Original subtitles

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

- It was 1977, and I was working as a photographer

on "The Daily Mirror" newspaper.

And I was doing the late shift.

You'd be just sitting there on call

waiting for anything to happen.

Could be parties, celebrities,

car crash, plane crash, murders.

It could be absolutely anything at all.

And then, quite late at night,

this one call had come in from a family in Enfield

saying that weird things have been happening in their house.

Furniture had been moving around on its own.

And, of course, nobody really believed it.

A lot of people phone up newspapers

and tell you all sorts of things,

so we didn't know what to believe.

But a second call came in where a neighbor had said

that the police had seen things move around the house

and they were convinced there was

something strange happening in the house.

♪ ♪

- The local police reported seeing an armchair levitate

across the Hodgson's living room.

- It came off the floor, oh,

maybe a half inch, I should say,

and I saw it slide off to the right

about 3 and 1/2 to 4 feet before it came to rest.

Um, I checked to see whether or not

it could possibly have slid along the floor.

I placed a marble on the floor to see whether or not

the marble would go in the same direction as the chair did,

and it didn't, didn't roll at all.

I couldn't find an explanation at all.

♪ ♪

- I drove up with the reporter, Doug Bence.

We had no idea what we'd find when we got there.

We pulled up at Green Street, Enfield,

jumped out.

♪ ♪

The house looked perfectly normal.

Didn't look anything-- anything special.

Peggy Hodgson was a mother, single mother,

trying to bring up a family of four on her own.

She couldn't cope.

- When I did see the dressing table moving,

I just couldn't believe it.

In fact, I pushed it back twice,

and the third time, I couldn't move it.

But while I was doing it and while I was in the room,

I was literally trembling,

and my mouth went completely dry

because I didn't really know what I was up against.

It's almost as though someone's standing there

with an invisible hand and lifting it

from one place to the other.

- It was decided that I would go into the house

first of all, and I planted myself

right in the very far corner of the kitchen.

Then the family came in,

and nothing happened really.

That was--that was it. Nothing at all

until the last child, Janet,

who was about 11 or 12, she was brought in.

Suddenly things just took off,

flew around the room as if you fired them out of a gun.

You know, it was sort of marbles and LEGO bricks.

They were really moving, hitting the walls,

hitting windows.

I remember Janet screaming and covering her face.

She seemed to be the epicenter of everything.

[child screaming]

And then, suddenly I got hit by a LEGO brick.

And it brought a lump up on my right eyebrow.

If it weren't for having the camera up over my face,

that force, I would have been blinded.

I have no idea if any of those pictures are gonna come out.

It was quite frustrating because it was just

shots of the family there

rather than seeing marbles whizzing across the room.

Looking back at it,

I still haven't got the faintest idea

of what happened in that house.

[dramatic music]

- Britain today is on the red line.

[indistinct chanting]

Confusion and anxiety are everywhere.

As people search for meaning,

many have become fascinated by the supernatural,

the occult, and the paranormal.

- Blockbuster horror films had people fainting in the cinema.

- Beat down Satan under our feet!

- And we've had regular reports

of hauntings and possessions.

♪ ♪

- The Hodgson family from Enfield in North London

aren't getting on too well with what they believe

to be a poltergeist.

- A poltergeist is a ghost

which makes its presence known through noises.

- Those who've studied the phenomenon say

it concentrates its attention on adolescent children.

11-year-old Janet Hodgson appears to be the focus

of many of the strange happenings in Green Street.

- I was a reporter for BBC "World at One"

and "World This Weekend," and I was working

on "World This Weekend" on the Saturday

when "The Daily Mirror" had this headline:

"The House of Strange Happenings."

You don't usually get kind of ghost stories

on the front page, do you?

It wasn't necessarily news in the sense that--

not hard news anyway--

and I was threatened all day with, if nothing else happens,

you'll have to go and cover this ghost story in Enfield.

