The Enfield Poltergeist | Horrord Magazine - The UK horror website (2023)

OOn the night of Tuesday, August 30, 1977, Peggy Hodgson, a 47-year-old divorcee and mother of four, walked into her children's bedroom to tell them to stop fighting and go to sleep.They complained that the bed was shaking, but without thinking about it anymore, he went to bed. The next night, she heard a noise like someone walking on linoleum in slippers, and then four loud bangs. A chest of drawers slid across the floor. Peggy pushed him back and he slid forward again. She tried to push him back, but she couldn't. It was then that the family fled to Nottingham's at 282 Green Street and called for help. Vic Nottingham, a carpenter, and his son, Gary, went to the Hodgson home to investigate and heard banging coming from all over the house.

Thinking someone was pulling a prank, they called the police, who showed up at the house at 1 a.m. m. The police checked the walls, the attic and the pipes, but found nothing to explain the errors. One of the policemen said:

'The PC and the neighbors all went to the kitchen to check the pipes in the fridge etc, leaving me and the family in the living room. The lights in the room went out again, and after a few minutes, the eldest son pointed to a chair next to the sofa. I looked at the chair and felt it rock slightly from side to side, then saw the chair slide across the floor toward the kitchen wall. It moved about 3 to 4 feet and then stopped."

The next night, Vic returned home and was attacked with flying Lego. Marbles and Lego flew through the house for the next three days, and various people visited in an effort to help, including members of the council and clergy. Not knowing what to do, on September 4, Ms Nottingham called the Daily Mirror, hoping they could do something to help. The Mirror sent reporter Douglas Bence and photographer Graham Morris. Graham Morris later said,

“I thought it was a normal job until I entered the house. I stood in the dim kitchen and one by one the children were led into the arms of the adults, Janet the last to enter. Suddenly things took off and started flying across the room. I got hit by a Lego block in the right eye. It was a lump for a few days, it had some strength. There were marbles and things in the kitchen that were flying around the room. I was seeing all [the family] and none of them were doing anything.'

George Fallows, the Mirror's senior reporter, and photographer David Thorpe visited the house. Fallows thought at first that Peggy was pulling pranks to get a new council house, but he soon realized that something serious was afoot.

'Due to the emotional atmosphere in the house and neighbourhood, ranging from hysteria to terror, excitement and tension, it has been difficult to record satisfactory data. However, I am satisfied with the overall impression that our research is reasonably accurate. To the best of our ability, we have removed the possibility of cheating TOTAL, although we managed to simulate most of the phenomena. In my opinion, this fake can only be done by an expert.

Fallows suggested contacting the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). They put him in touch with Maurice Grosse, a relatively new member of the society who had joined after the death of his daughter the previous year. Grosse visited the house on September 5. Grosse said of that first visit,

"I thought it was chaos, the whole family was gathered in the house along with the next-door neighbors and there were a lot of very scared people there."

Grosse and members of the press waited to witness any incident, and on Wednesday, September 8 at 1:15 a.m. m., they rushed to the children's room after hearing a crash. The two sisters, Janet (11) and Margaret (13) were still asleep, but a chair turned and moved three feet across the room. That was enough to convince Maurice to stay and investigate further.

On September 10, the Daily Mirror published the story, describing it as 'The house of strange eventsLater that night, Peggy appeared on a radio show called Night Line on LBC, a London radio station. When Peggy got home from the show, she was greeted by Roz Morris of BBC Radio Four.the world this weekend. Roz joined Grosse in an all-night vigil and also witnessed paranormal activity: "After the girls had gone to bed, there was a very loud crash in their bedroom... Something threw the chair into the other side of the room, I'm convinced of that." . '

Grosse also saw flying marbles, bouncing tea spoons and boxes, and a sofa being lifted into the air and falling facedown to the floor. Grosse was among several people who witnessed these events, other witnesses included reporters and neighbors. Grosse and the photographer set up a camera that took photos when activated and managed to capture Janet thrown from her bed. Realizing that he was missing, Grosse asked the SPR for help in investigating the poltergeist. Guy Playfair accepted the request and arrived home on September 12. He later he wrote the book,This House Is Haunted: The True Story of the Enfield Poltergeist(Books of the White Raven, 1980).

The family was evicted from their home on Sunday 25 September and sought refuge with Peggy's brother who lived down the street. As her wife Sylvia was making tea, a Lego block appeared in front of her and landed on the table. It was then that the family realized that the entity could escort them out of the house.

