The 1970s were a golden age for ghost stories in British newspapers, says ALAN MURDIE, and thanks to the late Tom Perrott, who collected newsclippings from the local press, we can step back in time to this haunted decade.
THE HAUNTED 1970 S
hat the times are out of joint is not a new complaint in human history. In recent years the notion of ‘hauntology’ and the attachment of eerie personal feelings to specific periods have come to focus upon the 1970s. Those who grew up during the decade recall it as unsettling, a time of indefinable disquiet and unease, leading it to be dubbed the ‘haunted generation’ (see Bob Fischer, “The Haunted Generation”, FT354:30-37). Fortean Times– which itself first saw the light in the year 1973 – has charted the rise of these retrospective perceptions and symptoms, together with their role in inspiring a new artistic movement which both recalls and re-imagines the time.
Certainly when the decade is revisited through the prism of hindsight, it presents as a majorly different world compared with that of today (though not, I venture, one as far off and strange as 1920s society seemed looking back from the 1970s).
But as one of those whose memory stretches back to the 1970s, may I venture an alternative suggestion as to just why this era should be recalled as ‘haunted’?Quite simply, because it was.
This is no false memory of my own derived from wistfully remembered television programmes, but rather from recollections of press and television coverage of hauntings at the time. Ghosts were national and local news throughout the 1970s, with an abundance of actual sightings that markedly contrast with the diminishing returns received from so many ghost hunting groups today.
If ever ready confirmation were needed of the 1970s being a prime period for ghost-seeing, we might turn to a series of scrapbooks and files compiled by Tom Perrott (1922-2013), an independent researcher and chairman of the Ghost Club between 1969 and 1998. Perrott was frequently the right-hand man of Peter Underwood, the Ghost Club President, who, thanks to a series of successful ghost books and a touch of self-aggrandisement, tended to be hailed as the leading British ghost hunter of the day. But it was the quiet research and dedication of Perrott in chronicling reports that really reveals just how haunted the 1970s actually were. Between 1969 and 1994, Perrott steadily built up a 3,000-entry card index on UK haunted places. In the manner of Charles Fort’s harvesting of mat
