It’s Friday, which means my brain has once again become a small magpie: snatching up shiny scraps of folklore, ghosts, grief, and odd little cultural tremors, and dragging them back to the nest.

Welcome to the second installment of The Ghost Geek’s Friday Files: a semi-regular round-up of the strange and interesting things that have crossed my screen lately. Think part scrapbook, part dispatch from the ghost-nerd trenches.

Ghosts as philosophy, not just Halloween décor

If you’re in the mood for a genuinely good current think piece, The Guardian has an interview with the author George Saunders that explicitly engages with ghosts as a way of thinking about mortality, meaning, and what we do with “presence” after a person is gone.

It also feels relevant right now because, in a period marked by mass death, public trauma, and a constant low-level sense of dread, Saunders frames ghosts not as horror props but as the natural consequence of lives cut short or left unresolved. It’s a useful reminder that ghost stories tend to surge when societies are struggling to process what’s happened to them - and what they’ve lost.

📌 ‘How do you really tell the truth about this moment?’: George Saunders on ghosts, mortality and Trump’s America (The Guardian)

Dead Man in the Pulpit 🩻

Simon Young’s recent post on his British Mythology substack, Dead Man in the Pulpit, is exactly the kind of historical ghost report that gets under your skin: a winter night, a church choir practising, a door creeping open… and then something walking down the aisle and climbing into the pulpit.

It gave me goosebumps 😱

It’s atmospheric, weirdly intimate, and (crucially) it doesn’t overplay its hand. It’s also a nice reminder that some of the best ghost writing isn’t about proving anything. It’s about the feeling of being there, in the dim light, with your heart in your throat. Absolutely love the British Mythology Substack!

📌 Dead Man in the Pulpit (British Mythology)

Grief, art, and ghosts as creative companions

Paste ran a cover story on Sufjan Stevens (no relation 😉) that dips into grief and ghosts in the way artists often do: not necessarily “I saw an apparition”, but the quieter sense of being haunted by love, memory, and the endurance of certain presences.

This piece quietly reframes ghosts as something closer to companionship than fear. These aren’t apparitions that need explaining away, but emotional presences that linger when love, grief, and memory don’t have a clean endpoint. In a culture that’s increasingly uncomfortable with prolonged mourning - that expects people to “move on” efficiently - Stevens treats being haunted as a form of fidelity - a way of continuing to carry those we’ve lost, even when it hurts.

📌 Sufjan Stevens Communicates With Ghosts (Paste Magazine)

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FYI: Stephen King on Netflix 🎞️

This one is less “think piece” and more practical ghost-nerd housekeeping: Netflix Tudum has a handy summary of Stephen King adaptations currently on Netflix, and I genuinely didn’t realise how many were sitting there waiting to be watched. So, if you’re the kind of person who periodically thinks “I want something unsettling, but familiar,” this is a useful little menu.

📌 Stephen King Movies & Series on Netflix to Watch Right Now (Netflix)

Also from me: The Worst Ghosts of 2025 👻

If you missed it, I recently posted The Worst Ghosts of 2025 - a lovingly judgemental little recap of the spectral nonsense that made me sigh into my tea last year. 5 worst ghosts to make the headlines in 2025 (and why I secretly love a naff spook.)

That concludes this week’s Friday Files. Hope you have a lovely weekend ✨

If you’ve got a link, story, or weird headline you think I’d enjoy, feel free to email me or fling it at me on social media (Bluesky | Instagram) like a small paranormal offering.

It’s been almost a month since I launched The Ghost Geek, and I really appreciate all of the support that people have shown since then - thank you!

If you’ve got a subject you’d like to email me about, you can reach me at hayley@theghostgeek.com, or find me over on BlueSky or Facebook.

Every so often on a Friday, I’ll put together The Ghost Geek’s Friday Files - a round-up of the odd and interesting things that have crossed my screen or brain lately: hauntings, folklore, weird headlines, documentaries, podcasts, and so on.

Think of this as sort of part scrapbook, part dispatch from the ghost-nerd trenches - written on a semi-regular basis.

Adjusting to the Era of Big Ghost

This year saw the completion of the National Folklore Survey For England, and around Halloween, stats on supernatural beliefs were published that surprised some people - especially the finding that younger generations are increasingly embracing supernatural beliefs. A real cultural shift!

I really enjoyed this piece by Sean Morley who spoke to folklorist Dr David Clarke about the survey and how ‘supernatural beliefs are flourishing in an era of isolation and mistrust’. Highly recommended!

My Review of NightWatch

I recently watched NightWatch on the BBC - starring Daisy May and Charlie Cooper - and was pleasantly surprised by how refreshingly it approached the genre, ditching the usual ghost hunting tropes. I wrote up my thoughts for The Skeptic: The BBC’s NightWatch is a control group for Ghost Hunting TV.

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Nationwide Archival Reports

This week I’ve been mostly watching vintage clips of the BBCs Nationwide (1960s-70s) via the BBC Archives YouTube Channel - such as this one about the Enfield Poltergeist, featuring Maurice Grosse very much in his element.

They’ve curated a spooky watchlist on their channel that you can access here. My personal highlights include the 1976 Hexham Heads Werewolf report, the 1973 report on Exorcising the Loch Ness Monster (obviously), and this 1973 report on the Warminster UFO Phenomena, which I thought was absolutely delightful.

Monster Talk: Haunted Drawers

Spookily (some might say), just as the BBC Archive videos began popping up on my homepage, the always-wonderful MonsterTalk podcast released the episode below discussing some of the reports - including this episode about a haunted chest of drawers investigated by none other than Tony Cornell, Dr Alan Gauld, and David Berglas.

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That concludes The Ghost Geek Friday Files #1 - have a lovely weekend! ✨