Exciting news today: yes, of course — it’s the 46th anniversary of the beginning of The Enfield Haunting, when a COMPLETELY REAL poltergeist moved furniture, made knocking noises and caused children to levitate.
There had been “some eerie and unexplained knocking” the day before, and on the night of 31 August 1977, 11-year-old Janet Hodgson and her younger brother Jonny “were in their bedroom when a strange rattling began to sound”.
At this point, Mrs Hodgson called the police, who (remarkably) came, with a WPC witnessing a chair wobble. Not being able to see the malefactor, which would naturally have been an obstacle to slapping the cuffs on, they ‘took no further action’.
For the next 18 months, furniture moved, objects were flung, children floated, and noises and voices were heard. Charlatans (sorry, I appear to have misspelled ‘qualified psychic researchers) came from across the world to investigate.
One day, the entire family was
Having “realised that the entity could follow them out of the house”, they went to Clacton for a week, and only heard a dog barking from Janet’s bed. Back at home, psychic investigators suggested they leave pens and paper out, and QUITE BY COINCIDENCE messages began to appear.
Perhaps the least surprising sentence in that particular account is the one which comes immediately after that paragraph:
The writing was very similar to Janet’s.
She was also issuing “weird, gravelly sounds” and “a torrent of subconscious gobbledygook” in different voices. Then, one night, Janet heard investigator Maurice Grosse say “All we need now is the voices to talk”, and QUITE BY CHANCE they did exactly that. A gruff-voiced man called Joe Watson spoke, and came back the next night with a new name: Bill Wilkins. They asked JoeBill how he died.
The other main investigator, Guy Lyon Playfair, asked Bill why he wasn’t visible, and got the perfectly reasonable answer:
I’m invisible… because I’m a G.H.O.S.T.
The story went on to inspire The Conjuring 2, Sky’s 2015 drama The Enfield Haunting, and — perhaps most famously for those of us of a certain generation — the BBC’s infamous broadcast-once-sparking-a-reported-million-complaints Ghostwatch.
You may have gathered that I am perhaps a tad less accepting of the supernatural explanations than others. Come on, then, Coates, if you’re so clever, what did happen? Well, obviously Guy Playfair believed it (and — well, well — also got a book out of it).
However, in his 1988 book, Forbidden Knowledge: The Paranormal Paradox, magician Bob Couttie says Playfair was “a devoted believer in Uri Geller”. Maurice Grosse was “a sincere and honest man”, but had joined the Society of Psychical Research on losing a child a year before.
Grosse, then, may have wanted — even needed — to believe. Couttie also notes that “Families afflicted by these phenomena are often deeply unhappy”. Janet and her sister Margaret were just hitting puberty and had recently seen their parents split up.
Writer and former magician Joe Nickell notes that Janet was interviewed about the phenomena by the Daily Mail in 2011.
He adds: “The principle of Occam’s Razor — that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the best one — well applies here”, and that the evidence suggests the sisters’ fakery was “closer to 100 percent”.
I mean, this might be a photo of a child shoved on top of some furniture by a spook while a concerned uncle looks at the camera, but it could also be a child who’s climbed up there, and an uncle going “Wow, this is fucked up”.
There’s also this from “psychology professor (and expert sceptic) Chris French”:
Perhaps it was supernatural, or perhaps “we may suspect tension in the household following the parents’ divorce”, but one way or another peace has returned to 284 Green Street, EN3, and it’s now as remarkable inside as it is out.
