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Aveek Bhattacharya argues that Andy Burnham is Labour's Boris Johnson: "The two men share a tendency to be led by instinct over doctrine, a talent for building coalitions, and a rare capacity to resonate emotionally with an audience. They also share a common vulnerability: a reluctance to bring their own side bad news. Both are men for the big picture rather than nitty-gritty details, happiest channeling grievance and hope into a broad political story."

A disproportionate number of children and young people growing up in care in Scotland are dying prematurely, Yet, despite Scottish government policy, almost two-thirds of such deaths over the last five years have not been reviewed, reports Karin Goodwin.

"If I can get 15 minutes with parents and policymakers, the argument becomes much more nuanced. Parents actually breathe a sigh of relief. They can make all the decisions they want to about how tech-free or tech-full they want to be, based on their values and what they want for their family – but they don’t have to make it with this threat that it's going to lead to horrible outcomes for their children." Amelia Gentleman interviews the psychologist Candice Odgers, who is a sceptic on social media bans for teenagers.

Alan Lester looks at the politics behind arguments about the teaching of the history of the British Empire in schools. 

Ferdinand Mount writes about M.R. James, ghosts and sex.

"As the narrator lies on the doctor’s couch, revealing her thoughts in a candid, unguarded manner, a harrowing picture begins to emerge. We learn how every aspect of her life has been dictated by men, from her upbringing to her choices of husbands and the nature of their marriages to the control of her physical and mental health." JacquiWine says Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Easter is the best novel she has read this year.

Secret Shropshire: The ghost of Copper Hole

Another tale from the BBC's Secret Shropshire series. This time it's the ghost of Copper Hole:

Richard Tisdale unravels the mystery of the Church Stretton ghost story that made global headlines.

In1874 the glowing white spectre of a woman who’d vanished off the face of the earth caused mass hysteria in the south Shropshire town. It’s a ghost story that has reverberated through the centuries and one that will never be laid to rest.

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Bee Boileau, Lucas Conwell ans Peter Levell find that Help to Buy schemes don't help the people who most need it: "The affordability gains from the equity loan schemes were concentrated among higher-income individuals. Since these individuals would normally be expected to be able to save for a minimum deposit quite quickly even without Help to Buy, it is likely that these schemes accelerated their first home purchase by a few years rather than making the difference between becoming a homeowner or not in the longer term."

"Rebekah Pierre, deputy director of the charity Article 39, said ... posters advertising payments of 'up to £932 per week per child' 'stopped me in my tracks' when she encountered them in a local shopping centre." Joanne Parkes on criticism of a fostering recruitment campaign by Croydon Council, arguing that its messaging risks reducing children in care to a "price tag".

Emma John reports that some researchers say that the common framing of ADHD as a characteristic for success can be unhelpful for those who are struggling.

James Cracknell says that AI is being used to undermine real local journalism: "North London News features stories about Enfield and Barnet and other boroughs that are put together by AI bots using existing stories published on other websites, including our own. This is bad enough – but what's worse is that they are also adding fake quotes, fake people (including fake councillors), fake organisations and fake facts into these stories as well. Whatever AI system they are using, it is massively flawed."

"Several startling passages of dialogue have sent me scrolling through the week’s listings to unveil an author. Katie Hims can nail a character through their choice of confectionery: of course, the trad Jim Lloyd would go for wine gums. Nick Warburton scripted a bonkers visit by a character obsessed with train timetables and pebbles, then cleverly had one of the most stolid residents complain that the incomer was a bore." Susannah Clapp praises The Archers scriptwriters.

"In Britain hauntings occur in ancient manor houses, old inns, and Gothic asylums – places whose very age makes them groan and creak, where shadows sit deep, and which are scarred by the lingering imprint of lives lived and lost. And yet arguably the most famous British ghost story of the 20th century took place somewhere quite different: in a humble council house, only half a century old, in Enfield, north London." Ray Newman considers the haunting of social housing.