Grosse and Playfair saw marks on the pillows and the bed, as if someone had been lying there. It was suspected that the spirit of a four-year-old boy, suffocated with a pillow by his father, could be responsible for the events. Peggy received furniture from the girl's house when she moved into her property in Enfield. Peggy made sure to throw out all the furniture belonging to the girl's old house, but the activity continued.

Janet was the common center of activity in poltergeist cases that predominantly affected girls and young women. Two physicists, Pierro Brovetto and Vera Maxia, who wrote an article entitled Some conjectures about the mechanism of the poltergeist phenomenon (NeuroQuantology, Vol 6, No 2 2008), argued that children generate poltergeist activity by channeling energy into the quantum mechanical vacuum.

His article posits that although poltergeist activity has been reported around the world and in different cultures, the one thing they all have in common is pubescent children or young women. The two physicists believe that a change occurs in the body during puberty that affects various organs and that these changes create fluctuations in electronic activity that can cause disturbances up to a few meters outside the brain. They believe that the additional fluctuations caused by the pubescent brain can increase the virtual particles around the person, which increases the air pressure around them, which may be responsible for moving objects.

The word 'Poltergeist' is derived from the German words 'poltern' meaning to strike or strike and 'geist' meaning mind, ghost or spirit and the first reports of poltergeist activity date back to 530 AD. A study of 500 cases by parapsychologists Alan Gault and Tony Cornell found that poltergeist activity involved the movement of small objects (64%), followed by tapping sounds (48%) and the movement of large objects such as tables and chairs ( 36%). ) .

Many of the witnesses to the haunting described hearing "hollow thumps" coming from all over the house. What differentiates a poltergeist heartbeat from a human heartbeat is the difference in the acoustic sound waves. When a human hits a surface, there is a gradually decreasing overall amplitude of sound. A poltergeist rap starts off quietly before growing louder and then fading out in an earthquake-like waveform. According to the doctor. Barrie Colvin, a polyurethane technologist conducting experimental psychic research, poltergeist sound signatures cannot be reproduced.

The Hodgson household was not happy when the activity began and it is believed that poltergeist activity tends to start after a major trauma or life event. In the Hodgsons' case, their father abandoned them for a younger woman and the family was left struggling in poverty. The two girls, Margaret and Janet, did not have a good relationship with their father and were afraid of him. The youngest son, Billy, was not with the family due to "behavioral issues" and was in boarding school.

William Roll, a parapsychologist who has studied many poltergeist events in the United States, has noted a tendency for the person at the center of the activity to display symptoms of repressed anger or distress. He believed that the haunting was due to the discharge of mental energy which he termed "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" or RSPK. He theorized that the person was unwittingly using RSPK to release her pent up feelings.

This certainly seemed to be the case with Janet, who had license to swear profusely and exhibited increasingly aggressive behavior during haunting. Suddenly, she would run across the room and bang her head against the wall and her family was worried that she might commit suicide. She would have tantrums in which she would yell and swear and have to be physically restrained. In late November, a doctor was called to her home and she was administered 10 mg of Valium to sedate her. After being sedated, Janet levitated and landed on a radio where she was discovered by John, Peggy's brother.

Janet was not the only person affected by the poltergeist, her mother claimed to know when the events were about to unfold as it would give her a headache and Margaret, at one point, shared the same dreams. However, the activity always accompanied Janet. Apparitions began to appear and a neighbor's brother saw a light about a foot high burning in the window of the Hodgson before disappearing. Another neighbor and Peggy saw the same old woman in different windows, independently of each other. Janet's brother, Johnny, saw an old man with big teeth looking at him. In all, around 15 different people are believed to have seen some sort of supernatural entity during the chase.

A physicist named John Hasted, who strapped Janet to a Blundell sofa, which is a device used to measure these types of anomalies, discovered that her weight increased in ways that could not be explained. He also observed a light bulb exploding, which he considered a similar unexplained incident. Another physicist named David Robertson tried to secretly film Janet, but found it impossible to hide the equipment from her. However, he saw several inexplicable incidents, such as a sideboard tipping over, Janet being levitated, and a cushion being transported to the ceiling, among other things.

