1977: The ENFIELD POLTERGEIST | Nationwide | Weird and Wonderful

This 13-minute report is a time capsule from the very start of the Enfield case. It aired on the BBC’s early-evening magazine programme Nationwide on November 23, 1977, less than three months after the Hodgson family first called the police, and the BBC Archive reissued it in 2023. The reporter, James Hogg, visits the council house in north London where Peggy Hodgson lived with her children — who were staying with relatives at the time of filming because their mother was ill.

Hogg talks to the people drawn in next: neighbours Peggy and Vic Nottingham, who heard the knocking and called the police; another witness who says flying Lego hit him on the elbow; and Peggy’s brother John Burcombe and his wife Sylvia. A police officer’s written statement about a chair sliding three or four feet is read out. Most of all, the report showcases Maurice Grosse of the Society for Psychical Research, who plays his recordings of the bedroom at night and of his question-and-answer “conversations” with the knocks, and calls Enfield possibly “the best case of all time.”

Hogg ends with a neat dilemma: either some of the 17 witnesses were playing an elaborate joke on the others, or they were all hallucinating, police included, or this was “the best documented ghost story of all time.” What the report could not show in 1977 is what happened next. In the months that followed, Janet Hodgson was caught on video bending spoons and attempting to bend an iron bar, Grosse himself saw her bang a broom handle on the ceiling, and the gruff “Bill” voice appeared only when the girls were alone.

Investigators from the same society Grosse belonged to, notably Anita Gregory and John Beloff, concluded that the sisters had staged many incidents, while Grosse and his co-investigator Guy Lyon Playfair defended the case for the rest of their lives. As adults, Janet and Margaret said that only a small part of it was faked. Watch this, then, as the story at its most persuasive — before the doubts arrived.