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Chapter 1: Who wrote the letters in the Battersea Poltergeist case?
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We're in Paris. It's 1963, and Harold and Lily Chibbert are on a long-awaited holiday.
How much further, Harold? It's just around the corner, I think, dear.
But Chib is chasing a lead.
This sweet shop had better be worth it. Oh, yes. If their records confirm they provided the royal family's sweets, it will be a key corroboration for Donald's story. Here we are. Rue du Bac. It should be there. Oh. I've had enough, Harold. I know this trip hasn't been for- It's not the trip. It's the last seven years, literally chasing ghosts. You're obsessed, and it's time to stop.
Now I am going back to the hotel for a long hot bath, and then tonight you are taking me to a French restaurant.
We're in Paris. They're all French restaurants. Vous êtes perdu, monsieur ?
Are you lost, sir? I think perhaps I am. This could be it, Shirley. We're finally getting somewhere.
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Chapter 2: How did the investigation into the haunting unfold?
But was it a haunting or a hoax? This is our final episode. We're going to assess the evidence, hear the case for both sides and try and give you answers. But I feel like we need to start by just reminding ourselves of our timeline. So I've got some post-it notes here to map it out on the wall. Now we start, remember, with the key. Shirley found it.
End of January.
27th.
It was on my bed, sitting on the pillow. I'd never seen it before.
That object that feels so loaded with symbolism. Is it a gift from Donald? Or just a random object that only seems significant in hindsight? Because it's that night the noises start. After three weeks of sleepless nights, on 18th February, the first object moves.
Ow! It's Shirley's glove.
That same evening, the entire family seemed to witness Shirley floating above her bed. Help me! The newspapers call it levitation.
It was like she was hovering maybe six inches over the bed.
20th February, the Daily Mirror, one of Britain's biggest newspapers, runs the first article about the case. And then the family are besieged.
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Chapter 3: What evidence suggests the events were witnessed by multiple people?
So she'd recognised this voice from somewhere.
Oh, yeah, she was shaken. I'm going to my room. Who was it, Dad? Who's Sarah? Sarah.
I'm with our experts, Kieran O'Keefe and Evelyn Hollow. Kieran, that awful moment where Ethel seems to hear her mum's voice. The whole family are in the room.
They can hear it too. When you have multiple viewpoints, of course it lends more weight to an eyewitness testimony, but within forensic psychology, we're well aware of the concept of contagion, which is where a person influences the emotions or behavior of another person and can influence even their reporting of an event. It's not unheard of
that somebody has an extreme reaction to what they've seen and everybody has a similar sort of reaction. OK, so how do you see that working here? This is being really hypothetical. But if, for example, you had somebody that was whispering in that room... effectively just whispering behind their hand. And then you get group conformity kicking in.
So somebody says, that sounds like an Irish accent. I could imagine people in that sort of environment thinking, yeah, absolutely it is. It is Irish. I could explain that. I could even explain Ethel going, yes, that's my mother. I think the difficulty we've got is that there is an actual conversation. So Ethel is hearing actual words.
Given the huge impact it had on her, Evelyn, it's really hard to see how this voice could have been faked.
When we talked about stages of a poltergeist, the very last one is voice phenomena. We can sort of explain away Ethel's experience in terms of the psychology and the trauma and the torture, but I just cannot work out how on earth somebody managed to do that because it's not just any voice, it's Ethel's mother's voice. She knows that voice personally.
For a few days after she went up to her flat and she wouldn't even come down to watch telly.
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Chapter 4: Is there a possibility that the haunting was a hoax?
When you say artifice, explain that more to me.
Well, if somebody has decided to put lots of curlicues and additions, it's nearly always a facade. It's a cover-up to try and hide the real personality.
So let's focus in on our two samples. Let's take Shirley's first.
Right, well, Shirley, like Donald, has a severe left slant and there are very wide spaces between the words. In fact, there are quite wide spaces between the letters. This is somebody who doesn't feel as though they are part of a group. They would come across as being friendly and sociable, but the reality is far from it and they feel themselves very isolated.
And next to it, we have Donald's letter. Well, I think this letter is, it's highly stylized. But I think that, again, there's artifice, there's spelling mistakes, there's transposing of letters, there's franglais going between French and English. It's almost somebody showing off their bilingual abilities. And it's a scream for attention.
I hardly dare ask this, and I've got to admit that I am really, really hoping that you say no. But could these two letters have been written by the same person?
I would say they almost certainly have. Gosh. The chances of these two letters having been written by different people are remote enough for me to say I'm certain they've been written by the same writer. I'm certain they've been written by the same writer.
Oh. What, me?
Yeah, so Emma feels that you wrote both letters. I hate to spring this on you like this.
