When Don Phillips’ name was mentioned during promotion for Volume 5 of Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix, I didn’t have to Google him.
Between 2011 and 2016 I wrote extensively about Don and his paranormal work on my old blog, Hayley is a Ghost. I looked at some of the evidence he presented, the equipment he used, the claims he made and, eventually, some of the ethical problems surrounding the way he involved dead people in his investigations.
So when I realised an entire Unsolved Mysteries episode was going to be built around Don and an alleged spirit guide called Becky, I was curious to see which version of the story Netflix had found.
It turns out to be a very sympathetic one. How nice.
The episode My Paranormal Partner (Vol. 5, Ep. 2) begins with a haunting in Leicester and gradually expands into something much stranger: Don travelling around Britain and Ireland with Becky, an invisible companion he believes communicates with him through digital recorders and helps him investigate paranormal activity.
There is certainly an interesting story here. I’m just not convinced it is the one Unsolved Mysteries thinks it is.
The Haunting of Gaynor’s House
The story begins more than a decade ago in a house in Leicester owned by a woman called Gaynor. The set-up will be familiar to anybody who has spent much time reading haunting accounts: the family moves in, objects apparently go missing, and a child begins talking to an invisible friend but refuses to say who the friend is. Later there are reports of curtains catching fire and people being pushed near the top of the stairs.
Don is invited to investigate.
He says that he arrived sceptical but quickly began to feel the energy of the house and sensed a female presence. During one session he asks into the air, “What’s your name?” and a recording is later played which Don interprets as a faint voice answering “Becky”.
Now, there are quite a few assumptions packed into that progression. Even if we accept that something resembling the word “Becky” can be heard on the recording, that doesn’t establish who or what produced the sound, let alone that it came from a dead woman who subsequently became Don’s paranormal sidekick.
Unsolved Mysteries doesn’t spend much time on that gap.
Instead, we’re told that Don has been able to “talk to the atmosphere, to the air, with the spirit people” since he was eight and that his ears have somehow become tuned to their frequency. Digital recorders then become part of the evidence for this because Don says he can hear spirit voices through them in real time.
This is where I started recognising the Don Phillips I’d written about years ago.
Don has long referred to some of his recordings as “Actual Voice Phenomena”, distinguishing them from the more familiar Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) usually associated with ghost hunting. The basic problem remains the same, though - if an ambiguous noise appears on a recording and somebody interprets that noise as speech, how do we establish that the interpretation is correct?
The programme mostly doesn’t ask.
Enter the Skeptic
Recognising that sceptics might want something a little more substantial, Don brings in Steve Mera, who is introduced as an open-minded sceptic interested in testing the claims.
Long-time readers of my work may also recognise Steve’s name. I have previously written about his unaccredited qualifications, questionable paranormal training courses and a supposedly scientific report he co-authored which was later criticised for plagiarism and poor methodology.
None of that context appears in the programme which isn’t necessarily surprising ( television documentaries can’t include every piece of somebody’s biography) but it matters here because Steve is being positioned as the person who will provide independent scientific scrutiny of Don’s claims.
And the scrutiny isn’t particularly strong…
Steve watches Don record what both men interpret as the phrase “my name is Becky” and describes feeling a rush when he hears it. Later, he devises an experiment involving three pictures sealed inside envelopes.
Don asks Becky what one of the pictures shows, records the response and a fuzzy sound is interpreted as “it’s a kite”.
The envelope is opened.
Inside is a kite.
I can understand why that makes good television. The reveal works because the audience has just been given a question followed by what appears to be the correct answer, but if we want to know whether Becky can actually identify pictures hidden inside envelopes, we’d need rather more than that.
As an audience, we’re nudged towards thinking ‘Wow. How could she have known?’ We aren't shown a pre-determined pool of possible targets or how the target picture was selected. There are no decoy recordings, and no independent listeners who don't know the correct answer are asked to write down what they think they hear. We also don't know how many attempts were made, whether other answers were less successful, or how repeatable any of this is.
There are straightforward ways to test something like this. Randomise the pictures, hide the target from everybody involved in the session, collect the recordings and have independent listeners judge them without knowing what the target was. Repeat it enough times to see whether apparent hits occur more often than we'd expect by chance.
If Don and Becky could consistently succeed under those conditions, that would be interesting but one edited television reveal is interesting in a rather different way.
