Ghosts, grief and the paranormal

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Why are we so spooked and yet so fascinated by things that go bump in the night? And can science really prove that ghouls exist? In this episode, Alice Vernon talks to John Borkham about the evolution of ghost hunting over the past 200 years, and how tales of pesky poltergeists and ectoplasm-filled seances have turned even some of the hardest skeptics into true believers. Now, Alice, I'm really excited to talk to you today because we're here to talk about your fantastic new book, which is entitled Ghosted.

A History of Ghost Hunting and Why We Keep Looking. And to be honest, that's a fairly straightforward title. It does exactly what it says on the tin. But to kick us off, can you just explain how you first got involved in this topic and where that idea came from? Yeah, so this is my second book.

And my first book came out three years ago and that was called Night Terrors and it was non-fiction again. And that was a book about how we have interpreted sort of spooky sleep disorders through history and culture and how we've misinterpreted them as well, because it's something that I've suffered with my whole life. You know, I I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and I see something that's not there. It's just, you know, a part of my life that I have these hallucinations, these sleep disorders.

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