The Enfield Poltergeist

In the late 1970s, a family in Enfield, North London, captured the UK media’s attention and eventually became the subject of global interest. In 1977 single parent, Peggy Hodgson, moved into a townhouse in the village of Brimsdown with her four children. Soon after, the family began experiencing unexplained phenomena that would last for more than a year and is still unexplained until this day, despite investigations by the police, press, mediums and experts from the Society of Psychical Research (SPR).

The unexplained begins

Peggy moved into the modest home with her four children – Margaret (12), Janet (11), Johnny (10) and Billy (7). It was not long after that strange events started to happen: furniture moved by itself, the sound of knocking came from within the walls and children’s toys, such as marbles and Lego, would fly through the air – often aimed at people – or would be too hot to touch.

Such odd goings-on inevitably attracted curious neighbors and, ultimately, members of the press and police. One female police officer who visited the house signed an affidavit to say she saw a chair move by itself and news reporters who could not find explanations for the strange occurrences suggested Peggy asked the SPR to investigate.

The experts are called in

Paranormal investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair spent 13 months with the family, chronicling and investigating the supernatural events taking place – and were convinced by the evidence presented to them that the house was also home to a poltergeist. During this time, among a number of incidents, there were 26 which the investigators witnessed but could not rationally explain, including levitations, bedclothes being pulled off, apparitions, cool breezes, puddles of water on the floor and fires spontaneously lighting then immediately being extinguished, objects disappearing and randomly appearing again at a later date, and equipment failing or having interference – a BBC TV crew who visited the house later found the metal inside their machines to be bent and recordings erased.

Grosse and Playfair were also present when Janet was apparently possessed and speaking using a voice that could otherwise not be repeated. While possessed, Janet referred to herself as Bill who said he had died of a brain hemorrhage in the house some years before and who often exhibited a cruel streak, swearing and making jokes. Interestingly, the experts were separately contacted by a man who claimed he was Bill’s son.

Apart from a sudden burst of activity in 1980, the events stopped happening in September 1978 and nothing supernatural has occurred at the house since.

Was the family haunted by a poltergeist?

Two separate investigators from the SPR who spent time with the family were less convinced than Grosse and Playfair, believing that the children had been the cause of all the activity after they found them bending spoons. While both Janet and Margaret have publicly admitted this, they remain adamant that they did not fake all the incidents and to suggest they did so is ridiculous.

Outside of the family, so convinced was he by what he witnessed at the Hodgson’s home, Playfair wrote a book about the period entitled This House is Haunted; and in 2010 welcomed the findings of research carried out by the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research which showed that recordings made at the house could not have been caused by human activity. The recordings were analysed in detail and the sounds made in them replicated in scientific conditions, which did not produce the same sound waves as those made in the Enfield house. Playfair explained: ‘This is absolutely the biggest step forward in the last 30 years, and it’s easily reproducible as all scientific evidence should be … In doing this research, scientific order has been brought into a very crazy area – poltergeist activity. I don’t think it’s been done before.’

In popular culture

The case has been analyzed and discussed in numerous documentaries, books and articles. It also inspired the infamous BBC ‘mockumentary’ Ghostwatch which was broadcast on Halloween in 1992 and purported to document the strange happenings experienced by a family in London who were haunted by a poltergeist known as ‘pipes’. After the success of horror film The Conjuring, a rumoured sequel has been touted in which the Warrens travel to England in the 1970s to investigate the case of a poltergeist.

While there seems to be no agreement between experts on the authenticity of the case of the Enfield poltergeist, those who were actually affected by it seem sure that what they experienced was real and have no other explanations for the events, as Playfair concludes: ‘It’s been accepted as one of the classic cases, there were so many people involved and I think it was the first or second case when the investigators were there right at the start and stayed right until the end.’

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