Episode 644: The Battersea Poltergeist Part II - Ghost Writer

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Speaker 5 There's no place to escape to.

Speaker 1 This is the last time.

Speaker 1 On the left.

Speaker 2 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 2 What was that?

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm on the shore.

Speaker 1 No, it can't be Irish.

Speaker 1 You're Irish again. Ah, fuck it.
But it's kind of like an Irish. I was listening to Shirley talk this morning.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 lady. The British, like the Battersea of the London accent.

Speaker 1 Man, when I did, there was an interview with her, with Shirley, about the new podcast, because I didn't know that there was a big, extensive podcast. Yeah, that's about three years ago.

Speaker 1 And I looked at it, and really, there doesn't really come to any specific conclusions, except for the fact in the end, like Shirley was like, a ghost will reel all along. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 But when they cut to her talking on this, it's like from, I guess, three years ago on this morning television show.

Speaker 1 She's the ghost.

Speaker 1 Now, currently? Yes, British people turn into ghosts while they're alive. Oh, yeah, at age like 44, I believe.

Speaker 1 Something happens where they all, one day she was a young girl and then she was a woman and then all of a sudden, when do you turn into the, hush, hush, hop, I, I, I,

Speaker 1 I knew the ghost was coming.

Speaker 1 Do you have a specific fear of old people though? You and Jackie both. I mean, it's fear.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You have a true, you, you are both truly afraid of old people.
You're disturbed by them. They're easy to fight.
It's the weird. You know what it is about

Speaker 1 bases. They pose you no threat.
There's something about them. I don't like them.
Yeah. I don't like them.
They skeeve me out. They make you uneasy.
They do. And I think.

Speaker 1 If you take a pad of paper from an old person, it'll ruin their month. I know.
I think it's that's the problem. Is that there's so many of them on hair triggers? Yeah.
Hair triggers.

Speaker 1 But the thing, once the trigger is pulled, what happens? Nothing. Sometimes they take a plane down.

Speaker 1 I don't know, man. It's just like you could take their socks and they'll die.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the last podcast on on the left. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks.
I'm here with the elder phobic Henry Zabrowski.

Speaker 1 I will say that there's nothing that quite keeps me more together elementarily as a female as my compression socks. Of course, without him, I would explode.

Speaker 1 And we also have the man who has a million ways to kill grandma. It's Ed Larson.
Oh, yeah. You know, one thing you slap her to death? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just put a pillow over her face. Honestly, if you just shake a really old woman like that.
Oh, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just remove the air conditioning.

Speaker 1 That's a summer kill. That's the summer kill.

Speaker 1 That's the winter kill. That could see some like new merch, like A Thousand and One Ways to Get Rid of Grandma with Ed Larson.
Slice him, dice him, drown him, gas him.

Speaker 1 Oh, like one of those like really rectangle horizontal books. No, I know you've always wanted to write a joke book.
I really am. I think this might be your joke book.

Speaker 1 A thousand and one uses for a dead woman. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Dead old woman. I'm sorry.
Dead old woman. Dead old woman.
Please. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Because we want someone to live the full life.

Speaker 1 Let's be respectful. And

Speaker 1 none of the ways uses are fucking. No, none of them.
No sexy.

Speaker 1 No, no, what's the problem? Keep a dork. No.
No, no pencil sharpener in her ass.

Speaker 1 That's number 98.

Speaker 1 Which is debatable as to how sexual it is. Today, we are on the Battersea Poltergeist, part two, the conclusion.

Speaker 1 So when we last left the Battersea Poltergeist, the spirit had taken the name of Donald and had engaged in his first violent act against the girl he detached himself to, 15-year-old Shirley Hitchings of London.

Speaker 1 This was after the Hitchings family had ignored Donald's repeated requests to have specific reporters that Donald had called out by name drop by the house to talk to him.

Speaker 1 And after the reporters didn't show up, Donald the poltergeist allegedly lit Shirley's bedsheets on fire in the middle of the night.

Speaker 1 And while it has been speculated that Shirley lit the fire herself, investigators came up with nothing when they tried to determine the fire's actual cause.

Speaker 1 To me, this implies that there could have been something paranormal behind the fire, something we don't understand. But literally, of the term paranormal.
Yes, of the term paranormal.

Speaker 1 Yes, something we don't understand.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying that it is a ghost named Donald who lit the fire, more just like the investigators couldn't figure out like any conventional reason why the bed sheet set on fire.

Speaker 1 And, you know, that's the thing. I don't think that it's likely that a 15-year-old girl in 1956 had the arson skills necessary to stump a hardened London fire investigator.

Speaker 1 Because it's such a burnable city. It's very much a burnable city.
Yeah. They've just gone through all the time.
They've just gone through the blitz.

Speaker 1 There's

Speaker 1 a lot of ways for London to burn down. Also, I think that this is a story.
I talked about it last week, but even further into this side of the story, you begin to see.

Speaker 1 It's obviously all around Shirley. It follows her everywhere she goes.
And I think it's very easy to say that it's a hoax.

Speaker 1 I actually think it's the more middleway conversation is the fact that we're seeing an actual contained psychic event mixed with a creation of a tolpa completely accidentally by a family in London.

Speaker 1 Yeah, something closer to something between, yeah, Carrie and Jeff the Talking Mongoose. Yes.

Speaker 1 Now, it seems like after the fire, Donald resigned himself to the possibility that no more reporters were coming. So he had no choice but to begin to...

Speaker 1 Sorry. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 You're a lot.

Speaker 1 So he had no choice but to begin communicating with the portly paranormal investigator that was Harold Chibbett.

Speaker 1 Who, if you'll remember, Harold Chibbett was the guy who named Donald the poltergeist who writes. It is a fat name.
Yeah, it is. It is.

Speaker 1 The guide who sits.

Speaker 1 Interestingly, though, Donald seemed to know his audience when he and Chibbett began communicating.

Speaker 1 See, in addition to being the founder of a paranormal group called the Probe, Harold Chibbett was also a science fiction author. He was very interested in aliens.

Speaker 1 So, while communicating, Donald sent a message that he would, quote, do harm to anyone who don't believe in flying saucers. That's cool.
Who don't believe in flying saucers?

Speaker 1 Well, I guess that you have to say, I'll do harm to anyone who don't believe in flying saucers.

Speaker 1 Let me think about this. I don't believe.
I believe.

Speaker 1 Figure out the double negative. That's how they get you with that Michael Cain British ghost logic.
Well, Donald also claimed that he had knowledge of space travel.

Speaker 1 Knowledge that was unknown to any human. That's the this is the first time I've ever heard of a poltergeist bringing aliens into it.
Go north. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he also had knowledge of eight foot tall beings who were living on no less than five other planets in our solar system.

Speaker 1 Oh, poor Chibitch is going, oh, sorry, I just made another mess in my breeches. This is the most fabulous conflagration topics I've ever heard.
Is this turning into space jam?

Speaker 1 I think it's space jelly.

Speaker 1 It's more space marmalade.

Speaker 1 Angry. But just as quickly as Donald had gotten friendly with Chibbit, he switched back to threats of arson.

Speaker 1 He claimed that he was going to set fire to Nan's bed, referring to Shirley's grandmother, Ethel, and that everyone should get ready for fire.

Speaker 1 And as it happened, on the evening of that threat, the family stove repeatedly turned itself on, and the stove kicking on by itself soon became a fairly regular occurrence in the Hitchings home.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't a gas stove, it was an electric stove, but still, it could cause fires. That's almost number one in poltergeist activity in terms of operating with fire and operating a stove.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which I find interesting. I just dealt with this with the ghost in the box in my home, where I was told,

Speaker 1 obviously, when we received the ghost, Jason, we knew that it would have an issue with flame and fire and that it would move things. That's what they said.
And I spoke with Jason. It's true.

Speaker 1 I gave him a little gift. I gave him a joint.
I gave him some alcohol because I knew he liked that in life. And then when I went, I was grilling and I was talking with Jason.

Speaker 1 And I had put hamburgers out on the grill with it fully going. And then when I came back out, the grill was turned off.
Hmm. Really? Yes.
Did you just run out of gas? No.

Speaker 1 The dials were completely turned. Oh, maybe it was a cook and he was mad you were burning the food.
I wasn't. I had a timer.
Sounds like you were burning it. I don't do that anymore.

Speaker 1 Also, it's very difficult to cook hamburgers to temperature on a grill. We all know this.
If you're asking for a medium rare temperature burger at a fucking backyard barbecue, leave.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, you definitely should. I'm trying to wrap my head around this right now.
So Harold Chibbett, this is what it looks like to me. Okay.
All right.

Speaker 1 Harold Chibbett is a fraud, but there's a real ghost in the house. I don't believe that Harold Chibbett is a fraud.

Speaker 1 Harold Chibbett is a true believer. He's not actually, I would put Harold Chibbett in the category of, you know, like the guys who were at the Enfield poltergeist house.
Okay. And

Speaker 1 the, what's it, the rectory? The Borley Rectory. The Borley Rectory.
Yeah, yeah. Harold Chibbett is a true fucking believer.

