The issues surrounding the conclusion of the case are larger and more complicated than is often suggested. Many of the factors involved haven't gotten much attention and remain unsettled. I can't answer every question, but I want to discuss what I know at this point.
I'll be citing the tapes of Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair. Grosse's tapes will be referenced with "MG", so that MG22B is a reference to tape 22B in his collection. Playfair's tapes will be designated with "GP", so that GP12B is a reference to his tape 12B.
It's common to distinguish between a haunting as something centered around a location and a poltergeist as something centered around a person or group of people. That distinction is helpful, but a case that starts as one can develop into the other. Enfield had more of a poltergeist quality when it originated and when it was at its height, and it's usually been described as a poltergeist for many years, so I favor referring to it that way. But some of the participants in the case occasionally referred to it as a haunting, which is the origin of the title of Playfair's book (as discussed by Tom Ruffles here), and the apparent persistence of phenomena in the house after Peggy Hodgson's death suggests that there's a haunting element to the case.
I'll expand on that last factor before proceeding to other issues. I'm going to address the conclusion to the case in reverse chronological order. I'll start with the most recent events and work backward.
As far as I know, the last occupants of the house to claim to have experienced relevant paranormal events were the Bennetts, who apparently were the first to live there after Peggy Hodgson's death in 2003. The most recent occupants I know of have the words "JESUS HOUSE" on the bay window, but I haven't heard any explanation for why the words were placed there. You can see a 2019 video of the house with the wording on the window here.
Before I get to the events reported by the Bennetts and the Hodgsons before them, I want to address how likely it is that paranormal activity is still going on in the house. We don't have much to go by. But based on what little we have, I think there's a small probability that the activity has ceased. One of the current occupants recently said, "It used to be haunted, but not anymore." When events were going on in earlier years, many people reported what happened during the decades when the Hodgsons were there, and multiple members of the Bennett family discussed the events that had occurred during the two months they spent in the house. Given how brief a time the Bennetts were there, the lack of testimony from other sources about the Bennetts' experiences makes sense. But if later occupants were in the house much longer, yet neither those occupants nor others around them have publicly referred to ongoing activity, I think there's a small probability that nothing has been happening. It could easily be that one or more events have occurred, but have only been known to individuals who haven't wanted to discuss those events publicly. Or there's ongoing activity, but nobody has noticed any of it in recent years, perhaps because it's so rarely occurring or of such a minor and easily unnoticed nature. Or the activity may have stopped after the Bennetts left, but will resume at some point in the future. Or there may be some other scenario involved. There's no way to be confident in either direction, but I suspect that the poltergeist (or haunting) has ended.
The account about the Bennetts seems to have originated in a 2011 article by Michael Howie. An article by Zoe Brennan referred to the Bennetts' experiences as well. But Brennan seems to be largely repeating what other people reported, and I think her comments on the Bennetts are based on Howie's work. I wrote to Howie for more information, but didn't get a response.
I don't know of any reason to reject the Bennetts' testimony. (See here regarding the principles involved in evaluating the testimony of witnesses.) Howie seems to have talked to at least two members of the family, so you'd have to reject the testimony of at least two of them to dismiss the attestation of ongoing activity at the house. The phenomena they reported are similar to what the Hodgsons experienced, including some close resemblances that were seldom or never discussed publicly up to that point, as far as I know. Brennan's article cited above quotes Janet Hodgson commenting:
"Years later, when Mum was alive, there was always a presence there — something watching over you. As long as people don’t meddle the way we did with Ouija boards, it is quite settled. It is a lot calmer than when I was a child. It is at rest, but will always be there….Even my brother, until the day he left that place after Mum died, would say: 'There’s still something there.' You’d feel like you were being watched."
