HOST 4 (2) pp.

173186 Intellect Limited 2013

Horror Studies
Volume 4 Number 2
2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/host.4.2.173_1

Murray Leeder
Carleton University

Ghostwatch and the

haunting of media

Abstract Keywords
Ghostwatch was an infamous mockumentary broadcast by BBC1 on 31 October Ghostwatch
1992, documenting the live investigation of a London haunted house. Its careful ghosts
recreations of the conventions of live television were such that it successfully fooled supernatural
many of its spectators into believing that BBC personalities, playing themselves, haunting
were in danger, and Britain was undergoing a massive haunting facilitated by tele- media
vision itself. A suicide was attributed to the programme, as well as several cases television
of post-traumatic stress disorder in children. This article links Ghostwatch with liveness
the supernatural implications that media of transmission are often understood as BBC
having, at least since the early linkages between spiritualism and telegraphy. It also
explores how the programme exploits the conventions of liveness as a dark parody of
the ways children are taught to understand television: as a semi-permeable barrier
that looks even as it is looked at. Finally, it considers the implications of the BBC
becoming perverted into a national haunting force in terms of its putative role as a
nation-building public service broadcaster.

On a Halloween night, a broadcast creates fear, confusion and excitement.

Some of the audiences fail to realize that it is a fictional presentation, so skill-
fully has it borrowed from an established news format. In the days follow-
ing, the programmes creators and the network that broadcast it faced censure
over the trauma they had induced in some of the public, who were not able
to successfully navigate the nebulous divide between fact and fiction. This

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Murray Leeder

1. The programmes title description would apply to the famous 1938 broadcast of The War of the
alludes to Crimewatch,
the BBCs reconstructed
Worlds by Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air, but I am instead
crime scene program, describing an event of only slightly less notoriety: the broadcast of Ghostwatch
which began in 1984. (Manning, 1992) by BBC1 in 1992.1 A television movie directed by Lesley
2. Though Ghostwatch is Manning, produced by Ruth Baumgarten and written by Stephen Volk, its
mentioned passingly in controversy was such that it has never been rebroadcast in Britain and was
numerous sources on
mockumentary, Hight suppressed almost entirely until a DVD release by the British Film Institute
(2010: 957) is the only in 2002. Putatively depicting a unique live investigation of the supernatural,
scholar known to me the programme falls loosely within the parameters of what has been termed
in who discusses it
substantially from this mockumentary, mock-documentary or spoof documentary, borrowing the
angle. formal conventions of a live television broadcast and featuring real broadcast-
3. These films might be ers as themselves within its fictional narrative.2 Ghostwatch accords perfectly
understood in terms of with the televisual uncanny that Helen Wheatley characterizes in terms of
cinematic videophobia
(Young 2006:13792),
simultaneous reference to its domestic reception context, in order to produce
in contrast to its lucid sense of the uncanny [] we are constantly reminded that this is
Ghostwatchs terror/horror television which takes place, and is viewed, within a domestic
autocritique. See also
Jowett and Abbott milieu (2006: 7, original emphasis), but extends this making-uncanny beyond
(2013: 17999). the domestic into the broader institutional and national frameworks of home.
4. This figure per the FAQ Further, it allows us to extend considerations of the uncanny qualities of tele-
on the website for the vision in another direction, into the force of liveness itself and its ability to
forthcoming making-of bind together, or haunt, a national viewing public.
documentary,
Ghostwatch: Behind
the Curtains. Other
figures are more Its (A)live
modest, still putting it
in the neighbourhood Though Ghostwatch is seldom discussed in these terms, I regard it as just
as 20,000. a much a locus classicus of the haunted television subgenre as Poltergeist
5. One this subject, see (Hooper, 1982), Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983) or Ring (Nakata, 1998).3 It
Koven (2007), Williams works rather differently from those films insofar as it is not only about tele-
(2010), Burger (2010),
OHara (2010) and Hill vision, but is television (though it shares with Poltergeist an interest in the
(2011: 6688). perverse side of childrens relationships to television). Perhaps it comes closer
in concept to The Outer Limits (1963-5) and The Twilight Zone (1959-64), which
famously used self-reflexive strategies to materialize televisions uncanny
subtexts (see Sconce 2002: 13339). Despite being shown in a drama slot at
9:25 p.m. and advertised as a fictional presentation, many audience members
thought it to be a legitimate live broadcast. It is alleged that more than 500,000
calls reached the BBC during the broadcast of Ghostwatch,4 far more than the
switchboard could accommodate, and at least one suicide was later blamed on
the broadcast, as were the only cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
in a child induced by a television programme ever documented. Even though
Ghostwatch was semi-suppressed by the BBC in the resulting controversy, its
influence can be felt in many places: it is remarkably anticipatory not only of
the spate of ghost hunting television shows like Most Haunted (20022010)
and Ghost Hunters (2004present),5 but also of the later breed of horror films
that manipulate documentary aesthetics, including The Blair Witch Project
(Snchez and Myrick, 1999), [REC] (Balaguer and Plaza, 2007), Paranormal
Activity (2007) and V/H/S (Wingard et al., 2012).
Ghostwatch depicts the live investigation of a haunted house in Northolt,
London, featuring BBC personalities Sarah Greene and Craig Charles play-
ing themselves, while trusted talk show host Michael Parkinson moderates
in the studio alongside Mike Smith, Greenes real-life husband. The house
appears to be a normal, safe location, occupied by a mother, Pamela Early
(Brid Brennan) and her two daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim

