The seventies and eighties were fabulous for horror movies, especially those that were based on a true story. We had The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, based on the serial killer Ed Gein who liked to make bowls out of human skulls, The Amityville Horror, where Ronald De Feo murdered his family and allegedly started a haunting for the Lutz family, and my older brothers favourite (mostly because of the sexual content I think) The Entity, which is based on the real life case of Doris Bither who was allegedly sexually assaulted on a daily basis by 3 ghosts.

I should point out that when a movie says that it is based on a true story or inspired by real events, they could just use someone’s real name and they wouldn’t be lying. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve tried to explain this to someone who’s said to me ‘but it’s a true story’ after seeing such a movie.

Doris Bither

Doris was born Doris McGowan to an upper middle class family. They had settled in California and this was where Doris spent her teenage years. It’s said that her parents saw sex as sinful and something that only happened to make a baby, and that her father paid her the wrong kind of attention. This all had a traumatic effect on young Doris, and by the time she was fifteen or sixteen, she left home with a man who raced motorcycles for a living. She married him and had her first son.

When her first husband died, killed in a race soon after the baby was born, she took her baby and moved to the land of mountains and ranches, where she worked as a waitress and married her second husband, having a second son.

Two more relationships followed, along with another son and a daughter, until the early seventies, when Doris found herself as a single mother to four children.

The Attacks Begin

In the summer of 1974, Doris and her four children, boys aged 16, 13 and 10, and her 6 year old girl, were living at 11547 Braddock Drive in Culver City, California. They were dirt poor and living on welfare, with Doris being made to attend secretarial school to improve her prospects, which she didn’t actually mind. The house was small, but welfare paid her rent so it offered her some security in that she should be able to settle there with the children. The boys bickered a lot, with a grown up Brian – 13 when they lived in Braddock Drive – explaining that the oldest brother was mean to him and the others, which caused a lot of tension in the family.

The first attack came one evening as Doris was getting ready for bed. She found herself being thrown down on the bed, a pillow shoved over her face so that she could barely breath, and being raped quite viciously. The attack lasted only minutes, but afterwards she screamed the house down and made her eldest son check the house for an intruder. Finding no one there, they had made sure the house was locked up tight and gone to bed.

More attacks happened, often preceded by a foul odour that smelled like rotting flesh, and a huge change in temperature. In time, Doris seemed to be able to see it coming and eventually was able to flee the house with the children before one particular attack. She drove to her friends house where they all slept on the floor in the living room and she explained to her friend that she had been raped. She didn’t explain, however, that she had been raped by a ghost.

After a frosty reception from her friend’s husband, Doris drove the children to the beach and they slept the rest of the night in the car.

Things seemed to come to a head when Doris was driving to work one morning and she heard the voice of her ghost rapist in her ear. The car then took on a life of its own, swerving through traffic at full speed with her unable to control it, until she finally managed to steer into a pole, totalling the car and sending her to hospital. It was here that she was referred to a psychiatrist whom she started to see on a regular basis.

The sessions with the psychiatrist didn’t seem to help much – the doctor thought it was all in her head, and she obviously didn’t. Even with visible bruises and bite marks in places where it would be impossible for her to have done it to herself, the doctor still saw her ‘attacks’ as hallucinatory or hysterical.

Life for Doris and her children went on with all of them experiencing the phenomena. The phenomena of being scratched or bitten, or seeing the entities walking around their house. The children did not experience seeing their mother being sexually abused. Brian has said his bedroom was next to his mums and he could hear her ‘being thrown’ around in there, and he stated that he once saw her being beaten by an invisible force, but no one actually saw the sexual abuse.

There is mention of Doris’s boyfriend at the time walking in and seeing something mauling Doris on the bed – in the book and the movie it says that he saw her breasts moving as if someone was touching them but there was no one there. It’s said that he broke a chair over the entity’s back to get it off her but it went straight through and put Doris in the hospital for over a week. In reality it’s said that he hit her with a guitar and it didn’t hurt her much at all.

Doris went to her friends house again, this time alone, to gather her thoughts and her sanity. Whilst she was there the entity attacked her and wrecked her friends’ house, this time being seen by the friend and her husband, and so confirming what had been happening over the last few weeks.

