Haunted Pype Hayes Hall To Become Luxury Hotel

Pype Hayes Hall stands in Pype Hayes Park in Erdington, here in Birmingham. We are very excited because news was released during the summer that the old house which dates back to the 1600’s is to be converted into a four-star luxury hotel and spa. Pype Hayes House is only a couple of miles from our office.

Now it appears that Pype Hayes Hall is also one of the most haunted houses in Birmingham. Pype Hayes House has one or two grizzly secrets. It is the site where medieval lovers carried out a suicide pact. It is reputed to be the site of a double murder mystery as well as a Black Death love tryst.

Patrick Hayes, a local historian, has written about the house and its other world inhabitants in his book ‘Ghost Stories of Erdington’.

Apparently local council staff – the house was owned by the city council until recently – all reported feeling ‘uneasy’ walking through the park.

There is a raft of strange sightings in and around the hall. These range from ladies seen in old-fashioned dresses ‘drifting’ across the grounds to incidents where a bookcase, plates and crockery have all been found scattered and smashed on the kitchen floor.

So long as the ghosts remain in Pype Hayes Park and are not tempted to jump on the bus to our office we will be happy.  In the meantime we watch with interest the restoration of what is a fine old historic house. It is expected to begin shortly.

Social landlords use exorcists to deal with supernatural complaints!

Most social landlords take complaints about haunted properties seriously, contacting priests and spiritual mediums, moving people up housing waiting lists and even transferring tenants.

Requests made by Inside Housing to every council in England under the Freedom of Information Act combined with a survey of the 100 largest housing associations revealed that 16 landlords have received 73 reports of ghosts and related paranormal activity.

Nine councils and housing association said they either have already, or would, contact an exorcist or spiritual medium.

A further six have either already moved tenants or said they would be prepared to move tenants that were especially badly affected by alleged hauntings.

Three housing associations also said that their offices were said to be haunted, and Lambeth Council said its town hall was rumoured to be haunted.

The true extent of haunting complaints is likely to be much greater as most councils did not have the information available to respond and only 15 housing associations replied to the survey.

However, of those that responded, all 15 associations said they would treat reports from tenants about ghosts seriously and sympathetically.

Landlords said they took complaints about ghosts seriously because of the impact the stress of experiences had on tenants’ health and because some tenants were especially vulnerable – sometimes having mental health problems.

FOI correspondence revealed examples of family members being prescribed tranquilisers because of stress-induced psoriasis as a result of alleged hauntings.

Sheffield Council, which experienced an incredible 47 complaints of hauntings in the past 10 years, gave one family a priority move to get a council house in the wake of a testimony from a housing officer at the council who claimed to witness paranormal activity in the family’s private rented flat.

Broxtowe Council received two reports of hauntings in its properties over the past decade; phone logs reveal that just last year a tenant complained he had been experiencing ‘paranormal activity’ at his property, where boxes had been ‘flying around the room’.

Similarly, Bromsgrove District and Redditch Borough Council had a property exorcised in January 2007 after a mother believed her child had been possessed.

A spokesperson for 66,000-home Circle Group, which received one complaint of a haunting, said: ‘it was a very serious and delicate matter, as the customer involved was badly affected by the experience.

‘The customer was dealt with sensitively and taken seriously, as we would with any customers concerns – I understand that an exorcism was offered.’

Associations that have not received any complaints about ghosts also said they would take reports seriously.

A spokesperson for 30,000-home Orbit Group said it ‘may facilitate a transfer or a management move if the issue was unresolvable and it was causing distress’.

Similarly, 12,000-home Contour Homes says it would investigate complaints, potentially using recording equipment, and ‘if there was no possible resolution other than moving the tenant this would be considered’.

Nick’s paranormal encounter at the North Hertfordshire Homes office....

Nick’s paranormal encounter at the North Hertfordshire Homes office......

Not only do most organisations treat the paranormal with an open mind, but several even report ghostly goings on at their own buildings. Lambeth says that Lambeth Town Hall is allegedly haunted, while according to local folk law, One Housing Group’s Arlington centre, in Camden which is a combination of accommodation for homeless people, local facilities and a conference centre, is also haunted.

Circle Group and North Hertfordshire Homes even have offices which staff claim are haunted.

Indeed, this very piece is being written from a housing association’s haunted meeting room. Specifically, I am sitting in the Salisbury room of North Hertfordshire Homes Georgian office in Baldock. The office – previously the home of Mary Graves, the mistress of Lord Salisbury – was been long-rumoured to be haunted before North Hertfordshire Homes moved into the refurbished property in 2005. However, some years ago, local medium John Aitkin visited the property and said he sensed four ghostly presences. These were an 18 year old serving girl called Elisabeth, a house keeper called Isobel, a small child called William and Mary Graves herself.

Curious staff have since held a sleep in, and occasionally reporting ‘weird sensations’ and witnessing the image of a woman by the window. As a result, one colleague has even moved desks. Mostly, though, talk of ghosts provokes jovial skepticism.

Typing alone at the board table, the wind howls outside causing the windows fidget against the shutters, and brittle Autumn leaves to tinker against the aging panes. There are no visions, flying objects, changes of temperature or strange presences. It is actually quite cosy. But nonetheless, it is easy to see how the building, with its alcoves, cellars and staircases could set the mind racing alone at night.

Indeed, the cleaners, who occupy the building alone at night were the first to report things going bump in the night. Steve Foulds, building technician at North Hertfordshire Homes, shows me the cleaners’ log of complains which reveals over series of dates in September 2006 ‘a chair spun round twice’, ‘the apparition of a young girl who smiled and then vanished’, hoovers turned off and on and the disabled toilet locking itself.

‘I thought they were real characters [a husband and wife cleaning duo],’ recalls Mr Foulds. ‘They were certainly very sincere in their belief that is what they saw – and sometimes I bump into them in the street and they ask if there have been further instances. Personally, I think it is a very warm, welcoming place to work.’

The Number Of Haunted House Is Rising!

If there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, you’re probably going to call your landlord about it. But how do social landlords deal with reports of things that go bump in the night? Nick Duxbury investigates… cautiously!

Do you believe in ghosts? While you mull this question, let me tell you a ghost story.

It starts with a family contacting a local authority because their 14-year-old daughter’s bedroom seemed cold and strange noises were heard in the room. The daughter was so scared by what she was hearing that she started to sleep on the floor in her parents’ room. The stress of the experience mounted to the point that two members of the family were prescribed tranquillisers and developed stress-related psoriasis.

A priest had visited the home in Fareham and confirmed he could feel a presence in the house - in particular, in the girl’s bedroom. The priest carried out an exorcism but the family did not feel it had helped. The teenage daughter was so terrified she was on the verge of moving in with her grandparents. Support was provided from the family doctor and the council housing department even agreed to help the family with a priority move if it would help. Fortunately the family found another tenant to swap homes with and were able to move out within a few weeks. The family that moved into the property has not reported any problems.

