There are certain rituals to observe, if, like Evelyn Hollow, you are a “Celtic pagan”, and a special day comes around on Halloween, or Samhain, as she knows it.
“Samhain is when the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds is thinnest and it’s a night to honour the dead, for cooking a big dinner,” she says.
“I set places for every person in my family who has died, with a photo, a lighted candle and something on their plate.” The following morning, all that’s left over “has to go back in the earth,” she adds. In this case, probably in a flower bed in Newcastle, where she will be on tour.
Hollow’s sudden manifestation as a media star is positively spooky. In little more than two years, she has become the UK’s best-known parapsychologist, a serious, fully trained scientist, engaged in the study of things apparently supernatural.
With two hit podcasts, The Battersea Poltergeist and Uncanny, and a mainstream TV show on her CV, she is in the middle of a 42-date run of the Uncanny stage show in which she offers expert analysis of contemporary ghostly experiences reported from around the UK.
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Along the way, she’s acquired cult status, and already a doll has been manufactured in her honour, capturing her self-described “goth noir” style: black clothes, white face, gold chain. Think Morticia Addams, played by Carolyn Jones, in the famous 1960s TV series, to get a sense of the glamour and good humour she exudes as she chats over Zoom from a theatre dressing room.
She takes the most brusque questions in her stride. Ghost-hunting is a science? Seriously?
“Science,” Hollows responds, “is not about proving things, it’s about disproving things.” So, if someone thinks they’ve seen or heard a ghost, it’s possible they were hallucinating, or had a mental health problem. There might be an environmental cause, or even a case of auto-suggestion.
“As a scientist you have to begin sceptically,” Hollow explains. “If I rule out all of the sceptical explanations when I get to the bottom I then say, ‘OK, could it be paranormal belief?’ ”
Her route to fame began with a degree in psychology at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, where she enjoyed “forensics”, assessing problems associated with criminal or aberrant behaviour.
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In her final year she discovered a senior member of staff had a qualification in parapsychology, and decided to change her field of study for her MRes (Master of Research).
She didn’t want “to spend my entire life with all these big questions in my brain that would never be answered”, she says. “When I started specialising on the interactions between consciousness and quantum physics I realised this stuff might explain some very random phenomena.” A professor said her choice of specialism was “career suicide”.
It hasn’t turned out that way. In 2021 she was recruited by Danny Robins, the broadcaster and comedy writer, as an expert analyst for The Battersea Poltergeist, which was to become a global sensation, the No 1 drama podcast in the world with more than four million downloads.
Over 12 episodes and updates it offers an engrossing mixture of dramatisation and contemporary commentary in which Hollow is played off against Ciarán O’Keeffe, a “sceptical” psychology professor. Together with Robins the pair weigh the evidence from a famous and perplexing decade-long haunting that took place in southwest London from the mid 1950s.
Uncanny follows the same blueprint but applies it to stories of more recent supernatural encounters reported by members of the public who experienced them — or, for readers of a sceptical disposition, who claim to have experienced them.
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What does Hollow make of people who just wrinkle their nose at the paranormal, and might view her whole gig as nonsense?
“My general attitude is that many thousands of people who’ve had experiences can’t all be lying or hallucinating,” she says. “Danny and his researchers run checks on everyone before they make an episode and they try to take cases with multiple witnesses and make sure that things can be corroborated.”
Robins will sit down with a witness “for hours, sometimes days” to test their credentials. “It’s a personal call for him as to whether they are honest,” Hollow says, “but you can see in people’s emotional reaction how altered they are by what has happened to them.”
She has her own “insane” experience to fall back on. In her early teens she was a goth, living in a village near Edinburgh but often travelling to the city to buy comic books and hang around Hunter Square, the notorious haunt of scores of glum-faced emo kids.
“I was sitting on the steps when I saw a homeless lady feeding the pigeons, with the birds eating out of her hand,” Hollow recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s nice, she must come here every day.’
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“I glanced back and she was talking to this bird and I was watching her, then she went like this ...” Hollow mimes the woman devouring the bird. Hollow shut her eyes in disbelief, and when she opened them again, the woman was gone.
“Did I hallucinate?” she wonders. “I thought, ‘Have I gone crazy?’ The thing that bothered me most was the fact the birds were all still on the ground, eating the stuff she’d fed them, the crushed up biscuits, but she just was not there. To this day, I’ve no idea what I saw.”
Hollow grew up in a “1.5-bedroom house” in Mid Calder, West Lothian, and at weekends in a static caravan in the Scottish Borders. Until 19 she had to share a bed with Rachel, her younger sister.
Her father, David Paterson, who died a couple of years ago, was a binman and her mother, Simone, is a compliance manager, with a “sensitivity”, to use Hollow’s word, to the spiritual world around her.
“My mum could always tell when one of the pets was going to die,” Hollow recalls. “That stood out for me when I was a kid. It was such a matter-of-fact thing. I thought there must be a scientific reason, a bigger explanation for why this stuff happens.”
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She was a bright kid. She loved acting at primary school, excelling at art and music at West Calder High School in Livingstone, her big hands apparently ideal for the bass clarinet. She loved English too and her teacher was the first adult to read her stories, encouraging her to write more.
She was still a teenager and an aspiring author when she adopted a nom de plume.
“I used Evelyn, from a song [by the synth band Hurts] and I changed my surname,” she says. “I visited my grandparents in Corstorphine in Edinburgh and I got off the bus and saw a hairdressers, White Hollow. I thought, ‘That’s a cracking last name!’ At 18, I had my name legally changed by deed poll.” She will not divulge her birth Christian name, she says, for security reasons.
There’s mystery all around her. A recurring theme in the podcasts is “stone-tape theory”, the notion that a building can contain the spirits of past traumatic events, which, as Hollow puts it, “under certain conditions can get replayed”.
She says: “It’s a neat theory, because it falls in with the way a lot of people feel when they have these experiences, but scientifically we can’t find the needle: what are the conditions under which they are replayed?
“Statistically if you look at places where there is a huge history of trauma and death — say hospitals, or at battle sites, such as Culloden or Bannockburn, or in the Edinburgh’s Grassmarket [the site of public hangings] there is a density of death and that’s where people have the most [supernatural experiences].
“Is that because of stone-tape theory? Or is it because the Scots and all Celtic people are great storytellers? Is it because we mythologise these events and our way of telling them or deterring other people from them, is to create these ghost stories?”
She suddenly sounds almost like a sceptic. Not so, she says, repeating her mantra: “My job is to rule out the obvious stuff.”
Truth is, she could haunt the airwaves for years. She’s proved a more than capable stage and screen performer and though she regards herself primarily as a writer she’s alive to other offers of work.
Could America come calling? She seems dubious, believing the pursuit of the paranormal over there is “very salacious, shocking and Christian-based — exorcisms, demons and things like that,” but, she adds “I’ll certainly not say no to a meeting.”
Then there’s the thought of those Evelyn dolls, with someone else selling her likeness. “I have to put a rush on making merch, that’s something I could look at next,” she says. But even for Hollow, high priestess of the strange, the prospect of flogging dolls of herself seems, well, weird. She adds: “It does feel a bit bizarre.”