Elsewhere in the same article, Clare Bennett comments that "There was definitely some kind of presence in the house, I always felt like someone was looking at me." Her son's report of hearing voices downstairs (while he was upstairs) is also reminiscent of the Hodgsons' experiences. I provide some examples in my article on the voice phenomena. Peggy reported hearing indistinct voices in a different part of the house than where she was at the time (MG94B, 0:51). See here for some comments Margaret Hodgson made about how the hearing of voices was one of the phenomena that continued to occur in later years. Similarly, Shaka Bennett's reference to a man walking into his room during the last night at the house is reminiscent of some of the apparitions seen by the Hodgsons and others involved in the case in earlier years. They sometimes reported other scenarios, such as a face at a window or a man standing before them, but also reported seeing a man walk into a bedroom, as Shaka Bennett described. To my knowledge, some of the overlap between the Bennetts' experiences and those of the earlier years weren't discussed much or at all in public prior to the time when the Bennetts made their claims. That adds some credibility to their testimony.
And they could have gotten a lot more attention and/or money from their claims if they were making things up in an attempt to get attention or money. Unless something comes to light in the future that significantly undermines their credibility, I think the testimony of the Bennetts should be accepted.
In Janet's comments quoted above, she refers to a sense of a presence and of being watched in the house until the time of Peggy's death in 2003. Janet has also referred to other phenomena in the house after the years covered by Playfair's book. She referred to the sound of "footsteps on the stairs" and how "doors would open and close on their own", and she said that she's sensed a presence with her, not just in the house (in Will Storr, Will Storr Vs. The Supernatural [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006], 197). In 1982, Janet produced paranormal results apparently related to the poltergeist in an experiment conducted at Birkbeck College. I cited an article above in which Margaret Hodgson referred to how voices would sometimes be heard in the house in later years. Judy Spera, the daughter of Ed and Lorraine Warren, reported an apparently paranormal movement of her purse while visiting the house in 1981. In the post just linked, Spera's husband refers to other paranormal phenomena the Warrens said they experienced at the house in 1979. Grosse's tapes from 1979 suggest that there was a lot of poltergeist activity that year, a large number and variety of events, starting in the spring. In a documentary that aired on December 26, 1978, there are some comments near the end from Peggy Hodgson, saying that "it's just the odd incident now". Since the documentary came out late in the year, the implication is that there's still some activity, though much less of it, at that point. It seems less likely that the people who put the documentary together would have recorded Peggy making those comments, say, a few months earlier, then aired the comments as if they represented what was currently going on, even though the poltergeist's activities had actually ceased since then. Furthermore, there wasn't much of a timeframe during the first three quarters of 1978 when Peggy's description quoted above ("it's just the odd incident now") would seem applicable. So, it appears to be likely that she was describing the situation in the closing months of 1978, meaning that there was still some activity at that time.
And that brings us to early October of that year, when the medium Dono Gmelig-Meyling visited, the point at which the poltergeist is typically said to have ended. Watch here for Guy Playfair and a narrator describing the situation that way in a 2008 documentary. And go here for the qualification that there was a "very, very minor outbreak about six months later, which only lasted a very short time, a day or two, I think, and, since then, nothing." As I've explained, there was far more activity after Gmelig-Meyling's visit than Playfair suggests. Judging by the tapes of Maurice Grosse and Ed Warren, the activities in 1979 seem to have occurred during many days over at least a few months. And there was further activity reported leading up to and including 2004. So, paranormal events continued for more than a quarter of a century after Gmelig-Meyling went to the house. Why, then, did Playfair describe the case's conclusion as he did, and why do so many other people not even mention anything after October of 1978, as if there weren't any paranormal events beyond that point?
Many of the people making those claims don't know much about the subject or are careless about it. People are often ignorant or careless like that. But that doesn't explain why somebody as well informed as Playfair didn't know better or express himself better.
People often have qualifiers in mind that they don't articulate well enough. For example, earlier in this article, I referred to the distinction between a poltergeist, which is person-centered, and a haunting, which is location-centered. I also mentioned that one can develop into the other. So, somebody could think that the Enfield poltergeist eventually became a haunting and refer to the poltergeist ending at a particular point, yet think there was ongoing activity that should be classified as a haunting. The poltergeist had ended, but the haunting hadn't. And some of the events in question are difficult or impossible to place in one category while excluding them from some other category. For example, how do you categorize the paranormal results of the 1982 experiment Janet participated in? Those events happened at Birkbeck College, not at the Hodgsons' house. You might argue that the events during the experiment are related to a haunting at that house, but I don't think it would make sense to say that the events are part of the haunting. On the other hand, they could be considered part of a poltergeist, since a poltergeist, as traditionally defined, could follow Janet to another location, like Birkbeck College. Then there's the question of whether Janet, in that 1982 experiment, may have just been manifesting some paranormal ability she had independent of the poltergeist. Or what if that paranormal ability originated with the poltergeist, but was operating independently of it at the time of the 1982 experiment? Issues like these complicate the situation.
