I was in England with my family visiting my dad's parents in 1992. I was 7 years old.
I was watching TV, sitting on a little plastic chair that my Gran had bought from the market in expectation of our visit, one each for me and my sister. I remember my sister and I were really excited about these chairs when we arrived at Gran and Grandads house in Urmston, a suburb of Manchester, in the Fall of that year.
It was Halloween-time and I was a little bummed that we were staying in a country that doesn't really do the whole Halloween thing. There's no trick or treating in England, or at least there wasn't in 1992. Perhaps the commercial lure of Halloween candy sales got English companies promoting the holiday more in subsequent years, but when we were there I remember trying to explain to a girl who lived next door to my grandparents how the holiday worked and she was like, yeah okay whatever, and we had a sort of dress up party, our own Halloween parade, at my grandparents house using things around the house to make costumes. There's a photo of us my dad took, my sister and me and Leeann, the neighbor girl, wearing shawls and hats and other random stuff found at my grandparent’s house, and for some reason I'm holding up an ashtray in the photo because I had decided that it was part of my look.
What I want to talk about here is a show I was watching that my Gran turned off while I was watching. I was annoyed. She called it “rubbish.” And maybe she was right. It was a scary program, maybe too scary for a little kid like I was at the time. I didn't watch much of the program, maybe the first 30 minutes before I got cut off, but what I did watch has stuck around with me and influenced my own beliefs about ghosts.
In the program, which is styled as a news special (and precedes the advent of reality shows in ubiquity), a woman and her two daughters talk to a TV crew about a disturbance in their household, what they think is a ghost who stays in their basement. The ghost makes its presence known by banging on pipes in the basement, and the mom has felt and smelled the ghost’s “cabbage breath” on the back of her neck while coming up the stairs.
The description of the “cabbage breath” is something I have never forgotten, and it’s something I still think about whenever I am in the basement coming up the stairs in my parents’ house. Sometimes I visualize and imagine it to the point where I think I can feel someone behind me and I end up running the rest of the way up the stairs.
A few years ago I decided to look into what ghost show I was watching at that time in 1992, to see if I could see the rest of what didn’t get to see at the time. When I did some basic searches like “ghost show 90s england” I was able to find exactly what I was looking for. Apparently the program was called Ghostwatch, and it was a one-off that was only aired once. The program was completely scripted, but made to look like a “live” investigative documentary. What resulted was pretty convincing, and with real life news anchors hosting the show, audiences all over Britain were fooled. The whole thing caused quite an uproar, and a young man was so disturbed by the show that he took his own life. You can read more about the response Ghostwatch garnered here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-41740176
After reading about the show and having my memories confirmed, I watched the program in full on youtube. I just checked and it doesn’t look like it’s on youtube anymore, but I found the video on one of those spammy streaming sites and I’m going to try to watch it again tonight. It is very well-produced and covers all kinds of ground: there’s a spiritualist expert who opines on the poltergeist and believes the children wholeheartedly, there’s a skeptic who looks for a logical explanation for all of the weird phenomena that the children and their mother report, there’s comedic relief from Craig Charles who runs around the neighborhood surrounding the haunted house and tells the viewers how much he hates Halloween, there’s even a telephone bank for viewers to call in and share their ghostly experiences or make comments about what was happening on screen. All of it scripted. And it did kind of set the tone for the future of ghost reality shows, and reality shows in general.
I feel lucky that I was able to witness Ghostwatch, the show that shocked a nation and changed television forever, firsthand. Even though I was annoyed at the time, I also feel lucky that I was one of the kids who had a sensible adult around who decided it was too scary for a little kid to watch.
UPDATE: The program is funnier and quirkier than I remembered. I found the whole show streaming on Internet Archive and watched it last night. Definitely worth a watch.