The house of strange happenings.
By George Fallows and Douglas Bence.
A family is living in fear of strange goings-on that are driving them from their home. For two weeks, they have been terrorised by objects inexplicably shooting through the air, of furniture moving for no apparent reason. Two clergymen have blessed the house, but the happenings have only increased. Police are baffled by the phenomena, and one policewoman is too scared to return to the house.
For four days, Mirror reporters George Fallows and Douglas Bence and photographers David Thorpe and Graham Morris joined a psychic expert in keeping watch. They have witnessed events they cannot explain. In the last eight days, a saucer has jumped across the kitchen, furniture has moved, and marbles and toy building bricks have shot through the air in the 60-year-old house at Enfield, Middlesex. One brick hit Morris on the head. Children’s story books in a bedroom were seen to fly through the air by friends of the family.
Police heard knockings which they could not explain, and a policewoman saw a chair move on its own. Fallows says: “Having kept observation at the house for four successive nights I believe abnormal happenings are occurring. I have seen nothing unusual, but i have heard knocks, and I’ve been present when strange occurrences have been witnessed by others in a back bedroom.”
Photographer Morris says: “I was sent to what I was told was a haunted house. When I went into the living room I saw toy bricks flying through the air. One of them hit me on the head. Nobody seemed to be throwing them. They were coming at the speed of bullets. I saw at least three and attempted to photograph them – but they were too fast for me.”
Reporter Bence says: “I saw a yellow brick hit the wall where I lost it in the flash from Morris’s camera. I did not see the brick that hit him on the head and missed a third that others saw.”
In an effort to unravel the mystery, the Daily Mirror called in Mr Maurice Grosse, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, one of the most reputable organisations in the field. Mr Grosse said: “I believe that genuine poltergeist-type phenomena is occurring, but it does not mean it is a haunted house. This type of manifestation is attached to people, not places.” Shortly after Mr Grosse began to investigate, a ten-year-old son of the family returned to residential school and the strange happenings ceased. For 48 hours nothing unusual took place, then on Wednesday night a ten-year-old girl reported that a marble had “flown through the air” in her bedroom. Mr Grosse and Fallows returned to the house. They were joined by Bence and Thorpe.
In the early hours of Thursday, they heard a bump and found a book, which had been on the mantelpiece in the girl’s bedroom, was on the floor. They replaced it. A few minutes later, they heard another bump. Again the book was on the floor.
Bence and Thorpe watched from the doorway of the darkened bedroom. Fallows and Grosse went downstairs. There was an almighty bang. A metal-framed chair near the bed was lying on the floor – 4ft from its original position. As it toppled, Thorpe saw the movement of the chair and photographed it. A few minutes later there was another huge bang. They found the chair in a different position.
On Thursday night the family were alone in the house. They say a drawer of the sideboard in the living room opened by itself. They were so frightened they went to stay with neighbours. Mr Grosse persuaded them to return to the house, and he and the family say they then saw marbles thrown across the living room. Chime pipes from the front door began to swing on their own. A mug of water was found standing on the kitchen floor with only two drops spilt.
Fallows adds: “Because of the emotional atmosphere at the house and in the neighbourhood, ranging from hysteria, through terror, to excitement and tension, it has been difficult to record satisfactory data. Nevertheless, I am satisfied the overall impression of our investigation is reasonably accurate. To the best of our ability we have eliminated the possibility of total trickery, although we have been able to simulate most of the phenomena. In my opinion this faking could only be done by an expert.”
Daily Mirror, 10th September 1977.
Ghost Story
Bryan Rimmer investigates a mystery that has scientists guessing.
World scientists are attending a conference on psychic phenomena at Cambridge University – and last night their subject was a haunted council house in North London. The incredible story of one of the most fascinating ghost hunts of modern times is told here, just as it happened. But we have disguised the nam eof the family involved to save them further stress.
It was a hot August night when a chest of drawers took off across the floor of Peggy H’s sitting room. This inexplicable occurrence triggered an eerie chain of events that have terrified the family, amazed police and journalists and baffled scientists, doctors and researchers. Other astonishing goings-on in the North London council house have included flying objects that seem to be propelled by a supernatural force, a dancing teapot and a spine-chilling voice, apparently from the grave.
Perhaps the voice was the most frightening of all the sinister happenings that have surrounded the family of five and seem to be centred on Mrs H’s two young daughters. It started in mid-December… and it was no ghostly shriek but a rich, deep male voice. Since then, I have spent hours chatting with it – and so have the baffled boffins. Usually the voice speaks through the girls, aged twelve and thirteen and a half, though often their lips do not move. It chats to them as they lie in bed at night, wishes each of the family “Good morning” and often asks for dance music to be played. It gives itself a variety of names: Andrew Garner, Stewart Certain and Dirty Dick.
The Daily Mirror has spent weeks investigating this amazing story and talked to many people who claim to have seen mysterious happenings in th ehouse.
Psychic investigator Maurice Grosse has spent more than 1,000 hours watching the story unfold. Grosse, a level-headed middle-aged business-man has made a signed, typewritten statement to the Mirror. These are the bizarre events he claims to have witnessed:
Marbles and plastic blocks flying across a room – after apparently materialising from walls and windows.
