Episode 393 - Ghostwatch | the BBC’s 1992 Live Paranormal Investigation

Two Girls One Ghost

The episode dissects the infamous 1992 BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, a live Halloween paranormal investigation that terrified millions of viewers before being revealed as an elaborate scripted

Key takeaways

• BBC aired Ghostwatch live on Halloween night, 1992, reaching 11 million viewers who believed they were watching a real paranormal investigation.
• The broadcast featured respected journalists Michael Parkinson, Sarah Green, Mike Smith, and Craig Charles investigating the supposedly haunted Early family home in Northolt.
• Viewers experienced intense psychological trauma, with the British Medical Journal documenting the first known case of childhood PTSD caused by television programming.
• An 18-year-old viewer named Martin Denham died five days after watching the broadcast due to severe terror and obsession, though the BBC was not held legally responsible.
• The entire segment was a scripted hoax written by Stephen Volk with a £900,000 budget, using pre-filmed clips and fake switchboard calls to simulate live events.

Main topics

• BBC Ghostwatch 1992 broadcast
• Live paranormal investigation hoax
• Psychological trauma and PTSD from media

Notable quotes

None of it, not a single thing was real.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a chilling case study in media manipulation, hig

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) When you put your body in the hands of a surgeon, you assume your doctor will do you no harm. I'm Speaker 4 (0:06) looking at the Speaker 2 (0:07) surgery board for tomorrow going, these people are f***ed. But when your doctor's in it just for the money, something absolutely insane happens. One doctor says, yeah, I did a lumbar fusion. My kickback was $25,000. And the other doctor's going, well, I only got $12,000 because I did a neck. This is a story about a massive web of fraud and deception. Dozens of doctors all over Southern California. A fraud worth over $1 billion. Speaker 1 (0:39) Patients were committing suicide. losing their homes, losing their marriages. From Speaker 2 (0:44) Sony Music Entertainment and Western Sound, this is Dr. Billions. Available now on The Binge. Search for Dr. Billions wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free. Some evil thing happened here. Speaker 4 (1:02) Three people die in a quiet suburb in the same house, years apart. Speaker 1 (1:09) It's not a coincidence. This wasn't ghosts and goblins, okay? These were murders. Speaker 4 (1:14) From Sony Music Entertainment, this is What Happened to the Harrisons. Start listening today, wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free. Speaker 5 (1:52) I've got mail. You've got mail? I've got a package for you. It's in my pants. Speaker 5 (1:59) I put a mustache on and I become a gross man. Speaker 3 (2:03) It's so funny. I can't like stop staring at your mustache because why did you take me through the decision to get the curly one? Speaker 5 (2:10) Well, I'll take you through the whole decision. Also, hi, everyone. Speaker 1 (2:12) This is Speaker 5 (2:12) two girls, one ghost. Two Speaker 1 (2:14) girls. Speaker 3 (2:15) And it's Halloween. It's October and we are your Speaker 5 (2:22) hosts. Oh, yeah. That's Corinne. I'm Sabrina. Speaker 3 (2:25) Did Speaker 5 (2:26) I whisper two girls, one ghost? I don't even remember. This is two girls, one ghost. Two girls. Speaker 3 (2:31) Listen, we've got costumes on. We're entirely different people. Speaker 5 (2:34) We have new personalities. Speaker 3 (2:36) And then it was made, we were made aware, or you made me aware that we forgot to do the costume contest last year. Yes. Speaker 5 (2:42) So Speaker 3 (2:42) this is our formal announcement that it will be happening again this year. And I will still be calling it the annual competition when the trophies are sent. And we'll pretend last year didn't happen. Speaker 5 (2:54) Yeah. It's annual. It still happens. We, in our minds. Gave out awards last year. Are Speaker 3 (3:00) you sure we didn't do it? I'm positive. Yep. But that's okay. I'm shocked I screwed up on that one. Sorry. Speaker 5 (3:06) Yeah, so Corinne, you are a Puritan. 1962 Salem Puritan. Are you an accuser or accused? Speaker 3 (3:14) I thought about it. At first I was going to be an accused, and then I was like, still feels wrong dressing up as a victim, even if it's 400 years later. But I'm also pregnant, so I can't be an accuser. I can't be a 12-year-old girl. I also don't want to be that. So Speaker 5 (3:30) I'm just a member of the community. Speaker 3 (3:32) Okay. You Speaker 5 (3:33) just watched Speaker 3 (3:34) it all happen and didn't say anything? Speaker 5 (3:36) I Speaker 3 (3:36) am trying to save myself. I've run off to Danvers, Massachusetts. Yeah. Hiding away. There Speaker 5 (3:42) you Speaker 3 (3:42) go. And I'm the mailman. We chose historical figures as our theme and you showed up as a mailman. Well, here's the thing. I was like, wait, is the theme historical figures or heroes? Historical heroes. Speaker 5 (3:57) Listen, they've been around for a very long time. That's true. And here's the thing. I have to give a shout out because on Campfire Stories literally this week, I was like, I still don't really know what I'm doing for this. I have another costume that could have worked Speaker 