Further Testing On The Enfield Knocking Phenomena

In 2010, Barrie Colvin published an article documenting that some knocking phenomena in several paranormal cases had a different acoustic quality than normal knocking. More recently, John Fraser did some research on the subject and wrote about it in a book he published last year, Poltergeist! (Washington, United States: Sixth Books, 2020). Chapter 6 of that book discusses some work he did with James Tacchi to replicate Colvin's findings. Colvin, Fraser, Tacchi, and others who have written on this subject over the past several years have made suggestions for further research and added further qualifiers to Colvin's initial findings. For example, Tacchi was able to duplicate the acoustic properties of paranormal knocking by normal means when the audio recorder was around 15 feet away. But the distinction between normal and paranormal knocking seems to hold up when the recording device is closer to the source of the knocking. You can read Fraser's book and the other relevant sources if you want more details.

I don't know much about acoustic issues. I've been able to follow some portions of these discussions, but haven't been able to follow others. However, I've done a lot of research on a poltergeist case, Enfield, for which we have a large amount of relevant information and audio recordings. I want to discuss some examples of relevant incidents and information from that case that Colvin, Fraser, Tacchi, or anybody else who's interested could look into. For example, as Fraser mentions in his book, it's important that we know how close the audio recording device was to the source of the knocking, and it would be good to have a knock done by normal means in the nearby context for the sake of comparison. I know of some incidents on the Enfield tapes that meet one or more of the relevant criteria, and there's a lot of potential to find more such incidents on the tapes.

Before I get to those incidents, however, I want to make a point that needs to be kept in mind. A paranormal source could produce knocking that doesn't have the acoustic properties under consideration here. It's not as though these properties must be present if knocking is to be considered paranormal. We don't know much about the means by which poltergeists or other sources produce paranormal knocking. It could be that the acoustic properties under consideration here are produced by a poltergeist or some other paranormal source under some circumstances, but not others. If the other evidence involved in a knocking event suggests that the event is paranormal, the absence of the acoustic properties in question wouldn't overturn that other evidence. It would still make sense to consider the event paranormal. Colvin's research included some Enfield material, which did have the acoustic properties under consideration, but it remains to be seen how widespread those properties are in the remainder of the Enfield case. See here for my article on the general credibility of the Enfield knocking phenomena. There's no need for other Enfield knocking events, the ones not studied by Colvin, to have the acoustic signature he was looking for in order for those other knocking events to be considered paranormal. But it's a good idea to look for that acoustic quality in those other contexts.

Having said all of that, I want to discuss some relevant incidents in the Enfield case. In the process, I'll be citing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's tapes. I'll use "MG" to refer to a tape from Grosse's collection (e.g., MG44A is his tape 44A). "GP" will refer to one from Playfair's collection (e.g., GP5A is his tape 5A). The distance between the tape recorder and the knocking is relevant here, and the layout of the Hodgsons' house is significant for other reasons, so you can view a floor plan of the house here.

I want to reiterate that I don't know much about acoustic issues, and I haven't been able to follow every detail involved in every discussion of Colvin's findings over the years. It could be that some, maybe much, or what I'll be discussing below will have little or no value to people doing work like Colvin's. I'm offering representative examples of material on the Enfield tapes that I think is relevant in one context or another, based on what I've read from various sources on the topic over the years.

My understanding is that Grosse and Playfair usually placed their tape recorder next to the door just inside the main bedroom upstairs (the largest bedroom, the one with windows at the front of the house). That's where you see the recorder in some photographs, and they sometimes refer to its being there on the tapes (e.g., at the beginning of tape GP7B). They sometimes put the recorder elsewhere in that bedroom and sometimes did recordings elsewhere in the house, but I think the recorders were next to the door in the main bedroom more than anywhere else.

There are many ways you could go about estimating the distances involved in knocking incidents. We have many photos and videos of the Hodgsons' house, including the main bedroom. I can provide links to ones that are publicly available, if needed. John Burcombe is in many of those photos and videos, and he says on one of the tapes that he's 5'10" tall (MG34A, 14:16). Playfair said that he's 5'11", and Janet Hodgson was about 5'6", according to Grosse and Playfair (MG80A, 7:42). Starting at 4:29 on the tape just cited, Grosse and Playfair are in the main bedroom taking measurements. They explain that it's approximately 34" from the floor to the top of the window sill of the bedroom windows (4:52). I can try to find other such measurements on the tapes or elsewhere, if needed.