Speaker 1 In fact, he is such a believer that he's going to spend years of his life trying to find a way to tell the world that this is real.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 he is a true believer to a fault.

Speaker 1 And it's also a specific type of ghost investigation. In America, we made it very aggro, right? The idea of that it's some battle between these forces of good.

Speaker 1 And they all got like tactical vests on shit,

Speaker 1 bloodlamps. It started with the Warrens.
Like the Warrens started this antagonistic style of ghost hunting.

Speaker 1 These guys really were more like, I'd put like wildlife photographers. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like he wanted to just be there and witness because he believed that if we just categorize all of this information, one day there will be a piece of proof.

Speaker 1 So he really is kind of just in the house, but that might instigate behavior from a little girl who's looking for attention or potentially a little girl who has untapped psychic abilities. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And also she likes boys and Harold Chippett's Harold Chippett. He's a man.
Mm-hmm. And she don't got that taste yet for a big, thick, British man.

Speaker 1 You gotta like vest fluff. Cigar ash.

Speaker 1 Yes, the standards have not yet gone away, and she has not yet accepted that she can't have both.

Speaker 1 Now, after threatening to burn Grandma Ethel alive, Donald began hurling insults directly at Shirley's nan. Whoa.

Speaker 1 See, Ethel and Shirley had somewhat of a strained relationship, although the strain was very normal, very middle class, and very British.

Speaker 1 Apparently, Ethel refused to teach Shirley how to make lace because Shirley was too impatient to master the craft properly. Shut up!

Speaker 1 And Shirley was very messed. Oh, you're mad about not making lace? Shut up! Oh, I want to make lace.
You can't. You're too impatient.
We fought the Holocaust. What did you do, Shirley?

Speaker 1 Maybe that's what happened with the bed sheets. She was just trying to get a quick way to make lace and burn little holes in it.
Who knows? Too quick.

Speaker 1 But even though this seemed to be the worst of Shirley and Ethel's conflicts, Donald began focusing his ire on Ethel in late March 1956 by communicating insults through messages using the tedious one letter at a time system the Hitchings family had developed, tapping out each letter one by one.

Speaker 1 And I just find it so funny because

Speaker 1 think about this when right before Henry reads it, like as Henry's reading this, think about this, is that these people are writing out this entire message one letter at a time? So it's like

Speaker 1 C. Well, what it is is they're moving their finger.
They have a piece of C. They have a piece of paper.
It's like a Ouija board. It's like Ouija board.

Speaker 1 They have a piece of paper with the entire alphabet written on it.

Speaker 1 And then when they get to a certain letter, when they get to like D, they'll hear like, and then like they write down D, and they get to E, and then. Write that down.

Speaker 1 Now, is it in order or is it the quarter system? It's in order. It's in order.
Yeah, yeah, it's in order. But this is the message that took probably half an hour, 45 minutes to decipher.

Speaker 1 She is old battle axe,

Speaker 1 fast like nose overgrown beetroot,

Speaker 1 silly old cow. Do as I say,

Speaker 1 shit pan monkey chops, windbag,

Speaker 1 bum fluff,

Speaker 1 shit, you shit.

Speaker 1 Just shit, you, you shit. Shit, you shit, you shit.
You shit. Shit, you shit.
Started losing it at the end.

Speaker 1 I mean, and then you shit, you shit. You shit.

Speaker 1 That's the weird thing about it. Is that it?

Speaker 1 Does sometimes these, even though they're tapping out the letter, tapping out the words one at a time, the messages do at times become more frenzied as they go on.

Speaker 1 S. Ooh, interesting.
Oh, yes. H, ah, maybe she, she, I,

Speaker 1 Ah, oh, oh, oh, T.

Speaker 1 Fine.

Speaker 1 You.

Speaker 1 Fuck you.

Speaker 1 Fuck me. Fuck you.
Fuck me. Check me.
I'm shit. I'm the one who shit.

Speaker 1 Windbag. I see.
Oh, bum fluff. Bumfluff.
Interesting. Now, not to keep being an asshole, but how does this little French boy speak English?

Speaker 1 Well, he also speaks French.

Speaker 1 He's about eight years old. He doesn't know shit, you shit.
I thought everything.

Speaker 1 He was 15. Mary.

Speaker 1 I thought the little boy died at eight. No, well, the little boy died at 8.
But I grew up in Heaven. Am I getting ahead of myself? You're getting ahead of yourself.
Sorry, Marlon. No, it's fine.

Speaker 1 It's fine. It's fine.
I grew up in Heaven.

Speaker 1 Everybody has thought he in Heaven. Sex is illegal for me in Heaven.

Speaker 1 Now that message was communicated to Harold Chibbett. But Chibbett was unmoved.

Speaker 1 After Chibbett set aside what seemed to be an almost uncontrollable amount of anger towards Grandma Ethel, he began deducing Donald's identity.

Speaker 1 Donald, however, tried on a lot of hats before he finally settled on a winner. Who would say shit?

Speaker 1 You shit. Come on.

Speaker 1 At first, Donald gave information that implied that he'd been an actor at a famous London theater who died in 1753 at the age of 100. Wow.

Speaker 1 As proof, Donald gave a bunch of names that supposedly belonged to his fellow 18th-century actors. That's easy.
I can do that all day. Daniel Punch.

Speaker 1 Reginald Actmost.

Speaker 1 Gwendolyn Act Least.

Speaker 1 I knew a lot of different. There's so many names you make up.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And most of these names, they were kind of close to the actor rosters that Harold Chibett found in the archives because Donald did name the theater. Yeah, how many British names are there?

Speaker 1 Quite a few. Like Tenderson Robertman.

Speaker 1 No, his name is Ribbett

Speaker 1 Wondergundt.

Speaker 1 Pritchard Fairchild. Yeah, this is all

Speaker 1 names.

Speaker 1 But there was at least one name that Donald absolutely nailed. The spirit claimed to have known an actor and playwright with the incredible name of Richard Steele.

Speaker 1 Now, Chibbett was floored when he found the name Richard Steele in the history books.

Speaker 1 Because how would a 15-year-old know the name of an actor who'd been dead for 200 years, especially a name as odd as Dick Steele?

Speaker 1 But even if it was a coincidence, Dick Steele was still enough to keep Harold Chibbett going. Now, after Donald spent weeks cycling through identities, he said he was an actor.

Speaker 1 Then he said he was an alien. Then he'd settle every once in a while into being a pyromaniac with a hatred for old ladies.
Which is understandable. It's relatable.

Speaker 1 But he finally began to settle on a permanent identity by the end of March.

Speaker 1 He was claiming that he was a 15-year-old French prince who had almost been murdered during the French Revolution.

Speaker 1 Unlike his unluckier relatives who had met their ends with the guillotine, Donald claimed that he had escaped the revolution but had tragically drowned in the English Channel not too long after.

Speaker 1 That he had been imprisoned at eight but had drowned at fifteen.

Speaker 1 Now, this is a big claim, so to prove it, Donald began leaving messages for Chibbet that described late 18th century France in great detail. Ah, yes, France, many a street,

Speaker 1 ah, France, restaurants,

Speaker 1 France,

Speaker 1 Many ways

Speaker 1 for you to visit France in the 18th century. I will say this.
He was far better at describing 18th century France than the Kentucky vampire. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 When he described 18th century France, he was way off. It really was like, there's like stones on

Speaker 1 fucking roads, and like people are eating like

Speaker 1 bread.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah, they were. Yeah, they were.
They were. No, this was, he was getting into pretty good detail, you know, like describing, you know, like court rituals and, you know, what the crowns looked like.

Speaker 1 It was fairly accurate. Not perfect, but still pretty close.

Speaker 1 And this would have been absolutely incredible if not for the fact that a British TV series called The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernell, set during 18th century France and involving French royalty, it was airing at the same time that these claims began.

Speaker 1 Now, Shirley Hitchings claimed that she never watched a single episode of The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernell. It had an 18-episode run.
It was actually one of Christopher Lee's first roles.

Speaker 1 He had an uncredited role as an executioner.

Speaker 1 Started off well. He was actually an executioner, and then he got hired to do the role.

Speaker 1 I love him, the story of him describing killing a man in real life to Peter Jackson.

Speaker 1 And while not a single episode of The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernell involved the drowned French prince, the emergence of the French royalty personality in Donald emerged right after this show finished airing.

Speaker 1 It must also be said that the airing of the show coincided with Donald's first celebrity request.

Speaker 1 In what would be a recurring theme, Donald left a message demanding that the Scarlet Pimpernel himself, a handsome young actor named Marius Goring, come visit the hitching home just to say hi.

Speaker 1 It's hard to get him. Yeah, it's hard to get anybody.

Speaker 1 How do you get a a celebrity to a young celebrity to be like, hey, there's a ghost out in Battersea that wants to see you? Well, if you also offer to sell him your daughter,

Speaker 1 I think a lot of the weird guys will come out of the woodwork. That's what Shirley was banking on here.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah.
Hopefully.

