Fitz
speaker
397 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Fitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Is there anybody here?
And I'm Fitz.
This episode, we have our traditional Find the Company with the most tenuous spooky season tie-in competition. We have listener stories from Tracy, Kate and Kat. And we head back to Whitby for the final time... Possibly, to share our stories of smugglers, occult artefacts and a swashbuckling ghost.
Yes, this paranormal radar, I have a veritable plethora of pings. It's lit up like a Christmas tree, or perhaps more aptly as a Halloween tree, which is something we do every year with spooky pumpkin fairy lights.
Regular listeners may remember that we like to find stories around Halloween where companies try and hijack the spooky season by finding the most tenuous links to their business to try and make spooky.
We've had the car leasing company sharing Britain's most haunted roads and a home removal company that shared a story on the spooky side of home removals and they normally start showing up in our social media from around the beginning of October.
This year however it's been eerily quiet so I set out to hunt some down for myself and immediately found that it might be a little bit more of a challenge than I initially thought. You see, my Google foo isn't bad.
Doing what we do, we often have to track down some piece of information or even just find out in what book or article it might be found, and we're narrowing down the parameters all the time. This time, though, it was the opposite. I needed to go broad, and the broader your search is, the more junk you get.
These stories aren't meant to stand out on their own as something you would search for directly. They're trying to blend in to the other spooky searches that people are doing around Halloween for general spooky stuff. I'm not sure what to call that either, but anyway, they aren't stories that it's easy to search for intentionally.
After quite a few frustrating attempts, I managed to come across a handful of stories, and then after a little refinement I hit the motherlode, which led me down a very rich vein of stories. The first is from the Guardian newspaper, and it's a review for the BBC Two show Hauntings.
I very nearly dismissed it out of hand, as it doesn't seem like something Paranormal Radar worthy, but it turns out that The Guardian appear to have a highly advanced stealth Paranormal Radar story, to labour the metaphor. It was only because I thought I'd make a note of the show to watch later that I clicked on the link, and boy was I glad that I did.
I don't know if the reviewer just didn't want the job, had a row with their editor, or was just a really, really bad choice for this review, but it is bad. And I don't mean that it's poorly written or that the reviewer clearly hadn't watched the show. They clearly had watched the show and they hated it.
They hated it with the kind of passion that one would normally reserve for people who steal your lunch from the office fridge. You know you're in for a fun ride from the off with the title There is not a single spark of wit to this meaningless nonsense. One star. One star. No goblins. Indeed.
Quite, and the reviewer does not relent from there, with the subtitle declaring that the Enfield Poltergeist case is an atrocious topic, and the first paragraph is dedicated entirely to how much the reviewer hates October and wishes they could simply skip the entire stupid infuriating season entirely to avoid what they call Halloween rage.
Sorry, carry on. So, a good start. The review carries on, bouncing back and forth between unveiled sarcasm and outright vitriol for a bit, while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for seeing through the unconvincing hoax.
Whilst they rightly point out that there are definitely some controversial issues surrounding the case, not least that the children involved did admit to faking at least some of the recorded activity,
I think even the most hardcore skeptics will allow that the study of paranormal activity is interesting for reasons surrounding our psychology and perception alone, even if there's nothing supernatural taking place. They sum up the article with, talking about the paranormal is always a waste of time. Well, we've wasted eight years then, haven't we? Quite.
That does appear to accurately reflect their attitude, but does leave me wondering who this review is actually for. If you have no interest in the paranormal, you probably will have skipped it anyway, and I don't think that it will really change your mind if you do.
All it really did for me was to make me wonder what on earth happened in their life to make them hate a bit of spooky fun, and what they did to upset their editor so much that they were picked to write this review. One star. Who hurt you?
I have never encountered Halloween rage before.
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