Though all hallows’ eve may have just passed, this story is not a Halloween wind-up. It is taken from a log entry from the tenancy service department of Fareham Council, in Hampshire, obtained by Inside Housing under the Freedom of Information Act. It is also not a one-off. FOI requests to all councils in England and a survey of 100 housing associations reveal many more.

Sheffield Council alone has experienced an astonishing 47 separate, unrelated reports of ghosts or hauntings in its homes since 2003. Broxtowe Council has received two reports of hauntings in its properties over the past decade; phone logs reveal that just last year a tenant complained he had been experiencing ‘paranormal activity’ at his property, where boxes had been ‘flying around the room’.

Similarly, Bromsgrove District and Redditch Borough Council had a property exorcised in January 2007 after a mother believed her child had been possessed. And the list goes on. Mid Devon Council has received two reports of hauntings, arm’s-length management organisation Hounslow Homes has received three, Whitefriars Housing Association has had two, and Six Town Housing has also had two. There are more: in fact, Inside Housing has uncovered 73 separate instances in which tenants have claimed their homes are haunted (see table below). The scary part? These reports come from just 16 social landlords. Three organisations even reported that their own offices and buildings are allegedly haunted. (see box below for Nick’s encounter)

No protocol
The true scale of alleged hauntings in social housing is likely to be far larger. Responding to the FOI requests for information on hauntings, the vast majority of councils said the information was not available because either it had not been recorded, or there was no relevant complaint category in their computer systems. Others cited data protection of tenants’ personal details and the prohibitive costs involved in finding the information. As a result, just eight councils and arm’s-length management organisations produce details of haunting-related complaints. Similarly, of the 100 associations surveyed, just 15 responded - eight of which had received reports of paranormal activity.

It is likely then, that tenant complaints about paranormal activity are in fact widespread across the hundreds of councils unable to produce data, the 85 associations that declined to respond to the survey, and the hundreds of others that were not asked. So, with this in mind, are landlords dismissing these complaints off-hand, or choosing to entertain the existence of ghosts?

As it turns out, councils and housing associations have dealt with these complaints very  eriously indeed. Inside Housing’s investigation reveals that social landlords have frequently contacted exorcists and spiritual mediums, in some cases moved people up the housing list, and even transferred tenants into alternative accommodation to deal with the problem.

None of the 15 housing association respondents had a policy for dealing with complaints of paranormal activity. Yet, without exception, all said they would deal with tenants’ concerns about ghosts sympathetically and seriously. In nine cases spiritual mediums or exorcists had been called to visit properties. And six said they would consider transferring - or in several cases had transferred - tenants into new properties.

One such example was when a tenant of Wales and West Housing reported that a ghost army of Roman soldiers had marched across the living room of his home in Brecon, south Wales. This was just one of a series of troubling ‘supernatural’ complaints. Shortly after, a friend visiting the property complained she had seen black dust fall on her arm and was then ‘bitten on the arm by the ghostly spirit of a girl dressed in a hessian garment’.

Wales and West sent site supervisor Brian Pritchard to investigate. His report stated: ‘All of a sudden it looked like a ripple appeared on the right-hand corner of one of the beds and kids started to run over them.’

Similar incidents were reported in other surrounding Wales and West properties. A medium visited at the tenant’s request and claimed to sense the ghosts of 250 families were ‘trapped in limbo’. It later emerged the site on which the homes were built was a former Roman slave camp. The family was later transferred to another home for health reasons - and no problems have been reported in the property since.

Serious concern
Similarly, when a tenant of 66,000-home Circle asked to be re-housed because of an alleged haunting it was treated as ‘a very serious and delicate matter’. Why? Because ‘the customer involved was badly affected by the experience’.

‘The customer was dealt with sensitively and taken seriously, as we would with all customer concerns - I understand an exorcism was offered,’ a spokesperson says. ‘The customer in question found alternative housing in the end. I am told it later turned out that someone had previously committed suicide in the property.’

Even landlords that have not received reports of the paranormal say they would take complaints of this nature seriously and investigate the underlying cause. Several say they would also consider moving tenants. Orbit Group says it ‘may facilitate a transfer or a management move if the issue was unresolvable and it was causing distress’. Similarly, 12,000-home Contour Homes says it would investigate complaints, potentially using recording equipment, and ‘if there was no possible resolution other than moving the tenant, this would be considered’.

So, why do landlords take complaints about ghosts so seriously?

For a start, as charitable organisations, housing associations must be more sympathetic than other businesses with regard to religious beliefs. And while entertaining the existence of ghosts might not be religion-related, a sizeable proportion of the population is spooked. A YouGov Global poll of 2,400 people in 2011 by psychologist professor Richard Wiseman found that around 25 per cent of the UK’s population believes in ghosts.

Perhaps more significantly, though, complaints of hauntings and paranormal activity could be a product of social landlords’ sometimes vulnerable customer base. Tenants reporting hauntings could be mentally ill, victims of drug and or alcohol abuse, or just reacting to high-stress situations, all of which require sensitive handling.

A few years ago, Tony Brandon, a revenue officer at 14,000-home Thames Valley Housing, had to deal with a tenant complaining that a shadowy presence was attempting to violate her.

‘The lady I dealt with had quite severe mental health issues and was very reclusive,’ says Mr Brandon. ‘Her religious beliefs were also strong. She felt that a neighbour was trying to rape her spiritually. She claimed he was sending his “shadow” - his ghost - down [to her flat] to rape her. Any form of rape is clearly upsetting, and she was convinced this was going on, so she was very distressed.’

Mr Brandon got in touch with the local priest and asked him to bless the property. ‘I thought that if she felt protected that would help,’ he adds. ‘I wanted her to engage with other religious people to help her with the reclusion. She is still reclusive, but I think it did help.’

Curo Group has also been faced with a mentally ill tenant who believed she was being haunted by two relatives. The woman was so scared that she occasionally slept rough rather than stay in her house - but would refuse all offers of counselling. Faced with this kind of harrowing situation and its very real consequences for the tenants concerned it is hard to imagine not taking a complaint - however apparently far-fetched - seriously.

On a separate occasion, however, 12,000-home Curo was faced with another tenant who was neither obviously mentally ill, nor especially religious. Nonetheless, he was adamant an ‘angry spirit’ had been throwing plates and ashtrays around the property. A housing officer, who does not wish to be named, says the tenant claimed another spirit regularly walked through the walls when he was trying to watch Match of the Day.

‘He refused to use the upstairs of the house because of “other more evil spirits” that were haunting the first floor. In response I went to the house and spent two hours with him including time upstairs on my own in the property. I did not experience anything other than the house being cold. I did not attribute this to anything paranormal as the heating was not on.’

