Ghostwatch

0:28Recommendations can be amazing. credentials, and reviews all right in the app. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today.

0:40You're in your apartment alone. Then you hear something. You think, was it just the storm? You realize you're not alone. Your living room is not safe with Unhinged, the new immersive game experience brought to you by Netflix. To make it out alive, you must answer the phone. The question is, when your phone rings, will you answer? Tap the banner to play Unhinged now, only on Netflix.

1:19The program you're about to watch is a unique live investigation of the supernatural. It contains material which some viewers may find to be disturbing. No creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shutter windows. Yet for the past ten months, this house has been the focus of an astonishing barrage of supernatural activity. On Halloween night in 1992, at 9.25pm, an unusual television show aired on the BBC. So welcome live this Halloween night to the first ever TV Ghost Watch. We're going to investigate one of the most baffling and fascinating areas of human experience, the supernatural. Tonight, television is going ghost hunting in an unprecedented scientific experiment we hope to show you for the first time irrefutable proof that ghosts really do exist.

2:13The host, a long-time BBC talk show host and journalist named Michael Parkinson, told viewers how the live investigation would work. The BBC's Sarah Green would be spending the night at a house that was said to be haunted with a small camera crew, reporting live on whatever happened at the house. During the show, people at home could call a phone number, broadcast on the screen, and share their own experiences with ghosts, and also to comment on whatever they were seeing on the show. This style of live broadcast was popular at the time. There was a show called Crime Watch that also had a call-in element, and one called Hospital Watch.

2:58This one, on Halloween night, was called Ghost Watch. The host, Michael Parkinson, introduced a woman in the studio with him as an expert on the paranormal, who would help explain what was going on during the show. She said she'd been investigating the haunted house, which was in London, on a street called Fox Hill Drive, for months. We ran a computer programme of all the haunted locations in the UK, and then we did a census of all the various investigators, and they were all unanimous that Fox Hill had more tangible phenomena on record than, well, I was going to say any place in the world, but certainly any place in the UK.

3:37What's the chance, do you think, of us seeing anything tonight? I don't honestly know. Sometimes we saw nothing for weeks and then other times things were coming through thick and fast. I mean so much so that we had difficulty logging it all. I mean some nights it was like being in a circus or a war zone. A war zone? What about Halloween? Will that make any difference do you think? Yeah, I think it will. Certainly there are more reports on Halloween than almost any other night of the year. But maybe that's because people expect to see things.

4:14I've always been interested in ghost stories. This is Stephen Volk. By 1992, when Ghostwatch aired, he'd written a few horror movies. One of them was directed by the same person who directed The Exorcist. Another was a reimagining of the vacation to Switzerland that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. He'd been interested in the ways novels like Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula are constructed Both novels are presented as non-fiction, a series of letters and journal entries And it struck me that many, many literary ghost stories that you read begin I'm going to tell you something that's quite unbelievable, but I really want you to know this really, really happened to me I know you're not going to believe me, but it really did happen to me.

5:08And being a television writer, I always thought to myself, what is the television equivalent of telling that kind of ghost story with that kind of authenticity? And it struck me, well, what they would do in TV if they told a ghost story is just put a camera in someone's face and the person would tell you, this really happened to me. This is, you know, what non-fiction TV is all about. You interview people straight to their face, and they tell you the story. So Stephen decided to do just that. He wrote a ghost story and pitched the idea to the BBC. It would be a ghost story presented as an actual live documentary investigation.

5:55Everything was designed to look as real as possible. But it only aired once. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

6:14Stephen Volk was used to writing movies. But writing what was supposed to look like live television was something else altogether. Live TV was full of mistakes and interruptions, and you never knew what would happen. He studied telethons and roving reporter pieces and shows in front of live audiences. It was a bit of guesswork. And I had, you know, for instance, in a movie, when you're writing a movie, you never put exposition on the screen. You never have someone saying, oh, I moved into this house and it was haunted and my kids were scared. And you just don't do it like that. And of course, that's the complete reverse of what you do on television.

6:53and you always thrust a microphone into someone's face and have them tell you a story or interview them and ask them questions straight. So I had to construct these kind of interview situations and question and answer sessions rather than the way I'd normally do it in a movie. And what was the reaction from the BBC when you first brought them this idea? I don't think they quite got what it was trying to be, which was basically something that looked like something else. So when the BBC saw what we were up to, it was a bit kind of taken aback and kind of bemused. I remember the executive producer, Richard Brook, when he saw the first cut that Leslie, the director, presented to him.

