The Battersea Poltergeist · BBC Radio 4

Episode 1: 63 Wycliffe Road

January 21, 2021·31 min·2 clips
Parapsychologist Evelyn Hollow describes a case with a floating clock, airborne pots and pans, spontaneous fires, and handwritten letters from a supposed ghost.
Danny Robbins begins with a box of documents, and he does not treat them like a neat ghost story. He says they tell the story of Britain's strangest alleged haunting, but his starting point is disbelief. The address is 63 Wycliffe Road in Battersea. On 6 March 1956, paranormal investigator Harold Chibbett walks there to visit the Hitchings family, who rent the house. By then, the house already has a reputation. People have heard noises, seen objects move, and turned one South London home into a thick record of claims. The episode keeps its grip by asking what can survive a closer look. Kieran and Evelyn study the original material: family diaries, newspaper reports, police reports, and Chibbett's files. Then the scale starts to feel harder to shrug off. Evelyn points out that the case reportedly ran for twelve years, long enough to make simple explanations feel too tidy. The reports keep escalating. Knocking and scratching give way to a floating clock, pots and pans thrown from an empty room, bedsheets pulled away, and objects apparently levitating. Then it gets odder. The files also mention handwritten letters, drawings on the wall, spontaneous fires, and voices heard during the haunting. Robbins does not solve it, and the episode is better for that. He keeps belief and doubt in the same room, letting each new detail make both positions less comfortable. The voices describe poltergeist cases as more aggressive and possibly more dangerous than ordinary hauntings, which gives the investigation its edge. Still, the frame stays grounded in dates, files, witnesses, and records. Atmosphere matters here, but evidence matters more. A family house becomes the start of a much bigger question: what was happening at 63 Wycliffe Road?

As heard by us

A careful ghost story that treats a famous haunting like evidence, not folklore.

The episode opens with Danny Robbins carrying a box of case files into the shed, and the Battersea haunting quickly feels less like folklore than an archive sorted in real time.

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Why you'd press play

When a skeptical host opens a box of ghost files, the story turns into a real case fast.

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