A teapot dancing on a kitchen cabinet top.
The shade on a bed-lamp tilting 45 degrees, then straightening up.
The lavatory door opening and closing, seemingly by itself.
A cardboard box full of cushions thrown at him while he was trying to communicate with the phenomenon by knocking.
A slipper tossed at him across a bedroom.
A settee hurled in the air and overturned when he was standing a foot from it.
The younger sister floating into the air from the chair on which she was sitting, then on to the floor several feet away.
Hearing footsteps walking across the ceiling when there was no one upstairs.
Says Grosse: “I have studied psychic phenomena for forty years and this is the most exciting case I have come across or even read about. I believe it will be the best documented poltergeist case in history. Much of what is going on here is unique and the tests carried out are the most exhaustive. The family are going through a period of tremendous stress because of what happened.”
Grosse remains convinced, despite the fact that in a harrowing scene in the family kitchen the elder girl tearfully confessed to TV ventriloquist Ray Alan that the whole voice episode was a hoax. Ray, better known as the sidekick of dummy Lord Charles, was called in by the Mirror to use his special knowledge as a ventriloquist. The elder girl admitted to him, in my presence, that she and her sister had invented the voices to keep attention centred on them. The next day the girl retracted her admission.
But even if the voice was a fake, it still does not account for the other odd events. The sisters knew nothing about the moving furniture and flying objects, but Dirty Dick and Andrew Garner were products of their imagination. Ray Alan said later: “It’s very sad, but these little girls obviously loved all the attention they got when objects were mysterious moved around the house and they decided to keep the whole thing going by inventing the voice. But it got too big for them and they didn’t know how to stop what they had started.”
Many people, however, as well as Grosse, feel that the manifestations are genuine.
Bumps that have boffins baffled.
Maurice Grosse was not the first person to witness things going bump in the North London night. Before he was called in by the Society for Psychical Research, other independent witnesses had been staggered by what they saw. There were:
The Policewoman: WPC Carolyn Heeps, one of the first outsiders called to th ehouse, saw an armchair move across the living room, apparently of its own accord. She made an official report.
The Author: Guy Lyon Playfair has spent countless days and nights observing the case. He has written two books on supernatural activity and spent four years observing ghostly goings-on in Brazil. He says: “This is my fifth poltergeist case and by far the most interesting. I, personally, have witnessed five incidents for which no reasonable, normal explanation has yet been suggested. Each was recorded on tape.” On one occasion, as the younger girl got out of a heavy armchair, Playfair saw it slide forward and then overturn backwards. NExt, while he was watching the girl, a table overturned.
“One morning I saw a red slipper go over the top of the door of the bedroom opposite mine. I went into the room at once. There was only one place the slipper could be and it wasn’t there. Only the elder girl was in the room. When we went downstairs, there was the slipper on the doormat. Either it went round a corner on its own, or it went through the wall.” Other incidents included a flying book that turned corners, a short conversation with “the voice” by means of rapping, and recording tapes and cables that mysteriously snapped.
The Hypnotist: Ian Fletcher is a surgeon, a hypnotist and a member of the Magic Circle – and it was in this role that he made two visits to the “haunted” house. He said: “What is happening in that house is very strongly suggestive of paranormal phenomena. I hypnotised the younger girl and from what she told me and from what other observers have said, I feel there is a poltergeist presence in the house. On the evidence I have I can’t believe this is a fraud.”
The Engineer: David Annette, product manager of Pye’s business communication closed circuit television, and four other Pye technical experts visited the house with highly sophisticated camera equipment. They set it up in the main bedroom where the girls were sleeping. But the camera jammed and they found the film had come out of the cassette and got entangled with the drive mechanism – so tightly that it would have taken the force of a sledgehammer to get it there. David says: “There’s definitely something odd in that house which I can’t explain.”
The Researcher: David Robertson is assistant to Professor John Hastead, head of physics at London University’s Birkbeck College, who is supervising a series of tests on the girls. He has heard knockings from empty rooms – one that he locked himself – and from a bedboard only a foot from his head. He said: “Once I saw a sideboard lift up at an angle and fall face down on the floor. Many strange things are unexplained.”
The Magician: Milbourne Christopher is one of the world’s most skilled magicians. He is also chairman of the Occult Investigation Committee of the Society of American Magicians – a post once held by Houdini. He believes the only spirits responsible for the events are high spirits – of the girls.
Daily Mirror, 30th March 1978.
“Something terrifying was happening – something we didn’t understand…”
A Jackie Special Investigation.
Have you ever jumped at the sound of “something” moving downstairs, or felt the hairs on the back of your neck suddenly prickle with fear? Then imagine what it must be like to live constantly in fear of the unknown, to feel all the time that not only your family inhabit your home, but someone or something else as well. That’s how Jackie reader, Margaret Hodgson (14) has felt ever since supernatural activity started to occur in her ordinary council house home in Enfield, near London.
