Ghosts in the Machine
In a week of eerily unseasonal sunshine, our theatrical thrill-seeker Freddie Hutchins goes searching for spooks in theatreland. But perhaps the most convincing of all are to be found offstage?
Where do spirits hide in 2025?
Southampton is a good place to look for ghosts.
At first glance, much of the city looks nondescript in its urban architecture: a predominance of 1960s town planning serving up shopping centres and car parks, with arterial roads connecting to its ferry terminals and massive harbour infrastructure. Traffic roars and cruise ships skulk threateningly on the horizon. So far, so 2025. But nestled in amongst the glass, concrete and tarmac is another city – ancient, unobtrusive and yet undeniably present.
Southampton suffered terribly in the Blitz of 1940, sustaining extensive damage and loss of life. Some scars are still visible today, such as the stark shell of Holyrood Church along from the city’s high street. Everywhere you look, it seems, there are gaps in the fabric of the place; windows into another time. Basking fretfully in outrageously unseasonal hot November sunshine, I sat in the café of the Tudor House and Garden Museum and wondered just how much of my view would have caused a 15th century inhabitant to stop and stare. A lot of it, certainly: I could still see a cruise ship funnel jutting beyond the boundary wall.
Peeling back the layers of a place like Southampton – where medieval timber frames hide behind Georgian facades, where Roman walls lurk beneath Victorian pavements – feels like the perfect metaphor for ghost stories themselves. Because isn’t that what ghosts are, really? Layers of the past refusing to stay buried, insisting on their presence in our modern world?
Tudor House and Garden Museum, Southampton
Ghosts in Fashion
I began my week seeing Conor McPherson's own revival of his haunting play The Weir, playing at The Harold Pinter Theatre with Brendan Gleeson and a shattering performance from Kate Phillips. McPherson's masterpiece, first performed in 1997, understands something fundamental about ghost stories: they're at their most powerful when they're simple, intimate, and rooted in the everyday.
My subsequent pilgrimage to Southampton was by way of – as they say in Eire – my being keen on a bit more of the theatrical ghost hunting. I never saw Danny Robins’ 2:22: A Ghost Story in any of its iterations in the West End. Romping through multiple cast changes from Lily Allen to Cheryl (Cole) and having mounted productions in LA, Melbourne and Dublin, the show is now on a UK tour featuring 2018 Strictly Come Dancing winners Stacey Dooley and Kevin Clifton as the play’s central couple.
And it seems I’m not alone in a predilection for the theatrically supernatural – the genre has exploded in theatres in recent years. Ahead of the launch of Paranormal Activity at the Ambassadors Theatre in December, theatrical chill seekers already have a multiplicity of terrifying treats to look back on, including the recent – and hugely entertaining – Inside No 9 STAGE/FRIGHT and, of course, Robin Herford and Stephen Mallatratt’s iconic adaption of The Woman in Black, terrifying audiences since its first iteration in a theatre bar in Scarborough in Christmas 1987.
But here's the question: in our world of smartphones and Ring door cams, of rational explanation and Google searches, where exactly do ghosts hide? And can they be conjured up in, of all places, a theatre – to an audience of TikTokers and YouTubers?
Inside No. 9 STAGE/FRIGHT
“In our world of smartphones and Ring door cams, where exactly do ghosts hide?”
The Weir: Ghosts in the Countryside
The Weir offers one answer: ghosts hide in the remote places, the rural pubs and windswept Irish countryside where mobile signal fears to tread and the old ways still hold. In Jack's pub, with its turf fire and local regulars, ghost stories feel natural, even necessary. They're entertainment, certainly – a way to impress newcomer Valerie, to assert local knowledge, to pass the time on a dark and stormy evening. But they're also a way of keeping the past alive, of maintaining a connection to the people and events that shaped – and continue to shape – the landscape.
The stories Jack, Jim, and Finbar tell are layered with history. They speak of fairy roads and phantoms on the stairs, of children who died young and lovers who never returned. Each tale tries to outdo the last, until Valerie quietly devastates them all – and us – with her own story of a phone call from her dead daughter, a phone call that couldn't have happened, of a grief so profound it tears a hole between worlds.
