28 Days Haunted's Very Real Impact On The Paranormal World

Netflix's paranormal reality series '28 Days Haunted' landed on the streaming platform to mixed reviews in October. Of course, this was perfect timing for Halloween and meant that the show was exposed to Netflix's approximately 200 million subscribers worldwide.

This subscriber base is made up of people who wouldn't normally watch paranormal shows, perhaps they never had before. Finding '28 Days Haunted' promoted on a famous Netflix rotating carousel on their television in the run up to Halloween meant that the ghost hunting genre had found a whole new audience.

This new audience became apparent very quickly online. Here at Higgypop HQ we ourselves noticed an unprecedented uplift in people visiting our website on very specific pages. The content wasn't directly linked to the show, but it related to topics discussed in the show such a demonology, scrying and Ed and Lorraine Warren, the late husband-and-wife paranormal team who proposed the theory of the "28 day cycle," which gave the show its name.

We also saw a sharp rise in people landing on our site in order to find out more about the ghost hunting equipment they'd seen featured in the series, including REM-Pods and spirit boxes. This rise in interest began on the day the series premiered, October 21.

The trend wasn't just something we noticed at Higgypop.com, the impact of the series has been much more wide reaching.

According to data on global search trends from Google, many of the paranormal methods and topics mentioned specifically in '28 Days Haunted' spiked in interest from October 21. The chart below shows this increase.

The lines on the chart indicate trends in search interest rather than any specific or relative volumes of queries, but it's clear to see an uplift for each term that coincides with the start of the series.

The purple line above indicates search volume for the term 'spirit box', orange tracks the volume of searches for 'Ed and Lorraine Warren', blue relates to 'REM-Pod', red to 'demonology', and yellow represents searches for 'God helmet'. Historically, there has been no such spike in any of these search terms at any point over the last five years, including previous Halloween periods.

It's true that the series divided viewers who are familiar with other paranormal shows, but the attention the series got is sure to have sent a new audience our way, which is beneficial to all of us in the paranormal community. The bigger the community, the more interest there will be from production companies and television networks looking to make new shows, and the more likely locations will be to allow teams into investigate.

This new audience may also now explore the huge collection of content, shows and teams that already exist around the world and are just waiting to be discovered by a global audience.