“It was during the Laxham Rectory haunting back in 1999 that I first noticed it – I was sat on the crapper when this hideous black shadow thing burst out of the airing cupboard and lunged towards me! I was terrified, but then I looked down and realised that I had the biggest erection I’d ever seen,” explains top TV ghost hunter Maurice Stretcher, one of the stars of popular late night television series High Spirits. “The spectre had obviously seen my monster hard on as well, and began to back off! Seeing its fear, I leapt up from the toilet and shuffled toward the thing, my trousers still around my ankles, firmly grasping my huge member in both hands and brandishing it at the ectoplasmic menace! I swear I could feel the power coursing though my penis – I’m sure it was giving off an ethereal glow!” With the apparition now backed into a corner of the bathroom, Stretcher suddenly felt the urge to masturbate. “It was as if some unearthly power was guiding my hands! I was so excited by now that it only took a couple of good tugs to set it off,” he recounts. “I shot my load directly toward the thing – it burst into flame and vanished as my jism hit it!” The banishing of the airing cupboard apparition proved an exhilarating experience for the forty nine year old former carpet salesman – in more ways than one. “I knew that I need fear no evil as I gripped that great stalk on,” he confesses. “And, to be honest, I was also relieved – I hadn’t been able to get past half-mast for years! I felt reinvigorated!” However, Stretcher quickly found that he wasn’t able to repeat his Laxham feat on demand. “It seemed that I could only get it up if I was in the grip of terror – most specifically, terror induced by the presence of supernatural evil,” he reveals. “It was clear that I had been given this gift for a single purpose – the destruction of evil!” Consequently, Stretcher (whose autobiography Scream and Cream Again is soon to be filmed with David Hasselhoff), has spent his time vanquishing a variety of supernatural threats, invariably accompanied by a bevy of attractive female assistants: “I usually have a few minutes of erection left after each exorcism,” he confides. “I think I’m allowed some perks!”

Many of these escapades have been captured on video for the High Spirits TV series, most notably the ‘staking’ of ‘Vampire Vera’, a Yorkshire prostitute possessed by the evil spirit of a seventeenth century bloodsucker. “We’d had reports of a crazed creature biting men at a reputedly haunted bus-stop in Barnsley,” he recalls. “My midnight loitering at the bus shelter – disguised with a raincoat and trilby hat – was rewarded when I was confronted by this pasty-faced, rouge-lipped succubus in high heels and a blonde wig! As she lunged for my throat, I felt the chill finger of fear run down my back and a massive stonker stirring in my pants! She took the full force of my roaring horn as It reared up and burst from my flies at the precise moment she jumped on top of me!” The programme’s infrared cameras clearly captured Stretcher and the vampire rolling about on the pavement beneath the shelter, in a desperate life and death struggle. “It was a pretty close call, but I finally managed to get on top,” he says. “She let out this blood-curdling moan and writhed grotesquely as the evil spirit was expelled from her! The jolt of energy as it departed nearly threw me off of her!” A grateful Vera was restored to her former self and was able to resume her normal life. “Instead of being forced to stalk the seedy back streets of Barnsley in search of prey, the poor girl was able to go back to hanging around upmarket hotel bars and lobbys in Harrogate,” says Stretcher. “It is always gratifying to know that you’ve been able to completely transform someone’s life like that!” However, not all of Stretcher’s exorcisms have run as smoothly. In 2001 the ghost hunter was arrested by police as he ran through a children’s playground in Bracknell one evening, naked from the waist down and shaking his huge erection at the full moon. “Those blundering fools prevented me from vanquishing a werewolf which had been frequenting some nearby woods – several young girls had been startled by something large and hairy whilst taking a short cut through there,” he explains. “I had to wait until the next full moon before I could deal with the beast – he emitted a terrible howl as I surprised him from behind, transforming back into his true shape as my ejaculations sprayed his hairy buttocks!” Police later confirmed that they had arrested a vagrant for indecently exposing himself in the woods. He was described as “very hairy”.

But what is the source of Stretcher’s amazing ghost-busting powers? Fellow High Spirits team member Brenda Spadger – the so-called ‘Naked Medium’ who routinely summons sexually troubled spirits by sitting in a pentacle, legs akimbo and wailing orgasmically – believes she has the answer. “It was the shade of porn star John Holmes that guided Maurice’s hands – I felt his presence the first time we met,” she explains. “Later, during a one of my regular psychic sex therapy séances (on the role of spirit guides in premature ejaculation, for what it’s worth), John himself contacted me and explained how he was using Maurice’s wang to channel his spiritual energy against evil spirits! Apparently he wants to atone in some way for his bad deeds here on earth – the drugs, the unprotected sex when he knew he was HIV-positive, making normal guys feel inadequate with his grotesquely out-sized genitalia, all that stuff.” Spadger – who has her clothes torn off and breasts fondled by an amourous spirit before conducting a nude exorcism at least once per edition of High Spirits – denies accusations that the TV series simply uses supernatural investigation as an excuse for outright pornography. “Sex and the supernatural are intimately linked – everybody knows that most black magic rituals involve nude women being tied to altars and menaced by semi-naked muscular high priests brandishing big choppers,” contends the sultry thirty-eight year old, who had first hand experience of this aspect of spiritualism from an early age. “From the age of eight I was sexually abused by my dead Grandfather’s ghost! It was only in my teens, when I first found my spiritualist powers aroused, that I the courage to exorcise him from my life.” Indeed, Spadger chronicles her spiritual awakening, her subsequent terrifying encounters with such supernatural menaces as the ‘Phantom Penis of Lichfield’ and the incredible story of her otherworldly love affair in the best-selling I Married a Poltergeist, which also tells of her subsequent divorce following a lesbian affair with a banshee. “My husband took it very badly – throwing furniture and crockery around the house. He even made the microwave explode,” she recalls. “Still, all that pent-up violence was precisely why I sought the tender caresses of a banshee. Mind you, her constant wailing got on my bloody tits so I ditched her as well!” Spadger has consistently poured scorn on press speculation of an affair with Stretcher, claiming that even she would find his prodigious powers too much to handle. High Spirits can be seen every Tuesday at 10pm on Firmament TV.