I was in England with my family visiting my dad's parents in 1992.



I was watching TV, sitting on a little plastic chair that my Gran bought from the market in expectation of our visit, my sister and I each had our little seats and I remember my sister and I were really excited about these chairs when we arrived at Gran and Grandads house in Urmston in the Fall of that year.



It was Halloween-time and I was a little bummed that we were staying in a country that doesn't really do the whole Halloween thing. There's no trick or treating in England, or at least there wasn't in 1992. Perhaps the commercial lure of Halloween candy sales got English companies promoting the holiday more in subsequent years, but when we were there I remember trying to explain to a girl who lived next door to my grandparents how the holiday worked and we had a sort of dress up party at my grandparents house using things around the house to make costumes. There's a photo of us my dad took, my sister and me and Leeann, the neighbor girl, wearing shawls and hats and for some reason I'm holding up an ashtray in the photo because it was part of my look.



What I want to talk about here is a show I was watching that my Gran turned off while I was watching and I was annoyed. She called it “rubbish.” And maybe she was right. It was a scary program, maybe too scary for a little kid like I was at the time. I didn't watch much of the program, maybe the first 15-20 minutes before I got cut off, but what I did watch has stuck around with me and influenced my own fear of the basement.

In the program, a woman and her child talk to a TV crew about a disturbance in their household, what they think is a ghost who stays in their basement. The ghost makes its presence known by banging on pipes in the basement, and the mom has felt and smelled the ghost’s “cabbage breath” on the back of her neck while coming up the stairs.

The description of the “cabbage breath” is something I never forgot, and it’s something I still think about whenever I am in the basement coming up the stairs in my parents’ house. Sometimes I visualize and imagine it to the point where I think I can feel someone behind me and I end up running the rest of the way up the stairs.

A few years ago I decided to look into what ghost show I was watching at that time in 1992, to see if I could see the rest of what didn’t get to see at the time. When I did some basic searches like “ghost show 90s england” I was able to find exactly what I was looking for. Apparently the program was called Ghostwatch, and it was a one-off that was only aired once. The program was completely scripted, but styled as a “live” investigative documentary. What resulted was pretty convincing, and it had audiences all over Britain fooled and caused quite an uproar. You can read more about the response the program garnered here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-41740176

After reading about the show and having my memories confirmed, I watched the program in full on youtube. I just checked and it doesn’t look like it’s on youtube anymore, but I found the video on one of those spammy streaming sites and I’m going to try to watch it again tonight. It is very well-produced, and it did kind of set the tone for the future of ghost reality shows. I feel lucky that I was able to witness Ghostwatch, the show that shocked a nation and changed television forever, firsthand. Even though I was annoyed at the time, I also feel lucky that I was one of the kids who had a sensible adult around who decided it was too scary for a little kid to watch.

UPDATE: The program is funnier and quirkier than I remembered. I found the whole show streaming on Internet Archive and watched it last night. Definitely worth a watch.