The Cleverness Of The Enfield Poltergeist

I've often discussed apparent differences between the entity behind the poltergeist and the individuals sometimes alleged to have faked it or produced it through their psychic abilities. See my article on the poltergeist voice, for example, which provides many examples of paranormal knowledge exhibited by the voice, its being ignorant of information the Hodgson children were aware of, etc. One of the categories I referred to there was knowledge the voice had that was above that of the children. I want to expand on what I said there, but with regard to the poltergeist in general rather than only the voice, and I want to focus on a particular form of knowledge it exhibited. It sometimes seemed more clever than you'd expect the Hodgson children to be.

By its nature, that sort of characteristic is going to provide weaker evidence than what we have for the poltergeist's authenticity and identity in other contexts. A child, or an adolescent in particular, could be unusually clever. As I've mentioned before, the magician Milbourne Christopher explained the Enfield case as a hoax perpetrated by the Hodgson girls and referred to Janet as "very, very clever". (The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 9, No. 2, Winter 1984-85, "A Final Interview With Milbourne Christopher", 161) But we don't begin with a default assumption that a person is so unusually clever, we have evidence I've discussed before that Janet and Margaret weren't so clever (e.g., what we know about their academic records, how poorly they faked phenomena on the occasions when they're known to have done so, the lack of such cleverness reflected in their later lives), and cleverness falls well short of explaining everything that needs to be explained. Furthermore, the argument from cleverness doesn't have to give us certainty or even a high degree of probability in order to have some significance. If the cleverness of the entity behind the poltergeist seems better explained by some entity other than the ones alleged to have faked the case or alleged to have produced genuine phenomena through paranormal abilities they had, that better explanation doesn't have to be better by a large margin. It just has to be better. A larger margin would be preferable, but a preference isn't a necessity.

An argument like the one I'm focused on in this post improves as the quality, number, and variety of the relevant events goes up. The higher the level of cleverness the poltergeist seems to have had, the more often it was clever, and the more varied its forms of cleverness, the better.

Enfield involves a quadruple-digit number of events over a double-digit number of years, so a post like this has to be far from exhaustive. And I haven't studied the cleverness of the poltergeist in a lot of depth. What I'm doing in this post is addressing some of the general principles involved, providing some examples of relevant events in the case, and encouraging further study.

I've argued elsewhere, such as in my article on the poltergeist voice, that the entity behind the poltergeist was likely a deceased human with a malfunctioning mind. Even if you think some other source was behind the poltergeist, such as a living human, I think it would be difficult to deny that some kind of malfunctioning mind was involved. And that complicates the cleverness issue. As Guy Playfair noted in his book on Enfield, "the Voice was a tremendous bore most of the time…a good ninety-five percent of what it uttered was trivial rubbish….there was nothing much more we could do with our Voices, except wish they would shut up and go away, which they did not." (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 164, 203) But as my article on the voice explains, the immature comments made by the voice were often below the maturity level of the Hodgson children through whom the voice was manifesting, and the ways in which its characteristics were of a low quality often differed from the nature of the relevant characteristics of the Hodgson children. In other words, its immature qualities can't be adequately explained by attributing the voice to faking by one or more of the Hodgson children without further qualification. And attributing those immature aspects of the poltergeist to fraud by the children wouldn't explain the more mature aspects of the poltergeist, like the cleverness I'm focused on here. We have to explain both the immature and the mature qualities of the poltergeist, and I think my view that it was a deceased human with a malfunctioning mind offers the best explanation. Under my view, the instances of cleverness seem to give us glimpses of the better qualities of the person's inconsistent mental state. So, even though this post is focusing on cleverness, I'm not denying that the overall situation is more complicated and that we have to also take other factors into account.

The references below to the tapes of Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair will use "MG" to designate Grosse's tapes and "GP" to designate ones from Playfair's collection. MG31A is Grosse's tape 31A, GP40B is Playfair's 40B, etc.