Heavy furniture flies about the house of its own accord, Lego bricks jump off the floor and hit people, and the family has even seen a copy of Jackie soar across the room and hit Margaret’s mum on the head. Experts believe it all to be the work of a poltergeist, a low form of the spirit world, which can only make its presence felt by causing physical disruption in the home. This extraordinary poltergeist activity has been seen, not only by the Hodgson family, but by many reliable witnesses, including policemen from the local Enfield station, social workers, neighbours and members of the Society for Psychical Research.
“I’ll never forget the night the whole thing started,” Margaret told me, looking round the cosy sitting-room. “It was the night of August 31, 1977, and I was lying in bed as usual, when suddenly I heard this shuffling noise. I thought it must be a mouse or something, so I called Mum. We both searched round for about an hour, trying to find out what had caused it, but could find nothing. Then we stood in the doorway of my bedroom and switched out the light. Once again we heard the same strange, shuffling sound.”
“Mum quickly switched on the light, and, to our amazement, we saw the chest of drawers slowly moving towards the door! Then it stopped right in front of us,” Margaret went on. “We all tried to push it back against the wall, but it just wouldn’t budge. It was as if some amazing force was holding it there.”
“At that moment, ” Margaret added,”I felt very frightened. I felt cold and shivery – something terrifying was happening – something we couldn’t understand. By this time it was one o’clock in the morning and none of us felt like sleeping, so we all went downstairs to the living-room, but there was no peace there either. Gradually the whole room was filled with a terrible knocking sound, which grew louder and louder. We were absolutely terrified now, and we decided the only thing to do was call the police.”
The police, though, were just as mystified as the Hodgsons. “They made us all stand in the middle of the room, so they could make sure that none of us was responsible for it,” Margaret said. “Of course, the knocking continued,” she went on, “and a chair jumped a foot from the bookcase. The police were completely baffled.”
Gradually, the dreadful knocking died down, and the police went away. No sooner had the family settled down to sleep on the living-room floor, though (they didn’t fancy venturing up to the bedrooms), than some marbles, which had been left in a pile in the kitchen, came pelting at the Hodgsons from all directions. “These were followed by Lego bricks – all flying about the room,” Margaret told me. “We all just lay there totally stunned, except for my little brother, Billy, who’s seven. He thought it was all fantastic fun!”
Since that first night, all those months ago, Margaret and her family have been subjected to more and more of these inexplicable, strange experiences. “Our beds and dressing-tables rock up and down or go banging and crashing across the floor,” Margaret told me. “One night the sheets from my sister Janis’s bed all flew off her bed on to my mum’s while we all watched, flabbergasted, and another time the curtains wrapped themselves round Janis’s neck, while she was sitting in a chair.”
“Talking of chairs,” Mrs Hodgson said, joining in the conversation, “my other son, John (16), was sitting in a chair here when suddenly we saw him rise up, spin round in the air and fall down again.”
“There were seventeen people here for a New Year’s party,” Mrs Hodgson went on, “and they all saw our furniture jumping about the living-room, so it isn’t just our imagination.”
All the family seem to be coping with the problem amazingly well, although it has taken its toll on their nerves and health. “For the first couple of months we were all terrified by this poltergeist – most of all myself, I think,” Margaret said. “But now we’ve become aware that it’s not something evil, more like a mischievous child really. It will throw my slippers at me and then hide them, so I have to hunt for ages, or it’ll throw Billy’s toys around. The worst thing that has happened was when it took the kitchen door off its hinges and hit Mum with it as she was passing through.”
“Honestly,” Margaret went on, “to an outsider, it sounds as if we’re all nuts! But so many people (even the police) have seen the strange things which happen in our house, that we’re definitely not imagining it.”
Mrs Hodgson joked, “When I watched the midnight horror movies on TV, I never dreamt that one day this would happen to me.” Just like a horror story, too, there seems to be no way for the Hodgsons to get rid of their unwanted guest. “People from the Society for Psychical Research told us that there was no point in moving house as the poltergeist will just go with us,” Mrs Hodgson said. “That was confirmed when we moved into my sister-in-law’s house for a while – exactly the same things started happening there. We’ve tried having the house exorcised by a priest, but it made absolutely no difference. If anything, the poltergeist was worse afterwards.”
So, for the time being, the Hodgsons just have to put with it as best they can. “We try not to let ourselves become too worried and upset by it,” Margaret says, “because we were told that the more anxious we got, the worse the poltergeist activity would get. So we realised pretty early on that we would just have to learn to live with it.”
“Most of the time I try to forget about it as much as I can,” she went on. “We carry on with everyday things, and just have to get on with our lives. The Psychic Research people have told us that poltergeists are usually attracted to households where there are teenage girls, so we’re just hoping that as we get older the poltergeist will disappear – but it could be a long wait. Looking on the bright side, we’ve been able to experience things which most people never even dream of,” Margaret said, more cheerfully. “One day I want to be able to tell my grandchildren all about it. But, by then, I hope it will all just be a very distant memory…”
Margaret… and some of the damage done by the poltergeist.
The Hodgsons – Billy (7), Margaret (14), Mrs Hodgson and Janis (12).