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 Ghostwatch and the haunting of media

(Cherise Wesson), but has the reputation of being haunted by a poltergeist. The 6. In addition to naming
real organizations
haunting force has been nicknamed Pipes by children currently living in the like the Society for
house but is traceable back to a suicide named Raymond Tunstall, who in turn Psychical Research
believed himself to be haunted by a figure of local lore, a nineteenth-century (SPR) and Committee
for Skeptical
child murderer named Mother Seddens. Within the apparently safe space of Investigation of Claims
the BBC studio, Parkinson interviews a parapsychologist named Dr Lin Pascoe of the Paranormal
(Gillian Bevan) who has worked on this case and an American skeptic, Dr (CSICOP), Ghostwatch
alludes to a broader
Emilio Sylvestri (Colin Stinton),6 while the studio accepts phone calls from the history of investigation
public. Ultimately, it transpires that the television broadcast itself has catalysed of the supernatural
in Britain. Smiths
the entire nation into a massive sance, spreading Pipes presence throughout characterization of
the nation, with even the BBC studio becoming a disaster zone. the house as the most
Repeated viewings of Ghostwatch are (ironically, considering its checkered haunted house in
Britain alludes to The
broadcast history) rewarded by clever and subtle details. For one thing, the Most Haunted House
corporeal incarnation of Pipes is visible at various points in the film, in reflec- in England (1940),
tions, fleeting glimpses and the like. Some of these cameos are impressively psychical researcher
Harry Prices book
subtle, including when he appears floating above Dr Pascoes left shoul- documenting his
der while she plays a tape of a mysterious voice emanating from Suzannes studies of supernatural
phenomena at the
mouth in an earlier experiment; the figure is easy enough to dismiss as an Borley Rectory in Essex.
imperfection in the video,7 but in fact gives us an eerie glimpse of the spectre Price had also done a
behind the voices, brazenly on display before our eyes if we only care to see it. live radio investigation
of a haunted house
Compare John Potts observation that modern ghosts take on forms orbs in Meopham, Kent,
and vortexes generated by the very technologies used to reveal them. in 1936. The Enfield
They perform the work of fusing magic and technology, of bridging mysti- Poltergeist, the
mysterious haunting
cism and science (Potts 2006: 90). Likewise, the haunting force in Ghostwatch of a North London
turns out not to be just documented by television but fundamentally house documented in
1977/1978, was another
composed of television and its oft-discussed property of liveness: variously inspiration (Ruffles
described [] as presence, simultaneity, instantaneity, immediacy, 2004: 2).
now-ness, present-ness, intimacy, the time of the now, or, as Mary 7. Rather like those
Ann Doane has dubbed it, a This-is-going-on rather than a That-has-been troublesome TV ghosts
(Sconce 2002: 6, original emphasis), which it shares with modern media of created by signal
interference (Sconce
transmission. Ghostwatch lives or dies on its ability to convince the audience 2002: 125).
that it is not watching a patchwork of edited segments recorded at various
locations at some uncertain time in the past, but something that is happening,
live. If its verisimilitudinous recreation of the conventions of live television
helps Ghostwatch convey the message that television should not be blindly
trusted, they tell us something else, too: that the media age has amplified the
possibilities of the supernatural, broadcasting ghosts into all of our homes
and even making them omnipresent.
In 1978, Howard Zettl wrote that:

[w]hile film can reflect upon our world or pretend to being current, it
is totally deterministic; the end of the story is fixed as soon as the reel
is put on the projector. Live television, on the other hand, lives off the
instantaneousness and uncertainty of the moment very much the way
we do in actual life. The fact that television can record images and treat
them in a filmic fashion in no way reduces the aesthetic potential and
uniqueness of television when used live.
(1978: 7)

What can we say, then, of a case where filmic uses of recorded and edited
footage are turned to impersonating the liveness aesthetic? Volk describes
Ghostwatch as an opportunity to satirise television [] In some respects

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Murray Leeder

8. Volk made similar Ghostwatch was a critical analysis of TV through the prism of a ghost story
statements (2003), with
his references to the
(Volk 2012a: 6) (original emphasis).8 First and foremost up for satire here
Gulf War lending a is the idea, propagated in part by commentators like Zettl, that liveness is
Baudrillardian cast to a neutral and essential quality of television, or that this liveness demon-
Ghostwatch.
strates objectivity and a privileged relationship to reality. In Ghostwatchs first
9. See also Weisbergs moments, Parkinson tells us that this live investigation hopes to show you,
2004 bio of the sisters.
for the first time, irrefutable proof that ghosts really do exist. The slippage
between live and irrefutable proof is significant. In its way, Ghostwatch
exposes how [t]elevision exploits its assumed live ontology as ideology
(Feuer 1983: 16) as eloquently as any critic. At very least, it reveals that those
most cherished mythologies of television, ones that suppose immediacy and
nowness as the basis for television (Caldwell 1995: 27) can be faked, and
represent no guarantee of truth or reality; they are just a set of aesthetic prin-
ciples, ideologically charged even though they efface that very ideology, and
may be turned to a variety of purposes. Ghostwatch also demonstrates that
trusted figures of the news media can deliver fictional news just as convinc-
ingly as real news; that they are, in a word, mouthpieces, always delivering
someones truth, someones facts.

The New Fox House

It was an appropriate decision to deliver this critique of the media through the
vehicle of the ghost story. Ghostwatch alludes to a long-standing association of
communication media, especially those of transmission and inscription, with
the supernatural, a connection that was central to the Modern Spiritualist
movement that would become such a cultural force in the latter half of the
nineteenth century and which endures to this day. Volk has admitted to
thinking of the Fox Sisters of Spiritualism fame in conceiving of Ghostwatch
(2012b); one expects the name of the fictional street where its events occur,
Foxhill Drive, was chosen in tribute. This reference is to the famous moment
of origination for the Modern Spiritualism movement, which occurred in the
March of 1848 in a farmhouse in upstate New York. In an event that came to
later be called the Rochester Knockings, two young sisters, Kate and Margaret
Fox, reported that they were in contact with the ghost in their house. Mr
Splitfoot could communicate with them through raps, one for yes, two for
no. Hundreds of spectators are alleged to have witnessed this phenomenon
in its first week alone, and it triggered a wave of similar occurrences across
the United States, and then Europe (Pimple 1995: 7681).9 This event is often
understood as a reflection of the nascent media age, coming as it did four
years after Samuel Morses invention of the telegraph made commonplace
what was previously deemed impossible: simultaneous communication over
vast distances. The taps from beyond the grave that the Fox sisters unveiled
were scarcely less amazing than those taps heard in the telegraph offices
sprouting everywhere. As Jeffrey Sconce writes:

the United States thus saw the advent of both the electromagnetic
and spiritual telegraphs, technologies that stand as the progenitors of
two radical different histories of telecommunications. Most techno-
logical time lines credit Morses apparatus with ushering in a series of
increasingly sophisticated electronic communications devices over the
next century, inventions developed in the rationalist realm of science
and engineering that revolutionized society and laid the foundations for

