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"I'm Not Ready To Give Up The Ghost Yet"
Most Haunted’s Yvette Fielding tells Grahame Kibble-White some of her ghost stories
Yvette Fielding is in a reflective mood. “It’s a peculiar business to be in, you know,” she says, referring to her role as the host of Most Haunted. “And actually, for the first time ever, I questioned what I was doing the other night during an investigation.
“I actually looked into camera and said, ‘I’ve just had a realty check, what the hell are we doing this for”? My knees had buckled. I was so frightened I can’t tell you. I was terrified.”
The last four years have certainly been eventful for the 37-year-old former Blue Peter presenter.
Back in 2002, she and her cameraman husband, Karl Beattie, came up with an idea for an investigative programme that would follow a group of people ghost-hunting at some of Britain’s spookiest locations.
The concept sprang from two sources. Firstly the couple had enjoyed being frightened by the film The Blair Witch Project. Then, one of their Friends told them about a haunted location he’d stayed at on holiday, Michelham Priory, in East Sussex.
“Karl and I sat up till five o’clock in the morning,” she remembers, “saying, ‘there’s something in this. We know enough people between us to just get a pilot going, we’ve got a location to film in. Surely we can sell this’.”
Putting their life savings into creating a pilot, they proceeded on a lengthy and furless traipse around various television channels, trying to sell the new show.
“Everyone just said, ‘Ghost programmes don’t work’.”
Understandably, they began to lose faith in their concept.
“We thought, ‘we’re so wrong. Our judgement is so wrong. Maybe we don’t know television’.”
And then a friend of the couple showed the programme to a commissioner at LIVINGtv, who immediately saw its potential.
Most Haunted will clock up its 100th episode tonight.
To celebrate their centenary, Yvette and Karl – who has long since graduated to a role in front of the camera – are returning to Michelham Priory, the medieval monetary from Most Haunted’s first-ever edition.
She says: “Well, me and Karl had to spend the night before the investigation there. We lasted eight minutes. And we both fled screaming.”
Why? “Just furniture moving,” she replies, matter-of-factly.
“There’s nothing worse than when you’re in a dark place, you can’t see your hand in front of your face, you know it’s haunted and you hear dragging or scratching.”
Last year, Most Haunted’s critics – and there’s plenty of them – rubbed their hands in glee when the who’s national star, psychic Derek Acorah, left the series to front his own programme, Ghost Towns.
Yvette admits LIVINGtv was worried about this development
“They were saying, ‘Oh no, the show’s about mediums and Derek is quite strong.’
“But we kept telling them, ‘this show is not, and never will be, about a medium. It’s about a group of people who are investigating the paranormal. Everyone has a role to play, it’s not about one star’. Even then they were still, ‘will it work?’, but it absolutely has.”
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