Danny Robins, Christopher French and Deborah Hyde chaired Stephen Law

Playwright and BBC podcaster Danny Robins, anomalistic psychologist Professor Christopher French and sceptic and cultural anthropologist Deborah Hyde debate whether ghosts are real or simply a product of the human mind. 

The ghosts of today don’t live in castles or stately homes, they’re in normal houses and workplaces, witnessed by ordinary people like us. Now we just need to figure out what they are – the dead returning from ‘the other side’? Or the product of that equally mysterious location, the human mind?

Robins says he is a sceptic who wants to believe. His award-winning BBC podcasts, Uncanny, The Battersea Poltergeist and The Witch Farm, and his hit West End play 2:22 - A Ghost Story, have made him ‘the UK’s go-to-ghost guy’, and he’s on a mission to try to solve this greatest of all mysteries – is the impossible possible?

French is professor emeritus in anomalistic psychology, Goldsmiths. He researches the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. French appears frequently on radio and television (including Haunted Homes) casting a sceptical eye over paranormal claims. His most recent book is The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure Up The Paranormal.

Hyde is a British sceptic, folklorist, cultural anthropologist, Ufologist, fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and was editor-in-chief of The Skeptic. She writes and lectures extensively about superstition, cryptozoology, religion and belief in the paranormal, with special regard to the folklore, psychology and sociology behind these phenomena. Hyde is known as a ‘vampire expert’.

Discussions are chaired by Dr Stephen Law, a philosopher and academic, author of bestselling introductions to philosophy for adults and children, editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Journal Think, and the festival’s major projects director.

Owen Mumford Ltd are supporters of the festival’s science and medicine programme and the festival’s annual award for science and innovation.