Three decades after its premiere swept the U.K. into a frenzy, Ghostwatch continues to terrify audiences with its paranormal investigation gone horribly wrong

It is an incredible, maybe even irresponsible, understatement to say that Ghostwatch caused quite a stir when it premiered on the BBC on Halloween night in 1992. These days, it’s hard to fathom the extreme effect this TV movie had on the British public. It’s just as hard to describe it without sounding hyperbolic. But 30 years on, the film’s original broadcast remains one of the most devastating Halloween tricks ever played on such a grand scale. 

Well before found footage “mockumentaries” like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) became surprise blockbusters, Ghostwatch presented itself as a live BBC Halloween special gone horribly wrong. Alert viewers may have recognized that the program, which featured real BBC personalities and reporters exploring “the most haunted house in Britain,” premiered as part of Screen One, an anthology series devoted to dramatic narratives. But in the network’s promotional campaign for the film, little, if anything, other than a Radio Times cover story made explicit that the paranormal investigation in Ghostwatch was a scripted work of fiction. The BBC aired a disclaimer following the broadcast and opened the film with production credits — including a writer (Stephen Volk), director (Lesley Manning), and a full cast list — but within the film itself, everything played as if it was actually happening live on air to real people. But if a viewer didn’t subscribe to the Radio Times or happened to tune in late to the program, they were in for quite an experience. Despite the subtle efforts of the network to ease the U.K. viewing public, the response the film garnered ranged from dizzying, often comical, reports of mass terror and outrage to a case of devastating personal tragedy, all of which led to a decades-long suppression of the film in its home country.

The production was staged so that it would seem as likely to be taking place in real life as possible. As mentioned, the cast consists of actual BBC personalities playing under their real names, including host Michael Parkinson, and wife and husband Sarah Greene and Mike Smith as a married pair of reporters. Greene is on location while Smith takes phone calls in the studio from viewers who have been encouraged to share their own paranormal experiences on air. The number given by the hosts — 081 811 8181 — was the actual number used for BBC phone-ins on many of their programs, including the similarly titled “Crimewatch,” adding yet another link to the strange alternate reality established for viewers. 

In the film, parapsychologist Dr. Lin Pascoe (a fictional character played by Gillian Bevan) is the primary guest on the program. She has recently published a book on her study of the Early family’s haunting, which involves two young girls and their single mother, Pamela (Bríd Brennan), who claim they are being harassed by a presence they call “Pipes.” Pipes is said to bang on walls, stomp across the floor, explode light bulbs, and lurk over the children as they sleep. The oldest daughter, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson), bears the most noticeable burden of the haunting; She speaks in strange voices and suffers from lacerations that suddenly appear across her body. Her younger sister, Kim (Cherise Wesson), though, has a different type of bond with the spirit. She claims to see Pipes often, giving a description of a large, androgynous, cloaked, bloodied, and skull-headed figure who communicates with her.

At the start of the program, the broadcast goes mostly as you would expect. It’s a rather dry, very British affair, with a few pranks sprinkled in among interviews with the family and demonstrations of the technology being used for the ghost hunt. In the studio, Parkinson and Smith treat the evening mostly as a lark. They go through the familiar beats of a typical BBC special while winking at the audience as odd little occurrences begin to cause ripples in the presentation. They have some reason to doubt what they’re seeing. In the Early’s home, Pamela is clearly at her wit’s end as to how to help the children, yet that doesn’t stop her from looking somewhat exhilarated every time she is on camera — she and her family are the stars of a BBC television special after all. She lights up during the preliminary tours of the house, even after answering questions about their traumatic experiences and the harsh accusations being cast at her and her children by doubters who think it’s a hoax. Even Dr. Pascoe invites some reasons for viewers to question the validity of the case early on: While she presents her evidence with clearly articulated hypotheses and well-demonstrated evidence, she also makes herself out to be a bit gullible and overly eager to believe that ghosts do exist. When a prank caller makes it onto the air, Parkinson catches Dr. Pascoe taking diligent notes on the obviously fake story. At times it appears that she is so hopeful to validate her research that she will take any evidence whatsoever as hard truth. Later in the broadcast, seemingly definite doubt is cast upon the alleged haunting when Suzanne is caught producing the clanging pipe sounds herself in a closet that she believed to be off-camera.

