The Enfield Poltergeist, 1977–1979

About 5 min read

On a quiet street in Brimsdown, Enfield, in north London, stands an ordinary end-terrace council house at 284 Green Street. Between 1977 and 1979 it became the setting for one of the most thoroughly recorded and fiercely argued paranormal cases in history. Furniture moved across rooms while adults watched. A police officer signed a statement about a chair sliding by itself. A gruff male voice spoke through an eleven-year-old girl and named a man who had died in the house years earlier.

The case was investigated for more than a year by researchers from the Society for Psychical Research, covered relentlessly by the press, and later dramatised in the film The Conjuring 2. It was also, by the admission of the children at its centre, partly faked. That tension — between careful documentation and admitted trickery — is what makes Enfield impossible to dismiss and impossible to prove.

Table of Contents

An Ordinary Family

The house was home to Peggy Hodgson, a divorced mother of four, and her children: Margaret, 13, Janet, 11, Johnny, 10, and Billy, 7. The disturbances began in late August 1977. The children reported knocking sounds in their bedroom, and Peggy found a chest of drawers sliding across the floor. Each time the family pushed it back, it moved again. On 31 August 1977 the family called the Metropolitan Police. Police Constable Carolyn Heeps attended the house and later signed a statement recording that she saw a chair slide across the floor with no one near it. She could not determine the cause of the movement. That signed police statement is one of the earliest official records in the case: a trained observer, with no prior involvement, documented something she could not explain.

Over the following weeks the reported phenomena escalated. Toys and furniture were said to fly across rooms, and heavy pieces of furniture moved while adults watched. Janet, the eleven-year-old at the centre of the case, was reportedly lifted from her bed, and photographs taken during the investigation appear to show her suspended in mid-air above it.

The Investigators Move In

Within days, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) sent two investigators: Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair. They would spend more than a year on the case, making well over a hundred visits, including all-night vigils, and logging more than 2,000 separate incidents. They amassed hours of audio recordings, photographs, notes and witness statements. More than 30 outside witnesses — neighbours, journalists from the Daily Mirror, clergy, a physicist and a psychiatrist — reported phenomena they could not explain.

The most striking element of the case emerged in December 1977: a deep, gravelly male voice that seemed to speak through Janet. The voice identified itself as Bill Wilkins, a former resident of the house, and described dying of a haemorrhage while sitting in his favourite armchair. Investigators later traced a real Bill Wilkins, a man who had lived and died in the house in 1963, and a listener to a radio talk show identified the recorded voice as his father’s.

Playfair, who published his account as This House Is Haunted in 1980, maintained that the activity was genuine. He argued that the voice’s low register was beyond the normal range of a child’s vocal cords, and that most incidents occurred when Janet had no opportunity to fake them. Grosse agreed. Both men acknowledged, however, that some incidents had been faked by the girls — a concession that their critics would return to again and again.

The Sceptics’ Case

The case against Enfield is as well documented as the case for it. Janet was caught on a video camera in an adjoining room bending spoons and attempting to bend an iron bar. Grosse himself observed her banging a broom handle on the ceiling and hiding his tape recorder. When Janet and Margaret admitted to journalists that they had faked some incidents, Grosse and Playfair pressed the girls to retract their confessions.

Other members of the SPR were unconvinced. Anita Gregory called the case “overrated” and concluded the girls had staged incidents for journalists, and former SPR president John Beloff suggested Janet was practising ventriloquism. Ventriloquist Ray Alan, who visited the house, concluded the male voices were vocal tricks, and stage magician Milbourne Christopher, who investigated briefly, found nothing he considered paranormal.

Sceptical investigator Joe Nickell, examining Playfair’s account and contemporary press reports, argued that the supposedly levitating photographs showed Janet bouncing off her bed, that the poltergeist “tended to act only when it was not being watched,” and that a tape-recorder fault attributed to supernatural interference was a common threading jam in older reel-to-reel machines.

The Case Fades, the Argument Continues

The most active period ran from August 1977 through late 1978, tapering off into 1979 — roughly eighteen months in total. No one was seriously hurt: the phenomena caused minor bruising at most, and the only death connected with the house was Bill Wilkins’ natural death in 1963, years before the disturbances began.

The house itself is still there, a private home, and the case has never left public discussion. The BBC broadcast a radio documentary in 1978, Channel 4 aired Interview with a Poltergeist in 2007, Sky broadcast the drama The Enfield Haunting in 2015, and Apple TV released a documentary miniseries in 2023. The SPR’s archive of recordings has been catalogued and digitised, and The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes was published in 2019. The case was later dramatised in the film The Conjuring 2, based on a brief visit by American demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren — a visit researchers describe as short, not the in-depth investigation the film suggests.

What the Evidence Says

Documented: The disturbances at 284 Green Street, Enfield, ran from late August 1977 into 1979, centred on Janet Hodgson, 11, and Margaret Hodgson, 13. Police Constable Carolyn Heeps signed a statement that she saw a chair slide across the floor with no one near it. SPR investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair investigated for over a year, logging more than 2,000 incidents and recording hours of audio. More than 30 outside witnesses reported phenomena. A real former resident named Bill Wilkins died in the house in 1963.
Claimed, not proven: That furniture moved by itself, that Janet levitated, and that a genuine discarnate voice spoke through her. Playfair and Grosse believed some incidents were genuine; no incident was ever demonstrated under controlled conditions, and the famous levitation photographs are equally consistent with a child jumping on a bed.
Proven false or disputed: That all of the phenomena were genuine — the girls themselves admitted faking some incidents, and Janet was caught on camera bending spoons and attempting to bend an iron bar. The claim that Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated the case in depth is disputed; their visit was brief. The idea that the voice of “Bill Wilkins” could not have been produced by a child is contested by ventriloquists and magicians who examined the recordings, and by SPR members who concluded the girls were playing tricks.

What Remains Unknown

Enfield remains unresolved precisely because both sides have evidence. The police statement, the volume of witness testimony, and the Wilkins identification are difficult to wave away — and so are the spoon-bending, the retracted confessions and the girls’ own admissions. No single explanation accounts for all of it.