7:38He was quite amazed that there was a shot where one of the technicians kind of moved in the front of the camera and the camera kind of wobbled. And he said, why on earth have you left that in? One of the things that I love about live TV or what I did love as a child watching live TV or the mistakes. This is Leslie Manning, the director of Ghostwatch. To do credit to the story as written, I wanted to present it as close to live TV as I possibly could. Like Stephen, Leslie says she watched a lot of live TV to prepare. She says she also watched a lot of documentaries to see how she could direct the actors.

8:20She remembers telling them to dial back their performances. In addition to the actors, she included real people on camera talking about their own ghost stories. The Ghostwatch team also decided to use very well-known and respected BBC hosts on the show. People viewers would be used to seeing doing interviews or documentary programs. It was a gamble because we were casting people like Michael Parkinson, who's kind of like a Larry King kind of character, I guess you would say, in terms of America, to kind of be an actor. And there was no guarantee that he was going to be able to do any of it, really.

9:00Leslie says they also didn't want actors playing the camera crew. So we asked around the BBC if there was anybody, any of the studio camera guys who actually were happy to be on camera. And we got two people back, one sound, one camera, and they got the job. There was a lot of handheld camera. Leslie tended to work out quite long takes so that the camera would be moving around the whole time, upstairs downstairs you know around the corner and this kind of thing uh which is not normally how you'd work on a movie for instance you know you'd have hundreds of angles and hundreds of shifts of lighting in order to do one sequence or one scene um and it was low quality it was a video camera uh i mean i think that's what outraged the higher up people at the drama department because they were used to something that was kind of well-lit and kind of, in a way, kind of well-acted and well-presented and, you know, the composition of every shot was considered.

10:05But because of the nature of this, none of those things really mattered. The only thing that mattered was it had to look like it was happening before your eyes. And if it's happening before your eyes, all those other considerations don't really matter. The point of it was really, do you believe everything you see on television? On the first page of the Ghostwatch script, Stephen wrote, I won't believe it until I see it on TV. On Halloween night, on the BBC's drama time slot, when they usually showed movies, a short introduction indicated that what viewers were about to see was fictional, but it was vague.

10:49It described Ghostwatch as a film, and the real BBC hosts in Ghostwatch as starring in it. If you missed that, then goodness knows what you were expecting. According to the BBC, around 11 million people were watching on Halloween night. The program began with what looks like time-stamped research footage from a few months earlier. It shows two girls sleeping in their bedroom. Then, in the middle of the night, there's a loud banging sound, and they start screaming. At one point, the light bulb in the bedside lamp bursts. Soon after that, the camera goes to what looks like a live feed of the reporter at the house, Sarah Green, interviewing the two girls, Kim and Suzanne, and their mother, Pam, all played by actresses, about the problems they've been having at the house over the last ten months.

11:45These terrible noises woke me coming from the walls, like a thudding. All around you? Yes, like the whole room was going to come apart. Did anybody else hear it? Yes, Suzanne Kim heard it. Kimmy, if you heard it too, what sort of a noise was it?

12:11I was screaming, I was shouting. What is it? What is it? Well, I didn't know what to say. They were that terrified. So I said it was pipes, you know, it's central heating. So afterwards, whenever Kim heard something, she'd say, it's pipes. Pipes is here. In the studio, someone had called into the phone line. The caller said they saw something in the earlier footage of the girl's bedroom. You know, at the beginning, when you showed the real footage of that haunted bedroom, Well, I know it was dark, but I was sure I could see a figure standing behind against the wall just by the curtain. Very, very vague, but definitely a figure there.

12:53Michael Parkinson asked to have the tape rewound so everyone could see it again. And then you could make out a figure standing by the curtains. But the presenter, Michael Parkinson, says, I don't see anything, do you? Whereas it has been on screen. So I imagined everyone at home going, but I did see something. He's saying he didn't see anything. And I love that idea. It's an idea that's purely television. You couldn't do it in a movie. You couldn't do it in a book. It's purely the relationship between the presenter and the audience making that moment work. As the program continued, more calls came in about the figure.

13:36Well, the strange thing is that we're still getting calls about that shadowy figure that was seen in the haunted bedroom, or people think they've seen in the haunted bedroom. Now, what's really weird is these are all tallying with the description. These are all different phone calls. They're generally all saying that it's an old man or a woman, bald with a skull-like head, dark eyes, or some are just saying holes for eyes, and wearing a black robe or a dress which is buttoned up to the neck. Things got stranger and stranger at the house. There are cat sounds coming from the walls. Do you hear it?

