Episode 643: The Battersea Poltergeist Part I - The French Prince

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Speaker 3 There's no place to escape to. This is the last

Speaker 3 on the left.

Speaker 3 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because that's what I'm trying to adjust for this episode. What? Because it's not fully enfeeled, crooked feet, like...

Speaker 3 Hey, hey,

Speaker 3 no it's i wish it was i know this is way more like again like sorry

Speaker 3 interrupt you're ghosting there oh sorry i pop around see if you had a good port guy so next door oh no

Speaker 3 that's fine sorry didn't mean to interrupt then it's because you're classist because infield in infield is a working class and uh this story is more middle class well all of the people were surprisingly like not out of alice in Wonderland's court that I'm used to.

Speaker 3 I think this is a fun story. I love a bunch of British knockers.

Speaker 3 We all do. We all do.
Welcome to the last podcast. On the left, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks.
I'm here with Class War Henry Zabrowski. Oh, sorry.

Speaker 3 Make sure. One check a bit of your British knockers here.
Make sure

Speaker 3 they're all full of berries.

Speaker 3 Call the doctor.

Speaker 3 We have Ed British knockers Larson with us as well.

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I don't like British huge.

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Speaker 3 That is the real Jack the Rapper. Turn it into some sort of mythological character.
Oh, you like that.

Speaker 3 Can we subtitle this? Oh, yeah, it's a guy going to do me. I just feel like the subtitles themselves would have to be blurred.

Speaker 3 Today, we are starting a two-part journey into the land of the spooky.

Speaker 3 It's the Battersea Poltergeist, part one. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.
You guys were sick of Nazis. Yeah, dead.
We're sick of Nazis. We wanted to come back with something a little more lighthearted.

Speaker 3 This is goofy. There's only one dead child in this whole series.
Wow, last time we had millions.

Speaker 3 That's true. I took it down from millions to one.
I heard you. I listened.
I see you. But this Bolter Guy's Tale, I honestly view this as more of a Carrie.
Yeah, it's Carrie. Yeah, it is Carrie.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of telekinesis involved. There's definitely, you know, a young girl at the center of all this.
But we'll, you know, of course, let people decide for themselves what they think about it.

Speaker 3 We don't care, actually.

Speaker 3 So in 1956, in the Battersea district of London, a 15-year-old girl named Shirley Hitchings began a 12-year association with a mischievous and sometimes violent poltergeist named Donald.

Speaker 3 But as opposed to other slow-burn poltergeist stories that take months, if not years, to be told, this story broke incredibly quickly, and the coverage made both Donald and Shirley national sensations in the infamously obsessive British press.

Speaker 3 Now, while Donald the poltergeist did indeed send objects flying through the air, and while it did drive Shirley's family to the brink of insanity with its incessant knocks and taps, the thing that set Donald apart from other poltergeist was his prolific communication with the world of the living.

Speaker 3 Through methods that were sometimes clear, sometimes mysterious, and sometimes very silly. Very silly indeed.

Speaker 3 Donald the poltergeist was a prolific writer of messages and letters to an almost overwhelming degree.

Speaker 3 As such, the main psychical researcher in this story, a man named Harold Chibbett, made the messages Donald's central characteristic when Chibbett wrote about the case.

Speaker 3 The title Chibbett chose, however, was extremely underwhelming. His book, which he spent years writing, he had years to come up with a title for this, was called The Poltergeist That Can Write.

Speaker 3 Well, Dora, his previous book, do you ever read The Frankenstein That Can Set?

Speaker 3 Very, very slow. I prefer the werewolf that can mount.

Speaker 3 Wayne is different.

Speaker 3 Well, this is 1956, after all. It's a good two decades before London's other infamous teenage girl poltergeist case, Enfield.

Speaker 3 So the paranormal community had not, in my opinion, found their flair for the dramatic, because there are far better hooks to this story than Donald's fucking communication skills.

Speaker 3 Well, it's very indicative of the way the British would go about investigating these stories. Very matter of fact.
Very matter of fact. And also, like, getting embedded.

Speaker 3 This is the guy, this guy, Harold Chibbett, would be sort of the proto-guy to be embedded amongst the family.

Speaker 3 And the Jeff the Mongoose story, if you remember, which also took place two decades before this, that kind of like set a little bit of the flavor of what could be like ghosty entertainment in the news in the UK.

Speaker 3 And they liked it, but Jeff the Mongoose sadly never set an old woman on fire.

Speaker 3 He's just a talking mongoose, right? It's just a talking mongoose. This one does a lot.
Donald does a lot more shit. Yeah,

Speaker 3 Jeff the talking mongoose said that he did it for the devilman. Donald the poltergeist

Speaker 3 actually did it for the devilman. Did it.
Yeah. Man, I want to party with this talking mongoose.
You do.

Speaker 3 You do. Jeff is cool, but the problem is that Jeff, he does tend to hang out with types like Donald.
Yes.

Speaker 3 Well, as far as hooks go, Donald the poltergeist was, as I mentioned, violent and sometimes dangerous.

Speaker 3 If you believe the stories, Donald was a pyromaniac, and the antics surrounding this haunting had dire real-world consequences.

Speaker 3 See, even if the haunting was simply the machinations of a highly imaginative 15-year-old girl named Shirley, they still actively contributed to the death of Shirley Hitchings' grandmother.

Speaker 3 Furthermore, as far as the poltergeist identity went, Donald ultimately claimed that he was the uneasy spirit of a French prince who had drowned in the English Channel after escaping the French Revolution following the guillotine execution of his father, King Louis XVI.

Speaker 3 And concerning what Donald wanted, his main motivation seemed to be to connect Shirley Hitchings with various young 1950s British TV actors with the ultimate goal of obtaining a starring role on a TV show for Shirley.

Speaker 3 But please, by all means, let's go with the poltergeist who can write. It should be the poltergeist that can talent manage.

Speaker 3 That's incredible. Just by the idea of looking for opportunities for your client in that way.
Yeah, the lost. Ken Some Jack Shit.
Oh, that.

Speaker 3 The lost boy king. There's so many different titles and angles he could go with.

Speaker 3 The mysterious case of the fire-setting poltergeist. That could also work, but no.
Grandma Killer inside Grandma's daughter.

Speaker 3 The fact it's a prince is like the most unbelievable part of all of it to me. Sure.

Speaker 3 You know, just like, why is it always like, whenever you talk about the afterlife or like people's past lives, it's always like, you were Abraham Lincoln. It's never like you were just some dude.

Speaker 3 You know, I think that really comes from,

Speaker 3 as we'll talk about in this whole case, I think this story of all the various ghosting stories that we've covered is one that is an example of psychic abilities gone rampant.

Speaker 3 And that I think you're seeing really the projections of a little girl and what they think about historical figures and what they find to be romantic.

Speaker 3 And that we are, we'll cover, obviously, as we go, but who knows? Man, I just can't believe we're going to spend hours on the ramblings of a little girl.

Speaker 3 I do it every night.

Speaker 3 I pour over young Greta's journals, looking for the key to her heart.

Speaker 3 You still think she's the Antichrist? No, I think Greta Turnberg is like, well, I do think she's the Antichrist, but I think that's good. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Moving along, ladies and gentlemen, let's get to the next post.

Speaker 3 Moving to the next post. Now, for our source today, we used a fascinating book called The Poltergeist Prince.
Much better title. Yes,

Speaker 3 very catchy. It was co-written by James Clark and the person at the center of this entire haunting, Shirley Hitchings, who filled in the gaps for Clark decades after all this happened.

Speaker 3 The poltergeist, formerly known as Prince, is right there. It's just like a symbol.
That's like a little ghost. Yes, it's right there.

Speaker 3 It's just a Pac-Man ghost.

Speaker 3 That's incredible.

Speaker 3 Well, as of the Poltergeist Prince's release in 2017, Shirley was still maintaining that everything we're about to discuss was solely due to the attachment of an extremely active poltergeist named Donald.

Speaker 3 But we'll, of course, as we said, leave it up to you to decide whether or not that was actually the case. I myself find this case to be extremely compelling.
There's a lot of cool shit here.

Speaker 3 It's got legs. It's very thick.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, unlike the tale of the Infield poltergeist, in which the haunting's victims were a working-class single mother and her two daughters, the story of the Battersea poltergeist occurred in the financially stable home of an only child.

Speaker 3 The address of the haunting, number 63 Wycliffe, was said to be nice and typical, with a backyard and a converted air raid shelter left over from the London Blitz, which wasn't too long before all this happened.

Speaker 3 By 1956, however, that shelter just held chickens.

