Ghost Channels

Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-FirstCentury America

Amy Lawrence

University Press of Mississippi 2022

Pb, 268pp, £32.95, ISBN 9781496838117

Like worms through a corpse, dozens of paranormal documentary programmes wriggled across American cable television screens in the first decades of the 21st century: formulaic, low-brow productions like Ghost Hunters, Ghost Stalkers and Ghost Asylum.

“Combining reality television techniques with paranormal subject matter creates a uniquely bad object,” admits Amy Lawrence, a US professor of media studies. Yet she braved countless episodes of paranormal reality television (PRT), and returned with a definitive guide to its tropes and themes – as well as perspectives on the deeplyburied social factors that may be responsible for PRT’s popularity.

There are paranormal survivor shows like When Ghosts Attack!, which combine first-person supernatural accounts with re-enactments informed by well-worn horror tropes. There are ghost investigator shows that place teams of paranormal researchers, armed with various sensors and specialised recording devices, in harm’s way to document hauntings. There are series that focus on haunted locations or on psychic kids.

Spiritualism – an ethereal parallel to the emerging communications technologies of its day – hovers over this genre. But what are the contemporary issues found within PRT? Behind stories of “Indian burial grounds” and voodoo priests, Lawrence finds the open wounds of slavery and native genocide. Countless shows about haunted prisons or sanatoria highlight the large scale traumas inflicted by institutionalised power. Other shows address more recent forms of decay. The spectre of the 2008 housing crisis, she posits, haunts the many firstperson haunted house shows that emerged soon after.

Lawrence has delivered a compelling analysis of the genre and its underlying societal concerns.