The Haunting of Doris Bither

Kerry Gaynor was in a bookstore talking to a friend about his research into parapsychology at UCLA when suddenly a woman approached them that had overheard their conversation.  Doris Bither asked for help. Three ghosts were attacking her.

The case of Doris Bither was an alleged haunting in 1974, Culver City, California. She alleged that she was being attacked and sexually assaulted by three ghosts. Her story inspired the 1978 novel The Entity made into a 1982 film of the same name starring Barabra Hershey.

Barry Taff was a researcher at UCLA working at the now-defunct parapsychology laboratory and, after hearing about her story from Kerry, decided to visit Doris in her home. Once there, the two researchers investigated the small California home where Doris, a single mother, lived with her four children and interviewed her. She told them that she was being raped by three ghosts, explaining further how two pinned her down while the biggest of the supposedly three ghosts would rape her. Barry Taff's initial thought was that Doris needed psychiatric help. The two researchers listened to her story but soon left believing Doris was mentally unstable.

The California home of Doris Bither, where she lived with her four sons.

Ten days passed, and Barry received a phone call from Doris, claiming friends of her neighbours had witnessed what was happening in her home and could collaborate on her story, so Barry and Kerry once again went to Doris' house and soon realised that Doris might not be so crazy after all.

As soon as they entered the house, they smelt an awful smell, best described by Barry as decomposing rotting flesh. While talking to Doris in her kitchen, Barry suddenly witnessed a cupboard door swinging open and a frying pan launching out like a ballistic missile across the kitchen. His first instincts were to examine his surroundings, looking for wires or springs that could have flung the cupboard door open and launched the frying pan out. Finding nothing, Barry and Kerry now took Doris very seriously and began their investigation.

First, Barry and Kerry explored the living environment. It was a tiny home for a woman with four children. The investigators noted a poor relationship between Doris and her children, and while interviewing her, Doris admitted she had a history of physical and substance abuse and traumatic childhood.

Barry interviewed the children who had witnessed objects been thrown around and sometimes receiving bite marks from the ghosts. Her eldest son told Barry that he had seen his mother been attacked, being thrown around the room by an invisible force. He tried to free his mother once during one of her attacks, being violently thrown back by one of the ghosts.

The children explained that the investigator's presence made the ghosts angry. While Barry and Kerry were there, the spirits did very little to make their presence known. Still, once they left for the day, the paranormal activity would resume but with more intensity, as if the ghosts were punishing them for letting these researchers into the house.

One day Barry and Kerry, along with 25 other researchers, began observing balls of green light. Barry best described them as balls of plasma the size of a fist and were always in the bedroom. The orbs of light were very fast, and with no reference point of origin and none of direction, they were challenging to photograph.

The researchers managed to take a couple of shots of the lights; the most famous photograph; Doris sitting on her bed;  an arch of light above her, a time exposure of a ball of light flying above her.

A few weeks further into the case, the large group of researchers witnessed the balls of green light suddenly joining together to form what looked like a huge man's head and torso, almost like an apparition in the room. After several seconds it disappeared.

Barry stated that it was highly unlikely that a group of over 25 people could hallucinate the same thing. He explained most of what he and the others witnessed could not photograph or videotape, suggesting that maybe they weren't seeing these things with their eyes but maybe their minds.

The photos they managed to take, including the arch above Doris, were analysed by the West Coast Editor of popular photography, Adrian Vance, who claimed to have never seen anything like them. He explained to the researchers that an SLR camera lens used to take the shots prohibits those images from recurring.

The investigation lasted for about ten weeks until Doris plucked up the courage to finally move out of the haunted house; however, the phenomenon continued in her new home, and Barry went to investigate further. Once again, doors were opening by themselves, cupboard doors being flung open, garbage dumped on the floor and electrical appliances turning on and off. Barry set-up a recording device to see if they could record any audio; after he witnessed a vase fly across the living room, he played back the tape to hear heavy breathing and footsteps on the audio. He claims everyone had been sitting down during the recording.

Eventually, Doris moved on once again, but the hauntings continued, although, over time, she said the attacks became less intense and frequent. She died in 1999 of pulmonary arrest.

Doctor Barry Taff claims the case of Doris Bither, now better known as The Entity case, is one of his most unexplained and famous cases. Over the years, he's researched over 4000 cases, claiming only 5% of those are genuine hauntings. 

He explains how hauntings are different from other cases. According to Barry, hauntings occur after a violent, traumatic death localised in a space. That space can be remained haunted for months, years, decades, even centuries. But what causes a supposed haunted place? Is it a lost, sad, angry spirit that met a grisly end? Or could such a tragic event in a specific location leave some powerful force behind, almost like an echo of what happened there, leaving that space a focal point for negative energy? Suppose a place can be full of negative energy. Is it possible that a person who has lived a traumatic childhood, suffered from physical abuse and suffers from substance abuse can also become haunted?

Barry has one theory of what could have possibly been causing the attacks on Doris. He claims 95% of cases are usually poltergeists and are different from ghosts. Barry theorises poltergeists are a product of psychokinesis. Is it possible that Doris Bither had psychokinetic abilities?

Were these abilities manifested into an opposing force due to her traumatic upbringing, a force that was the cause of this poltergeist manifestation?

With psychokinesis, there is no proven evidence that it is a real phenomenon and genuinely regarded as a pseudoscience. However, can our brains and emotions affect the environment around us; after all, we are made up of energy.

There are environmental satellites that measure the Earth's geomagnetic field. There was a particular day and time where there was an unprecedented strong peak in the geomagnetic data. That day was 9/11, 2001.

The world watched in horror as the World Trade Centre was attacked; 2977 people losing their lives. Did our collective subconscious full of negative emotions, shock, anger and sorrow somehow affect the Earth's magnetic field? For now, it remains a mystery, but Barry Taff hopes one day will we learn the truth:

"We can't draw the line between humanly generated phenomenon coming out of living people's brains and something that may indicate something survives physical death. I feel somewhere in the distant future when we have more sophisticated tools at our disposal, science and religion will probably merge because science will end up proving some aspects of our world that are called spiritual today."