The tenant could not show any evidence of the incidents and refused the offer of approaching a church or a local medium and transferred out of the property soon after. A spokesperson for Curo says the only cost has been housing officers’ time.

But time is money. No organisation was able to calculate how much investigating these cases has cost them. However, Redbridge Council said dealing with the two complaints it has received in the past 10 years used around 50 hours of staff time. That could certainly add up for the taxpayer.

So, with ever increasing pressure on housing, how should landlords work out whether citing ‘ghosts’ is a genuine complaint or an elaborate ploy to get a new property?

‘It’s difficult - especially as sometimes people use things to put pressure on landlords to get priority for a move,’ says Phil Oliver, a senior communications advisor at Gentoo Group, who spent 10 years as the 29,000-home organisation’s chief lettings officer and encountered around four alleged hauntings.

‘Sometimes people will use these links to medical conditions to get up the (transfer) list - a doctor’s letter can make all the difference. With paranormal activity, it is obviously very difficult for a tenant to provide evidence or quantify the problem.’

Eye witness
Of course, landlords do also have to consider the possibility that tenants’ homes could actually be haunted. Documents from Sheffield Council reveal that in January 2008, a housing officer was so scared by what she witnessed at a private sector one-bedroom flat that she fled the property. The officer had visited a tenant - a mother with two children - who had asked to move into a council house due to an ‘overcrowding priority’ - but on arrival it emerged there were also more sinister reasons for her desire to leave the flat. She claimed the family had been woken in the night ‘by something strangling’ them and that something had ‘pulled her hair’ and ‘lifted her off the bed’. She also claimed to hear voices and banging and see ghosts of children, an Afro-Caribbean man and an old man with a beard. The family said they were so scared they had decided to move into a hotel.

The officer’s report to the council states that while discussing the family’s options she experienced ‘a tapping sensation on her shoulder’ and heard ‘voices and whispering’ coming from the lounge. She also heard loud banging and the room became icy cold. The officer then witnessed ‘a thick rope hanging in mid-air in the doorway [to the living room]’ which then ‘dropped to the floor’. The officer asked to go into the kitchen as she was too frightened to continue with the visit. But in the kitchen she could still hear the whispering and banging and there ‘was a horrible feeling of foreboding’. The officer left the property and the family packed their bags and followed soon after. The tenant was later awarded a council house.

So, do you believe in ghosts? Because, even if you don’t take the existence of paranormal activity seriously, it is likely your employer does.

A Broxtowe Council report on paranormal activity in one of its tenant’s homes

5 Weird Things That Happen After You Die

The grave, gross facts about how your body decomposes.

Nature isn't kind to the human body after death. Thankfully, the days of natural decomposition have been replaced by decidedly modern rituals of death. We can choose to delay the decomposition process by being embalmed, where our bodily fluids are replaced with preservatives. Or we can be cremated, where we are cooked at temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours while we turn to ash.

 

While our modern disposal rituals might not sound appealing, the process of nature composting us back into the Earth is even less so. Even earliest man knew how to put some distance between himself and his decomposing dead. In 2003, archaeologists found evidence of ancient humans who had buried their dead in northern Spain about 350,000 years ago.

 

So what happens during decomposition? Here are five weird ways our bodies de-construct after death.

 

Your cells burst open. The process in which the human body decomposes starts just minutes after death. When the heart stops beating, we experience algor mortis, or the “death chill,” when the temperature of the body falls about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit an hour until it reaches room temperature. Almost immediately, the blood becomes more acidic as carbon dioxide builds up. This causes cells to split open, emptying enzymes into the tissues, which start to digest themselves from within.

 

You turn white — and purple. Gravity makes its mark on the human body in the first moments after death. While the rest of your body turns deathly pale, heavy red blood cells move to the parts of your body that are closest to the ground. This is because circulation has stopped. The results are purple splotches over your lower parts known as livor mortis. In fact, it is by studying the markings of livor mortis that the coroner can tell exactly what time you died.

 

Calcium makes your muscles contract. We've all heard of rigor mortis, in which a dead body becomes stiff and hard to move. Rigor mortis generally sets in about three to four hours after death, peaks at 12 hours, and dissipates after 48 hours. Why does it happen? There are pumps in the membranes of our muscle cells that regulate calcium. When the pumps stop working in death, calcium floods the cells, causing the muscles to contract and stiffen. Thus, there is rigor mortis.

 

Your organs will digest themselves. Putrefaction, or when our bodies start to look like extras in a zombie movie, follows rigour mortis. This phase is delayed by the embalming process, but eventually the body will succumb. Enzymes in the pancreas make the organ begin to digest itself. Microbes will tag-team these enzymes, turning the body green from the belly onwards. As Caroline Williams writes in NewScientist, “the main beneficiaries are among the 100 trillion bacteria that have spent their lives living in harmony with us in our guts.” As this bacterium breaks us down, it releases putrescine and cadaverine, which are the compounds which make the human body smell in death.

 

You may be covered in a wax. After putrefaction, decay moves quickly to turn the body into a skeleton. However, some bodies take an interesting turn on the way. If a body comes into contact with cold soil or water, it may develop adipocere, a fatty, waxy material formed from the bacteria breaking down tissue. Adipocere works as a natural preservative on the inner organs. It can mislead investigators into thinking a body died much sooner than it actually did, as was the case of a 300-year-old adipocere corpse recently found in Switzerland.

 

In the end, we all return to the Earth: it’s just a matter of how. But whether it’s by composting or the fires of cremation, we all turn to dust and ash — and in some cases, wax.

6 DIY Ways To Tell If Your House Is Haunted

 When it's time for spiritual house cleaning, keep these techniques in mind.

Being a first-time home owner can be an absolutely terrifying experience. And needless to say, things can only get more terrifying if after moving into the fixer-upper of your dreams your 5-year-old daughter makes a new imaginary friend prone to dressing in turn-of-the-century garb, your ottoman starts levitating, and you find a bunch of weird symbols scratched into your bedroom wall.

Do you have reason to believe that you’re sharing your home with the spirits of its past inhabitants? You could simply ask them to give all that moaning and slamming of doors a rest and to kindly chip in with the mortgage payments. That may do the trick. Or you can review these six methods in which to detect and to dispel any unwanted housemates of the supernatural variety. Most are of the DIY variety — after all, you want to be perfectly certain that something is going on before you call in the big guns or go on a spending spree at GhostStop.com — and most have beneficial side effects such as saving on energy bills, getting to better know your neighbors and clearing out boxes of junk from your garage.

Have you ever suspected that your house was haunted? What were the symptoms? And what did you do to clean house?

Grill the neighbors
Excuse me, I realize I’ve never properly introduced myself, but I was wondering if you happened to know if anyone was brutally ax-murdered in my basement within the past 60 years?