It's well known that when a reporter is sent out

to a ghost story, absolutely nothing happens.

I mean, it's really, you know, difficult to report on.

So I didn't really want to do it at all.

But in the end, nothing else happened that day,

so I went out to Enfield on a Saturday evening

and was quite skeptical

and thought, well, what's gonna happen?

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

I thought Mrs. Hodgson seemed a very sensible woman.

She seemed very normal and ordinary and down-to-Earth.

She had four children.

Johnny was ten, Billy was seven,

Margaret was 13, and Janet was 11.

♪ ♪

Mrs. Hodgson was divorced, and her husband wasn't there,

and the family were obviously quite poor.

And there didn't seem anything remarkable about the family.

Just what was happening to them seemed remarkable.

At the time, I was just focused

on the fact that I needed to get something

that could go on the program the next day.

It's now about half an hour since the family settled down

for the night, and Janet, who's the 11-year-old,

the one we've been watching most,

she now seems to be asleep.

She's not really moving around very much.

[knocking]

[knocking continues]

I was in the front room,

and it was really quite loud

and quite persistent sort of knocking.

It wasn't like a knock on the door.

It was like a knock on the wall,

and sort of high up on the wall sometimes.

[knocking]

You could never tell where it was.

[loud thud]

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

We've just heard a noise having come downstairs.

We've just heard a noise upstairs.

And the chair which was standing by Janet's bed

appears to have moved.

Now the chair was by the bed, and it's now by the door.

Well, Janet appears to be sleeping quite peacefully.

Well, I'm hoping I'm not getting the microphone

shaking in my hand because that was rather

an unnerving experience.

- Roslyn, you're looking fairly fresh, I have to say,

after that night and being up till 5:30 this morning.

Are you persuaded?

- I think I more or less am, yes.

♪ ♪

I couldn't explain what had happened that night.

It did all seem extremely odd.

And I thought there really was something strange

going on in that house.

- As a couple of "Daily Mirror" hacks,

you know, we were out of our depth,

so we had no idea what this was about.

So we decided that the Society for Psychical Research

had to get involved.

They'd studied this sort of stuff over the years

in lots of different countries around the world,

and they knew what they were doing.

And we certainly didn't.

♪ ♪

- The Society for Psychical Research,

which was founded in the 19th century,

does research into a whole range of different types

of alleged paranormal phenomena.

So this can range through the whole gamut

of apparitions, poltergeist,

spiritual mediums,

extrasensory perception.

Just about you name any anomalous phenomena

that you can think of, and the SPR is interested

in investigating it in a scientific manner.

My role in the SPR is the honorary

archive liaison officer, which means that I basically

collect archive material, catalog it, conserve it.

Well, this is where I keep a lot of the paranormal,

shall we say, archive.

Up here we have the Enfield box,

which has the items that were thrown around

in a poltergeist-like manner.

So here we have the LEGO bricks.

And one of the first times that anything flew in the air

was when a piece of LEGO brick hit the photographer,

Graham Morris, brought up a bit of a bruise on him,

and with such a volition

that it couldn't have just been sort of chucked in the air

and hit him on the head or something.

It had to be thrown very hard.

And at the time, everybody was in view.

There were quite a few people there.

So I don't think he ever managed to explain how,

other than through some paranormal force,

this thing managed to throw itself across the room

and hit him.

The posh words for this, psychokinetic energy,

which means things that get thrown around, basically.

The explanations are the same as they are

for all of this sort of phenomena,

ranging from fraud at one extreme

to spirits at the other extreme,

and plenty of other things in between the two.

Fraud could have been, in an extreme circumstance,

somebody palming a piece of the LEGO,

waiting until they were pretty sure that nobody was looking,

and then throwing it as hard as they could,

aiming it at poor old Graham,

it hitting him so that it brought up a bruise on him.

Graham didn't know what was going on,

so he contacted the SPR.

