The Battersea Poltergeist

November 2nd is All Souls' Day, and in Mexico, it's the final Day of the Dead, so perhaps it's not inappropriate that the Hallowe'en decorations in our neighbourhood have not yet been taken down.

Ghost stories are not limited to the end of October, however.

I follow BBC Four on Facebook, and on Hallowe'en, my attention was caught by a multi-part radio programme entitled The Battersea Poltergeist, which was first broadcast at the beginning of this year.  As it happens, I have familial connections to Battersea, so I tuned in.

The haunting took place over about a dozen years at 63 Wycliffe Road.  The house is long gone, as is the part of the street it occupied, but I brought up Google Maps and entered the address.  I was astonished, and rather alarmed, to be directed to an area about a nine-minute walk from elder daughter's flat --- in South Wimbledon.  

Fortunately, along with the half-hour episodes, there are three "case updates" to accommodate just a few of the listeners' hundreds of questions and comments. One of the discussions involved the proximity of railway lines, so I learned that Clapham Junction Railway Station is about a mile to the west of where the house stood, that part of what was Wycliffe Road is now Ashbury Road, and that Lavender Hill is just to the south.  That narrows the area to somewhere around the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nectarios, about five miles north of elder daughter's flat, and one mile south-east of where one branch of my ancestors were living in the second half of the nineteenth century, near the west edge of Battersea Park.

Nicely oriented, I settled in, listening (in daylight, of course) to nine episodes over Hallowe'en, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day.  It's a twisty-turny, rollercoaster sort of tale, veering from inexplicable to explicable, from other-worldly to mundane, and from belief to disbelief-- and back again.  It's a mixture of dramatization - the cast is led by none other than Toby Jones - and interviews, including several with Shirley, the original tormented girl, who is now eighty.  (At least she was in early 2021.)  All in all,  we have a fascinating examination of the paranormal, and our differing perceptions of what is plausible.  Follow the above link, and give it a listen.

I'm a little perplexed by the illustration of the series. 

The image is spooky and arresting, but it shows a green-eyed girl against a very old map of the East End of London.

And not particularly close to South Wimbledon.

Shirley Hitchings was (is) a brown-eyed girl, and Battersea is south of the Thames.