Janis and Margaret.
Jackie, 20th May 1978.
The ghost of children present?
By Rosalind Morris.
Reporters shouldn’t be afraid of any assignment but when one evening I was ordered to track down a poltergeist I was less than enthusiastic. And it was not through fear of ghosts. Just the down-to-earth thought of staying up all night with a tape recorder in order to prove that nothing unusual was happening. I was right to worry about losing sleep. I stayed up recording until 5 a.m. on my first visit to a semi-detached Enfield council house where the poltergeist was reportedly active, and I broadcast a short radio report that morning.
Although I didn’t see any chairs or toys flying around, as the family who lived there and their neighbours claimed they had seen, I did hear and see enough to decide that there was something very odd going on in the house. Unlike the other cases of reported poltergeists – the word is German and means noisy spirit – this one has plenty of witnesses to unusual events.
It isn’t just the Hodgsons – the family who live in the house – who have heard and seen things which most of us believe are impossible. In Enfield the first unusual thing Mrs Peggy Hodgson and her four children noticed were loud thumps on the walls of their house. No one could find any explanation for these noises. Having heard and tape recorded the thumps myself I can only say that they do sound unnerving. They do not resemble the kind of noises made by taps or central heating systems, an explanation that would occur to most of us.
Police and many other people who have visited the house have also been unable to work out how furniture, toys and household objects of all kinds were seen to move about, often quite rapidly, by apparently invisible forces. “It didn’t move fast. It didn’t move slow. It just seemed to be dragged about 8 inches,” Vic Nottingham, the next-door neighbour, told me when trying to describe how he had seen an ordinary kitchen chair move, apparently on its own, across the Hodgson’s floor.
Photographer Graham Morris, who visited the house to try to take pictures of the poltergeist, told me he had a bruise for several days after a Leggo brick suddenly whizzed across the living room and struck him on the forehead. He also claims he had unusual electrical faults with photographic equipment he used in the house at Enfield. Electrical trouble developed, too, on video recording equipment taken to the house by engineers from Pye Business Communications.
They weren’t the only items of equipment to be affected. While I was in the house next door, recording for a documentary – to be broadcast at 11 am tomorrow on Radio 4 – faults developed in my tape recorder which BBC engineers could not explain.
There are many theories about poltergeists and those who have studied cases seem to agree on only one thing: that patterns of their strange activities have occurred again and again over the centuries. These include thumps on walls and the movement of all kinds of objects by apparently invisible forces, often in destructive ways. Some poltergeist experts see these events as symptoms of frustration and anger. They say this is expressed through psychokinesis or mind over matter. According to this theory a young person sub-consciously wants to disturb adults – perhaps by picking something up and throwing it. In poltergeist cases the sub-conscious, in ways that we don’t understand, carries out the child’s wishes.
Poltergeist activity often seems to occur where a child or children are separated from one or both of their parents, and also when children are approaching puberty. In the Enfield case the Hodgsons are a single-parent family and two of the children reached puberty a few months after the poltergeist activity started.
All I can say is I have never worked on a more fascinating story. I don’t know why or how apparently impossible events took place at Enfield and why they’re still going on there. But shouldn’t we try to find out?
Evening News (London), 7th February 1979.
The terrifying events at No 284 Green Street.
All the other houses were in darkness. But lights blaze in every window at No. 284 Green Street. This is the home (pictured above) of Margaret Hodgson – reputed to be the most haunted house in Britain. With its neat lace curtains and red-painted front door, it seems no different from the other houses in this North London street. They were built by Enfield Council just over 40 years ago, and generations of contented people have lived in them. Strange things began to happen in Mrs Hodgson’s house two years ago. And they have brought it a chilling notoriety that has attracted the interest of ghost hunters all over the world.
Mrs Hodgson, a divorcee approaching her 50th birthday, brought up her three children in the neat little house, and is considered by her neighbours as a sensible, strong-willed woman. She refuses to catalogue the fearful things that have happened because she thinks people will ridicule her. But she has confided in investigators from the Society of Psychical research.
These are just some of the events recorded in their reports: Pools of water appear where there are no pipes or taps. A settee was raised four feet in the air without being touched. A heavy ash can hurtled across a 10ft. room.
Two investigators have spent 1,000 hours at the house, including 20 all-night sessions. And they have logged an amazing total of 1,500 ghostly incidents. Mrs Hodgson, looking tired and pale, says: “It’s had a terrible effect on the family. They can’t sleep at night and they go to school tired and listless. We keep the lights on every night in every room, but these things keep happening.”
Daily Star, 20th August 1979.
Possessed
The girl inside Britain’s most haunted house.
A pretty young girl lets out a spine-chilling scream in the dead of night. She is a girl possessed… by a supernatural force. This is not some scene from the latest horror film or TV drama. This is real. The girl is Janet Hodgson aged 14, who was photographed by remote-control camera in yet another encounter with the supernatural. For this startling picture was taken in the most haunted house in Britain. More than 2,000 ghostly happenings have been recorded in the small council house in Enfield, North London, where Janet lives with her mother, her sister and two brothers. Since 1977, the Hodgsons have been haunted by ghostly apparitions, flying objects, strange noises and other phenomena. Janet herself calls the weird presence “Charlie.”