Speaker 1 It seems like it's just like a little girl who wants to meet her crush. I mean, this is, it's true, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it's interesting in the way that the message was delivered versus what the message is.

Speaker 1 That's kind of what I keep coming around is they keep talking about how the messages were found and they were both highly strange, like written in weird, like papers and doing the kind of stuff, but also in this knocking, like weird way they do it in the long form knocking communication that they did.

Speaker 1 That it's just, it's, it's just interesting. I feel like the ghost would ask to see normal people as well as celebrities.

Speaker 1 He asked to see reporters. He did.
But that's not a normal person. I mean, those are people who are like out in the world with their names and papers and stuff like that.
I'm agree with you.

Speaker 1 It is one of those things of why why it's very easy to say the story is not true.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But it does also, but the thing is, is to use that as the only debunking method is to ignore everything else that happened.
It just keeps getting thicker. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Also, you remember when we were younger? Just like the grandma.

Speaker 1 We're going to dig your guns.

Speaker 1 Do you not feel like when you were younger, there was a lot more scarlet pimpernel in pop culture? Yeah,

Speaker 1 it was huge in the 50s. And then it had like another revamp and then another revamp.
and then I remember it being a musical. Yeah, and it just kind of went away.

Speaker 1 I think it just became too hokey and we stopped caring about

Speaker 1 aristocrats and saving aristocrats. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But also then technically like Batman

Speaker 1 came from that.

Speaker 1 So Batman's better, yeah. After the French bitched out and left the Vietnam War and we had to take over.
Fucking losers. I'd like to fucking hear

Speaker 1 finally a real goddamn man's opinion. I'm not going to comment on that

Speaker 1 because that was a big can of worms. You just opened that.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to move right past it. You can't give us the Bob Mee sandwich, and I love that.
Shang God for Vietnam. The one thing the Vietnam conflict brought me was summer rolls.

Speaker 1 And I will still argue that the scene with the French colonists in Apocalypse Now should have been left in the movie. It was awesome.
I love the scene, but it was long and boring. It's very, well,

Speaker 1 debatable. It's long and fascinating and boring.
Yes. Context.

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Speaker 1 Now, after Donald's request for a a celebrity visit was denied, he made a statement that would send Harold Chibbett down an obsessive investigative rabbit hole that would go on for years on end.

Speaker 1 After weeks of false starts when it came to Donald's identity, the poltergeist finally stuck to one and communicated that his real name was Louis.

Speaker 1 He was indeed a crown prince of France, and he had indeed been killed as a result of the revolution.

Speaker 1 Now, Chibbett took this statement and ran with it because this message heavily heavily implied that Donald was actually the spirit of Prince Louis, aka Louis XV,

Speaker 1 son of King Louis XVI. King Louis, of course, had been executed during the French Revolution in 1793 and according to historical record, Prince Louis died not too long after.

Speaker 1 Now this would have been a massive discovery for Harold Chibbett because throughout the 19th century, it was popular amongst scammers and crazy people to make claims that they were actually Prince Louis, the long-lost long-lost son of King Louis XVI.

Speaker 1 Usually, scammers would have some sort of harrowing tale to tell as far as how they had escaped the French Revolution, and they would sometimes even have documentation to back it up.

Speaker 1 Prince Louis's fate was therefore the subject of no less than 500 books in the coming centuries. It's so amazing.

Speaker 1 I didn't even, I had no fucking idea about this stupid conspiracy theory, and it was that big. No clue.
Well, it's not a conspiracy. It's just one guy.
Well, it's kind of like, what's his name?

Speaker 1 What was the the daughter from the

Speaker 1 family? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's really what it's like. I mean, as far as the cottage industry goes, it's think of it like the JFK conspiracy.

Speaker 1 You know, there's just a whole industry around it. There was a whole industry around the Prince Louis story.

Speaker 1 And this scam was the antecedent to the Princess Anastasia claims that were made throughout the 20th century, in which women came forward to say that they were the last surviving member of the Romanov dynasty and had somehow survived the mass basement execution that came as a result of the Russian Revolution.

Speaker 1 It's this interesting thing in which

Speaker 1 the people have a revolution. They kill a bunch of royal children, and then somebody comes forth to say like, no, I survived, and I am that royal.
Yeah, because they hope that they'll get money. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, no,

Speaker 1 it's about money, fame, getting into the aristocracy by actually doing nothing. I feel like it has to have worked at least once.
I mean, honestly, aristocracies,

Speaker 1 aristocrats get in there doing nothing anyway. What's it different if you lie to get in there? Amen, brother.
Now, as far as Prince Louis went, the real story is indeed harrowing.

Speaker 1 King Louis XVI was guillotined in January of 1793.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But his wife, Marie Antoinette, and his son, Prince Louis, were separated and imprisoned by revolutionaries until their fates were decided. And we're in real history.
This is real Prince Louis. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, Prince Louis was just eight years old when all this happened, but he was nevertheless locked in a dark, damp cell where he was fed infrequently and his jailers physically abused him.

Speaker 1 Hey, it's hard for a kid that age to get his own room. Yeah, it's truly.
And also, how much fun would it be to beat up a little prince? Yeah, that's the problem. It's too much fun.

Speaker 1 Eventually, the terrible treatment enabled the revolutionaries to convince Prince Louis that his mother and sister had sexually molested him prior to his imprisonment.

Speaker 1 This is more proof of the decadent royals.

Speaker 1 This false accusation of sexual abuse was used as evidence in Marie Antoinette's show trial, the one that the revolutionaries set up for, in order to basically give them license to cut off her head.

Speaker 1 And of course, the trial ended in a death sentence, and Marie Antoinette was executed by guillotine in October of 1793. Interesting.
I had no idea any of that. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 No, no, the sexual abuse thing, that was a really big part of, like, this woman needs to die. Like, look at how decadent she was.
Look at how awful she was.

Speaker 1 You know, it's because they needed some person.

Speaker 1 Extra. They needed some extra.
Yeah, they needed to show that, like, it wasn't enough to just show that, you know, we're starving while, you know, they're in their palace in Versailles.

Speaker 1 You also need, they also needed to show. They got to be evil.
Yeah, they have to be evil too. They can't just be

Speaker 1 out of touch. Yeah,

Speaker 1 they can't just be on the wrong side of history. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the crazy part of this story is that the revolutionaries simply left young Prince Louis to rot in jail. Over the course of about a year and a half, the prince became unrecognizable.

Speaker 1 He was covered in sores, and he eventually died from tuberculosis in prison at the age of 10.

Speaker 1 As was medieval European tradition, a physician cut out Prince Louis' heart and secretly smuggled it out of prison, preserved in wine.

Speaker 1 Very France.

Speaker 1 The rest of the body was reportedly dumped in one of the many mass graves that have been dug to bury the thousands of people who were executed during the French Revolution.

Speaker 1 It's estimated that about 17,000 people were guillotined during the French Revolution. That's awesome! A lot of blood? It's so much blood.
Oh my God, the headrooms. I can't wait till we do this.

Speaker 1 They must have got sick.

Speaker 1 No one liked it. Actually, it was a problem.
It was a massive, all the massive amount of bodies. It was a huge problem health-wise.

Speaker 1 But now the physician held on to the heart of Prince Louis until 1815. That was the year the French monarchy was restored, Napoleon and all that.

Speaker 1 The physician attempted to give the heart to Prince Louis' uncle, King Louis XVIII,

Speaker 1 but the new king declined to accept the ghoulish gift. I'll keep it.
You know what? You've already had it. You've already been, you're close to it.
You know, I don't want to get in there.

Speaker 1 I don't want to change its schedule.

Speaker 1 Well, instead, the heart passed through the hands of various European royals until it was finally laid to rest in a necropolis reserved for French royalty. Oh, I thought it was Dick Cheney's chest.

Speaker 1 Yeah, baby.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, did you hear the news? What? Dick Cheney's got a big old old hog. Oh, of course he does.
He's a piece of shit. Yeah.
Yeah, he's got that amount of confidence. Yeah.
That's a bed.

Speaker 1 That's big dick confidence. Big old hog.
Yeah. They found that on the autopsy.

Speaker 1 It's like, I can't even get to his chest.

Speaker 1 Giant cocks.

Speaker 1 Someone gets the hell out of the lock off. Honestly, can we pin this back behind him? Can we shove this up his ass? Fortunately, my cock

Speaker 1 shrunk three inches the few years I had the heart of that little French boy. Don't worry, we'll tug the rest of it out.

Speaker 1 Well, the heart stayed in the necropolis until 1999 when it was removed and DNA tested. At long last, the tests proved that the heart did indeed belong to Prince Louis.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And it was eventually laid to rest with the bodies of his parents, Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI. Oh, go for him.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, part of the reason why the heart had been DNA tested was because even back when Prince Louis died in 1795, rumors began immediately circulating that he had escaped prison and that the dead body of another child had been used in his place.

Speaker 1 As a result, dozens of impostors showed up at various European noble households over the following decades.