McPherson’s masterstroke comes from his understanding that the most compelling ghost stories are the ones we tell ourselves, the ones born from loss and longing. Valerie's daughter isn't haunting anyone – Valerie is haunting herself, unable to let go, desperate for one more moment of connection. In a play full of performative masculine storytelling, her quiet, devastating account of a genuine supernatural experience cuts through. There's no triumphant explanation, no comfortable resolution – simply a mother's grief and a mystery that defies explanation.
Brendan Gleeson in The Weir at The Harold Pinter Theatre, London
2:22: Ghosts in the Suburbs
2:22: A Ghost Story takes the opposite approach. Here, ghosts invade the modern, the renovated, the rational. Jenny and Sam have bought a large house in the suburbs and are in the process of rampantly restoring it: painting, stripping and burning away the old in the creation of the perfect middle-class family home. Except something from the past refuses to be stripped away.
Every night at 2:22 am, Jenny hears footsteps in her baby daughter's room. The beginning of the play sees the audience witness, via baby monitor, her terrifying first encounter with the supernatural presence. Her husband Sam, a rationalist to his core, dismisses her fears as sleep-deprivation and postnatal anxiety. But when the couple invite Sam's old friend Lauren and her new boyfriend Ben for dinner, the evening becomes a battle between belief and scepticism, with Jenny's sanity – and her daughter's safety – hanging in the balance.
2:22 is effective in its weaponisation of modern anxieties. Jenny is a new mother, exhausted and isolated, her concerns dismissed by her tyrannically condescending husband. Is she experiencing genuine supernatural activity, or is she unravelling? Use of jump-scares might be theatrical manipulation, but they're also utterly terrifying in the moment, because they speak to something primal: the fear that we cannot protect our children from threats we cannot see or understand.
“Ghosts aren’t relics of a superstitious past, but something more fundamental – manifestations of our deepest fears and most profound losses.”
2:22: A Ghost Story starring Stacey Dooley and Kevin Clifton
Peeling Back the Layers
Sitting in that Southampton café, surrounded by centuries of accumulated history, I thought about how ghost stories work. Perhaps they’re like excavations: archaeological digs through layers of time and memory. We peel back the present to reveal the past, and sometimes, the past looks back. In 2025, with all our technology and rationalism, we like to think we've banished the supernatural to the realm of entertainment. We watch ghost stories in theatres, read them in books, consume them as content. We're in control, separated by the fourth wall or the screen, safe in our modern world.
But both The Weir and 2:22 suggest otherwise. They propose that ghosts aren't relics of a superstitious past, but something more fundamental – manifestations of our deepest fears and most profound losses. They hide not in remote Irish pubs or Victorian nurseries, but in the gaps in our understanding, in the experiences that defy explanation, in the three in the morning darkness when rationalism fails us. After all, the supernatural works best when it sits right on the edge of the explainable, when we can almost – but not quite – rationalize it away.
McPherson and Robins have both crafted plays that entertain brilliantly – with humour, suspense, and theatrical flair – while also probing something deeper. What is it we're really afraid of when we're afraid of ghosts? Surely not ectoplasm or chainmail rattling. What we fear is the other side, the thought that death might not be an ending but a threshold… and we have no idea what waits beyond it.
Ghosts in the Machine
So where do ghosts hide in 2025? Everywhere and nowhere. In renovated houses and ancient pubs, in our phones and our memories, in the stories we tell and the losses we carry. They hide in the layers of history that underpin our modern world, waiting for us to peel them back. They hide in the darkness at 2:22 am, in the cry of lost children from green graves, in the space between what we know and what we fear.
Southampton taught me that the past is never really past – it's always there, just beneath the surface, waiting to be remembered. And perhaps that's what makes ghost stories so enduringly powerful. They remind us that for all our glass and concrete and technology, we're still the same frightened animals we’ve always been, telling stories in the dark to keep the unknown at bay.
Or possibly to invite it in.
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