MIND CAKE

🌕 MIND CAKE: Full Moons & Faulty Memories

🍰 Top Slice

What we’ve learned this week:

• Not everything that goes bump in the night is a ghost – sometimes it’s just your terrible memory.
• Lee is still traumatised by Poltergeist and should not be left unsupervised with horror films.
• Paul is officially Fox Mulder. Lee is reluctantly Dana Scully.
• And Deborah Hyde manages to kill the spooky vibe and be fascinating at the same time.

“ Strange experiences are perfectly human. The weird thing would be never having them." — Deborah Hyde

🎤 This Week’s Episode

Why We Believe (with Deborah Hyde from Uncanny)

This week Lee and Paul are joined by Deborah Hyde – editor of The Skeptic Magazine and resident sceptic on the BBC’s Uncanny podcast – for a Halloween-adjacent deep dive into why so many of us still believe in ghosts, full moons and werewolves… even when we know better.

It’s spooky-season vibes with a science brain:

We chat about:
👻 Why belief in ghosts and demons keeps coming back, century after century
🧠 How our memories edit, mash-up and outright lie to us
🌕 Whether full moons really make people go a bit loopy
😱 Why some of us pay good money to be scared silly by horror films
🛌 Sleep paralysis, old hags, randy demons and alien abductions (same experience, different story)
💚 How to stay curious about the paranormal without freaking out about your mental health

It’s funny, thoughtful and just unsettling enough to make you side-eye the coat on the back of your bedroom door.

🎧 Listen now — if you dare… but also if you’re just quite interested in cognitive bias.

🍪 Crumb of Wisdom

“ Our brains are brilliant at spotting patterns — even when the pattern isn’t really there." — Deborah Hyde

🍰 Icing on the Mind Cake

🧪 Spooky or Science?

Which of these is least likely to be caused by ghosts, according to the research-y killjoys?

A. Hearing your name called when no one’s there
B. Waking up unable to move and feeling a “presence”
C. Furniture sliding dramatically across the room
D. Three people remembering the same event totally differently

(Answer next week… or listen and find out before Paul accidentally hexes his hair.)

📅 Dates & Walnut Slices

5th Nov – Full Beaver Moon 🌕 (still not an actual beaver in the sky, sorry)

8th Nov – Bonfire Night. Perfect day to re-watch The Wicker Man

16th Nov – International Day for Tolerance

📌 Listener Mission

We don’t have ghosts doing our marketing. We have you.

Your mission this week:

👉 Share this episode with your most “I swear I saw something in that old house” mate.
👉 Tell us your weirdest unexplained experience (sleep paralysis, UFO, mysterious spoon movement) – tag us on socials or reply to this email.
👉 Bonus points if you can listen to this one in the dark without freaking yourself out.

Each share helps us convince the algorithm we exist and stops us becoming… an obscure podcast urban legend.

Join the cause. Wield your Blu-Tack with pride. 🍰

Click here for the the MIND CAKE flyer pink.png​

👋 Closing Bite

Thanks for keeping us in your ears and out of the paranormal bin.

Follow, share, and review to help us conjure even more brilliant guests (and to stop Paul pitching a Mind Cake–branded EMF detector).

Look after yourself. Be kind. And in the words of Dr. Jan, “Don’t be a dick!”

🍰 Mind Cake: not the podcast you deserve, but the one you’ve accidentally subscribed to.

​​​​​​​