On August 22, 1974, two young researchers from the parapsychology lab at UCLA arrived at a house in Culver City with a sixteen-page questionnaire. The woman who lived there, Doris Bither, answered around it and would not give her age. She said something in the house had been attacking her for months.
That case is the true story behind The Entity (1982). What the investigation recorded is small: a few photographs with arcs and patches of light, and the investigators’ accounts of lights, cold and a moving frying pan. The attacks are Bither’s account. The film’s liquid-helium ending never happened. What Happened to Doris? (2026) is a scripted drama that retells the case from inside the family.
The bookstore and the questionnaire
It began in a Los Angeles bookstore, told two ways. UCLA Magazine’s 2024 account says Bither approached Taff and Gaynor herself. Benjamin Radford, drawing on Taff’s writing, says a friend of hers overheard them and spoke up.
The two worked out of the lab Thelma Moss ran at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. No account places Moss herself in the house. Several sources describe the house as condemned and the family as poor, and Bither’s son Brian Harris, the middle of her three boys, said in a 2009 interview that she was drinking heavily at the time.
She told the investigators she had been sexually assaulted, repeatedly, by male figures she could half see. The number changes with the teller: three in Taff’s early account, four in her son’s. Taff wrote that her claims “could not be substantiated due to her failing to report the incident to medical or other authorities.” The record on the assaults stops there: her words, relayed by the men who came to study the house.
The street address circulates online. The house is a private home, and this page leaves it out.
What the investigators said they saw
On the second visit, Taff said, a frying pan flew out of a cupboard and followed “a curved path to the floor over 2.5 feet away.” Later he and Gaynor described small, fast balls of light, some seeming to answer requests, along with cold spots and foul smells. Taff says over fifty people came through during the case.
Radford points out that only Taff, Gaynor and Bither left descriptions of anything unusual. By the investigators’ account, the activity faded as the visits went on. Gaynor thought the energy came from Bither rather than the house, because it seemed to follow her. Taff called it a poltergeist with Bither as an unconscious “energy generator,” not a haunting by the dead, a distinction set out in what a ghost is, and what a poltergeist is.
All of this is testimony. There are no instrument readings, no audio and no film footage, nothing like the kit ghost hunters carry now.
What the record holds
There are two sets of photographs.
The first is a Polaroid SX-70 session: thirteen frames, six of them overexposed or “anomalous,” plus six ordinary frames meant as controls. The woman in them is not Doris Bither. She is Bither’s friend Candy, who said she was psychic, although the pictures are often captioned as Doris.
The second is two 35 mm prints from a later night, when the photographer Dick Thompson shot while Bither taunted whatever was in the room. They show bright arcs of light, one nearly framing her. One picture ran in Popular Photography in May 1976.
Nothing else turned up: no medical report, no police report. Taff’s research files are said to sit in a storage unit in California, unpublished.
The 2021 critique
In 2021 Skeptical Inquirer ran two re-examinations. In Kenny Biddle’s look at the photographs, the Polaroid “controls” were shot in different light, flash against ambient, so they control for nothing. The arc, he argues, is consistent with a hair close to the lens, and he recreated it with one: the same artifact as a strap or hair caught in the flash. The grid of black poster board and white tape Taff describes putting up is absent from the pictures.
Radford’s article calls the case “wholly uncorroborated,” a mix of “psychological disturbance, power of suggestion, and investigative incompetence by well-meaning people.” In 2022 he wrote that he had offered to pay for the stored files to be retrieved and “never heard back.” Believers have disputed the critique.
Taff’s own position has moved. His early account described the attacks in detail. Later he put her assault claims down largely to emotional distress and imagination. In 2008 he told NBC News, of the photographs: “Is it coming from her, or is it her with something coming from us?” In 2024 he told UCLA Magazine “this was the real deal.” He seems to stand by the lights and the pan while doubting the assaults.
From Doris Bither to Carla Moran
The novelist Frank De Felitta had known Taff and Gaynor since 1968, according to the AFI Catalog, and they invited him to the house. His interviews became The Entity, published on July 31, 1978. Sidney J. Furie directed the film from De Felitta’s screenplay, with Barbara Hershey as Carla Moran and Taff and Gaynor as technical advisers.
The climax, a replica of the house and a liquid-helium trap to freeze the entity, is fiction, already in the novel. As Gavin Smith wrote for the Criterion Collection, the investigation “ended inconclusively,” so De Felitta “simply invented” an ending. No investigator’s account mentions any capture attempt.
The dates slip too. Taff, UCLA and Radford say 1974. The AFI’s production notes say 1975. The film’s end credit places “a true incident” in Los Angeles “in October 1976.”
| The case | The Entity | What Happened to Doris? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The woman | Doris Bither, four children | Carla Moran, three children | Doris Bither (Heather Graham) |
| Point of view | The investigators | Carla and the researchers | The family |
| The assaults | Her account, never reported | Shown, central | Dialled back, per reviews |
| The ending | Inconclusive | Liquid-helium trap, invented | “Neat genre closure,” per Cinapse |
What Happened to Doris?
What Happened to Doris?, first announced as Entity Within, is a scripted feature, not a documentary. Nick Simon directed from a script by Thomas Fenton, with Heather Graham as Doris Bither and Mimi Rogers as Dr. Lillian Ross. It premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin on September 20, 2026. GVN Releasing is named as distributor; no US release date had been announced as of September 30, 2026.
The synopsis says it is told “through the eyes of the family who lived it.” Graham has said she prepared partly by talking to Doris’s son Brian, a friend of the screenwriter. C.H. Newell’s review at Father Son Holy Gore reads the film’s UCLA scientists as based on Taff and Gaynor, and Ross as modelled on Moss. Ross argues that the male researchers accept the ghost and dismiss the assault claim.
Dan Tabor at Cinapse calls the decision “to dial back the ghost sexual assault element” the biggest change. And where the real case stayed open, Tabor writes, the film gives “neat genre closure.” It too invents an ending.
As with the Perron farmhouse and the Lutz house, the family’s version and the films’ part ways. More are in ghost movies based on true stories.
- August 22, 1974 First visit to the house in Culver City.
- May 1976 Popular Photography prints one of the photographs.
- July 31, 1978 De Felitta’s novel The Entity is published.
- 1982 The film opens in the UK; the US follows in February 1983.
- Mid-1990s Doris Bither dies: 1995 by her son’s account, 1999 by Wikipedia.
- October 2021 Skeptical Inquirer publishes its re-examinations.
- September 20, 2026 What Happened to Doris? premieres.
What does not fit
Over fifty people passed through the house, by Taff’s count, and three of them described anything unusual. One was the woman who lived there, and she died in the mid-1990s. The files the other two kept are said to sit in a storage unit in California, and nobody outside has opened them.