A Ghost in Every Grid Square: Building a Haunted Map of Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes might be the last place anyone would expect to find a rich haunted history.
Built from the ground up around sixty years ago, it is a city of grid roads, roundabouts, underpasses, concrete cows and carefully planned estates. It has no ancient city walls, no labyrinth of medieval streets and few of the crumbling buildings traditionally associated with ghosts. To many outsiders, it appears rational, modern, and perhaps even a little soulless.
But what happens when someone takes the time to ask whether the city is haunted?
Since April 2025, psychologist, writer and photographer Dr Steph Lay has been attempting to find a first-hand account of something uncanny in every one of Milton Keynes’s grid squares.
What began as an apparently impossible challenge soon uncovered a hidden city of apparitions, phantom footsteps, haunted homes, poltergeist activity and strange encounters in the most ordinary of places.
In this talk, Steph will explain how she created the Revenants on the Redway project, how its stories are collected and mapped, and what she has learned from the people who trust her with experiences they may have carried silently for decades.
Along the way, she will share a selection of the project’s most compelling accounts, taking the audience through new-build estates, shops, footbridges, roadsides and older corners of the city. Together, these stories reveal an uncanny landscape that few people had thought to look for.
Milton Keynes may have been planned as a new city, but its haunted history is only just beginning to emerge.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Steph Lay is a writer, researcher and cognitive psychologist based in Milton Keynes. Her doctoral research explored the uncanny valley and why certain near-human faces can feel so unsettling.
She is the creator of City of Secrets and its ongoing Revenants on the Redway project, gathering local stories of the unexplained and exploring the hidden histories, folklore and uncanny possibilities of Milton Keynes.
Behind the scenes, Steph also works with Peter Laws on the YouTube channel Into the Fog. She curates first-hand paranormal accounts submitted by viewers and creates atmospheric artwork and visual storytelling to help bring those stories to life.
Across her work, she brings together psychology, place, folklore and the paranormal, exploring not only why strange experiences unsettle us, but why they matter to the people who live through them.
Curated & Hosted by
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
Don’t worry if you can’t make the talk live on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
