I've been studying Enfield extensively for a few years now, but I know much less about Battersea. I've read Shirley Hitchings and James Clark's The Poltergeist Prince Of London (Great Britain: The History Press, 2013) and some recent articles on the case, I've listened to the BBC series mentioned above, and I've watched some videos on the subject. Clark's book is good and is the best resource I'm aware of on the case. It had to have taken a lot of time and effort to sort through all of the material involved in such a large and complicated case and to present it so well. I recommend starting with Clark's book, then listening to the BBC series. The podcasts will be easier to follow if you have the background knowledge the book provides, and some of the material covered in the podcast series happened later than the timeframe the book covers.
Unless I indicate otherwise, references related to the Battersea case below will be to the approximate location in the Kindle version of Clark's book. I'll be citing some of Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes. I'll designate Grosse's tapes with "MG" and Playfair's with "GP", so that MG23B is Grosse's tape 23B, GP90A is Playfair's tape 90A, and so on.
I'll briefly discuss what I think of the authenticity of the Battersea case, then address how Battersea and Enfield relate and make some miscellaneous comments about the BBC series on Battersea and other issues. To keep this post from being longer, much of what I'll be saying will be summaries of my conclusions. I can expand on the points I'll be making if anybody wants me to.
- Last year, I posted an article about how to judge the credibility of witnesses, focused on the Enfield case, and the principles I discussed there are applicable to Battersea. And there are other posts in our archives that address the evidential issues involved, in both paranormal and normal contexts. For a case to be paranormal, it only takes one event that seems likely to be genuine, but Battersea has many. The BBC series covers some of the better examples, like the events experienced by the journalist Joyce Lewis, but there's a lot more in Clark's book (e.g., in chapter 2). A paranormal explanation for the experiences of individuals like Joyce Lewis and Andrew Green seems far more likely than a normal one. And the Hitchings family and Harold Chibbett, the investigator of the case, are credible witnesses to varying degrees in a lot of contexts. For example, the poltergeist was detrimental to the health and finances of the father in the family, Wally Hitchings. He was demoted and received a pay cut at work because of the lack of sleep and other problems he was experiencing as a result of the poltergeist. Regarding Wally's efforts to rent out part of his house to raise his income, Clark writes, "A mixed-race couple had also made enquiries about the rooms but had left hastily when the ever-honest Wally told them about Donald [the poltergeist]….The upstairs rooms were still vacant because prospective tenants who called to view them quickly changed their minds when they learned about Donald, and Wally thought it only fair to warn them." (3290, 3625) Evelyn Hollow made some good points in response to skeptical objections during the BBC series, and I would make points about Battersea similar to those I've made about Enfield and in other contexts.
However, I want to make a distinction between the writing phenomena in the Battersea case and the non-writing phenomena. There were many of the latter, but a large percentage of the case consists of the former. And the writing phenomena are problematic in a lot of ways. The problems are discussed at length in Clark's book and in the BBC series. I'll have more to say about some of those problems below, but there's enough that I'm ignorant about, including some things that nobody seems to have resolved, to prevent me from reaching much of a conclusion about the poltergeist's alleged writings. There's a good chance that some of the information in the poltergeist's documents was obtained paranormally, as discussed periodically in Clark's book, but that can be distinguished from whether the letters themselves are paranormal. Paranormal knowledge can be expressed in normal letters. From what I know at this point, I have a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of doubt about the genuineness of the writing phenomena, and the large majority of the argument I'd make for the authenticity of the case would involve the non-writing events.