There's also the matter of whether Playfair believed what was reported by the sources involved. Given his negative comments about the Warrens, how much did he believe what was reported regarding their involvement in the Enfield case?
And it seems that Playfair was ignorant of much of what happened in later years. After The Conjuring 2 came out in 2016, he often referred to his only being aware of one visit of the Warrens to the Hodgsons' house, even though the Warrens visited three times. I doubt that Playfair listened to Ed Warren's Enfield tapes, even though they were available to the public on the web site for The Conjuring 2. With the Warrens' visit to the house in 1981, there's not only the issue of whether Playfair would have believed what they or anybody associated with them reported, but also the issue of whether he ever heard about that visit. I doubt that he did.
And he doesn't seem to have known much about what occurred at the house in 1979. His own recordings there end in October of 1978 (GP40B). I suspect he was working on his Enfield book in 1979. That has to have been a difficult process that took up a lot of his time and attention. He may not have gotten much information from Grosse or anybody else about what was going on at the house during that period, and whatever information he received may have been largely forgotten over time. Playfair's collection of tapes includes copies of much of what's in Grosse's collection. I suspect he acquired those copies to use in the process of putting together his book. But Playfair's collection doesn't include any of Grosse's tapes after 1978.
Will Storr's book referred to earlier, where Janet refers to ongoing activity at the house in later years, was published in 2006. I don't know when Playfair read the book or the relevant portions of it, but he may not have done so prior to his 2008 comments cited above.
I don't think the Bennetts' claims about their experiences were made public before 2011. I have no reason to think Playfair knew about the situation before then.
So, the failure of Playfair (and others commenting on the subject) to take some of the relevant information into account is mitigated by factors like the ones discussed above. On the other hand, Peggy Hodgson's comment quoted earlier about how "it's just the odd incident now" was made in a documentary Playfair participated in, one that's included in his collection of Enfield tapes (GP41B). I'd expect him to have known about that comment, though he may have forgotten about it. And he refers, in his book, to "some isolated incidents after the Dutchmen's visit" and distinguishes those events from the increase in activity in 1979 (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 262). Similarly, he and Grosse discussed the 1982 experiment referred to above in an article they published several years later, so Playfair knew about the experiment (Journal Of The Society For Psychical Research, vol. 55, 1988-89, "Enfield Revisited: The Evaporation Of Positive Evidence", p. 213). And it seems unlikely that Janet told Will Storr and others about later activity in the house, yet Playfair had never gotten that information from Janet or anybody else. Even if he hadn't, he was aware of Storr's interview, which he (Playfair) references in the last edition of his book (271-72). While Playfair surely didn't know about all of the later activity, he did know about some of it.
Playfair and Grosse had reasons for wanting the poltergeist to end the way Playfair described in the 2008 documentary I cited. They and others involved, including the Hodgsons, were weary of the ongoing activity in the closing months of 1978 and didn't know how to make it stop, as Grosse's comments near the end of the 1978 documentary illustrate. It was an unsustainable situation. The Hodgsons wanted to get on with their lives, and so did the investigators. But they had committed the previous year to "press on with what resources we had. It was either that, or abandon the case altogether, and by the end of 1977 there was no question of giving up. We were going to see this one through to the end." (page 163 in Playfair's book) Poltergeists typically last less than half a year. In the fall of 1978, the Enfield poltergeist had been going for more than a year. It was commendable in some ways for Playfair and Grosse to commit to seeing the case through to the end, to help the Hodgsons, to help their neighbors and others involved, to further our knowledge of poltergeists, and so on. But the fulfillment of that commitment was something they didn't have full control over. They stayed in contact with the Hodgsons over the years, and they did help them in some contexts after 1978, such as Grosse's returning to the house to help with the increase in poltergeist activity in 1979. But I suspect that what they did in the fall of 1978, when they stopped their regular visits to the house, was an alteration of what they originally planned to do.
