Poltergeist Donald: the mystery of the house on Wycliffe Road, which has remained unsolved for 65 years
'01.02.2021'
Source: with the BBC
Shirley Hitchins is now 80. And when she was 15, the whole United Kingdom started talking about her. with the BBC.
For 65 years, who has not tried to understand the mystery: from the police to the priests. They even looked for a clue in the House of Commons: during parliamentary hour, the then Minister of the Interior was asked what he thought about all this, but they did not receive a concrete answer.
These days, a new investigation has been launched by BBC journalist Danny Robins. Two years ago, he had at his disposal a voluminous cardboard box with documents that were collected by the now-deceased famous "ghost hunter" and friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, Harold Chibbett.
On March 6, 1956, Chibbett rang the doorbell at 63 Wycliffe Road in Battersea, south London, which was rented by the Hitchins family: subway driver Wally, his wife Kitty, a bank clerk, Wally's elderly mother, and their daughter Shirley.
Chibbetta was escorted into the living room, where the main character of this story, a big-eyed fragile brown-haired woman, was sitting.
"You must think I'm crazy like everyone else?" She asked, barely saying hello.
“As long as I can see you're scared, miss,” Chibbett said softly.
It all started about a month ago, on January 27, when Shirley found an antique silver key on her bedroom rug - too posh for their home, according to the Hitchins, and did not fit any lock. Subsequently, he disappeared as inexplicably as he was found.
The next night, the family was awakened by a crash, as if someone were moving and dropping heavy furniture. It is clear, everyone was very scared.
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This, according to the Hitchins, was followed by new "miracles." In 90% of the other described cases of poltergeist, the matter is limited to knocks and squeaks, but here there was a complete set: flying objects, spontaneously igniting lights, house slippers walking on their own.
Someone moved pots and pans in the kitchen, pulled the sheets off the beds and flushed the toilet. According to Shirley, in front of her eyes, the chairs were lifted into the air, and the clock, taking off from the mantelpiece, spun and landed on the table.
Judging by the behavior of the poltergeist, he somehow especially treated Shirley, and seemed to be jealous of her boyfriends. The girl called him "Donald". According to the woman, “Donald” behaved with her like an annoying brother. Journalists called him “the boyfriend ghost”.
The grandmother once poured holy water on her granddaughter. On the same day, someone tore the curtains in her room. “Donald” was angry, the family decided.
In those years, the houses on Wycliffe Road were crowded, and the noise at the Hitchins' nights was such that the neighbors began to ask questions. They didn't really believe in poltergeist, but, on the other hand, respectable and even boring Hitchins did not look like people capable of joking like that.
For "the most terrible house in England" began, as they put it then in the USSR, "the bourgeois press, greedy for sensations." Moreover, ghosts and spiritualism have long occupied a special place in British culture.
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The audience was divided into those who believe in the supernatural and those who believed that the Hitchins were playing everybody for some reason. According to Shirley Hitchins, even her father sometimes doubted her stories.
Once on the wall of Shirley's bedroom there was an inscription: "Shirley, I will come." But no one “came”, the family got used to the oddities and lived like that for 12 years.
It all ended with the fact that in 1968 Shirley got married, left London for Sussex, and since then “Donald” has not shown himself.
The older Hitchins are long dead, and the house at 63 Wycliffe Road was demolished. The former proletarian district has become a prestigious place with numerous gastropubs and designer cafes.
Harold Chibbett worked on the mystery for the rest of his life, but did not come to definite conclusions.
At one time he was on duty at night in the Hitchins kitchen and tried to record mysterious sounds on a tape recorder, but nothing came of it. “Which is exactly what was required to be proved,” say the skeptics. “No wonder,” the “believers” argue. "Sign knew when he was being overheard."
Investigation with an open ending
The fruit of Danny Robins' work was a series of programs with a total duration of more than an hour and a half, aired on BBC Radio 4 the other day, on the 65th anniversary of the beginning of the mysterious events.
Fragments of interviews with Shirley Hitchins and discussions with guest experts, psychology professor Kieran O'Keefe and paranormal expert writer Evelyn Hollow, are interspersed with staged episodes in which long-dead people “talk” with Robins in the voices of actors.
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According to the last surviving witness, 65 years ago she was an ordinary cheerful high school student with a mass of friends and girlfriends, maybe a little self-confident and spoiled, dreamed of becoming an artist, adored the recently fashionable rock and roll, and did not suffer from an excess of imagination.
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“Donald” suddenly fell on her head and, in her words, “deprived her of normal youth”: at first she was “scared to death”, then she became afraid to end up in a psychiatric clinic, for some time reporters and photographers followed the girl on her heels.
Shirley assures that sometimes she managed to communicate with “Donald”, asking him questions, to which she asked to answer with one knock instead of “no” and two instead of “yes”. In the course of such "communication", he allegedly said that he would not leave her alone, but would not harm her.
And now the elderly lady confesses that she doesn't really want to talk about “Donald”: what if he hears and comes back?
The only thing Robbins is convinced of is that she believes in the reality of everything that happened to her.
Poltergeist is often attributed to the natural crackling of old houses and furniture, or the antics of mice and rats, but here the sounds were so loud that many neighbors heard them.
Maybe the heroes of this story still conspired and fooled everyone for many years, and Shirley Hitchins continues to do this to this day? But for what?
Professor O'Keeffe said that as a scientist he does not believe in otherworldly forces, but he is familiar with cases of mental disorders when people do not feel a shadow of doubt about their hallucinations, especially if they are excited or frightened.
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For persuasiveness, the psychologist arranged an experiment: he brought the author of the show, Danny Robins, to his laboratory at Buckinghamshire University, placed him in the "horror room", and then left one in an ordinary room, warning that he might hear unusual sounds, and the tensely awaiting journalist was really something heard, although there were no sounds.
But no one had previously frightened Shirley, and how could the entire family have the same hallucinations at the same time?
Evelyn Hollow's opinion is that there are many unknowns in the world. “Yes, I believe that there are spirits that choose a particular person and feed on his energy,” she said.
“I personally don’t believe in spirits, but the story is such that even skeptics have doubts,” concluded journalist Danny Robins, who revived this old story.
