Episode 2: Shirley

January 21, 2021·29 min·2 clips

Shirley Hitchings, now 80, says the poltergeist took all her teenage years and she just existed rather than lived.

First, there is noise. The episode frames the haunting as a slow tightening: disturbance, pressure, then Shirley as the person everything seems to gather around. Danny Robbins returns to the Hitchings house in 1956 with Harold Chibbett, who arrives with a camera, thermometer, notadpads, pens, and a sleeping bag. The house feels worn down. In the reconstructions, the family is short on sleep and starting to turn on each other as normal rooms stop feeling safe. A chair moves. Shirley is told to ask the unseen presence to move it again, and suddenly a frightened person is also the one everyone is watching. Then comes the glove. At breakfast, after another bad night, it hits someone in the face and turns into an argument about memory, angle, motive, and trust. One family member suspects Shirley. Another says she could not have thrown it. Nobody gets a clean answer. Robbins then cuts through the drama and asks the real Shirley, plainly and for skeptical listeners, whether she saw heavy pots and pans fly through her room. She says yes. She describes objects lifting from the kitchen stove, floating through the door, crossing the room, then speeding toward people or hitting the wall. The episode does not treat that as proof, but it does make her account hard to shrug off. Fear gets another pass too: the body wants to survive, while the mind wants an explanation. The family cannot just leave, which makes the Hitchings house feel less like a showpiece haunting and more like a place where people had to keep living with the doubt.

As heard by us

A witness-led haunting story that keeps dread, doubt, and domestic detail in the same room.

This episode shifts the Battersea haunting onto Shirley, the surviving witness, and lets memory carry the weight of the story. Harold Chibbett's 1956 investigation gives the account its frame, while the moving chair, the kitchen breakfast argument, and the reports of pots and…

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Why you'd press play

You want Shirley's testimony to make the whole room feel unsettled, as if the case is starting to move around her.

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