And then the SPR contacted Maurice Grosse to say,

you live relatively near-- he lived in Muswell Hill--

would you like to go along and investigate?

Maurice had not been a member of the SPR

before this case for very long.

The first job that Maurice had in the SPR

was actually the Enfield case.

[soft inquisitive music]

♪ ♪

- My father was 20 in 1939,

and he joined the Royal Artillery straight away.

And in fact, he was in the expeditionary force

to Dunkirk.

He ended as an acting captain.

And at the end of the war,

he was in retail, designing and inventing.

And then my father showed interest in psychic phenomena

and joined the Society for Psychic Research.

And after a period of time,

he realized that the only way to really get anywhere

with this subject was to research it on the ground.

And he'd been badgering the secretary for a case.

And the secretary had got in touch with him

and said, Maurice, there's something going on

in Enfield in Middlesex.

Would you like to go and have a look?

So he jumps at the opportunity.

And he marshaled his resources,

jumped into his car, and went off to Enfield.

And there started the story.

[music building]

♪ ♪

[knock on door]

- I found chaos.

And there were a lot of very, very frightened people there,

so we sat down, and we talked about what was happening.

And I began to realize that here we had

a classic poltergeist case on our hands.

- My father was a scientific, rational person,

no one more so.

Um, and he would have been looking at everything

with a very critical eye,

learning each hour, each day,

and assessing each event as it came along.

- I have actually seen myself marbles being thrown about

because they'd been thrown at me.

I've seen the door moving backwards and forwards

as though the wind was blowing it.

I've seen a T-shirt jump off the table onto the floor.

The door chimes on the wall,

I've seen them moving on their own.

I've also experienced the reduction of temperature.

- Janet was the focal point of activity.

My father became clear about that from relatively early on.

His enthusiasm was unbounded here.

I mean, I would come back from a discotheque

at 3:00 in the morning, and he'd be going off to Enfield.

We have our morning debrief sessions over breakfast,

and out would come the tapes,

and he would tell me the stories,

the new events, the progressions.

♪ ♪

[footsteps]

- And it is one of the extraordinary coincidences

that his very first case should be

one of the most important cases

in the history of paranormal phenomenon.

[electric crackling]

[eerie music]

- We were there just about every night.

It was too fascinating not to.

- We'd be sitting in the sitting room

for hours and hours

just waiting for something to happen.

And then, bang!

Got upstairs to find this bed that turned itself sideways

and was stood up against the wall.

And we couldn't have done that between us,

and let alone children.

And heavy chests of drawers,

big pieces of furniture would move.

Chairs would slide across floors staying upright.

My role then was to do sort of continuity pictures.

So I'd go into the house, and I'd take a picture

of each room, showing everything that was there.

And then when something happened,

piece of furniture moved or whatever,

I'd be the first one to go back in and take a picture again.

Everywhere Janet went, it seemed to follow her around.

That was quite frightening for her.

She hated that.

There was just so much of it.

We were seriously worried that somebody at some point

could get hurt and could be badly hurt.

♪ ♪

[soft scratching]

[ominous music]

[loud scraping]

- There's an old fireplace in the bedroom.

Janet said to me, "I can hear this scraping sound."

And she says, "Oh, my God, the fireplace is moving."

And all at once, the front of the fireplace lifted up,

and it lifted right over the double bed

and right onto the side of the camp bed

because Billy was next to me at that time.

We just sat there looking at one another.

We didn't know what to do. We were so scared.

- A fireplace had flown across the room and almost hit Billy,

the seven-year-old boy, in the face.

It could have killed him.

- The fireplace was a turning point as to my father.

For the first time, it was dangerous

and worried him hugely.

- Mum was beside herself.

Mum was trying to bring up four kids, no husband,

and just didn't need it, you know.

So it was just awful.

It was just too much for her.

[high-pitched ringing]

Janet couldn't get away from it, couldn't shake it off.

It was just always with her...

Whatever it was.