Just an FYI, but I have reason to believe that the closet in our master bedroom is a portal to hell. Have any insights? Oh, and here’s that Tupperware I borrowed over the summer. Sorry, I didn’t return it earlier. I’ve been preoccupied.
Grilling your neighbors — particularly ones who have lived in your neighborhood for eons and may be familiar with the history of your home and its past inhabitants — about supernatural goings-on in your home requires finesse and tact. Whatever you do, don’t start in with “I think my house is haunted and need more info” approach as that may only raise eyebrows, not yield answers.


Play the part of detective and start in with your research in a subtle manner. Don’t act panicked, scared or desperate. Perhaps buzz up the 85-year-old woman who lives across the street and tell her you found some sort of valuable antique hidden away in the attic and want to know more the folks who lived in the home previously (if said antique doesn’t exist, hit up a local estate sale so you have something to show for it). Better yet, tell her that you are starting some sort of blog (you can just refer to it as a “project” if said neighbor is truly an octogenarian) documenting the rich history of the neighborhood and would love for her invaluable insight. The deeper you delve into the past, the more unsavory truths about your home you may (or may not) uncover. (Try watching the excellent 1980 haunted house flick, “The Changeling” on the right and wrong ways to go about this). And if horror films have taught us anything, it is that any haunted house reconnaissance work should also involve spending endless hours at the local library poring over old newspapers with the assistance of a microfilm reader.

If your research doesn’t turn up an gruesome revelations about your home that support your haunted hypothesis, at least you’ve established some type of rapport with the neighbors. And you may as well kill two birds with one stone and talk to them about that neighborhood clean-up day or recycling effort that you’ve been plotting.


Call up your real estate agent
Like tactfully gathering information from your neighbors about the history of your home,

calling up the real estate agent who sold it to you and urging them to spill the beans about whether or not your house is haunted can also be helpful. That said, it varies from state to state as to whether sellers are required to disclose if a house is a “stigmatized property” that falls under the haunted category (but hey, it never hurts to ask).

Steven J.J. Weisman, a professor of business law at Bentley University, explains the basics of selling allegedly haunted houses to RealtorMag: “Haunted properties fall within the category of stigmatized properties, or real estate that is not defective in any physical manner, but due to psychological or emotional factors may have a reduced value. Among the situations covered under the title of stigmatized is a property that was the site of a murder, suicide, alleged haunting, or other parapsychological phenomenon.” Weisman adds: “In one well-documented New York case from 1991, the sale was voided due to the seller not informing the buyer of the house’s reputation for being haunted. The same reasoning could also be used in other states if there aren’t clear laws about disclosing paranormal activity.” You can read more about that case here.

So there’s that. Hopefully, like leaky faucets and creaky floorboards, anything that could potentially go-bump-in-the-night will present itself during a showing so that you don’t have to make any freaked-out late night calls to the realtor a couple on months after move in. But, really, pity the beleaguered agent whose showings keep on getting interrupted by massive fly infestations, slime-oozing toilets and a red-eyed pig demon named Jody.

Planning on moving to Hong Kong? In one of the most exorbitantly priced real estate markets in the world, you can actually score quite a deal by moving into a hongza, a deeply discounted home that’s been legally declared haunted and that the superstitious locals wouldn’t dare set foot in.

Conduct an energy audit
Unless you have Tangina Barrons or Peter Vankman on speed dial, you may want to consider bringing in a completely different type of outside professional help when confronted with possible supernatural activity: an energy auditor. Subjecting your home to a full energy assessment may be something that you’ve considered doing for a while now but have balked for some reason or another. A suspected haunting is an excellent reason to finally get ‘er done. Click here to find an energy auditor near you and remember to take advantage of any weatherization-related rebates or incentives. DIY energy audits are also a fine alternative if you’d rather not bring in outside help.


In addition to blower door tests, most professional energy audits include the use of a thermal imaging camera to pinpoint sources of heat loss around the home. This is extremely helpful if you ultimately decide to “button-up” your abode and improve its overall energy performance. It could also be effective in locating, you know, any heat-generating spectres or spooky “cold spots.” That said, when you hire an energy auditing team for an appointment you probably shouldn’t mention that you think your house is haunted. I realize that you’re busy detecting air leaks, but could you spend some extra time in the guest bedroom with that fancy infrared camera? We’re trying to figure out if a woman named Rebecca hung herself in there in the late 1930s. And if the offending ghost has a penchant for fiddling with light fixtures, you should probably bring in an electrician to investigate.

If anything, conducting an energy audit and making the recommended improvements to increase your home’s efficiency can eliminate sources of any unnerving, ghost-like activity: mysterious drafts, slamming doors, banging noises, rattling windows, etc. (keep in mind that your home might just be old and leaky, not old and haunted). Added bonus: You’ll save on monthly energy costs. However, if you seal up any leaks and further invest in home weatherization projects and still find yourself being plagued by phantom footsteps and the wail of a banshee at 12 a.m. on the dot, than you’re dealing with something that can’t be remedied by a new furnace and a caulk gun.


Smudge ‘em out
Remember that scene from the second “Paranormal Activity” film when Martine, the housekeeper, is caught — and subsequently fired by her doomed employers for — burning sage? Well, she was on to something. Smudging is an ancient purifying ritual that involves burning bundles of pungent dried herbs — usually white sage but sometimes cedar, sweetgrass or tobacco — to cast out existing negative energy from a home and further keep bad mojo at bay. A smudge bowl, commonly a simple earthenware bowl or an abalone shell, is used to catch the embers and ashes from the smudge stick and a feather is used to distribute the smoke to every nook and cranny of a home. Incantations, whether elaborate and read from a book or simple and improvised (please leave, please leave, please leave) generally accompany the burning of a smudge stick.

This may seem all rather stinky and esoteric — the spiritual equivalent of opening up a can of Glade and spraying it all over the place — but performing a simple yet sacred smudge ceremony is often the first line of defense when combating a pesky supernatural presence. The burning of sage also comes up several times in a 2008 New York Times article addressing the fine art of “Supernatural cleaning methods.” However, in that article, San Diego-based medium Bonnie Vent offers this, ahem, sage advice: “There are people who will take advantage of others by using holy water, burning sage and spreading salt around the perimeter of the house. Spirit people are people — these things have no effect in the long term. You really have to get to the root cause.” Vent also mentions that communication is key during supernatural cleaning sessions and that while they don’t always exactly make the ghosts pack up and leave, they do result in a more “livable situation.” Hey, a little compromise ending up working for the Deetz and Maitland families after a bit of comedic trial and error.

