FT258

In recent years, even the most abandoned lover of ghost stories is likely to have looked askance at the way ghost research has been treated by television. Ghosts are no longer a topic generating hot embarrassment; rather it is the antics of many so-called ghost-hunters themselves when performing before the television camera that are so awful. Light on subtlety and sensitivity, brazenly eschewing rationality and logic, these programmes happily present hysteria, New Age nonsense and re-heated spiritualist dogma as valid psychical research. Investigations are depicted as a form of thrill-seeking entertainment, giving the impression that contacting the dead is some kind of game.