Speaker 3 And that's why it's good because a lot of times you got to make sure you get your chickens all prepped to work them for the wintertime because, you know, most chickens on Wycliffe Street are gone till November.

Speaker 3 Pronounced Wycliffe. Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, so

Speaker 3 the great hero.

Speaker 3 Wycliffe.

Speaker 3 I hope people called her Shirley Chickens.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 You're all Charlie Chickens.

Speaker 3 That's Shirley Chickens. No, Shirley Chickens.
That man owns Shirley Chickens.

Speaker 3 I'm Charlie Chackers. You own Shirley Chickens.

Speaker 3 Well, the two-floor home was occupied by 15-year-old Shirley Hitchings, her 51-year-old mother, Kitty, her 47-year-old father, Wally, and Wally's long-suffering 73-year-old mother, Ethel.

Speaker 3 Won't somebody kill me?

Speaker 3 I've seen two centuries now, and I'm thinking I'm done. He's been caught for mental hundred years, and I certainly wish to exit this life.

Speaker 3 The Hitchings also had a 20-year-old adopted son living at number 63 Wycliffe, but this brother is largely missing from the Battersea Poltergeist story because he absolutely refused to speak about or even acknowledge the haunting while it was happening nor did he talk about it to anyone afterward.

Speaker 3 I'll fucking know these people.

Speaker 3 This is understandable because as it goes almost any time someone claims that a spirit is communicating with the world of the living, this story does get incredibly silly from time to time.

Speaker 3 Don't believe the movies. When a spirit actually communicates with people, it's always kind of stupid.

Speaker 3 Yes, and the ramifications of going to the media and telling the world that this stupid stuff is happening inside of your home and you're taking it seriously makes the whole world destroy your family.

Speaker 3 And that's why he's very understandable. He might not want to be involved.
Yeah. My problem with like Ouija boards and all that shit, I just don't believe that ghosts remember how to spell.

Speaker 3 They don't need to.

Speaker 3 Well, we'll actually address that later on in the story. I mean, basically, this story is Enfield meets Jeff the Talking Mongoose.

Speaker 3 Except in this case, instead of a foul-mouthed weasel, the communicating spirit was an aggressive teenage French prince from the 1700s, obsessed with young heartthrob celebrities. As he would be.

Speaker 3 As he would. Possibly.
Quite possibly.

Speaker 3 A French prince. Yeah.
The level of gay you become as a French prince must be incredible. I just can't wait till we finally do the French Revolution.

Speaker 3 We can get all of your thoughts on the French just out in the open. I just think about just like him covered in cream, that little, the little beauty mark drawn on his face.

Speaker 3 How old is he supposed to be, the French prince? 15. 15? Man,

Speaker 3 to sound like an asshole, I don't care. Nothing's more annoying to me than French spoken by children.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 It's all like, you think you're fucking better than me? When you see, when you hear it at Disney, and they're like, mama, mama, misse le pot le cosau. It's like, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 3 This crazy little French child. Oh, fuck you, buddy.
Yeah, fucking speak English like a real baby. Mama, mama, she le papa, push, shinippa, baby.
Oh, oh, what are you going to do?

Speaker 3 You're going to f uh rape the president of France or something? I know what you cheat, you do.

Speaker 3 Now, there was really nothing out of the ordinary about the Hitching family.

Speaker 3 But in January of 1956, the haunting kicked off when Shirley mysteriously found a key in her bed that didn't fit any of the locks in their home.

Speaker 3 A few days later, the telltale knocks and taps that signified the beginning of a poltergeist haunting began.

Speaker 3 The noises faded during the day, but returned in the evening and were sometimes paired with scratching that sounded as if something with claws was trying to break through.

Speaker 3 Santa Claus.

Speaker 3 Sorry. Sure.

Speaker 3 Eventually, the noises became so loud and all-pervasive that the family was kept awake night after night.

Speaker 3 But the majority of the taps, knocks, and scratches were clearly coming from the bedroom of the Hitchings' 15-year-old daughter, Shirley. Menarche.

Speaker 3 Oh, Shirley was more or less the archetype of the haunt. Do you get all your Menarche out? That's all I did.
I just said it once.

Speaker 3 I just did it one time. I know, but that's.

Speaker 3 Five Menarches at this point. No, you can only have one Menarche.
Well, I'd be like, isn't that the definition? I thought the Menarche. The Menarch is the first one.

Speaker 3 The Minarche is the starting pistol. Yeah.
Being miserable.

Speaker 3 So you can only have one by definition. Yeah.
Shirley it can't be a Menarche.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Now we're getting back to being fun.

Speaker 3 But Shirley was more or less the archetype of the haunted 15-year-old girl.

Speaker 3 Physically, she was slim and pretty with dark hair, while her personality was described as quiet and shy, but extremely high-strung.

Speaker 3 She was also imaginative, and like her poltergeist Donald, Shirley was obsessed with young TV actors.

Speaker 3 Shirley, however, struggled in school, because the other thing Shirley shared with Donald was that they both seemed to be dyslexic.

Speaker 3 See, as I said, Donald was the poltergeist who writes, and it just so happened that Donald and Shirley both tended to flip letters in the words they wrote.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I didn't say the poltergeist who writes well. No, no, that's just the poltergeist who writes.
He just writes. For example, they spell the word what, W-A-H-T, instead of W-H-A-T.
What? What?

Speaker 3 As far as Shirley's parents went, they also appeared to be archetypes straight from a British B movie. Like, I could see them, I could see Christopher Lee showing up somewhere in this story.

Speaker 3 Shirley's father, Wally, he was a straight-laced steam engine driver and a train conductor. But Kitty, her- I'll go choo-choo, but I will not go woo-woo.
It's extremely important.

Speaker 3 One must remain one's composure when driving the choo-choo train.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, I have murdered accidentally six train spotters this month. We must be on time.
Remove yourself from the tracks.

Speaker 3 But Chirley's mother, Kitty, she was described as elderly at the age of 51. Due to a crippling case of arthritis, Kitty hobbled around the Hitchings home on walking sticks.

Speaker 3 Both parents, however, were strict adherents to the teachings of the Church of England and had no knowledge of spiritualism or the paranormal prior to this haunting.

Speaker 3 In fact, Wally was certain that the taps and knocks had a physical explanation when they began, believing they were most likely due to faulty electrical wiring in the house.

Speaker 3 To be a strict adherent to the teachings of the Church of England, is that like being like a huge like soccer fan in Canada or something like that,

Speaker 3 they're in England, but it's like kind of it's the low-rent one, right? Isn't that like the low? Like, what is the commitment to the Church of England?

Speaker 3 The Church of England is the same church that the Queen adheres to, the same church that

Speaker 3 you just get rolled in and go, eh,

Speaker 3 and then get rolled out. Yeah, it's like, no divorce.
You can't have divorce. That was a big thing.
Good. Is that the King James Bible? Was that officially Church of England? I don't know.

Speaker 3 We'll say it is.

Speaker 3 Roll forward forward like the trains, bustle roll. Also,

Speaker 3 if there's a lot of knocking in your house and you're like, oh, it's just the faulty wiring, you got to check that out.

Speaker 3 Well, then being a part of the Church of England, I actually think it's a really important part to the story. Oh, I bet.

Speaker 3 Because, you know, they are haunted by this poltergeist. It does and it.

Speaker 3 torments them for 12 years, but being a part of the Church of England, it makes them very reticent to use any methods that may be deemed as Catholic

Speaker 3 so they're not got you by the fucking pools anyway yeah so they can't they're not gonna be bringing in a priest to take care of any exorcism they're going to keep calm and carry on throughout the whole fucking thing should be good there you enjoy yourself a bit of a roast there bowl King James Bible English translation commissioned by the Church of England fuck yeah

Speaker 3 so yes

Speaker 3 yes

Speaker 3 now after ruling out electrical problems he looked into it immediately Wally and Kitty naturally began blaming their daughter Shirley for the noise.

Speaker 3 To test her, they forced Shirley to keep her hands where they could see them. They could stare at her.
But the noises continued without any apparent movement from the teenage girl.

Speaker 3 I'm showing you my wrist top study. I'm showing you everything I've got.

Speaker 3 Well, flabbergasted, Wally began talking about the noises to his co-workers, and amongst his fellow train conductors was a spiritualist and amateur medium in his 50s named Harry Hanks.

Speaker 3 And so, when Hanks's hobbies suddenly appeared before him in the real world, he quickly volunteered to drive away whatever was causing the disturbance.

Speaker 3 Never tell anybody at your work that your home is haunted. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because every time there will always be one, there will always be, you're gonna see fucking Patty from Accounting show up with all of her gems, you know, being like, well, you know, I am a Reiki master.

