The Ghost of Christmas Tech Anxieties - Sara Clemens and Stu Horvath fill in, with guest Adam Allsuch Boardman
Dec 22, 2025
The British tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas came about during the Victorian era's rapid industrialization and social change, a time that also saw the rise of Spiritualism, a religion organized around mediumship and contacting the dead. Curiously, sightings of UFOs not only began in the wake of massive technological and societal advances in the 1940s, but they also share many characteristics of encounters with ghosts. We asked author and illustrator Adam Allsuch Boardman to chat with us about how both seemingly supernatural phenomena also embody many people's anxieties around the new technology of their day, and wonder about the ways in which the "unexplained" might manifest in the 21st century.