"Haunted" Devon swingers club investigated by ghost hunters after "eerie" events

DevonLive wins today's Headline of the Day Award. The judges remarked that if the sub writing this headline is that fond of scare quotes – and the story below is even worse – they should get a job at BBC News.

And after reading:

A Plymouth adult entertainment venue, housed in a former bank, has become the focus of a chilling paranormal investigation. The "alternative" establishment, which features a well-appointed bar and a bondage "dungeon", is reported to have a "horrible" atmosphere in certain areas, a sensation that has intensified since recent renovation work commenced.

they suggested the owners move the bondage dungeon into one of the areas with a horrible atmosphere and charge extra.

Christopher Frayling on the making of The Innocents (1961)

The Innocents, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw, is a wonderful film, and this documentary is worthy of it.

You don't see many of them here, but it's rightly been said that even monochrome behind-the scenes photographs of The Innocents are terrifying.

"The horrible ghost up on Nevill Holt hill"

The Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail for Thursday 19 August 1954 has a report on a benign ghost to be found at the Manor House in Medbourne.

In those days the house belonged to a Mrs Beadon, who tells the paper she has seen the ghost on quite a number of occasions but has never resented his presence because he is a "perfectly good-tempered old man".

She then added:

"Not like the horrible ghost up on Nevill Holt hill, who makes the village people scared to walk up there after dark."

Nevill Holt Hall, you may remember, is now accepted by most scholars as the chief inspiration for Bonkers Hall, though I don't recall the old boy reporting any hauntings there. Come to think of it, he never mentions Bonkers Hall being on a hill either.

So I wonder if the ghost was really the headmaster of the notoriously abusive prep school at Nevil Holt manufacturing a haunting to keep prying eyes away, like a Scooby-Doo villain.

Llyn Dulyn: The Ghosts of the Black Lake (Nationwide, 1973)

Another Fortean report from Nationwide, the BBC early-evening magazine programme that offered an unrivalled portrait of Britain in the Seventies:

Llyn Dulyn ("Black Lake" in Welsh) lies nestled in the Carneddau range of mountains in Snowdonia. 

A quiet, eerie place, it’s steeped not only in an ancient folklore of evil spirits and witches, but also a more modern variety of ghost story. It was the site of multiple airplane crashes during WWII, and became infamous across North Wales. 

In this clip, the locals speak in hushed tones to reporter John Swinfield of collecting debris from the plane wrecks, catching strange-looking fish and hearing disembodied voices calling out to them.

This report was broadcast on 17 October 1973.

Has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

I've given up writing "why oh why oh why" posts about the decline of Bonfire Night and the rise of Halloween.

In part this is because, while it's rather fun to play the old fogey when you're young, it's less fun when your older. You start to fear that you really are an old fogey.

But it's also because we British seem to have found a way to adapt the reimported American Halloween so it's more to our liking. So there's lots of M.R. James but very little Casper the Friendly Ghost.

For myself, I never miss a chance to post a rendition of Carl Orff's Trees and Flowers that sounds, as I always say, like something from the soundtrack of a lost folk horror classic.

But as Halloween is behind us, we can be a little more analytical about things that go bump in the night.

In the current London Review of Books, Jon Day reviews, alongside another volume, How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines.

Baines, says Day, identifies the writer Horace Walpole as the father of our modern idea of a haunted house through Stawberry Hill, "his kitschily Gothic Twickenham retreat":

Before Walpole, ghosts in English literature tended to haunt people, or generic geographic locations: crossroads, bridges, graveyards. After him, they came inside, haunting domestic spaces.

And there were socio-economic forces behind the rise of the haunted house too:

Baines’s central argument is that the rise of the haunted house in the popular imagination coincided with the emergence of the modern home as a physical and psychic reality: a building designed specifically as a dwelling, separate from farm or workplace, where a single nuclear family lived together in isolation from the rest of society. This led to a turning inward of domestic experience that is, as many historians have argued, reflected across culture more broadly. ...