Speaker 3 You know, like,

Speaker 3 you're gonna to get deeply involved with a co-worker that's going to ruin your life. We need a medium.
We don't have one in the office. I got a bunch of them.
I can call them.

Speaker 3 Well, employ one is what I'm saying. Amber says she sees ghosts every third day.
Every time she closes her eyes, she sees a ghost. Every time she thinks of a memory of her childhood.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she sees ghosts. We got enough psychics and mediums on call.
We don't need one on staff. No.
All right.

Speaker 3 Well, Wally agreed to let Harry Hanks help. So Harry arrived at number 63 Wycliffe in February of 1956, about a month after the haunting began.

Speaker 3 This visit, however, is the only time I've ever heard of a paranormal enthusiast bringing along his wife and daughter because paranormal investigation was apparently a Hanks family affair.

Speaker 3 That's nice. Normally it's a super weird loner.

Speaker 3 Truly. And usually families aren't like into all into like paranormal investigation together.
That's not usually like the family hobby. Usually it's camping.
Yeah, or

Speaker 3 getting together and killing another family. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Also, I'm picturing Tom Hanks covered in hair just so everyone else can do the same thing. You got it.
Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thank you. Harry Hanks.

Speaker 3 So you're picturing Tom Hanks in

Speaker 3 third act of Castaway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But like, I want hair on his forehead. Like, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Tom Hanks, the dogface boy.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Hey, how you do, buddy? I'm trying to figure out a Tom Hanks impression. Hey, hey, how you do, buddy? Is there a Tom Hanks impression? That's it.
Okay, thanks.

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Speaker 3 Now, Harry Hanks and his family performed a couple of seances with the intent of clearing the house of lost spirits.

Speaker 3 But as it often happens, the activity would stop when the Hanks family arrived and resume only after they left. The Hitchings family, meanwhile, were already at their wits' end due to lack of sleep.

Speaker 3 Tensions were running high, so in an attempt to lighten things up, they made what is considered a grave mistake in the paranormal community. Pun intended.
They make, yes. Very much intended.

Speaker 3 They killed the children.

Speaker 3 They made what? Well, actually, if the pun is truly intended, I have to deliver it in the right way. They made what is considered a

Speaker 3 grave mistake.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Look what it looks like.

Speaker 3 Get out of here, sir.

Speaker 3 Sir, you get out of here. Get away from this man.
He's not a woman.

Speaker 3 You get away from him. It doesn't matter what he looks like, just because he has a waist under 36 inches.
He's not a woman. He's going to tell you his name's Shirley Chickens.
It's not. It's not.

Speaker 3 Well, they gave the poltergeist a name. In fact, they gave it two names.
Sometimes they call it Charlie Boy. Other times, they'd refer to the spirit.

Speaker 3 This is one of my favorite ghost names I've ever heard, as Spooky Willie. Yep.
Oh, uncle, Spooky Willie.

Speaker 3 The voice you're doing, now that's Spooky Willie.

Speaker 3 That's Andrew's penis.

Speaker 3 But after they named this power, whatever it was, the knocks and taps only grew louder, and the noises were sometimes so intense, the neighbors claimed to have heard them from several houses away.

Speaker 3 Now, as I mentioned earlier, the Battersea Poltergei story got very intense very quickly. The tapping reportedly attached itself to Shirley and followed her outside of the home.

Speaker 3 And according to many accounts, the noise, whatever it was, it followed Shirley wherever she went. This is one of those parts of this case that makes it extremely compelling.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 It was everywhere she went. Yeah.
And I know that it's like, yeah, obviously it's centered around her, but that's what I'm saying. This is psychic ass shit.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, she'd go on the bus and people would hear the tap. She'd go to work, people would hear the tap, no matter where she was.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, for example, when Shirley went to her job as a dress cutter at a London department store, the tapping was heard there too.

Speaker 3 But interestingly, the tapping was not seen by her coworkers as an annoying prank being pulled by a teenager. Instead, the noises terrified the other ladies that Shirley worked with.

Speaker 3 Shirt, a dress cutter? Dress cutter, yeah. Yeah, like just show up and be like, could you remove the breasts from the shirt, please? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, things got worse when the poltergeist took a liking to a certain pair of scissors at the department store. Those scissors would reportedly move around on their own.

Speaker 3 And the activity thus became so distracting that Shirley was asked to take some time off work to figure out her quote-unquote troubles.

Speaker 3 But as it often goes, the haunting only escalated after Shirley's life began falling apart. In late February, Shirley reported that she was in bed when she felt her sheets being yanked away from her.

Speaker 3 She called for her father Wally, who tried tugging them back, but his efforts were reportedly met with an unknown force pulling the sheets in the other direction.

Speaker 3 Suddenly, Shirley went fully rigid before she was lifted up. Once lifted, she began floating in the air just six inches above her bed.

Speaker 3 This story, however, was Wally's recollection of what happened that night, best as I can tell.

Speaker 3 As Shirley remembered it, her head and feet stayed on the bed while her back arched upward, as if a force was pushing her to do so, all while she cried out that she could not, no matter how hard she tried, straighten herself out again.

Speaker 3 But either way, remember, this is 1956. All this shit, like you hear it, you think, like, oh, yeah, you know, I've seen floating above the bed a million times.

Speaker 3 I've seen the creepy arch, you know, that people do when they're supposed to be possessed.

Speaker 3 This is long before these sorts of stories became tropes in the worlds of horror or in the worlds of the paranormal. Largely, it's why they became tropes.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, while there are certainly things in this story that very well could have been cries for attention from a high-strung, imaginative teenager, other incidents like this one are more compelling.

Speaker 3 But, of course, how compelling you find all of this depends on if you believe the people involved. Or it could be

Speaker 3 cries for attention from a high-strung imaginative teenager who also is psychic.

Speaker 3 Like literally, like, like, what happens? What happens if fucking, you know, when Carrie's in a bad mood, everybody dies. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 3 that's the most infuriating thing about the paranormal is that, you know, two things can be true at once is that there can be something paranormal going on and the person can be lying about it.

Speaker 3 There could be human shenanigans as well. Yeah.

Speaker 3 What do we know about Papa Wally here? I mean, I know he works. He literally was desperately trying to just be a train conductor.
Yeah, he's just a regular, just a regular dude.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I mean, that's what's you know, because now that he's involved in the sheet pulling thing, she obviously couldn't have been doing that. So this is.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, and that's again, like, if you believe the people involved, it's like you, in order for all of this to make sense as a hoax, you would have to believe that Wally was also either lying or

Speaker 3 wildly hallucinating it. Yeah.
Or orchestrating it. But he has, as we'll see, there's absolutely no reason for them to orchestrate this.
Now, the British are nothing if not a nation of gossips.

Speaker 3 So the Battersea Poltergeist became a constant subject of discussion in the neighborhood where the Hitchings lived within weeks of the first occurrence. Yeah, it's juicy as fuck.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Once the public showed interest, the ever-invasive British media arrived just two months after it all began.

Speaker 3 And by March, Wally Hitchings was allowing pretty much any reporter who knocked on his door to come inside his home.

Speaker 3 In response response to the attention, though, the Battersea poltergeist actually got more active, throwing clocks and lamps to the ground or knocking over chairs.

Speaker 3 But once the reporters started asking the family questions, they found that while Wally and Kitty Hitchings were God-fearing button-up Brits, Shirley's grandmother Ethel was the witchier member of the family.

Speaker 3 I'll answer your questions for you.

Speaker 3 Yes, not things bad in this home.

Speaker 3 Cock of

Speaker 3 I have 12.

Speaker 3 Actually, could you run out to the store and grab me four more?

Speaker 3 I get nervous when I get below 15. I need 20 cocks of the newts

Speaker 3 at 73 years old. Ethel proudly told reporters that during her previous job working at a hospital, she had been able to see the misty essence of a soul leave a patient's body when they died.

Speaker 3 I suck it through a straw.

Speaker 3 Additionally, Ethel also claimed to see the ghost of her dead husband in her bedroom from time to time.

Speaker 3 As far as the current haunting went, though, Ethel swore that she'd seen clothes and shoes fly across the room on their own volition, and that hangers on the wall had mysteriously detached themselves and fallen to the ground.

Speaker 3 In other words, whether, as I said, whether the haunting was a tall tale, a shared delusion, or a genuine paranormal phenomenon, the adults in the Hitchings house were all in on this from the very start.

Speaker 3 Could have been shitty hangers.

Speaker 3 I mean, it could have been shitty everything. Shitty everything.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
England in 1956 was not a super nice place to live. It's been hastily rebuilt since the Blitz.