- And that raises the issue of fraud. To his credit, Danny Robins, the host of the BBC series, has said that he can't dismiss the paranormality of Battersea, despite the doubts that have been raised about it. None of the main participants in the BBC series seem to take an all-or-nothing approach, as if one instance of fraud would invalidate the entire case. As I explained in an article on fraud in the Enfield case last year, all of us accept a combination of the authentic and the inauthentic in many contexts in our everyday lives. No less a critic of Enfield than Anita Gregory referred to how it would be "crude" and "simplistic" to dismiss the entire case because some of it was found to be fraudulent. Similarly, when a skeptic of the paranormal like James Randi is found to be dishonest in a context like the Ted Serios case, we don't conclude that we therefore can't trust anything Randi said in any context. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Shirley Hitchings faked every document allegedly written by the Battersea poltergeist. Would that, by itself, overturn the testimony of individuals like Joyce Lewis and Andrew Green, the authenticity of events that occurred when Shirley wasn't around, etc.? No. Shirley's fraud would have some relevance in terms of demonstrating her willingness to fake things, the failure of some people to discern what she had done in some contexts, and so on. But other factors would still have to be considered before we dismissed the other events in the case.
- The longevity of the Battersea case is often mentioned, and it's sometimes suggested that Battersea lasted longer than Enfield. A lot depends on what you're comparing. The earliest paranormal event that's arguably connected to the Enfield case is an apparition that occurred during a Ouija board session Margaret Hodgson participated in in 1974. A variety of phenomena continued to be reported until just before the Bennetts moved out of the house in 2004. I'm not aware of any reports of activity since then, and a current occupant recently said there's no activity there any longer. Battersea is typically referred to as lasting from 1956 to 1968, but Shirley Hitchings has reported paranormal events related to the case that occurred in the late 1980s and within the last few years (all of which are discussed in the BBC series). If you classify those events after 1968 as ongoing activity in the case, then they extend the longevity of the case and illustrate how activity can cease for a while, then resume. If you accept one or more of the post-1968 events reported by Shirley as ongoing activity in the case, then Battersea is superior to Enfield in terms of spanning a larger number of years. But we shouldn't compare the timeframe for all Battersea events to the time when the Enfield case was at its height (typically thought of as August of 1977 until a little over a year later). That's an uneven comparison. Both cases have lasted a double-digit number of years and could resume in the future.
- The similarities between Battersea and Enfield make for an impressive list. Both occurred in the London area during the second half of the twentieth century. The poltergeist centered around an adolescent girl, one who was tested at the Maudsley Hospital and found to be physically and mentally healthy. The poltergeist lasted unusually long, was unusually communicative, and comes across as a highly immature chronic liar with mental problems. While the poltergeist differed from the adolescent girl at the center of the case in some significant ways, it also took on some of the characteristics of that girl and often acted in her interests. There are even parallels in some of the lesser details of the poltergeist's traits, such as a tendency to tell the family, dubiously, that he's protecting them from other spirits who want to harm them. The case was investigated by a man in his upper fifties who had served in the military, was married and had children, devoted an unusually large amount of time to working the case, and considered it the most important case he'd ever investigated. In both cases, one or more siblings of the parents in the family lived on the same street and sometimes helped the family. And so on. That's just a partial list of the similarities, and it's pretty impressive.
