Radio Songs #47: The Ghost (Part 1)

By now you must have realised that in my early 20s I was spending most nights of the week in the radio station, either working on the Phone-In programme, driving taped shows or firing in pre-recorded links over records to create the illusion of live radio. And as it's Halloween week, it seems an appropriate time to start talking about possibly the most interesting aspect of the radio station...

The place was haunted.

I'll get onto why I believe this - and I do believe it - soon enough, but first a little bit about my belief in the supernatural in general. The truth is, if you'd asked me at age 16 whether I believed in ghosts or not, I'd have told you flat out that it was all a load of rubbish. I was a very cynical teenager and even though I enjoyed horror films (and, as discussed in yesterday's post, watched far more of them than was probably good for me), I had convinced myself that such things were pure fiction. In much the same way that, despite being brought up with religion (my mum was the daughter of a Methodist preacher, I attended a C of E School and Sunday school until I was a teenager), I'd pretty much decided that the Bible was little more than a bunch of stories written by earlier generations to scare us all into being good. In both beliefs, I came to consider myself more an agnostic than an atheist though, and my experiences at work paved the way for that.

I was always a big fan of The X-Files, and just like Fox Mulder, I did Want To Believe... in aliens, ghosts, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster... but the only way I would believe in anything is if I saw it with my own eyes. I demanded empirical evidence before I'd truly believe anything.

So what made me a believer? Little things at first, and then much bigger things. And I wasn't the only one. Pretty much everyone who set foot in that building after hours started to believe one way or another. Was it the way the temperature dropped suddenly in certain parts of the station? Was it the feeling of being watched or followed, of looking back over your shoulder because you were certain someone was there? Was it the thud of a door closing that convinced you someone was coming into the building or down the corridor... when nobody actually was? This was how it began. But none of this really constitutes empirical evidence, does it?

We'll save some of that for part two. Meanwhile, here's a rather spooky radio song to set the tone for the next few posts from Jim White...