Speaker 3 Oh, God, not even close to being rebuilt. It's mostly just rubble everywhere.
So it's been decades. And I imagine it, yeah, it's, I mean, who knows? I'm certain they did their best.
But so far, yes.

Speaker 3 Everything could be mostly just British contracting.

Speaker 3 but we will get there. And this happens, though.
You know, I always tell Julie to stay away from my flying shoes. You know,

Speaker 3 every time I do, you know, I've paid more for that, you know. So it's like, stay away from my flying shoes.
They're going to fly around the room. And if you get near them, they're going to hit you.

Speaker 3 Where do you think my flying shoes are supposed to go? Yeah.

Speaker 3 I said in my vows when we got married that you're going to have to take me and my flying shoes. That's my flying shoes.

Speaker 3 Now you want to go back on the promise, huh? And he just puts his shoes on stands in the backyard, just going, going,

Speaker 3 I got to lose weight. My flying shoes aren't working anymore.

Speaker 3 Now the press ate up every detail the Hitchings gave them.

Speaker 3 They published every word the Hitchings uttered, and they eventually settled on Spooky Willie as the better of the two names for the spirit was haunting number 63 Wyckland.

Speaker 3 That's what I would have voted for. Yeah, out of Spooky Willie or was was it Charlie, like up Chuck Charlie? We already forgot the other one.
Yeah, Chuck ID.

Speaker 3 Chuck him. Yeah, Charlie Boy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 But everyone's going to hang out with Spooky Willie. Wouldn't you want to vote for Spooky Willie for like House of Representatives?

Speaker 3 Like, there's something about me being like, I have a name Spooky, but the one thing that's not spooky is my legislation.

Speaker 3 Like, oh, that's all I'd love to find a guy in a sheet all the time. Spooky Willie, Libertarian Party chair.

Speaker 3 Can't tax a ghost.

Speaker 3 Well, before long, one reporter got the idea that he could set himself apart from the pack by attempting to communicate with the spirit using knocks.

Speaker 3 One knock for no, two knocks for yes, and three knocks for I don't know. And after working their way through standard questions like, can we help you?

Speaker 3 And some surprisingly direct questions like, Are you evil? Great question.

Speaker 3 He said no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And evil people never lie. No.

Speaker 3 Are you evil? Yes, I am.

Speaker 3 That'd be fucking terrifying. Yes, I am.
I am, man. Yes, I am.

Speaker 3 British band. I actually did think, like, when I thought, like, I was wondering if, like, Diamond Head was reading the newspaper that day.

Speaker 3 Am I evil?

Speaker 3 I am, man. Yeah.
Well, the reporter eventually learned that Spooky Willie was actually Shirley Hitchings' great-grandmother, who died in 1916. Or at least that's what Spooky Willie was claiming.

Speaker 3 Spooky Wilma. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Spooky Willie. Oh, Jake Besan Squamer.

Speaker 3 The next Sunday, though, the spirit amended its identity, and not for the last time.

Speaker 3 While communicating directly with the Hitchings family, the spirit next claimed to be a boy named Ronald that Shirley had played with as a little girl.

Speaker 3 Ronald, however, had moved overseas with his family, and as the poltergeist claimed, he had subsequently died and returned as a ghost.

Speaker 3 Since the story was already being covered in multiple outlets, the press immediately tracked down this Ronald character.

Speaker 3 He was indeed a real person, but when he was found alive and well and not haunting a 15-year-old girl in Battersea, London, well, not as a ghost.

Speaker 3 Something interesting happened. Nobody really knows how, but the poltergeist name soon morphed from Ronald to Donald.

Speaker 3 The only explanation we could find was that for some reason, Kitty Hitchings thought it was hilarious to call this spirit Donald Duck.

Speaker 3 But nobody knows why she called him that or even why she thought it was funny.

Speaker 3 But after Shirley's childhood friend Ronald was found alive, both the press and the Hitching family quietly began calling the spirit Donald without giving a reason.

Speaker 3 But regardless of why, the poltergeist took the name permanently, and for the next 12 years, he was known as Donald, the poltergeist. See, Donald, yeah, it sounds like Donald said yes to the name.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And then once they started calling him Donald, the way I kind of interpreted it, it almost kicked up activity in a way.
And they would like learn to do. Because like, they're all sitting,

Speaker 3 they're building a talpa they're all sitting in a house if you really want to believe in some woo-woo part of the story at all they're building a talpa inside the house they're feeding whatever like whatever psychic energy was created here if you believe in that they're just sitting there and feeding it and there are people constantly coming into the house reporters feeding it and not just that the reporters are then taking what they're feeding it and they're publishing it in London and you know thousands upon thousands of people are reading this every day giving more power to it you know and it it just keeps increasing.

Speaker 3 And once you become a ghost, you can really start to reinvent yourself.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 again,

Speaker 3 formerly known as Prince. He's Jehovah's Witness in heaven.
The spooky Willie thing ain't working. I was working with Ronald for a little bit, but then I talked to my manager.
We're going with Donald.

Speaker 3 Yeah, what's his name?

Speaker 3 Wasn't that mankind used to be Hacksaw Jim Douglas Cactus Jack? Cactus Jack and Dude Love. Yeah, they change.
All the time. People change.

Speaker 3 Now, it was obvious to everyone involved that this spirit wanted to communicate.

Speaker 3 So the Hitchings family ended up making a kind of homemade Ouija board with pen and paper so they could actually get answers beyond yes or no.

Speaker 3 After writing out all the letters of the alphabet, they could move their finger from letter to letter until they heard a knock. And with each knock came a letter.

Speaker 3 That letter was written down until it spelled a word. And then finally, they would end up with a full message.
So boring!

Speaker 3 This tedious technique became the main method of communication that Donald the Poulter guys would use to communicate with the Hitchings family, the press, and various paranormal investigators over the next 12 years.

Speaker 3 Sometimes while objects were actively being thrown around in the very room while they were taking the message.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they would have to duck while they were listening to Knox, or at least so they say. Well, it's probably they picked the wrong letter.
And of course, like, go fuck yourself.

Speaker 3 I said Andy, not M.

Speaker 3 M, as in Mary.

Speaker 3 But no,

Speaker 3 I wonder. This is one of those things about the story is that there's so much activity.
Yeah. And everybody, it's all these reporters going in and saying they're getting things.

Speaker 3 I do believe they would have tried anything to debunk it as well. They all love exposing liars.
Everybody loves exposing liars.

Speaker 3 So they're in this state and they're really just watching things zip around a house, but it almost becomes like they're used to it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it does.

Speaker 3 They do describe it as becoming routine very quickly. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, when full messages began to be passed from the spirit world to our own, the interest in the press only got larger and the typical sleaze that is inherent within the British press increased with the attention.

Speaker 3 One paper, the South London Advertiser, ran a story that the poltergeist was actually an undead suitor whose ultimate goal was to marry the 15-year-old Shirley.

Speaker 3 But even though that story is fucking stupid, the people of London loved any story about Donald the poltergeist.

Speaker 3 But the more the story was reported in the press, the more that regular people would show up to the Hitchings home to see what they could see.

Speaker 3 So many people showed up that Wally would sometimes have to chase them off his lawn himself amidst a storm of piss-offs and leave us alone.

Speaker 3 It's interesting that it's very common, even more than in American society, it almost feels like, for everybody to show up at a haunting in the UK.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, they just gotta go, they just like to go look at it. Are they just look at the house? Sometimes they'll go knock on the door and be like, can I come in?

Speaker 3 Do you think that's because they have like kings and queens and stuff that they feel like ghosts are like their friends or their relatives? Like they actually can go and see a ghost and be like, Hey,

Speaker 3 I don't know about it and like throw something at it. This is 1956.
This is back when the royal family was still very much apart. That's what I mean.
I don't, I don't think so.

Speaker 3 I think at this point, they're just

Speaker 3 haunting is very much haunting's very much a part of the culture, I think. Yeah, I guess there's just so many people die there.
Yeah, of like everything. It's an extraordinarily haunted country.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's thousands of years of ghosts there. And it's a little town, it's like a little island, and it's all filled with

Speaker 3 the secrets of the Celts. Yeah, america's just got a couple hundred years of ghosts yeah but we but man we made up for lost time we really didn't really do although gettysburg oh

Speaker 3 not as a nice not as a nice old pile of ghosts there

Speaker 3 now not to derail us too much but didn't we cover something on side stories that all the ghosts in england are like dying because there's too old they're talking about stuff like uh the borley rectory these certain famous ghosts are sort of going away they're they are saying that they don't really understand why.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 partly, they do believe that there's something to the idea of a battery is running out and then it gets refilled.

Speaker 3 I still am down with my theory that it's Wi-Fi that's killing the ghosts.

