In all the interviews I've recorded for this show, nothing has quite matched what one member of staff at Tamworth Castle told me: a full, complete apparition, seen face to face inside the building. In this episode of the Haunted UK Podcast, I sit down with two of Tamworth Castle's own staff, Leigh and Hollie, to explore one of Staffordshire's most historic sites, and the ghost stories that have grown up around it.

Long before the Norman castle that still stands above the town, Tamworth was a seat of power in Anglo-Saxon Mercia. Leigh and Hollie gave me a personal tour of the castle before we sat down to record, then walked me back through it, room by room, once the microphones were on, along with the castle's long-running Black Lady and White Lady legends. Leigh saves the strangest of it for last: two separate sightings, the second a complete, unmistakable apparition unlike anything I've heard in any interview before it.

Hear Leigh and Hollie's full accounts in this episode.

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The most frightening face in horror is a $1.98 Captain Kirk mask from a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard, with the eye holes cut wider and the face sprayed white. In the very first episode of The Midnight Reel, Steve from the Haunted UK Podcast and Melissa from Haunted UK Fiction review John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the film that started the modern slasher.

Before the review, the episode goes behind the scenes of a horror classic made for around $300,000 in about three weeks. Jamie Lee Curtis, in her first feature film, bought Laurie Strode’s whole wardrobe at JC Penney for under $100. Donald Pleasence took the part of Dr Loomis after Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee both turned it down. Nick Castle got $25 a day to play The Shape. Paper autumn leaves were painted and reused in a South Pasadena spring, and Carpenter made one of the most famous theme tunes in film history on synthesisers, with hardly any money.

Then Steve and Melissa give their honest verdict on Michael Myers’ first night home in Haddonfield.

Watch or listen now, leave your own verdict in the comments, and vote in the poll for next month’s film.

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Jonathan Frank Tate spent years in security operations, the military, and private contracting, but it's his time as Warden for Newborough and Llanddwyn on Anglesey that gives this account its setting.

His book, Factual Supernatural, is out now on Amazon, and this episode features one of its accounts exactly as he wrote it, unaltered.

No hole in the ceiling, no vibration, no explanation, just a metal bolt hitting the cabin floor two seconds after Tate dares whatever's out there to prove itself.

This is Bolt Drop.

Tate's years as Warden meant long nights alone in Newborough and Llanddwyn, working paths shaped more by animals than people, in a forest built over the sand-buried ruins of a medieval royal court.

Watching over film equipment overnight in an isolated welfare cabin deep in the forest, Tate and a friend fall into a conversation about ghosts. His friend believes; Tate doesn't, and says so flatly, then half-jokingly challenges whatever might be listening outside to "do something" if it's really there. The cabin goes unnaturally quiet for a couple of seconds. Then comes a sharp, sudden bang: a metal bolt has landed on the floorboards a few feet away. They check the ceiling above it. It's solid, panelled, with no holes and no loose fittings, and nothing nearby that could have shaken it loose. There's no way to explain how it got there, only the fact that it fell straight down, moments after the challenge was spoken aloud.

Hear the full account in this episode, and find Factual Supernatural by Jonathan Frank Tate now on Amazon.

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A recurring childhood nightmare about a huge, fur covered creature chasing him down a hallway ends the one way it never should: three real claw marks appear on his body in the exact place it bit him in the dream. That's the story behind "The Creature in the Hallway," just one of four real listener submissions in this episode of Fright Bites, the Haunted UK Podcast's short, sharp true paranormal series.

Elsewhere in the collection, a woman getting ready in a hotel room in Virginia Water watches a pair of fishnet tights rearrange themselves into an impossible arc after she's already told the room the joke's over, a nurse wakes from a nap on a hospital ward to find something "blacker than black" looming directly over her, and a man returns downstairs to find a cold glass of milk moved, and mysteriously warm, in an empty house.

Four short, unfiltered encounters straight from the show's own listeners, no filler, no distractions. Press play, and see which one stays with you.

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Jonathan Frank Tate spent years in security operations, the military, and private contracting, but it's his time as Warden for Newborough and Llanddwyn on Anglesey that gives this account its setting.

His book, Factual Supernatural, is out now on Amazon, and this episode features one of its accounts exactly as he wrote it, unaltered.

No one touches the chair, no one is ever there, but Tate falls asleep in an old chair inside an abandoned caravan deep in the forest, dreams that something unseen is turning it slowly beneath him, and wakes to find it still spinning exactly as it was in the dream. This is Chair Spin.

Tate's years patrolling Newborough and Llanddwyn meant long, solitary hours in a forest that has spent centuries quietly reclaiming everything left inside it, from animal paths to a royal court buried beneath the dunes by ancient storms.