Since “Charlie” invaded the house, the Hodgson family have been visited by a stream of psychic investigators, scientists, priests and doctors. Even the police. Nobody now questions Charlie’s existence. But nobody can explain it. An investigator from the Society for Psychic Research, Guy Lyon Playfair, working with Maurice Grosse, plans to publish a book later this year on what these experts call The Enfield Poltergeist. Their carefully-documented study is described as “one of the most violent cases of visitation by a poltergeist.”
For more than two years, events at the house were captured on film by Graham Morris, a news photographer whose picture report appears in today’s Daily Star. The Daily Star also publishes the first full account of the Enfield Poltergeist. It is part of The World Beyond, a sensational new series on the supernatural that will amaze and intrigue you.
‘The Thing’ Tried to Strangle Janet with the Curtain.
By Ellen Petrie.
Janet is a pretty girl with long, fair hair. Like most 14-year-olds she idolises pop stars and her bedroom walls are covered with pictures of Gary Numan. She has a boy friend called Derek, but he never visits her at at home. “He has heard too much about this house. He is frightened to come in,” said Janet. It is no wonder he is scared because Janet lives with her mother, divorcee Mrs Peggy Hodgson, a sister and two brothers in the most haunted house in Britain. Psychic experts and photographer Graham Morris have recorded more than 2,000 strange happenings at the ordinary little semi-detached council house in Enfield, a suburb of North London. The frightening happenings began in September, 1977. There have been ghostly apparitions, and objects fly around the house willy nilly. A heavy double bed overturned on its own. Once a policewoman watched a chair fly across a room. Strange knockings are heard and the normally polite children have been known to speak in gutteral old men’s voices, using vile language.
Janet is brave about it all and even manages to laugh. She calls the strange phenomenon “Charlie” and says with pride awe [sic]: “Some people say the house is even more haunted than the one in the Amityville Horror” – the American haunted house which became the subject of a book and a film. “Some things here have been very funny,” Janet said. “Like the time my sister Margaret peeled potatoes and put them in a pot on the stove. One by one the potatoes jumped out and landed on the floor. We lost a teapot once. It turned up on the lavatory cistern. But floating out of bed isn’t so funny,” she admitted. “I’d be lying there and suddenly feel this force dragging me out of bed and up towards the ceiling. One time I was heading straight for the window and thought I was going to smash right through it. It was a terrifying feeling because you just didn’t know where you were going to end up. Then I’d be hurled to the floor, screaming. One time I got a black eye and another time bruised ribs. Apart from lots of bruises, there was never any serious damage, but it’s frightening to think just what might have happened.”
The strange powers attracted to Janet can make life at school really embarrassing. Janet said: “My desk would move about, and [sic] would disappear from where I’d put them and turn up somewhere else. The other kids call me ‘Ghosty’ or ‘Witchy’ – I’ve got used to it now.
Housewife Mrs Peggy Hodgson looked pale and tired as she told me about the ghostly experiences that have turned her normal, happy family home into a supernatural nightmare. “Furniture overturns, things fly around the room, doors and cupboards swing open,” she said. “I’ve seen ghostly figures and hear voices when there’s nobody in the room. I can’t sleep properly and have been ill since it started. I’ve been in hospital three times and had two operations. Sometimes I’ve just wanted to run away and never go back into the house again. But where can I go with four children? I have to carry on and pretend to be brave for them.”
Besides Janet, and Margaret, 16, Peggy has two sons, Johnny, 11, and Billy, 9. Peggy said: “The council did say they would move us, but the houses they offered were in such a state we decided to stay here. One night ‘The Thing’ nearly killed Janet. The bedroom curtain was wrapped tight round her neck. She was lying in bed screaming. Whatever it was seemed to be really fighting against me and it took all my strength to pull the curtain away from Janet’s neck. One night Billy was lying in bed when a heavy fire grate zoomed across the room. He ducked and it missed his head by inches. Some people say that ‘It is a poltergeist’ but they also tell me that poltergeists don’t harm people. That’s not true in this case.
“At one time we had two psychic researchers practically living with us. Various professors and scientists would also come down to investigate, and the police call in from time to time to check we’re all right. For all their investigations and experiments we don’t know what causes the trouble and I’ve given up trying to work it out.”
The Hodgsons try to lead a normal life. But “Charlie” follows them around. The phenomenon of the man’s voice started when they were on holiday in a caravan at Clacton, Essex. Janet said: “I’ve heard Billy and Margaret speak in the voice – even mum, once or twice. Their lips weren’t moving but it seemed to be coming from inside them. Some of the people who came to investigate the things that were going on seemed to think that we – the children – were responsible. We’re not. You can’t do any of those things to order. They just happen.”
Seeing is believing, says Pc Caroline.
Policewoman Caroline Heeps confirmed that unnatural activity was taking place at the Hodgson house when she went there in 1977. She said: “I saw a chair lift into the air. It moved sideways and then floated back to its original position. I have been called to the house several times since then. The family get very frightened but there is not much the police can do.”