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 Ghostwatch and the haunting of media

the modern information age. The Rochester Knockings heard by the

Fox family, on the other hand, inspired the modern eras occult fascina-
tion with sances, spirit circles, automatic writing, telepathy, clairvoy-
ance, Ouija boards, and other paranormal phenomena. The historical
proximity and intertwined legacy of these two founding mediums, one
material and one spiritual, is hardly a coincidence.
(2002: 24)

As John Durham Peters likewise notes, the 1830s and 1840s saw a revolution
in space-binding and time-binding, with the advent of the photograph and
the telegraph. The new possibilities of recording and transmission had impli-
cations for the human spirit:

By preserving peoples apparitions in sight and sound, media of

recording helped repopulate the spirit world. Every new medium is
a machine for the production of ghosts [] Spiritualists [] did the
danse macabre of the telegraph, celebrating the spirits conjured by elec-
tricity, the first of many in the nineteenth century to recognize that the
realms of the immortals had spread from the remembered dead to the
recorded dead.
(Peters 1999: 139)

The spiritualists themselves were not blind to this connection; The Spiritual
Telegraph was the name of one of the leading spiritualist periodicals in the
United States. In fact, they were always ready to draw on developments in
communication, chemistry and electromagnetism in their rhetoric to promote
mediumship as something with a new plausibility in the dawning media age.
Ghostwatch is a newer exploration of the entanglement of media and the
supernatural that received a significant early synthesis in Fox house and reso-
nates through to the present day. The Fox house became a site of the blur-
ring of public and private space, in which the homely setting proves a contact
point with another world and is transformed into a place of public scrutiny in
the process. The Rochester Knockings is also a classic haunted house narra-
tive complete with details such as past owners of the house having been trou-
bled by strange noises and the girls conviction that the ghost was a spirit
of a peddler who had been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar
(Owen 1989: 18). Just as Mr Splitfoot was apparently not restricted to the Fox
house, but spread to other locations with spiritualisms growth, Pipes bursts
free from the limitations of the Early house. His fleeting cameos throughout
the broadcast find him well outside of it. He appears in the studio early on,
and at one point Craig Charles interviews a spiritualist named Arthur Lacey
(Derek Smee) about his unsuccessful attempt to exorcise Pipes. Charles finds
Lacey in a crowd of locals, but Pipes is standing directly next to Lacey, and
nobody seems aware of it (ironically enough, as Lacey goes on to speak of his
special sensitivity to the supernatural). Ghostwatch thus flirts with questions
about whether the camera is simply documenting something that eludes the
naked eye, or whether it is facilitating the haunting through its very presence.
Dr Pascoes description of this event as a massive sance alludes to the fact
that the sance always was a product of the media age, a cutting edge new
form of communication that transforms the medium in a piece of communi-
cation technology through which voices from beyond may speak. The spirit
medium exists on the threshold between the visible world and the spirit