- But you have to take the differences into account as well, of course. People make much of the fact that Peggy Hodgson was divorced and the difficult nature of the family's background. There was nothing comparable in the Hitchings family. Shirley Hitchings and Janet Hodgson were both adolescent girls, but Shirley was 15, and Janet was 11. Four years doesn't make much of a difference later in life, but that sort of age difference typically is much more significant at that earlier stage. Grosse was the leader of a team of investigators, unlike Chibbett, who apparently worked alone. After Grosse started on Enfield in September of 1977, he was joined by Playfair the following week and by David Robertson in December of that year. John Hasted only visited the house once, but monitored the case and provided frequent help. That assistance Grosse received is significant. As he told Playfair in November of 1977, "Well, I mean, if you hadn't have come on the case, it would have been bloody awful for me, to say the least." (MG20Bi, 36:06) While Chibbett had a "long bus journey" (1794) to get to the Hitchings' house, Grosse lived closer to the Hodgsons. Though the two poltergeists were similar in some ways, they also differed substantially. While both claimed multiple identities, the Battersea poltergeist more consistently focused on one, his claim to be a member of eighteenth-century French royalty. The Enfield poltergeist changed its identity claims much more often, which was a large factor in preventing Grosse and the other members of his team from ever going to the lengths Chibbett went to in researching the poltergeist's claimed identity. And although both poltergeists were unusually communicative, there were significant differences in how they communicated. The Battersea entity apparently was much more verbose. He sometimes used a disembodied voice, but communicated through knocking and writing more often, especially writing. Though the Enfield entity also wrote to some extent, he did so much less. He communicated through knocking more than through writing, but communicated through knocking less than the Battersea entity did. The Enfield spirit seems to have communicated through a disembodied voice more than the Battersea spirit did, but the primary form of communication in the Enfield case was the embodied voice. I don't remember hearing of any instances of the Battersea entity communicating that way. And the embodied voice in the Enfield case manifested through all five members of the Hodgson family (and at least one dog, apparently), unlike the close association of the Battersea writings with one person, Shirley. Though the two poltergeists were similar in some of the details of their interests, behavior, and such, there were a lot of differences as well. For example, the Enfield entity apparently swore much more often, was much more misogynistic, and handled names differently (adopting the forms of address most often used by the people in the house, such as referring to Peggy Hodgson as "Mum" and Maurice Grosse as "Mr. Grosse"). Another example that stood out to me while reading Clark's book is the Battersea spirit's tendency to be unduly concerned about imagined dangers. He was frequently expressing concern about burglars outside the house, a plane crashing into the house, a chimney in the house collapsing, and so on. I don't recall a comparable tendency with the Enfield poltergeist. Etc. Again, this is just a partial list, but, like the list of similarities between the cases, it's impressive.
- I referred to how the poltergeist in both cases comes across as a highly immature chronic liar with mental problems. For more about how much precedent we have for such characteristics in poltergeists and in other paranormal contexts, see the section titled "How Much Precedent Is There For Such A Voice?" in my article here.
- Fraud hypotheses often focus on children as the primary or sole suspects. There were four children in the Hodgson family, but only one among the Hitchings. Some events couldn't be faked without more than one person or would be much easier to fake with more than one. Arguments for fraud are harder to make in the Battersea case accordingly.
- One of the most important differences between the cases is the triple-digit number of hours of audio tapes we have for Enfield, including recordings of many purportedly paranormal events and interviews with witnesses, often shortly after the time of the event in question. The tapes contain an enormous amount of information, as my Enfield posts reflect. The tapes are valuable in many contexts: knowing what people said; when they said it; making judgments about their sincerity and other characteristics of their behavior; measuring the speed with which events occurred, since unusually high speed is often a trait of poltergeist activity; measuring the acoustic properties of knocking; etc. The BBC's Battersea series consists largely of dramatizations. You could fill up such a series many times over using nothing other than the Enfield tapes.
- And we have much more information about the Enfield house and its surrounding neighborhood in some significant ways. A floor plan of the Hodgsons' house was published in the first edition of Playfair's book. I think far more photographs have been released to the public for Enfield than for Battersea. We have a lot of video footage of much of the Hodgsons' house and neighborhood, and new videos are regularly uploaded to YouTube. The original Battersea house was demolished long ago, but the Hodgsons' house is still standing. The environment in which poltergeist activity occurs is significant in many contexts, so there's significance in these differences in the information we have about the environment involved in each case.
- I've kept a list of people credibly reported to have witnessed one or more supposedly paranormal events in the Enfield case (a list that's admittedly debatable in some significant ways). My estimate is that there's a low triple-digit number of such witnesses. I don't know how many witnesses there are for Battersea. I suspect the number is at least in the upper double digits, and it could easily be a triple-digit number.
- It seems that the Hodgsons got much more help from the Burcombes and Nottinghams than the Hitchings got from their relatives and neighbors. That sort of additional help isn't just beneficial to the family experiencing the poltergeist, but also adds to the evidence for the case, since there's a larger number and variety of witnesses to the phenomena accordingly.
