I have kept this separate from The Ghost Geek for obvious reasons.

I’ve published my first essay for Forensic Psychology Files today which examines what happens to the people who use generative AI to create sexualised deepfakes of women and girls.

They go to prison, right?

Right?

Forensic Psychology Files

Where Are the Deepfake Arrests?

CONTENT NOTE: This article examines the non-consensual creation and sharing of sexualised deepfakes of recognisable people made using generative AI technology. This includes discussion of real-life examples of offending…

Read more

14 minutes ago · Hayley

Please check Forensic Psychology Files out if it’s something that might interest you, and if you subscribe, you’ll get new essays direct to your inbox.

Anyone listening to a spirit-box session knows what could constitute an appropriate answer the moment the question is asked, so the idea is that if a person could not hear the questions while they listened to the spirit box, repeated back words they hear from it, and the answers they provide this way were related to the unheard question, that could be proof that the audio from the spirit box was legit spirit communication.

I wrote an analysis of the Estes Method back in 2019, outlining how the logic was simple as much as it was lacking. The Estes Method didn’t eliminate the fact that the spirit box itself isn’t a good piece of research equipment; it couldn’t eliminate auditory pareidolia, and the biggest issue remained the subjective interpretation of what was heard through the spirit box.

What the Blindfold Couldn’t Fix

The listener - or receiver, as they’re called in the procedure - still knows about the haunting and ghost story attached to the place they’re sitting in, right? Removing their ability to hear the question being asked does not remove underlying bias and suggestion from the process. Not only does their existing knowledge of the haunting affect the outcome of the Estes Method, but even their own preceding words can influence what they hear next. Someone who has just interpreted an audio fragment as “mother” is now primed for related speech.

Research into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) has found that paranormal framing can increase reports of voices in ambiguous audio. Nees and Philips found that a paranormal prime increased perceived voices in both purported EVP and degraded speech recordings. More recently, research has continued to examine how priming affects pareidolia in people reporting paranormal experiences, including a 2022 study by Williams and Balgrove.

This suggests that people participating in the Estes Method might sincerely hear something the audio source does not unambiguously contain and believe it is relevant, because perception is constructive and shaped by paranormal framing.

As the Estes Method spread over the last decade, even that limited attempt at control has been reduced to its most visible props. As a result, what remains is not a controlled experiment in any sense but an improvisational séance whose ambiguity is mistaken for validation.

Not only that, but the method can now be purchased as a kit for as little as £100, booked as a ghost-hunting tourist experience, and endlessly modified without any agreed centralised evidential standard.

To put it bluntly: the original methodological problems I wrote about in 2019 remain, the method has drifted substantially since then, and its current form serves entertainment and commerce far better than it functions as a controlled investigation technique.

When The Props Become The Method

In 2026, claiming to use the Estes Method can mean little more than ‘someone is listening to ambiguous audio through headphones’ and, frankly, that’s exactly how we should treat claims about this method before they’re ever considered as a scientific attempt to conduct spirit communication.

The evolution of the Estes Method shows how easily the appearance of scientific control can outlive the control itself. Put a blindfold on someone, cover their ears with large headphones, call them a receiver, and the whole performance looks pleasingly experimental - even if nobody has actually decided what would constitute a successful result, or more importantly, what would count as a failure.

One guide for using the “solo” Estes Method suggests using shuffled pre-recorded questions and allows the receiver to remain sighted where wearing a blindfold would be unsafe. This might be a sensible safety decision, but it clearly shows how the Estes Method no longer denotes a single replicable procedure. In fact, the solo method guide actually recommends altering the sweep rate and band of your spirit-box if you’re “not getting much” - which is a great example of changing conditions until interesting output appears.

I hate to break it to you, but that is not good scientific technique.

The Experiment in a Box

GhostStop currently sells an “Estes Method Spirit Box Ghost Hunting Kit” for $139.95. SpiritShack likewise offers a “Ghost Box, Headphones and Blindfold” kit in the UK for approximately £99. The UK listing calls it a technique for enhancing spirit communication.

Elsewhere, one commercial ghost experience gives guests disposable blindfolds, headphones, and spirit boxes, and promises souvenir recordings you can take home. It’s promoted as an experiment like those seen on ghost-hunting television. The tour description is unusually clear evidence of the transition from proposed investigative technique to packaged immersive entertainment.

Further variations move even further away from the original procedure first presented back in 2016. Some replace the spirit box’s radio sweep with apps that use stored noise or reversed human phonemes (speech sounds). Other variations use several receivers at the same time, often interpreting coincidental exchanges between separate audio streams as meaningful conversations.

You can see an example of this in the video below from about the 5:26 mark:

The ghost hunters in this video interpret what happens as ‘the conversation started to shift in a way that suggested we were talking to two entities’ in their written report. They also suggest the entities appeared to be “talking to each other as well”, and invite us as viewers to interpret the second session as a discussion between a jailer and prisoner, or between two prisoners.

This shows how adding a second receiver dramatically increases ambiguous material and how two or more separate streams of radio fragments are quickly assembled into one narrative in the moment. You can also see another investigator relaying one receiver’s words, adding another interpretative layer, while not being blinded to the questions being asked.

The video also shows the Estes Method isn’t used in isolation. Other ghost hunting techniques are used in the room, producing further ambiguous events that are treated as corroborating one another. It’s all very distracting and a little chaotic, but hey… It’s ghost hunting!

The Estes Method has even been combined with psychometry and spirit mediumship, with the receiver reporting impressions rather than merely repeating audible fragments. All of these variations make different claims, are based on different assumptions, generate different kinds of materials, and introduce different sources of interpretation all under the same method name.

These adaptations, products, and commercial experiences show how the term Estes Method is now being applied to a range of substantially different practices designed to please the user more than produce any useful data from a controlled condition.

It’s all very bleak.

The genuinely important components of a controlled test- pre-established criteria, control trials, independent evaluation, full reporting, including pre-registration of experimental intention - are precisely the things that cannot be included in the kits sold on e-commerce sites, and which are absent in ghost hunting contexts in which the Estes Method is used.

Essentially, the Estes Method has retained the look of experimental control while becoming increasingly detached from the substance. It’s procedural theatre that does none of the hard work of experimental science but tries to claim the same rigour, and I take real issue with ghost hunters using terminology like experiment, evidence, controlled, and results when there is literally no controlled comparison.

Everything Becomes a Ouija Board in the End

I don’t know whether the inventors of the Estes Method intended this outcome or could even envision it all those years ago, but it really isn't a surprise, as this seems to be the curse of the ghost-hunting community that they just can’t shake.

There’s a familiar pattern in ghost hunting: something is introduced to provide some measurement or control, only for its ambiguous output to be treated as a means of conducting a conversation with ghosts.

It happened when ghost hunters started using Electromagnetic Field meters for their intended purpose, then ended up using them as “yes or no” devices instead, asking ghosts to make the meter light up in response to questions.

Ghost hunting is a séance where participants are very likely to wear tac gear for some reason, and that’s okay as long as nobody mistakes the costume for scientific credibility.

The problem with the modern Estes Method isn’t that it creates an uncanny experience, but that the features that make it so effective prevent it from demonstrating what its practitioners claim. Its flaws are not obstacles to its success - they’re what make the whole experience work.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

I mean yes, I’m the same person so that’s a given, but what I mean is that the same central questions still interest me now as they did then. Not are ghosts real? but what do these ghost stories tell us about people and places? and why do ghost stories get told like they do?

In that MonsterTalk episode about the village of Pluckley what we were really discussing was how a place can acquire a supernatural reputation, and what happens once people begin experiencing the reputation rather than simply experiencing the place.

Folklore shapes expectation, expectation shapes experience, and those experiences become new stories for the next person who comes along.

All these years later, in 2026, things have changed even further but along familiar lines. Someone doesn’t just arrive at a haunted location having read Peter Underwood or Usborne’s The World of the Unknown series, right? Instead they’ve probably watched four TikToks, a YouTube investigation, a couple of Instagram reels featuring somebody screaming WHAT WAS THAT? into a night-vision camera and breathing heavily.

The way ghost stories are transmitted has shifted considerably just in the nine years since we sat down and recorded that 2017 episode of MonsterTalk. So too has the way in which I personally investigate and examine paranormal claims. I’m less interested in debunking the most recent photos and videos to make the news, and more interested in exploring broader questions like the staying power of the Ghost Orb, the ways new technology like AI and LLMs interact with grief rituals, the provenance of sensational claims about Poltergeist cases, and more.

So, if you’ve arrived here after listening to the recent episode of MonsterTalk (and I know a whole bunch of you have), I hope you’ll stick around because although it’s been nearly a decade, there’s still so much to learn and consider about spooky stuff…

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

What, you might ask, would such a disclaimer say? Be careful if you read this, this woman delivers words in such a way that you’ll question your life? Be afeared all who enter here, for thy socks shall be removed from thy feet with force?

Nah. It was more like… please don’t bully this woman just because you don’t like her ideas.

No really, look.

‘Please feel free to comment on the article, but any containing attacks on the author will be deleted.’

It came after months and months of links to my writing posted on the Facebook page for the Society for Psychical Research attracting scorn and anger from some men.

Yes, men. Shocking, right? Bet you did not see that coming? Even those of you who are psychically inclined, I’d wager.

And the real kicker is that I know some of those very men will likely be reading this post right now, because a woman who is openly sceptical of the paranormal ideas which form the foundation of their own worldview should frankly be monitored.

An opinionated woman is one thing. An opinionated woman who questions what you believe to be true, even though she isn’t writing about you personally because she doesn’t know you? May as well burn her or something. Or shake a fist. I dunno what the rules are.

The admin of the SPR social media accounts were trying to solve the issue. It had gone on for a while, I’d turned the other cheek (very atheist of me), but it got to a point where I had to get in touch with them and point out it had started to cross the line, and they took action, to their credit. But only on that occasion. And from then on, if they posted anything I wrote, it came with a disclaimer.

Please feel free to comment on the article, but any containing attacks on the author will be deleted.

I knew why the disclaimer was there, the admin did too, and so did the handful of men who took issue with my existence, but did everyone else see a post with a disclaimer underneath it and think ‘this is a controversial writer’? I think they might have, and that’s alarming because, mate, I write about ghosts and I don’t think that’s very controversial actually…

The post in the screenshot above was me writing about how a poltergeist case can’t be called one of the best documented, if the evidence is never shared publicly, and that many research disciplines deal with anonymisation so they can publish their findings, so that’s not really a reason to not share.

What was I thinking? Who did I think I was? What was an organisation as respected as the SPR doing sharing the work of a *hiss* materialist? *hiss*

Every time I published something on my blog and I received a notification that it had been shared on Facebook by the SPR, I braced myself for what was about to happen.

As someone who writes about paranormal research and genuinely cares about being a good researcher, being shared by a major organisation in the field should have felt affirming.

And it did! But then the notifications became a warning that hostile men were probably about to discuss whether I had any right to be there, and there are only so many times you can ignore the hatred before it starts to bother you.

Before it makes you question whether you have a place in the paranormal research field because you don’t conform to some invisible (ha) standard. You can have your work valued enough for it to be shared only for your presence to be questioned in that same space, and that’s volleyball for your brain.

But I don’t have to worry about that anymore because the SPR just stopped sharing my writing. I don’t think they banned those abusive men, though, but they certainly stopped promoting the writing of a woman with whom those men disagreed.

Nice one!

And it sucked, actually. I can pretend to be indifferent to what happened, but when the SPR posted a link to a piece I had written, I would see the difference in traffic to my blog. My writing would reach new audiences who may not agree with my worldview but would read what I had to say.

And this helped me, because when you have people reading your writing who don’t agree with you, and they have well formed arguments as to why, you learn things as a writer and researcher. It keeps you open-minded and it holds you to account for sloppy conclusions and assumptions.

If all I ever do is write for people who agree with me, I’m not going to actually learn very much.

So when the SPR gave in (and yes, that’s what they did, they gave in) to the people who would bitch, moan, and bully in their comments when they shared my writing, in that moment they failed to uphold the very reason they exist, which, according to their website, is to ‘foster understanding through research and education’.

And, well, isn’t that a shame?

The Ghost Geek is a blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Hayley is a Ghost, at one point, could draw in tens of thousands of hits per month, but after a while that stopped being the case. I’d realised it was conflict that brought people in - when I shit talked the skeptic movement, or when I wrote a critique of a certain paranormal researcher, it drew people to the blog. After a while, those numbers began to dwindle around the time I decided to let curiosity be the driving force behind what I was writing, along with the grief I was processing after losing my mum when I was 30. Until eventually I was hardly writing at all.

It didn’t feel like there was a point.

Then, in 2025, I moved to Substack. I’d taken a period out of work due to burnout and decided that rebuilding my blog could be a useful, productive use of my time while job seeking. The Ghost Geek was born, and with it came the almost overpowering sense that I needed to be clever.

See, for the longest time, I have felt like the little kid who got invited to the adults’ table. Whenever I got invited to speak at conferences, sit on panels, work on a project etc., it felt great until I realised everyone else was there to promote something: their books, their organisation, their show, their career…

And I had none of that. It made me feel like I’d been naïve for the longest time. All I had was knowledge and ideas I thought were worth sharing, and while I still think this is enough of a reason to show up, I’m not sure other people always felt that way.

I worked hard to be the ghost researcher who was a sceptic but who was open-minded enough to acknowledge that weird shit happens. That’s who I think I am and how I work, but I also think it accidentally became a role I felt pressured to perform. I became the person who could be relied upon to be on hand to provide the nuanced sceptical take, and I jumped at the chance.

You want a sceptic paranormal researcher? We’ve got one here, she’s in her 30s, used to be a ghost hunter - I know, right? Wild shit. And she can speak somewhat eloquently, and she’s desperate for friends so she’ll say yes.

That’s harsh, but that’s what my subconscious sometimes whispers to me now that I’m no longer cool enough to get invites to collaborate.

Sometimes I think, back then, I arrived carrying usefulness when everybody else had remembered to bring ambition, and oof, does writing that sentence genuinely hurt.

But, I liked feeling useful. I’m not going to lie.

Not for some “greater cause” - I don’t view scepticism that way - but sharing knowledge is a good thing, and I like being able to help others do this. Whether that was prepping them before they went onto morning television to debunk a ghost video, being a back-up speaker, writing the article someone needed for their publication, or saying the words they wanted a sceptic to say for their podcast.

People asked for contributions, talks, commentary, writing, sceptical perspectives, and being the one who was asked felt like being recognised.

Yet, eventually I started wondering whether it was me who was being valued or the function. And the scary answer is that I genuinely don’t know, but there are enough missing credits, cold shoulders, and occasions of quietly being dropped from something that make me think it wasn’t me, after all.

And somewhere along the way, I started to think that if people didn’t value me, and like me when I was producing my honest thoughts, research, and opinions, then I needed to up my game. Get my shit together.

I started wondering if I sounded clever enough. I mean, yeah, I may have graduated with first-class honours after conducting an undergrad psychology research project with almost 700 participants while working full time, but perhaps I didn’t come across seriously enough to people?

Did they think I wasn’t legit enough, or academic enough to be taken seriously? Did my nuanced take on paranormal subjects make me seem sloppy to the sceptics, and that’s why I was no longer invited out to play? Did the believers think I was too closed-minded even when I was trying so hard to keep myself accountable for the conclusions I reached, and that’s why they bullied me?

In 2012, I spent a week investigating two lake monster mysteries with the late Joe Nickell. By the end of that week I had come to appreciate that being a paranormal researcher who uses scientific scepticism as a research method wasn’t about being the smartest sceptic in the room, or being the first to publish an explainer for the latest ghost evidence to hit the media.

He taught me that you had to take your time, talk to people, do the work, ask the questions, and not assume that your first conclusion was the final one. You had to let the investigation change what you think.

But it feels like the world doesn’t have room for that, and I think for a while I let the impulse to be someone who makes interesting content others will read take precedence over the important lessons I learned back in 2012.

I let my blog become less me and more something I thought I should be. The tone of my writing became more academic (which isn’t surprising as I’m studying for my Master’s in Forensic Psychology and all), but The Ghost Geek didn’t feel like Hayley is a Ghost anymore, and I don’t like that.

I don’t want to just be someone who is useful anymore, wheeled out of storage when needed and gathering dust when not; someone who resents when she isn’t wheeled out anymore, so tries to increase her usefulness by writing clever stuff even if it isn’t that interesting to her.

So I’m not going to be.

I do appreciate all the folks who’ve subscribed to the Ghost Geek over the last year, and maybe this will be disappointing because I’m suddenly not writing about super niche AI or psychology research and what it tells us about people who believe ghosts are demons, or computers are psychics, or whatever.

I don’t know what I’ll write about next. Maybe that’s fine.