3 (4:09) for this. Oh, Speaker 5 (4:09) was it like the last Speaker 3 (4:10) 15 minutes that I missed? Speaker 5 (4:11) Yeah. Were you guys secretly convened about a costume? The Speaker 3 (4:14) second Speaker 5 (4:14) you left, I said, hey, can people help me figure out my costume in the chat only so that I don't, in case Corinne goes back and... watches that you wouldn't see it. But yeah, Morgan said, be a postal worker. And I said, that's genius. How did I not think about that? And then as I was picking my costume, I decided I wanted to be a male postal worker and be a man for the day. And I'm going to man spread the entire episode. Good. Speaker 3 (4:37) I'm doing the same thing. But I also can't get my legs together at the current moment. Is this man's wedding? The belly is hanging. That is more flexibility than I think most men have in their hips. So, yeah, that looks good. What's up? You remind me so much, like, dressed with this mustache of some comedian, like some actor. But I cannot pinpoint it. Speaker 5 (5:02) Someone else Speaker 3 (5:03) let us know. Speaker 5 (5:04) You're not giving. But, yeah. Postal workers forever will be my one true love Speaker 4 (5:10) and admiration. Oh, shoot. Speaker 5 (5:11) I thought it beeped. It does. I think we just have to set it up. And now Noah has a new toy. Speaker 3 (5:19) He's going to love this. You can't wait. You're Speaker 5 (5:21) going Speaker 3 (5:21) to whip it around. I rode it for a little bit. You were sitting on it as I walked in. Speaker 5 (5:26) But hi, everyone. So our costumes might not be very scary. And I actually don't know. Is your topic scary? It can feel pretty scary at moments. Okay. Hold on to your Speaker 3 (5:37) butts. We're going to be transported back to Halloween night, October 31st, 1992, a year before. We were cooking. I wasn't cooking yet. You Speaker 5 (5:47) were probably cooking. Oh, wait. I started cooking November 27th. Why the fuck do you know your conception date? I don't know the exact date, but I was around Thanksgiving. Speaker 3 (5:56) Okay. So Speaker 5 (5:57) then I must Speaker 3 (5:57) have been. Oh, you might be right after. I think I must have been on November conception. Anyway. Anyway. We were thoughts, maybe, in our parents' minds. It's Halloween night. We are in Britain. Families are settling in for the evening. Kids are coming down from their sugar highs. And BBC, the most trusted broadcaster in the country, is about to do something that has never been done before. 11 million people turned on their televisions expecting, I don't know, some little spooky treat, some little fun segment from BBC. But instead, what they got was 90 minutes that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. And the BBC would spend the next decade trying to bury it. What? I like already have chills. It's so wild. Okay. So this case is going to begin with the early family. Pam, she's a single mom and she has two daughters, Suzanne and Kim. And Suzanne, I'll probably refer to her as Susie because in the segment, which I watched, she's always Susie. With subtitles. I told Sabrina, I rented it because you can rewatch it. And I rented it on Amazon Prime and the... The audio didn't work. So I had to watch the whole thing with just subtitles, which is hard to watch a spooky segment with no sound. But I will say the last 15 minutes, like just with subtitles, my heart was racing. I was scared. Well, you said they're trying to bury it. So Speaker 5 (7:24) is it purposefully without sound? I don't know. Speaker 3 (7:27) But like, why? Why Speaker 5 (7:28) let it even be available to rent at this point? Good question. Speaker 3 (7:32) Anyway. OK, so the whole segment is about the early family. Speaker 5 (7:35) Pam, Speaker 3 (7:36) single mom, Susie and Kim are her daughters. She's like more recently widowed. Okay. They live in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in Northolt. Pam works. The girls go to school. They eat dinner at the kitchen table. Normal people. Normal life. Except for the ghost in their house. Could be normal for some. Could be. But this activity is like pretty, it gets pretty extreme and it's pretty constant. So there's knocking on walls. There's cold spots that appear for no reason. And there's weird sounds coming from the pipes. That's like basically how it started. Speaker 1 (8:11) And Speaker 3 (8:11) the mom, Pam, had said something about like, oh, it's just the pipes. And so then the girls started calling the entity pipes. So now when something happens, they just call it pipes. Yeah, it's pipes. Pipes is coming for us. Pipes is here. Okay, when you put it like pipes is coming for us, that's horrifying. Speaker 5 (8:27) So Speaker 3 (8:28) for a while, the early family was experiencing these hauntings by themselves. But on October 31st, 1992, the BBC sent a crew to the Early Family Home to conduct a 90-minute broadcast. Wait, so Speaker 5 (8:40) it Speaker 3 (8:40) was live? A Speaker 5 (8:41) live Speaker 3 (8:41) paranormal investigation on the nation's most trusted station. How Speaker 5 (8:46) do we do that today? We'll host a live investigation with the news. We have talked Speaker 3 (8:52) about it, and that being an idea. And I'll tell you later on in the segment what their budget was. And you're going to say, oh. Never mind. Well, we've already said, oh, never mind, because of how expensive it is. Yeah, the budget Speaker 5 (9:04) that Speaker 3 (9:04) we had in mind is not the budget that it takes to do something like this. Speaker 5 (9:07) And this is Speaker 3 (9:07) 1992, too. This is 1992. Okay, so now the BBC is bringing in cameras and 11 million viewers are walking into the home that is basically slated as the most haunted house in Britain. And what unfolded on live television that Halloween night would be one of the most disturbing documented hauntings all witnessed by people like you and me. just sitting there on Halloween night trying to, like, enjoy a little spooky segment, curious to see what would happen from the comfort of her own homes. And this would be BBC's Ghostwatch. Ghostwatch. What a good name. Right? Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about the haunted house and why the Early family was chosen for this investigation by the BBC. So Northolt is a suburb of the London borough of Early. Ealing? I don't know what I'm saying, but that's what the internet told me. Ealing. I've never been to the UK. Oh, that's surprising, actually. Speaker 5 (9:59) I feel like Speaker 3 (9:59) you've traveled Speaker 5 (10:00) so much. Speaker 3 (10:00) No, I haven't. I've only been to Ireland. Huh. Which is not a part of the UK. No. Right? Not anymore, I don't think. It's Scotland, Northern Ireland, England. Yeah. Wales? Don't quiz us. I'm from 1692. We hardly Speaker 5 (10:14) know. I don't know anything. Speaker 3 (10:15) We hardly know American Speaker 5 (10:16) geography. My Speaker 3 (10:19) bread might be poisoned. Okay. But I'll just say that this is like a very normal place. There's normal houses, normal neighborhoods. It's not the place that you would see a house and be like, oh, that's a spooky house. That's the haunted house on Speaker 5 (10:30) the Speaker 3 (10:30) street. Like, it's very ordinary. Anyone could live there. So already people are seeing themselves in this family and in this home when presented on TV. So it's like anyone could be the next haunted house, right? So the early family, they had been living in this home for years when the phenomena started. I Speaker 5 (10:49) am curious. Because you said she was recently widowed. Like, did the timeline line up to when they lost the dad and husband? Speaker 3 (10:57) You know what? I'm not sure. Okay. I don't think they, like, specifically said anything about that. And they didn't say how long ago he had passed. But the kids are, like, younger. Okay. So I assumed it was more recent. Sure. Okay, so they're in this house for a few years before they start noticing the strange sounds. There's knocking in the walls. It's very rhythmic. It's very persistent. And it's also impossible to locate, which is why she said it's the pipes and the kids named the entity the pipes. Pipes is coming for us. Yeah. It's an old home. It happens. There's like weird sounds. She doesn't jump. Pam, the mom, does not jump to the conclusion that it's ghosts. But definitely weird if you've Speaker 5 (11:34) lived there for many years. It's not like, oh, this is a new house. These are the quirks about the house. This is like, we've lived here a long time. What's all of a sudden? Like it's a water Speaker 3 (11:41) heater shot. Like do we need a new water heater or something? There's weird noises. Which is also Speaker 5 (11:45) horrifying. Speaker 3 (11:46) That's true. So Susie, who's the older of the two daughters, Susie starts to witness some strange activity in the home. And it's largely when she's alone. So at first it's like objects are starting to move on their own. And nothing is... thrown at her or harming her, but it's just like unsettling and spooky, right? Like she's getting scared. And both of the kids, whenever something happens, they're not just like sitting there witnessing it. Like they get up screaming and like run for their mom. So Pam is very aware that things are starting to pick up. Speaker 5 (12:15) Soon, Speaker 3 (12:15) Susie notices some cold spots in the house as well. And things are happening more frequently. And she is basically, Susie's like mostly the witness in the early days, though everyone comes to have some. Speaker 3 (12:28) The mom, Pam, would find Susie every once in a while just like having these sort of trances. Like almost like the way it was described, I was like, this sounds like an absent seizure if you had never known the context of all the other hauntings leading up to it. But basically, like she would find Susie just like staring blankly, unable to be like changed or moved for 30, 60 seconds at a time. That reminds me kind of of the Hinsdale Speaker 5 (12:55) house. And the one daughter who also would like go into trances and not remember anything. No. Speaker 3 (13:01) There's a lot of connections and similarities between I feel like a lot of the big poltergeist cases in this one. Speaker 5 (13:08) Because they all follow Speaker 3 (13:10) a very similar pattern. They do. I actually can't remember if I even wrote this in here, but Susie was also getting scratched. Speaker 5 (13:17) The Speaker 3 (13:17) younger daughter, Kim, didn't necessarily go through all the things that her older sister did, but she was definitely creeped out. She could feel the energy of the home. She was really spooked. She didn't want to go into certain rooms. She never wanted to be upstairs alone at night. The two girls shared a bedroom, so at least they had