Speaker 1 One, a German clockmaker, even wrote memoirs that were so convincing that his death certificate and gravestone identified him as Louis XVIII when he died in 1845.

Speaker 1 That clockmaker, however, was just one of dozens of men who claimed to be the so-called lost dolphin, men who hoped to ascend the ranks of European royalty.

Speaker 1 But that's all to say that if Donald the poltergeist was indeed Prince Louis, the long-lost child king of France, then Harold Chibbett was on to a very big story indeed. And it would not be.

Speaker 1 The only problem is, is this is Harry Chibbett's main issue, is the fact that this is now where we really see the antiquity of his knowledge, where he has this idea now that it's a very specific ghost that does very specific things, and it's very easily categorical, like categorical, like you can put it all together.

Speaker 1 It's easy. Now I need to figure out the history of this ghost, and we'll tell its story, and it'll be a whole thing.

Speaker 1 And it's going to show, it's actually going to prove that in its trickster-like presentation of the phenomena, it's going to embarrass him

Speaker 1 looking for this information and essentially going to,

Speaker 1 I might even say waste most of the years of his life that he spent trying to connect Prince Louis to this ghost. That's a true haunting.
It is.

Speaker 1 I think that that is the spookiest story of all is Harry Jibbett reading about Prince Louis for no fucking reason for years. For years.
For years.

Speaker 1 Well, I think the reason why he focused on this so much is because he wanted proof. Yes.
And he thought that if

Speaker 1 the ghost could somehow say something that Shirley had no way of knowing, and if he could connect that, then he could say, look, look, here's the proof that this is a poltergeist.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 he has no way of knowing how to prove this phenomenon. I mean, he is collecting all of the information that he can through the Fortean method.

Speaker 1 But he is also looking to make his mark in the world of the paranormal, and he's trying as hard as he possibly can. Could be several ghosts.
Oh, very much.

Speaker 1 That's another, that's another weird explanation of this whole thing.

Speaker 1 Now, even though Donald was supposedly communicating directly with Harold Chibbett as Prince Louis, it must be repeated that the house at number 63 Wycliffe was still extremely haunted, and Donald's antics were by no means limited to messages.

Speaker 1 It said that furniture upended itself every night.

Speaker 1 Objects from the kitchen would go missing, or they'd fly through the air, and the taps and the knocks became so routine that each family member was greeted with a specific noise each morning.

Speaker 1 Can mine be a fart? Sure.

Speaker 1 That's my noise.

Speaker 1 That's my noise.

Speaker 1 There were so many incidents that occurred in even just the first few months, never mind the following 12 years, that it would take us hours upon hours to cover them all.

Speaker 1 So I would very much recommend the book, The Poltergeist Prince of London, if you want this full story.

Speaker 1 It is fascinating, but fuck, there's so many incidents. It's really, to me, it's the volume that speaks to the weirdness of the situation.

Speaker 1 That's why, like, if you read the book and allow yourself to be kind of enveloped in the amount of incidents that happens, you might start to

Speaker 1 see why we're like, there was something strange happening inside of the house. That's what happens.
It's so long when you let the ghost write. It's got nothing but time.
I mean, tell me about it.

Speaker 1 You got to cut these guys off. Get the ghost that editor.
The ghost that edits. That's what I want to know.

Speaker 1 The ghost needs a ghost writer that actually knows how to, you know, kind of mean, because everybody knows every script passes through like nine hands. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 But when you look at Donald the Poulter Guy's overall goals, it seems like one of his biggest focuses was keeping Shirley from holding a job. He wanted Shirley at home.

Speaker 1 Or, quite possibly, the other explanation is that Shirley wanted to be at home.

Speaker 1 See, after Shirley lost a second job to Donald's tapping, because if you'll remember that tapping followed her everywhere, Donald threw a tantrum the night before Shirley was about to start a third job.

Speaker 1 Reportedly, Donald hid Shirley's new work clothes the night before she was to start a new job at a bank.

Speaker 1 Then he tipped a slot bucket full of garbage, this is very weird, directly into Shirley's underwear. Yeah.
The spirit then drew black crosses on the wall using lead because, you know, lead was

Speaker 1 around at that point. I think they used it to clean their stove or something.
Brush your teeth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Seasons assume really nice.

Speaker 1 Cover my dildos in it.

Speaker 1 That's an old ingredient to English breakfast. It used to come with a side of lead.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just gnaw on that until you get dizzy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then Donald turned on the stove and caught a towel on fire.

Speaker 1 Donald then left a message saying that he had, quote, seen those Chinese fishermen with atomic ash fell on them, all burnt up and and swollen. Whoa.

Speaker 1 Which I assume is a reference to the same incident that inspired the creation of Godzilla. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? No, this is 1958.

Speaker 1 You know, it's when all those fishermen were burned and killed in the, I think, the Bikini Atoll test. One of the nuclear tests.

Speaker 1 But yeah, all those fishermen were burned and killed and inspired the story of Godzilla.

Speaker 1 Donald then added that he was quite capable of doing the same thing to the hitching family. That'll be fucking also.
Now he's threatening nuclear holocaust.

Speaker 1 Fucking no!

Speaker 1 One spared! I think the worst part is Donald doesn't know the difference between Chinese and Japanese.

Speaker 1 And I think that's a little upsetting, Donald. I do believe he was adding a bit of his own British point of view there.

Speaker 1 Determined to get the job, though, Shirley still tried going to work the next day, even after Donald threw a tea kettle at her head during breakfast.

Speaker 1 She even had a friend go with her to the train station.

Speaker 1 But after the friend was allegedly pushed onto the tracks by an invisible force, that's something the friend said, Shirley gave up on the job and returned home to focus on Donald.

Speaker 1 But isn't that weird? I know that it's, it's, it's really strange that it went with her so thickly, that the phenomena everywhere she went, and they all talk about it.

Speaker 1 That's the stuff that's really interesting is the fact that the noises were so loud, you could hear them on the street. The fact that everywhere she went, they could hear this series of noises.

Speaker 1 And there's only so often she can fake it. I wonder if there's just this mixture of all of this stuff flying around.
Yeah. I mean, I think it is a mixture because I bet she didn't want to work.

Speaker 1 I bet she's like, I got this ghost at home. I got a friend.
I got a reason not to work. I might as well go back home.
I'm feeding this topa. We're calling it a name.
We're giving it a job.

Speaker 1 We're telling it what it does. And the more and more we're all sitting here paying attention to it, it seems to just be feeding it all up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and they're now at this point like giving it a history, which is exactly how you make a topo. You know, and he could have just been trying to give her tea.
He's just a bad waiter.

Speaker 1 That's again, yeah,

Speaker 1 Europe is not known for its customer service.

Speaker 1 Now, Harold Chibbett somewhat ignored all of the intense paranormal activity that was constantly going on at the Hitchings house.

Speaker 1 But, I mean, it might be fair to say that the activity had become tedious and routine to everyone involved, Harold Chibbett included.

Speaker 1 As such, Chibbett began to pedantically obsess over the Prince Louis angle, constantly trying to catch Donald out with factual errors.

Speaker 1 Now, Shirley steadfastly denied that she knew anything about French history, although a second paranormal researcher who popped into the house, he claimed that he did see French history books in Shirley's room.

Speaker 1 It also did not sound like that obscure of a story. No.
Yeah. Also, if there's a French ghost in your house, I'd buy a book on French history.
I'll learn a little more about it. Just a bit, yeah.

Speaker 1 Interestingly, Donald the poltergeist could communicate impassable French, and he was quite fond of drawing fleur-de-lis designs, often used to signify French royalty, around the hitching home.

Speaker 1 After taking all this into account, Harold Chibbett declared in July of 1956 that there was no way that Shirley could have faked all this activity for six months straight.

Speaker 1 And he therefore decided that there were genuine supernatural agents at work, even if the facts weren't always straight. And that dude was embedded.
He was there every day.

Speaker 1 And I do think that he would have

Speaker 1 said

Speaker 1 that it was fake if he could have caught it. That's the worst part about having a poltergeist is eventually some fat dude has to come live with you.

Speaker 1 Are you talking about my wife's Natalie's life?

Speaker 1 With Harold Trivet, though, there's also an argument to be made for sunk cost. Oh, very much.

Speaker 1 Oh, he's got to do it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 he's put in so much time that he just needs to put in a little bit more. And then just around the corner is the answer.

Speaker 1 Now, after spending a few months getting hammered on all things 18th century French, Donald the poltergeist briefly reverted to making threats against the family after Shirley's father, Wally, refused to buy Donald a typewriter.

Speaker 1 I mean, we do need to speed up this process.

Speaker 1 Honestly, just can we just try? Can he just get flash cards? Just get taps. Yeah.
Get him a typewriter.

Speaker 1 Oh, but just think about about how loud a typewriter is and it's not it's never gonna end the ghost is like we can just speed this up so much if you just get me a fucking typewriter

Speaker 1 now for a brief period here after the request for the typewriter was refused Donald referred to himself as shaggy roots shaggy shaggy roots he took a new name oh i love this you'd be no shaggy root shaggy roots is getting angry yeah and he and shaggy roots threatened to burn everyone in their beds with matches.

