Correcting Wikipedia's Article On The Enfield Poltergeist

I recently ran a Google search for "Enfield Poltergeist", and the Wikipedia article on the case came up as the first result. It's gotten millions of views. Wikipedia is popular in a lot of contexts, and that's often a bad thing. On paranormal topics, Wikipedia is inordinately influenced by skeptics. The Enfield article has changed over time as it's been edited, and it will change in the future, but I want to respond to it as I saw it when I recently came across it again. As far as I recall, it was pretty bad on the occasions when I saw it in previous years as well. The skeptics who have been editing the article have had almost two decades to work on it. Let's take a look at the quality of their efforts.

For those who don't know my background, I'm a layman who's studied the Enfield case for several years. You can read what I've written about it on the page just linked. I've discussed the case with some of the eyewitnesses of the original events, I've listened to the entirety of Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes, I've read the committee report on the case produced by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and I've read many books and articles that address the case, for example.

I'll be citing Grosse and Playfair's tapes. I'll use "MG" to designate a tape from Grosse's collection and "GP" to refer to one from Playfair's. So, MG3B is Grosse's tape 3B, GP64A is Playfair's tape 64A, and so forth. Playfair's book on the case, This House Is Haunted (United States: White Crow Books, 2011), will be referenced with the abbreviation THIH. My quotations of the Wikipedia article are from the form it had when I accessed it on July 10, 2023.

The article opens with a reference to how supernatural activity was reported to have occurred "between 1977 and 1979". That's a common date range, and it's often used by people who think the case is genuine, not just skeptics. But it's problematic. It's arguable, and I think likely, that some activity reported before 1977 should be considered part of the poltergeist, and there certainly were ongoing reports of activity after 1979. See my article here for more information about those later events.

Wikipedia goes on to refer to how "more than thirty people" reported seeing paranormal events. The number of witnesses depends on the standard you apply for counting them, but "more than thirty" is an estimate often cited. In a 1983 article, Playfair called it a "very conservative estimate, that around 2000 inexplicable incidents were observed during the case, by about 30 different people." (The Unexplained, vol. 11, issue 121, "Enfield: The Trouble Begins", 2404) Notice the "very conservative" qualifier. I would place the number of witnesses in the triple digits. See the relevant section of my post here for more about the subject.

One of the most misleading aspects of the Wikipedia article is the large amount of highly significant information it doesn't mention. I'll provide some examples, but these can't convey the full weight of what the article leaves out.

There's an inordinate amount of attention (relative to the size of the article) given to skeptics of the case. But there's no discussion of the corroboration those skeptics have provided for the case's authenticity. That includes evidence that paranormal events happened when some of the skeptics named by Wikipedia (and others not named) visited the house, sometimes right in front of them. See here.

The article makes a few references to how Grosse and Playfair were accused of being "credulous" and "easily duped". It repeatedly raises doubts about their credibility while saying nothing about the doubts that have been raised about the credibility of the skeptics. There's nothing wrong with criticizing Grosse and Playfair where it's warranted, and I've done that myself, but here are some examples of the problems with the case's skeptics, problems you don't hear anything about from Wikipedia:

Anita Gregory
John Beloff
Milbourne Christopher
Joe Nickell
Deborah Hyde
Chris French

And those are just representative examples. You can find other relevant material in our archives.

Wikipedia also doesn't mention that many of the eyewitnesses who affirmed the authenticity of the case were initially skeptics. Many individuals were skeptical until they experienced something paranormal firsthand (John Burcombe, Graham Morris, John Rainbow, etc.), with some of them continuing to express doubts about other aspects of the case in the years since then (John and Sylvie Burcombe's skepticism discussed in the last paragraph here, the doubts expressed by Vic and Peggy Nottingham discussed in the section titled "The Nottinghams' Skepticism" here, Graham Morris' doubts about the voice phenomena and other aspects of the case, etc.).

