Enfield Miscellany (Part 5)

(See part 1 here for an explanation of what this series is about. And here are the other parts in the series: two, three, and four. When I cite Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes below, I'll use "MG" to designate a tape from Grosse's collection and "GP" to designate one from Playfair's. So, MG1B refers to tape 1B in Grosse's collection, GP94A refers to 94A in Playfair's, etc.)

The Absurd Logistics Of A Fraud Hypothesis

Part of what makes poltergeists so interesting, and has the potential to make them so evidential, is the variety of phenomena involved. And the Enfield case has a much larger number and variety of events than the average poltergeist. Faking such a large and varied case would be more difficult accordingly. I've written about many of the traditional categories involved: levitations, apparitions, fires, etc. But some of the events don't fit into a traditional category. Or they do, but with one or more characteristics that stand out as highly difficult to fake. Those events add to the variety of the case, and they illustrate the absurdity of a fraud hypothesis that would have one or more of the Hodgson children being skilled enough to so successfully fake such a variety of phenomena. (For documentation of how often critics try to explain the case by attributing the events to trickery on the part of one or more of the Hodgson children, see the first paragraph here.)

Margaret Hodgson and Peggy Nottingham reported that they saw the Hodgsons' refrigerator move about six inches forward, then turn to the side (MG3A, 0:23). Grosse, while discussing the incident a few minutes later on the tape, refers to the refrigerator as "extremely heavy", one that he found "most difficult" to move. When he got it to move, the process of moving it was "very noisy", whereas Peggy told him that the poltergeist's movement of it made no noise.

The poltergeist would often move lights. Peggy Hodgson reported an occasion when she monitored a lamp that was out of her direct line of vision by watching its shadow. She saw the shadow moving, indicating that the poltergeist was moving the lamp, apparently with no shadow of any person near it (MB10B, 8:11, 10:13).

Peggy also saw a light bulb move out of its socket and slowly fall diagonally rather than dropping straight down at a normal speed (MG65B, 29:01). Nobody was near it.

In another context, Janet opened a loaf of sliced bread, and six or so slices shot out of the bag on their own and went across the room (MG95A, 17:30). Peggy saw it happen. She refers to how "the slices kept coming out", and she told Janet, "Quick, shut that bread." Janet goes on to say that the bread came out "bit by bit", so both her comments and her mother's suggest that each slice came out on its own. It's hard to believe that Janet faked it all six times, with Peggy mistaking it for a genuine event each time.

Later on the same tape, Peggy recounts an occasion when she saw a tube of cream moving around by itself on the floor and squeezing out cream as it went (23:59).

On another occasion that also was witnessed by Peggy, a cupboard was moving around by itself and kept moving for about ten minutes (GP31A, 1:27).

Many more such events could be cited. These are just several examples. And the cumulative effect needs to be kept in mind, including the cumulative skills needed to fake all of these episodes.

A Presentation On The Case By Maurice Grosse Shortly Before His Death

If you haven't done so yet, I recommend listening to a presentation Grosse gave on the Enfield case before the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. It's titled "Enfield Poltergeist 25 Years On", and you can find it here. Judging by what he says during the presentation, the 25 years reference was just an approximation. The talk seems to have occurred in 2003, which was 26 years after the case started. He refers to Peggy Hodgson as if she's still alive, though she died in 2003, so it seems that he gave the presentation shortly before her death or before finding out about it. He mostly repeats information that's been widely available to the public for a long time, but some of the details he includes are less known. He included some photographs, and apparently some of them are ones I've posted elsewhere. He provides some background to those photos that I wasn't aware of, assuming those are the photos I posted. He discusses his note-taking practices, his role in editing Playfair's book, how he often carried a Kodak camera with him, around his neck, while at the Hodgsons' house, etc. There are many such details included in the presentation. It's well worth listening to.

Premonitory Headaches

I've occasionally mentioned the premonitory headaches Peggy Hodgson would get shortly before a paranormal event was to occur. An advantage of listening to Grosse and Playfair's tapes is that you get a better idea of how often such things occurred. There's frequent mention of Peggy's premonitory headaches on the tapes, and other individuals would sometimes get them. It seems to me that Peggy got them more than anybody else, though. Playfair went as far as to say that her premonitory headaches were never wrong (GP40A, 20:23). I don't know if that's true. (Peggy was nearby when he made the claim and didn't correct him.) But even if he was going too far in making that claim, it does seem that Peggy at least often anticipated events by means of these headaches.

Sometimes they would be accompanied by one or more other indications of something paranormal. For example, just before an allegedly paranormal writing incident occurred, she sensed a presence in the area and got one of her premonitory headaches (MG19A, 8:32). She commented at one point that she used to get headaches in coordination with furniture moving, but that the nature of her headaches changed with the arrival of the embodied poltergeist voice (GP32B, 10:14). Notice that the headaches not only kept happening in connection with a particular type of event, namely the moving of furniture, but also that the nature of the headache changed with the arrival of a new type of event (the embodied poltergeist voice). It seems highly unlikely that all of that coordination of timing was coincidental or has some other sort of normal explanation.

Grosse referred to how he had "a very bad headache" just before the famous incident when he saw a tea kettle move on its own in the kitchen, with nobody near it, and he refers to how "I don't suffer from headaches. I never have suffered from headaches." (15:58 in his presentation referred to above) That headache went away just after the tea kettle incident. John Burcombe recalls an incident in which he experienced a headache just after Peggy mentioned that she had one (MG91B, 31:54). In an earlier post, I recounted an experience Burcombe had that he considered the most frightening one he'd gone through. Something I didn't mention there is that just after the recording of that event, Burcombe mentions that both his daughter and Peggy had a headache (MG99A, 3:30). If you read the relevant section of the post I just linked, you'll see that there was a lot of paranormal activity reported around that time. On one of the tapes, there's discussion of two members of the family having a headache at the same time (GP13A, 7:41). It's somewhat hard to tell who's being referred to, but I think the two individuals are Peggy and Margaret. Apparently, they were far apart from each other when it happened. (Margaret was at school at the time.)

Earlier on that tape, Playfair asks Peggy for more information about the nature of the headaches (3:33). He asked her if the feeling is always the same. She responded, "It varies. If it's [the poltergeist's] hanging about, I get a slight throbbing sensation. And if it's going to be bad, it's sort of like a tight band across the front of the head. It only affects the front of the head. It's not like a normal headache." Playfair then asks if it's like a migraine, and she says she doesn't know what a migraine is like. It doesn't seem that she regularly got bad headaches before the poltergeist arrived. Even if she did, she says that these premonitory headaches aren't like a normal headache, so the sensations involved are different. She goes on to say that the headaches usually don't last long and that they don't go away until after the poltergeist has done whatever the headache was anticipating.