Professor John Hastead, head of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, confirms that some paranormal force is at work in the Hodgson home. He said: “I have experienced it first hand. Once I was upstairs when there was a crash downstairs. I raced down and found a chair overturned although there was nobody downstairs. I have a record on video tape of the children speaking in a deep male voice. You can clearly see on the tape that their lips are not moving.”
Was Janet Possessed By A Devil?
By Graham Morris, who shared the family’s nightmare.
It was in the early hours of a Friday morning in September, 1977, that I first went to what I had been told was a haunted house. The police were there investigating a strange case of flying objects. The Hodgson family – mother and four children – had been watching TV when magazines and children’s building bricks started flying around the room. Mrs Margaret Hodgson, fearing for the safety of her children, took them to a neighbour. The strange disturbance went on for several hours. Eventually the police were called.
When I arrived the Hodgsons were all in the living room of their neighbours, Vic and Peggy Nottingham. The youngest two boys Billy then seven, and Johnny, nine, were asleep on the settee. The girls, Janet, then 12, and Margaret, 14, were awake and frightened. They clutched a bible. Mrs Peggy Hodgson told me about the weird happenings that evening. She took me to her house next door. Everything seemed quiet – and normal. The Nottinghams helped divorcee Peggy to make up beds for the children in her living room. It seemed better and safer for the family to sleep together in the same room that night. The family filed into the house and I stood watching them. As Janet came in things started to happen. Lego bricks flew round the room at the speed of bullets. I tried to focus my camera but a blue Lego brick bounced from the ceiling to the wall and hit me on the forehead. I had a bruise for days.
Even on that first night Peggy Hodgson, who was bringing up the four children on her own, was determined that the family’s life should go on as normal. She is a very down-to-earth, sensible woman. At no time have I seen her hysterical or out of control. After two years of the happenings she told me: “I just wish it would all stop. Why doesn’t it go away?”
After that first night I visited the house regularly, two or three times a week. The family treated me like one of them. After a while the abnormal became normal. We even joked about the phenomenon. We called ‘It’ Charlie and would say, “Come on, Charlie, can’t you do something more exciting than open drawers?” Sometimes it did. Perhaps we were provoking it, but we had to joke to stop ourselves being so frightened. Margaret was always tearful. She would cry at the slightest thing but the other children seemed to cope with whatever it was that was causing the disturbances.
One of the strangest things was to see the children change personality. They’d be chatting perfectly normally, then suddenly their voice would change and they’d develop a deep male voice. The language was coarse and always aggressive. A speech therapist from the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London visited the house and heard the deep voices. She said that even if the children could manage to make their voices go so low, she was convinced that conversations could not have been held over a period of hours with the children “putting on” the deep guttural sounds she had heard. The voices could not be provoked to order. They just seemed to happen. Any one of the four children might suddenly talk in this strange male voice. There was no pattern.
Janet was the victim of fits and trances. In her sleep she’d start screaming and throwing herself around uncontrollably. Once it took five men, including me, to restrain her. We held her down until the doctor arrived and injected her with a sedative. The trances happened while she was awake. Her eyes would glaze over and she’d speak in strange voices, often using language we couldn’t understand.
Although the word was never mentioned in the house I was sure that we were experiencing “poltergeist” activity. Experts say awareness to this phenomenon is experienced more often by pubescent girls so Janet was the obvious suspect. In many photographs when the rest of the family look terrified, Janet seems to have an evil grin on her face. Whenever she was away from home unnatural activity stopped.
The children seemed to accept the recording and photographic equipment installed in their bedrooms. There was a tape recorder in the girls’ bedroom, wired to headphones in the living room and I had cameras set up on remote control. Margaret often told us that Janet “flew” in the night in the bedroom they shared. Janet was unaware of what was happening at the time. She suffered bruised ribs and one very black eye on occasions when she was lifted from her bed. It started gradually. One or both of the girls would roll out of bed and land on the floor. Then the movement went upwards. Janet was most affected. One second she was lying in bed under the covers, the next she seemed to bounce in the air. The bedclothes were hardly disturbed. It was as though Janet had come through them. She appeared to be awake at the time but didn’t remember anything afterwards. Margaret would cry and duck her head in case Janet “flew” into her. During the split seconds in which the pictures were taken I don’t believe there is any way Janet – or any other child – could have got out of bed, smoothed the covers and bounced on the bed. The heights she reached were far beyond where a normal “bounce” could have taken her, and the cameras would have triggered the second she sat up.
The tape recorder in the bedroom meant we could listen to conversations the children had while talking in their sleep. Some nights the girls carried on a strange, adult-like conversation. They talked about people, places and events which we couldn’t recognise. They talked in their own voices but called each other strange names.
Pye Electronics of Cambridge were invited by a university professor to video record the happenings in the Hodgsons’ house. As soon as the engineers switched on their equipment it jammed. When they took the recorder out of the house it worked perfectly. They came back into the house and the equipment jammed again. They couldn’t find a mechanical reason for the technical hitch, but the equipment just wouldn’t work in that house. They didn’t get their film.