Above all, just remember to be civil and not to taunt the spirits. Politeness is key. In the aforementioned article, interior designer Guy Clark reveals the low-key manner in which he banished a ghostly interloper from his home in Bullville, N.Y. He simply said aloud: “O.K., this is my house. If you need anything, I’m here, but you don’t live here anymore, move on.” Apparently, it did the trick.


Focus on critters
So yeah, those unexplained scratching and bumping noises, the inhuman wailing, the mysterious stains on the floor and the fact that your beloved antique vase that was found broken when you woke in the morning? It could end being the handiwork of a mischievous pet, not a vengeful poltergeist, so don’t be quick to rule your beloved kitty or pooch out of the equation.

Don’t have a pet? Well, a critter of another sort could be responsible for the disturbances — a squirrel in the attic, a family of mice living in the basement, etc.

If you come to the conclusion that ghostly goings-on are not stemming for your pets or another type of animal that may be taking up residence in your home, it may help to observe your cat or dog’s behavior. Has it changed? Have they become suddenly more aggressive or high-strung? Does Princess Muffincakes growl at one certain wall in the home and then run under your bed and hide and whimper? Does she refuse to enter a room that she normally hangs out in? Has she been levitating and speaking in Hebrew? Animals are thought to be more sensitive to supernatural activity than humans, so watching your pet and taking note of any strange behavior is a vital step in evaluating the haunted-ness or non-haunted-ness or your home. Or, their behavior may have nothing to do with a haunting. They could be upset by the presence of a new baby or another animal or the fact you’ve been listening to Barry Manilow again.


Hold a garage sale
Thinking about holding a séance? Try holding a garage sale first.

By unearthing boxes of crap from your basement or garage in preparation for a yard sale or a run to the Salvation Army, you may stumble upon some forgotten-about relics that could prove to be useful in the quest to find out whether your home is populated by spirits. Key items to look for: old VHS camcorders, baby monitors, motion sensors, Ouija Boards or, umm, EMF detectors. If you eventually decide to employ any of these items, keep in mind that politeness and keeping an open line of communication is key when hunting for and/or trying to contact ghosts.

Purging your home of unwanted material possessions is also an opportunity to cast out any objects that you suspect may have something to do with a haunting (particularly objects that came with the house like photos, paintings and keepsakes). After all, ghosts can have sentimental attachments, too. And if you’ve recently moved into a home and find something hidden away in the basement or attic that resembles a wine cabinet, a box of rather disturbing home video reels or a weird puzzle-like contraption called a Lament Configuration, put ‘em in the garage sale pile post-haste. On second thought, just bury them deep in the ground or burn them and don’t look back.

How Being Haunted Affects A House's Value!

If a deal seems too sweet, there could be a ghostly explanation. Jimmy Lee Shreeve reports!

So, you've just moved into your new home. Beautiful house, fantastic location, and you got it for a good price. The previous owners seemed very keen for a quick sale. Wondering why? Well, could it be that they thought it was haunted? Stranger things have happened. Beautiful properties have become houses of horror thanks to unexplained happenings. Some families decide to move out. Others learn to live with their ghosts, or resort to exorcism.

Or, in the case of the actor Nicolas Cage, they simply don't sleep in the house. In 2007, he shelled out $3.5m for LaLaurie Mansion, reputedly the most haunted house in New Orleans. "At any given moment," said Cage, "I have five or six ghosts surrounding the house, all looking up at this haunted temple, and I'm in there. We'll [his family] come over and have dinner there but nobody sleeps there." The property is now up for sale.

Being saddled with an unwelcome spectral guest is more common than you might think. According to a 2005 study by the Portman Building Society (now merged with Nationwide), one in three people surveyed claimed to have lived in a house that was haunted, or rumoured to be. The question is, if you've got a resident spook, do you come clean about it to prospective buyers? And if you don't, could you be prosecuted under the Property Misdescriptions Act?

"The Property Misdescriptions Act 1991 does not refer to haunted houses," says the London-based lawyer Conor Walsh. "But it does create a general duty to avoid making false or misleading statements." Theoretically, this should stop a seller from claiming that a house is not haunted – or, indeed, that it is haunted – when he or she believes otherwise.

In the US, it's a different story. There was a case in 1991 where a seller was ruled liable to the buyer for failing to mention that the property she was selling was haunted, which could have affected the value. "The court held that a buyer would be highly unlikely to discover the existence of such activity himself prior to purchase," says Mark Pawlowski, professor of property law at Greenwich University in London. "And therefore the onus was firmly on the seller to make disclosure."

In one extreme case of apparent supernatural activity, the residents fled in terror – and left the bank to repossess the £3.6m property when they couldn't sell it. Businessman Anwar Rashid moved into Clifton Hall in Nottinghamshire in early 2007. The 52-room mansion, which dates back to the Norman Conquest, was the dream home for Anwar and his wife, and their four young children – until the resident ghosts came out. "I fell for its beauty, but behind the façade, it's haunted," says Anwar. "The ghosts didn't want us there, and we couldn't fight them because we couldn't see them."

The spooky happenings started the day they moved in. And over time, they experienced everything from tapping on the wall and unexplained voices, to screaming in the passageways. Investigators of the paranormal were called in, but failed to solve the problem.

In the end, the Rashids couldn't take any more. And that was that: £3.6m down the drain. The property went on the market again in October 2008 (at £2.75m, nearly £1m less than Anwar paid for it), and is now a conference centre rather than a private residence.

If you own a country estate, a resident ghost could well prove a boon. "An interesting and spooky history – particularly involving any famous or infamous characters – can add intrigue and appeal for more eccentric buyers," says Charles Wasdell, head of research at Propertyfinder.com

Such a reputation certainly brings in the visitors to Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which is supposed to be the most haunted of all properties owned by the National Trust. Ghosts aren't always welcome, however, on NT properties. "The trust does exorcise some properties. It doesn't shout about it, though," says Siân Evans, author of Ghosts: Mysterious Tales from the National Trust.

According to Wasdell, exorcism is worth exploring if you're plagued by an unruly ghoul. "Every Anglican diocese in the UK has a specialist team of exorcists ready to vanquish evil spirits," he says. "So, if you're worried that a ghost is going to damage your sale chances, you can always call them in."

New TV Ghost

I bought the family a new TV and DVD surround sound system for Christmas, and I was at home setting up all this new stuff by myself. My wife and two kids were next door at her mother's house so I could get this stuff set up. After I finished, and before turning it on, I took a picture of it. No one was at home but me and I just simply cannot for the life of me explain this photo! A figure of a person appears in the reflection of the television. I have no clue as to what or who this might be! The room has a window in it behind the TV, with a curtain, and another across the room with the curtains opened. My wife and I were talking about the picture when we got it back the other day. We remembered on that night when we got the TV that we were watching a program and knew that our cat was acting strangely. He would crouch down right at our shower and growl like I've never heard him growl before. When we would try to shoo him away, he'd hiss at us and go right back to that spot. He stayed there all night. The next day, after we got home from work, the hot water pipe to our bathtub (not the shower) and the hot water pipe to our dishwasher came "undone" - not broken or busted, simply came undone! We've never had anything like this happen before. I just can't explain it and I don't really want the kids to know about it because they'd be so scared not to sleep in their own rooms.

