Find a copy of Ghostwatch on DVD
In this notorious "live" coverage, the most up-to-date television technology seeks to show proof of the supernatural in the first transmission from an alleged haunted house on Halloween night, 1992.
Ghosts no longer inhabit stately homes or rattle chains. They live in ordinary council houses like that of Mrs Pamela Early and her two children. For months the family has suffered strange noises, awful smells and bent cutlery, but is hers really the most haunted house in Britain as the tabloids claim?
For the first time, BBC TV turns its cameras on the subject of the paranormal, and sends its intrepid reporters to investigate ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night...
Are they real, or just make-believe?
Watch a clip from "Ghostwatch" on YouTube
"Extraordinary... a thrilling ghost story MR James would be proud of" "A supernatural TV landmark" SFX
"A work as ingenious as it is notorious" The Zone
"For sheer fright levels this has to be the one" Simon Clark
"The only truly hair-raising piece of television this decade" - David Protheroe (Chapter Arts Centre)
"A legend in the history of spooky television" Cornerhouse, Manchester
"One of the scariest TV shows I've seen" Hunter Peters, Suite 101
"One of the most complained-about BBC programmes ever" Joe McNally, Fortean Times
"One of the great 'Do you remember' moments of British television" Creature Corner
"They should all get a BAFTA for it" Letter to Radio Times (21-27 Nov 1992)
"The BBC's legendary Halloween special" - BFI
"A hugely prescient and perceptive moment in television history" - David Sutton, Fortean Times
"This BBC drama is legendary, and rightly so... years ahead of its time" Ian Berriman (DVD review, SFX magazine)
"…about as subversive as TV can get" Jerry Glover in Headpress 22
"A brilliant and complex bit of television and outstanding work of horror. It used all the devices of television to frighten, and frighten to make a point. And that point is as relevant, perhaps even more so today as it was in 1992" Samhain magazine
"A rare instance of inspired, creative and challenging TV production... I'll never forget Ghostwatch" ShortList.com
"It's not a huge stretch to say we are living in a post-Ghostwatch world, where the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction has accelerated. Only (...) now the people putting on the frighteners are our political lords and masters, who use scare tactics to justify corrupt wars and (...) curtailment of civil liberties..." Peter Tennant's blog, Black Static online
"Ghostwatch, in its own little way, was as much of an epochal TV event as the Kennedy Assassination" thecustardtv.com
"Ghostwatch is a fabulous piece of work - it is played so dangerously - a genius satire of the media, but there is mischief too and we are skillfully drawn into a world of uncertainty, the 'play' destabilising the very medium we are watching it in" Mytho Geography
"Genius" Mark Gattiss
"Superb" Scott Mathewson, The Stage
"One of the highlights of modern television" Stephen Susco (screenwriter, The Grudge)
"Charlie watched the 1992 spooktacular Ghostwatch at four in the morning, and, having initially laughed at Sarah Greene's performance, soon found himself getting genuinely frightened" Charlie Brooker (writer of Dead Set) in The Guardian
"A complacent British public shaken to its core by Stephen Volk's TV play" Phil Alderman, Noise to Signal
"The single most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life... A bloody brilliant piece of television - so controversial it was never shown again; so scary that it's seared on the mind of most people who saw it; and so ahead of its time that it inspired both Derren Brown and the makers of The Blair Witch Project." Thomas Bagnall, Narc Magazine
"Nightmare fuel of high calibre" You Tube
"The BBC gives over a whole evening to an investigation into the supernatural... Four respected presenters and a camera crew attempt to discover the truth behind The most haunted house in Britain, expecting a light-hearted scare or two and probably the uncovering of a hoax. They think they are in control of the situation. They think they are safe. The viewers settle down and decide to watch 'for a laugh'. Ninety minutes later the BBC, and the country, was changed, and the consequences are still felt today." Nubient
"Even the mere mention of Ghostwatch can reduce its viewers to gibbering messes" Digital Spy
"Genuinely terrifying TV, preying on people's primal fears and disguising it as a 'live, as it happens' experience" Read Horror
"Ghostwatch showed clearly where the real ghosts of our society had gone to live... Ghostwatch was, of course, also about television... The extraordinary reaction rather proved the central aim of the drama... It demonstrated the truth about modern television... A brilliant piece of TV drama." Adam Curtis
Directed by Lesley Manning
Producer: Ruth Baumgarten
Executive Producer: Richard Broke
(1992, BBC1 Screen One Special, TX: October 31, 1992)
Follow acclaimed parapsychologist Dr Lin Pascoe's blog "Angels of the Odd"
Michael Parkinson...................Himself
Sarah Greene........................Herself
Mike Smith............................Himself
Craig Charles........................Himself
Dr Lin Pascoe........................Gillian Bevan
Mrs Pamela Early....................Brid Brennan
Suzanne Early.......................Michelle Wesson
Kim Early..............................Cherise Wesson
Cameraman..........................Chris Miller
Sound Recordist....................Mike Aiton
Alan Demescu.......................Mark Lewis
Dr Emilio Sylvestri.................Colin Stinton
Arthur Lacey.........................Derek Smee
As yet, Ghostwatch has only ever been repeated on television outside of the UK, on stations such as Canadian digital channel SCREAM (for Halloween 2004) and the Belgian channel Canvas in 2008. In 2002, the British Film Insitute released a "10th Anniversary" edition on VHS and DVD.