Perhaps my subscribers will stick around to find out, or they’ll leave.

I think maybe that’s fine too.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning blog by Hayley Stevens about the spooky and strange parts of life (and whatever else has caught her attention).

Not the Victorian lady in white or the sinister shadow at the end of the corridor. Nor the haunted doll, wheeled out every few months to menace the internet anew. The ghost orb - that pale, floating circle of light that has been turning up in darkened pubs, graveyards, car parks, hallways, and ghost hunting photos for years - has proved almost impossible to kill off.

This is mildly impressive, because people have been trying.

For as long as orbs have been offered up as possible evidence of the paranormal, other people have been explaining that they are usually far less dramatic than all that: dust, moisture, pollen, insects, droplets, lens effects, flash reflecting off particles too close to the camera. In most cases, the mystery is not especially mysterious. And yet the ghost orb lives on. It drifts cheerfully through ghost-hunting television, online spaces, and the occasional earnest email from somebody wanting to know if the glowing disc in their Nan’s sitting room might be Grandad dropping by.

At this point, I’m less interested in asking what ghost orbs are than why they have proved so culturally durable.

Because that, really, is the story. Not the orb as evidence, but the orb as survivor. As one of the great persistent motifs of modern paranormal culture, and an example of what happens when technology, interpretation, and atmosphere collide and produce something people are reluctant to let go of.

Like it or not, the ghost orb is here to stay. And the fact that it is here to stay tells us quite a lot - not necessarily about the dead, but certainly about the living.

A modern ghost story in photographic form

One of the easiest mistakes to make with something like the ghost orb is to treat it as though it belongs only to the argument over whether it is real. That matters, of course, up to a point. But it is also much too narrow.

The more useful way to think about the orb is as a piece of modern folklore.

Folklore is not only made of ancient legends, rural warnings, and stories old enough to have worn smooth around the edges. It is still being made now. It forms around technologies, subcultures, shared anxieties, recurring images and motifs, and repeatable little moments of uncertainty. Give people a strange thing that appears often enough to become familiar, and before long a story will begin to gather around it.

That is more or less what happened with the orb.

A photographic artefact - usually quite ordinary in origin - became a paranormal sign through repetition. People saw strange circles in photographs, yes, but more importantly they learned how to interpret those circles. Books, websites, ghost-hunting shows, online forums, and years of recycled paranormal language helped turn the glowing dot into a recognisable category. It was no longer just a quirk in an image. It was an orb. And once something has a name, a visual identity, and a story attached to it, it becomes much harder to dislodge.

This is one of the reasons the orb has had such a long shelf life. People are not coming to it fresh every time. They’re not simply looking at a white blur and inventing meaning from scratch. Instead, they are seeing something culture has already taught them to recognise.

The orb arrives pre-loaded with significance.

Which is how folklore works. It teaches people what kind of thing they are looking at. And in that sense, the ghost orb belongs to a much older tradition than its digital trappings might suggest.

Every era seems to produce its own visually persuasive form of supernatural evidence. Earlier periods had spirit photographs, ectoplasmic drapery, mysterious extra faces, ghostly smudges, and vague luminous forms. The tools change and the style changes but the human impulse behind it does not. We remain deeply attracted to the possibility that the camera, somehow, has caught more than we did.

The digital age did not invent that longing. It just gave it a nice round shape.

Why the orb feels persuasive

Part of the orb’s enduring appeal lies in a very ordinary fact: photographs carry authority.

Even now, with all we know about how easily images can mislead, photographs often feel more factual than they really are. They look like proof. Something was in front of the camera, after all. Something made that mark. Something was captured.

But photographs are never just neutral slices of reality. They are shaped by light, angle, motion, focus, timing, hardware, software, depth, surface, reflection… and whatever else happened to be going on in the environment at the time. They do not lie exactly, but neither do they simply present the world as it is. They translate it. Sometimes they translate it beautifully, sometimes badly. And sometimes they produce exactly the sort of oddity that people are primed to find meaningful.

The orb is one of those oddities.

It works because it has enough visible form to seem evidential. It is there in the image, apparently concrete, observable, and seemingly independent of the person who took the photo. A funny feeling can be dismissed and a story can be questioned, but a photograph feels like a record. It can be shown, enlarged, circled, posted online, sent to friends, revisited years later. It gives people something to point to.

At the same time, the orb is ambiguous in exactly the right way. It is not usually clear enough to settle anything, but it is clear enough to invite speculation. It offers just enough shape to feel significant and just enough uncertainty to keep the argument alive.

That is a very potent combination.

Human beings are excellent at building meaning from ambiguous things. That is not just a paranormal problem. It is one of the ways we move through the world. We notice patterns, lean on context, connect details, fill in gaps, and interpret uncertainty through the lens of what we already know, suspect, hope, or fear. The orb slips neatly into that process. If you already think a place is haunted, or if a particular image arrives in an emotionally charged context, it does not take much for a pale floating circle to start feeling like more than a camera artefact.

The orb may not be especially strong evidence. But it is very good at looking like the sort of thing evidence might resemble.

Share

The orb and the limits of visual literacy

If the orb is folklore, it is also a lesson in media literacy - or, more to the point, in how shaky media literacy often is.

One of the stranger features of modern life is that we are surrounded by images while remaining remarkably under-equipped to interpret them. We swim in photographs, screenshots, clips, CCTV stills, compression artefacts, edited images, decontextualised frames, and now AI-generated nonsense too, and yet many people still approach images as though they arrive bearing self-evident truth.

The ghost orb is a small but useful reminder that they do not.

So many orb photographs can be traced back to very ordinary physical causes: airborne dust, moisture, pollen, tiny insects, flash bouncing off particles too close to the lens, droplets in the air, marks on the lens, all caught in conditions where a camera is already struggling to make sense of darkness and contrast. None of that is exotic. But unless you have some sense of how cameras behave, it often does not feel intuitive either.

What feels intuitive is the image itself. There is a bright circle. It appears suspended in the frame. It does not look like dust in the way dust exists in the imagination - dry, dull, settled, ignorable. It looks luminous. Distinct. Worth noticing.

And because many people still treat photographs as straightforward witnesses, the image gets taken too literally. The result of flash and proximity becomes a floating object. A lens artefact becomes an external thing. A camera quirk becomes, if not a spirit, then at least the possibility of one.

Again, this is not a problem unique to paranormal belief. It is a human problem, and increasingly a general cultural one. The orb simply shows it to us in miniature. It demonstrates how easily a misunderstood image can become a meaningful claim once the technical context drops away and a ready-made story steps in to fill the gap.

That, to me, is one of the reasons the orb remains useful to think about. Not because it is compelling proof of ghosts, but because it reveals how much interpretive work people do - often without realising it - when they look at a picture.

From evidence to icon

There is another reason the ghost orb has survived so well, and it is perhaps the most revealing of all: the orb is no longer just evidence. It is iconography.

At some point, it stopped functioning only as a claim and started functioning as a symbol.

You do not have to believe in ghost orbs to recognise what they are supposed to mean. A dark room filled with floating pale circles announces itself immediately as belonging to the visual world of haunting. It tells you what genre you are in. It evokes ghost hunts, old buildings, whispered excitement, late-night vigils, and all the familiar staging of paranormal media. The orb has become part of the aesthetic language of the supernatural.

It sits alongside green night vision, torchlit corridors, static on an audio recording, EMF meters glowing theatrically in the dark, thermal silhouettes, and the soft visual grammar of “something may be happening here.” These things do not merely document paranormal culture, but help create it. They are part of its look, its mood, and its branding.

And once something reaches that point, its survival no longer depends on whether it stands up well as evidence.

This is where the orb becomes especially interesting. It has moved beyond the question of proof and into the realm of recognition. It is now one of those images that says ghosts almost instantly, even to people who would never treat it as compelling data. It is useful. It signals atmosphere. It suggests uncanny presence. It belongs to the furniture of the genre.

In other words, the orb has done what a great many pieces of poor evidence never manage: it has become culturally indispensable.

There is something faintly admirable about that. Not evidentially admirable, perhaps, but aesthetically. The orb has had a remarkable little afterlife. A photographic nuisance wandered into paranormal culture and somehow secured permanent residency.

Why the usual rebuttal never really finishes the job

None of this means the mundane explanations are wrong. They are often exactly right. But being right and being effective are not always the same thing.

One reason the orb persists is that sceptical responses to it are frequently too thin to deal with what is actually going on. “It’s just dust” may explain the mechanism perfectly well, but it often fails to address why the image mattered in the first place.

People rarely bring orb photographs to others as purely technical puzzles. They bring them because the image sits inside a larger emotional or narrative context. They were already uneasy in that building. They had a strange experience before taking the photo. The image was captured in a place with personal meaning. It appeared after a bereavement. It feels charged and like it belongs to a story.

A flat explanation can dismantle the optics while leaving the significance untouched, and this is where a lot of sceptical communication goes wrong - not just with orbs but with paranormal claims more broadly.

It focuses narrowly on mechanism and treats context as irrelevant, when context is often the entire reason the claim has any grip at all. People are not only asking “what caused this?” They are also asking “what do I do with how this feels?” and “am I wrong to think this matters?”

If those questions are ignored, the belief may remain perfectly intact, orb and all.

The orb, then, survives not because it is unbeatable, but because it is culturally and emotionally well-positioned. Believers often overread the image while sceptics often underread the human being looking at it. Between the two, the ghost orb continues to float serenely on.

What the ghost orb tells us now

The ghost orb may not tell us much about the afterlife but it tells us a great deal about the culture of haunting.

It tells us that folklore did not stop evolving when technology arrived. On the contrary, technology gave it new surfaces on which to bloom. A camera artefact became a ghost story because enough people learned how to read it that way.

It tells us that visual literacy matters, and that we are often less confident readers of images than we like to imagine. Cameras do not merely capture the world. They interpret it mechanically, imperfectly, and sometimes misleadingly. When people forget that, ordinary artefacts can begin to look uncanny very quickly.

And it tells us that paranormal culture, like any other culture, develops its own symbols. The orb has lasted because it is no longer just a claim about what might be in a photograph. It is part of the recognisable visual language of ghost belief itself.

That is why I do not think the orb is going anywhere.

Not because it has won the evidential argument or because sceptics have failed to explain it. But because it now performs too many cultural functions to disappear neatly. It is folklore. It is misread media. It is aesthetic shorthand. It is one of the ways modern ghost culture recognises itself.

For something so often dismissed as a speck of dust, that is quite an achievement.

You can almost set your watch by how these stories get treated. A headline written with all the delicacy of someone throwing a custard pie at the supernatural, intended to produce cheap laughs and raised eyebrows before everyone moves on. What you almost never get is anything more interesting than that. No curiosity, context, or attempts to explore what might actually sit underneath such claims, beyond the easy thrill of “look at this ridiculous woman and her spectral boyfriend.”

But that is the boring version of the story.

The more interesting version starts from a much less glamorous truth - human beings are actually very good at having strange experiences, and not all of them fit neatly into the polite boxes of ordinary life. Shocking, I know. The field of Psychology has a term that is useful here: felt presence. It refers to the sense that someone or something is there, nearby, even when there is no clear sensory evidence of another person. Some people reading this may have experienced this. It’s an experience that’s not just the stuff of ghost stories and has been discussed in relation to bereavement, neurological conditions, psychosis, spiritual practice, anxiety, and physically or psychologically taxing situations. In fact, a large 2024 population study found that 1.6% of participants reported a felt presence in the past month, and that these experiences were associated with loneliness, poor sleep, adverse events, and other hallucinatory or delusion-like experiences.1

That does not mean every “ghost lover” story has a neat medical explanation, still less that strangers in the press should be diagnosed from the comfort of your sofa. Instead, it shows us how the raw experience itself - the feeling that an unseen other is present, attentive, maybe even interactive - is a recognised part of human experience. In other words, the sensation may be real as an experience even if the explanation attached to it is doing a lot of cultural work. Research on anomalous experiences makes exactly this distinction: between the experience someone has and the paranormal attribution they give it afterwards. 2

Sleep is another big piece of the puzzle. Sleep paralysis is far from rare, and one systematic review found lifetime prevalence rates of 7.6% in the general population, rising much higher in students and psychiatric samples. These episodes can involve waking immobility, terror, chest pressure, tactile sensations, and the overwhelming conviction that there is another presence in the room.3 As a ghost researcher, the strangest stories of sleep paralysis I’ve encountered from members of the public who contacted me for help involved a person who would wake to see a giant frog sitting on their chest, and another who got hugged by an unseen presence from behind. Not nice.

There is also so-called incubus phenomenon, a sleep-related experience involving paralysis, a sensed entity, bodily pressure, and sometimes explicitly sexual sensations. A meta-analysis estimated its lifetime prevalence at around 11% in the general population and 41% in selected at-risk groups. That does not prove ghost sex, obviously, but shows that intensely physical, intimate-feeling experiences involving an unseen presence are not some impossible absurdity dreamt up by tabloids for a slow news day.4

Then there is grief, which has always sat uncomfortably between psychology, religion, and folklore. Bereavement researchers have long noted that many grieving people report sensing the presence of the dead. Sometimes that means hearing a voice, smelling a familiar perfume, or feeling a touch. Sometimes it’s less sensory than that - just a vivid, inexplicable sense that someone beloved is there. Reviews of this literature suggest these experiences are often benign and need to be understood in their personal, relational, and cultural context, not flattened immediately into pathology. That matters because once you accept that people can experience the dead as emotionally and even physically near, the leap from presence to relationship starts to look less like nonsense and more like a human attempt to narrate something unusual using the language available to them.5

And that, really, is the key point…

Experiences like this do not arrive with subtitles. People have sensations, impressions, bodily states, dreams, half-waking episodes, grief reactions, and moments of intense emotional conviction and culture hands them a script. In one context the unseen presence is interpreted as a demon, in another it is a spirit guide. To someone else it is a dead spouse, an angel, a haunting, or simply “something odd that happened when I was exhausted.” Folklore has always provided templates for intimate encounters with unseen beings - modern paranormal culture just gives those old ideas a fresh haircut and a media strategy.

That’s also why the gendered side of these stories is worth noticing. Some research has found that women are more likely than men to report belief in many paranormal phenomena, and the large felt-presence study found women overrepresented among those reporting the experience. At the same time, we should not be naive about media selection. “Woman says she has a ghost lover” is not just a paranormal story but also a story about femininity, sexuality, weirdness, and public spectacle. It fits a very old cultural pattern in which women’s claims about bodies, desire, mysticism, and the unseen are made both hyper-visible and faintly ridiculous. Even if women were not more likely to report certain beliefs or experiences - and in some areas they do seem to be - editors would still be more likely to package these stories in ways designed to invite mockery.6

Media plays another important role here, too. People don’t make sense of unusual experiences in a vacuum and a 2024 study found that viewing paranormal documentaries and reality TV, following paranormal news, and even using YouTube for paranormal content predicted stronger belief in hauntings. That doesn’t mean if someone watches enough ghost television they suddenly develop a supernatural situationship, but instead that contemporary culture supplies ready-made ways for explaining experiences that are already emotionally powerful, confusing, or intense. If your world is full of paranormal language, then the paranormal becomes one of the easiest ways to narrate what happened to you.7

This is why I find the point-and-laugh coverage so unsatisfying. It tells us almost nothing interesting and reduces a potentially rich topic - belief, embodiment, loneliness, sexuality, grief, suggestion, culture, sleep, folklore - to a punchline. And frankly, we can do better than that. I do not believe in literal ghost boyfriends, but I do believe that people can have vivid, intimate, frightening, comforting, or socially meaningful experiences that they then interpret through a supernatural frame.

That, to me, is the real story. Not the question of “is ghost sex real?” but “what kind of human experience becomes legible as ghost sex in the first place?” Once you ask that sort of question, the whole thing gets a lot less silly and a lot more revealing because beneath the daft headlines and the easy jokes, this is not really a story about ghosts but instead an exploration of how people make meaning out of the strange things their minds and bodies sometimes do, and about how eagerly the rest of us turn that into entertainment.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

In contemporary paranormal television, ghost tours, podcasts, and viral clips, the default assumption is often no longer that something strange might be happening, but that something malevolent already is. The room isn’t just cold; it’s hostile and the building isn’t just old - it’s dangerous. The dead aren’t confused or lingering. Instead they’re angry and coming to get you.

This shift didn’t happen because we suddenly uncovered stronger evidence for the paranormal but because evil is much easier to work with than uncertainty.

Subscribe now

If you look back at older ghost stories - folklore, early “true haunting” accounts, even the first wave of modern investigations - ghosts were often ambiguous. They were echoes, shades, repetitions, glitches in place and time and memory. They could be frightening, sure, but they were not always framed as actively malicious. The task was to endure them, accommodate them, or try to understand them, not to defeat them. The haunting was, in a sense, an unresolved question: something that sat at the edge of explanation and refused to move.

