The Enfield Poltergeist

Green Street, Brimsdown. A council house in Enfield, North London. Number 284 was home to Peggy Hodgson, a divorced single mother, and her children Margaret, Janet, Johnny and Billy. Janet was the lively one. Everything that followed would centre on her.

At about 9:30 p.m. in late August 1977, Janet and her brother John heard shuffling in their bedroom. Peggy came in and heard knocking. Then a chest of drawers moved about 18 inches with nobody touching it, and it resisted when she pushed it back. The family fetched the neighbours, Vic and Peggy Nottingham. They heard the knocking too and called the police.

At about 1 a.m. on 1 September, WPC Carolyn Heeps was in the living room. "I heard the sound of knocking on the wall… Four distinct taps," she wrote. Then a chair began to move: "It moved approximately 3-4 feet and then came to rest. At no time did it appear to leave the floor."

The Daily Mirror came next. Photographer Graham Morris was hit on the head by a Lego brick. "I knew that no one was throwing anything because I could see everybody in the room," he said. He set up a remote camera in the girls' room. His frames of Janet in mid air became the case's best known image.

15 December 1977. Hazel Short, a school crossing attendant, was looking at the house. Books flew across and hit the window. Then she saw Janet "going up and down bodily as though someone was just tossing her up and down bodily, in a horizontal position."

That winter, a harsh and guttural old man's voice came through Janet. It called itself Bill. "I went blind, and I had a haemorrhage, and I fell asleep and I died on a chair in the corner downstairs." After a broadcast, a listener said it was his father, William Charles Wilkins. Wilkins had died in a chair downstairs on 20 June 1963.

Maurice Grosse of the Society for Psychical Research arrived on 5 September 1977, and Guy Lyon Playfair followed on 12 September. Between them they recorded more than 180 hours of tape; Grosse taped Janet's mouth shut, then filled it with water. The voice carried on, muffled. A BBC Nationwide report said that either 17 people, the police among them, had been hallucinating, or this was the best documented ghost story of all time. In May 1978 an SPR committee found good evidence of paranormal events from credible witnesses.

Not everyone agreed; Grosse himself saw Janet bang a broom handle on the ceiling and hide his tape recorder. SPR sceptics Anita Gregory and John Beloff concluded the girls were playing tricks; stage magician Milbourne Christopher, of CSICOP, caught Janet creeping out of bed. Joe Nickell wrote in the Skeptical Inquirer that the poltergeist tended to act only when it was not being watched, while Professor Chris French argued the levitation photo is consistent with jumping. Janet later said about "two per cent" of events were faked, but she still maintains the rest was real.

Playfair told the story in This House Is Haunted in 1980. Ed and Lorraine Warren came once, uninvited, for a single day. The Conjuring 2 later put them at the centre, a role Playfair said it greatly exaggerated. Sky's The Enfield Haunting, an Apple TV+ docuseries built on the original tapes and a stage play all followed. Peggy Hodgson died in 2003 without changing her view that it was real.