But when one of the first on-air callers claims to have spotted a dark figure in the background of some footage played at the top of the show, even the most damning evidence against the Early’s case appears worthy of its own suspicion. Even more than presenting moments that dare us to follow many of the characters and doubt the stories being told, Ghostwatch leads us to question what we are actually seeing through its visual style. The film sustains an unnerving sense of dread throughout even its most benign scenes. Pipes does appear on camera throughout Ghostwatch, but in ways that cause us to second guess whether we are perceiving something sinister or just imagining it — Wait, how many crew members are there? Who was that husky one in the black smock? The spirit’s presence is felt peripherally, like it’s perpetually just out of view. Pipes lurks beyond the camera’s immediate range or in mirror reflections. More viewers eventually call in who share bits of speculative information and urban legends regarding the dark history of the house and its tenants. Their accounts suggest that Pipes may be a sort of conglomerated presence of the people that have been possessed through the ages by an evil force rooted in the Early home. Eventually, the network’s technology begins to glitch and break down. The scene at the house becomes more tense and disorienting. By the end of the film, supernatural forces have found their way into the studio and all hell is breaking loose.

During the 1992 broadcast, the chaos depicted in the film’s final scenes extended beyond its own medium. In the aftermath of its Halloween premiere, the BBC reportedly received somewhere between 20-30,000 phone calls regarding Ghostwatch. These ranged from angry parents whose children were so scared that they couldn’t sleep — some were later diagnosed with PTSD from their viewing — to a vicar claiming the show had unleashed actual demons upon the world. One woman demanded compensation for the pair of pants her husband soiled while watching. Three expectant mothers were said to have been forced into labor from fear, and one man blamed Ghostwatch for making him “attack [his] missus.”¹ Screenwriter Stephen Volk took inspiration for the film from the Enfield Poltergeist, an incident that occurred in the late 1970s when two girls claimed they were being tormented by an evil spirit in their council house. Investigations proved, almost definitely, that the haunting was a hoax put on by the young girls. It was a well-documented story and the subject of an earlier BBC documentary. Decades later, The Conjuring II (2016) used this same event as its source to far more bombastic ends than Ghostwatch. But any similarities between Ghostwatch and the Enfield case were lost on many viewers. What they were seeing on their televisions felt too real to be merely inspired by actual events.

In the most awful and unpredictable of responses to Ghostwatch, an 18-year-old boy with learning disabilities recognized similarities between the banging sounds made by Pipes in the film and the noises from the old plumbing in his own house. Soon after the broadcast, he took his own life because he feared his house was haunted by a similarly malevolent presence. His suicide note directly linked his death to Ghostwatch by referencing the existence of ghosts. Following lawsuits and very public bashings by major publications and citizens who believed not enough was done to distinguish the film as a work of fiction, the BBC has never aired Ghostwatch again. For years they pretended the whole thing didn’t happen.

Of course, with a history such as this, and a reputation so sinister, the film couldn’t help but become a highly sought after piece of cult film history. Ghostwatch was far from the first horror film to be staged like a documentary. But, being a TV film made by the BBC to resemble a live broadcast, it presented an entirely novel shared experience for viewers who felt like they were involved in a nationwide haunting. Sure, Orson Welles had incited an imaginary alien invasion in 1938 with The War of the Worlds, but Ghostwatch had incredibly subtle and convincing visuals to further aid in the trickery — It even ends with beloved host Michael Parkinson appearing to be possessed himself in the apocalyptic final moments before the cameras give out.² 

While Ghostwatch can be looked at as a precursor to all those Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity-type films, that doesn’t really do Ghostwatch complete justice. For one, Ghostwatch doesn’t present itself as found footage. It doesn’t rely on the concept that the people in the film recorded up until their dying breaths, only for their tapes to be discovered by others who are publicly presenting the material at a later date. Formally, the closest comparisons, in the way it presents the footage as something that took place “live,” are films like The WNUF Halloween Special (2013) and the webcast presentation of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018). But WNUF is more interested in replicating and spoofing a retro television broadcast than in its horror elements. Gonjiam uses the webcast format of intercutting between various GoPro-wearing ghosthunters to more or less update The Blair Witch’s camcorder style.

