The X-Files Nearly Became All About Ghosts

It’s admittedly weird to think about X-Files heroes Mulder and Scully chasing down ghosts as much as they do aliens or government conspiracies. However, that’s exactly what happened in “Shadows,” an episode where an investigation into some mysterious dead bodies takes an unexpected turn into the paranormal. Pretty soon, our favorite FBI agents are dealing with the vengeful ghost of a dead man, realizing all too late how difficult it is to stop a force that you can’t even see.

This story came to us courtesy of fan-favorite X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, but it wasn’t their idea to write a ghost episode. The two later described how the show was getting notes from 20th Century Fox about wanting more episodes where Mulder and Scully helped people, and one unnamed executive suggested that, as Wong put it, “We should do a poltergeist show!” This led to “Shadows,” a relatively formulaic episode in which Mulder and Scully try to help out someone who might just have her own helpful ghost.

Interestingly, while these two X-Files writers were generally fans of watching ghost stories, they weren’t too happy about having to write one. They liked the idea of using this new show to tell really strange stories and primarily made this episode too, as Morgan said, “get them [the Fox executives] off our back.” He knew that despite his own annoyance at the request, he had to keep the executives happy: “We wanted to placate the network and we didn’t want to just blow them off.”

While this veteran X-Files duo gave it the old college try, neither of them was actually happy with the ghost episode they wrote. Morgan noted that “It was just a little too ordinary, like you have seen it before,” though he ruefully noted that this was “exactly what the network wanted at the time.” Wong, meanwhile, called this simply an “average episode” and later said that “it was a mistake” to listen to the executive’s suggestion because the final episode wasn’t “successful.”

Not everyone who worked on this episode agreed with that assessment, though. Director Michael Katleman enjoyed how the ghost story gave him the freedom to explore what he called the “psychological dilemma” of the narrative. Showrunner Chris Carter, meanwhile, called it “a really solid episode” and insisted that it was “very popular,” though popular media outlets Entertainment Weekly retroactively gave the episode a C+, calling it “exceedingly awkward.”

Obviously, The X-Files didn’t end up becoming all about ghosts, but the series still found a few more opportunities to have Mulder and Scully run into spooks and specters. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the relatively lighthearted season 6 episode “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas,” which has two residents of a haunted house trying to fatally prank the agents who have come to investigate the residence.

Overall, though, actual ghosts appearing in the series was a truly rare occurrence, likely because the show was “haunted” by something scarier than a specter: the memory of the awful season 1 episode “Shadows.”