Speaker 3 Wi-Fi and electricity, you know, because if we are electromagnetic beings, and maybe if there is some sort of electromagnetic element to ghosts or hauntings or something like that, Wi-Fi is not going to be kind to it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's actually like, yeah, it's not, it's really going to fuck things up. If you, you know, ask like, you know, people used to see ghosts all the time.
Why don't we see them anymore?

Speaker 3 You know, why is it that everybody has a phone in their pocket and yet there is, you know, nobody can catch anything, you know, on camera? It's possible that they just, they've all gone away.

Speaker 3 Ghosts just want dial-up. Yeah,

Speaker 3 because that's actually my biggest fear is that

Speaker 3 when we die in the past, that our souls went into some sort of collective unconsciousness. But now when we die, our souls just sort of get trapped and scrambled by the electricity in the air.

Speaker 3 Unless you get

Speaker 3 buried in a casket made out of carbon fiber. Yeah, that's only if you die in a casket made.
You got to be buried alive in it. That's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 3 To me or to you? No, I'm going to get my ghost off the grid. Hell yeah.
That's the only way to do it. I'm going to be a sovereign citizen ghost.
It's the only way to do that.

Speaker 3 But also, I feel like this is my reach out.

Speaker 3 If you go visit the Borly Rectory with your family, will you please tragically kill them in a way that leaves a lot of unfinished business and brings some tourism back to the Broiler Rectory?

Speaker 3 Yeah, please do. But there was a paradox with Wally talking to the press.

Speaker 3 Because while Wally would chase off Lookie Lose any chance he got, he seemed to say yes to pretty much any media request, and every bit of media coverage only brought more people to his home.

Speaker 3 Shirley was even featured in a segment on the BBC.

Speaker 3 And while you might begin thinking at this point that the Hitchings were angling for cash here, that appearance on the BBC gave them the only profit they ever gained over the course of this 12-year affair.

Speaker 3 The Hitchings family were never paid by reporters for any of the newspaper articles.

Speaker 3 And for the BBC segment, which aired just a couple of months after all this began, and the whole thing lasted for 12 years after that, Shirley was paid just £3,

Speaker 3 which is the modern equivalent of about $85.

Speaker 3 But I think this is a telling

Speaker 3 little detail about this story. And the fact that most of the time, when the people report to the news that they see a ghost, right? Like all of this kind of flurry of activity happens.

Speaker 3 And then you kind of see it die out a lot of the times, right? Like you see them kind of like have a moment.

Speaker 3 And then a lot of times the person that's the center of the activity ages out, but this one just keeps going

Speaker 3 past the point of it making any form of sense for you to keep fucking talking. Yeah.
And three pounds was the weight of the BBC.

Speaker 3 Cool.

Speaker 3 That's if you include the balls.

Speaker 3 We took you to England.

Speaker 3 We took you there.

Speaker 3 I didn't watch the fucking news. Nah, nah.
He was afraid that it would make him gay. He's like, our entire channel dedicated to BBC.
I gotta hide my wife's eyes. Hold on.

Speaker 3 How much blood is in this sausage?

Speaker 3 Now the story had somewhat leveled off by the end of February. And the answer is a lot of blood in the sausage.
Give me me more blood in the sausage, make it grainier. I want it grainier.

Speaker 3 Give me some mushrooms. Give me some beans.
I like the what?

Speaker 3 But when the story somewhat leveled off at the end of February, two reporters decided to up the stakes by pressuring Wally and Kitty into allowing Harry Hanks to perform an exorcism on Donald the Poulter guys.

Speaker 3 Remember, Harry Hanks is, he's just some guy from work.

Speaker 3 They agreed, but Hanks, for some reason, decided that it was better if the exorcism was done from the comfort of his own home, located about a mile and a half away from number 63 Wycliffe.

Speaker 3 We're going to want to do this in my home, exorcism dojo, okay?

Speaker 3 We're going to want to do this in my home. And if you could, could you just send over your teenage daughter? Don't come with her.
Just send her along, please.

Speaker 3 In my home. Leave her shoes.

Speaker 3 Since paranormal investigation was, as I said, a family affair for Harry Hanks, he performed the exorcism with his wife and his daughter, along with a clairvoyant and a spiritualist.

Speaker 3 Shirley was also present, although she only observed the exorcism to come.

Speaker 3 Seemingly making it up as they went along, the exorcists held hands and sang a couple of hymns, like they sang onward Christian soldiers. Then they fell into silent prayer.

Speaker 3 Suddenly, though, Harry's wife entered a trance and began shaking. Harry soon entered a trance as well, contorting his face and waving his arms around like a madman.

Speaker 3 A loud knock then came at the door, and when they opened it, they found the police

Speaker 3 who had gotten an anonymous tip that a black magic ritual was being performed at that address.

Speaker 3 Hey, we're looking for a wizarding, we're looking for people with covered in it.

Speaker 3 It's me, smart daughter, smart daughter,

Speaker 3 spooky willies, spooky willies.

Speaker 3 Who calls the cops on a black magic ritual and what cops come out for that? An old British bitch.

Speaker 3 Is it even illegal? No. Well, yes.
Yes, it is. That was a part of it.
No, that's right. Witchcraft was illegal in the UK until, what, like, yeah, the 50s, right? Like, like, the 80s.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, they went through a whole thing because that was with the high gate vampires. That also came out, too.
Like, they literally, it was very illegal. These are like old shit.

Speaker 3 So, one day there was a dude in the British Parliament just like, you know what, we need to legalize witchcraft. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He probably came in the mouth of a goth woman the night before and realized what he fucking did, and he had to figure it all out. Listen, guys, we don't need to legalize this witchcraft now for all.

Speaker 3 Because you want to lock me up.

Speaker 3 Well, after observing what was going on for just a few minutes, the police decided that this was all harmless. Oh, he's stupid then.

Speaker 3 They gave Harry the go-ahead to resume. So the exorcism picked back up where it left off.

Speaker 3 Harry Hanks once again began shaking violently. But unexpectedly, Harry's consciousness was very suddenly overtaken by a so-called African spirit guy.
Oh boy. Yeah, see, this was England in 1956.

Speaker 3 So the African spirit guide had the incredible racist name of Sambo.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Harry Hanks, a white British train conductor in his 50s, began speaking in an over-the-top black guy voice. Eddie,

Speaker 3 please provide the example.

Speaker 3 I really wish I could have seen this. We all would, we all do.

Speaker 3 Everybody would have been super happy with it being like all right then you want to you want to make like a tree and leave man you you you grass ass motherfucker how long is father wally how long was he just like all right how you know i'm just gonna sit here and watch this and be polite for a while this is the style of thing though like we always joke about like the z new reveal and stuff like that

Speaker 3 These guys are so serious. Like, Wally's so serious that these guys are, that's that's what's awesome about this scene is the fact that it is deadly serious.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and he is talking in a full-on, like, black face, like talking.

Speaker 3 He's using a minstrel show black man. And they're all taking it deadly seriously.
They're all sitting there and be like, I hope my daughter lives.

Speaker 3 Wonderful.

Speaker 3 Before long, Harry, speaking as Sambo, he declared the exorcism was a success. The spirit-haunting Shirley.
And how would that that sound?

Speaker 3 The spirit-haunting Shirley had been driven away, and Sambo had placed a psychic barrier around Shirley to protect her from future hauntings.

Speaker 3 This being England, they then all had tea, and Shirley went home satisfied. Now, it seemed like the exorcism had worked, because there were no knocks or taps that night.

Speaker 3 The Hitchings, therefore, slept for the first time in almost two months, and it might have all been settled then and there, if not for the meddling of the British media.

Speaker 3 See, there were two reporters from a paper called The Weekend Mail who were convinced that Shirley had fabricated the entire story.

Speaker 3 And so they arrived at the Hitchings house the day after the exorcism to convince Wally and Kitty to let them take Shirley to a hypnotist.

Speaker 3 And they said the shit, the hypnotist is going to get to the bottom of this whole story. You remember this also happened at Enfield? They do this too.

Speaker 3 They do a lot of bringing little girls into a room alone with a hypnotist. They really love it.
Now, Wally and Kitty agreed to the reporters' ask, although no reason is given why.

Speaker 3 Perhaps it was because hypnotism was getting a lot of positive press in England in the 1950s, and the hypnotist that the reporters had picked was indeed a recognized member of the British Society of Medical Hypnotists.

Speaker 3 Apparently, the British Society of Medical Hypnotists had been founded by the same man who had been responsible for the passing of the Hypnotism Act of 1952 in British Parliament, which had set regulatory standards for using hypnosis in medical practice.

