, not pumpkins — and the bleak Irish tale of Stingy Jack, locked out of Heaven and Hell, wandering the dark with a stolen ember. And how the Church stacked All Hallows' Eve directly on top of the old festival of the dead… and never quite managed to tame it.

Because here's the chill: they spent a thousand years trying to sand the magic off this night. And every October, without being told why, you do the old rituals anyway. That's what a real haunting looks like — a festival of the dead that refused to die.

Strip away the plastic and the marketing, and underneath is the oldest and truest thing the night was ever for: remembering the ones you've lost.

From the shadows. Keep a candle lit for the ones you've lost — and don't answer the door if it knocks after midnight. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time.

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The Witching Season runs every Saturday through October — and something big is coming on the 31st. Follow so you don't miss it.

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Four Saturdays. Four true stories from the dark. Every one of them real — and so much worse for it.

🎃 Oct 10 — The true origins of Halloween
🔥 Oct 17 — The Pendle Witches
👁️ Oct 24 — The Enfield Poltergeist
💀 Oct 31 — The big one… and something no one's expecting.

Grim's taking over the show for spooky season. Follow now so you don't miss a single night.

The Evident Conspiracy Files — from the shadows.
🔗 TheECF.co.uk

#TheWitchingSeason #Halloween #TrueCrime #Paranormal #PendleWitches #EnfieldPoltergeist #Haunted #Podcast #HalloweenCountdown

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CONTENT NOTE: Concerns a real 1948 unexplained death (a contested inquest finding; possible poisoning). Discusses suicide/poisoning as historical possibilities.

1st December 1948. Two men exercising racehorses on Somerton Beach, near Adelaide, find a well-dressed man dead against the sea wall — an unlit cigarette on his collar, as if he'd just stopped to watch the tide. No wallet. No ID. And every single label cut from his clothing. His fingerprints match no record on Earth. No dentist knows his teeth. No one, anywhere, is looking for him.

Then it gets strange. A poison the pathologist was sure was there — but the tests couldn't find. A tiny secret pocket sewn into his waistband, holding a scrap of paper torn from a book of Persian poetry: Tamám Shud — "it is ended." The book itself, found in a stranger's car, with a phone number and a five-lines of code no cryptographer has cracked in seventy years. And a woman who took one look at his death mask, nearly fainted — and said nothing for the rest of her life.

Tonight, Mark and Grim take on the greatest unsolved death in the southern hemisphere — the perfect Cold War spy story, complete with an uncrackable cipher you listeners can try yourselves **The code is in the episode artwork**. And then the twist: in 2022, a hair caught in a plaster death mask finally gave the man a name (They think). And it wasn't a spy's.

The real lesson? There's always a person under the mystery. Even when the mystery is this good.

From the shadows. Stay curious, stay sceptical, and remember there's always a person under the mystery. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time...

Remember to hit follow so you don't miss an episode.

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CONTENT NOTE: Concerns reported paranormal phenomena, a "werewolf"-like entity, and a genuine unsolved archaeological mystery. Atmospheric/spooky. Real named people are treated factually; where witnesses reported experiences, we say so as reports.

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Northumberland, 1971. Two brothers are digging in their back garden, near the old Roman wall, when their fingers close on something small and heavy in the dirt: a pair of crude carved stone heads, weathered and ancient-looking, with hollow, staring eyes. Ordinary boys. Ordinary afternoon. The kind of thing you take indoors to show your mum.

And from the moment those two little heads cross the threshold, the house stops being ordinary.

Tonight, Mark and Grim open one of the strangest and most genuinely unsettling files in all of British folklore — and it's one you can't easily laugh off, because the witnesses include a respected university archaeologist. Objects moving on their own. A family next door fleeing their home over something that walked, on two legs, down the stairs in the dark. A scholar who took the heads home to study them like the sober professional she was — and ended up chased through her own house by something out of nightmare. A chemist with a theory that a stone can record. And a pattern that should not be possible: wherever the heads go, it follows.

We separate the documented from the folklore — the real people, the real analysis, the real disappearance — and land on the question the sceptics have never answered: you can explain every thread, so why can't anyone explain the whole?

Some things, it turns out, were buried on purpose.

From the shadows. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and mind what you dig up. We will catch you again somewhere in time.

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CONTENT NOTE: This episode contains graphic descriptions of serious illness, physical deterioration, and death, and strong language. It concerns the real, documented poisoning of the "Radium Girls" — young women knowingly harmed by their employers. We’ve given this episode an explicit rating. Told with respect for the women; Grim's anger and profanity are aimed squarely at the company and the men who covered it up.

They were the luckiest girls in town. Clean work, good money, painting glowing numbers onto watch dials for the war effort. The paint shimmered so beautifully they painted their nails with it, their teeth, their buttons — and glowed faintly on the walk home, until the local boys called them "the ghost girls." They thought it was magic. It was radium. And the men who employed them knew exactly what it did.

Tonight, our darkest and most detailed episode yet. Mark and Grim tell the true, documented story of the Radium Girls — through the women themselves. Mollie Maggia, dead at 24, her jaw lifting away in her dentist's hand, her death falsely recorded as syphilis to protect the company. Grace Fryer, who couldn't raise her arm to be sworn in, and sued anyway. Catherine Donohue, who testified from her deathbed at sixty pounds and won from beyond the grave.

And the proof that it was no accident: the scientists who handled radium behind lead screens, with ivory tongs, in lead aprons — while telling the girls at the table to point their brushes with their lips. Lip, dip, paint. Hundreds of times a day. They knew. They protected themselves. They lied. And when the women began to rot from the inside, the company denied, stonewalled, and smeared the dead.

This is a hard one — graphic, and true. But it's also a story of almost unimaginable courage, and of the women whose deaths built the workers' rights that protect you today. Their bones still glow in their graves. They will for a thousand years.

Ask who's wearing the lead apron.

From the shadows. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and always ask who's wearing the lead apron. And we will see you again, somewhere in time.

If you have time, please leave us a review.

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CONTENT NOTE: This episode concerns the real 1900 disappearance of three lighthouse keepers. It separates the documented record from later folklore.

Twenty miles off the north-west coast of Scotland, past the last of the Hebrides, three black rocks stick up out of one of the wildest seas on Earth. On the largest, Eilean Mòr, stood a brand-new lighthouse — and in December 1900, three experienced keepers who tended it simply vanished.

When the relief vessel finally battled out on Boxing Day, the flare went unanswered. Relief keeper Joseph Moore climbed the steps alone to find the clocks stopped, a chair overturned, a meal abandoned — and no one there. Two sets of oilskins gone. One still hanging on its hook. And down at the west landing, storm damage a hundred and ten feet up the cliff, where the sea should never have reached.

Tonight, Mark and Grim take on one of the greatest disappearances in maritime history — and do the job the internet won't: separate what actually happened from what a writer made up. Because the chilling "final logbook entries" everyone quotes — the hardened keeper weeping, the men praying, "God is over all" — were fabricated years later. The storm they describe hadn't even arrived yet. The creepiest facts in this case are a hoax.

What's left is stranger for being true: three capable men, an indifferent ocean, and a rogue wave that possibly took them so fast they never grabbed their coats.

Three keepers of the light. One rock. And the difference between the satisfying story and the true one.

From the shadows. Stay curious, stay sceptical, and never trust a story just because it ends on a perfect line.

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