Ghostwatch

Remember when Orson Welles read The War of the Worlds on the wireless and the world kinda freaked out? A similar thing happened in Britain back in 1992, when the BBC aired Ghostwatch, which saw four respected British journalists (including Michael Parkinson) investigating a possibly haunted house in Northolt, in a 90-minute-long ‘documentary’ presented as live television. Although aired as a drama under BBC1’s Screen One banner, on October 31, the film was taken by some to be real—thus, the glimpses of the house’s ghost, nicknamed ‘Pipes’, disturbed some viewers. In fact, Ghostwatch disturbed a whole number of viewers: about 30,000 phone calls were reportedly made to the BBC switch within an hour of the show airing and the Broadcasting Standards Commission received 35 official complaints.