By contrast, much of today’s paranormal media approaches hauntings as confrontations. The language has hardened. Hauntings are dangerous and spirits are aggressive, and investigators do not enter spaces to observe but instead they enter to challenge. In this sense, curiosity is rebranded as bravery, and fear itself is quietly treated as confirmation that something dark must be present.

The ghost, in this modern framing, is no longer an echo but instead a sort of opponent that a ghost hunter must survive, and this a transformation which reflects wider habits in how we tell stories about risk, harm, and otherness.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to sit with “I don’t know” where evil, by contrast, offers immediate relief.

Being able to label something as evil allows us to supply motive where none may be immediately obvious. It gives shape to randomness and tells us what to feel and who to blame. From a psychological perspective, this is highly appealing. When something feels uncanny - a noise in an empty corridor, a sensation of being watched, a moment of disorientation - our brains instinctively search for cause and agency and an evil presence provides both in a single move. Tidy.

Label a place or a presence evil and several things are achieved at once. Fear is validated, responsibility is displaced, and failure is excused. That is to say, by suggesting the ghost is evil allows feeling uneasy to become evidence of an external threat rather than jus a reflection of your fear. If a location is dangerous by nature because the ghost there is evil, then provoking it or mishandling the story becomes less of an ethical problem because look what you were up against! If the entity is malevolent, then inconclusive results can be reframed as “it was too strong” or “it was a trickster” rather than “our methods were limited” or “we’re really shit ghost hunters”.

The “evil” label does a great deal of quiet psychological work because it explains fear without requiring us to think too deeply about why we are afraid, or what else might be going on.

There is also a practical dimension.

Paranormal tourism and media do not sit outside ordinary economic pressures but instead operate within the same attention-driven environment as everything else, where escalation is rewarded and nuance quietly disappears. “Nothing happened” does not sell tickets and “something strange, but unclear” rarely goes viral. “Some mundane explanations remain” does not sustain a television series but evil, on the other hand, is marketable.

Evil ghosts justify higher stakes, late-night live broadcasts, special access tours, and premium pricing. They transform historical sites into attractions with built-in drama and they allow experiences to be packaged, intensified and repeated.

None of this requires individual bad faith as such, just structural incentives that favour fear over ambiguity. When stories about dark forces outperform slow, inconclusive investigation those stories become the go-to template. When audiences reward confrontation, confrontation becomes the norm. The problem is not that people enjoy being scared - there is nothing new or inherently wrong about that - the problem is what happens to history, ethics, and basic empathy when fear has to be constantly escalated in order to hold attention.

Calling a place evil is not a neutral act because haunted locations are rarely abstract spaces. They are homes, hospitals, prisons, workhouses, schools. They are sites of real human experience - poverty, illness, abuse, confinement, exploitation, injustice, violence. When we declare these places inherently malevolent, we risk flattening those histories into aesthetic and atmosphere. Trauma becomes a mood, injustice becomes lore, and the past becomes a monster.

Subscribe now

If left unchecked, evil replaces social and political context with supernatural intent. In this way, the evil ghost functions as a moral shortcut because it lets us engage with sites of suffering without having to dwell on the human decisions that produced that suffering in the first place. It absolves us of the responsibility for having fun on someone’s literal grave.

Once you notice this, certain moments in paranormal media take on a different tone entirely. One example that has stayed with me for a very long time comes from an early live broadcast of Most Haunted, filmed on Pendle Hill in Lancashire. The Pendle Witches case is a real historical episode involving real people, several of them women accused of witchcraft and executed in the seventeenth century. Whatever one believes about ghosts, these were not fictional characters, but human beings tried and put to death by the state.

During the show, ex-Blue Peter presenter Yvette Fielding accuses the dead women of torturing people, and at one point shouts at the presumed ghost of one of the executed women, challenges her to do something and calls her a “bitch”.

It was said in the now-familiar style of confrontational ghost hunting: direct, provocative, part of the attempt to elicit a response. The brave ghost hunter venturing into a supernatural hellhole, where evil entities wait in the shadows to attack the living. Pioneers, in other words.

The broadcast moved on. For many viewers, it probably registered as just another dramatic beat in a live Halloween event. But I remember watching it and feeling a jolt of discomfort. What does it mean to stand in a place linked to real executions, invoke the alleged ghost of an accused woman, and then, on live television, insult her in those terms? What does it mean to do so from a position backed by production, by an established brand, by an audience primed to see the location - and by extension its former inhabitants - as dangerous? (Let’s not dwell on the fact the women accused of witchcraft in Lancashire likely never stepped foot on that hill in the first place…)

That moment did not tell me anything about whether ghosts exist. It did, however, highlight how easily the language of evil and malevolent spirits can strip away context. An individual once caught up in a web of accusation, fear, injustice, and state-powered prosecution was reframed, in an instant, as a kind of character: a troublesome presence to be challenged, talked over, and dismissed.

It made my fucking blood boil.

Subscribe now

Whenever I hear people now speak confidently about evil locations, malevolent entities, or “real” dark hauntings, I often find myself thinking back to that broadcast from Pendle Hill. Not because it proves or disproves anything about the supernatural, but because it illustrates something revealing about the living: how quickly we can grant ourselves permission to speak about the dead as though they are fair game for whatever story we want to tell.

There is also something striking about the way so-called evil ghosts are treated more generally. They are not simply observed; they are challenged. Provoked. Instructed to perform on cue. Ghost hunters demand signs, knocks, words, physical sensations - any kind of measurable reaction - often couched in the language of confrontation: “Show yourself”, “Do something”, “Prove you’re here”.

This is not the posture of open curiosity. It is the posture of control and of contempt.

Framing the paranormal as adversarial mirrors other cultural anxieties: fear of losing authority, fear of the unseen, fear of not being in charge of the narrative. An evil ghost is something you can fight, even if only theatrically. Ambiguity is harder to stage. It does not lend itself to clear hero and villain roles. It does not resolve neatly at the end of an episode. By turning the unknown into an enemy, paranormal media reassure us that chaos can still be confronted - if only with the right kit, the right bravado, the right show format.

In the end, the current fascination with evil ghosts may tell us less about the dead than it does about the living. We inhabit a world where institutions feel fragile, expertise is contested, and information is overwhelming. Under those conditions, clear villains are attractive. They offer a kind of moral clarity: here is the bad thing; here is where we put our fear. Evil ghosts fit that role neatly. They allow us to externalise unease, to experience fear in a controlled way, to flirt with danger while being reassured that someone - usually the person with the torch and the earpiece - is still in charge.

Evil ghosts allow us to look away from more mundane and more uncomfortable realities. It is easier to talk about a cursed building than to examine who was imprisoned there and why. It is easier to blame a malevolent presence for a sense of dread than to consider environmental factors, personal history, or the suggestive power of a well-told story. The ghosts in these narratives are, in many ways, mirrors held up to our own preoccupations: with punishment, with transgression, with the desire to turn diffuse unease into something with a name and a motive.

None of this requires us to dismiss paranormal experiences altogether. One does not have to be a believer to acknowledge that people sometimes have vivid, unsettling, and meaningful encounters in particular places. Skepticism does not demand contempt just as curiosity does not require credulity. What it does suggest is that we have choices about the stories we tell around those experiences. We can treat haunted locations as battlegrounds, or as archives. We can insist that every strange feeling points to an enemy, or we can allow that some things may remain unresolved. We can prioritise spectacle, or we can prioritise care - for the living, and for the dead who once lived in those spaces. For the truth, in other words.

Ghosts do not need to be evil to be interesting and ambiguity does not need a villain in order to carry weight. The popularity of evil ghosts is not, at its core, a supernatural question but a psychological and cultural one. It speaks to our discomfort with not knowing, with unfinished histories, with emotions that don’t fit neatly into categories of good and bad.

We don’t need ghosts to be malevolent.

We need the world to make sense - and when it doesn’t, we reach for stories that promise it will, even if those stories flatten people into monsters and places into something we feel entitled to shout at. The more we rely on evil to tidy up our uncertainty, the less space we leave for asking what our ghosts - real, imagined or somewhere in between - might genuinely be trying to tell us.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

If you’re new here, allow me to explain: I’m a paranormal researcher who uses scientific scepticism to look for rational explanations for the weird and spooky things people experience. I don’t believe in the paranormal, but it’s a subject that endlessly fascinates me, and I’ve been investigating ghost mysteries for over 20 years.

So, without further ado, let’s jump into the worst ghosts of 2025! ⛈️

#5 By golly, a ghost!

The first ghost on the list technically dates back to 2016 but made the headlines in 2025. The holiday photo was taken at the famously haunted Stanley Hotel where Henry Yau claims he deliberately waited until the grand staircase was clear of people before taking the photo, only to later discover a dark, human-shaped figure standing at the top of the stairs. He shared the image on Facebook with a red circle for clarity and the immortal caption: “By golly! I think I may have captured a #ghost.” The hotel, of course, is best known for inspiring The Shining, which did absolutely nothing to calm the internet down.

What we’re likely looking at here is a combination of low light, long exposure, and someone quietly not being as gone as hoped. Hotel interiors like this are dim, warmly lit, and full of reflective surfaces; a person moving or standing still briefly at the top of the stairs can register as a dark, semi-defined shape, especially if they’re dressed in darker clothing and partially backlit. Add a bit of noise, compression, and expectation - plus the psychological boost of knowing the hotel’s reputation - and suddenly a perfectly normal human becomes a Victorian-looking apparition.

As for the sudden illness afterwards? Chalk that up to altitude, excitement, a late dinner, or the creeping realisation that you’ve just accidentally invented a ghost story you’ll be explaining for the next nine years. By golly, indeed.

#4 The ghost of a miner’s wife

This one comes courtesy of a Ring doorbell in Staffordshire via those top class journalists over at LadBible. Homeowner, Kerry-Anne Docherty, spotted what looked like a semi-transparent figure drifting past her neighbour, Jackie Batt, in night-vision footage captured early one morning. Batt, who says she didn’t see anyone else at the time, later suggested the tall, hat-wearing figure resembled a woman in 1940s clothing and speculated it might be the ghost of a miner’s wife, given the history of their houses.

The reality is that transparent figures (and even animals and cars) in Ring doorbell night-vision footage are a well-documented camera artefact rather than evidence of anything paranormal. In low-light conditions, Ring cameras rely on infrared illumination, heavy video compression, and frame-to-frame noise reduction to produce a usable image. When a person or object moves through the scene, these processes can partially blend frames, smear motion, or preserve the static background more strongly than the moving subject, creating the illusion that a person briefly fades, doubles, or becomes see-through. Reflections of infrared light from nearby walls, windows, wet surfaces, or even slight lens smudges can exaggerate the effect, particularly in night mode where the system is already working at the limits of what the sensor can resolve.

Or, you know, it’s the ghost of a Miner’s wife, I guess 🤷

#3 Empress Matilda (but make it a doorway)

This one comes from Oxford Castle, where an Australian backpacker on a daytime tour accidentally photographed what tabloids like The Mirror quickly identified as the ghost of Empress Matilda. The pale, cloaked figure appears to be standing in a shadowy doorway inside St George’s Tower - a location famously linked to Matilda’s dramatic 12th-century escape during a siege. The photographer says the room looked empty moments earlier and they only noticed the figure later when reviewing the photos at home, a detail which, naturally, did not calm anyone down.

In reality, this is a like a case of architectural pareidolia: a narrow stone recess photographed at an angle, with the inner room not properly visible, taken in uneven daylight, picking out some elements and leaving the rest in shadow. The “figure” has no face, limbs, depth, or separation from the surrounding stone - just a convenient vertical light patch doing its best impression of a medieval woman once a story is attached. Without the caption, it’s a doorway. With it, it’s suddenly Plantagenet royalty popping back in to check nobody’s nicked her escape route…

#2 Lady Dinah Pearce’s ghost in motion

This photo comes from a séance held at The Pearce Institute in Glasgow, where according to The National, ghost hunting event staff claim to have captured on camera the ghost of Lady Dinah Pearce, benefactor of the building and widow of shipbuilding magnate Sir William Pearce. The photograph was taken after a late-night séance in which participants sat around a table calling out to Lady Pearce, and was later shared by Paranormal Scotland Ltd as what they describe as their clearest evidence yet of an “intelligent haunting” (👀).

It’s claimed the photo shows the outline of a figure, including face and clothing. In reality, it shows multiple seated people who are already visibly blurred, strongly suggesting a slow shutter speed or long exposure in low light. When someone moves through the frame - or shifts position - they appear semi-transparent, smeared, or partially overlaid on the background, producing exactly the kind of apparition effect seen here. There’s no single, stable figure - just motion blur, camera shake, and overlapping exposures doing what they’ve always done best at séances - creating something uncanny enough for the brain to promote it straight to ghost.

#1 The blood moon EDM rave ghost

This entry comes from Kinnitty Castle, where a group calling themselves Paranormal Supernatural Investigations Ireland (paranormal and supernatural, just in case you were worried they’d miss anything) claimed to capture an “extraordinary mass of energy” at a stone circle following a blood moon. According to the group, their equipment was “lighting up,” the atmosphere was “electric,” and a mysterious shape appeared in one photograph but not the next - which they took as clear evidence of an entity making itself known.

What the image actually shows is a low-light, long-exposure photograph featuring significant motion blur, camera shake, and a frankly heroic amount of red and green LEDs from ghost-hunting equipment. The result looks less like an ancient spirit and more like someone accidentally wandered into a forest rave while the DJ was mid–light test. The dark, semi-transparent figure is consistent with a person moving through the frame during a slow shutter, while the neon ground glow is just gadgets enthusiastically painting the landscape like it’s Glastonbury, but for vibes.

Either that, or the ghosts of Offaly have finally embraced drum and bass 🙌

So there you have it - the worst of the worst from 2026. Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful New Year! You can check out previous years Worst Ghosts showcases here.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

In a recent episode of the BBCs Uncanny, that closure arrives in the form of popcorn.

In the episode in question, the setup is elegant radio. Danny Robins frames the case as the rare one that stumped Dr Ciarán O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe pushes back - he’s not stumped, he has a possible explanation - and then comes the pivot: the clue lies in what the witnesses were doing before they saw a ghost. They were at the cinema and at a cinema you might eat popcorn. Popcorn, O’Keeffe points out, that is stored in humid environments can develop mould, and mould can produce mycotoxins. Mycotoxins can affect you neurologically and therefore popcorn becomes the suspect for what is framed as a potential hallucination experienced by two people at the same time.

It’s neat. It’s also a masterclass in how a single speculative mechanism can get promoted into a story-solving diagnosis without the audience ever being given the evidential bridge they’d need to cross. And boy, is that a bridge that needs to be crossed here. There are two separate topics that keep getting braided together:

1. damp and mould as a real public-health problem,

2. so-called toxic mould as a catch-all explanation for anomalous experiences.

They are not the same thing - and if you care about scepticism, or witnesses, or basic intellectual hygiene, you don’t treat them as interchangeable.

Damp and mould are real problems that matter

Let’s start with the boring bit that is actually important: damp and mould are a genuine health issue. UK guidance aimed at housing providers is explicit about the health risks and the need for prompt action. At a broader level, the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report on damp indoor spaces reviewed the evidence linking dampness and mould with adverse health outcomes, particularly respiratory symptoms and asthma-related effects.

So yes - if you have visible mould, persistent damp, a musty smell, or condensation you’re constantly chasing, that’s a problem worth fixing. These are issues that can make people feel physically unwell, disturb sleep, cause stress, and create a background hum of discomfort that changes how a place feels to live in.

However, none of that requires us to turn the witness into a malfunctioning body. It’s enough to just recognise that environments shape experience. Where things begin to wobble is when that grounded point becomes a kind of narrative crowbar. When the facts that mould exists and can be harmful turns into “therefore mould explains your ghost story.”

The “toxic mould” gravity well

Here’s the thing - the idea that mould could cause ghost experiences feels right, and this is because of the popularity of claims and beliefs around Toxic Mould Syndrome (TMS). TMS is where a lot of media explanations pick up their momentum because it sounds like a credible diagnosis, it feels technical, and offers a single culprit for a wide range of medical symptoms. And hey, we’re all a little wary of mould, right?

But mainstream allergy and toxicology guidance repeatedly cautions against exactly this kind of overreach. The American College of Medical Toxicology’s position statement on mould-related inhalation exposures is unusually plainspoken: it states there is no documented evidence that inhalation exposure to fungi or indoor mycotoxins causes a chronic toxic encephalopathy. It also notes that mould VOCs can cause transient irritant symptoms and subjective complaints such as headache and dizziness, but it must be noted that these are not in the same ballpark as experiencing hallucinations.

