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 Nothing in that balmy August evening seemed even slightly out of the ordinary. Peggy Hodgson was busily tidying up her terraced house in Enfield, north London, after her four boisterous young children had once again left it looking like a pigsty.
Mrs Hodgson’s daughters were upstairs getting ready for bed. As usual, twelve-year-old Janet was playfighting with her elder sister Margaret. As the pair rolled around and giggled on the bed, a chest of drawers began sliding slowly across the floor towards them.
The two sisters watched aghast as the chest shuffled across the room as if dragged by a pair of incredibly powerful but invisible hands. The menacing sound of shuffling and scraping filled the room. A chill ran down their spines when they realised that the piece of oak furniture was about to block their bedroom door - and their only means of escape.
Luckily for the children, their mother burst into the room to complain about the noise. She grabbed the chest and shoved it back against the wall. But the poltergeist was having none of it. Peggy watched in terror as the chest once again began sliding across the room. This time the piece of furniture moved far quicker and Peggy could sense a cold steely determination behind its movements. She tried again to shove the chest back against the wall but failed. And this time she could feel a strong ethereal force in the room. All three fled the bedroom in terror.
Over the following months the so called “Enfield Poltergeist” turned the lives of the Hodgson family upside down. Toys, plates, cutlery, books and pictures would all inexplicably fly across the room. Objects would miraculously appear and disappear before the eyes of terrified onlookers. On occasion, Janet appeared to be ‘possessed’ by the poltergeist.
The strange events were exhaustively investigated by respected paranormal researchers. And perhaps uniquely, the extraordinary events were witnessed by police officers and a BBC journalist.
"I felt used by a force that nobody understands,” says Janet. “I really don’t like to think about it too much.”
"I’m not sure the poltergeist was truly ‘evil’. It was almost as if it wanted to be part of our family. It didn’t want to hurt us. It had died there and wanted to be at rest. The only way it could communicate was through me and my sister.”
Bizarre though the events of Enfield were, they are far from unique.
Professor David Fontana, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society who has investigated similar hauntings, says: “From my own experience, and from the scientific literature, there is no doubt that these are real phenomena.
"There are various possible causes. It could be that the repressed emotions of people in the room are causing psychokinetic effects. The traditional explanation would be that they are a form of haunting. That they are earthbound spirits out to cause trouble.”
Hard-bitten sceptics, of course, claim that such hauntings are simply the result of hoaxing and trickery. But those who witnessed the events in Enfield were left in no doubt that they were involved in an truly extraordinary haunting that defies rational explanation to this day.
Shortly after the poltergeist first made its presence felt at the Hodgson family home in Green Street, Enfield, the police were called in and statements duly taken. At that stage the police officers were no doubt willing to ignore the matter and carry on with their normal duties. But as they were preparing to leave, a sitting room chair levitated off the carpet and moved slowly across the room.
"It came off the floor nearly half an inch,” says WPC Carolyn Heeps, one of the Metropolitan Police officers sent to investigate the haunting. “I saw it slide off to the right about four feet before it came to rest. I checked to see if it could have slid along the floor by itself. I placed a marble on the floor to see whether it would roll in the same direction as the chair. It didn’t.
"I checked for wires under the cushions and chairs and I could not see any. I couldn’t find any explanation at all.”
Specialist help in the form of the venerable Society for Psychical Research was called in. Two investigators, Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse, were to spend the next 14 months investigating the haunting. To avert any claims of trickery, the society drafted in a respected barristor, Mary Rose Barrington, to double check all of their work. This would ensure that there could be no credible claims that the pair were being anything other than meticulous, honest and impartial in their investigations.
Over the following months the researchers catalogued a range of inexplicable phenomena. Boxes flew across rooms, ornaments floated in mid-air, books mysteriously appeared and disappeared. Strange knocking sounds were heard inside walls. At one stage a bright red cushion appeared on the roof of the house (such ‘apports’ are reputedly common in poltergeist hauntings). All told, hundreds of different phenomena were witnessed by over 30 people.
Whilst all these bizarre and inexplicable phenomena were no doubt frightening they hardly threatened life and limb. It wasn’t long, however, before events took a far more sinister turn.
One morning when Guy Playfair was working at the house he heard a “tremendous vibrating noise”.
"I really thought someone was drilling a great big hole in the wall of the house,” he says. “I tore into the bedroom and there was quite a commotion. The whole fireplace had been ripped out.
"It was one of those old Victorian cast iron fires that must have weighed at least 60 pounds. It was so heavy even I couldn’t pick it up. The children couldn’t have possibly ripped it out of the wall. It just wasn’t possible. We caught the incident on tape including the fireplace being ripped out of the wall.”