that. But, like, there was still a bunch of, like, creepy, creepy things. She told her mom that she felt like she was always being watched in the home, which she was. She was being watched. So Pam was not sure what to do at this time. So she actually reached out to a local paranormal investigator group. Also another check the box of things that happened. Exactly. And she gets a response back. And they're like, OK, we're happy to come set up some time in the house. We'll document anything that goes on. And that is exactly what happened. So they brought equipment. They took notes and they declared, yeah, there is something unexplainable happening here. Like we don't understand how this like energy is manifesting and what's going on. So I don't think they like put a stamp that said this is a ghost. But but they basically were like, there's no rational reason we can totally. Okay, so somewhat of a relief now for the family to know that, like, other people are agreeing with them that something's happening. But what do you do? Like, how do you get help? The investigators aren't changing things. They're not fixing things or getting rid of this poltergeist. In fact, the opposite happened. Because the group had come in, another, like, check the box. The spirit got riled up and things got worse. Things intensified once that group left. And this is pretty concerning because... 15 years earlier was the case of the Enfield Poltergeist, which was a very famous case. Which I covered, I think it was at a live show. Oh, did you do it at a live show? I think so. You should recover it again. Speaker 5 (14:56) But I think we ended up releasing that live show recording. Speaker 3 (14:59) Okay. Yeah. But still, it would be like a shortened version of the story. That's true. For the live show. Speaker 5 (15:04) Yeah. Could redo it. Speaker 3 (15:05) But yeah, so this was like a huge case in British history. And it had a lot of similarities in terms of like a single mom. Because I think the Enfield Poltergeist case, I think it was a single mom with four kids. But it was like the same sort of thing. So this is on like the back of people's minds. People are nervous. The back of Pam's mind, right? So she's like, I don't know what to do here. So around this time is actually when the BBC, somehow the people who are in charge of like booking cases and booking interesting people or whatever, they catch wind of what's going on with the early family. And they approach Pam. about her family being the subject of this live broadcast. Like, can they use their home for this special that they've never done before? It could be super interesting. It's going to be on Halloween night. There's going to be a bunch of people there. Like, everyone will be safe. And she's like, yeah, I want answers. I want this to be documented. I want people to know what's happening. I want to be believed. I'm scared. Right. Come in. Sure. So the BBC books the Early family, and that is what they do on Halloween night. BBC sent... Well, they didn't send four people, but like four of the regulars from PBC were a part of this investigation. Like journalists? Yeah. News reporters? Exactly. So like personalities that people were familiar with. Michael Parkinson was one of the most respected journalists and presenters in Britain, and he was the anchor. So he was sitting in the studio. Speaker 1 (16:23) And Speaker 3 (16:23) it is really interesting because when I was watching the segment, like the beginning of it, they clip so quickly between like, because they're setting everything up. So it's like an interview with the family and then it's. another person on the street and it's like well they also only have 90 minutes they've got to get to the investigation exactly so he's the one that's kind of like running the show in the studio and introducing people and like being like okay now let's jump to here let's see what's happening back at the house let's go to the streets let's we have a caller or whatever he's the conductor he's a conductor sarah green she's a beloved presenter she was on a children's show blue peter that's what i'd call my package Speaker 5 (17:02) We are so sorry, U.S. Postal Service. Thank you for your service. Listen, I love my post office workers. I love my – I literally love the USPS so much. You do. It's just when I get a costume on, something happens. Something changes in you. And Speaker 3 (17:18) I Speaker 5 (17:18) am no longer me, and I become – You say whatever comes to mind. I become – Unsolicited. A Blue Peter. I don't know. I become my Speaker 3 (17:24) Blue Peter. Okay, but Sarah Green, so she said that she – oh, God, I'm trying to remember her story. It was like she had had an encounter before or like had some sort of weird paranormal thing happen to her where she was eager to basically volunteer for this. So like not the normal personality that you would have thought was slated for this. Right. But she was like, no, no, no. I love the paranormal. I'm a huge believer in ghosts. I've had my own paranormal experience before. Like I want to be the one on the ground in the house. That there's so many of us out there. Yeah. And like the least Speaker 5 (17:54) suspecting people are also. Yeah. Fans of the ghosts. Speaker 3 (17:58) I also feel like she was a good person to send because there were two young girls there. So like she has experience making kids feel comfortable. Yeah. And she's