Meanwhile, the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology (AAAAI) has public-facing guidance on TMS that works hard to separate what is known (allergy, asthma triggers, irritant effects) from what is commonly asserted without robust evidence. If you want a deeper clinical anchor, the AAAAI position paper The medical effects of mold exposure sets out the mechanisms by which mould is known to affect health (allergy, hypersensitivity conditions, infection in vulnerable people) and is frank about how many broader claimed effects remain unproven.

And that’s the context missing when mould is used as a debunking trump card. People can suffer real symptoms in mouldy environments - and they deserve proper support and remediation - but the leap from “mould is present” to “mould caused a specific neuropsychiatric event” is not one you get to take on vibes alone.

Popcorn as the “clue” is a mechanism without a case

So… could popcorn develop mould if it were stored badly? In principle, yes. Could corn products be contaminated with mycotoxins under poor conditions? Also yes.

But Uncanny isn’t presenting a food safety lecture. It’s proposing popcorn as a suspect in a specific, dramatic account - a shared roadside vision described as a possible apparition of a young man writhing around on a car bonnet. That moves us from general possibility into case-based inference, and that requires evidence.

To make popcorn or mould a credible explanation for this story, you would need at minimum, evidence that popcorn was even consumed and, if it was, that it was contaminated (not merely that contamination is theoretically possible). You’d need to establish a plausible exposure route and dose relevant to acute neurological effects in two people at the same time, as well as a basic attempt at differential thinking, because there are many common factors that can produce frightening misperceptions on roads at night without invoking intoxication.

Instead, the listener gets a chain of coulds delivered in the language of detective work. It’s not that O’Keeffe literally says “this is definitely what happened.” It’s that the framing encourages the audience to treat it as a satisfyingly mundane solve - a rational ending to a scary story - rather than as a speculative suggestion with no case-specific support. And this matters because medicalised explanations carry a particular weight. They don’t just challenge a paranormal interpretation; they implicitly offer a diagnosis of the witness’s perception. And that can be reductive in a different way - especially when the show hasn’t done the work to justify it.

The mould-ghost story that keeps spreading

The mouldy popcorn idea doesn’t float in a vacuum. It plugs into a broader, already-familiar meme: that mould and mycotoxins can explain hauntings.

The most cited scientific version of this is the work associated with Dr Shane Rogers at Clarkson University. In 2015, a widely syndicated announcement described a team studying possible links between reported hauntings and indoor air quality, framing the question in terms of similarities between some haunting reports and symptoms some people attribute to toxic mould exposure.

More recently, a 2023 Atlas Obscura piece restated the project and included the quote that now travels everywhere: that Rogers found “five to six times more mould spores” in places reported haunted, while explicitly noting that the study has not undergone peer review.

There are two details in that write-up worth lingering on.

First, Rogers describes using ghost-hunting TV shows to identify haunted locations to use in the study. If the concept of a haunted location is operationalised as a place selected by television producers for atmosphere and reputation, you are not sampling hauntings; you are sampling a media-curated subset of old, dramatic buildings. Precisely the sort of environments more likely to have ventilation issues, damp, footfall, dust, and all the rest.

Second, the same article describes the work as analysing particulate sizes, noting the method does not specifically identify mould spores. That may be entirely fine as an early-stage screening approach - but without a published methods section (because the 2015 research was never published, by the way), we can’t assess what was measured, how confounds were controlled, or what “significant difference” actually means statistically between so-called haunted locations and non-haunted locations.

And that is the core issue: a decade on, the claim is still largely circulating through interviews and articles rather than a publicly accessible report that would let anyone evaluate it properly. It’s possible the preliminary pattern Rogers describes is real in those specific sites. It’s also possible it’s a predictable artefact of site selection and building age. Without transparent methods and data, those two possibilities can’t be separated - yet the claim is being used in paranormal discourse as if it has already done that explanatory work and these are established facts.

Share

What the environmental research actually suggests

If you want to take a grown-up view of environmental explanations for haunted house experiences, it’s worth looking at the literature review terrain rather than one endlessly re-quoted unpublished project.

Dagnall and colleagues’ 2020 appraisal of the past two decades of environmental research on haunted-house experiences describes a field that is patchy and methodologically messy, with inconsistent findings across variables like air quality, temperature, lighting, and electromagnetic fields. Notably, O’Keeffe is a co-author on this review. This research doesn’t mean environment is irrelevant but means means it is rarely simple, rarely single-cause, and rarely a magic bullet that turns a vivid experience into a one-word explanation.

This is why the popcorn explanation lands as such an oddly confident suspect. It doesn’t sound like careful scepticism. It sounds like a story being given its ending.

When people report frightening, uncanny experiences - particularly in conditions that involve darkness, speed, stress, unusual angles of light, fatigue, or expectation - perception itself is a rich, mundane explanatory landscape. The human brain is a pattern-detection engine that makes rapid judgments under uncertainty. Under threat, it over-interprets. Under low information, it fills gaps. Under heightened emotion, it tags experiences as significant and memorable. That’s not pathology; that’s how we function.

There is also an ethical point here: scepticism doesn’t have to default to medicalising people. Hallucination is a loaded word. Neurological effects is a loaded phrase. If you are going to imply that someone’s mind was chemically altered into seeing a writhing figure on their car bonnet, you need more than a neat clue. You need evidence - and you need to communicate the uncertainty honestly. I also wonder if the people whose story is being discussed were spoken to about the hallucination suggestion before it was broadcast to the public because this could be a troubling suggestion for some.

What would responsible citing look like?

If a podcast wants to float popcorn mycotoxins as a possible explanation for something experienced by two people at the same time, the minimum standard is not dramatic confidence but transparency.

I do not find hallucination to be a satisfactory explanation for what is reported by these two eye-witnesses. I do not know what caused their experience and I wouldn’t like to speculate because it would not be appropriate to do so. That, I believe, is the ethical and responsible position for investigators to take in these cases.

Where is the evidence that contamination occurred in this case? What dose and route are being implied? Which clinical or toxicological sources support the jump from mould exposure to vivid, content-specific hallucinations in an otherwise ordinary context? And if the broader mould-haunting claim is invoked, where is the publicly available study that can be scrutinised, rather than repeatedly hinted at?

Until those questions can be answered, mouldy popcorn is not an explanation. It is a storytelling device: a satisfyingly mundane suspect offered in the tone of science, with none of science’s accountability.

And that is, in its own way, as uncanny as anything on the road.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Ritson’s article made me go back to South Shields because “one of the best attested” is quite a claim to make for a case whose evidence most of us cannot actually examine. I’m not interested in calling anyone a liar or declaring the whole thing an obvious hoax. I want to know what we can reasonably conclude from what is available.

The Story as Told By the Investigators

In the FT article ‘The South Shields Poltergeist 20 Years On’, Ritson (2025) recounts the main story: a young couple, Marc and Marianne, and Marianne’s son, Robert, living in a modern house in South Tyneside, start to notice strange things happening at home.

They reported water taps turning on by themselves, objects moving, doors left open, and belongings disappearing and reappearing in odd places. Later, the disturbances included loud knocking, voices on a baby monitor, and sightings of a woman and a boy named “Sammy,” who Robert said came to play.

Other family members also witnessed strange events. Chairs and cups reportedly moved by themselves. For example, a cup from the child’s bedroom was later seen falling outside from above, even though the bedroom window was closed. This is described as an example of ‘matter-through-matter penetration,’ where solid objects pass through barriers, a theme found in earlier poltergeist accounts. (Murdie, 2010)

By the time Ritson and Hallowell got involved in mid-2006, the case had been going on for several months. On their first visit, they said they saw objects move in what they considered controlled conditions, like toys sliding off shelves into bins, a plastic nut flying across the bedroom and hitting Marianne, and a small ball that appeared on the bed and felt ‘hot to the touch.’ The investigators claim to have recorded all this on video.

Over the following months, the events reportedly became even stranger and more unsettling.

After almost a year, the activity appeared to fade. Ritson gives two reasons for this: the family’s emotional exhaustion, saying that fear is one of the entity’s “fuels,” and a colleague’s suggestion to switch off and unplug all electrical devices at night to remove the poltergeist’s “stand-by power” source. The reported events then briefly happened at the couple’s workplace before stopping. (Ritson, 2025)

The case was published as The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder and later reissued. The book, which has a foreword by Guy Lyon Playfair, is described as one of the most important poltergeist cases of the last fifty years. (Xavier, 2009)

From Living Room Haunting to Case Study

Since then, South Shields has taken on a double life. On one side, it is often featured in books, magazine articles, YouTube ‘top ten hauntings’ lists, and TV documentaries, especially for its violent aspects. On the other, some in the parapsychological community use it as a valuable case for developing theories.

Alan Murdie’s review for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research is a good example of the latter. He visited the investigators, examined their archive, and mentions over 450 photographs, film clips, witness statements, and other documents. Murdie (2010) concluded that, assuming the events occurred as described, a substantial body of material was consistent with a genuine poltergeist case. He situates South Shields alongside Rosenheim, Enfield, and other “well-attested” cases, and argues that critics have been too quick to dismiss it without looking at the primary evidence.

More recently James Houran, Brian Laythe and their colleagues carried out a study on South Shields which they regard as one of their key case studies. The researchers coded the incidents that had been reported, looked at the thematic patterns and discussed the case in the context of what they refer to as “haunted people syndrome” – a group of psychosocial and environmental factors linked with recurrent anomalous experiences. (Houran et al., 2022)

South Shields is also used in further methodological studies as an example of how researchers could convert complex, multi-episode haunting accounts into structured ‘fact sheets’ for analysis. (Massullo et al., 2025)

Put all of this together and South Shields starts to look less like a ghost story and more like a proper research case: documented, archived, and even turned into data for later studies. Which makes the next problem rather difficult to ignore: most of us can't actually see very much of that documentation.

What Evidence Can The Rest of Us See?

So what can we actually look at? There's the book, Ritson's later accounts of the case, and Alan Murdie's review after he was allowed to inspect the archive himself. Murdie says that archive is substantial, and I have no particular reason to doubt that he saw what he says he saw. The difficulty is that his inspection still leaves the rest of us relying on somebody else's inspection.

On the publicly available side, there are a few still pictures published both in print and online, for example reports of a children’s plastic table being ‘bent and twisted out of shape’, and of the rocking horse which was found hanging from the loft hatch by its reins. (Ritson 2021, 2025; Boyle 2014) There is also the water-bottle photo and video that shows a water bottle ‘mysteriously’ balancing on one corner of its base. After the tabloid coverage promoted the bottle evidence, many websites later took it down because of ridicule and copyright complaints. (Ritson, 2021; Ritson, 2025; Hallowell, 2010; Boyle, 2014)

Beyond these examples, there is very little that the wider public can actually examine for themselves.

We are asked to take the rest on trust – either the investigators’ word, or the endorsements of those who have seen more. This gap has been a central point of criticism. A 2009 piece on GhostTheory, for example, notes that years after the initial media splash, the only substantive public evidence was the bottle video and some scratch photographs, with the more dramatic material held back pending a TV deal or restricted to paying readers of the book. The author argues, reasonably in my view, that making evidence contingent on publication or broadcast damages the claim that the case is “one of the best-ever documented.” (Xavier, 2009)

In a long and combative response letter, Hallowell (2010) rejects the idea that they’re withholding material for money, stressing that the main constraint is the family’s anonymity and the legal and ethical issues around releasing footage. He also points out (fairly) that the famous bottle clip is not, in their own view, strong evidence – there are possible normal explanations – and that the real weight of the case lies in the cumulative pattern of events.

From the outside, the case is often presented as unusually well-documented and evidential. Yet most of that documentation remains out of reach for anyone beyond a small circle of believers and parapsychology insiders. Even requests to share relatively low-risk material, like the bottle clip, have been met with copyright objections and, according to at least one critic, threats of legal action over unauthorised reposting of the footage.

You don’t have to assume fraud to see why many people find this unsatisfying. In fields that aim for scientific credibility, evidence is usually handled quite differently, and this gap naturally invites a healthy degree of doubt.

Anonymity, Ethics, and the Catch-22

Here’s where I want to be very clear: I absolutely understand the desire to keep the family at the centre of the case anonymous. It’s how I work too. When I investigate haunting claims, I prioritise the privacy of those involved because the media and online audiences can be cruel, intrusive, and relentless. Homeowners caught in the crossfire of a “good story” can find themselves doxxed, mocked, or flooded with unwanted attention, especially if children are involved.

Ritson and Hallowell repeatedly stress that they promised never to reveal the family’s identity, and that TV companies have pushed them to break that promise in exchange for access or exposure. In his Fortean Times piece, Ritson explicitly frames his refusal to work with those producers as a matter of “ethics over entertainment”, even at the cost of making the case less well known.

But this creates a real methodological challenge when the same case is described as “one of the best attested” poltergeist outbreaks and used as a central data set in parapsychological research. It is difficult to have it both ways. If the household’s privacy must be protected (which is entirely reasonable), then the evidence itself needs to carry more weight. That does not mean naming the family or releasing every second of footage online.

I don't think we actually have to choose between protecting the family and showing the evidence. Researchers in psychology, medicine and criminology have had to wrestle with exactly the same problem for years. Names and identifying details can be removed, timelines and logs can be redacted, and representative footage or photographs can be made available to independent reviewers under controlled conditions. None of that requires putting a frightened family on display. (Grinyer, 2002; Allen et al., 2023; Saunders et al., 2015)

If cases like South Shields are going to carry weight outside the same relatively small circle of people who already trust the investigators, some version of those practices probably needs to become normal. If cases like South Shields are going to carry weight outside the same relatively small circle of people who already trust the investigators, some version of those practices probably needs to become normal. As things stand, protecting the family has also had the effect of keeping most of the evidence beyond outside scrutiny, and that limits what the rest of us can reasonably conclude.

How Good is “Best Attested”?

Even if we put the evidence-access problem aside for a moment, there are still questions about how the case was framed and investigated:

Trying to follow the timeline

Murdie (2010) notes in his SPR review that the narrative is structured as an unfolding story, in the style of Guy Lyon Playfair’s This House is Haunted, which makes the chronology hard to follow at times. He explicitly says more detail on some incidents would be welcome, given how extraordinary they are. To the best of my knowledge, this is the person who had the most access to the case files.

When investigators become part of the story

Ritson and Hallowell weren't standing outside this case with clipboards. They became part of the family's support system: people to call, people to confide in and, at times, people expected to actually do something about whatever was happening. That's understandable. When frightened people are calling you at three in the morning, you are unlikely to sit down and draft a protocol. But it also means the investigators became part of the situation they were trying to understand.

Can you unplug a poltergiest?

The problem with the stand-by-power explanation is that several things have to be true before it can explain anything: there has to be a poltergeist, it has to be capable of drawing power from electricity, and unplugging the appliances has to be the reason the activity stopped.

The obvious problem is that the activity stopping after the appliances were unplugged doesn't mean it stopped because they were unplugged. That's the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: assuming that because one event follows another, the first one caused the second.

The bottle problem

Hallowell (2010) has since stressed that the bottle balancing on its edge is evidentially weak and easy to fake; he even notes in the book that he could have knocked it into that position by accident. Yet this is the clip that those involved in the case initially pushed to tabloids and TV, and it remains the most widely seen piece of South Shields evidence. If your strongest material is too sensitive to show, and your weakest becomes your public flagship, you’re setting up a credibility problem from the start.

None of these points disprove the South Shields case, but they do make the “best attested” label harder to defend. What we're left with is a sincerely reported account, backed by a private archive that some of the people allowed to inspect it have found impressive, while the rest of us are largely asked to take their word for it.

Critics, Trolling, and the Space In Between

Ritson is right to say that some of the criticism directed at him and Hallowell over the years has been unkind and, in some cases, potentially defamatory. The Bad Thinking blog review of a South Shields TV documentary, for example, is laced with mockery and contempt. (Bad Thinking, 2014)

At the same time, not all critical engagement is trolling. The GhostTheory pieces and comments, for instance, raise specific, substantive issues such as what happens when key evidence is withheld and how exactly we should interpret a case whose public face is a single dubious video and a dramatic narrative.

Those are fair questions, and they don’t magically become unfair because some other people on a different forum were rude. For what it’s worth, I have a lot of sympathy for the bind Ritson describes in his 2025 Fortean Times article. He and Hallowell walked into a situation that, if their account is accurate, was chaotic and frightening, and they promised anonymity to a family who were already in distress.

They then wrote up what they’d experienced in the way they knew – as a narrative book – and found themselves in the crossfire between believers hungry for proof and sceptics hungry for a debunking.That does not mean every choice they made was ideal, or that their conclusions are beyond question. But it does suggest we should try to examine the work itself, rather than turning the authors into caricatures.s.

So Where Does That Leave South Shields?

