I've been enjoying a bit of trash TV called Paranormal Witness recently. This is a strange programme which uses first hand accounts of paranormal activity intercut with dramatisations. These reconstructions use all the tricks learnt from modern day horror films: jump cuts, sudden discordant noises, disorientating angles, camera shakes as well as special effects. What gives the programme its edge I suppose is the fact that these are actual accounts from real witnesses. You may think (and in fact you should think) ‘So what?’ It’s true that people will say anything to get on the telly. Point a camera at them and small events will grow in their imagination until they have a full blown horror story which fits the common language of such narratives.

Last night’s story had elements of ‘The Green Mile’ as well as classic scenes from ‘The  Exorcist’. Picture the scene - a room goes cold, a young boy feels an ‘evil presence’, he ends up with deep bloody scratch marks on his arm. Sound familiar? Next, in a twist from the ‘blood oozing from the walls’ scenario, we hear that water, (or a water-like sticky substance) starts to fall from the ceiling. That’s right, it is raining indoors! (The house has no running water on that side of the house and it's not raining outside so obvious explanations are soon dismissed). There’s a nice supernatural twist when the ‘water’ starts to ‘fall’ upwards from the floor and then even move sideways. In the crescendo to the story (which always neatly happens after the last ad break) we have the classic scene of the priest coming in to perform an exorcism on the poor possessed guy. This is turned almost comical by the fact that as the priest shouts out lines from the bible, the water starts to be directed only at him. It’s a cross between the exorcist and a clown routine. The drenched priest’s frantic biblical exhortations somehow manage to convince the evil ‘Coco the Clown’ spirit to go and bother someone else and presumably (though they didn’t dramatise this bit) someone starts mopping up.

What makes the story more fascinating is that all this happened in front of a few people, and the other witnesses confirm these fantastical events from their own perspective. It did cross my mind that perhaps the people acting out the stories in the reconstructions were not the only actors on the show. What if the ‘witnesses’ were actors too and the stories were just concocted by script writers?

The previous episode seemed to rule this out; this story was all about a UFO sighting seen by many residents of a small American town as well as by the police force. Interestingly these hardened, ‘seen it all before’ officers opted to use their cell phones to report back the strange lights they were seeing rather than the intercom because they didn’t want their fantastical testimonies to be recorded. Once again, here was the classic film scene, this time from Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ The first police car sent to investigate the huge light emitting object appearing in the sky is suddenly robbed of all electrics: engine, lights, radio, everything went dead. If you have seen the film you’ll remember that Richard Dreyfus has exactly the same experience.

In the middle of all this good fun I was tripped up by the description by one of the officers of the lights and how they moved. It took me back my UFO experience in Colwyn Bay in the late seventies. Click here if you want to read all about my own paranormal witness and, if you like a good story, check out the series on TV. It’s a lot of fun and occasionally quite creepy; what more could you ask for?