- The Hitchings had a phone in their home. The Hodgsons didn't. I haven't thought much about the advantages and disadvantages of each situation, and I don't know which was better on balance.
- Something that impressed me about the Battersea case, and which comes across much more in Clark's book than in the BBC series, is the prominence of events involving fire. There were such events in the Enfield case, especially in February of 1978, but they were far less prominent in Enfield than in Battersea. The Battersea entity frequently threatened to start fires and warned of (supposed) other spirits starting them, and fires often did occur. And that began taking place early in the case. There's a lot of evidential significance to the prominence of fires, which I don't recall hearing anybody address adequately when discussing Battersea. If you read my article on the Enfield fires linked above, there's some discussion there of how fires would have worked against the family's interests in a series of ways and how fire episodes would motivate people to watch more closely for fraud (e.g., neighbors who were concerned about their own houses catching on fire). As John Burcombe mentioned in the aftermath of one of the fire episodes in the Enfield case, "There was some tension in the room, because fire is a nasty thing" (MG92A, 2:59). The testimony of so many family members, relatives, neighbors, and other witnesses in the Battersea case in support of its paranormality and their lack of detection of fraud are more significant accordingly.
- Another difference between the two poltergeists that I noticed while reading Clark's book is that the entity in the Enfield case seemed to know more about how to operate machinery and seems to have done so much more often. I posted an article on those aspects of Enfield earlier this year. Clark refers to how the Hitchings would sometimes shut off the electricity to their house to prevent the poltergeist from starting fires. It seems to have taken a while for the poltergeist to figure out how to get the electricity back on, though it eventually did. And I don't recall other instances of the Battersea poltergeist showing significant knowledge about such matters, though I could easily be overlooking one or more episodes. Something that makes the poltergeist's lack of involvement in such activities more striking is how appropriate its interference with machinery would have been in some contexts in which it doesn't seem to have behaved that way. The Enfield poltergeist frequently interfered with cameras and other equipment used by members of the media who were covering the case. And the Battersea poltergeist was highly antagonistic toward some members of the media, probably much more than the Enfield poltergeist was. The Battersea entity kept making negative comments about certain reporters, threatening to harm them, demanding that they be brought to the house, etc. Maybe the poltergeist interfered with cameras or other media equipment on occasions I haven't heard about, and maybe I've forgotten one or more occasions I did come across. But it seems that the Battersea entity was at least much less involved in such behavior than the Enfield entity was, despite the fact that the former apparently was more angry at the media than the latter. That contrast provides an illustration of how one poltergeist can differ from another, and it offers evidence against the common notion that poltergeist activity has been the same across the centuries. See my article linked above for more about the subject.
- The BBC series on Battersea mentions that the Hitchings had a cat who reacted to the poltergeist. Clark's book mentions that some dogs reacted to it (3751). It's noteworthy that Clark refers to two dogs and refers to their reacting in the same manner. There were incidents involving animals in the Enfield case as well, including ones involving dogs.
- If you begin listening at 14:37 in the final episode of the BBC series on Battersea, you'll hear Deborah Hyde and Ciaran O'Keeffe discussing their doubts about the case with Danny Robins. The issue of levitations comes up. I think there were some authentic levitations in the Battersea case, but the ones I've heard about are far fewer in number than those in the Enfield case and significantly lower in quality than the best Enfield ones. See the article just linked for further details.
- Unless you include one or more of Shirley's post-1968 experiences as instances of apparitions, I don't recall the involvement of any in the Battersea case. There were many apparitions at Enfield.