Terrified Mother Driven Out Of Carlisle Home By Poltergeist!

A TERRIFIED mother says she has been driven out of her Carlisle home by a poltergeist. Carol Tuttle, 34, is afraid to return to her house on Mount Pleasant Road in Currock after a series of ghostly happenings. Shattered glass lies on the floors, window sills and furniture where she says the poltergeist threw glasses around the living room, and smashed a glass cabinet door. All of the back windows in the house have also been broken. Miss Tuttle originally thought yobs were responsible but she now believes that was also the work of the poltergeist.

A TERRIFIED mother says she has been driven out of her Carlisle home by a poltergeist.

Carol Tuttle, 34, is afraid to return to her house on Mount Pleasant Road in Currock after a series of ghostly happenings.

Shattered glass lies on the floors, window sills and furniture where she says the poltergeist threw glasses around the living room, and smashed a glass cabinet door.

All of the back windows in the house have also been broken. Miss Tuttle originally thought yobs were responsible but she now believes that was also the work of the poltergeist.

Neighbours say they have also witnessed the spooky goings-on, which started a couple of months ago. Kevin Blythe, 37, who lives next door, was initially sceptical about the unwanted visitor but began to think differently after seeing its work for himself.

He went to the house one day last week to fetch Miss Tuttle’s cats as she decided she could not live there any longer, and narrowly missed being harmed by the poltergeist.

“The cat ran down the stairs and I followed it, and two glasses flew right in front of me and smashed against the wall,” he said.

Mr Blythe went through into the living room to see if anything was there, and got a shock when he looked towards the kitchen.

“There was a pepper pot flying in one direction and a wire basket flying in the other direction,” he said. “It was really powerful, you couldn’t have caught it.”

Another neighbour reports having a bottle of perfume thrown at her, and seeing a lightbulb from an upturned lamp shoot upwards at the ceiling, leaving a dent in the plaster.

Miss Tuttle has had the house blessed by a priest five times and has also been visited by a paranormal investigator from Manchester.

After researching the subject on the internet and speaking to experts, Miss Tuttle believes the disturbances will only stop if she leaves the three-bedroomed end terrace. She is in negotiations with Carlisle Housing Association (CHA) about the possibility of alternative accommodation being found.

“I won’t live there again,” she said. “I was told the only way to get rid of it was to move.

“I’m willing to take a two-bedroomed house if I have to.”

She and her nine-year-old daughter are staying with her mother for the moment.

CHA representatives visited the house on Thursday, had a meeting with Mrs Smith on Friday and were due to see her again today.

A spokeswoman for the association said: “We are still investigating and there are various things that are happening at the behest of the tenant.

“We are just reviewing the case at the moment. It’s not something that we write policy for so we should know better what is going to happen by early next week.”

"Please Give Me A New House" Pleads A Mother Who Believes Her Home Is Haunted By A Ghost Of A Man Called Nigel!

• Stacey McGill claims ghost flicks lights and microwave on and off 
•  Paranormal investigator identified 'male energy' at Loughborough house 
• Ms McGill felt 'cobwebs' on her skin when she moved in last December 
• Lives with partner Carl, 25, and their 18-month-old daughter Chelsey 
• 
  

A frightened mother is demanding a new home for her and her young family - because she is convinced their terraced house is haunted by the ghost of a man called Nigel. Housing association tenant Stacey McGill claims a spiritual presence flicks lights on and off, tampers with electrical appliances, moves posters around the walls and causes the floorboards to creak at the property in Loughborough. The 29-year-old, who moved into the house last December with her partner Carl, 25, and their 18-month-old daughter Chelsey, said a medium she hired to investigate the property confirmed a 'male energy' at their home.

Paranormal: 
The mother-of-one claims a 'presence' in the house has flicked lights on and off, moved posters around the walls, and caused the floorboards to creak Paranormal investigator Dave Vickers said he felt a ghost run through his body at Ms McGill's home, and told how he allowed the spirit to communicate with the mother-of-one via a scrawled message on a piece of paper. He described sensing the presence of a man aged in his late 30s whose name was Nigel. 

Ms McGill said: 
'We came back from the shops yesterday and as I went to get some cereal the light went on without anyone touching the switch. It's so unnerving. 'I noticed that something was there when I moved in straight away. I just felt cobwebs all over my skin. I knew it wasn't right. Then Carl said that he had felt the same. 'Next the microwave started going on and off by itself and posters have moved around the walls. 'One morning we were woken at 3am by the sound of maintenance works. It was so loud. But there were no work men, it was the ghost.' 

Ms McGill eventually contacted Mr Vickers, who has since made two visits to her home with infra-red night vision camcorders, EMF metres to measure electrical magnetic frequency, and digital cameras.' 'He confirmed that there is a presence here,' Ms McGill said. 'We were in a flat around the corner before. We didn't have any problems there. I just want the housing association to find me somewhere to live that isn't haunted. 

'The last tenant did not experience anything. But some people are more susceptible to ghosts than others. I have felt paranormal presences before.' Mr Vickers, from TSL Holistic Centre, twice visited Ms McGill's home with Carly Adams from the Female Paranormal Investigation team to examine her claims. 'On entering the house I was immediately aware of energy at the end of the hall way, the energy presented itself as a male, and kept saying "I am at the back",' said Mr Vickers. 'A lot of the activity occurred to the back of the property, mainly the rear bedroom. Going up the stairs the male energy made his presence more known, cold spots were experienced. 'I picked up on a man in his late thirties, however his mental age was a lot lower, he was a recluse and was kept hidden away during his younger days by his parents. 'They were embarrassed due to his mental disability. 'I picked up on the name "Nigel". He eventually turned to drink to forget his own fears of life. 'This spirit energy means no harm to anyone and will not harm anyone. Further investigations into the haunting may be needed,' Mr Vickers concluded. It was during the medium's second visit that he sensed that the spirit wanted to communicate, he said. 'I allowed the spirit to use me as a medium and give any messages through writing. This was carried out in the dark. I sat with paper on my lap and pen in hand in the dark while turning into spirit. 

Medium: 
Dave Vickers sensed the presence of a man in his late 30s named Nigel at Ms McGill's Loughborough home 'I pictured Nigel in my mind and my hand started moving the pen. 'Although when we examined the writings things are hard to make out, both Carly and I felt he meant no harm. 'I conveyed love and light to him and told him that he had nothing to fear and that he was free of those hurtful feelings.' Mr Vickers found that the posters and creaking floor boards could be explained by natural occurrences. 