On tape GP7B, which starts out with Playfair saying that the recorder is next to the door inside the main bedroom, there are some sequences of knocks that seem to be coming from different parts of the room (e.g., 4:22, 7:24, 25:38). Given that it's a small bedroom in a small house, it's doubtful that all of those knocks coming from different places within the bedroom were all too far away to be relevant. At least some of the knocks had to have been within the relevant distance.

There are similar circumstances on other tapes. Peggy Hodgson would sometimes state where she thought the knocking came from just after it occurred. She refers to a series of loud knocks as coming from the floor near the fireplace (MG9Bii, 7:37). On another tape, there's a sequence of knocks from different places within the bedroom, and Peggy describes where she thinks each one is coming from (MG70B, 42:18).

Grosse sometimes identified where he thought knocks came from. On the night the knocking started responding to Grosse (October 23, 1977), he commented, "I can feel the vibrations of the knocking on the floor very, very clearly, indeed. The vibration is quite heavy….The knocking is actually moving backwards and forwards. It appears to be moving backwards and forwards on the floorboards, underneath the bed, across the room, and back again." (MG10B, 44:07) As I said earlier, at least some of the knocking would have to be within a relevant distance from the tape recorder if the knocking was moving around so much.

Elsewhere, he refers to a knock as having come from the end of the double bed (MG54A, 16:18). That's the largest bed, and it's the one that was typically next to the wall with the Starsky & Hutch posters. The end of that bed would have to be close to the tape recorder, surely no more than some single-digit number of feet away.

Another knock is identified by Janet as having come from the headboard of her bed, and Peggy confirms that it came from that area (MG15A, 31:32). Shortly after, Grosse reports that a knock just heard came from the door (32:46). It's very loud on the recording, and another loud knock just after is said by Grosse to have come from the floor. At 33:38, Grosse knocks three times on the door. So, the allegedly paranormal knock at 32:46 could be compared to the three normal knocks at 33:38.

A lot of knocking occurred on the night of November 5, 1977. Grosse and Playfair were both at the house that night, and there are recordings from both of their collections. Playfair did some of his recording downstairs while Grosse was running his recorder upstairs. And while Playfair was downstairs, he explained where his microphone was at different points in time. Grosse kept knocking on the floor of the main bedroom in an attempt to communicate with the poltergeist, which would sometimes respond by knocking from various places apparently in or near that room. So, the tape Playfair recorded downstairs can be used to determine what Grosse's knocks on the floor sounded like with a recorder at various distances from below the floor. It's tape GP10A. And you can use tape MG12B for comparison purposes, since the two tapes overlap. For example, a sequence of ten knocks from Grosse starts at 4:51 on GP10A and at 8:31 on MG12B. Since Playfair moves his recorder around during tape GP10A and explains where he's placing it each time, that tape is good for measuring how those changes affect the acoustic properties of the recording.

Another significant tape in this context is MG48A, starting at 15:11. It was done by David Robertson on December 16, 1977. It's a recording of one of the levitation sessions he did with the Hodgson girls. I say more about it in an article I wrote about the Enfield levitations. For the purposes of this post, I'll just briefly outline some relevant material on the tape. Janet and Margaret are in the main bedroom, with the door closed and apparently kept shut by the poltergeist. Robertson is just outside the room, next to the door, with the tape recorder running. So, it's another good tape for determining what acoustic properties knocking has on a recording outside a closed room where the knocking is occurring. There's a sequence in which the poltergeist apparently kept hitting a metal knob from a radio against the door. You can hear that knocking noise repeatedly on the tape, with the recorder just outside that door at the time. At 18:44, there's a loud knock that Robertson describes as having come from the room next door rather than the room the girls were in at the time. If he's right about where the knock came from, then it's one the girls had no normal way of faking. There's a good chance that it's a paranormal knock. So, that purportedly paranormal knock could be compared to the normal knocking caused by the radio knob in the surrounding context (assuming the poltergeist didn't do anything that caused the knocking of the knob to have unusual characteristics).

These are just several examples I've noticed so far. I can try to gather more if anybody wants them for relevant research purposes.