The MonsterTalk podcast recently republished a 2017 episode that I was invited onto as a guest to discuss England’s Most Haunted village - Pluckley. This means I got to go back and visit 2017-me and see what she thought about ghosts, and hey… I recognise her.
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.