Apart from bruises Janet got on “night trips” no-one ever came to serious harm. I have seen many strange things, like chairs and tables mysteriously overturned, a settee raised four feet in the air, a double bed lifted and turned on its side. Objects like crockery, cutlery and books would disappear and re-appear in other rooms. It is frightening to think what could happen if ‘It’ really wanted to hurt someone.
Local people have suggested many possible explanations for the phenomenon. Some say it is the spirit of an angry old man who lived in the house and eventually committed suicide. Whatever, or whoever, it is, it has caused enough damage and disturbance. It is time to let the Hodgson family live in peace.
Story behind the picture.
Suddenly, inexplicably, Janet Hodgson is literally hurled from her bed in the dead of night, propelled by strange forces that defy belief. As she is thrown upwards towards the ceiling, a scream escaping from her lips, he elder sister Margaret is roused from her sleep and cries out in anguish at the bizarre sight. This is not a scene from a film. This is a photograph taken by Graham Morris in the Hodgsons’ terrifying house. He captured it, and other amazing pictures, with a camera that takes five frames a second. It was arranged so that if there was any disturbance Graham, sitting downstairs, could set off the camera in the girls’ room. He also set up a light that cast a beam across the room. When that beam was broken by anyone, or any thing, the camera automatically took a photograph.
Daily Star, 10th March 1980.
Behold! It’s the Enfield horror.
Peter Grosvenor spends a night in Britain’s most haunted house.
On the face of it Janet is a happy, healthy young girl of 14 who lives for school and has half a dozen boy friends, “but no one special.” The wall of her bedroom, shared with 16-year-old sister Margaret, has pin-up posters of John Travolta, Gary Numan, and a photograph of Prince Andrew. A typical teenager’s bedroom you might say… but not quite.
For in the last three years extraordinary things have happened in that bedroom. Such as Janet being thrown bodily to the floor with subsequent bruises on her legs and bottom to prove it… by an unseen force. Such as Janet suddenly levitating and floating bodily through the air while her sister screamed in terror – an episode that has been filmed. Another time her bed clothes were whipped off, then the curtains blew into her room and began to twist themselves into a tight spiril round her neck.
“I woke up and thought I was being suffocated,” said Janet, a pretty, toothy girl with long blonde hair who looks and is, according to doctors who have examined her, a perfectly normal young woman. Nor are these events the result of her fevered imagination. For I met Janet in what has been called the most haunted house in England, a semi-detached council house in Enfield, a suburb of North London, where some 2,000 odd events – flying bricks, coins dropping from ceilings, teapots and spoons bending – have been chronicled by psychic investigators. One of them, Guy Playfair, who has spent two years visiting the house, has now written an extraordinary book of dedicated documentation, “This House is Haunted: An investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist” (Souvenir, £6.95).
If you think psychic researchers are a bunch of nuts (which I don’t) then ask Policewoman Carolyn Heeps who, on patrol with a male colleague, was called to the house because of the disturbances and watched a chair floating through the air, unpropelled by human agency. Or ask the neighbours, like Vic Nottingham next door, a tough-looking building worker and roofer by trade, who was called in by Janet’s mum, Peggy Hodgson, to investigate some mysterious knocking. “I got the fright of my life when the knocking followed me round the house. I’d never even heard of poltergeists before but I believe in them now.”
The same goes for Janet’s uncle John Burcombe, a senior porter at the North Middlesex hospital, who lives just six doors down the road. “When my sister first sent for me in a panic, saying the furniture was on the move, my initial reaction was, ‘Silly cow, she’s been hitting the bottle!’ But I soon changed my mind. For me the worse episode was when I opened their living room door and Janet, who’d been sitting on the settee, came flying across the room as if an invisible person was carrying her, with such force that the door was smashed into my face and my glasses were knocked off. I had a bruise the size of an egg on my forehead. Your first reaction is to look for a normal explanation, but what is it?”
I find it hard to disbelieve these good people, though my own visit to England’s most haunted house was less than dramatic. Divorcee Mrs Hodgson, a plump and rather worried looking (who can blame her?) lady of 50, keeps the house spotless, from the glossy red front door to the newly papered walls. Hard to work up a spooky atmosphere with all that brightness, but on Playfair’s advice I took my faithful black Labrador Blackie as an investigator. “Dogs are very sensitive to the supernatural,” said Playfair. Blackie sniffed around busily and there was a brief moment of excitement when her hackles rose as we sat in the kitchen where a “stranger in black” had once been observed sitting. But this time it proved to be nothing more supernatural than next door’s cat scuttling by.
“Actually, it’s been all quiet on the poltergeist front since April last year and we’re hoping things have quieted down for good,” said Playfair. “I certainly hope so,” said Mrs Hodgson, “I’d really like to leave if the council could find me a new place. I’m not a crank or a spiritualist. Just an ordinary housewife. But it still goes through your mind, all the terrible things that have happened here. You wonder whether you’ll ever forget it.”
