As for the inspiration for the show, I am a huge fan of horror and science fiction, but also, like many people, unexplained mysteries — the more bizarre and impenetrable the better. Then, last year I was in a charity shop in Inverness and came across a book of magazines from the 80s called Unexplained. Someone had collected them and put them together and I just realised that was it right there! Weirdly, though, I’ve not used any of the stories from that series. I think many of them have been quite roundly debunked since… With each episode, MacLean Smith leads the listener on an atmospheric journey through the strange and eerie, taking in everything from bizarre tales of supposed time-slips, vanishings and UFOs to chilling unexplained deaths and dabblings in the occult. Ha, funnily enough, they have never been less interesting (without fail they always end up being more interesting in one way or another), but, and it has only happened once, I did start a story that half way through I realized didn’t quite fit my three criteria. In the end, I had to work quite hard to smooth it out as it felt too late to start a different one. It actually ended up being one of my favorites — it was the story of the Russian submarine K-219, which I think having looked into, we can well assume was rammed by a US submarine. But I was really heartbroken by the story of the young Russian sailor — Sergei Preminin – who lost his life saving the other men so it was important to find a way to get the story to work to include that. I think I just about managed to get away with it, and it gave me an excuse to read some Lovecraft at the end, so it was all fine. And then on top of that all, the music kind of brings it all together, and although neither of these elements are particularly novel in their own right, something about the way they all come together makes the show what it is. Unexplained is a haunting story-based podcast in which host and creator Richard MacLean Smith explores a different unexplained mystery each week - often to terrifying effect.

We humans cling desperately to a sense of purpose. We have an almost pathological need to know and understand the why and wherefores. And nothing irks us more than a story with no end, a joke without a punchline, a jigsaw with a missing piece. To Morn Names: The unidentified man found dead on a beach in Australia. The mystery is well laid-out, and the speculation and narrative done respectfully. This is one of those unsolved mysteries I think about from time to time -- as frustrating as it is to still be without answers, it was nice to see this story included with the same meticulous care as the other accounts. The majority of the stories have been carefully selected and are indeed very spooky, but they are too long winded. The author could have got to the point much sooner, whereas I just feel the chapters are too long which resulted in me becoming disinterested.

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I having trouble trying to decide what this book was meant to be. I know it is inspired from the author's podcast which the blurb tells me is very successful. If this book was just meant to be a podcast in book form, I guess it succeeded. But I don't think it was what I was looking for.

Many of those vintage programs were stunningly effective for that reason, but I definitely wasn’t spoiled for choice—the art form was also pretty much dead until the emergence and subsequent explosion of podcasts as a medium for storytelling over the past decade-plus, providing artists a new venue to create horrors and pump them directly into our earholes.

Unexplained Podcast’s tracks

This book fell into neither trap. The selected stories were fascinating, covering both classic incidents and ones that even I hadn't heard of; even the ones I had heard of had lots of new information that I was reading about for the first time. As I've said previously, I'm not usually into UFOs as much as I am ghosts and cryptids and other paranormal elements -- this book had me absolutely hooked on a straight-up UFO story, because it was so engaging and such an interesting case. Following each meticulously researched story was a lot of really interesting information, speculation, and context. The incidents were put into their social context; there was a lot of philosophising that asked questions about the nature of such things, about why we might be drawn to them, about what could have potentially caused them and why we might be open to them. Especially fascinating was the discussion regarding the internet's role in such things; the book went into detail about creepypasta and the rise of internet folklore, and it's the first time I've seen this subject touched upon in a book like this and I was thrilled, considering that's one of the subjects I'm fascinated by. There were lots of interesting things to say about it. Unexplained, based on a successful podcast of the same name, is a feast of the supernatural, paranormal and just plain weird that is known to have happened at various periods throughout the UK and is practically perfect for those drawn-in Autumn nights as we head towards Halloween. I am a fan of these often creepy stories from all corners of the globe and read them no matter the dale they're published, but I must admit that these had a bigger impact on me being both from this country and released at an inspired time of the year! The stories of Annalise Michel and Elisa Lam, both now hugely famous because of their downright eeriness and video/tape recordings, deserve their places in the book, and are for sure chill inducing, But the story of the attempted murder of a girl committed by 2 of her young friends who purportedly did it for Slenderman, doesn’t belong in this book.

Usually books like this don't really bring much to the table. They go over the same old facts, and the only real difference (and therefore the level of enjoyment) is determined by how much detail there is. Sometimes a book will have come across another source, or a lesser-known story, and the writing will be engaging, and that's good! But it doesn't really bring anything new to the discussion. On the flip side, some books will lean too heavy on pet theories and only look at the evidence from that specific theory, and while sometimes that can be ignored, other times it's a bit much. TVOM: It’s clear from the beginning that a ton of research goes into the topics that you discuss in the podcast. How do you go about choosing a topic, and what’s that research process like?Then we get the pontificating at the end. This is what I was here for. This was the thing I wanted. Smith was going to look at, say, reincarnation (chapter one) and ask what reincarnation stories tell us about what it is to be human. Instead, I got a piece of prose that jumps all around the place asking what it is to possess a body and whether we'll be able one day to upload our brains to computers. What that has to do with reincarnation I don't know but each chapter end was similar, looking at vague bits of science or news tangentially related to the topic instead of trying to grapple with what the topic means about us as humans. It was, frankly, disappointing.