Most ghosts, in the UK and America at least, are still domestically coded. Gruesome ghosts and body horror are rare. Instead there are female spectres who walk the same paths night after night searching for lost loves, or dead children who peer unnervingly through windows. Poltergeists are a relatively recent addition to the haunted house pantheon, only really gaining ground in the second half of the 20th century (and exploding in popularity after The Exorcist was released in 1973). 

Unlike fully embodied ghosts, which tend to favour grander backdrops, they often attach themselves to "dysfunctional, disenfranchised or otherwise unhappy families", Baines writes, so that parapsychic researchers and ghost historians sometimes call them "council house ghosts". 

This attachment might be exacerbated by the presence in the home of a "young, emotionally volatile female family member" – as with the Enfield Poltergeist, the haunting of a family with two young daughters in London between 1977 and 1979 – to whom such ghosts might be attracted (or who might themselves be responsible for the reported hauntings). 

But as Baines sees it, lack of ownership is also a significant factor in ‘purported haunted house cases, with people living in borrowed or rented houses tending not to properly “bond” with their place of residence, causing them to feel perpetually ill at ease’. If you’re more likely to be haunted if you rent than if you own, has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

There's more about How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines on the Profile Books website.

Secret Shropshire: Wild Edric and the Seven Whistlers

Is there anywhere spookier in Shropshire than the Stiperstones?

This short programme in the BBC's Secret Shropshire series tells you about the Devil's Chair, the Seven Whistlers and Wild Edric.

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"For 25 years, governments have been promoting executive elected mayors in English local government, an enthusiasm fully endorsed by the current government in a white paper in 2024 and bill in 2025. Existing legislation allows central government to transfer to these mayors all the functions of local councils, subject only to scrutiny arrangements which involve no more than a power to ask the mayor politely to think again. It empowers central government to turn all elected councils into functionless talking shops, and to create mayors who are local kings." David Howarth takes aim at Labour's demolition of local government.

Alison Bennett welcomes three-year financial settlements for children’s hospices, but warns that they will not resolve the sector's funding crisis.

Will Hurst reports that Labour ministers repeatedly overruling official advice that buildings should be listed: "In almost every one of the 10 cases of rejection, the site in question was subject to development proposals, raising the question of whether the government’s drive to remove the 'blockers; to economic growth is now imperilling England’s heritage."

"The figure of the 'girl-boy' – a girl masquerading in boys' attire – was a pervasive and evocative figure within late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. My sweep of digitised newspaper repositories has unearthed at least 51 reported cases of 'girls' dressing as 'boys' between 1867 and 1919 in the British Isles alone. These stories were widely circulated, picked up by both national and regional papers, and often republished with increasingly sensational details that lent them a larger-than-life quality." Hannah Stovin on her research into youth cross-dressing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

"The first time I saw a Mirror Scare was in Robert Hamer’s segment of the Ealing portmanteau chiller Dead of Night (1945), in which a haunted mirror reflects not its actual surroundings, but a murder scene from the past. Roman Polanski also makes terrifying use of the effect in Repulsion, when Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe mirror fleetingly reflects someone who isn’t there. But nowadays the Mirror Scare is just another 'Boo!' device; there’s even a YouTube supercut." Anne Billson explains how to film a ghost story.

Lynne About Loughborough goes for an autumn walk in the town's Outwoods.

Nationwide from 1970: A haunted Sheffield nightclub

If you want a portrait of Britain in the Seventies, you can't beat Nationwide. This was a news magazine programme shown every weekday evening after the six o'clock news. It began with news from your region and then went national to tackle both serious and lighter subjects.

The regional presenters featured in the national segment too, and people of my generation will still recall nanes like Mike Neville in Newcastle, Bruce Parker in Southampton and Ian Masters in Norwich. And I think they were all men – very Seventies.

Nationwide covered the three-day week, the drought, the Silver Jubilee and so on through the decade. It also covered the rise of both consumerism and environmentalism.

And the programme had a fondness for supernatural stories like this one, which also gives you a picture of Sheffield people in 1970.