Although the Council did not want to rehouse the family, they agreed to send them for a week's break during the semester. They went to Clacton on Sea and the only incident that occurred there was the sound of a barking dog from Janet's bed. On November 5, when the Hodgsons returned from vacation, Grosse decided to communicate with the spirit by rapping: one for no and two for yes. He asked some questions:

Are you a masculine spirit? knock Knock
Did you live in this house? knock Knock
Was it more than fifty years ago? knock Knock
You died in this house: knock knock
are you unhappy Beat
Because you are here? Is it because you want to give us a special message? Beat
You are playing with me?

The spirit then threw a cardboard box and a pillow into Maurice Grosse's face.

On Monday, November 10, Janet's 12th birthday, Playfair invited an Argentine medium named Eduardo Balanovski to visit her. He brought a magnetometer which they used to look for anomalies in the electric magnetic field around the house. During her visit, Janet's pillow was thrown and the machines registered a change in the strength of the electromagnetic field.

On November 12, Janet, on the medium's advice, left pens and papers around the house and called the entity to leave a message. After that, the messages started popping up all over the house. Peggy found one on the fridge that read, 'I'm staying in this house, don't read this to anyone or I'll retaliate.' The next message she found on her living room table read: 'Can I get a tea bag?' Peggy placed a tea bag on the table and a torn tea bag appeared next to it. Peggy's ex showed up at the house and she showed him the messages. After she left, Peggy apologized to the entity for showing the messages and another one appeared saying: 'It was a misunderstanding, don't do it again, I know who she was.' The handwriting was very similar to Janet's.

On Tuesday, November 29, the first medium, a Brazilian medium by the name of Luiz Gasparetto, visited the family. He was accompanied by his interpreter, Elsie Dubgrasa, who is a member of the healing department of the Spiritist Federation of the State of São Paulo. They offered some spiritual healing to the family which gave them some rest. Luiz would go into a trance state and make drawings and paintings, and after they left, Janet began producing haunting, gory images in a trance. She also wrote Watson's name repeatedly on one page. It turned out that a family named Watson lived in the house and her wife had died of a tumor in her throat similar to one of the gory pictures Janet had drawn.

On Saturday, December 3, Janet was taken from her bed and found by Maurice slipping down the stairs while she was still asleep. A few days later, another SPR member joined the team, a physics student named David Roberts. More SPR members joined them on December 10, Dr. John Beloff and Anita Gregory. The group challenged the entity to speak, and after some hissing and barking, a harsh voice calling itself Joe Watson began to speak. However, the next night, the voice said his name was Bill Wilkins and on Tuesday, December 13, Maurice Grosse's son, Richard, who was a newly qualified lawyer, helped his father question the presence. .

The spirit responded by calling questions, but soon a man's voice was heard coming from somewhere behind Janet's neck. The voice identified himself as Bill Wilkins, who died at the home at age 72. Richard asked how he died and said: 'I went blind. I had a hemorrhage. I fell asleep and died in a chair in the bottom corner. Bill's son Terry later confirmed that this was how his father died. When Playfair asked why he wasn't visible, Bill said, "I'm invisible... because I'm a GHOST."

I heard Bill speak on a tape

To rule out the possibility that Janet was faking the voice, Grosse taped his mouth over it, but the voice continued. He then asked Janet to hold the water in her mouth, which he did and her voice could still be heard speaking. Grosse recorded hours of the voice using a contact microphone attached to the back of Janet's head. A speech therapist who examined Janet said he wasn't sure where her voice was coming from, although it did sound a bit like a false vocal chord tone. There is a voice effect known as plica ventricularis, which is where muscle tension behind the throat can produce sounds independent of the vocal cords. However, using this muscle tension to speak usually results in an extremely painful sore throat and can cause serious damage, none of which happened to Janet, who spoke for up to three hours. Since no cause was found, it was concluded that something was using Janet as an amplifier.

Grosse and Playfair decided to hypnotize Janet and called in Dr. Ian Fletcher, who was a hypnotist, surgeon, and member of the Magic Circle. Fletcher put Janet into a mild state of hypnosis and asked her a few questions:

Do you know who is doing all this? Me and my sister.
Why do you think you are to blame? I don't know who it is.
What's the feeling? Cold hands grabbing me, grabbing me around my body
Who started the problem? None of us
What is the cause of the problem? increased unhappiness

Fletcher later said: 'The impression I got was that this is not a fraud. Her and her sister are doing some of those things, maybe jumping out of bed. Something compels them to do this against their will.