This Isn’t My First Don Phillips Investigation
One reason I found the episode frustrating is that none of this is particularly new.
In the early 2010s I was already looking at Don’s public demonstrations of paranormal investigation equipment. One television clip, for example, showed him using an infrared thermometer by pointing it at different surfaces and interpreting changes in the reading as evidence of paranormal cold spots.
Infrared thermometers measure the surface temperature of whatever they’re pointed at and so different surfaces having different temperatures isn’t therefore particularly mysterious, and moving the thermometer from one material to another tells you very little about whether something paranormal is happening.
The gadgetry looked impressive on television but the method rather dissolved when you asked what the instrument was actually measuring.
That became a recurring problem when I looked at Don’s work. Claims about research and scientific investigation were relatively easy to find; detailed methodologies, controlled tests, and evidence capable of supporting the more extraordinary conclusions were much harder.
I also remember the response to criticism being fairly unpleasant. I received hostility from Don and some of his supporters after writing about his work, although irritating people on the paranormal internet is hardly a rare occupational hazard.
What concerned me more were some of the ethical decisions being made around the dead. In one instance Don publicly described visiting a cemetery and contacting the alleged spirit of a named child who had died only a couple of years earlier, before inviting her to return home with him.
Enough information was included that somebody local could potentially have identified the child and her family.
You don’t have to believe Don really contacted anybody to see the problem here.
If the family believed in ghosts, discovering that a paranormal investigator was publicly claiming their dead child had followed him home could be deeply distressing. If they didn’t believe in ghosts, having their child incorporated into somebody else’s paranormal story could still be upsetting.
I remember thinking at the time that the question of whether the ghost was “real” was almost beside the point.
A Paranormal Road Trip
Back on Netflix, Don and his companions - both physical and invisible - begin travelling to supposedly haunted locations.
At Cannock Chase, Don is presented as somebody able to feel an energy connected with the murders committed there by Raymond Morris. We see him follow that energy into the darkness, become visibly distressed and eventually collapse while Steve attempts to comfort him.
I obviously can't know what Don was experiencing at that moment. He may have been genuinely frightened or overwhelmed, but what makes me uncomfortable is the way the programme connects that experience to real murdered children without demonstrating that any such connection exists.
Their deaths become part of the atmosphere surrounding Don's experience: something terrible happened here, Don feels something terrible, and the programme allows those two things to sit beside one another as though the relationship between them is self-evident.
It isn’t.
When real victims become part of a paranormal narrative I think there should be a much higher evidential and ethical bar than this. These were children whose murders devastated families and communities. Their deaths aren’t simply spooky history attached to a location, and that matters even if everybody involved sincerely believes the paranormal interpretation.
It’s Frickin Bats
At Tutbury Castle we’re introduced to Chris Andrews and a bat detector, which we’re told can somehow “modulate frequencies for EVP”.
Bat detectors are designed to detect ultrasonic bat calls and convert them into frequencies humans can hear. They are extremely useful if your research subject is bats.
Their usefulness for talking to dead people is rather less established.
During the investigation Don announces that a spirit portal is forming, after which the bat detector produces a sound interpreted as the word “portal”. Chris becomes emotional, the music swells and the camera lingers.
Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) are alleged voices found on recordings which weren’t heard normally at the time. In practice, many EVP examples consist of short, ambiguous sounds which listeners interpret as speech, and those interpretations can be strongly influenced by being told what they’re supposed to hear.
Once somebody says “it says portal”, it can become surprisingly difficult not to hear “portal”.
What the programme doesn’t do is ask how we would distinguish a meaningful communication from ordinary noise, equipment artefacts or the very thing a bat detector is designed to detect.
Bats.
Perhaps Tutbury Castle has unusually articulate ones…
Dowsing for Answers
Then there are the dowsing rods.
Steve Mera holds a pair while Don stands in front of him and moves his hands around. The rods begin turning and the suggestion is that Don is somehow manipulating them using an external or paranormal force.
This is another claim which could be tested relatively easily.
Dowsing rods are particularly vulnerable to the ideomotor effect, where tiny unconscious muscular movements can cause an object being held by somebody to move without that person deliberately making it happen. The same effect helps explain the movement of Ouija board planchettes.
That doesn't mean Steve was intentionally moving the rods. Quite the opposite: somebody can honestly feel that the movement is happening independently of them while still supplying the tiny movements that cause it.
