When I first started running, last winter, it would be dark in the morning when I’d leave the house, and I took to listening to podcasts where real people would describe a supernatural event from their past. There was the woman who grew up in a very haunted house, and the boy saved from a suicide attempt by an unseen presence, and a student bedroom that its tenant said contained “pure, distilled evil”. I’d be puffing along a muddy trail as the sun clawed its way out of a hole while a sensible adult dripped another mad terror into my ears, and by the time I got home the day would have already chosen its direction.
Although, to be fair, perhaps I chose that direction myself some years ago, when, as a child, I became obsessed with the Usborne Book of Ghosts & Hauntings. Apart from the story about the one-eyed ghost dog, Black Shuck, it didn’t give me nightmares so much as provide a lens with which to view the entire world, a place groaning with mysteries, fear and inexplicable events.
I have made no secret of my passion for the supernatural, so last week when the UFOs started coming, it was no surprise that three separate friends messaged to check I’d seen the news. Four flying objects had been shot down by US authorities and, while one was confirmed to be that Chinese balloon, authorities couldn’t identify the remaining three. UFO experts in the paper today warn, “Prepare for a wave of extraterrestrial sightings in the UK.” To which I take a pull on an elegant fag and say, “Babe, I was born prepared.”
And I’m not the only one. Uncanny, the podcast I listened to last year, has been joined by a whole genre of similar supernatural-themed podcasts, including Otherworld, where interviewees include a woman who discovered her father was being poisoned through a clairvoyant, and two brothers haunted throughout their lives by the same dark figure. The appeal of these podcasts is not just in the thrill of a ghost story, but the fact that they’re told by people – sceptics – who would never have believed in ghosts had one not just chucked a massive rock at their head. But, of course, the thrill is there, too. They always take me back to childhood sleepovers, the torches held to the chins as someone tells a story. There’s an almost erotic charge to tales like these, about the possibility of worlds we’ll never know.
Uncanny is about to be adapted for TV, with host Danny Robins talking about the “incredible community [that has built] around the show, many of whom never realised how interested in the paranormal they were”. Elsewhere on TV, similar shows already invite real people to narrate the story of their own hauntings – stripped of their drama (and now acknowledging our self-awareness and cynicism), these are the modern versions of the ghost-hunting series from my youth. At an exhibition recently I pored over artefacts from Living TV’s Most Haunted, including four musket balls that were “thrown by unseen hands”. Two were modern fakes, two were from the 1800s. No explanation was given.
For me, the real thrill of the supernatural has always been centred in the psychology of a haunting. I loved Kate Summerscale’s nonfiction book The Haunting of Alma Fielding, which calmly balances the story of a 1930s housewife who appeared to be haunted by a poltergeist within its political and social context – ghosts were the only way to make sense of a world that was falling in on itself. I love ghost stories which express the things a person is unable to say out loud, secrets that emerge as “energies” slamming beds against a wall, or in sly sleights of hand as the haunted person dares an audience to understand them, a violent example of “show don’t tell”. I’m less interested, I think, in Danny Robins’s question of whether ghosts are real – and more in why so many people claim to see them, or want to believe.
In 2017, a third of British adults said they believed in ghosts. In America, this is rising, with more than half in 2019 “expressing a belief in haunted places”. It makes sense that in a time when established systems and ways of viewing the world have been proved to fail a huge proportion of people, a huge proportion of people might quietly start looking elsewhere for answers.
Questioning reality is now a mainstream pastime. There are conspiracy theorists, who have lost faith in institutions like government and the media, and choose their own realities, often featuring computer chips or Jews. Then there are religious people, whether Catholic or Pagan – paganism (reported Elle this month) “has become the breakout religion of the decade”, and then there are those searching for some new mysteries hidden in among the rubble of their lives.
Mark Gatiss made the case for ghost stories, post-pandemic, during a cost of living crisis, as “they are essentially optimistic – it means there’s more to life… there’s more to it than dreamt of in our philosophy”.
I think he’s right – or at least, I choose to believe there is something hopeful about the possibility of a haunting, and the rise of paranormal curiosity. Though there were times on those early morning runs when I heard footsteps behind me and told myself it was definitely a fox.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