177
Murray Leeder

10. For more on ghosts in world (Summerland or The Seventh Heaven in spiritualist parlance), and
childrens culture, see
Goldstein et al. (2007:
in Ghostwatch that medium becomes television itself. It turns all the houses of
81140). Britain into the Fox house or more precisely, it exposes the fact that we all
now live in the Fox house.
The Rochester Knockings also solidified the tradition of placing young
girls at the centre of supernatural events; indeed, mediums would be
predominantly female for most of spiritualisms history. Ghostwatchs two
sisters, Suzanne and Kim, mirror Kate and Margaret Fox, even as the ghost
with whom they come into contact is less friendly than Mr Splitfoot. At
one point in the narrative, it appears that Suzanne and Kim are faking the
haunting, which Pascoe refuses to accept; this may allude to the fact that
the Fox sisters eventually acknowledged that they had faked the Rochester
Knockings by clicking their toe joints (Steinmeyer 2003: 5556). Indeed,
young girls would prove a remarkable blind spot for the first wave of profes-
sional psychical researchers: the Society for Psychical Research had an
early setback when the Creery girls of Derbyshire, the subject of numerous
successful telepathy experiments, were revealed to have been using a secret
code the whole time (Oppenheim 1985: 35960; Thurschwell 2001: 24).
Though Ghostwatch alludes to these historical frauds, it ultimately affirms
the convention of girls standing at the juncture between our world and
the next, depicting the girls as (unhappy) minions of Pipes. It even implies
that they contrived to bring the BBC into the house at Pipess behest, to
allow the catastrophic spread of his presence with which Ghostwatch ends.
Dr Pascoes investigation, rather than ending in embarrassing exposures of
fraud as did those of her predecessors, takes a much darker turn: in her
zeal, she unwittingly helps unleash an angry spirit into all the houses of the
BBCs viewing public.

Everybody Wants to See Him!: Child spectatorship

No doubt the centrality of terrorized children to the plot is part of the
reason why it became so notorious for its impact on child viewers.10 Writes
Andrew Screen:

Despite its late transmission time Ghostwatch was viewed by a sizea-

ble child audience and the tabloids of November 1 had a field day: My
kids were terrified! commented Mrs. Valerie McVey in the News of the
World, whilst Mary Jenkins was quoted in the Mail on Sunday as saying,
Its disgusting thousands of children will be having nightmares.
Other parents complained the programme had given their children
sleepless nights, and even worse, post traumatic stress syndrome. Ruth
Baumgarten personally responded to complaints from angry parents,
taking time to write to the children detailing how the programme was
made. Sarah Greene even made an appearance on Blue Peter to assure
kids that she was still alive and unharmed.
(2003: 60)

In February of 1994, a pair of child psychiatrists reported two cases of PTSD

supposedly induced by Ghostwatch in the pages of the British Medical Journal
(BMJ). Both were 10-year-old boys, described as worriers, who suffered
anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, nightmares, daytime flashbacks and other
phenomena typical of PTSD, including a tendency to [bang] his head to

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 Ghostwatch and the haunting of media

remove thoughts of ghosts (Simon and Silveira 1994: 389). The subse- 11. Poltergeist is another
ghost film frequently
quent month, letters to the BMJ reported a few similar cases, both induced described as causing
by Ghostwatch and other shows like an episode of the hospital drama lasting phobias in
Casualty (1986present), though some physicians also disputed the diag- young spectators for
many of the same
nosis of PTSD. One of these letters, from three doctors from the Fleming reasons (Cantor 2004:
Nuffield Unit, a mental health facility in Newcastle upon Tyne, noted that 28991).
The realistic quality of both Ghostwatch and Casualty may have prevented 12. In British parlance, the
the parents from adequately containing their childrens anxieties (Baillie et cupboard beneath the
al. 1994: 714). Furthermore, five days after the programme, a Nottingham stairs, not the sexual
practice of the same
18-year-old named Martin Denham, described as a nervous young man name.
with the mental age of 13, hanged himself from a tree, leaving a note stat-
ing Mother do not be upset. If there is ghosts I will now be one and I will
always be with you as one. Love Martin. His mother blamed the BBC for his
demise (Anon. 1992: 3).
Making these traumas especially fascinating is the fact that, superficially,
Ghostwatch is a rather tame programme. The DVD release carries only a
12 certification, and despite a small amount of blood, it is by and large
restrained and suggestive. A large part of Ghostwatchs effectiveness derives
from its credible harnessing of the conventions of a live television broad-
cast in a way that speaks particularly to childhood experience. Children are
socialized from a young age to think of television as a porous entity that
looks out as at the spectator as surely as the spectator looks back. 11 The
presence of a childrens presenter like Sarah Greene helps emphasize those
connections, and Greenes perverse fate, sucked into the glory hole12
where Raymond Tunstall committed suicide and was subsequently devoured
by cats, must have been a stressful sight indeed for children weaned on
her presence on Blue Peter (on which she was a presenter from 19801983)
and Going Live! (19871993). Several young spectators reported watching
the programme only because of the presence of a familiar presenter whose
presence suggested an altogether different kind of programming: Because it
was a childrens presenter, I thought it would be like a late kind of childrens
programme, stories and stuff like that (Buckingham 1996: 247). Authors
Benjamin E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford wonder [W]hat of the
responsibility to the many child listeners who recognized Sarah Green [sic]
and Craig Charles from their popular kids show roles? At best, it seems to
have been poor judgment to have cast them in roles where they would be
attacked (2012: 51).
These writers are not alone in believing that the makers of Ghostwatch,
despite its late timeslot, were insufficiently responsible to children in its audi-
ence; David Buckingham offers the cautious double negative it would not
seem unreasonable to conclude that Ghostwatch was an irresponsible piece
of broadcasting (1996: 246). Part of this reaction, no doubt, is in recognition
of the fact that Ghostwatch materializes the darker implications of the ways
children are encouraged to experience television. A major theme in Freuds
essay on the Uncanny (1964: 23335) is that those things that seem safe
and comforting during childhood (doubles, animate dolls, the supremacy of
thought) take on frightening aspects when they return in later life, and this is
how Ghostwatch constructs television. As one spectator recalls,