Speaker 3 So, for Wally and Kitty, this probably all seemed like it was on the up and up.

Speaker 3 A one, a two, a three, your knees are now your feet.

Speaker 3 One, two, three, your ears are now your lips.

Speaker 3 And as you can all now see,

Speaker 3 charlatans such as this is why we need regulation in the hypnotism industry.

Speaker 3 Okay, now bark like a cat.

Speaker 3 But as it turned out, taking Shirley to a hypnotist was the wrong move. Shirley refused to relax when the hypnotist told her to.
Relax! And she wouldn't watch the pendulum he was swinging.

Speaker 3 Look at the goddamn pendulum. I don't know why you won't fucking relax.
You set the meeting with me. God damn it.
Relax!

Speaker 3 Look at my eyes!

Speaker 3 Calm down!

Speaker 3 She also constantly fidgeted. She patted her face to stay awake.
So all the so-called hypnosis standards utterly failed that day. Wow.

Speaker 3 But because Shirley was so uncooperative, the reporters who had brought her to the hypnotist gave up the story as a bust and drove Shirley home.

Speaker 3 But that night, the knocking and tapping returned louder than ever. And a framed photograph was even flung across the room where it struck Kitty Hitchings in the back.

Speaker 3 Supposedly, it was flung completely of its own volition. Nobody was around.
What was the picture of?

Speaker 3 Didn't say. I wondered too, but they didn't say.
It's important information. It really is.
No, they didn't say. There's lots of pictures.
Unless this was

Speaker 3 probably a train. Yeah.
Probably something like, you know, British people. Never bring your work home with you.
You see, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's been like, would you be sick of trains?

Speaker 3 I'm like, when you see a boat? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like, if you were to walk around my house, like, I don't think you'd say that, like, oh, because my house, it's not like it's all, like, chains and blood and bones or some bones, but not a lot.

Speaker 3 I mean, you're all. No more than like the average man.

Speaker 3 I think that I'm frightened just by the vibe of it, of your home. But for me, same.

Speaker 3 You're coming to my home. What do you expect to see in my home? You have a ghost in your home.
I do. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I also do have a lot of scary imagery. Yeah.
Your home's actually upsetting. That's the the idea.

Speaker 3 The children cry in your home. Good.
When I had to explain to the children that the cheddar goblin was like our friend. I think it helps.
I think it helps.

Speaker 3 Now, by the estimation of Harry Hanks, the two reporters and the hypnotist had demolished the protective aura that his African spirit guide Sambo had placed around Shirley. Oh, yes, that magical.

Speaker 3 Wow, I'm certain. Yeah.
A second exorcism, however, proved to be unsuccessful. And eventually, Harry Hanks, who again is.
So then he got into the Asian guy, right?

Speaker 3 And then then he did the Asian guy.

Speaker 3 Then they did the whole.

Speaker 3 Man, I can't wait till they got to, because what's he thinking? The Italian, German, Japanese. Like, that's funny.

Speaker 3 So eventually, Harry Hanks, who, again, is just some guy who worked with Shirley's dad. He's a train conductor.
He just started a deeply racist train conductor.

Speaker 3 That's why I don't realize he's probably trying all the voices while he's doing the announcements on the train. So, you know, I'm like, oh, fuck, I can't do any of them.

Speaker 3 It's all right. I'm sorry, bro.
It's good to do. No, it's good.
Yeah, yeah. Self-control.
It's good.

Speaker 3 Well, Harry Hanks eventually decided that Shirley was a natural medium who had attracted a second earthbound entity.

Speaker 3 Now, Shirley was convinced that the spirit haunting her was still Donald, still the same old poltergeist.

Speaker 3 But Harry Hanks sat this teenage girl down and tried to convince her that she was being actively haunted by the spirit of an adult woman from the neighborhood who had died in a horrific suicide years earlier.

Speaker 3 She was so sad that her breasts were too large.

Speaker 3 Just imagine that this train is a man in his 50s sitting down like a little girl that... No.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, I do have to tell you that you are being haunted by the ghost of suicide, and I really want you to accept that. That there's a woman that is haunting your room who has died by suicide.

Speaker 3 And what I need you to know is that her soul was absolutely so desperate. So absolutely filled with malaise.

Speaker 3 She ran a razor across a conrad audio and allowed the blood to sleep forward till she became a green rotting corpse. Now her spirit lies in this fairy room.
Let me get my drums. Excuse me.

Speaker 3 The choo-choo is calling actually up super late.

Speaker 3 Choo-choo sitting at the session.

Speaker 3 Harry's exorcisms, however, stopped when Harry decided that Shirley's psychic abilities were simply too strong.

Speaker 3 And until she got her powers under control, she was likely to keep attracting new spirits just as soon as he got rid of the old ones. Sambo here was powerless.

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Speaker 3 Available now in your refrigerated section. Now, by March, the two skeptical reporters from the weekend mail had settled on an angle to discredit Shirley Hitchings.

Speaker 3 See, one of Shirley's hobbies was ballet. And like most ballerinas, she developed a deformed hammer toe.

Speaker 3 And for some reason, during the visit to the hypnotist, the reporters had insisted that Shirley remove her shoes. Gross.
Yeah, it's weird.

Speaker 3 I don't know if they had a maybe they had a hunch about the hammer toe, but they said, like, if this is going well, Coral, you got to take off your shoes.

Speaker 3 Well, we know that this is all connected back to the Fox sisters. Yeah.
That's where it came from with the shoes. Ah, I didn't know that.
Yes, because they famously faked.

Speaker 3 tappings and knockings using the joints of their feet or their toes. Right.
Well, the thing is, the reporters had seen Shirley's deformed big toe.

Speaker 3 They're like, I know, I know that big old toe, big old ghost noise. And we know that hammers knock.
Yeah, and they'd noticed that the toe made a loud cracking sound whenever Shirley moved it.

Speaker 3 According to the reporters, the cracking of her big toe sounded just like the taps supposedly being made by Donald the poltergeist.

Speaker 3 So the stalwarts of journalism published a full article about this teenage girl's ugly foot and titled it, Spook Was in Girls' Big Toe. Girls love that shit.

Speaker 3 Nothing helps a 15-year-old girl's life

Speaker 3 than focusing on her ugliest part in the news.

Speaker 3 Yeah, full front-page newspaper article. It's the worst part of your body.

Speaker 3 It was all just like, Henry Zabrowski's belly button is a mess.

Speaker 3 You see, his belly button caused what's happening in Gaza.

Speaker 3 And also, he's a liar.

Speaker 3 But rather than kill the poltergeist story, the toe angle only introduced more intrigue and speculation, which of course made the story even bigger. Now you had something to argue about.

Speaker 3 Is it her big toe? Is it real? And after the so-called big toe story, no less than 12 newspapers were reporting on the Battersea Poltergeist.

Speaker 3 And amongst all the reporters working on the story was a dashing young man named Michael Kirsch.

Speaker 3 Since Shirley was just 15, she was pretty quick to develop crushes, and she started crushing on Michael Kirsch soon after he started reporting on the story.

Speaker 3 Michael, in turn, realized that if he gave Shirley extra attention, if he nurtured this crush a little bit, he might be able to get a few more details that could give him a scoop on Shirley's specter.

Speaker 3 I'll tell you what,

Speaker 3 you're how I wish I was a nail to be subject to your hammer toe.

Speaker 3 I'd love your delicious little

Speaker 3 horrible crooked feet.

Speaker 3 Never, never help a 15-year-old's crush on you. No, no, never don't cultivate that, not for a story in the news.
But on the other hand, as we all know, British journalists have no ethics.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know, it's just they're a little bit more adventurous over there. What is wrong with them?

Speaker 3 They've got different rules.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they got different rules, and those rules are no rules. Like, there's like it's a go as hard and as fast as you can to get the story no matter what.

Speaker 3 Like, they are, god damn, the British press are vicious.

Speaker 3 And so, right around the same time that the Big Toe article was published, Donald the poltergeist communicated its longest message yet.

Speaker 3 This message, recorded letter by letter using the homemade Ouija board, would mark the beginning of a barrage of letters dictated through taps by Donald.

Speaker 3 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Speaker 3 It was the blurst of times.

Speaker 3 Please, stupid poltergeist.

Speaker 3 Now, this first big letter was somewhat nonsensical, but it did have some clues as to what the motivation for this whole thing was and where the poltergeist story would eventually go.

Speaker 3 It read, quote, and please, Henry, verbatim: I am 15.

Speaker 3 I come from France, lost in Chennai, cannot remember name.

Speaker 3 I had a girl like you.

Speaker 3 Donald is not aware of me.

Speaker 3 I want someone to tell him.