Exhausted after hours of walking before dawn, Tate steps inside an old caravan he had always found unsettling but never entered, and sits down in a swivel office chair that looks strangely well kept compared to everything decaying around it. He falls asleep almost instantly and dreams he is still in the chair, being turned slowly and deliberately by someone standing just out of sight. He tries to plant his feet and stop it, but his body will not respond. Then, in one sudden movement, he is awake, and the chair is still turning, slowing down as though whatever had been pushing it had only just let go. Outside, the forest stays completely silent: no footsteps, no movement, nothing to explain what just happened.

Hear the full account in this episode, and find Factual Supernatural by Jonathan Frank Tate now on Amazon.

Enjoyed the episode? Subscribe, leave us a rating, and drop a review. It really helps the show reach more listeners. Here's where to find more:

Support the show: Patreon (patreon.com/hauntedukpodcast) | Ko-fi (ko-fi.com/hauntedukpodcast)

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On the same night an old family friend died in a car crash hundreds of miles away, a teenager staying overnight at that friend's own house in Melbourne, south Derbyshire, watched a silent, jet black figure the exact shape of the man standing in the hallway. In this real Witness Files account, Ash describes an encounter with what may have been a final visit home.

Seventeen at the time, Ash was staying the night at the house Charlie and his wife Amy lent his grandparents every Christmas while they skied in Austria. Walking back from the kitchen late one December night, he found the hallway blocked by a tall, dark, featureless shape wearing what looked exactly like Charlie's coat and flat cap. It didn't answer when he spoke, and when he stepped closer, it vanished into the room beside him, leaving nothing behind.

The next morning, Ash's grandparents delivered the news: Charlie had died in a car crash in Austria the evening before, at almost exactly the moment of the sighting, and his wife was fighting for her life in intensive care.

Hear Ash's full witness statement, and find out how to submit your own story to The Witness Files, in this episode.

Enjoyed the episode? Subscribe, leave us a rating, and drop a review. It really helps the show reach more listeners. Here's where to find more:

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Produced by Pink Flamingo Sound Studio

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Frank Tate spent years in security operations, the military, and private contracting, but it's his time as Warden for Newborough and Llanddwyn on Anglesey that gives this account its setting.

His book, Factual Supernatural, is out now on Amazon, and this episode features one of its accounts exactly as he wrote it, unaltered.

No footsteps, no growl, no chase, just a small, familiar dog trotting happily through the pines at midnight, exactly as she'd always looked, hundreds of miles from the house where she should have been sleeping.

This is Mandy.

Tate spent years patrolling Newborough and Llanddwyn after dark, along paths worn by animals rather than people, in a landscape where centuries-old storms buried a royal court beneath the dunes.

On a calm, clear night deep in the forest, Tate spots movement among the trees: a small spaniel with reddish fur, moving happily through the undergrowth. He recognises her at once as Mandy, his grandmother's dog, a dog he hadn't seen in months while working in North Wales, hundreds of miles from her home in London. She looks exactly as she always had, relaxed and pleased, moving with total confidence through a forest she has no business being in. She glances back at him once, then carries on between the trees until the dark swallows her completely. The next day, Tate learns that Mandy died peacefully at his grandparents' house in London during the night, at almost exactly the same time he saw her.

Hear the full account in this episode, and find Factual Supernatural by Jonathan Frank Tate now on Amazon.

Enjoyed the episode? Subscribe, leave us a rating, and drop a review. It really helps the show reach more listeners. Here's where to find more:

Support the show: Patreon (patreon.com/hauntedukpodcast) | Ko-fi (ko-fi.com/hauntedukpodcast)

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In the summer of 1988, a small South Carolina town found itself chasing a seven foot, scaled creature with red eyes, and the strangest part of the whole case is that the only real evidence anyone ever produced was a terrified seventeen year old boy who passed a police polygraph test. This episode of Dark Matters heads to Scape Ore Swamp, near Bishopville in Lee County, for the story of the Lizard Man.

After a couple's car turned up mysteriously damaged in the swamp overnight, Christopher Davis reported being chased by something out of the trees while changing a flat tyre on a lonely back road. Deputies cast three toed footprints, a cryptid researcher blamed Bigfoot, a fake evidence claim collapsed within days, and the story went national, turning a quiet cotton town into a media circus complete with lizard themed merchandise and a million dollar reward nobody ever claimed.

More than three decades on, the case is still unresolved, tangled up with a dying sheriff who never stopped believing, a witness whose life was upended by that one night, and a local rumour involving a butterbean farmer that's never been confirmed or denied.

Hear the full story, and the competing theories behind it, in this episode of Dark Matters.

Enjoyed the episode? Subscribe, leave us a rating, and drop a review. It really helps the show reach more listeners. Here's where to find more:

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Produced by Pink Flamingo Sound Studio

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