Radio 4 podcast produced by Bafflegab Productions, available on BBC Sounds

Doubt a poltergeist, and it will prove itself.

NB There are spoilers for elements of this episode – have a listen first!

The dangers still lurk for young Shirley Hitchings, and a family member is seriously hurt as the drama heats up at 63 Wycliffe Road.

The monsters in this episode come in the form of scurrilous tabloid reporters, who lure Shirley out of her home, interrogate her, strip her to check for a wire-tap, scare her, lie to her, impersonate her brother, and take her without her consent to a doctor for an examination. It’s utterly horrendous and makes the phone tapping scandal look like child’s play. Oh, and they’re not done there, as their accusatory ‘exposé’ adds a pinch of victim shaming to its nasty cauldron of spite. As if the pressure on the family wasn’t bad enough already, apparently the sounds that were loud enough to wake the neighbours in the middle of the night in Wycliffe Road were, in fact, made by the bones in Shirley’s big toe ‘clicking’. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

With his by now familiar dissection of the facts, Danny Robins enlists his wife to test this sound on. It sounds to me like a cross between a snap of the fingers and someone gently playing the spoons on their thigh, certainly nothing to wake either the dead or the living. Danny also turns to expert and author Emily Midorikawa to explain a similar case from the 19th century in which ‘paranormal rock star’ Maggie Fox (pictured with her sisters) confessed that the knocking noises that she had purported were from spirits were, in reality, made by her clicking her big toe. Immediately, it seems obvious that this is the inspiration for the crooked reporters’ manipulation of Shirley for their contrived article. There are too many sweeping generalisations here for my liking – why should one case being exposed as a fraud mean that all such cases are also fraudulent? Generalised judgements encompassing everything that has ever gone bump in the night do not ring true in each and every case. Maybe some are charlatans, maybe some are ghosts. Why does it have to be all or nothing?

The reporters’ desire to explain away the phenomena in 1950s Battersea with sound-bites from another case over a century earlier strikes me simply as lazy, sensationalist journalism but Ciaran O’Keeffe drops the knowledge, explaining that trying (erroneously) to ascribe different events to one single cause is common enough to have a name: ‘misattribution hypothesis’. Donald could be causing the banging sounds in Battersea but the tapping in Fleet Street, where Shirley was interviewed? Is he following her around London now? Or was Shirley simply keen to ‘perform’ for her adoring public? I’m not convinced on that last point, but I am convinced of the evils of the gutter press.

One of the points of view we can’t gather is that of Donald himself, but it becomes horribly apparent that he does not like doubts being cast on his ‘beloved Shirley’ and has something to prove. Did the attempted exorcism enrage him? “You can’t get rid of a poltergeist with an exorcism, it’s like shouting at a naughty child.” Chib’s view on the subject. Did Donald go as far as to attempt to burn the house down, leaving Shirley’s father hospitalised? Experts investigating the fire could find no cause for it. This means that there is no evidence that it was a poltergeist either, but as Evelyn Hollow sensibly states, if that’s the view of the experts, I’d be inclined to listen.

Verdict: A freak of super-nature? Shit just got real. 9/10

Claire Smith