As far as the four-man ghost-hunting crew Paraletic Activities are concerned, ghosts have between the hours of 8pm and 11pm to make themselves known. “We’re getting too old for the paranormal all-nighters!” laughs John Smith, 51, who by daylight hours is a commercial signwriter. At weekends he joins Neil, Luke and Nigel, three fellow 30- to 50-something Walsall Ghostbusters fans who have carried their childhood passion for the paranormal into middle age to form Paraletic Activities. They meet to drink real ale and explore the many reputedly haunted locations that litter the Midlands, from the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory in Leicestershire to spooky pubs such as The Four Crosses in Cannock.
The crew’s technology, honed over a decade in the ghost-hunting game, includes “Old Faithful”, a meter that measures fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, and “Carol Anne”, a 1970s portable television set that the team believes registers localised static interference. Carol Anne takes her name from the suburban child who became a conduit and target for supernatural entities in the 1980s Poltergeist trilogy.
“The best bit is the social side,” John says of his crew, who share their encounters via YouTube videos and through the Paraletic Activities podcast. “We don’t take it all too seriously. It gets us out of the house and from under the wives’ feet.”
Ghost hunting is having a moment. “Have-a-go” ghost hunters are cropping up all over YouTube and TikTok, while organisations ranging from luxury hotel groups to English Heritage are latching on to the lucrative opportunities presented by the paranormal pound. English Heritage hosts regular nighttime ghost hunts at two of their properties: Dover Castle in Kent and Bolsover Castle south of Sheffield. London’s Langham Hotel, said to be haunted by the ghost of a German prince who fell to his death from a hotel window, allows curious spook sleuths to book its “most haunted room”, number 333.
It’s a pop-cultural juncture that’s accompanied by increased scientific enquiries into the nature of unexplained paranormal phenomena and parapsychology (the study of the psychological causes for claims of paranormal encounters).
Academic Dr Kate Cherrell lectures on Victorian Britain and the paranormal. She believes the current enthusiasm for ghost hunting shares features with that earlier era. “The love of the paranormal seen in the 19th century sprang from a fear of death in a time when people were turning away from the established church,” she explains. During Covid, she notes, it was our generation’s turn to confront the prospect of death. “It made many of us consider the afterlife at the same time as we were at home, noticing the bumps and squeaks in our own houses.”
Cherrell has a lot of time for new community ghostbusting teams such as Paraletic Activities, including those who dress up in 1980s Ghostbusters-style boiler suits and backpacks. “It’s easy to laugh at the aesthetics: the cheesy team logo fleeces and the beeping and flashing boxes,” she says, “but these groups are rich and vibrant communities and a social lifeline for many people, including the recently bereaved.” The Church of England is not so keen, complaining of amateur ghost hunters who trespass in “haunted” church graveyards at night.
Dr Malcolm Schofield studies the psychological basis of paranormal belief at the University of Derby. He is also on the Spontaneous Cases committee at the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882 to “understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal”. SPR and fellow paranormal association The Ghost Club, which includes Charles Dickens, WB Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon among its illustrious former members, are seeing rising membership and increased reports of ghostly and unexplained phenomena. “We are getting a lot of reports of precognitive dreams and after-death communications,” Schofield says, “though reports of poltergeists are way down.”
While believers in broad-brush “spirituality” tend to be hard to categorise, according to Schofield, believers in the paranormal have certain traits. “They tend to have more open and intuitive thinking styles than people who believe in institutional religions, who tend to be more dogmatic.”
At 9pm on a dark night in Stoke on Trent, I’m hunkered down with the Paraletic Activities team in the city’s Stoke Haunted Museum (which bills itself as “the sixth most haunted location in the UK”). We’re armed with a pentagram, Carol Anne, and a noisy smartphone opened to an “instrumental trans-communication” app, which purportedly channels the voices of present spirits. For these believers it’s not solace in the afterlife but the physiological thrill of ghosthunting in company that’s the principal attraction: the rush of being spooked and spooking others in turn.
On arrival at the black-painted Victorian building, Nigel thinks he hears breathing by the loos and John claims someone or something has touched the back of his neck. Yet it’s quickly clear that there are, excuse the pun, a lot of dead hours in the ghostbusting game. After 40 minutes at a motionless ouija board, which John dislikes (“I can’t work ’em out to be honest”), we follow the sound of a distant thud to a room. Inside, Luke thinks he can feel a chill by his legs, the left of which is adorned in tattooed scenes from the Ghostbusters movie. “I’m getting f-in’ goose bumps,’’ John hisses, face ashen white, but delighted. “Yes, that’s the draught there,” Luke replies, side-eyeing a velvet curtain covering a door.
Jaden Darnell, 21, is among a younger generation of ghosthunters. He says he was turned on to the paranormal by 2020-launched British indie gaming hit Phasmophobia. In it, a ghost hunter works with up to three other players to identify one of 24 types of ghosts, including poltergeists (from the German “loud spirit”) and yūrei (or Japanese “faint spirits”). But the trainee teacher traces his own personal enthusiasm to his sightings of a ghostly apparition stalking the grounds of his childhood home. “I would see this lady wearing black walking down our path towards the living-room door, then I would blink and she would be gone,” he recalls. “My mum would see her, too.”