14:13And one of the girls suddenly has scratches all over her face. What's wrong, Susie? At that point, about an hour into the program, Michael Parkinson tells viewers that they're extending coverage beyond the scheduled window. I should tell you if you joined to see the next program, that in fact we're staying with what we have here from Fox Hill Drive because the events are so remarkable and dramatic that we'll be staying with them for as long as we have to. Things continue to escalate in the house. It seems as if at one point one of the girls becomes possessed. Stop it! Stop it, Susie! Then the connection with the studio is lost.

15:00And after it comes back, the reporter, Sarah Green, gets trapped in the small closet under the stairs with whatever is haunting the house. Sarah? Sarah?

15:15Yeah, at that point, Ruth, the producer, always said, you know, everyone's going to realize it's a drama now so we can do what we like. So we kind of went a bit crazy in the last five minutes. Back at the studio, unmanned cameras start rolling across the stage, Studio lights are exploding, and Michael Parkinson seems totally confused. I'm not going.

15:45The studio is completely dark. Just blackness now. All the lights are filled. The power's gone off.

15:59We've got some lights in the studio. I don't know. There's cameras, but I don't know which one's working. I mean, there are no cameramen. I mean, it's difficult to know, even if anybody's still with us. but if they are, this is the scene in this studio, this totally deserted studio. He slowly walks towards the camera. Water cue's working. And it becomes clear that he's become possessed by something as the camera fades to black. Round and round the garden like a teddy bear. Didn't leave the story of Mother's End. Did you?

16:58We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Honey, did you invite the Minions over? Well, you know how we talked about getting Wi-Fi from Xfinity? Yeah. I ordered it this morning. It was online in minutes. Then, they showed up. So they just came over to use the Wi-Fi? For what?

17:21Better not to know. Get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi from Xfinity. Plus, lock in your price for five years and see Minions and Monsters only in theaters. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply. Not available in all areas. Learn more at Xfinity.com slash same-day Wi-Fi. And we're live on Match Day as Doug reaches for a buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi, too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match Days deserve Pepsi. The night Ghostwatch aired, everyone who worked on it got together to have a party and to watch the show, in part so that no one would see Sarah Green at a restaurant when she was supposed to be trapped in a haunted house.

18:06The producer, Ruth Baumgarten, was at the BBC studios to make sure everything was going well. She wanted to keep an eye on the phone lines. They'd posted the normal BBC number on the screen during Ghostwatch, both to give the illusion that the calls on the show were really coming in live, and to allow viewers at home to call in and react. Towards the end of the night, Ruth joined the rest of the crew at the party. She said that as she was leaving, the technicians were looking up at the big screen in the lobby, saying to each other, my God, what's going on in Studio One? And that was the first time she thought, oh my God, even the technicians watching the thing go out are starting to worry about what's happening.

18:54And by the time she got to us, she said the phone system at the BBC was jammed. There were, you know, hundreds of complaints logged and it all went a bit crazy. Ruth and director Leslie Manning had prepared for some worried callers during the show. They had operators ready to tell anyone who called that the whole thing was fake, just a Halloween special. But there were too many calls and not enough operators. The BBC estimated that 20 ,000 people called that night. The people that complained, there was quite a wide range of different reactions. Some people were genuinely scared. Some people were outraged because they feel they were made a mug, like someone had played a trick on them, you know, like a candid camera.

19:48And also there was this additional level of the trust that's invested in the BBC to tell the truth, you know, and to be the nation's protector in a way. BBC was the first television station and for decades the only television station. So all the way through the Second World War, both in radio and TV, the BBC was relied on for national news. So that's why colloquially it's known as Aunty, because the BBC is relied on as kind of one of the family, if you like, for reliability and trust, which I think added to their sense of outrage. The phrase that sort of stuck was that Aunty had broken faith with the nation.

20:33Director Leslie Manning. I was totally surprised by the whole reaction. The BBC show Points of View read letters from viewers after Ghostwatch aired. One person said the BBC should be locked up. Someone else said the show was brilliant, and that it wasn't the BBC's fault that people didn't understand that it was fiction. Another BBC show, called Bite Back, also responded. Hello and welcome to Bite Back, the programme in which you, the viewer, take the programme makers to task. And there are hundreds of you who want to do exactly that following Halloween night, when the BBC pretended to investigate the supernatural in Ghostwatch.