Grosse and Playfair's tapes shed some light on their thinking and that of the Hodgsons around the time of Dono Gmelig-Meyling's visit in early October of 1978. In a discussion with Margaret Hodgson on October 2, Playfair told her, "If he [Gmelig-Meyling] can't do it [get rid of the poltergeist], then we're going to give up. This is the last chance….He's one of the best people there are…and if he can't do it, then we're really in trouble." (GP40A, 2:04) The tape continues with a recording of an October 4 discussion involving Playfair, Grosse, Peggy Hodgson, Gmelig-Meyling, and his translator (Peter Liefhebber). Peggy makes some comments about how she's at least seriously considering moving to another house, and Playfair refers to how he and Grosse haven't abandoned the family and how Peggy has their phone numbers and can contact them anytime she wants (23:40). It should be noted that this discussion occurred two days prior to October 6, the day when Gmelig-Meyling allegedly got the poltergeist to leave, desist, or whatever you would call it. Peggy goes on to refer to how they're getting "this", meaning poltergeist activity, "every morning" (25:17), so it seems that there was still a lot of activity as of October 4.
After the October 6 events at the house, which weren't taped, Playfair interviewed Liefhebber in a hotel room. According to Liefhebber, Gmelig-Meyling had traveled out of his body on October 2 and met Janet Grosse, Maurice's deceased daughter, and identified a connection between her and the poltergeist. Playfair asked for a description of what she looked like (35:34) and noted that the description didn't seem to match the photos he'd seen of Grosse's daughter. Liefhebber said that Gmelig-Meyling only had a vague impression of her appearance. Liefhebber mentioned that, on October 4, Maurice Grosse had asked for Gmelig-Meyling, who was supposed to be able to travel outside his body at will, to go to Grosse's house and describe what it looks like (GP40B, 0:43). Gmelig-Meyling refused to do so, claiming that it wouldn't prove an out-of-body experience (OBE), since the same information Grosse was asking for could be obtained through telepathy. But Grosse had said he wanted evidence that Gmelig-Meyling had "any psychic powers" (0:32), so an OBE wouldn't be needed to satisfy what Grosse was asking for. Telepathy would have been sufficient. So, why didn't Gmelig-Meyling provide that? Later in the discussion, after Playfair referred to how hard it was to believe that Janet Grosse would have been the source of the poltergeist (11:34), Liefhebber added some further qualifiers about how the best explanation is that Janet came along after some other source started the poltergeist, how one or more other entities involved may have taken the poltergeist in a different direction than Janet wanted, etc. But he initially said that "only the girl" (Janet Grosse) was perceived as involved in the case at the time of Gmelig-Meyling's OBE, not any other entities (GP40A, 37:28). Furthermore, he claimed that Maurice Grosse had a "very strong" connection to the poltergeist and was in the "middle" of the case, in the sense of being central to it (GP40B, 1:32). So, Liefhebber's later qualifications seem inconsistent with what was said earlier about the alleged centrality of the Grosses. If the case was started by one or more other entities, Janet only came along later, and the case largely took a different direction than Janet wanted, you have to wonder why Gmelig-Meyling and Liefhebber didn't include such qualifiers earlier. Liefhebber goes on to suggest that Janet was involved in the poltergeist because she wasn't able to get the contact she wanted with her father earlier (13:48). But as chapter two in Playfair's book discusses, there was a series of events at Grosse's house after Janet's death that he took to be paranormal events produced by Janet. Given how convinced Grosse already was that Janet had made paranormal contact before Enfield began, Liefhebber's suggestion that she "didn't succeed in getting any contact" prior to Enfield (13:51) is dubious if you accept those earlier events as coming from Janet, as Liefhebber apparently did after Playfair mentioned those events (13:56). It seems that Liefhebber was sometimes just presenting what he thought was the best explanation of the case at the moment, based on the knowledge he had at the time, but it's still worth noting that his suggestions were largely dubious. And he and Gmelig-Meyling claimed some paranormal knowledge of how Janet and Maurice Grosse supposedly were involved in the case, so it wasn't just a matter of their giving an opinion the same way anybody else could have. They claimed some degree of paranormal knowledge, but what they claimed to know is problematic enough to cast a lot of doubt on their credibility.
