The Enfield Poltergeist

In late August 1977, Peggy Hodgson, a single mother raising four children in a rented council house in Brimsdown, Enfield, called the police to say furniture was moving on its own and her children were hearing knocks in the walls. A police constable who came to the house reported seeing a chair wobble and slide across the floor, and said she could not tell what had moved it. Within days the family reported marbles and Lego pieces flying through the air. The activity centered on the two daughters, Janet, 11, and Margaret, 13.

The Daily Mirror took up the story, and the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) sent members to look into it. SPR member Maurice Grosse and the writer Guy Lyon Playfair spent months in and out of the house, recording hundreds of hours of audio. Over roughly 18 months more than 30 people — neighbors, journalists, investigators — said they had heard knocking, seen toys thrown and heavy furniture overturned, or watched Janet apparently hurled from her bed. Most famously, a deep, gruff male “voice” began speaking through Janet, calling itself Bill and claiming to have died in the house.

The case also produced some of the most detailed skeptical analysis of any haunting, much of it from inside the SPR itself. Anita Gregory, investigating for the Society, wrote in its journal in 1980 that the case had been overrated: she described episodes she found plainly suspicious and concluded the girls had staged many incidents, especially for reporters looking for a sensation. John Beloff, a former SPR president, suggested Janet was producing the voice by ventriloquism, and both he and Gregory ended up convinced the sisters were playing tricks. At an SPR conference in Cambridge in 1978, video of the voice drew open doubts.

The evidence of trickery is not in dispute. A video camera in a neighboring room caught Janet bending spoons and trying to bend an iron bar; Grosse himself saw her banging a broom handle on the ceiling and hiding his tape recorder; the “poltergeist” tended to act when nobody was looking, and the voice would not speak unless the girls were alone with the door closed. The girls admitted pranks to journalists — and then, under pressure from Grosse and Playfair, retracted. The American magician Milbourne Christopher watched Janet sneak out of her room to check whether she was being observed, and the ventriloquist Ray Alan concluded the voices were vocal tricks. Playfair and Grosse’s position, set out in Playfair’s 1980 book This House Is Haunted, was that some incidents were faked but others could not have been.

Decades later Janet, as an adult, told interviewers that she and her sister had faked only a small fraction of events — about 2 percent, she said. Skeptics such as Joe Nickell and the psychologist Chris French argue the evidence points to children’s pranks that spiraled out of control in a household under strain, amplified by eager adults and the press. The SPR has since catalogued and digitized Grosse’s tapes, and the case lives on through The Conjuring 2 (2016) and a string of dramas and documentaries. The house remains a private home.

Knocking in the walls, furniture sliding and overturning, marbles, toys and slippers thrown, Janet apparently thrown from or “levitating” above her bed, whistling and barking noises, and a gruff male voice (“Bill”) speaking through Janet — reported by the family, neighbors, a police officer, journalists and SPR investigators.

Mostly the girls’ bedroom and the stairs of the family’s council house, usually at night and around Janet; some incidents were reported to follow her to a neighbor’s house and to school. Nothing happened when Playfair spent a night alone in the house.

The case inspired the BBC’s notorious 1992 mock-documentary Ghostwatch, the 2015 Sky series The Enfield Haunting, The Conjuring 2 (2016), a 2023 West End play, a 2023 Apple TV+ documentary series built around the original tapes, and Melvyn Willin’s 2019 book The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes.