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Perhaps, now that we’re on to the fourth season of the podcast, it might be worth taking a moment to look back at where this all began…
There may be people who started listening to the podcast part-way through and perhaps aren’t aware of its history – where the show comes from and how things have changed as we’ve gotten all the way into its fourth year.
I never really expected that it would last this long. But people have been listening. So I’ve just kept on going.
Before it was a podcast, New Ghost Stories was (and in part still is) a book project. Over a decade ago, I had an unexpected encounter with a friend, which led to an even more unexpected encounter with a relative of his, who had a ghost story to tell.
It was the first time I ever took a ghost story seriously. I hadn’t before thought of a ghostly encounter as something that could really harm people. Something that could have an actual life-changing impact.
And why shouldn’t it? If you’ve always been sceptical about the supernatural, experiencing it yourself first-hand, coming face-to-face with something that shouldn’t be possible; it could well make you reconsider everything you thought you knew to be true.
That was where the hunt began. The hunt to discover more of these true stories. Stories people might otherwise be too afraid to tell, because of the stigma attached to believing in things strange and otherworldy.
Quite a lot has changed in all that time; believing in strange things seems a lot more widespread now than when I started. At the forefront of my thinking, at the time, was to see whether I could try to offer evidence that the supernatural actually existed. A rather lofty goal, considering the many more eminent and qualified people who have tried to do this over the past 150 years.
I wished to do this by insisting on proof from my ‘subjects’ – those whose accounts I wished to record (I think I choose to use the word ‘subjects’ to sound more scientific – I wished I’d just said witnesses, but too late to go back now.) I wanted them to back up their accounts with evidence, so I could be sure this was no flight of fancy or deceit. I didn’t expect photographic or video evidence per-se (although I have seen some startling things), I wanted to see that people were serious and that they were genuine in their assertions.
This part of my process hasn’t changed. I still set a high bar when people come forward to make sure they are telling the truth, at least as far as they know it. What has changed as the years have gone by is my so-called mission to prove, one way or another, that the supernatural exists.
Why has this become less relevant? Besides finding myself forever lost in a grey area where it’s hard to prove something one way or the other, I’ve found that it may be beside the point. Whether ghosts really exist or not, people will go on experiencing them anyway.
It’s the realm of human experience that has come to be my main focus. An exploration not just about the possibility of life after death, but what ghosts and our experience of them says about ourselves, the world we live in today, and the legacy of our past.
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Roadkill | New Ghost Stories Podcast 33