- As the activity gained in momentum,

it changed.

It became more intelligent.

- Are you a male spirit?

Knock one for no and two for yes.

[two knocks]

- Two. - It's two.

You are a male spirit.

Did you used to live in this house?

[two knocks]

You did.

Was it--was it more than 50 years ago?

[two knocks]

Yes.

Did you--did you die in this house?

Did you pass on? [two knocks]

You did pass on in this house.

- That's when he realized he was dealing

with some form of entity that could communicate.

- What happened next was completely unexpected

and very disturbing.

- I want you to call out my name,

my complete name, Maurice Grosse.

- These voices came from Janet.

And they were very strange and gruff

and very deep like a grumpy old man.

- Come on. Let me hear you say my name.

- Maurice.

Maurice.

Maurice.

- I thought, well, I've got to record that,

so with Maurice Grosse,

I went and talked to the girl.

And the voice just started talking.

- People say to me, where do the voices come from?

I don't know. They were just there.

Really strange.

I've never known anything like it,

but then that's true of most of the Enfield poltergeist.

I mean, I've never known anything like it

before or since.

♪ ♪

- I was a skeptic, absolutely skeptical,

until I stepped into the house.

And at about 9:00 in the evening,

the kids were going to bed.

[electric crackling]

And the kids were in the room, the door was closed,

and almost immediately this voice started,

this old man's voice talking.

I went into the room, and I was told

I had to stand facing the door.

I said to him, to the voice, I said...

I want you to tell me whether you remember

what happened to you when you died.

And he said, "I'm Bill Wilkins..."

both: "And I died 15 years ago.

"I'm 72 years old,

"and I used to live here.

"Just before I died, I went blind.

And then I had a hemorrhage..."

- It had identified itself as Bill Wilkins.

The intellect behind the voice was not Janet's.

Can an 11-year-old child speak in a gruff old man's voice

for literally an hour or more

and not show any sign of distress,

not cough, not splutter?

You would say, that is impossible,

and that's my position.

Also, the chances of Janet even knowing

what a hemorrhage was had to be close to zero,

so we're talking about language and knowledge

which was outside of Janet's experience or understanding.

Obviously, the examination of the voice to try

and discover what it was and where it was coming from

was of paramount importance.

They asked Janet to put some water in her mouth

but not swallow,

and then they put some tape over her mouth.

So the water was in her mouth, and her mouth was taped shut.

♪ ♪

The voice was not coming from her.

It was coming from behind her.

- I could see the family deteriorating

because the upheaval of not only

what was happening in the house,

but also having all these strangers coming to your house

to do whatever they needed to do to prove

that this thing was happening.

Maurice Grosse was quite excited about the whole thing

because this was suddenly taking on a different feel.

And Janet, who was just completely mystified,

wanted it to go away.

There she is a 12-year-old girl

being possessed by a 72-year-old man

who died in a chair downstairs years before.

This was taking over her life.

[child screaming]

Suddenly one night, there was this enormous scream

and then a crash.

Everybody rushed upstairs to see what had happened

and found Janet lying facedown on the floor

in a bit of a heap.

Maurice asked her what happened,

and she just said that there was someone there

who had just grabbed her and thrown her out of bed,

thrown her across the room.

So I had to then try and photograph it somehow.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

So I set up a camera on a tripod,

corner of the room, flash gun.

The camera was triggered by a cable

that ran down the stairs into the room below

where we were all sat with a tape recorder running

where we could hear what was happening live in the room.

And as soon as we heard a noise,

I'd hit the button, it would take loads of pictures.

[loud thud]

♪ ♪

When the pictures were taken, they were at least

a sixth of a second between each frame.

She started off flat in bed normally.

The next shot, the covers had come away.

Her arms were flat by her side.

There is no picture of her between flat

and coming out of the bed.

There's not one picture of her climbing up

or moving the covers down to get her legs out or anything.