The Entity Investigation

Now that Doris’s friend believed what was going on, her and Doris set out to try and figure out how to deal with it. One day, whilst in a book shop, the ladies overheard a conversation between two parapsychologists from UCLA discussing a haunting, and Doris explained that she was living in a haunted house.

The parapsychologists, Barry Taff – now Dr Barry Taff – and Kerry Gaynor, made an initial visit to the house on 22nd August 1974. They didn’t experience much of anything whilst they were there, and when Doris explained that she had been raped by the ghost she was met with eye rolls and the opinion that she was in need of a psychiatrist. They spoke in detail to the boys and Doris, (the daughter wasn’t there), and gathered that there were 4 entities in the house – one that they saw quite often who was a large man, two smaller ones, and another that they called Mr Who’s-It that someone mentioned could have been Doris’s grandfather. They frequently bumped into Mr Who’s-It in the hallway, as this was where he liked to walk up and down, and Brain has said that they basically lived with the entities like they lived there. They were so used to it by this time.

The men left with no intention of going back.

A couple of days later the men received a call from Doris to say more stuff had happened and more people had witnessed it, so they should come back. This time they brought a tape recorder and camera with them so that they could document anything.

The first things that they noticed when they visited the second time, was that the temperature in Doris’s bedroom was super cold, despite it being a muggy August evening, and there was the foul stench of rotting flesh. In the kitchen, Kerry was talking to the eldest son when a lower cabinet opened and a pan came flying out and across the room by itself.

Taff and Gaynor got permission from the head of their department at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute to investigate the phenomena, and a ten week observation began.

The Phenomena

Doris had explained to people, that when she was being raped by the larger entity, Mr Who’s-It, the two smaller ones used to hold her down by her arms and legs whilst he did his thing. This seemed to be how it happened each time. But by the time the investigations began by the parapsychologists from UCLA, Doris was thought to have been co-operating with the beast and letting him do what he wanted to her, even enjoying it at times.

The ten week investigation saw numerous people witness phenomenon in the house – not any sexual assaults – but lights, visual formations of Mr Who’s-It who appeared as huge as he had been described, cold gusts, the foul stench, and the odd growl or two.

Various photographs were taken of light anomalies flying across the room and bleached out faces, but not one of the entities as a human form.

The author, Frank De Felitta took part in the observations and was able to interview the family for his book, The Entity, which the movie was based on.

The Entity Follows Doris

Over time, the attacks became less frequent and less violent. But the entities apparently followed Doris and her family as they moved from Culver City to Carson, then on to San Bernadino, to Texas, and back to San Bernadino again.

Doris was drinking heavily throughout the whole ordeal, often being described as an alcoholic. One observation that was made was that when she was sober, there was no phenomenon witnessed.

In San Bernadino Doris said that the entity had made her pregnant and visited a doctor to have this confirmed. Obviously, there were no physical signs of a pregnancy found.

By the time The Entity movie was released in 1983, starring the wonderful Barbara Hershey, Doris reported to Dr Barry Taff that ‘to her great relief, the phenomena had ended quite some time ago’.

Doris disappeared from the limelight and wasn’t heard from again. There are reports that she passed away in the 90’s from pulmonary arrest.

The Facts Behind The Doris Bither Haunting

Doris Bither went though a really traumatic childhood which turned into an even more traumatic adulthood. She saw more than one husband die, and it’s rumoured that she spent three days snowed in with her second husbands dead body while he began to decompose in the bed where he lay.

When Doris and her family moved into Braddock Drive, she was dealing with four bickering children and her own psychological issues whilst trying to hold it all together.

Spectrophilia

I don’t believe in spectrophilia, where people have sex with ghosts, but it seems to be something that’s quite popular. When researching this article, I came across all kinds of women – and absolutely no men – who claimed to be having regular sex with a man ghost. A few of them even married their spectral boyfriends! There was a lady in the news late 2024 who had married her pirate ghost boyfriend, who she said looked like Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, and was the perfect man for her. They ‘divorced’ early 2025, because the ghost husband was too jealous of male attention towards his human wife. Go figure.

Spectrophilia is described as sexual attraction to ghosts or sexual attraction to images in mirrors (the modern day internet dating phenomenon, perhaps?) as well as the alleged phenomenon of sexual encounters between humans and ghosts. But if you think about it, ladies, if we could have sex with ghosts, what would we need men for?