Read the Wikipedia entry on "Ghostwatch" here
An extensive, authoritative article on "Ghostwatch" by Stephen Volk exclusive to Fortean Times
Watch the original viewers' responses on the BBC "Points of View" programme with Anne Robinson
Extract of Stephen Volk on "100 Greatest Scary Moments" ("Ghostwatch")
"Ghostwatch" entry on Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television website
Join the fan site: "Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains" YouTube channel (includes "Biteback" extract, clips, and many viewer comments
Become a Follower of "Ghostwatch: BtC" at the GW BtC Blogspot
Go to the "Ghostwatch" entry on the BBC Cult website
In the 31 Jan-6 Feb 2004 edition of Radio Times, "Ghostwatch" made an appearance as 3rd most spooky TV show ever, beaten only by "The X-Files"
and "Stephen King's It"
Ghostwatch was also cited by the BMJ as being the first television programme to be responsible for post-traumatic stress disorder in children (4 Feb 1994).
There is a section devoted to Ghostwatch in the book "Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion" by Robert E Batholomew & Hilary Evans (Sutton Publishing). The programme features in the chapter "Media-Made Monsters: Four Tall Tales and Why People Believed Them".
Ghostwatch also features as a case study in the book "Media Studies: Texts, Production & Context" by Dr Paul Long and Tim Wall (Longman, 2009) in the chapter "Media Texts and Meaning" (p120-121): "Case Study: Snuff Movies and the Boundaries of the Real".
On 29 October 2009 Ghostwatch featured on "Reece Shearsmith's Haunted House" on BBC Radio 4. Mark Gattiss said Ghostwatch was "genius", while Vic Reeves had never heard of it (though he said he had heard of Michael Parkinson!). Hear the clip via YouTube
To read Peter Tennant's blog on Halloween and Ghostwatch, click here
What to watch this Halloween... "my favourite - possibly of all time - Ghostwatch"
Halloween Video Vault: Ghostwatch
Interesting new blog on web site MSSV; The Reality Artificers. Subtitled: "How the BBC (i.e. Ghostwatch), Orson Welles, ancient Egyptian scribes and alternate reality game designers all follow the same 3900 year old tradition."
Also, nice to spot on "The Gralien Report" web site essay competition winner Scott Lyall, an independent investigator from the UK, writing "For my money the best film to deal with a Fortean topic was the BBC's Ghostwatch..."
Ghostwatch featured in an article on hoaxes in the media in The Guardian dated 14 March 2010, entitled: Bad News: Broadcast Hoaxes.
Ghostwatch was also discussed on the comedy quiz show The Bubble, 18 March 2010 on BBC2, after a discussion of the hoax Russian invasion of Georgia. Host David Mitchell, ignorant of the original broadcast, said: "If I'd seen Sarah Greene and a ghost called Pipes I'd have shat myself!"
On April 1st, 2010, it was announced that "Pipes" from Ghostwatch would appear on a future episode of The Simpsons alongside an appearance by Ghostwatch writer Stephen Volk. (The news turned out to be a rather devious hoax.)
Pipes becomes rap artist shock horror!... Samples from the original GW broadcast are used in this rap single 16 Ghostwatch (feat. Pipes) created by Dick Limerick Academy on their album Merseycide.
An interesting new review of Ghostwatch can be found on TV Tropes. And another interesting take at The Medium Is Not Enough TV Blog.
image: Arfon Jones
In October 2010 Ghostwatch featured in FANGORIA horror magazine issue #297 (Halloween Special):
The programme was cited in The One Show (BBC1) on 24/09/2010 as part of Kim Newman's "60 Seconds of Huge Hoaxes", naturally including Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast, the BBC spaghetti harvest, and Nanook of the North.
October 2010: New reviews appeared on British Horror Television, Beyond Fiction and 100 Top Horror Films. Ghostwatch also featured in SFX magazine's feature on "The Classic British TV Ghost Story":
In 2011, writer/broadcaster/satirist Charlie Brooker devoted a chunk of one of his programmes in the series How TV Ruined your Life to Ghostwatch and the furore it caused in 1992. "A cunning blurring of fact and fiction" he called it.
A write-up on Ghostwatch by Thomas Bagnall in Narc Magazine, prior to its screening as part of Alien Nation: A Season of Cult British TV at Northumbria University, programmed by lecturer in Film and TV James Leggott.
Also in 2011, The Fan Can website looked at the Best and Worst TV Ghosts. And "Pulling Focus - Found Footage Films and Marketing" - an article by Sean Watson on the site The McGuffin calls Ghostwatch "complete nightmare fuel".
Meanwhile, esteemed horror writer and film critic Anne Billson gives a nod to Ghostwatch in her Scary Bits (PART ONE & TWO) on Multiglom. (Be sure to scroll down to the "honourable mentions" at the end of PART TWO.)
Some highly perceptive observations re: Ghostwatch on "The Medium and The Message" blog by Adam Curtis, outstanding documentary film-maker of the likes of The Power of Nightmares: it's called The Ghosts in the Living Room. Well worth watching in full the clip from 1963 of the much-imitated (at the time) Fyfe Robertson on the BBC Tonight programme with a proto-Derek Acora (equally unconvincing schtick, even then), plus a suburban haunting in Swindon circa 1973, and several clips of the Enfield poltergeist featuring the late psychcical investigator Maurice Grosse. I particularly like Curtis's name check of The Innocents with regard to GW - and I've lifted a quote from this blog to join the others at the top of this page. Praise indeed. (December 22, 2011)
"A perfect pastiche..." to quote another piece on Ghostwatch in the context of "the persuasing power of the simulated live broadcast" which appears on Electric Sheep (January 2012) whilst another new, enthusiastic review appears on Fear Theatre.
Check out "The Experiment" on YouTube ... A multimedia "happening"-cum-hoax created by psychologist Dr Brendan Dare and Thrill Laboratory, directly inspired by Ghostwatch and its screening at the 2011 Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham. Fascinating stuff.
A cheeky sneak peek at the Ghostwatch "20th anniversary" interviews so far:
Parky and me
Sarah Greene and Mike Smith
Me, Craig Charles, Lesley and Rich