Lizzy Groves, a 59-year-old mother from southeast London, says she has been “possessed” by the spirit of serial abuser Rolf Harris. She claims the ghost of the disgraced former children’s entertainer “entered my dreams and took control of my body and then made me paint in my sleep.” Waking up, she found she had drawn a sinister sketch of the Australian TV star.
Unexplained Drawing
Groves, who lives alone in Bexleyheath, said, “I’m a very sane, logical woman and I’d have put all this down to a bad dream if it wasn’t for this picture which I have no memory of drawing. I’m not an artist, I’m good at interior design but I can’t draw like this when I’m awake. But I must have done it because I live alone. It’s not a prank. And nobody broke into my flat. The doors and windows were intact.”
She had previously moved to Bexleyheath to escape the ghost of Jimmy Savile, but said, “I was getting along nicely until this new nightmare started. Rolf Harris began appearing in my dreams last month with his bloody didgeridoo and after a couple of weeks I woke up to find I’d drawn this picture in some kind of trance.”
Harris's Criminal Past
Harris, a former BBC star, was jailed for a series of indecent assaults on girls and died three years ago aged 93. He had been found guilty of a string of indecent assaults between 1968 and 1986 following a trial in 2014 and was jailed for five years and nine months. He was released from prison in 2017, but never apologised to his victims.
Groves said, “I’m traumatised by it all. I feel violated. I mean why me? I’m a good Catholic woman from southwest London. I don’t deserve this persecution. The dreams were bad enough, but this is like a bad B-movie. There is no good side to it. I spoke to a local art dealer who said my picture was exactly in Harris’s style, but I can’t sell it because nobody wants to buy the art he painted when he was alive, let alone now he’s gone.”
Psychic Tendencies and Past Encounters
Groves, who has “always had psychic tendencies,” said, “I know when it’s going to rain because my knees swell up. But this is far beyond that. If it keeps happening, I will ask my priest to bring in a special minister to perform the rite of exorcism.”
She came forward in November 2023 to reveal that she had been plagued by repeated nightmares where she was pursued by Savile, who called her “the one that got away.” She awoke to smell “a trail of cigar smoke” lingering in her flat every time it happened.
Groves met both Savile and Harris as a girl on the set of BBC1’s Top Of The Pops. She experienced a month of horrible nightmares where Savile “chased me down a BBC corridor, and even one where he’s chasing me around my bedroom; I wake up from them shaking.”
She explained, “When I was young, I used to get into Top Of The Pops under-age – a few of us did. I was a big fan of Madness and Mod bands like the Chords, so I went three or four times. I met Rolf Harris in 1981, a special edition where he talked about Two Little Boys. He wanted me to sit on his knee but it didn’t feel right. One time Jimmy Savile was the presenter and invited a few of us back to his dressing room, but me and my friend Sarah didn’t go because he seemed creepy to us. There was something unsettling about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it back then, but it makes sense now.”
Groves believes the 2023 BBC1 four-part drama series The Reckoning has awakened suppressed memories and opened up “a psychic wormhole” for Savile to pursue her in her dreams. She said, “It brought back suppressed memories. I can’t watch Steve Coogan anymore and I was a huge Alan Partridge fan.”
The only other TV star she remembers meeting growing up was comedian Benny Hill, when she was with her lollypop lady mum in a canteen at Teddington Studios, where The Benny Hill Show was filmed. “I was only little but meeting Benny made me cry. I don’t know why. He hasn’t been in my dreams yet though.”