It’s difficult to discount Doris’s stories of her three assailants, when her whole family and then many witnesses experienced different forms of phenomenon at her house. It is possible for a group of people to see the same ghost, even if it doesn’t exist. You just have to read up on The Philip Experiment of 1972 where a group of parapsychologists proved that human will and expectation can make you see a ghost. I believe that this is true, and could have been possible where Doris and her children were concerned.

There is no evidence that anybody witnessed a sexual assault towards Doris except for her boyfriend at the time, but his testimony only appears in the book of The Entity, which is a fictionalised account and not all entirely accurate. If there were a first hand account of this event, it may go some way to corroborate the story.

The Son’s Story

In 2009, the middle son, Brian Harris gave an interview to Ghost Theory, giving his version of events.

He was 13 years old at the time of the haunting of 1974 and described the house as having ‘built a large reputation for being haunted and the whole neighbourhood was coming by, trying to see inside the haunted house. At school I used to get teased a lot for living in the house.’

I’ve never thought about it before, but there must have been a lot of information floating around about the haunting if people were coming to the house to see it. Could this have just been through word of mouth? Or was there more to it.

He states further on in the interview, “It was all true. Well, it was mostly true. We all experienced some form of attack. There was pushing, biting and scratching being done to us. There were about four entities in the home and they made themselves known by appearing all the time.”

So over 30 years later can we rely on the memories of the events, after all that time and endless writings on the matter? It’s well documented that if we hear something over and over again our mind can start to interpret that information as memory, when it’s not necessarily so.

Brian explains that when the entities would appear they would be like a fog in human form – so not a solid mass, but something that definitely resembled a person. He also said that they would be watching television and these things would just walk past, as if they belonged there. “We were so used to the poltergeist that we just got to a point where we wouldn’t even care.”

Very different to the story told back in 1974.

As I’ve said previously in this article, Brian never witnessed any sexual assault against his mother, he only heard things being thrown around in the bedroom next door. So we don’t actually have any kind of evidence that there was any kind of sexual assault or rape by a ghost.

It seems that every time there were investigators in the house, the entities would become extra active, as if they were annoyed that people were trying to see them.

It was put to Brian that his mother could have created the poltergeist herself through telekinesis/psychokinesis and his answer was very interesting.

“Yes I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reason,” he said, “The home was unstable. We did fight a lot. My older brother was mean to us. So there was a lot of tension. The telekinesis theory is possible. There was so much tension and negative energy.”

The Parapsychologists Theory

Poltergeists are believed to surround people rather than a place, and allegedly happen when there are troubled teens or tension in a household. This would all make sense when you hear about all the tension in the Bither household. It’s very believable that Doris manifested the energy herself, with her psychological issues that she had been dealing with most of her life.

In his book, Aliens Above, Ghosts Below, Dr Barry Taff states that “In the simplest terms and contrary to the popular media hype, The Entity case was not, in my opinion, an instance of haunting or discarnate intelligence, but one of extreme RSPK, that is, a poltergeist manifestation.“

The parapsychologists documented smells, cold spots, manifestations of lights – some caught on camera – and partial manifestations of human forms. They saw objects moving and heard noises throughout the house. They didn’t find any evidence of assaults against Doris so did not corroborate this in their report, but most other phenomenon matched what the children and Doris described.

I reached out to Dr Barry Taff to ask him how he felt about the case today – whether his thoughts about all the experiences had perhaps changed over the years – and he said he feels exactly the same about it today as he did then. The Doris Bither case was a poltergeist infestation.

Final Thoughts

It’s difficult to be able to discount or explain any of the events of this case when phenomenon was witnessed by so many people over a significant amount of time. We know that the mind is a powerful thing and can conjure up any amount of ghosts. The whole universe is made up of energy, so who’s to say that we can’t control it with our mind? I struggle to convince myself that this is possible, more than I struggle with the ghost sightings.

So I’m stumped.

If there was ever a case that could maybe convince this sceptic of the existence of poltergeists, it would probably be this one.

You can comment below on any thoughts you might have about this case. Or email scepticonline@btinternet.com and let me know that way.

Dr Barry Taff’s book with his reports on The Entity Case is available on Amazon:

The interview with Doris Bither’s son, Brian Harris is available at Ghost Theory:

The Entity – Interview with Doris Bither’s son