21:14The switchboard was jammed with complaints, reports that children were terrified, pregnant women had gone into labour, and intelligent people felt duped. Conversely, many of the 11 million who watched it thought it was a brilliant piece of television. Well, what was it? A treat or a dangerous trick? This wasn't the first time the BBC had aired a hoax. 35 years earlier, on April Fool's Day in 1957, the BBC aired a very short segment on a current affairs program about farmers in Switzerland who grew spaghetti. After picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length.

22:00But this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders, who've succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti. A lot of people believed it, in part because not many people cooked spaghetti at home in England in the 1950s, but also because the fake documentary looks real. Even the director general of the BBC tried to look up spaghetti in the Encyclopedia Britannica after he watched the segment. But the encyclopedia didn't even have an entry for spaghetti at the time. Some viewers called in to ask where they could get a spaghetti tree for themselves, and whether it would grow in English weather.

22:44BBC operators had been coached to stick with the joke and say, place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. One viewer said he thought the program had used trick photography because, quote, spaghetti grows horizontally, not vertically. But the BBC reported that most of the callers, quote, did not quite grasp what was going on, but somehow felt spaghetti does not grow on trees, and that most of the people who called in took the joke well. The viewers of Ghostwatch were much more upset. Even though the show ran after 9 p.m., the publicized time when the BBC transitioned to content that might not be appropriate for children, many children did watch it, and many of them were scared.

23:39One viewer on the Bite Back program said she knew it was a spoof, but her son didn't. He reacted instantly. He was very distressed instantly to something very sinister in the presentation and nothing had actually happened and I think You mentioned that you were anxious to put it against The ghost story against a contemporary background. I think it's that Actually that made it most sinister Martin Plum you want to make a point? I didn't know it was a drama I've got three children of 14, 12 and 10, and I just thought that it was going to be a very safe... And were they frightened? Well, yes, I mean, to the degree that my youngest child, who was 10, rushed out of the room, vomited in the hall, was absolutely ashen-faced, wouldn't even talk about the thing for two or three hours.

24:36It was at 1 o 'clock in the morning that I got her to talk about it, and she wouldn't sleep in her own bed for two nights. Five days after Ghostwatch aired in 1992, a teenager with intellectual disabilities died by suicide. His parents said the show caused their son's death. They said he had seemed hypnotized by the show and that when the pipes in their house made the same banging sound as the ghost in Ghostwatch, he became upset. He asked to move bedrooms and spoke to his parents often about ghosts. The note he left read, Please don't worry. If there are ghosts, I will be a ghost, and I will be with you always as a ghost.

25:20His stepfather told reporters, In my own mind, I hold the BBC completely responsible for his death. His parents sent in a formal complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Council, which eventually concluded that the BBC had, quote, a duty to do more than simply hint at the deception it was practicing on the audience. The BBC reaction was really to batten down the hatches and pretend the program never happened. I think a memo went round that nobody should ever mention it again.

25:56Seven years later, the movie The Blair Witch Project used a similar documentary-style approach. The movie was presented as found footage that had been shot by three film students who had decided to take recording equipment into the woods to investigate a series of murders rumored to have been committed by a witch. The students never make it out of the woods, but what they recorded eventually does. The way the movie was marketed made it hard to tell if it was real or not. It was 1999, and the marketing team used the relatively new internet to create confusion. They posted missing persons photos in chat rooms.

26:39And even the movie's IMDB page made it seem like the cast was missing. Three years later, the British Film Institute released a 10-year anniversary DVD of Ghostwatch. And many people were finally able to see it for the first time. Since then, the documentary style format has become popular in horror movies, like Paranormal Activity. But Stephen says that when Ghostwatch came out, this kind of style wasn't so well known. And even people close to him, who knew exactly what he was trying to make, were still confused by the show. A couple of weeks before it aired on Halloween, I spent some time with a friend of mine and said as I was leaving, oh, by the way, I've got this drama going out on Halloween night.

27:29Let me know what you think, as one does. And I spoke to her after the event, and she said, oh, I thought it was real. And I said, what do you mean you thought it was real? I told you I'd written it. And she said, oh, yeah, but when I saw Michael Parkinson, I thought you must have got something wrong. And that maybe is the power of the kind of image of TV, that however much you tell people, it might not be real. you know perceptually it's it feels real and that for me was the whole purpose of it is to actually get the audience to think what am i looking at what am i listening to do i believe this you know uh can i believe my eyes you know one of the things that happened that was kind of a part of our psyche if you like when we made ghost watch was it was during the time of the first Gulf War.