It’s Halloween time once again, and like most people I’m looking for a good scare. To be honest, I’m finding the search harder than ever. Modern television just isn’t cutting it! As a child of the 90s I grew up during the heyday of spooky TV shows–programs like Are You Afraid of the Dark, Eerie Indiana and Goosebumps got my imagination going and my heart racing in my tween and early teen years. But even before those classics there had always been Unsolved Mysteries, a show that I probably shouldn’t have been watching but couldn’t get enough of. Hosted by the inimitable Robert Stack, each week the 80s classic would regale its audience with tales of ghostly appearances, UFO sightings and unsolved murders. Just thinking about Stack’s creepy voice narrating the story of a mysterious kidnapping gives me the shivers.

The murder segments on Unsolved Mysteries are widely regarded as the scariest, mostly because they always ended with ol’ Stack-y explaining that the accused killer had gone missing and could be… anywhere. You could have walked past the killer at the grocery store that day, and not even known it. Maybe they were living a few streets over planning their next murder spree. Who could say? It was usually at that point that the show ended, asking people to call a 1-800 number if they had any info. Meanwhile you got to spend all night awake and terrified because Robert Stack just made you realize that crazed killers look just like everyone else!

The unsolved killings were definitely hair-raising, but my favourite segments by far were the ghost ones. This part of the show was the blueprint for almost every paranormal documentary series that’s on the air today. The people who had experienced a haunting would tell their story while some low-rent actors played it out in reenactments that managed to be deeply cheesy and also completely frightening. Many of them followed the classic young family/old house formula: couple moves into a new home; wife starts hearing strange noises and seeing things fly around while the husband is at work; husband thinks that the wife is “imagining things” and needs to calm down; husband sees shit flying around with his own eyes and calls an exorcist. There were others, of course. Some independent women didn’t need no man to call a demon-dispelling priest. One story that had me spooked for weeks featured a young woman hitching a ride with an unsuspecting driver and asking to be dropped off at the local cemetery. SPOILER ALERT: she’s already dead!

So what’s the deal with this show’s ghoulish choke-hold on my imagination? After trawling for an Unsolved Mysteries box set online I found that I am definitely not the only person who looks back on it with deeply fond (yet even more deeply disturbed) memories. Unsolved Mysteries had the perfect mixture of eeriness and camp; even its most far-fetched segments were presented with such sincerity that you couldn’t help but think they could happen to you. And that 1-800 hotline provided by the show actually did help to solve some of those mysteries! The thrill of witnessing a crime and the pain of being denied the traditional whodunnit ending we’re all so used to means the audience can obsess over the details of a case for days, if not years after. Unsolved Mysteries set a precedent for shows like Paranormal Witness, A Haunting and The Unexplained to continue the tradition of purposefully and deliberately freaking out viewers before bedtime.

So if you’re looking for something scary to watch tonight, why not go to the original? Seek out some episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and see why after 25 years this show still holds up as the creepiest thing you’ll see on TV.