There's also a problem with Wikipedia's ignorance about or lack of interest in other sources. They cite Melvyn Willin's The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes (United States: White Crow Books, 2019), but say almost nothing about the contents of the book. He discusses a lot of significant topics (the contents of Grosse and Playfair's tapes, the contents of the SPR's committee report on the case, etc.). My work on the tapes isn't mentioned at all, though that makes more sense than their lack of interest in Willin's book, given that I don't have any relevant credentials, and I'm not popular. Anita Gregory's doctoral thesis, which has a lot of Enfield material in it, has been available online to the general public for more than five years now, and Wikipedia says nothing about it. As we'll see below, there's substantial evidence that at least some of the people who edited the Wikipedia article hadn't read Playfair's book, even though they cite it. They discuss Stewart Lamont's coverage of the case for the BBC, but what they say about the subject is inaccurate enough to suggest that whoever wrote that part of the Wikipedia article hadn't watched the video produced by Lamont's team, a video that Wikipedia (inaccurately) comments on.

The article makes vague references to "furniture moving", "knocking sounds on the walls", and such, but none of the details that are the most difficult to explain by normal means are mentioned. Wikipedia tells you nothing about Grosse's report of a couch levitating and turning over in the air right in front of him, for example, an incident that was caught on audio tape (MG20Ai, 4:31; THIH, 73-74). Several other people were in the room with him when it happened. Shortly after, Janet Hodgson levitated while Grosse was looking directly at her, an event also caught on tape and seen by other witnesses who corroborated Grosse's report (MG20Ai, 6:12; THIH, 74). Here's a video of Playfair describing some of the many events he witnessed, and the two he describes there were also caught on tape (GP6B, 2:09, 4:21). Or Wikipedia could have mentioned the details surrounding an incident in which a fireplace was ripped out of a wall it was cemented into, with the brass pipe it was attached to bent to a 32-degree angle. Or the details surrounding the December 15, 1977 teleportations and levitations witnessed by several people. Or the equipment malfunctions that professional operators of the equipment described as "impossible", "absolutely impossible", and "one chance in a million". Or the many events that occurred when none of the children who are typically thought to have faked the whole case were around. Instead of mentioning details like those, let alone providing a good argument for the normal rather than paranormal nature of the events, we just get vague references to "furniture moving", "objects being thrown across a room", etc. By being so vague, they make their skepticism seem much more reasonable than it actually is.

I could give more examples of significant information Wikipedia doesn't mention, including entire large categories of evidence, but I'll move on to provide several examples of the article's factual errors. Ironically, though the article repeats Joe Nickell's references to Grosse and Playfair as credulous a couple of times, the Wikipedia authors keep credulously repeating false claims they got from Nickell's Enfield article, which is highly inaccurate. If they had checked the original sources, including sources Wikipedia cites in their own article, they could and should have known that Nickell was misleading them.

For example, the article tells us the following, with Nickell cited as their source:

When Janet and Margaret admitted "pranking" to journalists, Grosse and Playfair compelled the girls to retract their confessions.

The admission being referred to supposedly only came from Margaret, not both girls. And it was only an admission about one type of phenomena, the poltergeist voice. And Margaret denied having made such an admission from the start. She wasn't "compelled" to retract. For further discussion of this episode and documentation that Nickell and Wikipedia are wrong, do a Ctrl F search for "confessed" here. I wrote the post just linked before listening to Grosse and Playfair's tapes. After listening to the tapes, I provided an update on the issues surrounding Margaret's alleged confession. Do a Ctrl F search for "confession" here.

Wikipedia tells us:

According to Playfair, one of Janet's voices, who she called "Bill", displayed a "habit of suddenly changing the topic—it was a habit Janet also had"….

Skeptic Joe Nickell of the US-based Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) examined the findings of paranormal investigators and criticized them for being overly credulous; when a supposedly disembodied demonic voice was heard, Playfair noted that "as always Janet's lips hardly seemed to be moving."