- In one of the final episodes of the BBC series, a handwriting expert said that she concluded that Shirley's handwriting matches the alleged handwriting of the poltergeist after examining two letters written on the same day, one by Shirley and one allegedly by the poltergeist. I don't know much about that handwriting expert or the reliability of handwriting analysis more broadly. Clark's book mentions that other individuals (not experts in the field, apparently) had made such handwriting comparisons in previous years and had reached differing conclusions. From the photos and descriptions I've seen, it seems that the writing style in the alleged poltergeist documents differed substantially from one document to another. See my article on writing incidents in the Enfield case for a discussion of how writing styles varied in that case as well and the evidential significance of that variation. Something the BBC series on Battersea doesn't mention, as far as I recall, is that Clark reports in his book that one of the poltergeist's documents suggested that it produced those documents through Shirley (3065). Yet, Shirley has denied that she had that sort of mediumistic role. In the BBC series, she goes as far as to say that her mother was monitoring her too much for her to have had enough opportunity to produce the documents, and she mentions that she was sometimes away when the documents appeared. I don't know how much research has been done to examine such claims. But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that every document was written in Shirley's writing style. How much reason do we have to conclude that a poltergeist wouldn't do that? Poltergeist behavior is often parasitic in other contexts. Poltergeists are often thought to be manifestations of the mind of one or more living individuals, so how would the use of Shirley's handwriting be problematic under that scenario? There's also the issue of how the poltergeist could have used Shirley as an instrument without her knowing it, such as at nighttime or periodically at other times of the day, then delivered the letters whenever he wanted to. We shouldn't assume that the documents are paranormal without evidence. But there is a good chance that some of the information in the documents (though not much) was obtained in a paranormal manner, as I mentioned earlier in this article, and the BBC series didn't address some of the relevant evidence and explanatory options. It seems that more work needs to be done on the subject, though I could easily be ignorant of such work that's already been done.
- In a post last year, I discussed some phenomena in the Enfield case that I referred to as involving unknown precedent. The event in question has precedent in one or more previous paranormal cases, but that precedent is unknown to the people involved in the event. You can read the post just linked for more information on the subject. One example I discussed there was a sense of a cat lying on your feet. Alan Gauld and A.D. Cornell referred to a woman who reported "a feeling as if a cat were curling round her feet" in a haunting case that occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Poltergeists [United States: White Crow Books, 2017], approximate Kindle location 3236). Similarly, in the Enfield case, Peggy Hodgson reported experiencing a sensation like a cat sitting on her feet and the bottom of her legs (GP5A, 4:44, especially 5:59): "a cat sitting on you…on your feet, [unintelligible] your legs". And I noticed that Clark's book on the Battersea case cites a journal entry from Shirley Hitchings in which she refers to how "We felt something lying across our feet." (287) It would be good to know if Shirley or anybody else involved ever associated the feeling with having a cat or some similar animal lying on you. Even if they didn't think of the feeling that way, there's enough similarity for it to be significant. That sort of connection with other paranormal cases, a connection a hoaxer would be unlikely to have thought of, adds to the credibility of Battersea.
- Janet and Margaret Hodgson have admitted that some of the Enfield events were inauthentic, Janet estimating the number at 2 percent. I'm not aware of any such admission from Shirley Hitchings. Something that often gets overlooked or underestimated in this context is that so many other witnesses in both cases have lived for decades, and many have died now, without retracting their claims to have witnessed paranormal events. And many of those events occurred without the Hodgson or Hitchings children having been present or with their being present, but apparently without any normal means of producing the events. The stability of the witness testimony over time is impressive in both cases.
- There's been a widespread and steady stream of analysis of the Enfield case by both paranormal researchers and the public since the case started. That includes many people who have been antagonistic toward the case, among them such prominent paranormal researchers as Tony Cornell and John Beloff. Anita Gregory not only visited the Hodgsons' house several times over several months and wrote publicly against the case, but even included a large section on it in her doctoral thesis. As I argued in a post last year, it seems that some paranormal events occurred while skeptics of the case were visiting the house, sometimes right in front of them. I'm not aware of a comparable situation with Battersea. I don't know of any Battersea equivalent of, say, Gregory's doctoral thesis, the Enfield committee report of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the tapes we have for Milbourne Christopher's visit to the Hodgsons' house, or the widespread discussions of Enfield that have been occurring for decades. Battersea seems to have been subjected to much less scrutiny in some significant ways, and there seems to be a smaller amount of hostile corroboration for Battersea than there is for Enfield.
