My daughter is currently reading my copy. I’ll have to get an update from her on that particular ghost…
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Sure, it’s just some rubber tentacles and a car headlight and looks very shonky now, but this was pure behind-the-cushion tv!
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I’m fascinated by the hysteria about rabies.
All the ‘if you touch a foreign animal YOU WILL DIE’ stuff. And then it turns out there’s been like a dozen cases of rabies in Europe since 1900 or something daft.
Maybe that’s all down to nobody touching foreign dogs.
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Oddly I was reading about this just last night - it was a tabloid silly season filler favourite for years but ramped up after… go, on, you’ll never guess… yep, Britain joining the EEC, which alongside the increase in European package holidays and the influence of things like James Herbert’s The Rats led to an increase in pulpy novels about stray dogs being picked up by our new friends abroad and smuggled back to Britain whereupon they turn feral. It was one of the reasons always floated around the Channel Tunnel too, that it would give carte blanche for rabid killers to enter the country unnoticed, however that would have worked.
FWIW the last human case acquired in the UK* was in 1902, the last dog to die of it outside quarantine was in 1970, and there have been 26 cases reported in the UK since WWII all contracted abroad and the vast majority of those from dogs in the Indian sub-continent.
(* apart from bats, which harbour a different variant of rabies from which someone in Scotland died in 2002)
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+1 for rabies, and also quicksand. Never hear about it these days, but it terrified me
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Ok this is going to sound weird but genuinely don’t think anything scared me when I was a kid. Even Threads I just kind of watched and definitely no sci fi or horror stuff.
Wasn’t at all a brave or hard kid I just don’t think that sort of stuff had an impact.
The only thing I can think of is the anti Heroin adverts and especially the giant billboard posters (1980s), I’m pretty sure they did a decent job of putting me off heroin.
First thing: I love that miniseries, I remember watching it maybe last year or the year before early on and finding it very proto-Twin Peaks in a way that I don’t feel like has been talked about enough.
But also, I’m also kind of “scarred” by that. But not by having seen it at a young age. My uncle has a weird prankster streak in him and told us, when we were kids, that that exact scene (vampire at the window, tapping, etc.) had happened to my granddad. We later asked my granddad about it and he was like, “Oh yeah, I remember that! Terrifying.” Somehow didn’t question that story at all for a good few years
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Like I wasn’t even that terrified, it was just like “yeah man, a vampire tapping at the window isn’t outside the realms of possibility”
This is actually one of the world building elements of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (which has plenty of hauntology vibes), it’s set in an alt-history Britain where the Stuarts remain on the throne and construct an 18th century Channel Tunnel, which lets wolves cross into England.
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Well, it just goes to show how memory can confound you. I remember this vividly but it clearly wasn’t in the Usborne book of Ghosts, unless they chopped a lot out since the 70s. I remember a whole thing about Borley Rectory as well. I wonder what other book about ghosts I had then 
Both of these are talked about fairly regularly in the podcast and I thought usually in conjunction with that book
Just done a bit of googling, looks like it might be the other Usborne book that @Clang mentioned further up thread which I said I never had, well maybe I did after all! It was nearly fifty years ago, I think I can excuse my poor recollection!
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Yes, thank you! Oddly I remember the picture being more horrific than that, probably made worse by my memory.
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I’ve been watching Noah’s Castle on Youtube, a children’s drama series from 1979 that apparently went out after the Sooty Show. To quote the blurb it’s “set in a time of social and economic collapse where hyper-inflation has lead to food shortages and mass riots”. It’s bleak! It’s got Mike Reid (Runaround now!) and Zammo in it.
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