Events were soon to take an even more disturbing course. Late one evening, when the children were asleep in the their rooms and Maurice Grosse was downstairs compiling his days findings, he was disturbed by the sound of Janet’s screaming.
Maurice ran to the foot of the stairs only to see the twelve-year-old apparantly being dragged through the door by an unseen force. Janet was then hauled down the stairs and dumped unceremoniously at Maurice’s feet. This incident was also caught on tape. This was just the first of several incidents in which the poltergeist apparently picked up Janet and tried to carry her off.
Soon afterwards Janet was seen floating in mid-air but this time there were two independent witnesses. Through an upstairs window a lollipop lady and a passing baker both saw Janet apparently hovering above her bed.
"At one point,” says Janet. “The lady saw me spinning around and banging against the window. I thought I might actually break the window and go through it.
"A lot of children fantasise about flying but it wasn’t like that. When you’re levitated with force and you don’t know where you’re going to land it’s very frightening. I still don’t know how it happened.”
Events quickly became even more disturbing. The poltergeist began to take ‘possession’ of Janet and speak through her. The spirit, or spirits, spent most of their time swearing and hurling insults at those in the room. It was as if a disturbed and disembodied trickster was at work.
Maurice Grosse asked his son Richard, a solicitor, to interrogate the spirit. The poltergeist responded positively to the questioning.
“I went blind,” said the spirit who identified himself as Bill. “I had an haemorrhage and then I fell asleep and I died in a chair in the corner downstairs.”
It turned out that long before the Hodgson’s moved in an old man called Bill Wilkins had lived in the house. He died of a brain haemorrhage whilst sitting in a living room chair.
To those apt to believe in ghost stories, the story of Bill Wilkins proves beyond all reasonable doubt that there really was a poltergeist in Green Street. But is the case really proven? If you dig deep beneath the surface doubts begin to emerge.
On several occasions the girls at the centre of the case were caught playing hoaxes on their investigators. For the most part they were childish pranks easily uncovered. On one occasion the girls were caught hiding Guy’s tape recorder. They planned to pretend that the poltergeist had whisked it away. Unfortunately for the girls, the recorder was running and caught their plotting on tape.
"They weren’t very good at playing tricks,” says Guy Playfair. “We always caught them out. What do you expect children to do? I would have been more worried if they hadn’t played around from time to time. It means they were behaving like normal kids.”
Janet clearly believes she was haunted by a real poltergeist, so why did she and her sister do it? She says that were sick of being tested all the time. They had become like animals trapped in a zoo constantly being asked to perform tricks for gawping onlookers. People would turn up expecting inexplicable things to happen and quite often they didn't. She estimates that only about one or two percent of the phenomena were faked by her and Margaret and these were minor things like balancing a chair on top of a door and pretending that the poltergeist did it.
"We were children," says Janet. "Maurice and Guy could tell when we were playing tricks, they knew."
The barrister Mary Rose Barrington who investigated the researchers on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research is in no doubt that they did a thorough and honest job. She re-interviewed and cross-examined many of the witnesses and double checked the evidence. The 30 or so other witnesses including police officers, BBC journalists and those just passing by all seem convinced by the case.
Nevertheless, the girls trickery does beg the question, how many of the other seemingly inexplicable phenomena were hoaxes pure and simple?
Professor Chris French, a psychologist at London University, is in no doubt: “It places a huge question mark over the whole case.
"Children can be very ingenious. I don’t buy the idea that kids can’t outwit intelligent investigators. There are undoubtedly some things in the case that defy rational explanation but that does not mean that they are real phenomena.
"When you also consider the fact that people, no matter how sincere, are notoriously unreliable witnesses then you have to take this case with a very big pinch of salt.”
Professor French points to other famous hoaxes such as the Amityville Horror to dispute not only the Enfield case but hauntings in general. Does this mean that poltergeists are invariably simply hoaxes? Well, there are dozens of well documented cases similar to the Enfield haunting. Are they all hoaxes? It seems unlikely.
Professor David Fontana, the esteemed research psychologist, says: “From my own studies I know of accounts of poltergeists pulling people’s hair, causing objects to disappear before returning them in the most unlikely places, starting small fires, throwing water about, upsetting furniture, scribbling on walls, breaking objects and generally discomforting the hapless owners of the property they choose to haunt.”
And Janet is adament that though she and her sister played a few childish tricks on the investigators most of the phenomena were nonetheless real.
"I know from my own experience that it was real,” she says.
“It lived off me, off my energy. Call me mad or a prankster if you like. Those events did happen. The poltergeist was with me and I feel that in a sense that he always will be.”
Buy Guy's book about the Enfield poltergeist from Amazon by clicking HERE
Watch Interview with a Poltergest on YouTube
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