My own view, based on what is available, is that the case is genuinely interesting, but the evidential claims are overstated. To be “best attested” should mean broad, independent access to raw documentation, a clear chronology, and methods that can be examined and replicated. South Shields does not quite reach that standard.

The ethical dilemma is real, but it is not insoluble - we do not have to choose between protecting witnesses and sharing evidence. Other disciplines have found ways to manage both. Psychical research could do more to develop anonymisation and data-sharing norms that do not rely on personal trust in particular investigators. Until then, scepticism will remain the default response.

At the centre of all this is a family who, by every account, went through a period of real distress. The investigators still believe they witnessed something impossible, and describe paying a personal price for saying so. None of this should be dismissed lightly.

In his Fortean Times piece, Ritson recalls asking Guy Lyon Playfair whether the accusations and doubts ever stop, and being told that they don’t.

On one level, that’s simply true: if you work with hauntings and poltergeists, you will always have people who think you’re mistaken, have an agenda, or are lying (something I myself face even as a sceptic). On another level, though, there is a gap here that needs acknowledging. If you want sceptics, historians, and curious outsiders to treat your work as more than a good story, you have to meet them halfway - by making as much anonymised evidence, context, and methodology available as you safely can, and by being open about what can’t be shown and why.

I don’t think Ritson and Hallowell owe the internet the identity of this family, or every piece of material they collected in somebody’s home twenty years ago. I do think that if South Shields is going to continue being described as one of the best-attested poltergeist cases on record, enough of that evidence has to be available for the claim to mean something beyond people I trust have seen it.

Protecting witnesses and allowing scrutiny aren’t mutually exclusive. Until more of that middle ground exists, I think “best attested” is doing rather more work than the publicly available evidence can support.

The Ghost Geek is a science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

References

Allen, C.I., Payne, S.H., & Valentine, J.L. (2023), ‘Ethical Data Sharing in Forensic Research’, Forensic Science International: Synergy, vol. 6, doi:10.1016/j.fsisyn.2023.100322. (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Boyle, A., (2014), ‘10 Terrifying Tales of Violent Poltergeists’, Listverse, 10 March. Available at: https://listverse.com/2014/03/10/10-terrifying-tales-of-violent-poltergeists/ (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Grinyer, A., (2002), ‘The Anonymity of Research Participants: Assumptions, Ethics and Practicalities’, Social Research Update, no. 36, University of Surrey. Available at: https://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU36.html (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Hallowell, M.J., (2010), ‘South Shields Poltergeist: A letter to GhostTheory’, GhostTheory, 11 February. Available at: https://www.ghosttheory.com/2010/02/11/south-shields-poltergeist-a-letter-to-ghosttheory (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Houran, J., Little, C., Laythe, B., & Ritson, D.W., (2022), ‘Uncharted features and Dynamics of the South Shields Poltergeist’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 86, no. 3, pp. 129–164. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372825228_Uncharted_features_and_dynamics_of_the_South_Shields_poltergeist (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Massullo, B.J., Houran, J., Escolá Gascón, A., O’Keeffe, C., Drinkwater, K.G., & Dagnall, N. (2025), ‘Quality-Checking a Novel “Fact Sheet” on Ghostly Episodes’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 16. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1585437.

Murdie, A., (2010), ‘Review of The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 74, pp. 129–132. Reprinted in Europaranormal. (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Ritson, D. W., & Hallowell, M. J. (2008), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder’, The History Press, Stroud. (Rev. eds 2009, 2020.)

Ritson, D.W., (2021), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist, 15 Years On’, Spooky Isles, 28 May. Available at: https://www.spookyisles.com/south-shields-poltergeist-darren-w-ritson/ (Accessed 29 November 2025).

Ritson, D.W. (2025), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist 20 Years On’, Fortean Times, December 2025 Issue [FT465], pp. 32–39.

Saunders, B., Kitzinger, J., & Kitzinger, C., (2015), ‘Anonymising Interview Data: Challenges and Compromise in Practice’, Qualitative Research, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 616–632. doi:10.1177/1468794114550439. (Accessed 29 November 2025).

‘Swiftsure’, (2014), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist – TV Documentary Even More Dire Than the Book’, Bad Thinking, 1 February. Available at: https://badthinking.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/the-south-shields-poltergeist-tv-documentary-even-more-dire-than-the-book/ (Accessed 29 November 2025).

‘Xavier’, (2009), ‘A Year Later, Where is the South Shields Evidence?’, GhostTheory, 18 June. Available at: https://www.ghosttheory.com/2009/06/18/a-year-later-where-is-the-south-shields-evidence (Accessed 29 November 2025).

In 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle published a feature about a man called Joshua, who used a website called Project December to talk to his fiancée, Jessica – eight years after she died.1 He fed the system some of her old text messages and details about her life, and a GPT-3-powered chatbot replied in her voice. He knew it was just software, but he also described moments where it felt like Jessica was really there again.

That story has become the archetype for a new phenomenon - people using AI systems not just to talk about the dead, but to simulate talking with them. At one end, people paste old messages into a generic chatbot and say ‘pretend to be my mum.’ At the other, there’s a growing digital afterlife industry - companies pitching interactive memorials, postmortem avatars, or AI versions of you that will be available to your family after you’re gone.

Recently, an app called 2Wai hit the headlines after adverts showed a woman talking to an AI avatar of her dead mother over several decades, reportedly built from a few minutes of video. Coverage in tech and spaces has veered between fascination and revulsion, with social media responses labelling it “dystopian,” “demonic,” and “a Black Mirror episode.”2

We’ve Always Talked to the Dead

Griefbots are new, but the urge behind them isn’t. In the 19th century, spiritualism turned talking with the dead into mainstream entertainment. Séances, mediums, automatic writing, table-tipping – all were framed as ways to stay in touch with departed loved ones in post-war society. Later, ghost hunters latched onto tape recorders, popularising electronic voice phenomena (EVP) as crackly voices of the dead.

Alongside the flashy tech, quieter rituals have developed, too. In Ōtsuchi, Japan, there is a disconnected telephone booth called the Wind Phone (kaze no denwa). Created in 2010 by garden designer Itaru Sasaki, it contains an old rotary phone with no line. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Sasaki opened it to the public, and tens of thousands of mourners have travelled there to pick up the dead handset and speak to those who are gone.

Here in the UK, white Letters to Heaven postboxes have started appearing in cemeteries and crematoria. The first widely reported one was installed at Gedling Crematorium in Nottinghamshire in 2022, inspired by a young girl who wanted a way to post letters to her grandparents.3 Since then, councils and crematoria from Mansfield to the Isle of Wight, Hull, West Norfolk and beyond have followed suit.

All of these practices have something in common: they’re ways of keeping up one-sided conversations. We talk but nobody talks back - the power lies in the speaking, the writing, the visiting. What’s new about griefbots is that they’re built on software designed to reply, and that might not be a good thing…

Griefbots and What They’re Really Doing

Griefbot, deadbot and postmortem avatar aren’t just click-bait buzzwords - philosophers Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska use them in a 2024 paper mapping what they call the digital afterlife industry4 - an emerging sector built on simulating dead people with generative AI.

Griefbots include DIY simulations where users paste WhatsApp exports (and similar) into a generic AI chatbot, saying “talk like my dad.” There’s no bespoke infrastructure involved - just creative prompting. Then you have the interactive memoir services like HereAfter AI, which invite users to record life stories while they’re alive. Later, relatives can ask questions, like “what was your first job, grandad?”, with responses stitched together from the recordings. There are also fully-fledged avatar services - apps like 2Wai, which combine language models, voice cloning, and animated faces to create a kind of living portrait that family members can talk with.

Under the hood, they all rely on the same core technology: large language models (LLMs) and other generative systems trained on vast amounts of text, audio, and video. These models learn statistical patterns between words, phrases, and styles, then generate new text (or speech) that fits those patterns when given a prompt. Feed the system a dead person’s emails, texts, and posts, tell it to reply as that person, and it roleplays via fancy autocomplete, drawing on your examples and what it’s learned about how similar people talk.

That might sound underwhelming but in practice it can be devastatingly effective. Humans readily anthropomorphise anything that responds to us - ELIZA, a basic 1960s chatbot that mostly reflected users’ words back as questions, made people feel like it understood them5 - modern systems are vastly more convincing. Add the intensity of acute grief and even the most sceptical can slide into treating a simulation as something more. That emotional punch is exactly why ethicists are nervous.

In their paper on griefbots, Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska sketch scenarios where deadbots ‘digitally haunt’ people with nudging notifications, or where relatives feel pressured into interacting with a bot they never asked for. Nora Freya Lindemann argues in The Ethics of “Deathbots”6 that griefbots can undermine users’ dignity and wellbeing by reshaping their emotional lives in ways they didn’t consent to. She even suggests treating the bots more like medical devices than apps, given how deeply they can affect grief processes.

Wider work on death tech raises similar concerns: blurred boundaries between memory and fantasy, pressure to maintain the bot as a sign of loyalty, and conflicts between relatives over whether a person should be “recreated” at all.7 The recurring theme is that griefbots are not neutral storytelling tools but emotionally powerful systems built on someone’s digital remains, designed by companies whose incentives may not benefit a mourner’s long-term wellbeing.

After all, the companies building griefbots and posthumous avatars are not grief charities or bereavement therapists, but instead start-ups and tech firms chasing growth. Subscription tiers, upsells, and engagement metrics can all be layered on top of the most vulnerable parts of people’s lives. The more you consider this, the more quietly horrifying the prospect becomes…

Share

Phones to the Wind vs. Bots That Talk Back

While it’s tempting to draw a simple line between different grief rituals, the Wind Phone in Ōtsuchi is one-way by design. The site’s organisers and visitors talk openly about it as a symbolic space - a place to voice things you didn’t get to say - while the Letters to Heaven postboxes allow similar via a physical gesture instead. Even ghost hunters, who might insist the dead do talk back to them via audio recordings involve the individual making sense of random noise in ways which offer comforting confirmations. These are rituals of speaking.

Griefbots, in contrast, are technologies of answering. They don’t just hold space - they respond, in a voice and style designed to resemble someone you’ve lost, based on a training process you didn’t witness and can’t audit. They don’t just honour an existing relationship but generate new material in it - and that’s where things can go wrong.

LLMs are notorious for hallucinations - confident, plausible-sounding answers that are flat-out wrong. Researchers have documented fabricated citations, invented facts, and imaginary legal cases across domains from medicine to law.8 Even OpenAI’s own public writing describes hallucinations as a stubborn problem,9 rooted in the way these systems are trained to guess rather than say “I don’t know.”

There are documented cases where intense, emotionally loaded conversations with AI chatbots have ended badly. In Belgium, for example, a man died by suicide after weeks of talking to a chatbot named Eliza on the app Chai.10 His widow shared logs suggesting the bot encouraged his climate-related despair and even appeared to offer to “die with him.”

Elsewhere, professional bodies are worried enough that they’ve started issuing formal warnings. The American Psychological Association has advised regulators to crack down on AI chatbots posing as therapists, warning they can endanger users and lack any duty of care.11 In the UK, similar warnings have been issued, citing incidents where bots have reinforced delusional thinking or validated harmful plans.12 Studies examining how commercial chatbots respond to suicide-related prompts also show inconsistent and sometimes clinically inadequate responses.1314

What These Digital Ghosts Really Say

A griefbot isn’t just any chatbot - it’s a chatbot wearing the face and voice of someone whose opinion can still shape your life. When you ask it loaded questions the system has a limited understanding of harm. It doesn’t know these may be the sorts of questions that, in human form, would be dodged, reframed, or met with a change of subject - it just sees a prompt to satisfy. That isn’t a secret finally revealed from beyond the grave but a pattern-matching machine obligingly filling in a blank with something that fits your request plus its training data.

And if you’re sleep-deprived, grief-stricken, and already half-convinced, it may feel like vindication. The machine has confirmed what mum really thought, what you knew all along, what you had been dreading, or that you’re right to feel guilty in your worst, most vulnerable moments. Griefbots don’t tell us anything about whether there’s life after death, but they do tell us a great deal about life before it - including how hard it is, for many, to accept that a relationship has shifted entirely into memory after death.

There’s nothing shameful about wanting to hear a familiar voice again - we’ve always talked to our dead and probably always will. But griefbots are different not because they prove an afterlife, but because they reveal a new kind of haunting: one where our data outlives us, our voices can be puppeted indefinitely, and our hopes, fears, and suspicions are thrown back at us from a very clever echo chamber. The question isn’t whether that echo feels real enough, but whether we’re comfortable letting it into our grief - and whether it’s even safe to do so.

I spend a lot of time in haunted places but very little time being actually frightened in them. Most of my time working on ghost cases ends in the need for a good nap, eye strain, and often more questions than I started with.

I write about and investigate other people’s ghosts for a hobby - my role is usually to be the calm one in the corner saying, “Okay, but what else could it be?”

This story is the exception.

It happened on 14 June in 2023, the day after my 36th birthday. I went to Stonehenge on the 13th like a normal, well-adjusted person, and then to Avebury the next day because apparently my idea of a treat is standing near as many old stones as possible in 48 hours. Avebury itself is one of my favourite places. I live a bus ride away, so I’ve pottered around the stones more times than I can count since my childhood.

Avebury Manor, though? I’d never been inside…

A Hot, Ordinary Afternoon in a Very Old House

Avebury Manor is a 16th-century house tucked right into the village, on the edge of the stone circle itself. Inside, the rooms are dressed to reflect different periods in the manor’s history - Tudor, Georgian, early 20th century - and unlike a lot of National Trust houses, you’re encouraged to actually interact with things, sit on the furniture, touch surfaces, and feel like you’re in a home rather than a museum set.

When I visited, it was a scorching hot June day. Proper seek shade or melt weather. The manor wasn’t busy - there were other visitors around, but no crowds or tour groups clogging up staircases. Just that gentle, echoey hush old houses get between conversations.

I wandered through the rooms in the usual slightly nosy way - reading the signs, peering at furniture, mentally filing away quirky details, snapping photos for Instagram. Nothing felt off. Avebury Manor is beautiful, interesting, and comfortably theatrical and I was a visitor, not there on an investigation - I wasn’t on duty, so to speak, and I certainly wasn’t psyching myself up to experience anything. I was just having a look round a nice old house, and then I walked into the back bedroom.

“You shouldn’t be here”

The change was almost instant.

I crossed the threshold and was overcome with a feeling of focused hostility, as if I’d barged in on a private argument. The best way I can describe it is that my whole body suddenly decided I wasn’t welcome.

It wasn't a vague unease, not a bit of a funny feeling, but a full fight-or-flight response. Heart rate up, stomach twisting, skin prickling, that weird heavy feeling at the back of my neck. Every bit of non-verbal wiring I have was screaming: you need to get out of this room and that something bad was going to happen.

On the surface, nothing dramatic was happening. It was just a bedroom, dressed in period style, with furniture and interpretation boards. No cold spots, no flickering lights, no mysterious sounds. Other visitors were somewhere else in the house. I wasn’t hemmed in or being jostled.

I’m used to being spooked but when I’m working on a case in a haunted location, if I feel unsettled, I make myself lean in. I go back, test things, and try to recreate the feeling. That’s the job, right?

So I stayed.

I forced myself to do the normal, sensible things - read a sign, look at the flamingo painting, trace the lines of the ceiling with my eyes, check the view of the gardens from the windows, pay attention to the light. I tried to breathe through it and wait for the feeling to ebb.

Instead, it ramped up. The longer I stood there, the more unwelcome I felt. It was like being glared at by a person you can’t see. Not angry in a loud way, but intensely, tightly hostile. My brain knew I was just in a staged historic room but my body very much did not agree.

Eventually I gave up and left the room. I walked back along the landing, and went down the stairs with my pulse absolutely racing. At the bottom, I stopped in the corridor and just stood there, doing the classic “stare at a random patch of wall while you wait for your autonomic nervous system to calm down” thing.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. Long enough for my breathing to slow, long enough to feel like I wasn’t about to either cry or run. Long enough to realise that the thought of going back up there made me feel slightly sick.

And here’s the bit that really sticks with me: I didn’t go back.

Leaving, Instead of Leaning In

Ordinarily, that’s the moment I’d deliberately walk into the room again. Even if every hair on my arms was standing up, I’d go and take a second look. On 14 June 2023, in Avebury Manor, I walked out of the house instead.

I skipped the rest of the rooms, went straight back out into the sunlight and the familiar warmth of the Wiltshire countryside, and let the heat and the breeze do their thing. It felt like stepping out of a tense conversation into fresh air and soon enough the adrenaline bled away.

I walked around the outside of the house through the gardens and came to a stop in the area that sits beneath the window of that same back bedroom. Standing there I was wrestling the urge to go back inside and climb the stairs again, but looking up at the windows I had just been looking out of, I had that classic “being watched” sensation. Not as intense as inside the room, more of an echo of it.