So remove that possibility.
Mount the rods in a rig which prevents the person holding them from influencing their movement, vary Don’s position without the operator knowing where he is, record the results and see what happens.
If the rods still consistently respond to Don, then we’ve got something worth investigating.
Instead, we’re shown one uncontrolled demonstration.
For somebody presented in the episode as the scientific counterweight to Don, Steve’s apparent lack of concern about controls is difficult to ignore
Maybe the Ghost Lied
The episode eventually travels to Ireland, where former ghost-hunting television presenter Barry Fitzgerald introduces another supernatural possibility: a djinn.
There isn’t much cultural or theological discussion of what a djinn actually is. The term functions mostly as another category of potentially dangerous invisible being and becomes folded into the growing mythology surrounding Don.
By this point, though, we have another problem.
Don has already provided quite a detailed biography for Becky. She is supposedly a 35-year-old teacher with two children who died in either a train or plane crash in 1988.
Barry Fitzgerald says that he tried to find somebody matching those details and couldn’t which is genuinely interesting information because it gives us a chance to check a specific paranormal claim against the historical record.
There are several possibilities - perhaps the details are wrong, perhaps Don misunderstood whatever he believes Becky communicated, perhaps the records Barry searched were incomplete.
Or perhaps Becky doesn’t exist.
The possibility the programme seems most interested in, however, is that Becky lied.
I watched this bit twice.
When an alleged spirit provides biographical details which apparently cannot be verified, treating deception by the ghost as a serious explanation has a useful side-effect: there is almost no conceivable outcome that can disprove the original claim.
Correct information can be evidence that Becky exists, incorrect information can be evidence that Becky exists but is lying.
At what point would these people consider that maybe this Don bloke might be talking out of his arse?
When the Explanation Can Become Anything
By the end of the programme we’re well into demons and possession.
Perhaps Becky isn’t really Becky. Perhaps she is something malevolent pretending to be Becky. Perhaps Don himself is possessed.
Again, I can’t prove that demons don’t exist, and that isn’t really the standard we should be using anyway. The person making the claim needs to provide some reason to think a supernatural explanation is preferable to the ordinary possibilities available to us.
What evidence distinguishes a demon pretending to be Becky from Don misinterpreting ambiguous recordings?
What evidence distinguishes possession from somebody becoming frightened, distressed or immersed in an elaborate paranormal belief system?
The episode never really establishes this, and maybe that’s because it’s a Netflix show and we shouldn’t really be expecting much from it.
Either way, the possibilities accumulate. Ghosts lead to portals, portals lead to djinn, unverifiable identities lead to deceptive spirits, and deceptive spirits eventually lead to demons.
Each new idea protects the previous one from being seriously tested, and I think this is where we can confidently say that the episode stops pretending to function as an investigation altogether.
So. What Is The Mystery Exactly?
My Paranormal Partner presents Don Phillips as a man with an extraordinary ability who has developed an extraordinary relationship with an unseen spirit woman called Becky.
Perhaps Don sincerely believes every part of that story. I have no particular reason to think otherwise, but sincerity isn’t evidence. Sorry, but it isn’t.
The episode shows us ambiguous recordings, uncontrolled demonstrations, subjective sensations, dowsing rods, a bat detector and biographical information about Becky which apparently couldn’t be verified. When those details create problems for the story, the programme tends to introduce another paranormal possibility rather than asking whether the original interpretation might simply be wrong.
And because I had encountered Don’s work years before Netflix did, this felt very familiar.
The locations have changed and the production values have improved, but the pattern I remember is still there: extraordinary interpretations built on evidence which becomes much less extraordinary when you look closely at how it was obtained.
There is also a recurring ethical issue which I don’t think the programme takes seriously enough. Real dead people - including murdered children - become supporting characters in paranormal narratives without any meaningful evidence that they are involved at all. Gross.
That bothers me more than whether somebody believes a fuzzy recording says “Becky”.
Unsolved Mysteries hasn’t uncovered evidence of an invisible paranormal investigator travelling around Britain with Don Phillips. What it has documented rather well, perhaps unintentionally, is how a paranormal story can become increasingly elaborate when every contradiction is treated as another mystery to explain rather than a reason to reconsider the story itself.
And after more than a decade of occasionally looking at Don’s work, that is the part I still find most interesting.
The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.