Ghostwatch: The BBC Hoax That Traumatised a Nation

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

On the night of 31 October 1992, BBC1 handed ninety minutes of primetime to a haunting. The programme was called Ghostwatch, it carried the reassuring furniture of a live outside broadcast, and it convinced a large fraction of the people watching that a real family was on television being terrorised by a real ghost. It was fiction. It had a writer, Stephen Volk, a director, Lesley Manning, and a slot in the Screen One drama strand. None of that mattered to the switchboard, which reportedly took tens of thousands of calls before the credits rolled. The BBC apologised, kept the thing off British television for a decade, and — without quite meaning to — produced the most influential horror film of the 1990s that almost nobody outside Britain saw at the time.

Ghostwatch - vo.rs

Ghostwatch: The BBC Hoax That Traumatised a Nation