30 oct. 2016

The BBC Halloween Hoax That Traumatized Viewers


After more than 20,000 phone calls, one induced labor, and thousands of angry letters, the UK's Broadcasting Standards Council convened for a hearing. On June 27, 1995, they ruled that the producers of Ghostwatch, a BBC program that aired on Halloween night less than three years earlier, had deliberately set out to “cultivate a sense of menace.” Put another way, the BBC had been found to be complicit in scaring 11 million people senseless.

-mental_floss