Speaker 3 I want a happiness between you two.

Speaker 3 It's French. Just keep in French, you can go into Italy.
I want the happiness between you two.

Speaker 3 I won't go till I made it, sir.

Speaker 3 Really delicate balance here.

Speaker 3 Let me go.

Speaker 3 You gotta keep going, Kevin.

Speaker 3 Let me go happy by telling Ronald or me, but not tell his family.

Speaker 3 He must keep me a secret between you and me and to himself.

Speaker 3 Give this to Kursh.

Speaker 3 Let no one see it.

Speaker 3 Get Kursch. You, but keep a secret.

Speaker 3 If give to Father,

Speaker 3 be angry and set fire. Whoa! Yeah, now the important points of this message were that the ghost came from France.
He comes from France. Yeah, he comes from France, like the Coneheads.

Speaker 3 He's gonna set fire if his instruction, he's gonna set fire to something if his instructions are.

Speaker 3 It's gonna be fire. And finally, it wanted the letter given only to the handsome young reporter, Michael Kirsch.

Speaker 3 And I want you to further it up and I want you to place it ever gently, sir, into his front pocket so that the message can touch the shaft of his pinace.

Speaker 3 And please, if you can tap his bottom

Speaker 3 upon delivery of the letter. I would like to give him kisses.

Speaker 3 Kirsch, however, seemed to be the main factor here. And the request came, as they often did, with increased poltergeist activity.

Speaker 3 The evening after that message was given, Wally and Kitty reportedly saw Shirley's slippers floating three feet above the ground, walking in the air by themselves, as if something invisible was wearing them.

Speaker 3 My flying shoes. Yes, my flying shoes.

Speaker 3 Later that night, Kitty was woken up by what felt like fingers on her back. And the fingers were paired with an insistent tapping.

Speaker 3 Donald obviously had another message, but when Kitty translated it using the homemade Ouija board, she found that the message was not for her. Instead, it said, quote, get Kirsch, get him out of bed.

Speaker 3 Now, after the Kirsch request, Donald the poltergeist reportedly began writing messages himself, messages that showed up on scraps of paper or written on the walls.

Speaker 3 Eventually, the messages became so prolific that the family actually got Donald a journal to write in.

Speaker 3 Supposedly, when no one was in the room, Donald would write in the journal using long, straggling characters that barely came out as words.

Speaker 3 Although, for some reason, the spirit's handwriting would vary in quality throughout the 12-year haunting.

Speaker 3 Now, amongst believers, there is speculation that Shirley would become possessed by Donald, and she would black out whenever Donald wanted to actually write down messages. She was Donald's hand.

Speaker 3 But it was said by investigators that Donald and Shirley had entirely different styles of handwriting when those samples were laid out side by side.

Speaker 3 Now, since Harry Hanks's exorcisms had failed, and since the Hitchings were a staunchly Church of England household, no Catholic funny business here, they had more or less resigned themselves to accepting Donald the poltergeist as a part of their lives.

Speaker 3 Ain't nothing to do. It's just

Speaker 3 over.

Speaker 3 Well, it is, I really do think it's like this Blitz mentality. It's, you know, this is 1956.
I think there is a keep common carry-on mentality of like, eventually it's going to end.

Speaker 3 Just another thing, another thing on the poil.

Speaker 3 But one day, a man appeared at their door in the great tradition of British paranormal investigation cold calls. A man who thought he could help.

Speaker 3 This man, who would eventually give the Battersea poltergeist its worst name, the poltergeist who could write, was paranormal investigator Harold Chibbett. Another Harry? Harry Chibit.

Speaker 3 Oh, Harry Chibbetts.

Speaker 3 So much British shit going on in this world. I don't want to meet Harry Chibbett.
Well, you don't want to see Harry Chibbets. But I think that Harry Chibbett is a one-perald paradigm.

Speaker 3 I think all Harry Chibbets, his example of the consummate UK paranormal investigator, is almost untouched. Oh, yeah, pipe smoking.
Oh, yeah. He looks good.
Blobby. Three-piece suit

Speaker 3 every day, fully dressed.

Speaker 3 It's like they wear so much material. They're so afraid of their penis escaping.
And like, why? It's like,

Speaker 3 it's like their genitals are in like maximum security prison. They refuse a wife.
It's the wool and the tweed. They love wool and tweed, the uncomfortable, itchy

Speaker 3 material. They like a stiff cut.
They like a jacket that can hold its shape.

Speaker 3 Now, Harold Chibbett was in his mid-50s by the time of the Battersea Poltergeist.

Speaker 3 Like many men of his generation, he'd become deeply interested in spiritualism and psychical research after he'd served in World War I. And he wasn't a train conductor.
He was.

Speaker 3 Which honestly really hit himself up.

Speaker 3 As such, he'd founded a group that investigated psychic and occult phenomena. And since Chibbett was absolutely terrible at naming things, he named his new group the Probe.

Speaker 3 But during his time with the Probe, Chibbett became a follower of the Fodian School of Paranormal Research, meaning that he believed that it was his job to observe and document paranormal phenomena, but never interfere.

Speaker 3 This, of course, is impossible when you're basically living with a family. The guy who, you know, that studied the infield poltergeist, he found the same thing.

Speaker 3 If you're there all the time, you're going to get involved.

Speaker 3 And as it went, Harold Chibbett more or less embedded himself with Shirley and the rest of the Hitching family not too long after he introduced himself.

Speaker 3 In the Fordian style, they know that the paranormal phenomena itself is extremely subtle and personal. And so the idea is to be there 24-7.
Yeah. So you can record every single thing.

Speaker 3 And I love Harry Chibbett's style of this because he really just like, that's the idea is to record it all and let the whole world sort it out. I'm not convinced he's not homeless.
Oh, he is.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's wonderful.

Speaker 3 This is wonderful, magnificent. Is this hot water? Oh, that reception is simply wonderful.

Speaker 3 Yes, oh, this is bad.

Speaker 3 His food is excellent. Oh, this is like, what do you call this? A blanket?

Speaker 3 The Hitching family invited Harold Chibbett into their home as they did with pretty much anyone who knocked on their door. It really did seem like, I can't figure out.

Speaker 3 It seems like it's it's a compulsion with Wally Hitchings. Anytime someone shows up and says, Hey, I didn't, he just is like, All right, come in.

Speaker 3 My take is the fact that these people are showing up in like an idea of authority and they're showing up as like, we're here to investigate and we are here to report on this.

Speaker 3 And he's like so British, he always has to go, yes, of course, welcome. Yes, T biscuits for everyone.
Yes, of course. Because they're just like locked into every form of social caste.

Speaker 3 Terminal politeness. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But the arrival of the middle-aged, portly, pipe-smoking paranormal investigator seemed to elicit an aggressiveness in Donald the poltergeist. Of course.

Speaker 3 See, Harold Tribbett was not an attractive man. Well, he is a specific look.
Well,

Speaker 3 the world of Fortian

Speaker 3 paranormal investigators is not full of heart throbs. No, it's for the woman who loves a difficult personality.
It's like an exotic nut.

Speaker 3 A difficult personality, and let's call it a unique body. The Agurian fruit of men.

Speaker 3 Well, Harold Chibbett was not an attractive man as opposed to say the dashing young reporter, Michael Kirsch.

Speaker 3 So Donald began making threats, saying that there quote, wouldn't be a tomorrow if someone didn't bring Michael Kirsch back to the house.

Speaker 3 Now the family refused to contact Michael Kirsch, but Donald ended up blaming the reporter himself for not showing up.

Speaker 3 In the typically belligerent British poltergeist style, I don't know why British poltergeist are more belligerent, they just are.

Speaker 3 Donald communicated that he was going to get revenge on Kirsch by, quote, poking him and suffocating him that very night. It's the first really violent threat that Donald the poltergeist makes.

Speaker 3 Well, that and the fire.

Speaker 3 I'll shit for it. This is a specific.

Speaker 3 The fire was like, that's more general. This is like, I'm going to specifically hurt

Speaker 3 a person. Yeah, Donald's like, and then, and I, and I can imagine that Harry Chibbets is so used to men casually telling him they're going to kill him.

Speaker 3 I mean, it just seems like it's Shirley at this point now, because she's like, I don't like this ugly guy. Get the cute guy back here.
It's interesting.

Speaker 3 That's the very interesting part of it because as we talk about it more and more, it's going to so very obviously become Shirley.

Speaker 3 In fact, it's going to become more and more obvious that it's Shirley as the story goes on. But then the activity is also going to get weirder.
Exactly. And that's the thing.

Speaker 3 The activity gets weirder. The coincidences get weirder.

Speaker 3 So it just begs the question of like, where is this actually coming from? And what is Donald?