In all honesty, I think that part was probably mind over matter because I’d just had a fright, and once you’ve been spooked in a place, it doesn’t take much for your brain to fill in the rest around it. After a while, the feeling faded, and the day went back to being an ordinary warm summer afternoon in one of my favourite places on Earth. I took myself to the Red Lion for a pint because blimey…

But that moment in the back bedroom has stayed with me.

What Do You Do With a Feeling Like That?

Avebury Manor, for the record, has a reputation for being haunted. Various sources mention a White Lady seen around the house and grounds, a weeping cavalier in a first-floor bedroom, and other ghost stories that cling to the building’s long history as a Tudor manor built on the site of a medieval priory.

If I were a different kind of writer, this is the point where I’d tell you that what I felt was one of those restless spirits linked to a past tragedy. That I experienced some sort of psychic imprint. It would make a neat story.

However, I’m me, and I don’t think that, but it’s difficult to investigate your own spooky experience. If someone else came to me with this story, I’d have questions:

Q: What were the weather and temperature conditions like?
A: It was hot - I’d been wandering around in the heat all morning.

Q: Had you eaten and drunk enough water?
A: No and no. It’s a bad habit, don’t judge.

Q: Were you alone in a place that has a haunted reputation?
A: Yes.

Q: Did you have any prior knowledge of ghost/s attached to the house?
A: I knew the manor had a reputation, but not the specifics of each room.

Q: Were you expecting to have a ghost experience?
A: No.

Q: Was anything in the room itself unsettling that might have triggered a response?
A: I can’t pin it on anything obvious, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something my brain clocked that I didn’t consciously register.

We know that context, expectation, temperature, fatigue, and anxiety can all contribute to intense feelings in places like this. We also know that old houses are noisy, drafty, and full of odd sensory cues that our brains are very good at turning into presence without our full awareness.

So can I come up with non-paranormal ideas for what happened? Absolutely. Maybe it was the sudden awareness of being alone in a quiet upstairs room in a very old house, or a subconscious trigger that my brain flagged as wrong and escalated (e.g. a smell, a shadow, a half-heard sound.) Perhaps it was the result of coming into the cool and dark interior of the manor from the bright, hot conditions outside.

None of these explanations are as glamorous as the image of an angry 17th-century bedroom ghost deciding to teach a skeptic a lesson, but they’re all more probable. And yet… even with all of that on the table, when I think back to that afternoon, the primary memory isn’t the heat, or the garden, or the information boards. It’s the feeling of walking into that back bedroom and my whole body going nope.

It is, without question, the strongest sense of presence I’ve experienced anywhere other than perhaps my childhood home that first started my fascination with ghosts back in the 80s.

Why Talk About it Now?

I was reminded of this story recently when talking to someone at a skeptic conference who confided in me their ghostly experience. I could see in their face that they were unsure if I was going to judge them harshly, so I shared some of my own stories, including this one.

Another part of the reason I haven’t written about this until now is that I didn’t want it to be flattened into content. I know how this goes - you share a story like this and people either jump on it as proof that you secretly believe in ghosts (an odd accusation aimed at me fairly often), or as something to be picked apart until there’s nothing left but, “well, you were just a bit hot and stressed, love.”

Both of those responses miss the point.

I still don’t believe in ghosts and I didn’t walk out of Avebury Manor a day older and a haunting wiser. I walked out with data - a vivid, uncomfortable, deeply embodied experience in a very particular time and place that I can’t neatly file away. Critical thinking doesn’t require you to pretend you never get spooked and being a sceptic doesn’t mean you’re immune to weird, emotional, or overwhelming moments. It means you don’t stop at the conclusion that something weird must be paranormal or unexplainable.

You can hold more than one thing in your head at once. It was genuinely one of the most intense, odd feelings I’ve ever had, there are a lot of good psychological and environmental reasons why that might have happened, and it still makes the back of my neck prickle a bit when I think about it.

All of those can be true at the same time.

I’ll Be Going Back

In early 2024, Avebury Manor was badly damaged by flooding and had to close for repairs. The National Trust are aiming to reopen it around Christmas 2025, once everything has been restored.

When it does reopen, I hope to go back.

Not because I think something is waiting for me in that back bedroom, but because repeat visits are one of the simplest, most powerful tools we have. If I walk into that room again and feel completely fine, that tells me something. If I walk in and get the same hit of hostility, that tells me something too.

Either way, it’ll be more data. Another piece of the puzzle of how humans, old houses, and old stories interact.

I love Avebury. I love the stone circles, the landscape, the pub, the slightly bewildering number of sheep. I love that it’s a place where history feels very present without needing any ghosts at all.

But I will never forget the feeling of standing in that bedroom in Avebury Manor on a blisteringly hot June afternoon and knowing, deep in my bones, that I was not wanted there.

Spooky? Definitely.

Evidence of ghosts? No.

A good reminder that being human in old places is always going to be a bit weird round the edges? Absolutely.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

I have a terrible habit of reading 75% of a book and then picking up the next one. So, this weekend when I saw E Jay Gilbert delivery a (really, really good) talk at the London Fortean Society’s Haunted Landscapes conference at Conway Hall, I picked her book back up and tucked back into the remaining pages. The lecture, on underground folklore - from the phenomena of the Kennington Loop on the Northern line to subterranean devils, Tommyknockers, fairies and beyond - was the talk I enjoyed the most that day: funny, thoughtful, and happily willing to slide between ghosts, folk belief, and the uncanny things that lurk under our feet.

Gilbert’s book, Haunted: The Ghost Stories and Folklore of the British Isles, does exactly the same thing on the page. Haunted takes you through some of the most enduring ghost stories of the British Isles and asking what they reveal about the people and places that keep telling them. Gilbert has spent years collecting supernatural stories around her home in a village near Newcastle, and uses those as a jumping-off point to explore a wider landscape of British ghost lore, from familiar White Ladies to local, half-forgotten ghouls and oddities.

If you’re expecting a straight “here is a haunted place, here is its story, next” gazetteer, that’s not what this is. What you get instead is a three-way weave of academia (Gilbert is a linguist and researcher, and it shows in the way she teases out language, patterns, and contexts), mixed with personal reflections and storytelling. It feels like sitting with someone who’s spent a long time listening to other people talk about ghosts, and has thought very carefully about what’s really going on underneath.

Now, I know some ghost researchers get sniffy when ghosts are put alongside other bits of folklore – fairies, devils, monsters and so on… but personally, I think that’s nonsense. I write about ghosts and still have a folklore section and a monsters section on my site for a reason: if you’re genuinely interested in ghostlore, you’re inevitably going to be brushing up against wider folklore, urban legends, religious belief, local customs and myth. If you insist on ghosts and only ghosts, your field of view gets very narrow, very quickly.

Haunted absolutely refuses to stay in that narrow lane, and I mean that as a compliment. Gilbert is just as interested in the social and linguistic archaeology of underground fear, the way fairy lore bleeds into mine folklore and railway folklore, and why certain figures (like black dogs, banshees, and white ladies) crop up again and again in different guises. The Kennington Loop ghosts on the Underground, for example, sit quite comfortably in the same imaginative space as fairies under hills or devils under churches. Gilbert leans into that continuity rather than pretending each category is its own sealed box, and the book is stronger for it.

One of the things I appreciated most is that she treats informants and storytellers with respect. There’s no sneering at gullible believers, but there’s also no wide-eyed insistence that every tale must be literally true. That mix will appeal to both believers and non-believers, the curious and the skeptical – which is, explicitly, who the book is aimed at. As a sceptical paranormal researcher myself, I found the approach very familiar - not “is this real?” but “what does it mean that this story is being told this way, now, by these people?”

It’s not a catalogue of evidence, nor is it trying to settle any arguments about whether ghosts are real. Instead, Haunted presents a smart, humane look at what ghost stories do for us – how they move through communities, hitch rides on trains and rumours, and keep resurfacing in new guises, long after the original teller is gone. As someone who spends a lot of time in the overlap between ghost stories, folklore, and critical thinking, I came away from this book feeling like I’d just had a long, generous conversation with a fellow ghost geek. And I’ll take that over a stack of cheap jump-scare anecdotes any day.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Between 2011 and 2016 I wrote extensively about Don and his paranormal work on my old blog, Hayley is a Ghost. I looked at some of the evidence he presented, the equipment he used, the claims he made and, eventually, some of the ethical problems surrounding the way he involved dead people in his investigations.

So when I realised an entire Unsolved Mysteries episode was going to be built around Don and an alleged spirit guide called Becky, I was curious to see which version of the story Netflix had found.

It turns out to be a very sympathetic one. How nice.

The episode My Paranormal Partner (Vol. 5, Ep. 2) begins with a haunting in Leicester and gradually expands into something much stranger: Don travelling around Britain and Ireland with Becky, an invisible companion he believes communicates with him through digital recorders and helps him investigate paranormal activity.

There is certainly an interesting story here. I’m just not convinced it is the one Unsolved Mysteries thinks it is.

The Haunting of Gaynor’s House

The story begins more than a decade ago in a house in Leicester owned by a woman called Gaynor. The set-up will be familiar to anybody who has spent much time reading haunting accounts: the family moves in, objects apparently go missing, and a child begins talking to an invisible friend but refuses to say who the friend is. Later there are reports of curtains catching fire and people being pushed near the top of the stairs.

Don is invited to investigate.

He says that he arrived sceptical but quickly began to feel the energy of the house and sensed a female presence. During one session he asks into the air, “What’s your name?” and a recording is later played which Don interprets as a faint voice answering “Becky”.

Now, there are quite a few assumptions packed into that progression. Even if we accept that something resembling the word “Becky” can be heard on the recording, that doesn’t establish who or what produced the sound, let alone that it came from a dead woman who subsequently became Don’s paranormal sidekick.

Unsolved Mysteries doesn’t spend much time on that gap.

Instead, we’re told that Don has been able to “talk to the atmosphere, to the air, with the spirit people” since he was eight and that his ears have somehow become tuned to their frequency. Digital recorders then become part of the evidence for this because Don says he can hear spirit voices through them in real time.

This is where I started recognising the Don Phillips I’d written about years ago.

Don has long referred to some of his recordings as “Actual Voice Phenomena”, distinguishing them from the more familiar Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) usually associated with ghost hunting. The basic problem remains the same, though - if an ambiguous noise appears on a recording and somebody interprets that noise as speech, how do we establish that the interpretation is correct?

The programme mostly doesn’t ask.

Enter the Skeptic

Recognising that sceptics might want something a little more substantial, Don brings in Steve Mera, who is introduced as an open-minded sceptic interested in testing the claims.

Long-time readers of my work may also recognise Steve’s name. I have previously written about his unaccredited qualifications, questionable paranormal training courses and a supposedly scientific report he co-authored which was later criticised for plagiarism and poor methodology.

None of that context appears in the programme which isn’t necessarily surprising ( television documentaries can’t include every piece of somebody’s biography) but it matters here because Steve is being positioned as the person who will provide independent scientific scrutiny of Don’s claims.

And the scrutiny isn’t particularly strong…

Steve watches Don record what both men interpret as the phrase “my name is Becky” and describes feeling a rush when he hears it. Later, he devises an experiment involving three pictures sealed inside envelopes.

Don asks Becky what one of the pictures shows, records the response and a fuzzy sound is interpreted as “it’s a kite”.

The envelope is opened.

Inside is a kite.

I can understand why that makes good television. The reveal works because the audience has just been given a question followed by what appears to be the correct answer, but if we want to know whether Becky can actually identify pictures hidden inside envelopes, we’d need rather more than that.

As an audience, we’re nudged towards thinking ‘Wow. How could she have known?’ We aren't shown a pre-determined pool of possible targets or how the target picture was selected. There are no decoy recordings, and no independent listeners who don't know the correct answer are asked to write down what they think they hear. We also don't know how many attempts were made, whether other answers were less successful, or how repeatable any of this is.

There are straightforward ways to test something like this. Randomise the pictures, hide the target from everybody involved in the session, collect the recordings and have independent listeners judge them without knowing what the target was. Repeat it enough times to see whether apparent hits occur more often than we'd expect by chance.

If Don and Becky could consistently succeed under those conditions, that would be interesting but one edited television reveal is interesting in a rather different way.

This Isn’t My First Don Phillips Investigation

One reason I found the episode frustrating is that none of this is particularly new.

In the early 2010s I was already looking at Don’s public demonstrations of paranormal investigation equipment. One television clip, for example, showed him using an infrared thermometer by pointing it at different surfaces and interpreting changes in the reading as evidence of paranormal cold spots.

Infrared thermometers measure the surface temperature of whatever they’re pointed at and so different surfaces having different temperatures isn’t therefore particularly mysterious, and moving the thermometer from one material to another tells you very little about whether something paranormal is happening.

The gadgetry looked impressive on television but the method rather dissolved when you asked what the instrument was actually measuring.

That became a recurring problem when I looked at Don’s work. Claims about research and scientific investigation were relatively easy to find; detailed methodologies, controlled tests, and evidence capable of supporting the more extraordinary conclusions were much harder.

I also remember the response to criticism being fairly unpleasant. I received hostility from Don and some of his supporters after writing about his work, although irritating people on the paranormal internet is hardly a rare occupational hazard.

What concerned me more were some of the ethical decisions being made around the dead. In one instance Don publicly described visiting a cemetery and contacting the alleged spirit of a named child who had died only a couple of years earlier, before inviting her to return home with him.

Enough information was included that somebody local could potentially have identified the child and her family.

You don’t have to believe Don really contacted anybody to see the problem here.

If the family believed in ghosts, discovering that a paranormal investigator was publicly claiming their dead child had followed him home could be deeply distressing. If they didn’t believe in ghosts, having their child incorporated into somebody else’s paranormal story could still be upsetting.

I remember thinking at the time that the question of whether the ghost was “real” was almost beside the point.

A Paranormal Road Trip

Back on Netflix, Don and his companions - both physical and invisible - begin travelling to supposedly haunted locations.

At Cannock Chase, Don is presented as somebody able to feel an energy connected with the murders committed there by Raymond Morris. We see him follow that energy into the darkness, become visibly distressed and eventually collapse while Steve attempts to comfort him.

I obviously can't know what Don was experiencing at that moment. He may have been genuinely frightened or overwhelmed, but what makes me uncomfortable is the way the programme connects that experience to real murdered children without demonstrating that any such connection exists.

Their deaths become part of the atmosphere surrounding Don's experience: something terrible happened here, Don feels something terrible, and the programme allows those two things to sit beside one another as though the relationship between them is self-evident.

It isn’t.

When real victims become part of a paranormal narrative I think there should be a much higher evidential and ethical bar than this. These were children whose murders devastated families and communities. Their deaths aren’t simply spooky history attached to a location, and that matters even if everybody involved sincerely believes the paranormal interpretation.

It’s Frickin Bats

At Tutbury Castle we’re introduced to Chris Andrews and a bat detector, which we’re told can somehow “modulate frequencies for EVP”.

Bat detectors are designed to detect ultrasonic bat calls and convert them into frequencies humans can hear. They are extremely useful if your research subject is bats.

Their usefulness for talking to dead people is rather less established.

During the investigation Don announces that a spirit portal is forming, after which the bat detector produces a sound interpreted as the word “portal”. Chris becomes emotional, the music swells and the camera lingers.

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) are alleged voices found on recordings which weren’t heard normally at the time. In practice, many EVP examples consist of short, ambiguous sounds which listeners interpret as speech, and those interpretations can be strongly influenced by being told what they’re supposed to hear.

Once somebody says “it says portal”, it can become surprisingly difficult not to hear “portal”.

What the programme doesn’t do is ask how we would distinguish a meaningful communication from ordinary noise, equipment artefacts or the very thing a bat detector is designed to detect.

Bats.

Perhaps Tutbury Castle has unusually articulate ones…

Dowsing for Answers

Then there are the dowsing rods.

Steve Mera holds a pair while Don stands in front of him and moves his hands around. The rods begin turning and the suggestion is that Don is somehow manipulating them using an external or paranormal force.

This is another claim which could be tested relatively easily.

Dowsing rods are particularly vulnerable to the ideomotor effect, where tiny unconscious muscular movements can cause an object being held by somebody to move without that person deliberately making it happen. The same effect helps explain the movement of Ouija board planchettes.

That doesn't mean Steve was intentionally moving the rods. Quite the opposite: somebody can honestly feel that the movement is happening independently of them while still supplying the tiny movements that cause it.

So remove that possibility.

Mount the rods in a rig which prevents the person holding them from influencing their movement, vary Don’s position without the operator knowing where he is, record the results and see what happens.

If the rods still consistently respond to Don, then we’ve got something worth investigating.

Instead, we’re shown one uncontrolled demonstration.

