Hauntings, review: ghostly docu-series trudges through scarily familiar territory

There’s an endless appetite for spooky stories, but this series kicks off with two ‘hauntings’ that have been raked over countless times

2/5
Ghosts are box office. Tell a story about ghouls and poltergeists and bumps in the night and you’ve got yourself an audience. Audio has led the way lately, with the much-lauded podcast Ghost Story and Danny Robins’s series Uncanny haunting Radio 4. TV has muscled in on the paranormal action with Hauntings (BBC Two).
It kicks off with the famous case of the house in Enfield where in the 1970s a single mother and her four children were supposedly disturbed on a nightly basis by a noisy spectre who’d make objects and indeed humans fly across rooms. Those who bore witness at the time – a press photographer, a local TV reporter, the son of a new recruit to the Society for Psychical Research – are still refusing to entertain the counter-theory that little Janet Hodgson, then a buck-toothed girl of 11, might have been a playful genius at performative hoaxing.
The problem with such a well-known case is that it’s haunted by the ghosts of all the other times it has been told and retold. It’s like making yet another documentary about the Bermuda Triangle. You itch for an interview with Janet, but – oh look – she spoke to Apple TV+ when they joined the long conga line revisiting the same story only last year.
The second episode, set in a Rhode Island forest where a house was apparently haunted by a malevolently grieving mother, is stronger because two of the Perron family who lived there both take part and visit their old home. You feel the fear and the sorrow of people who remain traumatised to have been on a spectral frontline.
Unusually for the BBC’s grid-like schedule, the episodes are only 45 minutes long (the programme is a stowaway from streaming service Paramount+). An extra 15 minutes spent investigating the fascinating byways of human suggestibility – as practised in Uncanny – would have strengthened the case for yet another rummage around among these yellowing cuttings. 
The stories are reconstructed efficiently enough with much use of doomy sound-loops that feel AI-generated. (Oh for one ghost doc to use the music from Benny Hill.) The Perrons sold the rights to their story, it says in an endnote. The Conjuring made more than $300 million and spawned a sequel about the house in Enfield. So both families spawned massive profits for others. They’re probably more haunted by that.
4/5