Ghoul – ‘a person morbidly interested in death or disaster’ – is such a descriptive word. There are a lot of them about these days; all too many emerged in the aftermath of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley.

In this tragic case, involving a 45-year-old woman who went missing three weeks ago while walking her dog, we have seen the inevitable grisly conclusion of the ghoul mentality. A body found this week in the River Wyre in Lancashire has been identified as that of Nicola Bulley. But even now, the ghouls who have followed this case continue to speculate wildly about what happened.

I’m sure that some of the people who turned up to ‘help’ Lancashire Police – so many that eventually a dispersal order had to be issued, lest they inadvertently destroyed crucial evidence – were sincere in their desire to find her. But plenty were probably there to take selfies. Imagine how this must have made Nicola Bulley’s loved ones feel: the worst thing that will ever happen to you, turned into a TikTok craze.

It has been left to the family of Nicola Bulley to conduct themselves with dignity

The police’s botched investigation didn’t help matters, of course. Even when officers mean well – which, in light of recent revelations about the police, can’t be taken for granted – they come across as hopelessly incompetent. When Lancashire Police complained that social media sleuths were making their job harder, they also confided – for all the world like some blabbermouth down the pub – that the missing woman was ‘struggling’ with issues such as alcohol and the menopause. Talk about throwing petrol on the wildfire of social media; no wonder the sensible-sounding Bob Eastwood – a former chief superintendent at Lancashire Police – told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

‘When I first heard the police had released that, I cringed, but I didn’t say anything…I didn’t know why they had taken those steps.’

There was no end to this finger buffet of frivolity when the Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell tweeted a criticism of Detective Superintendent Rebecca Smith’s appearance at the press conference: ‘Skin tight navy dress, stilettos, poker straightened hair – whatever happened to a cop uniform! Or is she auditioning for Love Island for mid-lifers?’

Andrew Snowden, police commissioner for the force conducting the investigation, retorted that: ‘Superintendent Smith is a detective so doesn’t wear uniform – she also has more on her mind than what a clickbait journalist thinks of her choice of office wear.’

But just in case we thought that this situation couldn’t get any more inappropriate, Lancashire Police replied to a tweet showing Det Supt Smith as a Lego figurine – with a heart emoji.

It has been left to the family of Nicola Bulley to conduct themselves with dignity while dealing with the assorted clowns of police and public alike: ‘You are no longer a missing person – you have been found,’ their ineffably sad statement read after the body had been identified. But what of the monstrous regiments of those whose hearts are so hollow and whose lives are so empty that they treat fellow humans like a cross between carrion and a whodunnit – who can ever find these lost souls, the ghouls of social media?

This morbid obsession is, of course, not isolated to this case. Once, if you knew that someone was interested in mass murderers, you’d give them a wide berth, but these days: ‘Do you like serial killers?’ is a standard Love Island chat-up line. I’ll declare an interest here and say that though I’m far from sensitive, people who use gruesome death as a spectator sport have always given me the creeps. I read a book about Charles Manson when I was a teenager and that was enough for me.

Yes, I can take this Pollyannaism too far, as when I was approached by the Jewish Quarterly magazine to be a judge of the annual Wingate Prize and informed the administrator that I never had and never would read any books about the Shoah; when I was officially informed that this was incompatible with my imminent role, of course I did the right thing. But that was 15 years ago and I’ve never read another one since. Maybe my instinct to swerve descriptions of death and disaster makes me unrealistic – but I’d also wager that it contributes to my state of sunny good humour, while all around me I hear crime fans agree on how horrid people are. You are what you watch.

The trial of O.J Simpson was when this vile kind of voyeurism kicked in big-time; I’ll never forget reading one of the Great and the Good – now departed – smugging that one of her favourite ways to spend an evening was with supper on a tray and something ‘juicy’ on TV ‘like the O.J trial’. Juicy – the violent death of two fellow humans. Once, only madwomen would write mash notes to men on Death Row. But as I wrote here in 2019 in an essay called Netflix And Kill:

‘In the past, you could dismiss the consumers of this trash as semi-literate, barely housetrained weirdos, but The Cultured have had their retroussé snouts in the charnel–house trough for some time now. Since 2016, we have witnessed the rise of ‘Death of a Woman as Hipster Diversion’ programmes: Serial, Undisclosed, Making a Murderer, The Jinx. Then came the recent Oscar nomination of a film about the murder of James Bulger. The distressed parents of the murdered child had not even been contacted by the film-makers.’

In the years since, things have got worse. And as Nicola Bulley’s poor family have found out to their cost, when tragedy strikes, the ghouls are never far away.