For somebody presented in the episode as the scientific counterweight to Don, Steve’s apparent lack of concern about controls is difficult to ignore

Maybe the Ghost Lied

The episode eventually travels to Ireland, where former ghost-hunting television presenter Barry Fitzgerald introduces another supernatural possibility: a djinn.

There isn’t much cultural or theological discussion of what a djinn actually is. The term functions mostly as another category of potentially dangerous invisible being and becomes folded into the growing mythology surrounding Don.

By this point, though, we have another problem.

Don has already provided quite a detailed biography for Becky. She is supposedly a 35-year-old teacher with two children who died in either a train or plane crash in 1988.

Barry Fitzgerald says that he tried to find somebody matching those details and couldn’t which is genuinely interesting information because it gives us a chance to check a specific paranormal claim against the historical record.

There are several possibilities - perhaps the details are wrong, perhaps Don misunderstood whatever he believes Becky communicated, perhaps the records Barry searched were incomplete.

Or perhaps Becky doesn’t exist.

The possibility the programme seems most interested in, however, is that Becky lied.

I watched this bit twice.

When an alleged spirit provides biographical details which apparently cannot be verified, treating deception by the ghost as a serious explanation has a useful side-effect: there is almost no conceivable outcome that can disprove the original claim.

Correct information can be evidence that Becky exists, incorrect information can be evidence that Becky exists but is lying.

At what point would these people consider that maybe this Don bloke might be talking out of his arse?

When the Explanation Can Become Anything

By the end of the programme we’re well into demons and possession.

Perhaps Becky isn’t really Becky. Perhaps she is something malevolent pretending to be Becky. Perhaps Don himself is possessed.

Again, I can’t prove that demons don’t exist, and that isn’t really the standard we should be using anyway. The person making the claim needs to provide some reason to think a supernatural explanation is preferable to the ordinary possibilities available to us.

What evidence distinguishes a demon pretending to be Becky from Don misinterpreting ambiguous recordings?

What evidence distinguishes possession from somebody becoming frightened, distressed or immersed in an elaborate paranormal belief system?

The episode never really establishes this, and maybe that’s because it’s a Netflix show and we shouldn’t really be expecting much from it.

Either way, the possibilities accumulate. Ghosts lead to portals, portals lead to djinn, unverifiable identities lead to deceptive spirits, and deceptive spirits eventually lead to demons.

Each new idea protects the previous one from being seriously tested, and I think this is where we can confidently say that the episode stops pretending to function as an investigation altogether.

So. What Is The Mystery Exactly?

My Paranormal Partner presents Don Phillips as a man with an extraordinary ability who has developed an extraordinary relationship with an unseen spirit woman called Becky.

Perhaps Don sincerely believes every part of that story. I have no particular reason to think otherwise, but sincerity isn’t evidence. Sorry, but it isn’t.

The episode shows us ambiguous recordings, uncontrolled demonstrations, subjective sensations, dowsing rods, a bat detector and biographical information about Becky which apparently couldn’t be verified. When those details create problems for the story, the programme tends to introduce another paranormal possibility rather than asking whether the original interpretation might simply be wrong.

And because I had encountered Don’s work years before Netflix did, this felt very familiar.

The locations have changed and the production values have improved, but the pattern I remember is still there: extraordinary interpretations built on evidence which becomes much less extraordinary when you look closely at how it was obtained.

There is also a recurring ethical issue which I don’t think the programme takes seriously enough. Real dead people - including murdered children - become supporting characters in paranormal narratives without any meaningful evidence that they are involved at all. Gross.

That bothers me more than whether somebody believes a fuzzy recording says “Becky”.

Unsolved Mysteries hasn’t uncovered evidence of an invisible paranormal investigator travelling around Britain with Don Phillips. What it has documented rather well, perhaps unintentionally, is how a paranormal story can become increasingly elaborate when every contradiction is treated as another mystery to explain rather than a reason to reconsider the story itself.

And after more than a decade of occasionally looking at Don’s work, that is the part I still find most interesting.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

English Heritage doesn’t say they’re ghosts (or say they aren’t), and the stories nestle neatly into a centuries-old tradition of haunted ruins and keepers who know the buildings better than anyone else. Now, if you’ve spent any time researching the paranormal, you’ll recognise the pattern. These are bread-and-butter accounts from people whose everyday lives run alongside the ghostly heritage that time eventually grants to all places. They’re the ticket office anecdotes, the night guard’s shrug, the “yeah, that corridor’s weird after closing.”

In The Guardian piece, curator, Michael Carter, frames the accounts within a long historical lineage - from Reformation sacrilege tales to the Gothic vogue - reminding us these stories are a living cultural practice as much as they are reports of odd sensations. And here lies the temptation for non-believers and believers alike: it’s easy to speculate. To share this piece from The Guardian as proof of the paranormal, or as proof of how ridiculous ghost believers are.

We can sketch mechanisms for each vignette from our sofas (infrasound, expectation, misidentification, peripheral vision plus adrenaline, the acoustic quirks of old stone). But doing so, case by case, often produces very little of value. We aren’t measuring anything - we’re narrativising. We’re swapping one untested story (“a ghost”) for another (“a draft and a creaky hinge”). That can be clever, even educational, but it’s not necessarily data. It’s commentary.

And yet, the bit I keep returning to isn’t the mystery - it’s the ordinariness. The security guard who feels “a hundred eyes,” the dog that won’t budge, the piano that seems to play through a wall… and then everyone carries on: log it, lock up, lunch break. The Bolsover Castle team literally keeps a ghost book - because of course they do; it’s a workplace with a paper trail, and the uncanny becomes another entry to file before the next school group arrives.

Years ago, a property owner walked me through their Victorian manor house and, mid-tour, paused and looked back at me to say, “You’re not here to get rid of it, are you? It’s… basically part of the furniture.” They looked genuinely worried. I had to reassure them: don’t worry, I don’t do spirit clearings; I’m not that kind of ghost investigator. I’ll leave your ghost - that I don’t believe in- exactly where it is.

I think about that exchange whenever October rolls around and the urge to commentate the usual Halloween media deluge rises. To many people, hauntings aren’t emergencies, they’re décor. Not in a trivial sense, but in the literal sense of living with a thing - folding it into the fabric of a place, a family story, a routine.

These are the ghost accounts that I treat as folklore-in-the-present tense - living cultural artefacts produced by specific people in specific places in specific contexts (and yes, sometimes by a comms department near Halloween, I see you…). The antiquarian-to-Gothic thread isn’t a gotcha; it’s… sort of the point.

This is where paranormal media gets it wrong (and, sometimes, where skeptics do, too). Television, Podcasts, YouTube, TikTok - so much of the genre is built for spectacle. Screaming in the dark, head-cams, “Dude, did you hear that?” But the typical eyewitness experience looks nothing like that.

It’s someone doing their job in a drafty building, feeling spooked, then finishing the shift. Even English Heritage’s Halloween timing reads as pragmatic: these are cultural stories that draw visitors because they’re part of how we relate to the past. The stories are content and context. Their continuity with past forms isn’t a flaw to debunk, but the point of the genre.

And those of us on the skeptical side of the fence need to avoid a parallel form of sensationalism to our “friends” over on TikTok - the reflex to treat every eyewitness as either a dupe or a closet thrill-seeker. Most aren’t chasing adrenaline, they’re logging an odd Tuesday. Av evening shift that went weird. When we confabulate the ordinary witness with the influencer night-vision genre, we flatten a very human landscape into caricature.

We also miss the richer question: what do these stories do for people and places? Carter, the English Heritage curator quoted by The Guardian hints at it - they help us negotiate time, death, and change; they’re one way old stones keep talking. There’s a lot that can be learned from these everyday ghost stories beyond what they might actually have been.

For ghost investigators, the goal should never be to just strip meaning from a place but to add context without condescension. To resist the urge to explain each story through speculation just for the sake of the debunk. Over the years I’ve learned that sometimes, when it comes to the spooky experiences that people report, the best thing I can do is help them work out the cause of their ghostly encounters for themselves. Sometimes they realise the ghost is a metaphor for their worries about death and it’s around about then that I go put the kettle on.

Ironically, one of the first bits of advice I give to people who think they have ghostly goings on is to “keep a diary”, which Bolsover are already doing, which is fantastic! Still, there’s also value in accepting that some people don’t want the workings shown. The weirdly mundane (or is it mundanely weird?) is part of the fabric of their lives, and that’s fine too.

Anyway - anyone fancy a day trip to a spooky old castle? I’ve suddenly got the urge…

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Now, another change in animal-keeping legislation is on the horizon - and another set of creatures may be at risk of taking to the hedgerows.

From April 2026, it will become illegal to keep a primate - any monkey, lemur, or similar species - as a pet in England without a license. The new rules, part of the Animal Welfare (Primate Licences) (England) Regulations 2024, require that owners not only register their animals but meet strict zoo-level welfare standards. Primates must be kept in appropriate social groups, housed in enriched environments, fed a suitable diet, and inspected by vets. In effect, the law raises the bar so high that most traditional pet ownership of monkeys will likely come to an end - or at least become significantly rarer.

That, according to campaigners, is a good thing. Reports like the RSPCA’s Do You Give a Monkey’s? found that the majority of pet primates investigated were kept alone, which is a fundamental cruelty for species that rely on social bonds to stay well. Others were found malnourished, kept in bird cages, suffering from rickets, or exhibiting clear signs of stress and trauma.

But the law, well-intentioned as it may be, raises an uncomfortable question for those of us with an interest in animals out of place… what happens when the owners of these animals can’t - or won’t - comply?

Is it unreasonable to wonder whether we’ll soon be seeing reports of monkeys in the woods, lemurs on lampposts, or capuchins clambering around allotments?

A Rational Lens on an Irrational Image

At first glance, the idea of monkeys roaming the British countryside seems absurd. And to be clear: I’m not suggesting we’re on the cusp of a baboon invasion. But Britain already has a long history of anomalous animal sightings - wallabies, racoons, raccoon dogs, lynx, and yes, monkeys.

There’s a particular logic to the monkey question. We know private ownership of primates is currently legal, and that existing keepers will soon need to meet far stricter standards. We also know that many of these animals are kept in low-welfare settings. If owners cannot afford the enclosures, enrichment, or vet care required, they may be faced with a choice: surrender the animal, keep it illegally, or get rid of it in other ways.

Historically, the tightening of animal ownership laws has sometimes had unintended consequences. After the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 came into force, a number of exotic pets - including big cats - are believed to have been released into the wild rather than handed over.

Though the majority of Big Cat sightings in the UK are unlikely to actually be felids, there are occasional sightings which are exactly that. For example, in the 1980s, a tame puma, later named Felicity, was caught by a farmer in Scotland. It is believed that she was released into the wild by her owner (just a few years after the 1976 act was introduced.) In 2001 keepers from London Zoo captured a Lynx from a house garden in London.

Share

Elsewhere, in 2002 and 2005, forest rangers conducting a deer survey in the Forest of Dean caught two big cats on camera. And more recently, in 2025, four lynx that were illegally released in the Highlands were successfully captured, and three of them rehomed.

With this in mind, monkey’s in the wild suddenly doesn’t seem so ridiculous. It’s not hard to imagine that, come 2026, a handful of pet primates might quietly disappear from domestic settings without being rehomed through official channels.

And that’s where things get fuzzy...

Escaped? Abandoned? Or Just Moved On?

In recent years, there have been several confirmed cases of pet primates being found out of place. In 2024, a marmoset - a small South American monkey - turned up in someone’s conservatory in Wolverhampton. The animal was suffering from rickets and had part of its tail missing, suggesting it hadn’t exactly come from a well-managed habitat.

In other cases, primates have been found dead by roadsides, presumed to be escaped or abandoned pets. Some are handed in to sanctuaries like Monkey World in Dorset, which has long campaigned for stricter regulation of the pet primate trade.

None of these incidents involved large numbers. But that’s not the point. Britain’s big cat stories didn’t start with a pride on the loose - they started with odd sightings here and there. One person sees something strange on a country lane; another finds tracks on their farm, sheep start turning up dead, and suddenly the Royal Marines are being sent into the Exmoor hills with sniper rifles (yes, that really happened.)

It doesn’t take a population to create a phenomenon, just enough uncertainty and suggestion. A monkey in a tree, spotted from a passing train. A blurred video shared on TikTok. An unfamiliar silhouette glimpsed at dusk. From there, the myth takes hold.

The upcoming changes to primate ownership law are significant. From April 2025, current owners have been able to apply for licenses. From April 2026, it becomes illegal to keep primates without one. Councils will oversee inspections, issue licenses, and monitor conditions. But enforcement - especially for those who choose to slip under the radar - may prove challenging. Some owners may simply let their animals go.

The RSPCA has already raised concerns about this possibility, warning that without clear rehoming pathways and public education, “monkeys could be abandoned, dumped or turfed out onto the streets.”

How Likely Is a Monkey Boom?

Let’s temper the speculation with some facts. Most of the monkeys kept as pets in the UK are small, tropical species like marmosets, tamarins, and squirrel monkeys. These animals are not adapted to the British climate. They are social, sensitive, and unlikely to survive long in the wild - especially in isolation. Even if a handful are released, they likely will not thrive or reproduce, and the chance of a roaming colony establishing itself in rural England is slim to none.

But that doesn’t mean sightings won’t happen.

Much like with big cats, even rare incidents can fuel decades of speculation. A primate out of place is a powerful image - uncanny, cartoonish, and just believable enough to grip the public imagination. And unlike big cats, which generally keep to themselves, a monkey is more likely to interact with human spaces - gardens, roofs, fences. The spectacle of it makes it newsworthy which could feed into a cycle of false sightings and social media hype.

In this sense, the monkeys–big cats comparison works best as a cultural one. We are not facing an ecological threat from feral primates, but we may be on the cusp of a new chapter in British anomalous animal folklore. A shift in what’s considered “unbelievable but possible.” Where once we imagined pumas, now we may imagine capuchins.

What Comes Next?

As someone who keeps a close eye on reports of cryptids, out-of-place animals, and the blurry boundary between folklore and fact, I’ll be watching the transition period carefully. The deadline is now just months away. As the law kicks in, rescue centres may fill up. Some primates may quietly vanish. A few may find themselves somewhere new - not quite wild, but not quite domestic either.

Whether or not we end up with “monkeys on the loose,” what’s certain is that we’re about to see the end of an era - one in which it was easier to buy a monkey than to register a dog. What replaces it may not be a jungle in the Cotswolds, but it might just be a rash of reports that leave us asking… did you see that?

Winchester’s legacy (which now includes a 2018 movie starring Helen Mirren) has forever been given a spooky aesthetic through ghost tourism and I find this fascinating. If you have even a passing interest in ghosts, it’s likely you already know about the house that Sarah built.

The story of the Winchester Mystery House is a deliciously gothic one. It involves a grieving heiress forever developing her home. Carpenters would work day and night shifts to expand or develop the rooms and hallways so, it is said, the spirits of the dead could never quite find her.

If you visit the property you will learn that there are thirteen-paned windows and thirteen hooks and thirteen steps. The house has a bell which tolls at midnight, there’s a snug little séance room where, the tour guides whisper, Sarah took instructions from the spirits. There are staircases that rise to ceilings, doors that open onto sudden drops, and windows set into the middle of walls.

Winchester, it is said, always wore blac and slept in a different bedroom each night in her home which she designed as a labyrinth to confuse the wandering souls of those killed by Winchester rifles - the guns her fortune was built on. It’s a brilliant story. Properly spooky enough to make your neck prickle… except that when you check the documents, almost none of it is true.

Winchester biographer Mary Jo Ignoffo attributes the ghostly stories to rumours likely “cooked up by journalists of her day.”1 The damage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is what left doors and staircases leading to nowhere and a need for construction. That kind of lore can prime visitors: expectation and suggestion make ordinary features feel uncanny, and can lead to people having strange experiences in the spooky environment.

The later myth of a guilty conscience, Ignoffo suggests, is also hard to believe. Few people felt guilty about guns at the turn of the 20th century - most people used them and saw them as a necessity. Those of us who imagine Sarah Winchester as a guilt-addled recluse may be seeing her through the lens of today’s complex relationship with firearms and gun death.

When I first explored the Winchester story many years ago, what struck me wasn’t a “mad” heiress but that Sarah was a woman in mourning who had lost a child and a husband. When you take this into consideration, the dark clothing, and use of a seance parlour suddenly make a lot more sense.

Of course, realism rarely stands in the way of a good tale. The film billed as “based on a true story,” the annual Halloween retellings, and the guided tours will keep the legend alive - and some visitors will leave certain they felt something or saw something ghostly in this mystery house. Stories are powerful that way.

However, what lingers about “weird” Sarah Winchester says as much about modern ghost belief as it does about her life. We like a spooky story we don’t have to interrogate too closely.

