Things That Go Bump in the Night: Finding Comfort in the Paranormal on the BBC

As Hallowe'en approaches at a time of rampant disinformation, hysterical extremism and deep political unease, Graham Williamson examines the nostalgic appeal of the supernatural

BBC iPlayer is currently promoting its "Spooky Season", a curated set of shows for Hallowe’en viewing. Most of these are in the genres you'd expect: suspenseful serials like Wreck and Interview with the Vampire, supernatural sitcoms like Ghosts and What We Do in the Shadows, the occasional classic horror film. But there is also a wealth of documentaries. 

At the more grounded end, you have Charlie Cooper investigating British folklore in Myth Country. You also have straight-faced documentaries about ghosts (Hauntings, Uncanny) and UFOs (Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens). They're glossy, moody, atmospheric, a close relative of the current slew of true crime documentaries, just with fewer sensitivities to avoid treading on. One – Amityville: An Origin Story – manages to be both at the same time, covering a real-life spree killing that inspired a fictionalised ghost story.

Paranormal documentaries are hardly new to British television – a quick flick around the outer limits of the digital programme list shows everyone from Yvette Fielding to the Osbournes looking for the truth about something-or-other. But a cluster of them on the BBC? There are poltergeist reports that are less weird than that.

Roz Morris, a former reporter for BBC World at One, would concur. Interviewed in the first episode of Hauntings, she looks at a 1970s edition of the Daily Mirror and notes "You don't usually get ghost stories on the front page, do you? It wasn't necessarily news – not hard news, anyway". She's talking about the Enfield poltergeist case, one of those classic stories that any paranormal documentary series must get round to sooner or later. 

There is a distinct 1970s flavour to a lot of these shows. On the most prosaic level, a lot of them deal with cases from that decade. The first two hauntings in Hauntings are from the ‘70s, and Broad Haven – the titular Village That Saw Aliens – saw them in 1977, just as the Hodgson family were being terrorised in Enfield. 

More subtly, they evoke a lost, lamented age of TV where, despite Roz Morris's claims, news outlets actually did cover the supernatural. In recent years, blogs and books with titles like Scarred for Life, The Haunted Generation and A Year in the Country have nurtured a sense that 1970s and 1980s British culture was unusually ghoulish. Children's television was either deliberately terrifying (Doctor Who) or accidentally so, (Jigsaw), public information films became taxpayer-funded exercises in mutilation, and a cloud of nuclear doom hung over the whole era. 

As well as fictional classics like The Wicker Man and Children of the Stones, fans of this least comforting of nostalgia movements will also reminisce over disturbing documentaries and news programmes. If you can remember Uri Geller bending spoons on talk shows, Nationwide covering the curse of the Hexham Heads, or the blood-soaked stigmata episode of Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, you might be of the haunted generation.

Why the 1970s and 1980s? The common answer is that it was a fraught time. All that unease about Cold War brinkmanship, all those winters of discontent, the emergence of AIDS... it was inevitable that the period would produce more troubling popular culture. 

Danny Robins, the puppyish, parka-wearing host of Uncanny, is keen to draw the line between scary stories and scary times, citing "Covid, the existential threat of climate change and war creeping ever closer to us in Europe" as reasons for the resurgence in paranormal belief. Conversely, in Hauntings Roz Morris says she was sent to report on the Enfield poltergeist because there was nothing else happening that day. 

This eerie wave of nostalgia might be more sociologically inclined than most nostalgia movements, but it's still fundamentally nostalgic. It's easy to see why Robins, born in 1976, would want to make a show harking back to his childhood favourites. But what about Paranormal's investigator Sian Eleri? She was born in 1994, meaning even the post-X-Files wave of supernatural shows is only the faintest memory for her. 