It seems that Wikipedia, like Nickell, doesn't have much of an understanding of the explanatory options for a poltergeist or is being dishonest about the subject. It's common for poltergeists to be viewed as partly or entirely a manifestation of the mind of one or more living humans. Under those circumstances, not only would it not be a problem for the poltergeist to reflect the mind of a living human, move that person's body, etc., but it would be surprising if it didn't ever do such things. And even if an entity other than a living human is involved, it's plausible that the entity would use information from the mind of a living individual, move a person's body through whom it's manifesting, etc. Yet, people like Nickell and the skeptics behind the Wikipedia article act as if alignment between alleged poltergeist activity and a living human not only is evidence that a case is fake, but is even such obvious evidence that somebody like Playfair is "credulous" if he doesn't take the alignment to be highly evidential against the authenticity of the case.

The Enfield voice would sometimes manifest in a disembodied form and sometimes manifest in an embodied way, through different people or animals on different occasions. The amount of lip movement would vary from no movement at all to a lot of movement. At the point in time Playfair was addressing in the passage of his book Nickell and Wikipedia quote, it was known that the voice was manifesting through Janet's body. So, some degree of lip movement was possible accordingly. The fact that there wasn't much movement at the time was impressive, since that would be hard for a young adolescent girl like Janet to fake so soon after the voice originated. Just after commenting on how little Janet's lips moved, later in the same sentence Nickell and Wikipedia quote, Playfair commented that "and she [Janet] herself seemed little interested in what the Voice was saying". He goes on to note some differences between the character of the voice and the character of Janet. He refers to how he "wondered" about the voice's behavior and "whoever or whatever it was" (THIH, 178-79). He's just making observations about the nature of the phenomena at the time and considering various explanatory options. That's the context of his observation about lip movement. Nickell and Wikipedia seem to be insinuating either that Playfair was so credulous that he wasn't able to figure out that the voice was coming from Janet's body even while knowing that her lips were moving or that he should have dismissed the voice as fake as soon as he knew that it was coming from her body. Both of those responses to Playfair's comment are ridiculous, and anybody who's read his book shouldn't be making that kind of mistake.

But Nickell and Wikipedia do that sort of thing over and over again. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the skeptics editing the Wikipedia article haven't even read Playfair's book.

Anybody who's interested in studying the voice phenomena in the Enfield case, including issues related to lip movement, can read my article here and the later update here. The issues are much larger and more complicated than people like Nickell and Wikipedia's skeptical editors suggest, and the evidence for the voice's authenticity is far better than they let on.

And Playfair never said that the voice was demonic. He repeatedly criticized the demonic hypothesis. It's misleading for Wikipedia to bring up that view when addressing what Playfair believed.

We're told by Wikipedia:

Skeptics have argued that the alleged poltergeist voice that originated from Janet was produced by false vocal cords above the larynx and had the phraseology and vocabulary of a child.

We know such facts largely because people like Grosse and Playfair were studying and documenting them long before skeptics like Nickell and the Wikipedia editors came along. For example, Playfair's book discusses his and Grosse's efforts to obtain a laryngograph, run some tests with it, and work with people like A.J. Fourcin and John Hasted to analyze the results (e.g., THIH, 203, 213-15). Grosse and Playfair also ran a lot of other tests on the voice, recorded many hours of the voice's manifestations, and so on. In addition to the characteristics of the voice that are of a normal nature, as outlined by Wikipedia above, there were other characteristics that are more suggestive of a paranormal explanation, characteristics Wikipedia ignores. See my articles on the voice here and here for a consideration of the evidence as a whole.

Citing Nickell again, Wikipedia claims:

He states that a remote-controlled still camera—the photographer was not present in the room with the girls—timed to take a picture every fifteen seconds was shown by investigator Melvin Harris to reveal "pranking" by the girls. He argues that a photo allegedly depicting Janet levitating actually shows her bouncing off the bed as if it were a trampoline.

