The 1968 East Anglia.

Professor Parkins must have 1968, East Anglia.

Professor Parkins must have slept soundly for an hour or more

when a sudden clatter shook him up in a most unwelcome manner.

He turned over sharply and with his eyes open lay breathlessly listening. There had been a movement he was short in the

empty bed on the opposite side of the room.

I can figure to myself something of the professor's bewilderment and horror,

for I have in a dream 30 years back seen the same thing happen.

But you will hardly perhaps imagine how dreadful it was to him to see a figure suddenly

sit up in what he had known was an empty bed.

Parkins was out of his bed in one bound and made a dash towards the window where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he had propped up his screen.

This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty

bed with sudden smooth motion slipped from the bed and took up a position

without spread arms between the two beds and in front of the door.

Parkins watched on in horrid perplexity.

By the late 60s television was as popular as cinema and the ghost story adapted

by moving from the big screen to the small screen. In 1968 the BBC made a TV adaptation of a classic MR James ghost story which aired on Christmas Eve.

This sparked a new television craze and a whole series of ghost stories that would play every Christmas

for the next 10 years. What began a simple adaptations of classic literature evolved into new stories

set in the modern world, ones that mixed science with the paranormal.

With the restrictions that came from making television,

these ghost stories had to rely on ideas, on suspense, stories that

...