Speaker 1 But the focus of the aggression was once again on Grandma Ethel.

Speaker 1 See, even though Grandma Ethel was the witchiest member of the family outside of Shirley, remember she had said that she had seen souls leave the bodies of people at the hospital where she worked.

Speaker 1 She loved it. Yeah, she had still frequently...
Oh, boy!

Speaker 1 She in hell.

Speaker 1 She had still frequently expressed her displeasure about living with a poltergeist in her Twilight years.

Speaker 1 And so, acting as Shaggy Roots, Donald reportedly soaked Ethel's sheets sheets in alcohol, then left a message saying that Ethel was going to be dead by dawn. Dead by dawn! Dead by Dawn.
Dead by Dawn!

Speaker 1 Dead by Dawn! Donald then cryptically added, Oh, help! He got Durat poison.

Speaker 1 He got Durat poison. Oh, help.
It's me, Shaggy Roots. I'm trying to tell you all what's happening there.
He got the rat proson. It wasn't me.

Speaker 1 The coffee's sleeping in the cup.

Speaker 1 Those are taps. They're bombastics.
Yeah, I'm out. Leave them alone.
It's not me, man.

Speaker 1 Not me, Shaggy. Oh, you trust your mother.
You trust your brother, man, Shaggy.

Speaker 1 The poltergeist then spent the night throwing objects around the house. Actually, if it wasn't the shaggy, it's like, oh, help, you got the rat poison.

Speaker 1 That's a really good shaggy. Thank you.
I actually, I've.

Speaker 1 I didn't realize that. But how you do the shaggy, you do it with the meat.

Speaker 1 The shaggy voice actually ain't that hard to do. Yes, wasn't no one.
It wasn't me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
I got to do that. It's really easy.
Try to. I do it around the house all the time.
Oh, yeah, I'm perking on that.

Speaker 1 It's one of my talking to myself, making myself laugh voices. Yeah, a lot of my voices I can't repeat anymore.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But they're for you. Yeah, for my family.

Speaker 1 Well, the poltergeist then spent the night throwing objects around the house while all the members of the Hitchings family huddled together in the bedroom to wait out Donald's tantrum.

Speaker 1 Now, just as quickly as Donald had turned violent, he changed tack yet again and began communicating with Shirley about matters that sound more like they're coming from a fellow teenage girl as opposed to the vengeful spirit of a drowned child king.

Speaker 1 Using taps, Donald asked Shirley if she liked a 19-year-old British child actor named Jeremy Spencer, who at the time was filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe and Sir Lawrence Olivier.

Speaker 1 19 years old? That's a man, baby!

Speaker 1 Well, he was a former child actor. He'd been acting since he was like 12 or 13.
So he was a well-known child actor in British Post in the British Post-War cultural history.

Speaker 1 Now, was he the prince or the showgirl?

Speaker 1 He was the prince.

Speaker 1 Now, Shirley obviously liked Jeremy Spencer. She had an autographed photo of Jeremy Spencer hanging above her bed.
Don't ask Shirley about Jeremy Spencer.

Speaker 1 But after Shirley confirmed that she did indeed like Jeremy Spencer, Donald started asking Harold Chibbett if he could contact Jeremy Spencer.

Speaker 1 Because Donald was sure that Jeremy Spencer was about to get into a car accident. And Harold Chibbett is exactly who Jeremy Spencer wants to talk to.

Speaker 1 That man's going to arrive, and he can't wait to go to that little girl's house with Harry Chibbett. He's just like, oh, would you like to come with me and experience the most wonderful

Speaker 1 phenomenon?

Speaker 1 He'd leave. Now, no one contacted Jeremy Spencer at this point, but Donald was adamant.

Speaker 1 He even tried proving his pedigree by saying that he had known James Dean was going to die in a car crash in 1955, but he had not been strong enough back then to communicate the warning to other people.

Speaker 1 But in a moment that is only amazing, if you believe Harold Chibbett, Donald warned the family once more that Jeremy was going to have an accident on November 25th.

Speaker 1 And the next day, the British newspaper reported that child actor Jeremy Spencer had indeed been in a car accident, but was ultimately unharmed. Interesting.

Speaker 1 Unless it's Harry Chibbett trying to make a little bit of news for himself. Never thought about it.
I figured out how to cut these brakes. How do I cut these brakes? Or, you know, news traveled slow.

Speaker 1 He could have heard about it. And then they told.

Speaker 1 This is in the 1860s, buddy. There's radio and television.
Yeah, it's the 1860s.

Speaker 1 You don't got to wait for the boat to come across the pond.

Speaker 1 You got to wait for the early paper, then the late paper, then this evening paper. You're right, you're actually right.
But he had been saying for weeks beforehand that the car accident was coming.

Speaker 1 And then finally, you know, car accident's coming tomorrow. And then the car accident came.
And she had also claimed that Donald made another correct prediction on December 9th when Donald wrote,

Speaker 1 They have accident, Paola.

Speaker 1 Allegedly, that same evening. And more of Melania.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Turned into like a little Peruvian. Yeah,

Speaker 1 Paula, not Paola. Paula.
Paula is a Brazilian. I just go immediately.
No, sorry, it's Melania.

Speaker 1 Indeed, Donald. You buy me from Big Bad Men.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Allegedly, that same evening, the news reported that 28-year-old Paula Marshall, the wife of a famous British magician, had been killed in a car accident.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say that's a really good way to release her from that fate.

Speaker 1 Being married to a

Speaker 1 British magician.

Speaker 1 Well, perhaps encouraged by two correct predictions in a row, Donald began telling Shirley that Jeremy Spencer had a message for her.

Speaker 1 And Donald knew so because he could read Jeremy's thoughts through accidental mind transference. Awesome.
Yeah, that means, and those are Donald's words. Donald wrote out accidental mind transference.

Speaker 1 That's a lot of taps. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now at this point, I don't know if there was actually something going on or if Harold Chibbett was totally losing his mind because he documented that Shirley's autographed photo of Jeremy Spencer just after this car accident, that autographed photo actually began weeping like fucking stigmata.

Speaker 1 And the wetness on the photo was indeed salty like real tears. And you tasted it.
Stop licking every ghost juice. Yes.

Speaker 1 Harry, stop it. So it's wet over here.
I'll lick that.

Speaker 1 Oh, that is urene.

Speaker 1 Ah, yes, that is every urea. That's grandma.
She hasn't been wet in a long time.

Speaker 1 It looks like I just accidentally added some wetness of my own.

Speaker 1 She, uh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, he documented this. He said he swore that this thing started crying.
This photo started crying. That is an exact, another

Speaker 1 wild, full-on poltergeist commonality. Yeah.
Right. Also, with every single religious visitation, they experience things weeping.
It's a very, very common psychic phenomenon. But he's not dead.

Speaker 1 No, no. Jeremy Spencer's alive.
No, the Spencer's photos start weeping. Picture sad.
But the picture is of him. Picture misses him.
Well, it's Donald, whatever Donald is, making the photograph cry.

Speaker 1 Fuck Donald. Sorry.

Speaker 1 Well, Chibbett even gave in at one point and actually reached out to Jeremy Spencer's agent. And while I don't know exactly what Harold Chibbett said to him, Spencer's agent declined to respond.

Speaker 1 Thank you for the opportunity. No, thank you.

Speaker 1 Now, as 1956 became 1957, Donald remained a fixture in the Hitchings household, although Harold Chibbett seemed to be totally lost in the sauce.

Speaker 1 Frustrated by his lack of progress with Donald, Chibbett wrote and mailed a letter to the Hitchings addressed to Donald the poltergeist.

Speaker 1 In the letter, which was meant to be read aloud so Donald could hear it, Chibbett demanded that Donald once and for all give some proof that he was indeed Prince Louis the lost child king of France.

Speaker 1 But what's strange about this is that while Donald's response was indignant, it was also far more articulate than Donald's previous messages.

Speaker 1 Whereas before, his messages were rambly and disjointed, you know, you know, wind fluff, shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Yeah. He now wrote, quote, that letter is preposterous.
How dare he ask me that? Chib has made me very angry. And he calls him Chib, by the way.
Chib, you make me very angry.

Speaker 1 I dismiss him now. I will not talk to him.
Chib thinks of me as a machine, but he must understand, I am a spirit of the past.

Speaker 1 Far more articulate. Fuck you, Chib.

Speaker 1 Chib, you go fuck. Now, did he ever say his name was Louis or did he say that he was the son of King Louis? Because King Louis could have multiple sons.

Speaker 1 Well, okay, the thing is with that, I simplified it because there was so many, there's a lot of Louis around. A lot of Louis.
Technically, Prince Louis' name was Louis Charles. Okay.

Speaker 1 And he was also, but he was also known as like Louis XVI.

Speaker 1 So just to simplify it for the listeners so they wouldn't become confused. Yes,

Speaker 1 his name was technically Louis Charles.

