Original subtitles

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 neighbour 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 Hodgsons' living room.

It, erm, came off the floor, oh,

maybe a half inch, I should say,

and I saw it slide off to the right

about three-and-a-half to four feet

before it came to rest.

Erm, 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 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.

OBJECTS WHIZZING

I remember Janet screaming and covering her face.

OBJECTS WHIZZING MARBLES ROLLING

She seemed to be the epicentre of everything.

DISTORTED GIRL 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've been blinded.

I have no idea if any of those pictures are going to 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.

Britain today is on the red line.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

Confusion and anxiety are everywhere.

SHOUTING CONTINUES

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 sceptical and thought,

"Well, what's going to happen"?

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 programme 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.

ELECTRICITY BUZZES

KNOCKING ECHOES

KNOCKING CONTINUES

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 ECHOES

You could never tell where it was.

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 5.30am 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,

catalogue it, conserve it.

Well, this is where I keep a lot of the, er, 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.

There's 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.

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 realised 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 marshalled his resources,

jumped into his car, and went off to Enfield.

And there started the story.

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 realise that

here we had a classic poltergeist case on our hands.

My father was a scientific, rational person, no-one more so.

Erm, 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 3am 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.

OBJECT CLATTERS

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.

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.

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've 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.

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.

KNOCKS TWICE

Two. It's two.

You are a male spirit.

Did you used to live in this house?

KNOCKS TWICE You did.

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

KNOCKS TWICE Yes.

Did you...did you die in this house?

Did you pass on...? KNOCKS TWICE

You did pass on in this house.

That's when he realised 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 sceptic, absolutely sceptical,

until I stepped into the house.

And, at about 9pm in the evening,

the kids were going to bed.

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..."

"..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 haemorrhage..."

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 haemorrhage 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.

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.

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.

OFF-Was that a big distance that Janet was thrown?

Across a room, er,

you'd be looking at about... three or four metres.

That's quite a force to be able

to pick up a 12-year-old girl.

That could've 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".

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've 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 around 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 going to 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 downstairs.

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 haemorrhage, 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.

OFF-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.