Ghostwatch

1992 | Horror

Notorious BBC hoax/drama, broadcast on Halloween in 1992, purporting to be a live outside broadcast from a haunted house in London. A family has been terrorised by a malevolent spirit known as Mr Pipes and now a BBC film crew is spending the night in the building to see what happens.

Advertised and listed as a drama, but sufficiently plausible to be utterly credible to casual viewers who happened upon it, the programme ended up jamming the BBC switchboard with alarmed viewers, apparently giving some of them PTSD and being implicated in at least one suicide. The corporation was banned from attempting anything similar again and Ghostwatch has never been repeated, living on only as an urban legend (and various DVD releases).