Poltergeist is German for noisy ghost. Was Janet possessed by one? “As Bertrand Russell said about electricity, a poltergeist is not a thing, but a way in which things behave,” says Playfair. “Poltergeist activity often takes place at a time of excess energy, for example during puberty, at the time of the first period. There’s usually some kind of trauma – in this case the separation of Janet’s father and mother. You also find altered states of consciousness in a person, a kind of possession in fact, which Janet seemed to manifest.”
Surprisingly, the least affected is Janet. “I was frightened at the time when all these strange things happened, but you just have to accept it. I’m not worried any more. In fact, these days I enjoy reading ghost stories.”
Daily Express, 11th June 1980.
Phantom Fred is a force to fear.
By Val Hennessy.
Guy Lyon Playfair is an earnest, kindly man who wears yellow socks, grows roses and offers me honey to cure my cough and a bunch of rosemary to brighten my hair. Risking ridicule, scientific contempt and a dwindling bank balance he has just devoted two years of his life to investigate the most widely documented poltergeist case in Britain. With his partner, small businessman Maurice Grosse, author Playfair volunteered to help a family who claimed that normal life was being disrupted by strange phenomena in their Enfield Council home.
Over 18 bizarre months Grosse and Playfair became believers as they carefully logged tables flipping over, beds vibrating, sofas levitating, wall echoing and marbles zooming around rooms like hornets. With Playfair playing Doctor Watson to Grosse’s Sherlock Holmes the two intrepid psychic-hunters have now published a thud-and-crash account of their curious experience. Playfair found himself sucked into the Enfield affair when he went to a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research. He volunteered when Maurice Grosse appealed for observers to assist on the poltergeist case. The heroine of this psychic saga was and is Mrs Peggy Hodgson, a single parent who retained her sanity and coped with three children while assorted TV crews, reporters, spiritualist investigators, policemen, vicars and psychiatric social workers tramped through her small home. Somehow she learned to live with pools of foul smelling water appearing inexplicably on her kitchen floor, kettles hurtling through the air and chairs spinning round – not to mention Playfair and Grosse hanging permanently about the landing with tripods, tape recorders, remote controlled flash cameras and video equipment (all inevitably sabotaged by unseen forces).
The disturbance centred mainly on Janet, Mrs Hodgson’s hyperactive 12-year-old who was frequently suspected of playing practical jokes and being solely responsible for the knockings and flying furniture. Janet is the second heroine in this story and must, surely, have possessed the sweetest most tolerant of natures. She didn’t object to Playfair creeping about her bedroom in bare feet trying to detect trickery, or to Grosse flinging the door open and dashing in with his Polaroid in attempts to outsmart her.
Says Playfair: “It was just not possible that Janet could have been faking these phenomena. She was frequently in bed when furniture moved in downstairs rooms. Take the knocking sounds. Grosse decided to develop a rapport with the poltergeist. One evening Grosse was standing on a chair banging on the living-room ceiling (such behaviour was common and presumably Janet was doing her homework regardless), Grosse felt tetchy. “Now listen,” he shouts angrily, “one knock means yes and two mean no. Understand?” Whereupon there is a responsive single knock. “Are you having a game with me?” he roars and the invisible rapper hurls a box across the room which hits him quite a whack on the head.” As Playfair says: “Janet was upstairs so we had a 100 per cent. genuine paranormal incident.”
Paranormal happenings proliferated. Janet levitated in full view of a lollypop lady on duty opposite the Hodgsons’ house. Words were scrawled on walls in excrement which was also found in rooms other than the lavatory. The words “I AM FRED” in strips of plastic tape appeared inside the bathroom door. Mysterious lettering demanded “GET ME A TEA BAG.” The kettle jumped about on the cooker. Clearly the poltergeist was a joker although some of its japes weren’t so harmless. It killed the goldfish. The budgie died. Curtains swished off their wire and whipped round Janet’s neck like a lasso.
Above Mr Playfair’s makeshift desk at his Earl’s Court flat are shelves spilling over with cuttings and documents relating to the affair. “You cannot convince sceptics until they see things for themselves. I’m now used to people dismissing our evidence or accusing me of being dotty.” Certainly there is a fervent intensity about Mr Playfair. He’s into herbs, sunspots and brain awareness but perhaps it is precisely this super sensitivity and slight fanaticism that makes him receptive to ideas that make the rest of us laugh. He maintains that poltergeists are more common than people suspect: “I know of three happening right now. They occur in conditions of frustration or stress and a young person at the age of puberty is the epicentre, it may be a boy or girl. Poltergeists have no sex discrimination…”
It is too easy to scoff at Playfair’s book. But his meticulously collected data, his tape recordings and photographs continue to challenge even the rational sceptic that something inexplicable did occur in the Hodgsons’ home. Playfair rests his case on the fact that he has no scientific explanation for what occurred at Enfield. “There is without a doubt a link between mind and matter. There must therefore be forces and dimensions in our world that are not yet dreamed of – we must learn to be receptive to new phenomena.”
This House is Haunted (Souvenir Press, £6.95).
Evening News (London), 11th June, 1980.