There's a striking example of a poltergeist exhibiting cleverness on one of Grosse's tapes, but the cleverness comes from another poltergeist, not the Enfield one. It's a good example to start with, though, to illustrate what I have in mind. Grosse recorded a discussion he had with Archie Roy about a case Roy had investigated. That case involved two adolescent boys who were close to the ages of the Hodgson girls when the Enfield case began. The elder boy, who will be referred to below, was 13 years old when the case started. Roy recounts an incident in which the family was gathered in their sitting room and playing cards. The elder boy "started going through a series of card manipulations and tricks of the sort that David Nixon would have been proud to present, which he [the elder boy in the poltergeist family] had never done in his life before and which he never did again, card [unintelligible], manipulation, extracting cards from the pack, fanning them out, the sort of thing that was part of the opening and closing shots of the late 'Avengers' series on television, almost as if someone was saying, 'Look how well I can control him.'" (MG80B, 1:46). I don't know of anything that impressive in the Enfield case. But there are some lesser examples worth noting.

A good example is an incident that occurred on November 5, 1977, involving the throwing of a box. Go here to watch a video reenactment of the event along with a small portion of the audio tape. To hear more of the audio and Grosse explaining more of the context, go here, look for the audio titled "Enfield Poltergeist 25 Years on", and start listening at 42:55. Grosse had been talking to the poltergeist for a long time, and he was getting responses through knocking. At one point, after the poltergeist had been giving some inconsistent and nonsensical replies, he asked it, "Are you having a game with me?" It instantly threw a box across the room, with some pillows and toys in it, hitting Grosse in the head hard enough to knock him back, but not hard enough to hurt him or leave any mark, not even any redness. The poltergeist's response is clever on multiple levels: the timing, the contents of the box, where Grosse was hit, and the appropriateness of hitting Grosse with some force, but not hard enough to hurt him. As Grosse said at the time, and you can hear it in the second audio clip linked above, "That was a very good answer…That was a very fine demonstration of what you can do, because I couldn't have better than that." Later that month, in a discussion with Playfair, Grosse commented, "And Janet didn't throw that box of toys, box of pillows, at me to deceive me. You know damn well she didn't do it. She was lying in bed when it happened….You're not telling me a kid's going to lie in bed, waiting for me to say 'Are you having a game with me?', then sling it at me like that. I mean, it's just too ridiculous for words. I mean, what is this child, a bloody genius or something?" (MG20Bi, 41:03) Playfair was standing just outside the room when the event occurred, with the door partly open, and he walked in fast enough to see the box falling from Grosse's forehead. Playfair commented in a 1980 interview, "That incident is one of many which were quite unquestionably genuine. It was witnessed by five people. I was in the room quickly enough to see the box falling off Maurice's forehead, and it had come about eight feet. And there was just nobody near enough. Anybody, if anybody had touched that box, I would have seen them. I am absolutely certain of that." (GP43B, 7:27) It should be noted that witnesses like the ones who were present during this box-throwing incident acknowledged that they weren't looking in the right place at the relevant time, that events might have been faked, etc. on other occasions. (See here for some examples.) So, it's significant accordingly when they comment on how confident they are about this box-throwing event. It's not just that an eleven-year-old child in a lower-class home without much education, one with the characteristics we know Janet had, probably wouldn't have thought of faking an event that's so clever on so many levels. It's also that she had no way of anticipating that Grosse was going to make such a comment and when he would make it, and she surely couldn't have pulled off that response to Grosse's comment even if she wanted to (with both Grosse and Peggy Hodgson in the room and monitoring what was going on there and Janet's having to throw the box in such a way that it hit Grosse in just the right place with just the right amount of force). The cleverness of the event makes far more sense coming from a source other than Janet and the other Hodgson children.

That incident was clever in multiple ways simultaneously, but there are others that involve only one form of cleverness and are, therefore, less significant. The evidential force of those simpler incidents increases when you consider them cumulatively, though. I'll provide some examples of what I have in mind.

When asked what its favorite jazz musician was, the poltergeist responded, "Scarlet Fever" (GP22B, 21:33). There was no way I'm aware of for any of the Hodgson children present to have anticipated the question, and the poltergeist voice provides that answer about seven seconds after the question was asked. Apparently, the answer is an allusion to the raspy nature of the poltergeist's embodied voice, since the medical condition known as scarlet fever is associated with the throat and a sore throat in particular. Would one of the Hodgson children (the voice apparently was manifesting only through Janet at the time) have anticipated such a question or have so quickly come up with that sort of answer without anticipating the question? Probably not, but you can't be confident that it wouldn't happen. Children are more clever than you expect them to be at times, and they sometimes say things that are more clever than they intended if interpreted a certain way.