My impression is that Gmelig-Meyling probably did have some paranormal abilities and probably did bring about a temporary decrease in the poltergeist's activities, as previous mediums had, but that he did less than is often suggested. I find his claims about the sources of the poltergeist highly unlikely, and Liefhebber's shifting explanations for apparent problems with Gmelig-Meyling's claims further weaken Gmelig-Meyling and Liefhebber's credibility.
Near the end of his discussion with Liefhebber, Playfair comments, "It's true that we are trying to help them [the Hodgsons] to move house, because I think they should move house….Because Mrs. Hodgson said she would never feel happy in that house again and also that she never has been. I mean, she's always been a little bit unhappy there." (22:46) It looks to me like both the Hodgsons and the investigators decided to put forward a big effort to end the poltergeist in the fall of 1978. They simultaneously took multiple approaches: making various psychological adjustments, bringing in Gmelig-Meyling, discussing moving to another house, and whatever else. They'd taken other steps earlier in the second half of 1978, such as having Janet Hodgson physically and mentally tested at the Maudsley Hospital, having the investigators stay away from the house for a while, and having Peggy stop taking notes on the poltergeist's activities. So, we could say that there was an acceleration in the fall of what had started earlier. Because so many efforts were made, often in an overlapping way, it's difficult or impossible to tell just what worked and what didn't. But we know that no single effort or combination of them eliminated the poltergeist. It seems that there was just a temporary reduction in its activities.
After Playfair's book came out in June of 1980, he made some media appearances to promote it, and there's a collection of them among his Enfield tapes. In those contexts, he made a variety of claims about whether and how the case ended. "In the end, things just stopped happening. I can't say if it ended. One never knows." (GP43A, 7:35) "[The Hodgsons are] totally back to normal…[The poltergeist] stopped in October of '78, after the Dutchman, the Dutch medium was there. There was a very brief flareup, a kind of an encore, in April of '79, incidentally on the anniversary of the death of the previous occupant (just a coincidence, of course). Since then, it's been quite okay." (21:07, 21:19) "And life had been totally normal up to then [when the poltergeist started], and I'm glad to say it is now back to normal….sure enough, since then [the visit of Gmelig-Meyling], nothing." (24:21, 29:57) All of the comments I've just quoted were made in a few interviews during June of 1980.
In his book, writing about the time Janet spent in the Maudsley Hospital in the summer of 1978, Playfair commented, "we used all our powers of persuasion to suggest that the case had ended now that Janet was [away in the hospital], although it was quite obvious that we were wrong." (240) I suspect that much of what they did later that year and beyond was similarly motivated. They wanted the Hodgsons to believe that the poltergeist had ended. Treating the activity that occurred after Gmelig-Meyling's visit as residual effects of a poltergeist that had ended, like aftershocks of an earthquake, was an effort at persuasion. And they may have believed it to some extent. Or they may have persuaded themselves in the process of trying to persuade the Hodgsons.
But it's been evident for many years now that one person they didn't persuade much, at least over the long run, was Janet. You can tell from reading her interview with Will Storr and Zoe Brennan's article in 2011, for example. Here she is, in a documentary around 15 years ago, commenting on how there was "always something there" at the house while her mother was alive. Yet, even in that context, she refers to how the events "stopped". Whatever she meant by that, it's an illustration of how imprecise and confusing people often are when discussing the ending of the case.
I mentioned Janet's comments cited in Zoe Brennan's article. Something else that stands out in that article is that Shaka Bennett was 15 years old at the time of publication in 2011. If Shaka lives to be somewhere in his 80s, as people often do, he'll still be alive when the one-hundredth anniversary of the Enfield case arrives. That's an example of how much opportunity we have to increase our knowledge about issues like whether and how the Enfield case concluded, if the witnesses and people with access to them are willing to do the relevant work. But many of the witnesses won't live that long. There hasn't been much of an effort to get the relevant information from them about what happened after the earliest years of the case. That needs to change.
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