Ghost Census

The council has a problem with its records. Hundreds of residents who died were never properly removed from the database. It is untidy, inconvenient and precisely the sort of issue an automated cleanup ought to resolve. The system will reconcile the information, correct the discrepancies and restore a satisfactory relationship between the official record and the world outside it.

Unfortunately, the correction appears to be working in the wrong direction. The missing residents begin returning physically. People who should exist only in old files are suddenly available to complicate the situation in person. What looked like an administrative failure becomes something no routine procedure was designed to handle, although that is unlikely to stop anyone looking for the correct form.

For the living, the return of the dead carries questions far beyond database maintenance. An error on a screen is one thing. Someone you have lost is another. Grief, memory and the practical business of living collide with an event that cannot be contained inside the language of a cleanup operation. Being officially present may have consequences nobody imagined when the records were first left unchanged.

The uncomfortable possibility is that the bureaucracy was never merely describing reality. It may have been helping to sustain it. If failing to remove a name helped keep a person in existence, then correcting the record is no longer a neutral act. Somewhere between what the system says and what the community has lived through lies a problem that accuracy alone cannot solve.

Ghost Census is a British supernatural comedy about the extraordinary power of ordinary administration. Forms, databases and unfinished grief meet in a story where putting things right may be the most disruptive thing anyone can do—and the people affected are very much available to complain.