The Enfield Poltergeist

The chest of drawers was the start.

After that came knocking. Inside the walls. In patterns that were not random, not the settled-house variety, but deliberate. Four knocks. Pause. Four knocks. Like someone who wants you to know they're there but is also, in some deep-seated way, extremely patient.

Then marbles.

The marbles appeared from nowhere and flew across rooms. This sounds, on paper, manageable. Marbles are small. But these marbles were hot. This is in the investigator's notes: the marbles were hot to the touch. Marbles that came from nowhere, crossed rooms at speed, and arrived at the temperature of something that had been held in a fist for a while.

Neighbors noticed. The family next door, the Notts, came over when they heard the knocking. Vic Nottingham, who was a large man and not given to imagination, went upstairs to check, and he heard the knocking clearly and he could not explain it, and he later told investigators that he had never been so frightened in his life.

Peggy called the police.

A police officer named Carolyn Heeps arrived and witnessed a chair move on its own. She filed a report. This is one of the most important details of the entire case: an officer of the Metropolitan Police filed a written report that a chair moved on its own, in the presence of a witness, in a house she had been called to investigate. Her name is in the records.

After the police filed their report with what must have been some interesting paperwork, Peggy contacted a reporter from the Daily Mirror. The reporter came. The photographer came. The photographer's name was Graham Morris.

Graham Morris would take photographs that people are still arguing about.

Janet Hodgson was eleven years old.

She was the one it focused on. Poltergeist activity, in the various case studies, tends to center on specific people, often adolescents, often in periods of stress. Researchers debate what this means. Whether it suggests a psychological component. Whether it suggests something else.

In Janet's case, it was impossible to miss.

She was thrown from her bed. Not rolled out, not slid. Thrown. In the middle of the night, across the room, landing against the wall. This happened multiple times. Her mother witnessed it. Investigators witnessed it. Graham Morris photographed Janet mid-air, inches from the ceiling, arms up, expression of a person who is experiencing something involuntary.

The photographs are the subject of considerable debate. Some investigators believe they show genuine levitation. Others argue for a simpler explanation: a child can generate considerable airtime from a bouncing mattress, and Morris was shooting in low light at high speed without warning.

The photographs look like a child floating. They also look like a child jumping. Both things are true simultaneously, which is an uncomfortable place to live.

Janet also had things thrown at her. Kitchen utensils crossed the room. Books launched off shelves. A toy brick flew and hit a photographer in the face, hard enough to need medical attention. The photographer's name was also Graham Morris, who was having an exceptionally difficult assignment.

And then Janet started speaking in a voice that was not Janet's voice.

It was a deep voice. A man's voice. Coming from an eleven-year-old girl.

The voice had things to say.

The voice first appeared in 1977 and continued for months.

Janet would go into what investigators described as a trance-like state. Her face would change. Her posture would change. And the voice that came out was a man's voice, low and rough, speaking in a cadence that was not a child's cadence.

The voice said its name was Bill. Bill Wilkins. The man who had died in the sitting room downstairs, in the armchair, of a brain hemorrhage. The previous tenant. The man who had been there before the Hodgsons arrived.

Bill, through Janet, was very specific about this. He had died in his chair. He had gone blind first. Then fallen. Then that was it.

This was later confirmed. Researchers tracked down Bill Wilkins's son. His son, who had not been contacted before the voice session was recorded, confirmed: his father had lost his sight before dying. He had fallen from the chair. This was not public information. The Hodgsons had not known it. The investigators had not known it.

Bill, via Janet, also had opinions about his house. He had a quality, in recordings, of a man who has been away for a while and come home to find everything rearranged and people living in his rooms. Mildly aggrieved. Territorial in a quiet way.

There are recordings. Long recordings, hours of tape, of Janet's voice shifting into Bill's voice. Researchers and audio analysts have examined them. They cannot explain the mechanics of how an eleven-year-old was producing those sounds. The larynx doesn't work that way at that age.

Janet, years later, said she remembered almost nothing from the sessions where Bill spoke through her.

Bill apparently remembered quite a bit.

The Society for Psychical Research sent Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair.

This is the part where you might expect the investigators to arrive, find nothing, and explain everything sensibly. That is not what happened.

Grosse was a senior investigator. Playfair wrote a book about the case. Both of them witnessed things that they spent the rest of their professional lives discussing. Grosse witnessed a sofa levitate. He witnessed Janet being thrown. He heard the voice of Bill Wilkins at length.

Playfair, in his book 'This House Is Haunted,' concluded that something genuinely inexplicable had occurred in that house. He was not a sensationalist. He was a careful researcher who had investigated other cases and found normal explanations. He did not find a normal explanation for Enfield.

There was also a skeptic. Anita Gregory, a researcher from the Society, conducted her own investigation and concluded that Janet had faked significant portions of the phenomena. She caught Janet bending spoons when she thought no one was watching. She caught Margaret practicing ventriloquism with Janet.

This is where the case becomes genuinely complicated.

Because here is what Janet admitted, eventually, as an adult: yes. She had faked some of it. About two percent. She and Margaret had sometimes enhanced or reproduced events for the cameras, because the cameras were always there and the pressure to perform was real and they were children.

Two percent.

Which means ninety-eight percent she cannot explain.

Which leaves Maurice Grosse's sofa. Which leaves the police report about the chair. Which leaves Bill Wilkins's son confirming information the investigators couldn't have known.

Two percent is a large number when it gives skeptics something to point at. It is also a very small number.

Janet Hodgson grew up. She became Janet Watson. She had children of her own. She has given interviews over the decades, including to journalists covering the 2013 film 'The Conjuring 2,' which dramatized the Enfield case with some adjustments.

In these interviews, she is a normal person. A woman in her late forties. Thoughtful, a bit weary of the subject, which is understandable given that she has been answering questions about it for forty years.

She says: yes, we faked some of it. Two percent. Maybe a bit more. We were kids. We were bored. The cameras were there all the time and we felt pressure to give them something.

She also says: the rest of it was real. And we were terrified.

There is something about her testimony, specifically the combination of those two things, the admission and the insistence, that is harder to dismiss than a simple 'everything was real.' The willingness to say 'yes, we faked this part' lends weight to 'but not that part.'

The house at 284 Green Street is still there. People live in it. The current occupants have been interviewed and they report nothing unusual, which is either reassuring or simply the way hauntings work: they don't stay forever, they move on, they finish what they came for.

Bill Wilkins, if he was ever there, appears to have left.

Janet says the worst part was not the flying furniture or the voice or being thrown from her bed, though obviously those were not pleasant.

The worst part was not being believed.

Which, if you think about it, is the most human thing in the entire story.