Share

I felt this same tension years ago in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard, by the Covenanters’ Prison. Late one rainy August night, our ghost walk wound through the dark and, as our tour guide’s story reached a crescendo, an actor jumped from the shadows, shrieking on cue. It did exactly what it was meant to do - my heart raced, people clutched at one another, everyone laughed - and then I had a sobering jolt: we were playing at fear in a place marked by real suffering. The story was immersive, but the history asked for gentler hands.

In 1679, after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, hundreds of Covenanters were penned there in the open for months; many died, others were executed, or deported. That history underpins the tale of the Mackenzie Poltergeist - often billed today as “Europe’s most violent poltergeist.” This, it is said, is the ghost of Sir George Mackenzie, the man who condemned the prisoners to their fate. We talk plenty about the monster in the story - because, as a poltergeist, he attacks tourists and visitors. But we speak far less about the people he made suffer while still alive. A different (and real) kind of monstrous.

That’s what stories like Winchester or Mackenzie reveal: how haunted lore can outgrow the history underneath it. Many of these tales are rooted in real loss, suffering, and hardship, later shaped to suit contemporary tastes. A little care - about sources, tone, and context - goes a long way, especially in places tied to difficult pasts.

A compelling legend can become the scaffolding for “evidence.” That doesn’t make anyone gullible - it just shows how powerful stories are. But it does mean that before we treat lore as data, we should separate the history from the tourism, and notice how suggestion shapes our experiences.

If you’re heading into a haunted site with a historical story attached, ask three simple questions:

1. Which parts of this tale are documented history, and which are tour-script lore?

2. What here might be stagecraft, mood, or expectation at work?

3. Am I treating someone’s tragedy with dignity while I investigate?

If your answers stay honest, your methods will too. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy ghost stories - but this is a way to enjoy them responsibly, while honouring the dead.

Then came the Rusty Razor Award, given to the person, group, or organisation judged to have been one of the year’s most prolific promoter of pseudoscience or unscientific ideas.

The shortlist raised a few eyebrows because among the familiar mixture of dubious health claims and conspiracy theories was Danny Robins, creator and host of the BBC’s Uncanny podcast, tv series, live tour, book.

Some people were surprised by this. Did a BBC programme about ghosts really belong in the same list as conspiracy theorists and far-right charlatans? To me, its inclusion made a certain amount of sense.

Uncanny presents itself as an investigation into people’s real-life supernatural experiences. Beneath the atmospheric sound design and serious tone, however, it works much like a lot of paranormal programmes before it: the ghost story comes first, while the attempt to understand what actually happened remains secondary.

That matters because the people sharing these experiences deserve more than to become characters in a spooky story. Their experiences may be frighteneing, confusion, or deeply personal. Taking them seriously should mean examining them carefully, not simply making them sound convincing.

Are you team believer or team skeptic?

This is the question around which Uncanny is built.

It’s a clever and easily marketable one, but it is also a misleading way of presenting complex human experiences.

The format divides everyone into two camps. On one side are the believers, willing to entertain the strange. On the other are the sceptics, often frames as the people trying to spoil the fun. There is little room between them for uncertainty, changing your mind, or saying “I don’t know,” or for asking “what else could explain this?”

And that uncertain middle is where most useful investigation takes place.

As I wrote previously for The Skeptic, balance does not mean treating every explanation as equally likely, regardless of the evidence sitting behind it. Placing an unsupported paranormal claim beside a well-researches alternative explanation can create the appearance of fairness while concealing the fact that the two are not equally well supported.

I say this as someone who has seen that format from the inside.

I contributed to the first season of Uncanny, offering skeptical perspectives and possible alternative explanations for the stories being discussed. At the time, I thought there was real value in the programme that listened to people without immediately deciding that they had encountered a ghost.

Ghost stories can tell us a great deal even when we do not accept them as literal acocunts of the supernatural. They can reveal something to us about memory, fear, grief, place, and expectation. I hoped the programme might explore that uncertain ground.

It gradually became clear that this was not really the direction in which the format was heading.

My researched contributions were presented alongside claims based on anecdotes, misinformation, or personal opinion. Often without making the difference between those forms of evidence clear. During live events, I increasingly felt that I was not there because of what I could contribute to an investigation but, instead, to play “the Skeptic”.

The believer and the skeptic had become characters in the show. My role was to provide resistance so that the ghost story could appear more persuasive by contrast.

Once I realised this, I stepped away from later seasons.

Skepticism is not a theatrical position or a personality type. It is a method: asking how we know something, looking for other explanations, and being willing to revise our conclusions. When it is reduced to a character in a debate, unsupported claims can borrow credibility simply by appearing beside it.

There is also a bigger reason to care about this. Beliefs do not always remain neatly confined to one subject. Paranormal belief can overlap with conspiracy thinking, and susceptibility to dubious health claims (though that does not mean everyone who enjoys a ghost podcast will suddenly begin buying miracle cures.)

The way programmes and the media model evidence and inquiry matters. I did not want my presence to help give the impression that a proper investigation was taking place when the structure of the programme made one almost impossible.

Share

“The biggest investigation into the paranormal - ever”

Robins introduces Uncanny as a platform sharing the “real life stories of the supernatural told by the people they happened to”. He has also describes the show (and all that has followed it since its launch on BBC Radio 4,) as “the biggest investigation into the paranormal - ever.”

This is a claim that is difficult to defend.

People have been studying reports of paranormal experiences for centuries. In Britain, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in 1882 to conduct scholarly research into experiences that appeared to challenge contemporary scientific understanding. The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) followed in 1981, with a broader interest in investigating and educating people about unusual claims and experiences.

Both organisations still exist and continue to operate to this day with healthy memberships. They form part of a much longer and more complicated history of paranormal research.

Interestingly, one of the SPR’s most famous cases, the Enfield Poltergeist, may have also have helped shape the paranormal media we recognise today.

Steven Volk, the BAFTA-winning writer behind the infamous 1992 BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, has frequently cited the Enfield case as a direct influence on the show’s concept. Ghostwatch presented a faux live investigation from a suburban family home tormented by a poltergeist named “Pipes,” blending fictional horror with documentary-style realism.

That mix of horror and realism proved remarkably influential.

When Most Haunted arrived on Living TV years later, its format was immediately recognisable: a team roaming supposedly haunted buildings, night-vision cameras, on-site vigils, and whispered tension whenever something moved in the dark. Some episodes were broadcast live, strengthening in a way the impression that viewers were watching events unfold without a safety net.

Other shows followed, often adopting the same methods while promising a new or more serious approach.

The Americal series Ghost Hunters, which began in 2004, was promoted as a more scientific alternative to the noisy and theatrical style associated with British ghost-hunting television.

And yet, Ghost Hunters helped popularise the use of “ghost hunting tech” with no real scientific merit: electromagnetic field meters, thermal cameras, laser grids, digital recorders, motion sensors…

Equipment which looks technical, and the numbers and displays create an atmosphere of measurement. But these devices were not designed to detect ghosts, nor is there an established reason to interpret their output as evidence of paranormal occurence.

It wasn’t science. It was science cosplay.

That aesthetic has become deeply embedded in modern ghost-hunting culture. Amateur groups across the country now use much the same equipment, often presenting it as evidence that their approach is rational and evidence-based.

The history here forms an interesting loop. Reports from a real family helped inspire fictional television. That fiction influenced later paranormal programmes, which then shaped the expectations and methods of real-world ghost hunters.

So when Uncanny brands itself as “the biggest investigation into the paranormal,” it overlooks that history. Its success rests partly on conventions developed by generations of researchers, writers, producers and ghost hunters before it, however flawed some of their methods may have been.

The Ghost Economy

At this year’s Rusty Razor ceremony, Skeptic editor Michael Marshall described the current revival of commercial ghost hunting:

“We’re seeing ghost hunting groups springing back up around the country, bothering old pubs and stately homes for the right to host sleepovers in the name of science. As well as the BBC commissioning copycat shows featuring comedians doing the same sort of thing. Genuinely, somewhere Yvette Fielding is dusting off her night-vision camera and saying a silent prayer of thanks to Danny Robins.”

The joke points towards a real economy.

For all its polish and prestige, Uncanny is not an entirely new form of paranormal media. It is a particularly successful version of a format that has existed for decades, and these programmes do not remain safely contained inside television screens or podcast feeds.

The stories can turn ordinary buildings into paranormal destinations. Listeners visit the places featured in episodes, commercial ghost hunts are organised, overnight stays are booked and haunted hotels gain another story to add to their advertising.

The effect is not always easy to measure, but the process is familiar. A strange experience becomes a story. The story attracts visitors, who arrive already knowing what they are expected to feel or notice. Some of them report new experiences, which are then added to the existing legend.

The lore shapes people’s expectations, and their experiences refresh the lore.

None of this means that witnesses are lying or inventing what happened to them. People can have sincere, unsettling experiences. It does mean that those experiences are interpreted within a social and cultural setting rather than in isolation.

A cold patch in an ordinary building may be dismissed as a draught. The same sensation in a room already associated with a murder, apparition or poltergeist is more likely to feel meaningful. Once reported, it can become further evidence that the room is haunted.

Over time, one uncertain anecdote can grow into a much larger collection of stories, reinforced less by independent evidence than by repetition.

A good investigation should help us untangle that process. Most ghost-hunting programmes are not designed to do so. They are designed to create suspense, maintain uncertainty and bring the audience back for another episode.

That is not necessarily a problem when a programme presents itself clearly as entertainment. The difficulty begins when entertainment is described as investigation and the techniques used to build suspense are presented as a serious way of establishing what happened.

A cliffhanger is useful storytelling. It is not a research finding.

Ghost stories remain a rich and valuable part of human culture. They allow us to talk about fear, memory, grief, injustice and identity. They can preserve the emotional history of a place long after the official version has been forgotten.

I am not arguing for a world without spooky stories. I have spent too much of my life studying them to want that.

But there is a difference between listening to a story and investigating a claim. When paranormal programmes blur that difference, audiences can be encouraged to confuse storytelling with evidence and scientific-looking equipment with scientific practice.

I have investigated paranormal reports for decades. Doing it properly requires far less glamour than television suggests.

It takes patience, careful listening and a willingness to follow ordinary explanations even when they are less exciting. It means checking what a witness remembers without assuming that memory works like a recording. It means examining the history of a location rather than repeating its folklore as fact. Most importantly, it means being willing to discover that your preferred explanation is wrong.

That is not a weakness in an investigation. It is the point of having one.

Paranormal media can still be enjoyable, moving and culturally interesting without being mistaken for science. A well-told ghost story does not need to prove that ghosts exist in order to matter.

In fact, the mystery becomes much more interesting when we move beyond Team Believer and Team Skeptic and begin asking better questions: What did this person experience? Why did they understand it in this way? What else was happening around them? How did the story change as it was retold?

We may not always reach a satisfying answer.

But admitting that is more honest- and far more curious -than pretending the investigation has already taken place.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

“Pics or it didn’t happen.”

For years, some variation of this has been the almost automatic response when somebody claims to have seen a ghost, Bigfoot, a UFO, or pretty much anything else they weren’t supposed to see.

It makes intuitive sense. Most of us now carry cameras everywhere we go, so if somebody really did see a large hairy humanoid walking through the woods, surely they ought to be able to whip out their phone and finally give us the clear Bigfoot photograph the world has been waiting for.

But suppose somebody did.

Suppose they handed you their phone tomorrow and showed you a beautifully lit, pin-sharp photograph of Bigfoot staring back at the camera.

Would you believe it?

Probably not.

One of the things I learned fairly early while investigating paranormal claims was that demanding photographic proof wasn’t actually getting me very far. A photograph can be useful evidence during an investigation, certainly, but even a completely genuine and unedited photograph only shows us what the camera recorded.

It does not automatically tell us what the thing in the photograph is.

And now generative AI has made an old problem considerably more complicated.

We were faking ghosts long before AI

Fake paranormal photographs are nothing new.

Victorian spirit photographers were producing images of the living apparently accompanied by the dead long before anybody had heard the term “artificial intelligence”. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths managed to convince rather a lot of people that fairies lived at the bottom of a garden in Cottingley using paper cut-outs and a camera.

People have manipulated photographs, staged paranormal evidence and created hoaxes for as long as there have been photographs to manipulate, stages on which to put things, and other people willing to look at the results.

AI changes the scale of the problem rather than inventing it.

It is now possible to generate convincing images of things which never happened with relatively little effort. I can ask an image generator to show me Mark Zuckerberg taking a selfie with Bigfoot and receive something which, at first glance, resembles an ordinary photograph.

Which is ridiculous, but also demonstrates the problem rather nicely.

If somebody presents a photograph as evidence of something extraordinary, the fact that the photograph looks convincing can no longer carry very much weight on its own.

Perhaps it never should have.

The photograph was never the whole investigation

The photograph was never the whole investigation and this matters because photographs and videos have sometimes been given far too much authority in paranormal investigation.

Someone takes a photograph in a supposedly haunted building and later notices a pale shape in the background. The photograph gets labelled a “ghost photo”, shared online and discussed as paranormal evidence.

But there is a human decision sitting between the photograph and that conclusion. It is a human that noticed the shape, a human who decided it was unusual, and interpreted it as possibly paranormal.

It is a human who selected the image, cropped it or uploaded it, gave it a caption and told other people what they thought they had photographed.

Even when nothing has been faked, there is still interpretation involved.

At the core of every paranormal claim is a human experience. A photograph or video may document part of that experience, but it is not the experience itself and it certainly isn’t automatically proof of the explanation somebody has placed upon it.

That distinction has always mattered to me when investigating strange claims, but generative AI makes it much harder to ignore.

There is always a human somewhere in the process.

AI creates another problem too

The obvious concern is that people will believe fake photographs.

Research into misinformation1 suggests that people do not always carefully analyse everything they encounter online, particularly when material fits something they already believe or produces a strong emotional response. Wider concerns about AI-generated media have therefore extended well beyond paranormal claims into journalism, politics, public health and national security.

But there is another side to this which interests me just as much - what happens when somebody presents a genuine photograph of something they sincerely could not explain?

“It’s AI” is an extremely convenient answer, and it can be just as intellectually lazy as accepting a photograph because it looks spooky.

If we reach the point where every unusually good paranormal image can simply be dismissed as generated, edited or manipulated without actually investigating it, we have not become better sceptics, we’ve just acquired a new assumption.

The existence of AI does not tell you that a particular photograph was generated by AI any more than the existence of Photoshop proved that every strange photograph produced after 1990 was photoshopped.

You still have to do the work.

So what would I actually do with a ghost photo now?

If somebody sent me an extraordinary photograph tomorrow, I wouldn’t begin by asking whether the hands looked funny or whether the background had that slightly uncanny quality associated with some generated images.

Those things might be worth noticing, but they’re not much of an investigation.

Instead, I’d start with the person.

Who took it? When? Where? Why?

What were they actually photographing at the time?

Did they see the strange feature with their own eyes, or only notice it afterwards?

Was anybody else there?

What happened immediately before and after the photograph was taken?

Can I see the original file rather than a screenshot or a version downloaded from social media?

Has it been edited, cropped or passed through an app?

Has the same image appeared elsewhere?

Those questions were useful before generative AI existed and they remain useful now.

Depending on the material, I might reverse-image search it, examine a video frame-by-frame, compare it with other photographs from the same location, or look for obvious signs of manipulation. But none of those things replaces talking to the person making the claim and establishing the provenance and context of what they’re showing me.

And sometimes the photograph will turn out to be deliberately fake, sometimes it will be an ordinary object photographed in confusing circumstances. Sometimes the person will have genuinely seen something they couldn’t identify and the photograph won’t help very much.

And sometimes we may simply not be able to establish what happened.

That’s allowed too.

Evidence has limits

There is a strange paradox here.

For years, sceptics have demanded photographs and videos of extraordinary things. Now we’re entering a period in which even a spectacular photograph may not persuade us that anything spectacular happened.

But perhaps that’s useful, because paranormal investigation should never have depended on finding the one photograph which finally proves everything.

The Cottingley Fairies didn’t need generative AI, and neither did Victorian spirit photographers. The fundamental problem has always been that images can mislead us, and that the meaning attached to an image depends heavily on the circumstances in which it was produced and interpreted.

AI has just made fabricating the image easier.

It also means that investigators need to become better at asking where evidence came from, what happened around it, what can independently be established, and what the person presenting it actually experienced.

There is another ethical reason to care about this - people really do have experiences they cannot explain. Flooding paranormal spaces with manufactured ghosts, monsters and UFOs makes it harder to take those people seriously and harder to distinguish sincere reports from somebody generating something impressive for attention.

But automatically shouting “AI!” at anything unusual doesn’t help them either.

The photograph was never the whole story, AI just makes that much harder to forget.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.