I felt literally sick with fear, standing in the corner of the room, peek-
ing out between my fingers, thinking All my life I have wanted to see
a ghost, and now there is one on the fucking TV! Two thoughts raced

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Murray Leeder

13. This broadcast is around my head was it only me who was seeing this? And worse,
available online as
part of the online
could Pipes see ME?.
component of (Robbins 2002: 159)
Ghostwatch: Behind
the Curtains, http://
www.youtube.com/ This commentator admits to being 25 years old at the time of the broadcast,
watch?v=mCqVOw- and yet he still experienced Ghostwatch the way children are encouraged to
5CDGg. see television: as a gateway through which disembodied visitors, friendly or
otherwise, enter your home. It resonates with a larger cultural mythology
about the living quality of such technologies, suggesting [] that television
is alive [] living, real, not dead (even if it sometimes a medium of the dead)
(Sconce 2002: 2, emphasis original). Late in the programme, Kim, whom we
now realize has been consciously assisting the ghost, frantically cries: Pipes
wants to see everybody! She juts a finger at the television camera at the
viewer and states Look, everybody wants to see him! That childlike view
of television is fulfilled, as it becomes a conduit that facilitates the haunting
of a nation.

Haunting Britain
Televisions centrality to British national culture has been much discussed. As
John Ellis writes, It was a pervasive and everyday phenomenon. It was urbane
and generalist, able to deal with anything that was important in the world. It
had an important national role, unifying the nation around a common televi-
sion culture (2000: 46). It is here that the special status of the BBC becomes
critical to our understanding of Ghostwatch. As Robin Aitken writes:

The BBC makes and shapes us as a nation in a way no other institution

can. For many it is an ever-present companion; from breakfast time to
bedtime, from childhood through to old age, there it is telling us about
ourselves and the wide world, amusing and entertaining us. No other
institution in the country [] can claim to be so deeply embedded in
so many lives.
(2007: 1)