Darnell joined The Ghost Club on his 18th birthday and has since conducted his own nocturnal searches with friends. He often attends The Ghost Club’s monthly paranormal lectures in London – events attended by hundreds of curious souls and with subjects including the history of ghost-hunting technology and the celebrity working-class female mediums of the 1800s. “People are replacing religion with spirituality,” says Darnell, “but we are just as fascinated by whether there is life after death. I think that ghosts hold the answer to this mystery.”
According to Dr Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of a new book called The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal, ghost believers, however sceptical they claim to be, do not in fact want their experiences to be explained away by scientific, or non-paranormal explanations. “None of us like the prospect of simply ceasing to be when our physical body dies, or, even more so, the thought that when our loved ones die, we will never have contact with them again. So any kind of evidence that seems to support the possibility that part of us lives on beyond physical death is welcome, no matter how flimsy that evidence may be.”
There are downsides for those who believe in life after death anyway, adds French. “Those who believe in an afterlife are potentially open to exploitation by con artists claiming to be able to speak to dead loved ones.” Perhaps humanists have got it right. “They do not believe in an afterlife,” says French, “and therefore focus their efforts on living the one life we have in the most fulfilling way possible rather than hoping for some reward after they pass away.” That’s as may be, but in a 2017 Ipsos Mori poll 38% of people classified themselves as believers in ghosts, with a similar number reporting having seen one. The same survey revealed that women were more likely than men to believe in guardian angels and premonitions.
Dr Neil Dagnall studies our fascination with life and death at Manchester Metropolitan University. He says that ghost fanciers are looking for meaning and reassurance: “They want to know that there is more than mere lived mortality. Psychologically speaking it’s a double whammy: it provides a sense of meaning but also appeases anxieties and concerns about death.”
Russ Bevin, 49, a sales manager for a Midlands utilities provider, is the founder of ghost-hunting collective Wednesbury Paranormal. Bevin’s childhood nickname was “the cellar dweller”. “I would creep into spooky places and hang out there all night,” he tells me. “It got so I wasn’t bothered a bit by taps and knocks.” Bevin, like many paranormal investigators, describes himself as “an open-minded sceptic” when it comes to the supernatural. He leads both paid-for and free nightfall investigations with Wednesbury Paranormal at allegedly haunted locations, including The Rising Sun pub in Tipton (said to be haunted by the spirit of drowned publican Eliza Whitehouse) and the ruins of Dudley Castle. Bevin favours Georgian devices over the jazzy modern ghost-sensing technology many groups go in for. “We use scrying, which is an old method of channelling spirits with mirrors and pentagrams and sometimes incantations, though not everyone goes in for that gloomy occult stuff.”
Shows such as British reality TV programme Most Haunted, The UnXplained with William Shatner, and comedian Danny Robins’ series Uncanny on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Two have all captured audience imaginations with their strange mixtures of spooky bravura and debunking. Most Haunted ran on Living TV from 2002 to 2010 and provoked a raft of Ofcom complaints for suspected staging of paranormal encounters. These have since been superseded by darker and more niche strands of ghost media, such as the US’s Paranormal TV, which routinely explores malevolent demon attachments, and YouTube’s Alehouse Haunts, which investigates ghost hauntings of British boozers.
One ghost fan who entered via the TV fandom pipeline was Jayne Mortimore, 45, a paranormal investigator based in Liskeard, Cornwall. She fell, she tells me, for the “thrilling” world of the paranormal in the early 2000s heyday of Most Haunted, and believes that radiation from the bedrock granite and quartz in her native Cornwall make it a hotspot for paranormal sightings. Mortimore’s most spectacular encounter to date was last year, when she, along with other witnesses, saw a lingering matt black figure in the hallway of a haunted Victorian home, though she says her ghostly encounters are few and far between. “There’s loads of waiting around in this game,” she says. Mortimore runs private paranormal investigations across Cornwall and is a regular at ghost-hunting evenings and dinners at Cornwall’s Bodmin Jail and Jamaica Inn, the famous smugglers’ haunt immortalised in Daphne du Maurier’s novel, whose periphery is said to be stalked by a “demon dog”.
The Cornwall businesses are not alone in turning a profit from the paranormal. Enthusiasts can enjoy ghost-hunting walks of storied rural spots and guided sleepovers in abandoned hospitals or workhouses, while tourism aggregators such as hauntedrooms.co.uk allow guests to book beds in supposedly haunted hotels for BBBs (or bed, breakfast, plus bumps in the night). In 2023 I spent the night at Eastwell Manor in Kent, a neo-Elizabethan pile that regularly tops UK most-haunted hotels lists for the lady in white and galloping horsemen apparitions said to stalk its halls and grounds. Sadly there were no spectral sightings for me, although its spooky reputation added a certain frisson to my midlife insomnia. Community venues occupying historic buildings, meanwhile, such as Warmley Clock Tower in South Bristol, an atmospheric former 18th-century pin factory, have found that they can keep the lights on with the income provided by paranormal nights. “There’s money in paranormal events, but some castles and hotels keep it quiet as it can affect wedding-venue bookings,” Mortimore says.
Back in Stoke, the Paraletic Activities team are steadying their frayed nerves, as they do at the end of most ghosthunting investigations, with a paranormal “brew review” at the pub (they call some of their group investigations “Boos and Booze”).
On balance, they say, it was a typical night’s ghosthunting. “A few bumps and bangs,” says John, “the usual, really.” When the team later reviewed their audio recordings of Stoke, they told me they caught a voice whispering to them in the room that had the rogue draught. I say I struggle to make out any whispering on the hissing clip they sent me. John responds: “It’s all good fun though, innit?”
