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 thestory 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 UFOsstarted 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”.