- More should be said about Deborah Hyde's skepticism of the Battersea case. She appeared on the final episode of the BBC's series. And she later wrote an article about her skepticism of the case. She refers to how much similarity she sees between Battersea and Enfield. I wrote a response to Hyde's claims about Enfield a few years ago. That was before I'd listened to Grosse and Playfair's tapes, read the SPR's committee report on the case, and done some other research that's given me further reason to conclude that Hyde's view of Enfield is wrong. And there's now a YouTube video available to the public that features a portion of an episode in the Enfield case that Hyde dismissed as sleep paralysis. (You'll hear an audio recording of the event, taped by Grosse. There is no video footage of it.) For a link to that video and a discussion of its significance, see here. Listen to the audio, read my comments on it, and ask yourself if it's reasonable to identify what you heard as an episode of sleep paralysis.
Hyde begins her comments on Battersea by saying that the television was the only object in the home that wasn't harmed in some way by the poltergeist. She suggests that Shirley wouldn't have wanted the television harmed and that its not being harmed is evidence for her being behind the alleged poltergeist activities. That take on the Battersea case should sound familiar to those who have read a 2015 article by Hyde expressing skepticism about Enfield. In that article, she wrote:
Touchingly “the television … was almost the only object in the house never disturbed in any way throughout the case”. I’m the same age as Janet, and well remember the importance of the box in the corner in an age before iPads and X Boxes.
See the section titled "Was The Television Undisturbed?" here for documentation that Hyde is incorrect about this issue. As I explain there, not only was the television disturbed or in a lot of danger of being damaged on multiple occasions during the Enfield case, but the poltergeist also did many other things that were against the interests of Janet (the person closest to an Enfield equivalent of Shirley) and the other people most involved in the poltergeist.
Besides, even if Hyde were right about the television not being disturbed (she's wrong about Enfield, and I don't know whether she's right about Battersea), that wouldn't do much to suggest the inauthenticity of the case. Though the public seems to usually view poltergeists as either ghostly or demonic, my sense is that the most popular view among researchers who accept the paranormality of poltergeists is that they're manifestations of the mind of one or more living humans. And people often combine these views in various ways, combining a ghostly element and paranormal activity directed by a living human, for example. Or they suggest some other combination. So, the Battersea poltergeist could reflect Shirley's mind while being genuinely paranormal. And even a ghost or demon or some other entity who's not a living human could want to accommodate a living human for one reason or another (e.g., liking the person, as the Battersea poltergeist apparently liked Shirley to some extent). As Clark's book mentions, the poltergeist in the Battersea case said that it liked watching some of the programs the family watched on television. I wouldn't accept Hyde's claim that the television was the only object not damaged in the Hitchings' house just because Hyde says so, and the claim doesn't have as much significance as she suggests even if it's true.
A lot more could be said about problems with Hyde's analysis of both cases, but I'll leave it at that for now.
- Late in the last program in the BBC's Battersea series (54:45), Robins brings up the issue of whether there's been more recent poltergeist activity and the common objection that modern technology would show poltergeist cases to be fraudulent. It seems that an objection that many people have in mind is that poltergeist activity supposedly hasn't been caught on video. But we do have video footage of poltergeist activity. See here regarding a case in Australia in 1998, for example. See my article here concerning video footage of paranormal activity more broadly. We have a lot. I discuss Enfield and video footage of its events near the end of that article.
In conclusion, I think Enfield is more significant than Battersea overall, though Battersea is superior in some ways, is a highly significant case, and should be studied much more than it has been. If you're interested in studying it, I recommend reading James Clark's book and listening to Danny Robins' BBC series.
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