ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, British and American television has made a substantial contribution to an expanding strand of popular culture that deliberates on the importance and ongoing relevance of the paranormal and unexplained phenomena to secular lives and ordinary everyday experience. It consistently explores the supernatural and its manifestations as potential vehicles that might transport, in disguised and displaced forms, past traumas into the present moment or else, if less often, the reassuring notion that life in the form of the spirit does not end with the death of the body. It is interesting to observe that it continues to address these notions without embarrassment or apology during a period when scientific rationalism and positivist inquiry remain the dominant Western paradigm for understanding the world, its potentially troubling or disturbing elements and our place within it. As Michael Barkun (2003: 33) has noted, through popular culture, in particular, alternative ways of understanding the world and our place within it are being articulated and circulated:
The volume and influence of stigmatized knowledge have increased dramatically through the mediation of popular culture. Motifs, theories and truth claims that once existed in hermetically sealed subcultures have begun to be recycled, often with great rapidity, through popular culture.