She's gone from that to that.

- She's literally flying... - In a sixth of a second.

- Was that a big distance that Janet was thrown?

- Across a room, uh,

you'd be looking at about 3 or 4 meters.

That's quite a force to be able

to pick up a 12-year-old girl.

That could have done her some serious damage.

Maurice, as soon as he'd seen the pictures,

he then said, oh, they're levitating.

But there were lots of different theories

as to why they could or could not be levitation.

- The number of people that have looked

at that photograph and said,

"She's just jumping."

You know, you'll get people saying,

should her knees be flexed and so on.

You know, would her body be in that position?

But I just looked at the face, and I thought to myself,

mm, that's not someone who's playing.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- It was reported by several people

who had nothing to do with the family

that they'd seen Janet floating

around the upstairs bedroom.

I went and interviewed two eyewitnesses,

one of whom was the school crossing warden.

The house was opposite the school.

And she had looked up

and seen Janet floating around the room.

And she was very shaken by this,

but she was prepared to be interviewed about it.

- I was standing there looking, and all of a sudden,

I saw the middle girl, Janet,

going up and down in front of the window.

Well, I thought that she was jumping

up and down on the bed.

But when I looked, she was horizontal,

going up and down with her arms

and legs going everywhere.

And I suppose she did this about half a dozen times,

and then it stopped.

- What was interesting about all this

was that people who had no skin in the game

were prepared to be interviewed about it

because they'd seen something so extraordinary.

- The lollipop lady and the baker both believe

that they saw Janet actually in the horizontal plane

going up and down rather than this sort of straight up

and straight down, almost like a triangle shape,

which it looks like from Graham's photographs.

If Janet was physically fit enough,

which she possibly was, then there is a possibility

that she could have been manufacturing this herself,

and this sort of correlates, if you like,

with "The Exorcist" film, which came out in 1974.

Remember, this was all happening in 1977,

and it's possible that Janet may have seen the film

or seen clips of it somewhere or the other

and that she was therefore trying to copy

what was going on there.

There were several members of the SPR who,

without displaying a corporate viewpoint,

as individuals felt that it was not real, the levitation.

And they put that into print occasionally

and defended their case.

Maurice was very upset about some members being so hostile

to his interpretation of what was going on.

And so the controversy raged backwards and forwards.

I think that a few members of the SPR felt

that Janet's motive for levitating,

if you want to call it that,

was because she wanted to have fun.

She wanted to draw attention to herself.

She wanted to be special,

because she was the star of the show

for quite a bit at the time.

And I think she probably enjoyed that

as a break from some of the miseries

that she was suffering in her childhood

and at the time of her life.

- I had been there up to four nights a week

for months by the time we got 'round to the voices.

It was getting a bit like a circus by then anyway.

There were so many people coming and going in the house.

All these experts were brought in,

doctors and voice coaches,

and all sorts of people that would be there

to try and prove that she couldn't do this.

It was crazy.

It was like Victorians pitching up a Bedlam hospital,

you know, and putting up scaffolding and looking

over the wall and watching them for the afternoon.

Janet wanted everything to go away.

She was scared of the whole thing.

I was really worried that she was gonna get

seriously hurt at some point.

- It did get worse and worse,

and Janet did actually get quite ill.

She was getting quite frightened

by feeling that things were happening to her.

She felt that something was pushing her around,

pulling her out of bed, wrapping her in a curtain

and nearly strangling her, making her fall down stairs.

[soft dramatic music]

She was put in the Maudsley for two months,

which is a psychiatric hospital in South London.

♪ ♪

I visited her a week later,

and she was calmer and more cheerful

and said she was getting more sleep.

And I think it was good for her

to get away from the house

because there were a lot of demands on her.

The doctors gave her lots of tests,

and they decided that she was just a normal child.

There wasn't anything wrong with her.

And she was discharged after six weeks.

- After Janet got back from the Maudsley,

the activity died down.

