Uncanny – The Evil in Room 611 BBC Sounds
Start the Week Radio 4
For the weekend that’s in it, Uncanny might just be the frisson of fear that you’re looking for.
Danny Robbins of The Battersea Poltergeist fame takes us into this world of supernatural encounters.
“Are you Team Believer or Team Sceptic?” he asks. Alongside each story there’s a believer and a non-believer.
The scientist telling this first tale is also level-headed and a sceptic, were it not for what happened in Room 611 40 years ago.
Ken, the geneticist who doesn’t believe in ghosts, was a student in the 1980s in room 611 at the old Alanbrooke Hall at Queen’s University.
Those halls were where all my friends lived back in the day.
But this was a student bedroom which left its mark on the men who shared it.
Two reported having the exact same nightmares.
Ken said there was a presence that was “pure evil”. He remembers the door rattling off its hinges. There are stories of books and cutlery flying across the room.
Supernatural or in the minds of the occupants?
Listen and make up your own mind.
Journalist Fintan O’Toole featured on Start the Week.
His book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is a long look at Ireland dating from his birth in 1958.
All changed, changed utterly.
It’s not an autobiography but it is a reflection on how far Ireland has come from the Catholic, conservative state that was dominated by the Church.
The weekend that O’Toole was born, the Dublin Theatre Festival was cancelled because one Archbishop John Charles McQuaid had indicated his displeasure at the inclusion of an adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses as well as a play by Seán O'Casey, a communist and a Protestant.
The archbishop did not hold a press conference nor put out a statement, he just indicated his displeasure and that was enough, said O’Toole.
He had huge political power and he and the Church could set the limits for what government could do, he said.
Yet fast forward and how Ireland changed in the 1990s with same sex marriage and abortion.
And if John Charles McQuaid was one figure that stands out, then Gay Byrne was the other.
The Gay Byrne Show was all people talked about – in a world when you didn’t have a choice of channels, it was what everyone watched.
There are moments that will remain in the Irish psyche forever.
None more so than the discovery that the ever popular Bishop Eamon Casey – the man who was front stage in 1979 welcoming Pope John Paul II to Ireland, a man who had done such good in ministering to the homeless - had fathered a child with an American woman.
It was an “apocalyptic revelation” said O’Toole.
And indeed it was.