In 1982 David Dimbleby took over from Michael Barratt as the programme's main host, and his pomposity killed it off. But naybe something as Seventies as Nationwide was always going to struggle in the new decade.

Wits in Felixstowe: The genesis of Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad

Filmed at King's College, Cambridge, and on the Suffolk coast, Wits in Felixstowe looks at the genesis, influences and setting of M.R. James's famous story Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.

Writer and presenter Robert Lloyd Parry takes a fresh look at James’s character. He finds, behind the academic and bibliophile, a man surrounded by diverse and intriguing friends: the millionaire Liberal Felix Cobbold, the prolific essayist Arthur Benson and the tragic publisher, poet and Ripper suspect J.K. Stephen.

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"Humiliation is not 'merely' symbolic. It is an immoral act that has serious, long-lasting consequences. The effect of it is the destruction of our status claims. Even the most desperate among us try to present themselves with a certain amount of dignity. Humiliation removes that. It also isolates us from other  people, makes us feel more alone, and leaves a deep and lasting anger." Toby Buckle argues that humiliation has moved to the center of the reactionary project under Donald Trump.

Nick Cohen on the right's abandonment of law and order: "Conservatives used to support the forces of law and order. Now they equivocate. They treat the police and courts as the coercive arm of the liberal elite – just as leftists once viewed them as the coercive arm of the capitalist class."

"Places where children commonly used to play, such as streets and local neighbourhoods, have been transformed into car-only spaces where traffic and parking take priority. Likewise, city spaces frequently 'design out' children by prohibiting skateboarding, ball games and other kinds of play." Michael Martin looks at ways of giving children the freedom to play all across cities, not just in playgrounds.

Will Tavlin explains the economics of Netflix: "For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theater seats. "

" The last hostile invasion of mainland Britain took place in south-west Wales on 22 February 1797. The French revolutionary force, led by an Irish-American colonel, William Tate, were captured two days later. The initial plan had been a three-pronged attempt to liberate Ireland but various misadventures meant that the landing of a rump force in Pembrokeshire, planned as a distraction, was all there was to be – a disconsolate arrival on the wrong island." Gillian Darley visits Fishguard to see a locally produced tapestry that records this failed invasion.

Jamie Evans remembers the ghost photographs that frightened him to his core as a boy, but also imparted a lifelong love of horror.

A walk across the fields to the new Braybrooke Beer Co. taproom

A few years ago the Braybrooke Beer Co. set up a brewery at a farm outside the Northamptonshire village of that name to produce lager. The company was formed with the London market in mind, but you can buy their beers at the Beerhouse in Market Harborough and no doubt it has other outlets beyond the capital.

They have just opened a taproom at the brewery, and there is a surfaced path leading to it from the Brampton Valley Way - the old Market Harborough to Northampton railway. On Friday, I set out to walk that path.

I was surprised there was no signpost at the turn off from the Brampton Valley Way, and I wasn't convinced at first that I was going the right way. But if you leave the Way by a few muddy steps and set off diagonally across a field - see the photo above - you're doing fine.

Cross the bridge, and you will find a surfaced path - suitable for wheels as well as boots - and a pleasant landscape.

When you cross the River Jordan, on its way to flood Little Bowden and then join the Welland by Market Harborough railway station, then you are almost there.

And at the business end of the path, there is a sign.

There are also signs along the way for horses, which are very intelligent in this part of Northamptonshire and value politeness.

Finally, though I didn't manage to photograph the start of the new path or the taproom itself, I did capture this disturbing image.

My theory is that these are the ghosts of Iron Age warriors, disturbed by an archaeological dig that all the locals advised against.

As seen on TV: Charles Dickens's short story The Signal-Man

After five M.R. James adaptations, in 1976 the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas turned to Dickens and an unforgettable version of The Signal-Man.

This story is the subject of a good episode of the podcast Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! Though it's only 10 or 11 pages long, Dominic Gerrard and John Bowen find it inexhaustible.