Graeme Stewardson, head of housing at East Midlands Housing Association, said: 
'We are aware of the unusual activities reported by Ms McGill and have listened to her concerns in a sensitive manner. 'We understand that she has previously sought advice from specialists in this field. We will continue to offer Ms McGill our support and advice as a landlord. 'There have been only three tenants, including Ms McGill, in the property in the last 13 years, and we have not had any reports of this nature before. 'As far as we know, the house does not have an unusual history'.

Ely Family Ask To Move Out Of Their ‘Haunted House'!

PARANORMAL investigators have been called to investigate poltergeist activity that a resident says has been tormenting her for weeks.

 Lisa Way Believes Her Council House In Ely, Cardiff Is Haunted! 

Lisa Way, who lives in Ely, said she was taking action to exorcise the demon spirits that plague the home she shares with her two teenage daughters – after a recent visit from a pastor failed to do the trick.

The ghostly goings-on began three weeks ago, on her daughter’s 14th birthday.

She said: “We had been seeing things out of the corner of our eye for a while.

“But on that day things started getting weirder. I started feeling cold air on my face. I saw white light flash by the door. We started taking pictures with our camera phones – and the strangest things started showing up. Arms coming round doors, legs coming down the stairs.”

“I said ‘we need to get out of here right now’. We haven’t slept here since.”

She said that the most frightening incident was a few nights after the birthday, when Lisa approached her front door – and saw a man staring at her from the front window.

Since then there have been lights that turn on and off by themselves, kettles that turn on in the middle of the night and the sound of children running around upstairs.

Lisa said she was desperate for the council to move her out of the house, in Marcross Road, Ely, where she has lived happily for more than 10 years until she realized it was haunted. “I spoke to the council and said we can’t stay here – but they don’t have a policy for dealing with haunted houses. They gave me a business card for a pastor. He blessed the house but it only made things worse.”

The family has turned to mediums Richard Oliver and Christopher Rees, better known as Paranormal Wales.

A spokeswoman for Cardiff council confirmed it did not have a policy for dealing with paranormal activity and they had not received notice from the tenant she wished to move houses.

“Should the tenant wish to apply they should contact C2C on 029 2087 2027,” the spokeswoman said.

The Ghosts In The Living Room!

In 1992 the BBC transmitted a drama that was based on a number of the factual reports I am going to show. The underlying aim of the makers of the drama was not just to frighten, but to demonstrate in a vivid way what had happened to the very idea of reality in television.

It was called Ghostwatch, and it caused a national sensation because thousands of viewers believed it was real. And, at the time, the BBC promised never to show it again.

I want to tell the story of the rise of the suburban poltergeist in factual TV from the 1970s onwards, how those reports inspired Ghostwatch, and how the extraordinary reaction on the night Ghostwatch was transmitted in 1992 showed clearly where the real ghosts of our society had now gone to live. They are inside television itself - a strange nether world of PR-driven half truths, synthetic personalities, and waves of apocalyptic fear.

In the 1950s and early 1960s the reporting of ghosts on television followed the classical rules. The hauntings were in old houses, stately homes, or ancient ruins. Here is a perfect example. It is from the Tonight programme in 1963. The reporter also follows an accepted format - he is indulgently sceptical, but brings with him a religious "expert" who is going to exorcise the presence.

But then, in the early 1970s, there was a peculiar change. The ghosts moved. They gave up haunting old castles and ruins and moved into the most ordinary suburban houses.

The battle between good and evil was now relocated into the suburban kitchens, bedrooms and even the stairs of modern Britain. Throughout, the ghosts also showed perfect taste in wallpaper.

Here is an extract from one of the earliest. It is the haunting of a council house in Swindon in 1973.

At this stage the film-makers are still following the classical editorial model. The local vicar brings in a religious "expert" to expel the poltergeist. The vicar smokes a fantastic pipe - and there is a wonderful shot of the Mr and Mrs Pellymounter watching the exorcism.

As the suburban hauntings multiplied in the mid 1970s, the approach of the programme-makers changed. The idea of exorcism disappeared and the TV reporters decided to turn to science. They would use special recording equipment to discover whether the hauntings were real, and the stories were turned into a battle between superstition and reason.

Here is part of a film made by the BBC Northeast regional magazine programme in 1975. It's about a 1960s block of maisonettes that have been built over an old disused coal mine just outside Newcastle.

The reporter and the crew decide to stay all night in an empty flat - and set up their special cameras and audio recording equipment.

There also a wonderful long-held shot in which one of the haunted occupants shows the reporter what the spirit did with his golf clubs.

The poltergeists kept spreading.

In January 1977 one turned up at 16 Ruskin Road, Dartford in Kent. Ann and Barry Robertson who lived there were terrified and are fleeing the house as the film starts.

There is a change in this film. The suburban couple at the heart of the story are no longer secondary figures in the story. They turn it into an emotional melodrama where they become the focus - Ann especially who has an epic turn of phrase:

"I can't even face taking the furniture with me because this thing - whatever it is - has interfered with my home. It's touched my things. And I'm so frightened that I won't even take the things with me now. So we're back to square one where we started. With nothing"

Suddenly suburbia becomes not boring - but sinister, mysterious and epic.

The film also interviews the man from Dartford Council who Ann and Barry are demanding rehouse them. He is sympathetic but then comes out with a great quote - "I'm afraid the Dartford Council Transfer Points Scheme doesn't recognise ghosts - and therefore they can't be pointed".

And then - ten months later in November 1977 - the Nationwide programme made a film which brought all the elements of the modern haunted house together into a perfect form. And it also introduced a powerful new character into the melodrama - the psychic investigator who was determined to prove that the haunting was real.

A poltergeist had apparently turned up in a house in the north London suburb of Ponders End in the borough of Enfield. The Nationwide film was going to make this house famous.

And along with the house, the film would also make a star out of this man - he was Maurice Grosse who was an investigator for the Society for Psychical Research. Maurice Grosse would come to dominate the TV-ghostworld interface.

The film is beautifully made. It is possibly the best evocation of the mood that is at the heart of all these film reports - a transformation of the dull interior of an ordinary suburban house into an intense psycho-drama where even the most mundane of objects, in this case a Lego-block, becomes possessed by an inner destructive force.

And the poltergeist has by now gone beyond wallpaper. It has chosen the most wonderful bedroom to live in. The walls are covered with Bay City Rollers and David Soul posters. And the shot of an elderly psychic investigator sitting among the images of late 70s teen dreams while listening to the recordings of himself communicating with the poltergeist is just brilliant.

The fascination with the Enfield haunting didn't stop there. Two years later BBC Scotland made another film inside the house.

This time they concentrated on the two daughters - Margaret and Janet Hodgson. The crew filmed the two girls as the poltergeist seems to speak through Janet, the strange voice coming and going in front of the camera.

