The grass is greener on the other side – or at least that’s what they’d have you believe. For Doris Bither, the other side only brought more challenges. None more powerful than her time in Culver City, California.
Doris Bither grew up in an abusive home, her parents were alcoholics. As most kids would be, Doris became a rebellious, wild girl, and was fascinated by the paranormal. She held seances and used the ouija board. She began drinking and using drugs and it wasn’t long until her family ultimately threw her out and disowned her.
Doris had a number of failed relationships, several of which were abusive. In the end, she walked away a single mother of four – each child having a different father.
In 1974, 33 year old Doris Bither and her four children (ages 16, 13, 10, and 6) packed up and moved to Culver City, California. Their new start began in a rental house on Braddock Avenue. As they were settling in, a strange woman knocked on their door. She was of Hispanic descent, and told Doris that she used to live in the house, and that it was evil. Without further explanation, she turned and left.
Shortly after receiving the cryptic message, the family began experiencing poltergeist activity. Lights turned on and off, objects moved on their own (Doris reported a candelabra was thrown directly at her, as was a fuse box, ripped from the wall before it flew through the air at her). They heard strange noises, and then apparitions themselves.
The apparitions started out as shadows, moving such that they were only visible in their peripheral vision. But then they began taking on a human-like shape. The figures didn’t do anything at first; standing or sitting in the corner of a room and watch. The neighbors began seeing the figures as well, giving their story some credibility.
In an interview with Ghost Theory, Doris’ 13 year old son, Brian described them, “It was never clear. When they would make themselves known, it was always like a fog. Like a human…but not quite. It was like a sculpture. Like a chiseled body. Not a full figure, but at times we could see some of it. At times, it would be annoying. We would be watching television and these things would walk by. Like nothing. We were so used to the poltergeist, that we just got to a point were we wouldn’t even care.”
What once seemed like seemingly harmless apparitions, turned violent when Doris was attacked in her bedroom. Two male spirits held her down, while a third raped her. The attack was so loud that Brian heard it through the wall, and later saw evidence in the form of bruising on her inner thighs. Unfortunately, this was not a one-time occurrence. “The whole rape thing was real,” Brian said, “My room was right next door to my mother’s. I would hear the attacks happening. Things being thrown, her screaming. Then she would come out of the bedroom and have all these bruises. On her legs, her inner thighs. There were times were[sic] we would see it happen in front of us. It was like if a man was standing in front of my mother and would start to beat her. Imagine a woman being beaten. You could see her being picked up and thrown around. Sounds, slaps…but there was no one there to actually do it. We all felt it too. pulling, biting and scratching…we were all attacked.”
The entities began to attack every member of the family, pushing, shoving, hitting, clawing and biting. It didn’t seem to matter what time of day it was, they were always there. In that same interview with Ghost Theory, Brian said, “We all experienced some form of attack. There was the pushing, biting and scratching being done to us. There were about 4 entities in the home, and they made themselves known by appearing all the time….I think it took a lot of energy for them to do that. It was as if they [the four entities] showed themselves whenever they felt like.”
They began to refer to the largest entity as “Mr. Whose-it.”
Doris was desperate for help. She found paranormal investigators and parapsychologists, Kerry Gaynor and Dr. Barry Taff, in a Los Angeles area bookstore where they were discussing their research. She approached them and asked if they would be willing to look into her home. Intrigued, they took her number and later went to the home to hear her story.
Upon arriving, Gaynor and Taff noticed the house was a mess, to say the least. The history of the house showed that it had been condemned, twice. Observing how the family related to one another, they discovered that Doris’ relationship with her eldest sons was contentious. Not seeing any “otherworldly” evidence, they referred her to a psychiatrist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute.
But just a few short weeks later, Doris contacted them again and asked them to return, citing more witnesses to the phenomena.
This time when Gaynor and Taff returned to the house. It was a hot August day, and the house was stiflingly hot as they did not have air conditioning. The pungent smell of rotting flesh filled the home, and as they moved from room to room, they found that the bedroom was ice cold.
Their formal research began on August 22, 1974, and lasted about 10 weeks.
The first thing they did was have Doris go into one of the rooms where the most activity had occurred, and asked her to start yelling and cursing at the entities, to try and draw them out. Almost immediately, Gaynor and Taff caught intense orb activity, with spots of light flitting all over the place. They then saw Doris surrounded by a greenish mist from which the upper torso of a man appeared. Though they did not capture the entity on film, they did get a photograph of Doris with a strange arc of light appearing over her.
Over the coming months, they discovered that their presence alone seemed to anger the entities. Playing music by the metal group, Black Sabbath, also seemed to make the paranormal activity stronger. They discovered that Doris was a heavy drinker, and when she stopped drinking the activity stopped. It was also observed that the activity was most intense when Doris was in the house.
They brought in geiger counters to measure radiation in the house. During quiet times, the counters showed normal levels of background radiation. However during times when activity was occurring, they found that their counter didn’t register any measurable background radiation.
They saw bright green-yellow balls of light, which they referred to as “corpuscular balls of light” flying around the bedroom, and while they were successful at capturing photos of some light anomalies, there were many attempts that failed.
WIthout informing Gaynor or Taff, Doris moved her family to San Bernardino, and then to Texas. Over time, contact between them ended, despite her claims that the paranormal activity followed her.
Dr. Barry Taff wrote about the case in his book Aliens Above, Ghosts Below, and he and Kerry Gaynor published some of their findings in scientific journals.
Doris told her story to author Frank De Felitta, who wrote the book, “The Entity” based on her experiences. Taff served as a consultant to Felitta on the book, and later the movie based on the book. While Taff has remained hesitant to draw a conclusion on the case, he has suggested in interviews that he suspects that at least some poltergeist activity was psychokinetic activity, possibly coming from Doris Bither herself, and perhaps her teenage sons. This is further corroborated by her sons’ claims that their family had always experienced some minor level of psychokinetic activity – even before moving to Culver City.
The case has never been solved, and remains a mystery to this day.
If this story interested you, be sure to read about Amityville.