Speaker 1 And really, like Donald didn't really, like, he didn't always call himself Donald. He just responded to Donald.
Okay, gotcha.

Speaker 1 And Donald then claimed that he was going to produce an old handkerchief if Chibbett needed evidence so badly. He does.
He's asking for it. Just do it.

Speaker 1 Now, the handkerchief never materialized, nor did Chibbett respond. A few days later, though, Donald wrote that he was glad that Chib had apologized, even though Chibbett had never apologized.

Speaker 1 And I never will. I didn't

Speaker 1 apologize to the French.

Speaker 1 Actually, both of them seemed to willfully forget the whole stand-up. It's better for just move on.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because by February of 1957, they'd continued communicating with each other as if they'd never had the whole tiff. Look at Musk.
You just

Speaker 1 move right along.

Speaker 1 Now, despite Harold Chibbett's continued push towards the Prince Louis angle, Donald the poltergeist had, by 1957, become focused mainly upon young, handsome male celebrities.

Speaker 1 By February, Donald was claiming to be the spirit of James Dean. And in another interesting twist, Donald's handwriting and grammar were much improved when he was playing James Dean.

Speaker 1 As James Dean, he wrote, in what is by far my favorite message, quote, Now I don't know who you good folks are, but I'm still waiting for help.

Speaker 1 Please hurry. I'm grateful to you, ma'am, for keeping me here, but I'm lost.

Speaker 1 I want to get back to my country.

Speaker 1 Look, mister, I'm James Dean.

Speaker 1 I didn't ask to come here, but I just guess I got here. So help me, please.
I belong in California.

Speaker 1 It gives me the same vibes as, oh, Mama, I'm stuck in the orb.

Speaker 1 Mama, I'm in the orb.

Speaker 1 I'm stuck, but I'm in the orb.

Speaker 1 Look, mister, I'm James Dean. I didn't come here.
Help me, please. I belong in California.
Sign. I'm going back to California.
Sign James after Dean.

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Speaker 1 At this point, Donald seemed to become confused even with himself. When Shirley started swooning over James Dean, Donald seemed to get jealous of the James Dean persona that he himself had created.

Speaker 1 Jesus. He told Shirley that he wasn't going to help James Dean and he was going to cut off James Dean from sending messages entirely.

Speaker 1 You're not going to talk to James Dean anymore if you love James Dean so much and you're going to talk to him.

Speaker 1 I just got to say, honestly, I don't care what you're fighting about, but if you could get me back to California, because I hate it here. It's cold.
It's rainy. There's no motorcycles.

Speaker 1 There's no men for me to dally with. I mean, actually, if you look at the message, you did kind of get like James Dean's pouty personality.

Speaker 1 Like, I didn't ask to come here. I guess I just got here.
I just got here. He was a great actor.
He really was. He was incredible.
Have you ever seen Giant? Oh, it's great.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Love Giant.
East of Eden? Incredible. Now, Chibit.
He wasn't there, though. Yeah.
He wasn't in the UK.

Speaker 1 But Chibit, meanwhile, dutifully documented the messages that spelled out the fights between Donald and James Dean.

Speaker 1 And again, it must be said that this very well could have just been the ramblings of a high-strung, if imaginative, teenage girl talking to herself. Very much so.
Of course. Very much so.

Speaker 1 But what if it's all done with

Speaker 1 an uncontrollable childlike psychic ability? Like, what if all of that's true? Okay. And it's projected from her changing body.

Speaker 1 She's growing older. They always talk about this.
It's connected to young women. She happens to have this latent telekinetic ability, and it's doing the will of a 15-year-old girl.

Speaker 1 I believe that over anything else. That's what I think is kind of happening here.
I think that that's way more real than any poltergeist will ever be.

Speaker 1 Because eventually a ghost would show up that's not like some hot teen boy. Sometimes, you who knows? You know, like that's hot teen boys die.
Why is it all hot teen boys?

Speaker 1 Because hot teen boys die with fucking unfinished business all the time. Every time, it's not just hot teen.
I mean, Shaggy Root showed up, and he was just a fucking insane pyromaniac.

Speaker 1 Don't talk about Shaggy like that.

Speaker 1 I don't think Shaggy has a problem.

Speaker 1 Say you want about Shaggy. He's not a heartthrop.
All right.

Speaker 1 He's not had super handsome actors. I'm just not good at catching being caught.

Speaker 1 I gotta work on this. I gotta work on this.
Now that I know that I can do that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But if you look at the way this James Dean-Donald fight works, it sounds like you're in the mind of a teenage girl who is in the throes of just kind of a fantasy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like, I've got this French boy king, and then James Dean comes in.

Speaker 1 But then the French boy king, he, France Louis, he gets jealous about James Dean. He says, he's not going to let me talk to James Dean anymore.
And he gets mad.

Speaker 1 You know, it's, she's imagining that two boys are fighting over her. But at the same time, she's also communicating this fight through psychic taps.

Speaker 1 It's insane. I'm starting to feel bad for Chibbett.

Speaker 1 Chibbett loves every minute of this. Never feel bad for Chibbett.
He loves ghosts.

Speaker 1 At this point, he is getting very frustrated.

Speaker 1 It's starting to get tedious.

Speaker 1 Now, if it tells you anything, anything, it's around the time that Donald was fighting with James Dean that the poltergeist began working very hard to get Shirley accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art so Shirley could become an actor.

Speaker 1 At the same time, Donald began writing letters, which I suppose Shirley stamped and mailed, to David Spencer, Jeremy Spencer's brother.

Speaker 1 See, David was also an actor, but he was also a producer, a writer, and a director. So in these letters, Donald begged David to give Shirley an acting job.
That's huge.

Speaker 1 Failing David, Maybe Jeremy could give Shirley an acting job. This is not a bad idea.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 If you want to get an act, you want to be an actor on the stage. She can't be having taps following her everywhere.
But the idea is, he got a problem.

Speaker 1 She was sitting anything goes. She could do taps.
Oh, shit. Or

Speaker 1 she would look so much better at stomping.

Speaker 1 Well, they didn't have stomp back. No, you could throw the kettles back and forth.
That's the thing is, you can't control the tapping, so it's going to throw all the rhythm off.

Speaker 1 She'd actually be the worst person to be in stomp or tap. I wish a poltergeist would inhabit a black person.

Speaker 1 It happens.

Speaker 1 Well, these letters were apparently enough of a nuisance to the Spencer team that an actual representative of David Spencer's showed up to number 63 Wycliffe to personally tell the hitching family, you gotta stop sending David letters from the ghosts.

Speaker 1 It's not working. It's not working.
It's a nuisance because she's sitting out with three, four a day and it's filling up their inbox.

Speaker 1 But tellingly, the same night that the Spencer representative dropped by, Shirley was reportedly thrown from her bed eight times, and Vaseline was smeared across all of Shirley's closet doors and walls.

Speaker 1 The knocking also became so loud that it sounded like someone was stomping down the stairs. And Wally reported that their piano began playing on its own.

Speaker 1 Now, again, this all only holds water if you believe the family. But remember, Wally Hitchings was a very average Englishman who never made a dime off of this story.
He gained nothing.

Speaker 1 Specifically, Wally. Yes.
Did not do anything to make money off of this story. Nothing.

Speaker 1 But on the other hand, I started thinking about like, well, if that's not the case, if that's not the motivation, what is another possibility?

Speaker 1 Wally may have been so repressed and straight-laced that it could have been easier for him to believe that his daughter was haunted by a poltergeist.

Speaker 1 Because... The other possibility is that his daughter was a Force 5 pain in the ass who talked a lot about burning Wally's mother alive in her bed.
I completely completely agree.

Speaker 1 I think that there's a little bit of that too, of the, he's so stiff upper lip that it's much easier to believe a ghost is causing all these problems instead of his daughter. Yeah.
So now I'm on

Speaker 1 she is the ghost. She is telekinesis.
That is me. That is my theory.
Okay. All right.
All right. All right.
Yeah. I, I'm, uh, I'm willing to follow on that as well.
Yes.

Speaker 1 There is something that she's, she's tapped into something. Uh, there is no pun intended.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Ghost stole No, pun intended. Yeah.
Pun intended. She's tapped into something.
Thank you. No.
She had to say it right.

Speaker 1 Now, it's my personal opinion.

Speaker 1 I guess that we're all there. It's kind of both.
But I'm not the first person to come to that conclusion.

Speaker 1 Ghost hunter Andrew Green, who had become one of the UK's most famous ghost hunters, he visited number 63 Wycliffe and surmised that while he thought Shirley was mentally unwell, she had nevertheless summoned Donald the poltergeist with psychokinesis during a mental break.

Speaker 1 Yes. And by the way, everyone in the house hated Andrew Greene.
Yes, they did not like it because the, again, the idea of a physical ghost is so, it is easier. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's easier than being like, it's her fault. It's easier to wrap your head around.
Either then,

Speaker 1 whether or not she knew she was doing it or not, I don't think she even knew she was doing it. I don't think so.

