I have been rediscovering the delights of BBC Radio 4.  As  friends were coming to dinner on Friday and I was going to spend some of the afternoon in the kitchen cooking I decided I needed something good to listen to.  I discovered ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’.  If you are curious about the weird and wonderful and live in the UK this might capture your attention and imagination as much as it did mine!  The journalist Danny Robbins had taken up the tale of Number 63 Wycliffe Road in Battersea which in 1956 had been the scene of some terrible and inexplicable ‘happenings’.  The long and short of it is that for a period of several years this house was apparently disrupted by the actions of a poltergeist which the residents named ‘Donald’.  The first unusual happening was the appearance of a key on the pillow of the 15 year old girl, Shirley, who lived there with her parents, grandmother and brother. Nobody knew where this key had come from or what it was for.  The appearance of the key was followed by banging noises which seemed to come from the walls, the floor and the furniture. As time went by these noises became so loud that the neighbours began to complain.  In later months there were fires, flying objects, levitations, disembodied voices, and  writings on the walls. A psychical researcher called Harold Chibbett became interested in the case and virtually moved into No. 63 to study the happenings. Shirely is still alive and was interviewed by Robbins about her memories of these events; the subtle implication being that perhaps she was behind them in some way. However, as her testimony and the details of the story unfolded it became hard to imagine how anyone could have fabricated these events without being detected over  such a long period of time.

Of course the psychologists are wheeled out to give an expert opinion!  On the one hand we had the sceptic, Ciaran O’Keefe and on the other the paranormal specialist Evelyn Hollow.  O’Keefe was aiming to offer a range of explanations based in standard psychology many of which, whilst relevant, seemed to me to fail to offer a credible explanation and largely rested on the idea that people cannot trust their perceptions and experiences.  Whilst it is true that over the years there have been many hoaxers and certainly Derren Brown has made it part of his life’s work to debunk apparent psychical events, it is also true that many people have these experiences. To imply that these people are either lying or deceived  seems to me to be unfairly dismissive of experiences which warrant exploration if not explanation.

I did once have my own small poltergeist experience.  A couple of years ago I had rented a small cottage in Yorkshire for three nights. The cottage must have been at least 200 years old; quite small and fairly basic it provided somewhere reasonable to stay whilst I visited relatives.  In the bedroom there was a large, old oak chest under the window. It had a flat top and I had placed my emptied canvas bag on the top.  At about 2.00am I was awoken by what sounded like the creaking of the stairs. I froze in my bed!  In my mind I recalled having locked the only door which gave entry to the house and decided it could not be a person. After a few moments the creaking stopped and there was a bang as the canvas bag fell from the chest to the floor.  That was it.  I eventually got back to sleep. Rationally I told myself that the creaking was imaginary or was perhaps the bag gradually sliding.  But this did not fit my experience of the event.  I concluded that ‘something’ did not want me to place a bag on the chest. The following night I left it on the floor and there was no disturbance. I would not stay in that cottage again!

After all I have read and explored in recent years I have to conclude that  material reality is far from the sum total of all reality.  In many ways we lose sight of the incredible magic and mystery of simply being alive. The idea that consciousness and memory might not simply be a consequence of brain activity but might in some way ‘exist’ independently seems to me no more bizarre than the fact that we are alive and aware in the first place. And of course, we are also approaching a time of the year which for centuries has been associated with the mystery of death and what might or might not lie beyond.  A part of us longs to be able to come to terms with death: our own and that of those we love.  Is it really the end?

However, I might make the observation that Danny Robbins seems to be doing very well on the back of this story. He is going on tour with it this autumn.  Whilst it might be an exploration of a fascinating event it is also entertainment tapping into our delight in the chilling, the extraordinary and the unexplained!