Speaker 3 Now, Donald gave up on Kirsch after a few days and instead requested a different reporter named Ronald Maxwell. Although this request also came with a threat.

Speaker 3 If Maxwell didn't show up, Donald wrote, he was going to set the house on fire. While that sounds like an empty threat, both Shirley and Kitty.
It's just like front of the poltergeist, guys.

Speaker 3 Yes, everyone's like,

Speaker 3 he's fucking bluffing.

Speaker 3 And how many times has someone has threatened to set my house on fire this week? Seven. Seven times.
And three different ghosts.

Speaker 3 Well, both Shirley and Kitty reported that later on that evening,

Speaker 3 after Donald made the threat, they both saw green orbs floating in their bedroom. And again, this is 1956.
Orbs are not in the zeitgeist.

Speaker 3 And it's not so much the poltergeist II movie version of like, you know, when they do that weird energy thing where it moves between all the rooms and the house. Like it feels like that.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Or like the end of Poltergeist, the first Poltergeist, you know, when the gate gets closed. Yeah.
This house is closed. God, I love her.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But when the requested reporter still didn't show up, Donald the poltergeist apparently attacked. One night, around 1 a.m., Shirley said that she saw another green orb, followed by the smell of smoke.

Speaker 3 She called out for her father, and when Wally burst into the room, he said that Shirley's bedsheets were on fire.

Speaker 3 He put out the flames, but the fire was big enough where he burned his arms and his hands. The burns were bad enough to take him to the hospital.
Those are his conducting tools.

Speaker 3 How is he supposed to pull the horn?

Speaker 3 How is he supposed to stick his fingers in the mouth of the face of the train?

Speaker 3 Or any boy that happens to be at his stop.

Speaker 3 You ever sitting there, like in New York, were you ever like waiting for the train and the conductor just reaches out and he puts his fingers in your mouth?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I always wanted to. I just thought that was like a bug thing.

Speaker 3 I thought that was a G-train thing. It's the little things you miss about New York City, you know? Yeah, I miss

Speaker 3 those pick eyes wingers.

Speaker 3 But before you say that Shirley simply lit the fire herself, Wally's injury triggered an official investigation. The fire investigators were entirely unable to determine how the fire started.

Speaker 3 They tried, because, you know, this is a famous case. Everyone by this point, everyone in London knows about the Battersea Poultergeist case.
You know, these guys are going, they want an explanation.

Speaker 3 They cannot find one. Furthermore, the whole family was adamant that Donald had done it and that they were all in grave danger.

Speaker 3 And so it's with Donald's first act of violence that we'll pick our story back up next week for the conclusion to the story of the Battersea Poltergeist.

Speaker 3 Because next week, we're going to be getting to the French Revolution. We're going to be getting some actual deaths, mini deaths.
Yes. Quite a few deaths, actually.
Yeah, I'm kind of excited.

Speaker 3 It's going to be pretty bloody. We really do.
Like, this is the, I can't believe this is the first time I've come across this story. Like, we did.
I'd always heard about it.

Speaker 3 Like, I'd seen it on lists or something, but yeah, it's an insane story.

Speaker 3 It's a massive story. And the second half does sort of feel like a psychedelic tumble down to the mind of a 15-year-old psychic girl.
So it's going to be very, very interesting.

Speaker 3 This happens for 12 years, so eventually she's going to get older, obviously. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Does she get married and all that? I guess we'll save it.

Speaker 3 I'm chariot. We'll find out.
Hey, call us. I'll tell you this, Eddie.
She's still alive. She's still alive? She's still alive.
Oh, let's get hitched. She's British as all fun.

Speaker 3 We go to patreon.com/slash last podcast on the left. You can pay money to watch us talk.
You can watch us money to watch us slop back and forth.

Speaker 3 Most importantly, you can pay money to watch us do last stream on the left live every Tuesday, 6 p.m. PST.
And you can join the chat and yell at us. It's a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I am definitely going to say this last episode of the stream, I had a ton of fun, but the majority of it is not making it to YouTube. That's so funny.

Speaker 3 The vast majority of it is

Speaker 3 one of the funnest episodes we've had in forever.

Speaker 3 But it's just

Speaker 3 the foot sex toy with the vagina on the sole of the foot and the mouth.

Speaker 3 We can't show that on YouTube. So the only place you're going to be able to see it is over on Patreon.
Yeah, they have zero tolerance for it.

Speaker 3 Thank you, zero tolerance, for giving us something to have zero tolerance about. Very much so.
And thanks for all the Luby. It is really helping me not stick to this chair.
Luby.

Speaker 3 Go check out our YouTube channel. We are currently crushing it over there at LPN TV.

Speaker 3 Our new LPN RPG, Vampire the Masquerade, run by Jared Logan with me, Jackie Zabrowski, Ross Bryant, is, I want to say...

Speaker 3 say you guys are crushing it all our guests are amazing in it ed was a guest like two episodes ago. Marcus is going to be a reoccurring character.

Speaker 3 I mean, technically, in the word, he's a recurring character.

Speaker 3 Come and watch it. We are having so much fun over on LPN TV.
It's on the YouTube.

Speaker 3 And then also check out our other new LPN, another new LPN-based YouTube channels like Someplace Underneath, No Dogs in Space, LPN Romanticy, and The Foreign Report.

Speaker 3 Yeah, man, it's a lot of fun over there. Come see us live.
Henry and I got a show in Vegas. I'm very excited about that.
December 7th, you can catch us out at Wise Guys in Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 And also, just know, we are performing way off the strip. So please come there.
Like, it's going to be nice. For those of you that are locals, like, I know it's a past the airport.

Speaker 3 But, but, you know, but we're going to have fun. We're going to have fun.
We're going to stick it up. Yeah.
No, this is for the locals. Yes.
This isn't necessarily for people visiting.

Speaker 3 And if you are visiting, you can come. But I want some real Vegas Indians.
That's what I'm looking for. Yes.
And you and check out the rest of us on the road.

Speaker 3 We got Saturday, November 29th, right after Thanksgiving. We're going to be in Akron, Ohio at the Goodyear Theater.
Is it a mistake? We say no. No, we're doing it.
We're doing it. Who gives a shit?

Speaker 3 I love tires, all right? We all do. Check out the video.

Speaker 3 December 12th and 13th, Portland, Oregon.

Speaker 3 Get your tickets fast for Portland, Oregon, because those are selling out. Yeah, those are going to be gone very soon.
Yeah, Henry and I's show in Columbus sold out, too. So it's happening, folks.

Speaker 3 Revolution Hall. Get in there.
Basically, Portland's already sold out at this point. You can buy the last straggling tickets, but go to Akron.

Speaker 3 Why don't we all go to Akron for the Saturday after Thanksgiving?

Speaker 3 Rubber City. You are going to be so happy to be outside of your home and away from your family in Akron.
You just leave whatever home you're at. Leave whatever place you're at.
The fuck up.

Speaker 3 Come from Wyoming. Come from South Dakota.
Rubber City. There's a lot of places that you could drive from Akron.
Delaware. All right.
A lot of horrible places will never go.

Speaker 3 Well, the Delaware people, I want you coming to Philadelphia. January 31st, we're going to be at the Met in Philadelphia.
That's going to be a big-ass show.

Speaker 3 And we're going to do something fun for that, but I don't know what that is yet. Hell yeah.
February 28th, Austin, Texas. March 13th, Indianapolis.
April 25th, Cincinnati, Ohio. I can't wait for that.

Speaker 3 Friday, May 29th, we're going to be in Pittsburgh. June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma. And July 18th, Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma.

Speaker 3 I cannot believe we're actually in Grand Rapids at an actual normal human time to be inside of Grand Rapids. Yes.

Speaker 3 What month are we going to be there? June. June.
Oh, wow. Yeah, it's going to be nice.
We might actually be like, it's nice there because we went during this.

Speaker 3 The last time we were there was during a snowstorm, and it was honestly a blast.

Speaker 3 You know what? I have no memory of that. You weren't there.
Oh, you were sick. I was sick.
That's right. That's when I had long COVID.
And I'm sick again now, but now it's long COVID.

Speaker 3 Now it's a lot of fun. Just regular, normal, sick in the head.
Yeah, this way, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just normal, unbridled.

Speaker 3 Strength of a thousand sons. We love you.
Hailsake. Oh, and Hail Game.
Why not?

Speaker 3 I guess

Speaker 3 Hail Harry.

Speaker 3 The first Harry.

Speaker 3 Harry Hanks. Yeah, good work.
Choo-choo man. I like it.
Can you believe this? Can you ever heard about this?

Speaker 3 He just became JLenn.

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