ABSTRACT
The fact that a ghost seems to take over the studio reveals a technophiliac aspect to the spirit world. Radio is a particularly strong medium for both storytelling and documentary, and examples that have hybridized these forms have included programmes on ‘true’ ghost stories. Ghosts are as invisible as soundwaves and can imbue and inhabit the domestic space of their victims and the listeners. There were all kinds of ghosts on classic American radio. In Rosemary Timperley’s “Listen to the Silence”, an episode of the BBC series Haunted, a lonely woman is terrified of silence and fills her life with the sound of the radio. In the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of American radio broadcasting, themes of mystery and the supernatural were abundant in standalone plays and series. Electronic Voice Phenomena specialists have developed techniques and theories to explain the phenomenon of captured voices in recordings of empty rooms and the white noise of out-of-tune radios.
