It’s the late 1970s in Enfield, North London.
Rows of drab-looking houses make up what’s known as Green Street.
Inside one of those houses two young girls are being asked about a story that has already
made headlines and shocked a nation.
The story contains what we might call supernatural disturbances.
We are talking about moving objects, things flying around the room, knocking inside the
walls, contact with an out-of-this-world entity.
A policeman who went around to investigate said these exact words in his report, “I
then saw a chair slide right across the floor.”
He could offer no explanation as to how this happened.
No one ever has, and more frightening things happened.
This has been called the best case ever for proof of a poltergeist, but there are many
skeptics.
It all started on a balmy night in August of 1977.
A single mother made a phone call to police and told them something they didn’t regularly
hear.
The mother, named Peggy, told the cops she believed her house was haunted.
Things were moving around by themselves.
Sounds were emanating from the walls.
The policeman went around to see what was happening, and as we said, he witnessed a
chair sliding across the floor.
He checked for hidden wires, fishing line, anything that might have been used to move
the object, and wrote in his report that he found nothing.
No crime had been committed, though, so what could the police do.
Unfortunately, in North London there was no branch of Ghostbusters Inc.
At first many people just thought it was the kids playing a prank.
These were the then 13-year old Margaret and the 11-year old Janet.
The two almost became household names because the British media were all over the story.
On TV the two would talk about flying Lego bricks, and generally just things moving on
their own accord.
Maybe they were just kids with very active imaginations, but others came forward, too,
to say they had seen the same.
In interviews one man said he was hit by a flying slipper.
There is an interview with another police officer, and her exact words were, “I saw
a chair levitate.”
Many more people in the end would witness these strange happenings, some say about 30,
but 17 of those people were confirmed and interviewed.
Could they all have been hallucinating?
Could they have all fallen for an elaborate hoax played on them by the kids?
We’ll get around to it later, but we should tell you now that those girls, now middle-aged
women, still say today what they saw was real.
That they had been a part of a haunting.
When you can’t call Ghostbusters perhaps the best thing to do is to call the Society
for Psychical Research, and that’s what the stricken family did.
A member of that society and a paranormal investigator would spend a lot of time at
that house.
His name was Maurice Grosse.
He didn’t have to be there long to claim that he was dealing with perhaps “the best
case this century, maybe of all time, of a poltergeist.”
It wasn’t long until he was conversing with the spirit using a knocking system, one knock
for yes and two for no.
But surely some prankster kid could have been doing the knocking.
Oh yes, there were plenty of skeptics, but also a lot of rational thinking people whose
minds were blown.
It’s written that during the investigation, Grosse, and his partner Guy Lyon Playfair,
logged over 2,000 instances of what one might call paranormal activity.
Moving chairs seemed to be a favorite, but the pair also noted drawers just opening and
closing by themselves, toys flying around the room, things just flipping over and even
pools of water forming for no reason.
We should say as the family, including two young sons, had relatives on the street when
things got too bad they stayed elsewhere.
In November, the mother became quite upset.
Her daughter’s bed had been upturned in the night throwing the young girl to the floor.
Ok, enough is enough, thought the mother.
She said out loud that she wanted to know what was going on.
She left a notepad and paper on the table.
In the morning this is what was written on that pad, “I will stay in the house.
Do not read this to anyone or I will retaliate.”
It just got worse.
The kids were now being knocked out with Valium to help them sleep.
They often just crouched in corners, slept on tables even, because time and again they’d
be found in the morning flipped out of bed, sometimes violently.
The same month a medium was invited to try and talk to this ghost that didn’t seem
to like kids having a good night’s sleep.
His name was Luiz Gasparetto, known as the Brazilian psychic.
All that happened, though, was he made the family feel better.
It’s now December, and Janet, the youngest child, has been acting up.
She speaks in a weird voice as if possessed, and it’s said in a semi-conscious state
she produced a series of rather violent and disturbing drawings.
Janet seems to have it the worst, and now isn’t just being thrown from her bed but
is found sleepwalking.
She believes she was pulled out of bed and led by someone.
Janet seems to be the chosen one, because for one day when Maurice was trying to get
the entity to speak and record it, at first all the thing did was whistle and bark.
But then Maurice got a shock, because Janet then started speaking like an old man.
She said her name was Joe Watson.
All this was recorded.
A few days later and a William "Bill" Wilkins makes an appearance through the girl.
The investigators asked what happened to him, and he replied, “I went blind, and I had
a hemorrhage, and I fell asleep and I died on a chair in the corner downstairs.”
Hmm, maybe that explains the dislike of chairs.
It’s almost 1978 now, but something special is going to happen just before Christmas.
Two independent witnesses explained how one night books, cushions, pillows started flying
around Janet’s bedroom.
Here the spirit through Janet said David should get away, and the door should be locked.
But from the street a woman was walking past the house.
Her name was Hazel Short.
