The Enfield Poltergeist

The story

This page covers an event, not a place to visit. Between 1977 and 1979, a family in a council house in Brimsdown, in the London Borough of Enfield, reported knocks, moving furniture and a rough voice. The activity centered on two sisters, Janet, aged 11, and Margaret, aged 13. We do not give the street or the family's surname: it is a private home and later residents have lived there.

The chronology below comes from Wikipedia and the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia; we read no document from the time. On 31 August 1977 the mother called the police after knocks and a chest of drawers that moved. An officer said he saw a chair move and slide and could not explain it. The Daily Mirror visited on 4 and 7 September and followed the story for about 18 months. On 5 September the SPR investigator Maurice Grosse became involved, and the writer Guy Lyon Playfair joined on 12 September. They would make about 180 visits and 25 night vigils over a year. In December 1977 a gruff voice, calling itself "Bill Wilkins", was attributed to Janet. The SPR members Anita Gregory and John Beloff visited and were unconvinced. In May 1978 the SPR set up a review committee, whose report (which we did not read) is said to have found much of the testimony to be clear and convincing while reserving judgment on the voice. The activity reportedly declined during 1978, and BBC Radio 4 aired a documentary on 26 December 1978. Playfair's book This House Is Haunted followed in 1980.

The legend

What is reported: thrown objects such as marbles and Lego, moved furniture, knocking, the levitation of Janet seen in press photographs, bent metal, and the voice of "Bill", an old man who said he had died in the house. According to Grosse and Playfair, a son of a man named Wilkins recognized the voice as his father, a claim we could not verify. Witnesses, more than thirty according to Wikipedia, included the family, neighbors, police and journalists, and the investigators recorded over 180 hours of tape.

We found no earlier legend and no sign that the house had a reputation before August 1977, so the oldest trace is the testimony of that date and the Daily Mirror coverage of 4 to 7 September 1977. We have not read any British newspaper of the time.

The case is also unusually well known for evidence of trickery. Wikipedia reports that a video camera in an adjoining room caught Janet bending spoons and trying to bend an iron bar, and that Grosse saw her banging a broom handle on the ceiling. Melvin Harris analyzed the photographs and concluded they showed play, and Chris French has said that the picture of Janet's supposed levitation could just as easily show her jumping. Joe Nickell wrote in Skeptical Inquirer (2012) that the poltergeist tended to act only when no one was watching. We know these critics only through Wikipedia and the Psi Encyclopedia, not from their own texts. In 1980, on ITV, Janet reportedly said the sisters had cheated once or twice to see whether the investigators would catch them, and that they always did. We know this only as quoted by Den of Geek and have not seen the broadcast. Her later estimate that about 2 percent of the phenomena were faked is also secondhand, from the Psi Encyclopedia citing the Daily Mail. At the other extreme, Nickell's reading seems to imply something close to all of it. Wikipedia adds that after the sisters admitted pranks to reporters, Grosse and Playfair pressed them to retract, and other researchers mocked the two men for credulity. According to Wikipedia, Playfair often doubted the girls, and he and Grosse accepted some trickery while holding that other events were genuine.

Ed and Lorraine Warren visited only briefly, and their role has been inflated by the 2016 film The Conjuring 2. Other screen treatments include the BBC's Ghostwatch (1992), a fiction inspired by the case, Channel 4's Interview with a Poltergeist (2007), Sky Living's The Enfield Haunting (2015), and Apple TV's The Enfield Poltergeist (October 2023), with dates as given by Wikipedia. SPR members have disagreed about the case.

What remains today

Nothing public remains. The house is a private home. Grosse died in 2006 and Playfair in 2018, according to the Psi Encyclopedia.

Visiting

There is nothing to visit and we deliberately give no address. Please do not look for the house or disturb the people who live in the neighborhood. If the case interests you, the better trail is in print: Playfair's book, the SPR's Psi Encyclopedia article and the critics' pieces by Nickell and French.

Sources

1. Enfield Poltergeist — Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research)
2. The Conjuring 2's Enfield Case: A True Story That Still Haunts Us Today — Den of Geek
3. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.