The first episode of Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens offers an answer. It begins with Eleri going into work at the BBC. She passes a huge screen in the lobby showing a US congressional hearing on UFOs, then scrolls through more UFO sightings on TikTok. Eventually, she gets back to the supernatural documentary's chronological heartland by watching a clip of John Craven's Newsround, but the point has been made. Eleri doesn't need to remember the 1970s. Her haunted, fraught, irrational, paranoid decade is happening right now.

There's always been a link between paranormal belief and extremist politics. George Orwell wrote in 1943 that "examining a copy of Gringoire, the French Fascist weekly... I found in it no less than thirty-eight advertisements of clairvoyants." 

I should also note that some of the nicest, most generous people I know believe in spiritualism, or crystal healing, or the Mongolian Death Worm – but there is a definite unease about politics and irrationality right now. When I clicked play on an episode of Hauntings, the first thing I saw was that new BBC advert in which Clive Myrie declares the Corporation to be on the front line of a war against fake news and conspiracy theories. 

You might justifiably wonder: where does the Enfield poltergeist fit into this?

Robins, always a great ambassador for belief, sees it differently. "I think Uncanny has opened up a safe space where people can agree to disagree and enjoy debating with people who are different from them," he said in a Fortean Times interview, defining the show's ethos as "delicious uncertainty". That's certainly true of Uncanny, with its friendly dialogues between "#TeamBeliever" Evelyn Hollow and "#TeamSceptic" Ciaran O'Keeffe. It is less true of wider paranormal debate on the internet, which can be just as intransigent and blinkered as anything else.

Including, it should be said, scepticism. Part of the reason why it's so surprising to see the BBC doing paranormal documentaries is that, by the end of the 2000s, it looked like scepticism had won. The "Four Horsemen" of considered, non-believing rationality, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were notching up bestsellers; Brian Cox and Alice Roberts were TV's new professorial pin-ups; Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column in the Guardian was cutting down fashionable frauds... It was a time when rationalism was cool, energised by the twin threats of Islamic fundamentalism and the Christian right.

Reading the sniffy broadsheet reviews of the above-named shows, you might think we were still in this era. But you don't have to be a Trump supporter to think the mainstream media has lost its right to position itself as the arbiter of rationality. 

Newspapers whose critics sneer at poltergeists and UFO sightings will also publish conspiracy theories about sinister "blobs" of civil servants plotting against the Government, or promote inflammatory fake news about plots to "Islamise" British schools. They endorse MPs who peddle lies about the police covering up the Stockport stabbings, or print articles about Jewish billionaires pushing "gender ideology" that recall Nazi-era conspiracy theories.

By the early 2010s, the previous decade's sceptical movement was in a miserable state. Too many of the rank-and-file fell into a reactively anti-feminist position, which quickly led to other bigotries. Others became true believers in conspiracy theories, so long as the conspiracy theories had an establishment origin: Iraq helped al-Qaeda commit the 9/11 attacks, say, or global warming is a hoax. 

The supposed "critical thinking" boom of the 2000s had taught many people to laugh at creationists. When it came to critically assessing lies which stroked their biases, it's hard to see any kind of success.And here’s where the collapse of movement scepticism intersects with the story of our time. 

The methods used by the liberal commentariat to dissuade people from voting for Trump or Brexit were not a million miles away from the methods they used to dissuade people from believing in Bigfoot: Come now, isn't this a bit silly? Why don't you get your news from proper sources like us? It didn't stop people believing in Bigfoot, and it didn't stop what was coming.

It's for this reason that – even as a paid-up member of #TeamSceptic – I found myself enjoying these shows, despite knowing we were inevitably winding our way towards a final episode that included the well-worn phrase "perhaps we'll never know". 

Having earlier drawn the link between political disinformation and the material in these programmes, it's worth noting that there is a crucial difference between far-right conspiracy theorists and paranormalists. I think believers in past-life regression are probably wrong, but they've never tried to burn down the centre of the town where I live.

Ultimately, we don't have to revive the spirit of the 1970s to enjoy a paranoid documentary. There's enough of it on the news, and it makes shows like Hauntings and Paranormal into the comfort viewing they really are.