Enfield poltergeist

[1] Some members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) such as inventor Maurice Grosse and writer Guy Lyon Playfair, believed the haunting to be genuine, while others like Anita Gregory and John Beloff were "unconvinced" and found evidence the girls had faked incidents for the benefit of journalists.

[2][3][4] The story attracted press coverage in British newspapers, has been mentioned in books, featured in television and radio[5] documentaries, and dramatised in the 2016 horror film The Conjuring 2.

In August 1977, single mother Peggy Hodgson called the Metropolitan Police to her rented home at 284 Green Street in Enfield, London, saying she had witnessed furniture moving and that two of her four children had heard knocking sounds on the walls.

[1] Over a period of 18 months, more than 30 people, including the Hodgsons' neighbours, paranormal investigators and journalists, said they variously saw heavy furniture moving of its own accord, objects being thrown across a room and the sisters seeming to levitate several feet off the ground.

[3][6] Society for Psychical Research (SPR) members Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair reported: "curious whistling and barking noises coming from Janet's general direction."

Although Playfair maintained the paranormal activity was genuine and wrote in his later book This House Is Haunted: The True Story of a Poltergeist (1980) that an "entity" was to blame for the Enfield disturbances, he often doubted the children's veracity and wondered if they were playing tricks and exaggerating.

[3][6][7] Other paranormal investigators who visited the Enfield house included American demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were convinced that the events had a supernatural explanation.

[12] Psychical researcher Renée Haynes noted that doubts were raised about the alleged poltergeist voice at the SPR conference at Cambridge in 1978, where videocassettes from Enfield were examined.

[14] In the first edition of the BBC series Hauntings, broadcast on 13 October 2024, it was revealed that the unexplained voice of "Bill Wilkins" was later played on an LBC radio talk show, featuring Maurice Grosse.

A listener to the show identified the voice as that of his father, William Charles Wilkins, who had lived at the house, had gone blind, had suffered a haemorrhage and had died in a chair downstairs, on 20 June 1963.