Day 21: The Enfield Poltergeist
In Enfield, London, England in the late 1970s, two sisters claimed to experience poltergeist activity in their home, a council house in Brimsdown. Margaret was 13 and Janet was 11 when the hauntings started and it continued for eighteen months. While many have been sceptical about the claims of the girls and their family, some believe the hauntings were genuine and, to this day, the girls claim they were telling the truth.
In August 1977, Peggy Hodson (the single mother of the girls and two other children) called the police claiming she had witnessed furniture moving and that two of her children had heard knocking sounds on the walls. A police constable that responded said that, while there, she saw a large armchair "wobble and slide" but could not determine the cause. The chair apparently moved four feet across the floor. The police however informed them that there was no-one breaking the law and it was not a police matter. The case was reported by the Daily Mirror and attracted the attention of The Society of Psychical Research (SPR) and several paranormal investigators including Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon-Playfair from the SPR and the Warrens said that they believed the incidents at the house were caused by a supernatural entity. Initially, Guy had not wanted to get involved. It was after hearing Maurice Grosse on the news. Maurice had spent a night at the house with a BBC reporter and Guy realised that it was a big story that wouldn't wait for him. Various people (at least 30) over the eighteen months described seeing heavy furniture move on it's own, objects thrown across the room and the girls levitating. Some also reported hearing knocking noises and a gruff voice. Other phenomena experienced by the family was cups randomly filling with water, fires igniting on oven gloves and match boxes and then just going out without damaging the matches in the box.
Both Margaret and Janet admitted later that, though the haunting was real, they fabricated some evidence when investigators and journalists were present. Janet was caught on camera bending spoons and attempting to bend an iron bar. she was also caught banging a broom handle on the ceiling and hiding an investigator's tape recorder. Janet had also been practising ventriloquism and one of the voices heard, Bill, had a habit of changing the topic, a habit Janet had. however, there were people who said they couldn't understand how Janet would be able to sustain the gruff and raspy voice for as long as she did without hurting her throat. When "Bill Wilkins" spoke, the words came out of Janet's mouth and she said it felt like they were coming from behind her. At one point the voice described how he had died. That he had gone blind, had a haemorrhage and died "in the chair in the corner downstairs". Bill's son Terry, confirmed that that was how his father had died in the house. Janet said that at one point, Maurice Grosse had filled Janet's mouth with water and taped it shut, yet the voice still spoke clearly. The list of evidence that the girls were making it up makes many people believe that the whole story was fabricated and they experienced no paranormal activity.
The photo of Janet apparently being thrown across the room is widely debated. While some see it as proof of the activity, critics and sceptics say that it looks like she is jumping. Janet said what happened was that she felt cold hands and a force pulled her out of bed. This happened on several occasions. sometimes she would just be dragged to the door, other times she would be thrown through the air. The photos were taken by a newspaper journalist but he wasn't there at the time. The camera had been left in the girl's room, set to take photos every few seconds.
On an interview on This Morning in 2012, Janet (whose surname is now Winter) described what went on in the home. Guy Lyon-Playfair and sceptic Deborah Hyde were also at the interview. Janet said the first experience was her and her brother hearing shuffling noises than seeing a chest of drawers move by itself. After witnessing it herself and not being able to push the chest back and becoming scared, the mother told everyone to come downstairs. They went to a neighbour, Vic Nottingham for help and upon experiencing the same was so scared he fled the house. It was at this point Peggy called the police. Janet recounted some of the incidents and said the scariest thing was when she was in bed and a curtain wrapped itself around her neck.
Guy Lyon-Playfair, when asked by Philip Schofield what he had witnessed in the house, said that he remembers an armchair and table moving and toppling over when Janet was no-where near them (the armchair was the same one the police officer saw). He said also "about a thousand" other things. He said that he heard the voice of Bill and it terrified everyone including the speech therapist they brought in. He said that the therapist refused to be interviewed and ran from the room. He said Bill could speak through Janet for hours without Janet getting a sore throat, which is effectively impossible.
When sceptic Deborah mentioned the girls fabrication and recodings being tampered with, Guy said that she was mistaken and misinterpreting things she had either read or heard. He said that the girls tampering with a recording was when they tried to do a video recording and the tape recordings they got was genuine. When Deborah said that a member of the SPR had done a further investigation and concluded the stories were false, Guy again corrected her. He said the individual she was taking about had actually concluded it was genuine. She just understood that some evidence had been fabricated by the girls but said the haunting itself and some incidents were in fact due to supernatural forces. Deborah argued her point that people can be influenced by their own imagination, that our memories aren't the best and we can both see things that are not there and not see things that are. Guy told her that you had to see such things to believe them and he was there and she wasn't. Janet also said that Deborah wasn't there, has no idea what it was like, what she went through, how she feels and how it affects her to this day.
In closing the interview, Philip Schofield said that after Peggy died a woman named Claire Bennet and her family moved into the home. Claire said that although she didn't see anything, she did feel "uncomfortable. There was definitely some kind of presence in the house so I always felt like somebody was looking at me." They moved out after just two months.
Over 40 years after the event which grabbed headlines and the publics attention, the Enfield poltergeist story is still remembered, discussed and even adapted for entertainment. The Sky Living 2015 series 'The Enfield Haunting' was very popular and even The Conjuring 2 was about Ed and Lorraine's investigation into the case. It is one of the 'true' ghost stories that has endured and probably will for many years. There are those that believe the whole thing was fabricated, those that believe there is a mix of truth and fabrication to the case and some that believe the whole thing is true and the stories of Janet's fabrication are invented and/or exaggerated to discredit her account of events.
Was Janet the target of a poltergeist? Did unexplainable things really happen? Was it fevered imagination and/or some form of mass hysteria that led to so many witnesses claiming the stories were true or did these people really see what they claimed? It is one of the cases we may again never learn the truth about definitively. After all, Janet rarely talks about what happened, her This Morning appearance was a rare interview. It may be that one day Janet admits it was fake or she may go to her grave insisting it is true. Either way, the Enfield Poltergeist is one of the true ghost stories that makes our world so much more exciting.
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