The Reithian values of its first General Director, Lord Reith, set the pattern
for public service broadcasting all over the world, tasked with elevating the
public by reduc[ing] virtually to zero the marginal cost to every member of
the nation of full access to an enormous cultural heritage, previously avail-
able to a privileged minority (Burns 1997: 42). Others accuse the BBC of an
internal colonization that propagates a homogenous, white, male, middle-
class and London-centric vision of Britishness (Creeber 2004). Some angry
commentators saw Ghostwatchs hoax as a betrayal of the channels mandate
as public service broadcasting and its tradition to impartiality and good
taste. On 4 November 1992, Ann Robinson read out various letters to the
BBC, including statements like The BBC ought to be locked up for such a
prank and that the programme did not fit the BBCs standards of taste.13 In
July 1995, the Broadcasting Standards Commission formally censured the BBC
over Ghostwatch (Culf 1995: 8), stating that the imagery was too shocking and
that the BBC was wrong to build a sense of menace into the documenta-
ry-style programme about the haunting of a suburban house without giving
an adequate warning that it was a hoax (Frean 1995: 12). The criticisms of
Ghostwatch have much to do with its subversion of what Volk characterizes as

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 Ghostwatch and the haunting of media

an in-built element of trust about the BBC brand (2012b: 6), and he agrees 14. For more, see Khair
(2009) and Smith
with interviewer Elizabeth Evans that it would not have had the same impact (2010: 14367).
had it aired on Channel 4 (2012b: 7).
The viewers calls in Ghostwatch report ghostly activities of increasing
violence from different parts of Britain. As supernatural events intensify in
Northolt, callers also report increasingly bizarre phenomena across the UK: a
clock stopping in Derby, a radio going dead in Shropshire, a barking dog in
Chepstow, Monmouthshire, an exploding glass table from a woman who will
not declare her location, and repeated sightings of a terrifying old bald man
wearing a womans dress (Raymond Tunstall/Pipes) from various places. As
if moving from the margins to the core, the haunting eventually invades the
BBC studios. As a public service broadcaster operating under a Royal Charter
and a licensing agreement from the Home Secretary, nation-building is very
much part of the BBCs mandate, so it is striking to see Ghostwatch pervert
this agenda into nation-tricking (if unintentionally), or even nation-haunt-
ing. And though it takes on an unusually demonic quality here, the haunting
of Britain is not so outlandish of an idea. As a reporter states in the classic
Night of the Demon (Tourneur, 1957), Take it kind of easy on our ghosts. We
English are sort of fond of them. Indeed, living in a haunted house is likely
as cause for pride as fear in Britain. Paul Cowdells study of belief in ghosts
in postwar England (2011) finds a widespread belief that has vastly increased
since 1945. Many studies emphasize the important role ghosts have in British
culture and literature (Briggs 1977; Sullivan 1978; Clery 1999; Davies 2007;
Bennet 1999; Smith 2010; Hay 2010), and ghosts have long had a place of
pride on British television, too (Wheatley 2006: 2656). Ghost stories, which
lend themselves to a sense of restraint and taste that rhymes with the BBCs
general principles, have been a signature of British television since at least the
1950s, often leaning on the cultural prestige of famous authors. Volk identifies
the annual series A Ghost Story for Christmas (19711978) and Nigel Kneales
masterful The Stone Tape (1972) as key inspirations for his becoming a writer
(Volk 2012a).
In Ghostwatch, Sarah Greene tells a story that evokes the repressed colo-
nial underpinnings of a great many British ghost stories. She describes stay-
ing with friends who live in a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century mansion in the
Cotswolds and being woken by harpsichord music that she initially dismissed
as a dream. She describes waking to see this Indian womans face, and she
had her hair pulled across her forehead and tightly back, and coal around
her eyes, and her eyes were going from side to side, you know, like in Indian
dancing. The day after, she was informed that the house once belonged to
the viceroy of India, who kept two Indian concubines and buried them in
unconsecrated ground in his garden when they died. As Greene reports,
There had been talk in the village of actually digging up the grave to see
what else was down to there, and it became very clear to me that it was a
message saying No, they mustnt do it. On learning that the rumours were
false, says Greene, she went to the bedroom and told the ghost Dont worry,
nothings going to happen. She describes feeling the atmosphere becoming
peaceful as a consequence.
Simon Hay notes three broad tendencies in British imperial ghost stories.14
In one, native superstition is contrasted with white rationalism, with narra-
tives ultimately affirming one position or the other. In the second type, native
ghosts create problems that white imperialists resolve (Hay 2011: 131). In the
third, white ghosts populate the colonial landscape, implicitly legitimizing