It felt like it was time to go.

It had run its course.

That was it.

Maurice was desperate to see it through to its end

and found it very hard to leave it.

It turned out that he also had a daughter called Janet,

and she had died in a car crash recently,

you know, just before he came along to the house.

And he did mention that he was hoping somehow

that it was his daughter trying to contact him.

The chap who's coming along to try and solve

the whole mystery was really being sort of sidetracked

by this unfortunate incident

that had happened with his daughter.

- My sister, Janet, was two years younger than me.

She decided she wanted to be a reporter.

She had moved on to the Cardiff "Leader,"

and it was in Cardiff that she was killed

in a motorcycle accident.

When Janet died, obviously,

the effect on my parents was profound.

For my father, he found a practical outlet.

He decided that he wanted to look at psychic phenomena,

the paranormal, in more detail.

When he arrived at the house, he was struck by the fact

that one of the girls was called Janet.

He didn't give it anything other than passing mention,

the fact that she was called Janet.

A lot of people thought it was terribly important.

A lot of people tried to attribute to him

an emotional connection to the case,

to Janet, to what was going on--

entirely wrongly.

It's an easy thought.

But it wasn't one that was borne out,

because at the end of the day,

the entity was Bill Wilkins,

not Janet Grosse.

This was a statement of fact.

So therefore, it should be verifiable.

There was an extraordinary event

that happens sometime later.

My father was on a talk show on OBC,

and they played some of the tape.

- They had a phone call, and they said,

a gentleman wants to speak to you.

He says it's important. So they put him on,

and he said, well, I know that voice.

That was my father, Bill Wilkins.

He did live in that house, went blind,

had a hemorrhage, died downstairs,

and he was buried in a cemetery down the road.

"Treasured memories of dear husband and father,

William Charles Wilkins, died 20th June, 1963."

♪ ♪

Do I believe in ghosts?

It's hard to say no

because I've had a conversation

with Bill Wilkins, who's dead.

It opens the door for such a question,

and as a result, I can't close it.

- The Enfield tapes are in that box.

Those are the original reel to reels,

and these are the Enfield cassette tapes

that belonged to Maurice Grosse.

So they're all in those boxes there.

So these are the recordings that Maurice made

of just about all the phenomena that occurred there

from an auditory viewpoint between 1977 and 1979.

- That's a long time. - Yeah.

- Have you listened to all of it?

- I've listened to all of the recordings twice.

I would say hundreds of hours and approaching thousands

of hours have been spent listening to it.

I'm not happy with the voice at all

because I think that it doesn't fit with me.

I don't like the sort of things it was coming out with.

A lot of the time it wanted to--

it swore a lot of the time,

very bad swearing constantly,

as if somebody is allowed to swear

because they're not who they really are.

So they can swear and get away with it

because it's not me swearing, Mummy.

It's the voice swearing.

My overall thoughts about the case in Enfield

are that I think that there was more playing about

going on than Maurice believed there was,

but I don't think it was all playing about.

The incidents that I think from my own viewpoint

have the most credit are things where things appeared on tape,

so you could hear them-- alas you couldn't see them,

but you could hear them, you could hear the reactions

of the people, and you thought, well,

there's something happening there that just doesn't fit.

I do think some of the activities

that occurred there were beyond our normal senses,

and therefore needing to be investigated more.

- I never want to do anything like this ever again

because it was very disturbing.

It was really worrying.

It was dangerous and difficult,

and you didn't know what was happening.

And while it was extremely interesting

to record it as an observer,

it was very, very disturbing.

- I don't mention it.

I don't tell anyone I know.

You know, I haven't told my wife.

I hadn't told my daughters.

I haven't told anyone really,

because they wouldn't believe you.

If you told them what happened,

they'd just think you're mad.

It's too strange.

People can't get it into their heads.

45 years later, I'm no closer now to knowing

as I was on day one when I walked into the place.

♪ ♪