Enfield Poltergeist

The Enfield Poltergeist arose in August 1977 at 284 Green Street, Enfield, a working-class suburb north of London. The Hodgson family, headed by Peggy Hodgson, a single mother of four, witnessed the first signs of paranormal activity when loud bangs on the walls were heard at night and the girls' wardrobe began shaking violently. Peggy, alarmed, called the local police, who attended but found no physical evidence of intruders. The older daughters, Margaret (13) and Janet (11), were the main focus of the initial disturbances, with objects moving on their own and furniture shifting without any clear explanation. This incident marked the beginning of one of the most documented and most disputed poltergeist cases in modern paranormal history.

The manifestations included heavy furniture such as chairs and tables moving across rooms, synchronised knocking on the walls (the so-called raps) in which the phenomenon answered back by copying the witnesses' sequence, whistling and barking, and hoarse voices, among them that of an old man who identified himself as Bill Wilkins and claimed to have died in the house in 1963 of a brain haemorrhage. The best-known episode is the set of photographs Graham Morris took of Janet in mid-air above her bed: the investigators presented them as levitation, sceptics read them as jumps from the mattress, and Morris himself has given differing accounts over the years. Small spontaneous fires in clothing and toys were also recorded, and several neighbours and police officers stated that they had witnessed some of the phenomena.

The main investigation was carried out by Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, of the Society for Psychical Research, over eighteen months and more than a hundred and eighty hours of recordings, on which the voice claiming to be Bill Wilkins was captured. Journalists from the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror passed through the house, as did other investigators. The case was never unanimous, not even within the SPR itself: Janet and Margaret later admitted faking some of the episodes, by their own account to see whether Grosse and Playfair would catch them, and the researcher Anita Gregory, who also visited the house, signed a highly critical report. Grosse and Playfair maintained that the bulk of the incidents remained unexplained, and that disagreement is now part of the case itself.

The Enfield Poltergeist is regarded as a classic model of phenomena linked to adolescents in difficult family settings, with the distinctive feature of a voice attributed to a specific dead man, Bill Wilkins, which sets it apart from other cases. It inspired the film The Conjuring 2 (2016) and numerous documentaries, and returned to public attention in 2016 with interviews given by an adult Janet Hodgson, who stood by her account. It contributed to the development of modern poltergeist studies and fuelled the debate between recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), which places the origin in the focus person, and the hypothesis of an independent presence. It remains the most cited British case and also one of the most contested: there is no consensus about what happened on Green Street.