181
Murray Leeder

colonization through an appeal to white history. Greenes narrative fits most

clearly into the second category, since it gives us a white woman encounter-
ing a colonial ghost and being tasked with soothing it and restoring order,
while simultaneously naturalizing colonial relations and consigning them to
the dead and buried past. Even considered outside of the colonial context,
it invokes the trope of disturbed or improper burial that is at least as old as
Pliny the Youngers tale of the philosopher Athenodorous investigating a
haunted house in Athens, and dispelling the ghost by tending to an improp-
erly buried skeleton (iek 1991: 23; Davis 2007: 18; Leeder 2012: 76). And
yet this laying to rest narrative told by Greene contrasts intriguingly with the
ghost story that surrounds it, which moves not towards order and closure but
to chaos and openness. If, as Lord Reith argued, public service broadcasting
had the effective of binding the masses together and making the nation as
one man (quoted in Creeber 2004: 29), that man must be Raymond Tunstall.
Ghostwatchs invocation of colonial ghosts ultimately turns back on itself in a
parody of the BBCs brand of internal colonization, as Pipes hijacks the BBCs
broadcasting apparatus and its nation-building framework to transform all of
Britain into a giant haunted house.
It is in the final minutes that Ghostwatch moves from a live depiction
of an investigation to a live catastrophe. In her discussion of television and
catastrophe, Doane suggests that Catastrophe [] always seems to have
something to do with technology and its potential collapse. And it is also
tainted by a fascination death so that catastrophe might finally be defined
as the conjuncture of the failure of technology and the resulting confronta-
tion with death (Doane 1990: 229). In Ghostwatch, technology fails insofar as
control over it fails; Pipes takes up residence within television itself, wresting
it away from the technicians who operate it and the public that consumes it.
The studio space, so often seen as a bland non-place unpinned from real-
ity and thus neutral, safe and apolitical, is subverted into the epicentre of the
catastrophic haunting. Lights explode with showers of sparks, a mysterious
breeze blows cameras away, and the programme ends with Michael Parkinson
wandering around the dark, deserted studio. In its last moments, he speaks
to the audience in Pipess low, disturbing rasp: Did you believe the story of
Mother Seddens? Did you? Fee fi fo fum. The patrician voice of the BBC, in
the end, is usurped by the voice of legend and rumour and popular supersti-
tion, and the conventions of television news broadcasting are travestied into
an unforgettable image of national catastrophe. Ghostwatch cleverly uses the
BBC to deracinate the BBCs own authority, to expose its brand of cultural
nationalism and internal colonization, and even as it exposes television as
uncanny, it does the same to nation.

Signing off
Perhaps the most notable feature of Ghostwatch is its willingness to use televi-
sion against itself: harnessing the aesthetic of liveness to expose the ideology
of liveness, and using the BBC to subvert and critique the BBC. Ghostwatch is
thus one of the best and purest examples of TV horror, a form checkered by
allegations of being a poor cousin of literary and cinematic horror, watered
down by censorship and timorous producers (Hills 2005: 11128). Ghostwatch
does not feel like a pale copy of anything, nor as horror displaced from is
proper setting, but rather explores the contours and limitations of its own
medium. Two decades after its release, it feels remarkably contemporary, even

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 Ghostwatch and the haunting of media

prophetic. With the storm of controversy surrounding its release receding into
memory and its term of semi-suppression ending, as evidenced by the recent
DVD rerelease and the documentary Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains forth-
coming (at this writing), it may finally be allowed to take its place among the
most significant works of twentieth-century horror in any medium.

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Suggested citation
Leeder, M. (2013), Ghostwatch and the haunting of media, Horror Studies 4:2,
pp. 173186, doi: 10.1386/host.4.2.173_1

Contributor details
Murray Leeder holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University. He is the author of
the forthcoming book on Halloween for the Devils Advocates series (Auteur
Press).

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Murray Leeder

E-mail: mleeder@connect.carleton.ca

Murray Leeder has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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