THE BATTERSEA POLTERGEIST
DR CIARAN O’KEEFFE takes a fresh look at a case that has baffled investigators for decades. In 1956, a normal family home at 63 Wycliffe Road, Battersea, became the centre of an astonishing and frequently terrifying array of phenomena focused on a 15-year-old girl called Shirley Hitchings…
DR CIARAN O’KEEFFE takes a fresh look at a ‘cold case’ that has baffled investigators for decades. Between 1956 and 1968, a normal family home at 63 Wycliffe Road in Battersea, south London, became the centre of an astonishing and frequently terrifying array of phenomena focused on a 15-year-old girl called Shirley Hitchings. Could this be Britain’s best poltergeist case?
“It was as though there was a presence watching you all the time, that it, he was there…”
Shirley Hitchings
I’ve spent a 30-year career being enthralled by parapsychological phenomena, with a particular focus on investigating after-death communication, both within an experimental context and with research in the field. This split between experimental work and fieldwork is mainly due to my early fascination with the paranormal and my later career taking two paths – one as a parapsychologist, a scientist researching the natural explanations for haunting and poltergeist experiences, the second as a ‘ghost-hunter’, spending any available weekends sitting in the dark in haunted locations, soaking up the atmosphere and exploring the possible origins of eyewitness accounts. As a 13-year-old, having just seen Ghostbusters, I dreamed of picking up a phone and shouting “We got one!”
In the midst of the lockdown of 2020, I was presented with an account of a poltergeist case that started in 1956 in a normal family home in Battersea, London, where the activity focused on an adolescent girl who was 15 years old at the time the events began. Becoming involved with this poltergeist ‘cold case’, I felt like that exuberant 13-year-old ghostbuster: this one had everything. It was a smorgasbord of phenomena that stretched across all areas of parapsychology (see panel): objects moving, flying, levitating, stolen, disappearing and reappearing; loud banging and incessant knocking; people levitating; anomalous scratches; apparent telepathy; sudden darkness (in daytime); bedsheets being pulled; direct communication (verbal and written); spontaneous fires; unexplained lights; precognition; claims of reincarnation; sense of presence, and so on.
At times, the case tested my rational scientific perspective. Sometimes it was comical, the phenomena whimsical in nature; at other times, it took on a macabre, menacing aspect. Sixty-five years on, hearing the primary witness, Shirley Hitchings, recount her experiences should capture the mood for even the most sceptical reader:
“We didn’t, we didn’t know. We didn’t know. We didn’t know what was happening to us. My nan kept saying whatever it is, it’s evil… I think personally myself, I thought that we
A contemporary article on the case in the Daily Express. FACING PAGE: Shirley Hitchings holding the picture of actor Jeremy Spenser that was claimed to shed tears (see p36).
were all gonna die, that something horrible was gonna happen to us with all this going on, and we were all really scared. Scared out of our wits, I just can’t put it into words, but the memories of it as a child, because you know I was a child, I thought this is gonna be the end, we’re all gonna die.”
COLD CASE FILES
I started re-investigating the Battersea Poltergeist for a BBC Radio 4 podcast. Writer Evelyn Hollow (a former psychology lecturer and holder of a Masters in paranormal psychology) also independently re-investigated and we both came together to discuss theories and findings with writer, broadcaster and journalist Danny Robins, who had initiated the entire ‘cold case’ investigation. In his words: “A couple of years ago I started doing a podcast called Haunted, interviewing people who believed they had seen ghosts. And I was introduced to one case that very clearly wouldn’t fit a single episode. It was too big. Too weird…”
Since then, Danny had also been conducting his own investigation and had accumulated a wealth of material, including his fascinating interview with Shirley, now 80 years old, and a cardboard box she had stored in her attic for many years. Danny described this as “full of material about the case. It contains her father’s diaries, entitled ‘Living with a Poltergeist’, photographs and newspaper cuttings, and, most usefully of all… the files of the original investigator, a man named Harold Chibbett [see below], which Shirley rescued from his house after his death.”
A SMORGASBORD OF PHENOMENA THAT STRETCHED ACROSS ALL AREAS
BEYOND ENFIELD
Compared to hauntings, poltergeist cases are typically short in duration. The infamous Enfield Poltergeist case ( FT32:47-48, 33:4-5) is notable for its length compared to the majority of cases: just over a year, from 1977 to 1978. Surveys on poltergeist cases have consistently found the majority to last approximately five months. Gauld and Cornell (see panel) found that 59% lasted less than a year. The Battersea Poltergeist case lasted 12 years. This long drawn out poltergeist intrusion into one family home resulted in all of those involved suffering from extreme sleep deprivation and other potentially detrimental psychological factors such as anxiety and fear.
The case has some standout features: séances and failed exorcisms, the fall-out from which led to a debate involving the Home Secretary in the House of Commons; a range of physical phenomena experienced first-hand by multiple witnesses from outside the family; the active, and at times obsessive, involvement of a key paranormal investigator; worldwide media fascination, involving salacious, headline-grabbing character assassinations, unethical treatment and horrible set-ups; a spontaneous fire that damaged property, caused serious injuries to a family member and may ultimately, due to the resulting stress, have caused the death of another.
Readers may recall a similarly named 1927-28 poltergeist case which the psychical researcher Harry Price (see FT229:28-34) investigated and wrote about in his book Poltergeist over England (1945). He even referred to it at the end of his account as the “Battersea Poltergeist”. This occurred in Eland Road, less than a mile away from 63 Wycliffe Road, the address where, in January 1956, the 15-year-old Shirley Hitchings became the focus for another outbreak of phenomena.
KNOCK, KNOCK
It wasn’t just Shirley’s life that was changed by the events that began that year. The rest of the family at 63 Wycliffe Road all featured throughout the case. As well as Shirley, there was her dad, Wally (in his 40s), a driver for London Underground, and her mum Kitty (slightly older than Wally) who suffered from severe arthritis. Ethel (Kitty’s mother), a
devout Catholic known locally as ‘Old Mother Hitchings’, whose deeply held religious beliefs played a key role in her interpretations of who, or what, the poltergeist was, and her adopted son John (a surveyor in his 20s) also lived in the house.
The phenomena started off quite innocently one morning, in late January 1956, with the appearance of a key. Shirley remembered the incident:
“Okay, well, when it started, it was an ordinary day and I got up in the morning, I was home from school because I was on the school holidays, waiting to go to start art school in three weeks’ time. And I got up and went out to the kitchen to get my breakfast… I… went back to make my bed and on the pillow was this elaborate key and it was ornate, you know, it had sort of curly bits on it and it looked old, so I picked it up and… it was silver and what I can remember it was about four inches long. And it was, it had the key bit you know, you put in the lock, but the top of it where you hook it up to or that, it was quite ornate. Sort of curly, it had swirls on it and curls and I’d never seen it before.
“So I picked it up, took it out to my father who was washing up and doing things in the kitchen. I said, ‘Look, dad, I found this on the bed, where’s it come from?’… He said, ‘Well, I’ve never seen one like that.’ He checked all downstairs, all our cupboards, and then he went up and checked nan’s flat and all her drawers and cupboards. It never fitted anything we had in the house. He said, ‘No, oh, that’s a mystery.’ He put it back on the shelf. He said, ‘Don’t worry your head about it if it