Things That Go Bump

Like many other things, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition. When Radio 4's podcast The Battersea Poltergeist came out at the start of the year I was wary of its promised mixture of 'drama and documentary', but having dipped into presenter Danny Robins's other offering, Uncanny, I gave it a go and somewhat against my better judgement was drawn into the narrative. The hook is the prospect of finding something that will prove conclusively what's going on in this 'paranormal cold case' from 1956, in which a working-class family in southwest London is tormented by a manifestation which - it was eventually claimed - was the Dauphin Louis Charles, the lost heir to the French crown. It will not spoil the fun too much to reveal that nothing is mentioned in the podcast which proves anyone's point of view. It's vanishingly unlikely that Louis Charles was smuggled into England, rather than dying, as history has recorded, sick, maltreated and neglected, in the Tower of the Paris Temple in 1795, so whatever the poltergeist the family called 'Donald' was, he wasn't that. Yet while there are possible normal explanations for much of what happened in no.63 Wycliffe Road, it's hard to account for the rappings, bangings, and other weirdness that followed Shirley Hitchings, the 15-year-old at the centre of the phenomena, to distant places, including the studios of the BBC where she was interviewed by Cliff Michelmore for the Highlight programme, an event that clearly unsettled Michelmore enough for him to refer to it years later. Mr Robins has two resident consultants to epitomise the different approaches listeners might take to the story - writer on the paranormal Evelyn Hollow, who is a bit of a Goth, and 'arch-sceptic' academic psychologist Ciaran O'Keeffe, who isn't. They bat about the possibilities between them and neither inflicts a killer blow, as it were.  With skilful artifice, the show draws every atom of energy from this indeterminacy: but in truth, although Mr Robins often mentions using a mysterious cardboard box of papers left by the paranormal investigator Harold Chibbett, who worked on the case at the time, and having interviewed Shirley Hitchings, James Clark, who wrote the whole thing up in The Poltergeist Prince of London in 2013, did both too. The podcast adds a few new nuggets of information: for instance, a graphologist decides that the  mysterious letters from Donald are almost certainly in the same hand as Shirley's. But ultimately the only way a listener will be able to decide is to have decided already, long before they hear the story. 

What do I think about it? In the end I wouldn't see much to dissent from in sceptic Deborah Hyde's assessment that Donald was 'a story with many authors, created communally, both consciously and unconsciously, according to a script that's readily available to everyone in that culture'. There's a lot in the Battersea Poltergeist narrative that doesn't add up, but at this distance in time it's almost impossible to disentangle what might have happened regarding any reported phenomenon in the case. As the priest who took our classes on this stuff at theological college said, 'There's about two hundred things a thing can be'.

My experience is that people often have a somewhat unhealthy interest in this kind of weirdness and so I am wary of feeding the fire: the Church as a whole has also been very, very reticent about this in the past after some loose practice resulted in terrible cases of abuse or malpractice in the name of 'the ministry of deliverance' (I wrote about a film based on one fairly recent incident in Romania). But the situation when I arrived in the Guildford diocese where people were reluctant even to mention who the Advisor on Deliverance was does seem a bit extreme, and in fact there's now a relevant page on the diocesan website. In fact such stuff comes my way pretty infrequently, amounting to only half a dozen cases in sixteen years, and most of them so vague and uncertain that it wasn't clear any lay beyond the normal bounds of psychology. As a priest I am of course committed to the idea that there is a non-material aspect to human life, but also to a scepticism about any particular incident that presents itself, and I'm always grateful that I seem to be completely insensitive to 'atmospheres' and the like. I don't know anyone even remotely inclined to go in all-guns-blazing with holy water, lighted candles and the Major Exorcism of Persons and Places at the first hint of paranormal events. The last such incident I dealt with was someone who had become convinced there was a 'presence' in their home and who'd been unsettled by a medium friend claiming they could detect the spirit of a young woman who'd lived in a large house on the site of the block of flats that was there currently, who had died after a pregnancy and been illicitly buried in the garden. After some discussion we agreed that in fact nothing needed to be done apart from praying for this soul, if soul it was, to be assured of God's mercy and justice. We did so, and the manifestation, such as it was, stopped. Make of that what you will. 

Make what you will, too, of the only time anything weird has ever come my way personally. I went to visit a mother and adult daughter who lived on a new estate built on an old site. The daughter had done some low-level mediumship in the past and was now, she said, afflicted by unwelcome presences that seemed to be linked to the history of the place: she (and others) heard voices, and she experienced a sense of oppression. I arrived at the house, and spoke to the mother in the kitchen, with my bag (containing all my kit - Bible, stole, water and anointing oil, just in case) on the table beside me. I could see the daughter appear on the stairs out of the corner of my eye but was still in mid-sentence so I didn’t turn to her for a few seconds. When we moved to go to the living room, I checked my bag and found a lipstick and hair grip in it. As I got them out, the daughter said they were hers. Both she and her mother seemed bewildered at how they got there. We left them on the table and said no more about it. After I left the house, I sat in the car for a few moments and said, ‘If there are any of you here, I want to make it absolutely clear that you must stay here where you belong. You’re not coming back with me!' On getting home I thought I’d go to church to say Evening Prayer and went through my bag to get my stole and the oil to take back. Right at the bottom, under my Bible, notebook and other things, I found a bulky car key and battery fob with two keyrings. This turned out to be the daughter's too. It's possible that she could have placed the objects in my bag in those few seconds when she wasn’t completely in my field of vision, though she would need a Magic Circle-level of expertise to do it without me seeing her move, or hearing the keys rattle. She certainly couldn’t have done so without her mother seeing so if there was deception it was done by both of them. Despite my prayers and those of others - it turned out the couple had been talking to various other people as well as me - the manifestations didn't seem to stop completely. I still have no idea what any of that was really about.

Don't, as the wonderful theme song to Uncanny by Lanterns on the Lake insists, have nightmares!