Ghostwatch sets its sights on a larger, more cosmic level of horror. The film that it shares the most in common with is Pulse (2001), the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film about a website that invites visitors to “meet a ghost.” Whatever portal or realm the website taps into eventually finds a way to translate its spirits into the material world through the internet. Unsurprisingly, reality can’t handle it when the ghosts start scaring people to death and usher in humanity’s downfall. Both Ghostwatch and Pulse conjure a world in which media technologies transcend their basic functions and are commandeered by the very spirits their human operators are trying to connect with.³ 

But Ghostwatch’s greatest asset is the way it restricts its narrative to such a small scope. Pulse stretches itself incredibly far in its final act as buildings fall and planes crash and explode. It loses a bit of its power when the world crumbles to oblivion around its characters in such an extreme manner. Ghostwatch is able to reach a similar breadth of climactic destruction, but, by containing itself entirely within the parameters of the live broadcast, it uses what we can’t see beyond the studio to much greater effect.

The film juggles so many different perspectives (the on-scene reporters, the presenters in the studio, the viewers calling in) that there isn’t time or space to explain everything or establish a complete lore. Everything involving the deepest darks of the haunting’s backstory is mostly suggested — mere hypotheses or incomplete parcels of knowledge. A caller chimes in briefly to discuss research they did into an urban legend about a notorious child killer known as Mother Seddons; an anonymous social worker speaks of a subletter in the Early’s home who was left off the records and who perished in the house under mysterious circumstances. The pieces don’t fit neatly together. Nothing clicks into place like a puzzle. This makes the possibilities of what is happening on the live broadcast all the more threatening. With all the little gaps, each ghostly occurrence sends our minds scrambling through the fragments of information we have received. When the pieces do start to come together by the film’s end, a whole new layer opens up — as the poltergeist’s powers reach far beyond the Norfolk house — and overwhelms us with a dread more severe than we could ever have imagined from the quaint little ghost story initially established.

Related: Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992): The Sweetest Terror by Frankie Vanaria

Just as there is no definitive source regarding what is happening within the film, the communication of potentially useful information is routinely interrupted by television conventions and broadcasting limitations. Parkinson and his fellow hosts in the studio do everything they can to keep the program as viewer friendly as possible. Evidence is displayed in the blandest fashion; the male presenters’ comforting smirks are so routine that even when things do go totally wrong, their faces remain fixed in plastic smiles while they search for words to fill dead air time. And are those callers who phone-in with knowledge of child murderers and subletters who were mauled to death by mobs of cats really hanging up mid-conversation? Or are the producers realizing the horror is getting a little too heavy for primetime television?

The scariest part of Ghostwatch is not only that the thing you see out of the corner of your eye might be an apparition — even a sinister one — but the suggestion it could be some prehistoric force of evil that has been compounding and evolving through the generational mills of true crimes and urban legends. The ghost Pipes is slowly built up to stand as a compendium of ages of violence and wickedness — each one influencing its successors, its spectral form resembling elements of all the generations of evildoers. The terror that builds throughout the film seeps in so gradually. Compared to the immediately satisfying jump scares of The Conjuring 2, Ghostwatch offers something so much more sinister because it never turns its ghost sightings into major events. The scary parts stick with us because they take place around the central drama of bickering presenters arguing over what is being shown on the program and whether it’s actually happening. The peripheral terror created by Ghostwatch causes us to hang behind in the previous scene and wonder if what we saw or felt was really there. Nowadays, films and shows may add little Easter Egg scares for viewers to rewind and search for. But Ghostwatch was produced as a live experience — there was no pausing and backtracking; there is no gimmick here. The most horrifying images linger in our minds because they are presented so delicately. They are felt more intensely on a subliminal level. It makes you question and damn your own senses — which may account for why it was such a profound shock for its many unsuspecting viewers during its initial broadcast. While the film eventually validates our worst suspicions of what we might have seen, in the corners and far reaches of its frames, it doesn’t make the experience more comprehensible. It somehow makes us want to go back — back in for further proof that our worst fears have actually been there staring at us through the camera all along.

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1. Screenwriter Stephen Volk has compiled a thorough historical account — including archival clippings and television reports — of the public’s response to Ghostwatch on his website.
2. Parkinson’s own mother was one of the concerned callers.
3. Split Tooth’s Bennett Glace astutely notes that, in the case of Ghostwatch, it is also “especially eerie to see an entity that may be eternal not just taking advantage of modern day technology, but also mostly playing by its rules.”