In a statement she said, “When I looked up, a candy-striped pillow hit the window
as well.
That came after the books, and I was...
I don't know if I was frightened or not, just fascinated.
The windows were still closed.
Then after a little while, I saw Janet.”
She then said she saw the girl levitate.
In her exacts words she said she saw Janet, “going up and down as though someone was
just tossing her up and down bodily, in a horizontal position, like as if someone had
got hold of her legs and back and throwing here up and down."
Another man saw the same thing, but again, was this little girl just very good and making
things seem a certain way?
Many more people visited that house, and from all over the world.
It was a big case, only because respected people had all witnessed these strange things,
not to mention police reports stating objects moved in front of officers.
The American magician and paranormal researcher called Milbourne Christophe went over to London,
but he was part of a group that believed this was a giant hoax created by smart or even
crazy kids.
They’d have to be slightly mad to do what happened on their mother’s birthday on January
15th.
The oldest sister went to the bathroom and came out upset.
Someone had written S-H-I-T on the wall and it had been written using human excrement.
Hmm, happy birthday Peggy.
The day got worse because that’s the day Peggy said she clearly saw an apparition of
a man at the bottom of the stairs.
As a single mother with four kids, a poo-paining ghost, months of craziness, Peggy was later
hospitalized.
She was soon released, though.
Many people, supernatural experts, magicians, and the media, made trips to the house.
It’s was like a paranormal circus.
Perhaps the most famous people to visit were the paranormal investigators Ed & Lorraine
Warren.
You might know these guys as they have been portrayed in the Conjuring movies.
On a second trip to London in 1979 they filmed for hours, saying they captured things levitating
and also the "spontaneous removal of the wallpaper.”
They were both convinced the haunting was real, and year’s later Lorraine would call
The Conjuring 2 movie “accurate”.
That’s the one with the Enfield trip in it.
Eventually young Janet stopped speaking for dead people.
She would say she didn’t remember much of what went down when she was in those trance
states, but many years later when she was a middle-aged woman would say in an interview,
“I know what happened and I know what was real.
I don’t care what others think.
I know what was real.”
Her sister would back her up, and looking at the two women it would be hard to accuse
them of lying.
Still, they both admitted at times playing up for Maurice and his team because they liked
the attention, but they said this was only about two percent of the occurrences.
They said they felt bad if nothing happened and someone had come to visit, so a few occasions
did cheat somewhat.
There have been many skeptics of course, with that American magician saying the girls were
behind it all.
He once said, "The poltergeist was nothing more than the antics of a little girl who
wanted to cause trouble and who was very, very, clever.”
Others said Janet was very smart and was able to do amazing things with her voice, which
is possible, but not easy without training.
Many came forward and said it had all been a hoax, just a very good one.
But then there are just some things that still stand out.
Did the kids really go to all that trouble to flip out of bed?
They, or perhaps just Janet, or even the whole family, must have had great sleight of hand
to make things just fall over, slide, fly through the air and make dozens of people
see it.
All that without adults seeing the trick.
One of the better known critiques of the Enfield haunting came from Chris French, a psychologist
who works at Goldsmiths, University of London.
He starts with the basic stuff, saying if the girls said they made up about 2 percent
of what went down it’s likely they were lying about more things.
He then says that famous photo of Janet apparently levitating isn’t exactly trustworthy and
she could have just been mid-jump.
He goes for a bit of a long shot with the police reports, stating that people can be
very suggestible.
Conjurers often make people see something that isn’t actually happening, he says,
and suggests that the cops just saw what they thought they should see.
He added, “I strongly suspect it was Janet and her sister behind it.
There are other cases where schoolgirl pranks have got out of hand.”
Once those sister got going, there was no going back, he believes.
Maybe that is still the case, because they still say what happened, happened.
Another point is that they seemed so scared at times.
Were they incredibly good actresses, these two children?
This is what one newspaper reporter said when he visited the children during the hauntings.
“You had to see it to believe it,” he said.
“They were petrified, they were so frightened.”
He was one of the believers, of course.
And this is what one of the police officers said in an interview, rather than an official
report, when talking about the moving chair, “It came off the floor, ooh maybe a half
inch I should say.
And I saw it slide off to the right, about three and a half or four feet, before it came
to a rest.”
Could suggestibility move a chair four feet?
One inch perhaps, but across the room?
Nonetheless, time and again skeptics have debunked the paranormal story, with one of
them recently stating in The Guardian that none of the occurrences happened under controlled
circumstances.
Expectations can fuel perceptions, said that writer, and people saw what they wanted to
see.
That might not necessarily mean the family was playing tricks, or rather the girls, but
they had become convinced of what their imaginations told them.
It’s time now to leave this open to you.
An elaborate hoax or a real life haunting?
Tell us what you think in the comments.
Also, be sure to check our other show The Ghost Ship That The Government Tried To Keep
A Secret.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.