Lost 1972 TV report on a squash-playing RAF ghost found – and the medium got everything wrong
A Norfolk writer dug up long-lost BBC footage about a haunted RAF squash court. The ghosts' names, it turns out, belonged to people who never existed.
Ghost hunters rarely find what they’re looking for. Writer Paul Lee, from King’s Lynn, has managed it – sort of.
For decades, the former RAF Bircham Newton in Norfolk has been the subject of spooky tales: figures in RAF uniform, and the sound of squash being played on empty courts. Because if you’re going to haunt somewhere for eternity, you may as well keep up your cardio.
The stories hit the big time in 1972 when BBC One’s Nationwide ran a report on “the ghost that likes to play squash”. The BBC no longer had a copy, and many assumed it had been wiped. But Lee tracked it down in the British Film Institute’s archives, on the 6 January 1972 edition, recorded off-air on reel-to-reel tape.
“I was so excited!” he told BBC Sounds’ Secret Norfolk.
The footage includes recordings of unexplained noises on the courts, plus a medium solemnly naming three ghostly airmen. Here’s where it unravels. RAF records weren’t available back then; they are now.
“We can say with certainty that every single detail the medium told us was completely wrong,” said Lee. “The three airmen never existed.”
Lee says he keeps a neutral attitude to ghosts and would like people to be more open-minded – but “maybe more critical”. Whoever’s been playing squash in there, it isn’t them.