Speaker 1 I think that there were knocks coming from literally the bones in her feet that she was subconsciously doing. I think that there were exterior noises that she somehow created.

Speaker 1 And I do believe that the objects flying around came because she had this weird untapped ability. Mm-hmm.
Not untapped ability.

Speaker 1 Literally, yes.

Speaker 1 Now, if Shirley was indeed behind the whole thing, one way or another, she got very angry in May of 1957. Donald began writing a barrage of letters that Shirley sent to Harold Chibbett.

Speaker 1 So many letters that Harold simply began ignoring them. And similarly, several of the Hitchings' neighbors began receiving horrible, abusive letters in the post, supposedly sent from Donald.

Speaker 1 They called them poison pen letters. Donald also began threatening murder and arson more often, which unfortunately brings us to the death of Grandma Ethel.
Finally!

Speaker 1 See, in July of 1957, Donald asked Wally and Kitty if they would buy Shirley some new makeup, but the request was again ignored. And if you'll notice, this is a recurring theme.

Speaker 1 Donald asks for something for Shirley. The family says no.
Donald throws a fit. Right after the request for makeup was made, five shillings went missing from Grandma Ethel's purse.

Speaker 1 That sent Grandma Ethel into an uncontrollable rage. She tried hitting Shirley with her cane,

Speaker 1 which led to a huge fight and a massive poltergeist event, which allegedly sent everything in Ethel's room airborne.

Speaker 1 Imagine the end of poltergeist, the movie where everything's flying around the room. You know, it's supposedly like that.

Speaker 1 And the next day, a butcher knife was thrown with such force by invisible hands that it supposedly stuck in the kitchen door.

Speaker 1 And after that, Ethel's room was in such a state of constant paranormal turmoil that it eventually gave her a stroke. She was placed in a nursing home and died soon after.

Speaker 1 That is one of those facts about this case that prove

Speaker 1 something

Speaker 1 was happening inside of the house.

Speaker 1 It literally drove her to have a stroke. Yeah.
She was so afraid and upset by what was happening inside of the house that it really like, that I find that that's the most interesting of all. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that there was something that was so awful. Like that, yeah, she had a stroke.
But it's just happening all all the time. They didn't get any fucking footage.

Speaker 1 I mean, pictures. They didn't have video.
They didn't have the proper. I mean, I know.
I know.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's a problem. Honestly, dude, it's a very valid question.
Yeah, it's a huge problem. I'm not sold on this at all.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a very valid question.

Speaker 1 And, you know, they're, and, you know, there is arguments to be made in these sorts of things that, you know, people not necessarily make things up, but they fill in the gaps

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 and they end up saying that stuff flies through the air and there was nobody there but maybe there was somebody there you know or they exaggerate things when they retell it or you know their memory memory is valible of course they just get a shot of the knife in the door I mean yeah but they just you know

Speaker 1 that's one of those mm-hmm now after Donald killed Ethel he went away for a few days then left a note that he was not allowed to speak for at least a week because he had taken a vow of silence that vow of course, was broken the next day when he left a note suggesting that it might be nice if Wally paid for Shirley to get a new hairdo.

Speaker 1 Maybe her up. Maybe it would be nice if you wanted to give her like a spa day or something.
It'd be nice. She's looking a little rough.

Speaker 1 My host is ugly.

Speaker 1 Donald returned in full force within just a few days, continuing to torment the Hitchings family with near-constant paranormal activity.

Speaker 1 The Hitchings, meanwhile, very much put on a stiff British upper lift and attempted to continue with their lives.

Speaker 1 They accepted Donald to such a degree that they began leaving presents under the tree for him every Christmas. This is making them solid as hell.
They are.

Speaker 1 Chibbett, on the other hand, continued down the fruitless path towards trying to prove that Donald was the spirit of Prince Louis.

Speaker 1 For the next year, Chibbett chased down any detail that Donald put forth. And of course, he would go to his colleagues and try to get them to help him out with it.

Speaker 1 That, of course, shredded any credibility he had with associates who kept telling Chibbett that there was no there there with Donald and the French. Finally.

Speaker 1 Stop it. They just eventually, but that's the thing that kept going on for years.
They were like, Harold,

Speaker 1 you're ruining your life. You've got to stop.
There's nothing. There's nothing here.
Like there's something like I agree that there's something going on, but this is not Prince Louis.

Speaker 1 You need to stop. He was just desperate because I do believe there was a sunken cost fallacy and it did seem like, oh, this is my big get.
I get to be the guy from Borley Rectory.

Speaker 1 I get to like be the guy that's embedded. He's put so much time in at this point.
I get it. It's like, if it's not Prince Louis, his life's a failure.

Speaker 1 And it was.

Speaker 1 Shirley, meanwhile, finally found a job that was acceptable to Donald. But it's not like Donald was holding out for something fun.

Speaker 1 In September of 1958, Shirley took a job as a clerical assistant at a stationery firm in West London. It sounds like the most boring job.
It's not like she got a job at the candy factory.

Speaker 1 Oh, he loved notes. He needs lots lots of paper.
He did. That's interesting.

Speaker 1 That's very interesting. I actually really like that.
And, you know, Shirley ended up keeping that job for many years.

Speaker 1 Donald's communication also began slowing down considerably after Shirley got this job.

Speaker 1 And while it seems like the noises stopped following Shirley outside of the house, the poltergeist activity within the house nevertheless continued on a fairly constant basis.

Speaker 1 As such, Harold Chibbett continued working on the Battersea poltergeist story for years afterwards. This went on for years and years and years.
Finally, in 1963,

Speaker 1 seven years after Harold Chibbett met the Hitchings, he finally decided that while Donald was certainly a spirit, it was unlikely that he was the spirit of Prince Louis.

Speaker 1 It took him six years to come to that conclusion. God, what a further seven years to come to that conclusion.
Excuse me.

Speaker 1 I suppose. He became a doctor.
What? He literally could have become a doctor. He could become become a real doctor in that time period.

Speaker 1 I suppose because he came to this conclusion, Harold Chibbett declined to make the French angle nor the celebrity angle the focus when he finally finished his manuscript about the case.

Speaker 1 Instead, he gave his book a title that was utterly unmarketable in every way, calling it the poltergeist that can write.

Speaker 1 And this is why sometimes you need an American.

Speaker 1 Every once in a while, you need him in in there because

Speaker 1 sometimes when your publisher tells you it needs a little Zaz, they're right. They're right.
Also, you hit it earlier. Ghostwriter is

Speaker 1 a term. Title.
Yes. That's an immediately a better term.
Ghostwriter is incredible.

Speaker 1 That's a movie.

Speaker 1 Literally, sometimes they say this. Titles.
are the difference between hits and not hits. Harry Chippett destroyed his life.
It's like calling Jaws the shark that bites yeah

Speaker 1 my stephen shark movie

Speaker 1 you know like

Speaker 1 and you know i actually i actually i agree with that because i think that if super troopers had a better name it would be respected on the level of ghostbusters seriously it's just a bad name it's just but it's a classic comic phenomenal film yeah yeah one of my favorites but yeah terrible name Now, by the time Harold Chibbett finished his book in 1963, Shirley was 22 years old and had fallen in love with a man named Derek.

Speaker 1 The Hitching family, however, neglected to mention anything about Donald to Derek for several months.

Speaker 1 And they should have, because whatever was going on with Shirley was still happening seven years later. And that's what's interesting about this is that it's seven years later.
Harold Chibbett's gone.

Speaker 1 There's no reporters. There's no nothing, but something is still happening.
To the point where the family has to sit down and talk to this suitor.

Speaker 1 They have to talk to Derek and say, like, Hey, so there's this thing named Donald, and you're going to have to deal with it if you want to be with Shirley. It's very interesting.

Speaker 1 And Derek decided that if staying with Shirley meant that he had to accept Donald as well, then bring on the boogeyman. Oh, yeah, dude.

Speaker 1 He got it, man, because I guess that poltergeist knew what we all didn't know: that

Speaker 1 she had that coochie that wouldn't quit, and she was a wife material. The poltergeist knew that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Derek knew that. That she had a coochie that just wouldn't quit.
Well, she knew from the inside. Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 The poltergeist knew from the inside.

Speaker 1 Shirley is a woman at this point. Okay, yeah, yeah.
So surely is a woman now. But you said from the beginning, so now you're speaking on a 15-year-old girl's.
I'm saying he had an idea.

Speaker 1 I mean, the ghost is 15. I'm just saying.
The ghost is a little boy. Ghost is immature.
Wow. Does statutory.

Speaker 1 Save it. Save it.

Speaker 1 It's it really is. It's the

Speaker 1 Twilight argument.

Speaker 1 He's technically a teenager, but he's also hundreds of years old.

Speaker 1 She's a teenage girl. Does it apply? When I had to explain to Natalie when I was playing Persona 5, explain how, yes, I am playing a 15-year-old boy.

Speaker 1 Yes, I am seducing my teacher who I found out was a hidden sex worker, and then I'm using that information against her. Yes, but it's a video game.