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Chapter 5: What were the psychological impacts on the Hitchings family?
Wally and Kitty have saved enough to buy their own place. But even in their new house on Latchmere Road, just about 15 minutes walk away, activity continues, much more sporadically, but it's still there. Shirley's in her 20s now, grown up, and on 20th of March, 1965, she marries her boyfriend, Derek.
Come over here, Dad. John's going to take a group photo.
Come on, buddy. All right, all right.
Get your mum in too, Cheryl.
Oh, nobody wants to see me.
It's almost exactly nine years since Chib first arrived at number 63.
Congratulations, Shirley.
Chib, thanks for coming.
Oh, of course, of course. Lovely canapes. Mum and Dad say you've been going over to see them still. They appreciate it. Well, Donald may not appear so often these days, but we must continue to document the case.
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Chapter 6: How do the handwriting samples compare between Shirley and Donald?
And I'm guessing you're going to say Shirley most of all. It's no coincidence for me that the poltergeist activity started very quickly into the period when Shirley had to go out and work. So is it a kind of response to that? But there's also a figure there who I think is in the shadows. And I think, therefore, we've got to look at John. God's sake, listen to you all. It's a flipping noise.
Faulty pipes or bust electrics or mice. If I was standing there and witnessing this phenomena as it was described, I would be blown away. And so somebody that's sceptical in the face of such amazing phenomena, you've got to think, does he play some responsibility in it? Or is he the person that's directing it all?
Back in Ep 2, we heard him point the finger of suspicion at Shirley and Kitty. Who found the key?
Who's always first to scream about things flying? And then, who called it Donald? What if it's both of them? Fading each other. John, deflecting and pointing the finger at other people is a classic technique that I've seen in paranormal investigations. Did you hear that? And you point over in another direction at somebody else and say, yes, that's where it came from.
Because you're completely deflecting any attention, any blame on you. I would also like to know the relationship between Shirley and John. You know, she refers to him very fondly in the interview. I wonder how much Shirley confided in John that she didn't want to go to work and how John ultimately may have come up with the key that prevented her from having to go to work.
He was involved in buildings, in surveying work. He therefore could have potentially had access to an unusual key that the family weren't able to attribute to anything. Oh my God. And maybe that's the starting point, the key.
Kieran, I feel like I should tell you something about John. He actually has a very complicated relationship with the family. The truth is that until John was 18, he grew up believing that that he was Ethel's son. I want you to listen to this clip from Shirley.
Nan attended the birth as midwife. John was born and he was then immediately put up for adoption and my nan said that she would adopt him.
How did he find out the truth?
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Chapter 7: What theories exist about the identity of Donald?
And then because it's molecular in nature, it's able to do things that seem odd. You know, it can interact. And if that's true, and that is potentially what, you know, ghosts are, then it really brings me to the conclusion of having to say that this is a poltergeist case. To me, ghosts are real. It's just a question of what are they?
Then you fundamentally disagree with Kieran about this being a hoax. I understand why, because I think it comes from a place of fear. People don't want to believe, you know, like that Sherlock Holmes quote, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
Interesting. So for you, the impossible is not objects flying around the room, but that this can be explained naturally. In your opinion, this is a ghost story. Yes, I do believe this is a ghost story, absolutely. I promised you a solution to this mystery. We've given you two. But the most important one, I think, is the one inside your head.
We live in an age where it's very hard to change people's minds. How you view the solution depends on your beliefs. But here's what I think. I believe the second half of the case was a response to the first. There's a tendency in the human brain to impose faces on the world around us. The man in the moon, the image of Jesus on a slice of burnt toast. Chaos scares us, so we try to humanise it.
Whether Shirley wrote the letters consciously or unconsciously is impossible to say. I think the answer is too deeply buried now. But I believe something very strange did happen at number 63 Wycliffe Road in 1956. Something that terrified an ordinary family. And if you've been on this journey with me, I hope that you also believe that the fear that Shirley felt still feels is real.
Evelyn posed a question, what are ghosts? And in a way, so did Kieran. Whether you think the ghost is a dead person or the product of the mysteries of the human mind depends on your beliefs. To me, both of those possibilities seem equally frightening. I believe ghosts are the cracks in our brightly lit, explainable existence. They're how the dark creeps in.
I've spent a long time staring into that darkness and I think it's time to close this box up and open these blinds. What are you guys doing? Bouncing.
Can I come on the trampoline?
But there's someone who can't forget this case, who cannot neatly close the box. The last time I spoke to Shirley, she ended our interview with a story that sent a little shiver down my spine. It's the late 1980s. Shirley and Derek are raising their kids in a small town on the south coast of England.
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Chapter 8: What conclusions can be drawn from the investigation?
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