Shortly after that, Janet began to levitate. On Thursday, December 15, at 11:45 a.m. At m., Hazel Short, the local lollipop lady, saw Janet float into her room,

“I was standing looking at the house when suddenly some books flew and hit the window. It was so sudden. I heard the noise because it was so quiet, there was no traffic and it startled me... Then after a while I saw Janet. I don't know if there is a bed under that window, but she was moving up and down with her body as if someone was pulling her up and down her body, in a horizontal position, as if someone had grabbed her legs and back. and he was throwing her, up and down. I definitely saw her scale the height of the window, but I thought if she was bouncing she would jump off it, she wouldn't be able to get enough strength to bounce off her back to climb that high. My friend could see it too, we both could see it.

On Friday December 23rd, the family goldfish died and Bill admitted that he had electrocuted them in his tank using 'spirit energy'. On Christmas day, the pet parakeet was found dead in his cage. And later that day, they found Janet with a curtain around her neck. Peggy managed to untangle her, saving her from suffocating. Later, Janet complained that a knife was following her up the stairs and she and Peggy found one of the knives that she had just put away on the stairs.

Janet later said:

"I was used and abused: there was levitation, there were the voices and then there was...the curtain that was wrapped around my neck, which was life threatening, and brought it home to me, which could kill you."

On Sunday January 15th, Peggy's birthday, a writing on fecal matter appeared on the wall. This was followed by a few days of puddles of diarrhea that were sent to a lab for testing and came back as cat urine. Peggy also saw a man from the waist down coming up the stairs. A few days later, she found "I'm Fred" on the bathroom door written in duct tape.

Many people have witnessed paranormal events during the 19 months of poltergeist activity, but numerous experiments have confirmed that eyewitness testimony may not be reliable, as observers often see what they expect to see. Dingwall, Goldney and Hall, who worked on the Borley Rectory case in 1956, argued that the influence of suggestion played an important role in what people saw or heard, "...once in the mind of the afflicted, the belief can be strengthened and they misinterpreted simple events to fit them into the desired pattern." This is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of existing beliefs or theories. Confirmation bias along with poor memory and self-reporting consensus means that strong evidence is needed along with witness testimony.

On May 16, the SPR formed a commission to conduct its own investigation. The commission interviewed the witnesses it found convincing. They also consulted with Charles Moses, a senior investigator with the Southern California Society for Psychical Research. The committee found that there was good evidence of paranormal phenomena described by various witnesses. However, they were reluctant to credit Bill Watkins' voice.

On July 25, the family sent Janet to Maudsley Hospital, which is a psychiatric hospital in south London and incidents have subsided, although the family still sees hauntings. Janet underwent an extensive physical and psychological evaluation at the Neuropsychiatric Institute under the direction of Dr. Peter Fenwick and nothing was found wrong with her, including brain damage or epilepsy. Janet returned on September 1st after being away for almost 6 weeks and within half an hour she saw the appearance of a baby.

On Monday, October 2, another medium was called, a Dutchman by the name of Dono Gmelig-Meyling, who came to the house and traveled through the astral plane. He was pretty sure that a 24-year-old woman was involved in the case. Maurice Grosse had a daughter named Janet who died in an accident at the age of 24 and this was what led him to become a member of the SPR. After Dono identified the 24-year-old woman, the incidents slowed and stopped.

Maurice Grosse remained in contact with the family until his death at age 87 in 2006. He spent much of his time towards the end of his life defending his investigation into the ghost. Guy Playfair remains an active author, researcher, and SPR board member. Peggy Hodgson remained in the home until her death in 2003. Janet herself left home at age 16 and married early. Her brother John hers died in 1981 at age 14. Janet and Margaret made several television appearances over the next few years, where they continued to insist on the authenticity of their experiences. In fact, Janet said in a 2011 newspaper article, "Years later, when Mom was alive, there was always a presence there, something that watched over you."

The Enfield poltergeist continued to fascinate and several films were made based on the events. Spielberg's 1982 film,elfwas loosely based on what happened. In 1992, a BBC mockumentary calledghost watch(Lesley Manning), starring Sarah Green and Michael Parkinson, featured identical paranormal incidents. In 2015, there was a three-part series calledThe Enfield Curse(Kristoffer Nyholm), starring Timothy Spall and Juliet Stevenson. In 2016,the spell Of the(James Wan), got hold of two American paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who visited the house in May 1978.