A similarly clever reply from the voice occurred in January of 1978. The poltergeist was behaving unusually badly that night (a lot of swearing and other ridiculous comments, knocking, throwing Janet around the room, pulling wallpaper off the walls, etc.). Peggy Hodgson commented, angrily, "How long are we going to be awake tonight? Two o'clock again?" (MG61A, 38:00) Less than a second later, without much time to think about it, the poltergeist voice responded, "No, five." Just before Peggy's comment the poltergeist was responding to, Janet had commented on how sick she felt and had been thrown around the room multiple times by the poltergeist. You can hear her panting, trying to catch her breath, and banging into things. It doesn't seem that she would have been in much of a condition to rapidly respond "No, five" to Peggy's question, especially given how calmly and in how normal a voice the poltergeist made that comment. (The voice was manifesting through multiple individuals by this point in the case, but the voice in question sounds like it normally did when it manifested through Janet. Another voice can be heard occasionally making comments as well, presumably one manifesting through Margaret, which sounded significantly different than Janet's.) This is another incident in which the poltergeist seems to have been operating with a different mindset than the mindset of the people around it, including the Hodgson children.

Grosse and the Hodgsons discussed an event in early December of 1977 that seems to reflect some degree of cleverness on the part of the poltergeist (MG30A, 0:14). There was a heavy table Peggy Hodgson wanted to remove from the house, but she didn't know of any way to do it. Grosse estimated that the table weighed about 120 to 150 pounds. Just after commenting about how she didn't know how to go about moving the table, Peggy heard a loud crash in the living room. The table in question had moved about 6 to 7 feet, on to the top of another table or nearly on top of it. I don't see how any of the children or a combination of them could have faked the incident, not only because of the table's weight and how far it was moved, but also because of the timing of the incident. How likely is it that one or more of the children would have been prepared to fake such an incident just after Peggy made the comment under consideration? Furthermore, the table was moved in such a way that it separated into multiple pieces, which revealed that the table could be taken apart in that manner, something Peggy hadn't known previously. Once she knew the table could be taken apart that way, she and the children were able to carry it outside. So, it seems that the poltergeist knew something about the table that Peggy didn't know (with the likely implication that her children didn't know it either) and moved the table in a manner that would reveal that information to Peggy just after she expressed a desire to move the table.

Another type of event should be mentioned here, one that involves ignorance on the part of the poltergeist rather than cleverness, but would require an unlikely sort of cleverness on the part of one of the Hodgson children if the incident were being faked. The incident occurred on tape MG41iB. Grosse asks the voice what year it is (30:00). After a long pause, it says, "Queen's Jubilee" (30:15). That's a correct answer. 1977 was a Jubilee year for the queen. The voice was willing to give an answer and gave it in a somewhat sophisticated manner, so it can't be argued that one of the children was faking an unwillingness to answer or faking unsophistication on the part of the poltergeist. But it's a roundabout answer and one that it only gave after a long pause. You get the impression that the poltergeist was ignorant of what year it was, but had picked up on the fact that it was a Jubilee year for the queen by means of something it saw on television or in some other way. (For a potential explanation of why a poltergeist would be ignorant of what year it was, see my comments on the apparent mental impairment of this poltergeist in the article here.) If the voice was being faked by one of the children, why not just answer the question by saying "1977"? If one of the children was faking ignorance of what year it was and combining that with knowledge that it was a Jubilee year for the queen, that's a more clever form of faking than you'd expect from any of the Hodgson children. To read about other incidents of a similar nature, see the section titled "Knowledge Below The Children's" in the article here.

An event of a similar nature from a different context warrants mentioning. Among the photos of Janet allegedly being thrown from her bed by the poltergeist, there are some that show her leaving the bed with her feet next to the pillow and with the covers largely undisturbed. If she faked that set of circumstances, it required more cleverness than you'd expect somebody like Janet to have. See my post here for further details about the significance of those photos.

Notice that these indications of cleverness go across multiple types of activity: the throwing of a box, the comments of the embodied voice, the moving of a table, the throwing of Janet from her bed. So, you can't explain them merely by addressing one type of phenomenon, such as the voice. And this is further evidence of the unity of the phenomena. I've noted other indications of such unity in other contexts.

As I said near the beginning of this post, I wouldn't assign much weight to this argument from cleverness. It's among the weaker lines of evidence for the authenticity of Enfield. But I do think there's some merit to it.