It is weird and a bit frightening - but you also think that she may be faking it. And it is fascinating to watch the long held shots of the two daughters, studying their faces to try and work out what they are up to. And it introduces a new element into these haunting stories - that children are not innocent, but potentially malicious and a bit dangerous (like in The Innocents). A modern fear that was going to grow much bigger in the 1990s - especially again on TV.

The girls have since said that they faked some of the incidents in the house. But they insist that they were only doing this to test and tease Mr Grosse - and that much of it was real.

The Scottish crew had also got their own mini-scoop. They persuaded the police who had seen the chair levitate inside the house in 1977 to describe it. It is a fantastic two-shot.

The Enfield haunting became famous, and so did the psychic investigator, Maurice Grosse. He was completely convinced by the two Hodgson girls from Ponders End and it launched him on a thirty-year odyssey to try and fight against the rise of what he saw as a narrow-minded sceptical rationalism in Britain.

Grosse was a wonderful person. He died in 2006 aged 87. He had been trained as an engineer - and back in the 1940s he had become an inventor. His most famous invention was called "The Cost-Effective Poster Machine". It is better known as the rotating poster display which you can still see today at thousands of bus stops.

In 1976 Maurice Grosse's 22 year old daughter died in a traffic accident. It devastated both him and his wife. But then Maurice came to believe that his daughter was trying to make contact with him from beyond the grave. This led him to join the Society for Psychical Research - and that took him into the Enfield house just a year later.

Maurice Grosse was well aware that his quest to contact the supernatural was driven by the intense feelings of loss he had experienced through his daughter's death. This made him intensely sympathetic to the people he encountered in his investigations.

In 1996 Grosse made a Video Diary with the BBC. He went around with a Hi-8 camera, operating it himself. He then had full editorial control - and used it to put together a beautiful and moving film.

It is structured around various of his visits to hauntings - both past and present - but he uses that structure to also tell the story of his life - both factual and emotional. He describes his daughter's death and the feelings that raised in him, and the odyssey it led him into, in a very moving way.

One of the most touching moments is when he sits in an ordinary living room and talks to a couple who believe their dead son appears to them on their television. Grosse himself then becomes overtaken by emotion and has to leave the room

As you watch the film it becomes clear that Grosse believes that it is these intense feelings that give people, and the places they live in, the power to summon up poltergeists. The feelings give people something special - the power to pierce through the disappointing reality of their suburban lives and enter into something new and special. Another, and possibly better, world of high drama and raised emotion.

In 1988 a TV dramatist called Stephen Volk had an idea for a six-part drama based on all these suburban hauntings - the story would focus on how television had reported them. Volk's original idea was to have a TV reporter team up with a psychical researcher to investigate the haunting of a contemporary London council house. It was going to culminate in the final episode with a live broadcast from the house - and all hell was going to break loose.

Then Volk's producer, Ruth Baumgarten, suggested that instead they make a one-off play based on the sixth episode. Volk agreed. And he immediately realised that he could use the structure of a live outside broadcast to make a powerful drama that demonstrated dramatically what was happening to television as a medium - how the line between reality and fiction was getting blurred.

Out of that came Ghostwatch.

A few years ago Stephen Volk wrote a fantastic essay about the making of Ghostwatch. It was published by the Fortean Times. And you can find the whole thing here.

In it Volk describes his underlying aim - to make people look at what was happening to reality on television:

Ghostwatch was, of course, also about television.

It's quite difficult now to think back to the televisual landscape of 1992. Formats that dissolve the boundaries between factual and fictional TV have since become the staple diet of the schedules, and it's difficult to imagine a world where they were new or unusual. But this was the time of the first successful hybrids: docu-dramas and drama-docs. Drama series like NYPD Blue increasingly employed a hand-held camera style derived from documentary realism, and documentaries like Crimewatch and 999 were full of reconstructions using actors mix-and-matched to real footage of real people.

Ruth, the producer, and I discussed how we both felt we could no longer trust what we were seeing, what we were being shown or told by TV. The lines between the once distinct languages of factual and fictional TV were becoming dangerously blurred. Even the CNN Gulf War reports on Newsnight (with the infrared camerawork we duplicated in Ghostwatch) felt suspect, somehow unreliable. What was drama and what was not?

But then Volk added a line that I think goes to the heart of what has happened to TV ever since. The strange paradox that, at the very time that the audience is becoming more and more aware that not everything on TV is real, that same audience feel that if an event appears on TV - that is a guide to whether it is real or not.

Yet, paradoxically, television had also become the arbiter of reality, as John Waite exemplified on hearing of the release of his hostage cousin Terry in November 1991: "I won't believe it until I see it on TV."

Ghostwatch was transmitted on Halloween 1992. It was quite obvious from both the introduction and the titles that it was a work of fiction. But the reaction was astonishing - thousands of people rang in - either terrified or angry or to report that they were experiencing paranormal activity in their house at that very moment.

The next day there was a media storm - and the BBC reacted in its normal courageous way by burying the programme and disowning it. The Radio Times was apparently told never to mention it ever again. And Volk has described how it was like being airbrushed out of a photograph in Stalinist Russia.

But the extraordinary reaction rather proved the central aim of the drama.

It demonstrated the truth about modern television - that we all know that increasingly the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurred on TV. But far from making us distrust television this actually makes it more powerful. It possesses our imagination more powerfully precisely because we don't know what is real and what is not.

I think the reason is that, from the early 1990s onward, the big confident stories of our time started to collapse, and people were faced instead with an everyday reality composed only of small and mostly mundane fragments. In the face of that, factual television has increasingly become a two-dimensional version of our world where everything is amplified and distorted.

News reporting and factual television are populated today by a strange nether world of PR-driven half truths, synthetic personalities and waves of apocalyptic fear. It is a world that is like ours but is exaggerated - weird, wonderful and frightening.

It is just like living in a haunted suburban house on the fringes of North London - except that it is now the whole world. All the mundane and banal aspects of reality are taken and infused with an hysterical intensity - that we are both fascinated by and terrified of - whether it be food or Al Qaida. Yet we know in our hearts that much of this is either distorted or just untrue.

It is the true spirit world of our time.

It is made even weirder because, at the same time, audiences are shown harsh and terrifying moments of reality, but they are also insubstantial 2D images flickering on a box in the living room. They don't feel real, they look like a ghost world. Here is an example.

The tiny white figures you see that look like ghosts are actually still alive. But probably not for very long.

And here are some extracts from Ghostwatch - which show how much it was rooted in the suburban poltergeist reports of the 1970s. But also how it used them to brilliantly evoke the mood at the heart of today's television - where so much is half-fiction and half-real.

It is also very frightening - and a brilliant piece of TV drama. Just remember it's not real.