Speaker 1 And how did you explain that to her? In that way.

Speaker 1 And she said, don't talk about it anymore. Yeah.
Cool.

Speaker 1 There's plenty of video games.

Speaker 1 You don't have to play that. I did eventually stop.
I did stop. There's so many.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I did stop. I did stop.
I did feel weird.

Speaker 1 It did feel strange. Well, Shirley and Derek were married in 1965.

Speaker 1 And after Donald spent a few years just changing the channel on the TV every once in a while, he did hang around after they were married.

Speaker 1 The activity went down, you know, like he ever they would say that they would be sitting there watching TV.

Speaker 1 They even moved out of London, and they said every once in a while the TV would change channels on its own. They might hear something weird every once in a while.

Speaker 1 But by 1968, Donald had fully disappeared. Whatever, no exorcism,

Speaker 1 no nothing. He just went away.
Whatever was happening just stopped.

Speaker 1 As for Harold Chibbit, the manuscript for the poltergeist that can write was sent to to and rejected by so many publishers that it eventually got lost in the mail.

Speaker 1 He made so many copies. He accidentally sent the, I think what happened is that he accidentally sent the original copy to a publisher and then it just disappeared.

Speaker 1 So Chibbett gave up and instead self-distributed a paranormal newsletter until his death by heart attack in 1978. Do fucking paranormal investigators die of anything besides heart attacks?

Speaker 1 Heartbroken, because that's what that is, is your heart. They heard their wives try to kill them.

Speaker 1 Well, that's true. It is true.

Speaker 1 I think his heart got bored. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And left. Much is like they all do.
This is what we keep beating for.

Speaker 1 It's not an attack as much as it just passed out.

Speaker 1 His heart quit.

Speaker 1 Shirley and Derek, however, are still alive and happily married to this day, as far as we can tell. But Donald the poltergeist never returned.

Speaker 1 And whatever he may have been, still remains to this day a total and complete mystery. It's very interesting.
And Shirley, she would come out later on.

Speaker 1 She had a little cap later on because she said that they had activity on and off for several years. And Shirley said that she'd been dealing with it for a while.
And so two stories came out.

Speaker 1 One story. Oh, she said more.
She has got two new stories. So one story was

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 when he finally went away, they found a letter, like a piece of paper that said goodbye. Right? That was like one story that she said, which I don't know about that.

Speaker 1 The second one was she said that within the year of the interview that she had done, she was doing some, I forgot what was class, and she was there with a lady that was a

Speaker 1 lady.

Speaker 1 No, it's important.

Speaker 1 She came forward and told, did the thing, being like, I'm a medium. Have you ever dealt with anything? Have you ever lost somebody? You ever lost anybody? And she's like, no.

Speaker 1 And she's like, you ever lost a little brother?

Speaker 1 And she says, no. And she's like, well,

Speaker 1 I just have to say something because I don't do this unless I have to. It's like, you're being followed by

Speaker 1 something.

Speaker 1 And she's like, what am I being followed by? She's like,

Speaker 1 you're being followed by a little boy with red hair, like long red hair, in silk clothes, like silk princely clothes. And she had never, she didn't know who she was.
So it's interesting.

Speaker 1 It's a famous story, though. Yes.
And she's immediately. But this was years after.
This is all years after that. It's just interesting.

Speaker 1 It's one of those where I don't know how I feel about it, but Shirley holds on to it. And Shirley has come to believe that it's a ghost.
But

Speaker 1 I do think that Shirley is also a very strange woman. Yeah.
And now she's talking to Michael Landon.

Speaker 1 Hey. Hot boy who's died or young.
He's the you remember Michael Landon.

Speaker 1 That was my mom's hall pass. My mom loved Michael Landon.
My mom. Loved Michael Landon.
Michael Landon was like in his 30s when he died. That's young.

Speaker 1 If she's going for anyone, it's going to be River Phoenix. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
At this point. Or Jonathan Brandis.
Oh, quivers.

Speaker 1 Well, no, now that Shirley's like 85 years old and British, it's like Benedict Cumberbatch or something. I mean, you know who I see her for? He's not dead.

Speaker 1 Is it weird to describe that, but I feel like she's an Emmanuel Macron woman?

Speaker 1 Hmm. Interesting.
Yeah, I could see that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's a good one. See, this is why we like we try to do ghost stories.
And this is as close as we got.

Speaker 1 This is how, I mean, but that's the thing. This is every ghost story.
This is as close as we got on this one. Sorry.
The conjuring doesn't exist. It's just hard.
It just didn't.

Speaker 1 It just doesn't happen. UFOs are more real than this.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I believe at the center of this is the psychic activity, which is why it's interesting. But no one's like, besides everybody now, as we're all as Monday morning quarterbacks, we can see it.

Speaker 1 Italians are ghosts that play tricks on us. How about that? Love that.
Yeah, love it. Yeah.
It's

Speaker 1 at the end of the day, it's like all we can say is it's wee wee wheel. Wee-wee wheel.
Yeah. And that's it.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

Speaker 1 Patreon.com/slash lastpodcast on the left is where you can go to watch us actually do these podcasts. You can get video episodes of every podcast on Patreon.

Speaker 1 And you can check us out every Tuesday at 6 p.m. PST for Last Stream on the Left.
We play some fun videos and we have a good time. We do.
That's how you get to see it unedited.

Speaker 1 You get to see the full version and you also get to interact with us on the chat. I would also behest upon you to go to LPN TV on YouTube and watch our new series, LPN RPG Presents Bloodbath.

Speaker 1 This is one of the first times we have received almost unanimous enjoyment. Yeah.
Of a thing that we've done. And so...
Let's go give us some hate. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because that's what it's going to. it out.
In that way, if we could bump up the numbers so that the hate could come in, that would actually really help us.

Speaker 1 We know that the hate really only comes once you hit a certain lip. So please help us get to the numbers in which we can finally be insulted on the one thing that we're truly most proud about.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Actually, I will say that is the,

Speaker 1 that has been in the past the metric for success is that let's we get to get to the point where people start hating you. That's the idea.
That's how you know you're doing it.

Speaker 1 Where some people people say yeah the enough people get to it where the the um the the negative people um who hate everything once it gets to them you know you made it yeah because it means that you're part of the zeitgeist yeah and they hate everything in the zeitgeist yep so let's get to that point lpm bloodbath i'm i play a character on it

Speaker 1 have you played a character on it yeah

Speaker 1 the entire network and some people outside of the network are guesting on lpn tv's new lpn rpg bloodbath so come and check it out yeah and we're gonna be on tour tomorrow We are in Akron, Ohio at the Goodyear Theater.

Speaker 1 That's going to be November 29th.

Speaker 1 And then after that, Portland for two nights, December 12th and 13th. Get your tickets for that.
If you haven't, it's about to sell out.

Speaker 1 January 31st, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. February 28th, Austin, Texas.
March 13th, Indianapolis, Indiana. April 25th, Cincinnati,

Speaker 1 Ohio. I like that phrase.

Speaker 1 May 29th, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, July 18th, Oklahoma City.

Speaker 1 And then on the 12th of December, come check out Henry and I at Wise Guys Comedy. I think it's at the town center one.
This one, past the Luxor, past the airport. We're coming to the corner country.

Speaker 1 That's right. Las Vegas, Nevada, December 7th.
Come see Henry and I. And of course, on January 4th, I will be at the Oxnard Levity Live with a bunch of other people that you know and love.

Speaker 1 Julia Johns, Holden McNeely, Jake Young, and Carolina Hidelgo. And that's going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 I love you guys. I love you.
Very nice. Very good and spooky.
We're coming back to some grisly ass true crime in the next couple of weeks. So we'll see you there, won't we? Hail Satan.

Speaker 1 Oh, you know what I'm going to say? Magustalations. Thank you.
What? It's been a long time. Good.
I like that. It feels good.
Hail, James Dean. Yeah.
Yeah. Hail James Dean.
Wow. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why not? And here, and here's a tip: if you go to James Dean's hometown, there are two James Dean museums.

Speaker 1 One of them is run by the town. The other one is allegedly run by a convicted sex offender.

Speaker 1 So make sure to do your research. Which is the better one?

Speaker 1 Honestly, the one that was run by the town was closed for the season. So we only...
We had to go to the other one.

Speaker 1 We had to go to the other one, but we did not find out until afterwards that the man who ran it was a convicted sex offender.

Speaker 1 Was it a good museum?

Speaker 1 Underwhelming because it was stuff like,

Speaker 1 this is a jacket that was worn by a guy who was two grades above James Dean.

Speaker 1 This is some underwear that I imagine James Dean might have worn. Yeah, he's like this.
He's like this. This is a motorcycle that looked kind of like James Dean.

Speaker 1 Well, I can't wait. I gotta buy a plane ticket to get wherever that is.
Yeah. You know, James Dean, Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, and

Speaker 1 Jim Jones are all from the same 50-mile radius. Wow, lots of gyms.
Yeah. What's in the water?

Speaker 1 Lasagna.

Speaker 1 Hail Satan, everyone.

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