How Radio Shaped The Paranormal From Spirit Boxes To Art Bell

Radio was my first love and the industry I worked in for most of my adult, which makes today - World Radio Day - a special day each year. To celebrate, I wanted to explore the link between radio and my other life-long passion, the paranormal.

From ghost hunting technology to late-night talk shows that fuel belief in the unexplained, the airwaves have shaped how we perceive and engage with the supernatural. Here are some of the key ways radio has influenced the paranormal world.

The spirit box is a popular ghost hunting gadget that owes its existence to radio. A spirit box rapidly scans AM or FM frequencies, creating a continuous stream of white noise and bursts of radio broadcasts. Paranormal investigators believe that spirits can manipulate these sounds to form words and phrases, offering real-time communication with the other side. As a radio geek, I find it hard to focus on the sounds crackling through a spirit box as I'm constantly trying to identify the radio stations based on my rough knowledge of station frequencies as the device loops through the spectrum. It's often easy to pick out the burst of an ad from a local radio station, a fragment of a speech-based programme on Radio 4, and easiest of all, the sound of orchestral music from Classic FM around the 100 MHz mark. Those less bound by radio familiarity claim to have captured intelligent responses from unseen entities.

Before the spirit box became mainstream, Italian researcher Marcello Bacci was at the forefront of radio-based spirit communication. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bacci conducted experiments in which he tuned an old vacuum tube radio to static, claiming that voices from the dead would break through. Unlike standard EVP recordings, which require playback analysis, Bacci's method allowed for real-time conversations with spirits. His audience, which often included grieving families, believed they heard their deceased loved ones speaking through his radio.

No discussion of paranormal radio would be complete without mentioning Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM. Launched in the United States in the 1980s, Art's late-night radio show became the go-to platform for discussions on UFOs, ghosts, conspiracy theories, and all things strange. The programme played a major role in bringing fringe paranormal topics into the mainstream, giving airtime to everything from alien abductions to government cover-ups.

Following in the footsteps of Coast to Coast AM, British broadcaster Howard Hughes carved out his own niche in paranormal radio with The Unexplained. Since its launch in 2006, the show has explored ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and other supernatural topics. The weekly show covered off the biggest stories from the paranormal world from the last seven days, and featured interviews with guests about their paranormal experiences or research. His passing in November 2024 marked the loss of a key figure in paranormal broadcasting, but his legacy lives on in the countless interviews and discussions he hosted with researchers and experiencers.