You can read it for yourself on Project Gutenberg. And for more on premotions, I strongly recommend Sam Knight's The Premonitions Bureau.

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Madeleine Davies reports on the Makin Review of the Church of England's response to the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth: "Among the conclusions reached by Dr Elly Hanson, the clinical psychologist whose psychological analysis of Smyth is appended to the review, is that 'the beliefs and values of the Conservative Evangelical community in which John Smyth operated are critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims into it, how it went on for so long, and how he evaded justice.'"

"Though Farage has been forced to justify his past praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, there are much deeper questions beyond ideological support that he has to answer about his Kremlin connections, especially given the current war in Ukraine." Peter Jukes lists five questions journalists should ask the Reform UK leader.

Yvonne Jewkes argues that conditions in most prisons mean rehabilitation is impossible.

"Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside." Stephanie H. Murray on the wonder of play streets.

Pamela Hutchinson explains why I Know Where I'm Going is her feelgood film: "Powell had been besotted with the Scottish islands ever since making The Edge of the World in 1937, and he shares that passion here – it’s a film that will make you fall head over heels in love with its landscape."

"Good antiquarian ghost stories emerge from an author’s unsettling experience of dwelling with and delving deeply into the tangled roots of the past." Francis Young reviews The Lammas Ghosts: Fifteen Norfolk Ghost Stories by Barendina Smedley.

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Linsey McGoey listened to Trump voters and suggests the Democrats will have to do the same if they are to win power again.

"The language of social justice - 'wokeness' if you will - is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite." Kenan Malik reads We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi.

Pam Jarvis fears many multi-academy trusts are putting copious amounts of public money into the pockets of non-teaching managers while giving the nation’s children less quality for more funding.

Alfie Steer asks if Caroline Lucas was really Britain's first Green MP: "One other former MP could plausibly claim this historic title: Cynog Dafis, Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire from 1992 to 2000. The reasons why reveal a unique, and largely forgotten moment in Welsh and British, political history."

"Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive." Russell Moul on why we believe in ghosts.

"At St Mary de Castro ... the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves." Iain Sharpe goes back to Leicester.

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"Liberal democracy depends upon a sense of shared citizenship, a relatively stable society and an inclusive economy without too great a gap between rich and poor." William Wallace puts his finger on an important truth: economic inequality is a barrier to liberal politics.

Robert Saunderson on what the Conservatives must do if they are to recover from July's rout: "The party must resist three fantasies that have loomed too large since the election: that defeat was less severe than at first believed; that its failures in office were the fault of traitors or non-believers; and that there are easy solutions to the dilemmas that now confront it."

Meg Gain listened to Sayeeda Warsi speak about the tendency to a growing acceptance of racism and Islamophobia at the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival.

"Seeking to silence him once and for all, Jersey’s government also slapped Syvret with a superinjunction in 2012 – an action undertaken via a secret court proceeding, which took place without his knowledge, and forbade him from speaking about the four individuals he had named." Stuart Syvret describes how he was forced out of Jersey for doing his job as a senator.

"In one of the Rolling Stones’ most crucial songs, Sympathy for the Devil, it’s not Keith Richards’ guitar that defines the melody or propels the piece. It’s a series of stark piano chords, struck by a studio musician, that give the piece its earth-shaking power." Jim Farber on the genius of the pianist Nicky Hopkins.

Shane McCorristine asks why ghosts wear clothes or white sheets instead of appearing in the nude.

Zoinks! It's a book about the spooky folklore behind Scooby-Doo

Mark Norman, creator of The Folklore Podcast, talks on American TV about his book Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby-Doo.

Welcome to The Shropshire Witches Podcast

Good news for lovers of the Shropshire supernatural: the first edition of The Shropshire Witches Podcast has gone live. 

Its writers and presenters, Alix Chidley-Uttley and Amy Boucher, warn us to expect witches, folklore, hauntings and all things with a superstitious and murderous history.

The first episode features severed penises, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General and a misogynistic king.