A Day Living With A Poltergeist

One way of conveying what it's like to live with a poltergeist is to walk through the events of a particular day. And I've been wanting to write more about the events of May 30, 1978 in the Enfield case, since it was one of the most significant days in the case and has received much less attention than it should.

In the process of discussing what happened that day, I'll be citing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes. I'll refer to Grosse's tapes with "MG", meaning that MG31A is a reference to tape 31A in his collection. And I'll refer to Playfair's tapes with "GP", so that GP68B is a reference to his tape 68B.

Grosse begins interviewing Peggy Hodgson about the events of the day at 8:06 on tape MG87A. It was a Tuesday, and she explained that they'd had a "pretty quiet weekend". The poltergeist would often do little or nothing for a while, even for multiple days occasionally, then become much more active for no apparent reason. The family had gone to bed around 11:00 P.M. on Monday after watching a movie. Johnny was home from boarding school, and all five of them spent the night together in the main bedroom.

Peggy woke up at about 1:50 A.M. on Tuesday and noticed that the lamp was off. They normally kept a light on throughout the night, because of the poltergeist. She saw something that had been in another part of the room hanging on the light, and the plug had been pulled out of the socket. After turning a light on, Johnny's bed began to move, and some slippers shot across the room. Everybody other than Margaret decided to go downstairs. Margaret followed shortly after and said there was something "walking about" upstairs. Some of the other children saw "something on the curtain". After getting a drink downstairs, they went back up. Objects began moving around the room, apparently originating near the lamp, away from the children. Peggy comments that she's "100% sure" that none of the children were moving the objects. (She frequently acknowledges when she's hesitant about something, so it's significant when she uses a phrase like "100% sure".)

After collecting the objects, she turned around to see Janet levitating. She levitated several times, and some of those occasions involved going "almost up to the ceiling". Grosse asks whether Janet was lying down when she went up into the air, and Peggy confirms that Janet was in a lying position when she went up. Grosse asks for further confirmation, and Peggy confirms that Janet was "lying down, horizontal, when she was going up to the ceiling". Grosse asked whether the bed covers went up with Janet, and both Peggy and Janet say she went through the covers instead. When she came back down, though, she landed on top of the covers. She then started getting thrown across the room and landing on Johnny, multiple times. At about 3:30 A.M., they decided to go back downstairs. Peggy explains, more than once, that they were trying to disrupt the poltergeist's activities by going back and forth between the floors. Apparently, that had caused the poltergeist to leave them alone for a while on other occasions, though changing floors wasn't doing much good this time. That sort of inconsistency was part of what made living with the poltergeist so difficult.

After they got downstairs, a container of Legos shot through the air and nearly hit Peggy. Her apron then disappeared. Margaret was preparing some potatoes they were going to have with a meal later in the day. The pan she had them in lifted into the air, turned upside down, and flew across the kitchen, spinning in the process and shooting out potatoes as it went. Peggy commented, "I've never seen anything like it. I was so flabbergasted." Then the bowl Margaret had put the potato peelings into was thrown onto the floor. A spin dryer then started jumping around and moved out from where they normally kept it. Some other object, I don't know what, started "flying up and going all over the place". Margaret kept hearing a sound like a cat scratching, coming from different corners of the kitchen at different times, but without seeing any cat in the area. See here regarding other events in the case involving cats, including some that happened shortly before the day I'm discussing in this post.

Late in the afternoon, stones started flying around outside the house, from different directions. Peggy didn't see any of her children or anybody else throwing them, but she called her children inside because she wanted to be sure and because one of the neighbors thought Peggy's children were doing it. Eventually, milk bottles started falling from the sky as well. The neighbors from some of the other houses on the street became involved and started watching to see where the objects were coming from. After watching for a while, they were convinced that the Hodgson children weren't throwing anything. Peggy commented to Vic Nottingham that she thought it was the poltergeist doing it, and it seems that the neighbors eventually came around to agreeing with her. Grosse interviewed some of the neighbors about what they witnessed.

The most impressive interview was with Jack Richardson, Peggy Nottingham's brother. He reported seeing large clumps of dirt moving around outside the Nottinghams' house, with nobody touching the clumps or anywhere near them (MG89A, 0:11). One of the clumps was moving with so much power that it forced the door to the Nottinghams' kitchen open, then kept moving and hit the bathroom door. Richardson was in the kitchen at the time, and he witnessed the event. He refers to the movement of the clump as "impossible". A few people were in or near the house at the time, and they all looked for any children nearby and didn't see any.

After Grosse got back from conducting one his interviews with the neighbors about the day's events, he received a report from John Burcombe about an event that happened in the Hodgsons' house while Grosse was away. Nobody was in the kitchen, but they heard the sound of some glass hitting the floor, so they went to the kitchen to see what had happened. They found a series of objects arranged in a pattern on the floor (something poltergeists are known to do occasionally). There were four plants arranged in the shape of a triangle, a box of tissues stood up on its end, a plastic container also stood up on its end, a small red bowl overturned, and a milk bottle between two of the plants. (Apparently, it was the noise of the milk bottle hitting the floor that they heard, which led them to look in the kitchen to see what had happened.)

Peggy Nottingham reported that, sometime during the day on May 30, her son, Garry, set down a drink and turned around to find the glass empty (MG89A, 4:30). Peggy Hodgson told Grosse that the same thing had happened on other occasions as well.

During an interview on May 31, Peggy told Grosse about some events that had happened "last night" (8:01). Some are described as happening as they were getting ready for bed, so the incidents probably happened late on May 30, the day I'm focused on in this post. It's possible, though, that one or more of the events she describes happened during the earliest hours of May 31. So, there's some ambiguity here, but it looks like at least some of the events happened on May 30, and it could be that all of them occurred then.

There were several levitations involving at least three of the Hodgson children (Billy, Johnny, and Janet). Peggy saw Billy levitated while in a horizontal position a few times and said she was "certain" that he went up slowly. Johnny referred to how he was levitated while in a sitting position. Janet levitated about six feet while in a horizontal position. Peggy had Janet and Johnny sleep in one of the smaller bedrooms while the rest of the family was in the main bedroom. Soon afterward, however, all of the drawers in multiple chests in Janet and Johnny's room shot out, apparently simultaneously. Peggy then told Janet and Johnny to move to the main bedroom with the rest of the family.

I've mentioned that the Hodgsons would sometimes move to the other floor of the house to see if the poltergeist would leave them alone if they changed their location. They'd have different people sleep in different places, in different rooms or in different locations within one room, to see if that would help. They went through many such efforts, sometimes on multiple occasions in a single night, experimenting to see what would work and what wouldn't, often with inconsistent results. They brought in police officers, the local government, church officials, paranormal researchers, mediums, and other people they thought might help, they left the house for long periods, they prayed, they tried ignoring the poltergeist as much as they could, they reasoned with it, and so on. The family wasn't just living ordinary lives that were occasionally interrupted by poltergeist activity. Rather, their lives were deeply disrupted, on many occasions and in many ways, even during much of the time when the poltergeist was inactive. While discussing the incidents with the stones and other objects falling from the sky outside the house on May 30, Playfair wrote of how "the poltergeist put on a show in public in broad daylight in front of several witnesses." (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 226) The neighbors who witnessed those events initially thought the Hodgson children were throwing the objects. Peggy, describing how the neighbors initially reacted, refers to how "she was calling me everything….They were calling me and the kids everything….She threatened to call the police." (MG87A, 20:21) This was one of the poltergeist's most active days, but it was just one day in a poltergeist that lasted for more than a quarter of a century.