You can read my response to Nickell several years ago for more about Melvin Harris' claims. Nickell misrepresented what Harris said, and Wikipedia repeats the misrepresentation. And see here and here regarding what skeptics need to address in the levitation photographs, which neither Nickell nor Wikipedia has done. The focus should be on issues like where Janet's feet are relative to the bed in certain photographs and the people in the photos who are looking at Janet, for reasons explained in my two posts linked above. Nickell and Wikipedia, like other skeptics, don't seem to be aware of some of the evidence, and they're focused on less significant issues instead.

The claim that the camera was "timed to take a picture every fifteen seconds" is false, and I don't know where Wikipedia is getting it. It doesn't appear in Nickell's article. The camera was operated by remote control, and it could take pictures at any moment. It would sometimes be set off for no apparent reason, when the girls couldn't have been expecting it, and you sometimes hear the camera going off under such circumstances on the tapes. Contrary to what Wikipedia implies, the camera wasn't set to go off at a predictable "every fifteen seconds". The girls didn't control the camera, and they largely didn't know when it would take pictures, which is problematic for any fraud hypothesis.

Wikipedia goes on:

In 2015, Deborah Hyde commented that there was no solid evidence for the Enfield poltergeist: "The first thing to note is that the occurrences didn't happen under controlled circumstances. People frequently see what they expect to see, their senses being organised and shaped by their prior experiences and beliefs."

An entity like a poltergeist isn't something you can necessarily put through a scientific experiment or expect to be replicated in a predictable manner. But there were some scientific tests done in the Enfield case, and neither Hyde nor Wikipedia addresses any of them. See here for a brief overview, and see the post here for a lengthy discussion of the subject with David Robertson, who was involved in some of the testing. See here for a brief segment in a documentary in which Robertson discusses the results he got from one of the experiments. And other such testing was done, aside from what's mentioned in the material linked above. Do a Ctrl F search for "detect" in the post here, for example.

Even when the controls involved weren't of a higher, more scientific, more formal nature, there often were controls of a lesser sort in place. Janet's mouth would be taped shut during experiments on the voice, certain people would be kept from certain places at certain times to make sure they didn't interfere with events in any relevant way, etc. You can't always have the highest sort of controls in place at all times in a context like a poltergeist case. And skeptics can always, and frequently do, object that there isn't more evidence even when you give them some. If you give them what they ask for, they can just ask for more. The goal posts can, and often do, keep moving. But evidence doesn't have to be maximal in order to have some significance. There were more controls and more significant evidence than Hyde and Wikipedia suggest.

We're told:

In a television interview for BBC Scotland, Janet was observed to gain attention by waving her hand, and then putting her hand in front of her mouth while a claimed "disembodied" voice was heard. During the interview both girls were asked the question, "How does it feel to be haunted by a poltergeist?" Janet replied, "It's not haunted," and Margaret, in a hushed tone, interrupted, "Shut up". These factors have been regarded by skeptics as evidence against the case.

Here's the video Wikipedia is referring to. It's clear, at many points throughout the video, that it's about an embodied voice, not a disembodied one. During the video, Grosse talks to the interviewer about what effect the manifestation of the voice has on the girls' bodies, Playfair asks the voice how it avoids "bashing Janet's vocal cords to pieces", etc. It's astonishing that Wikipedia would not only get the nature of the voice so wrong, but would also refer to how Janet was trying to "gain attention". She was sitting on a couch being filmed by people who asked to interview her. You don't have to do anything to gain attention in that kind of situation. And she isn't "waving her hand" in any relevant way. The interview was done in late February of 1978. It was known since the previous December that the voice manifested through Janet's body, along with sometimes manifesting in other ways. And the voice frequently manifests during the video without Janet's mouth covered at all. Furthermore, Wikipedia's interpretation of the "It's not haunted." line is false. For one thing, it's highly implausible upfront that Janet would refer to the case as inauthentic under such circumstances. Second, she goes on, just after the line in question, to refer to various paranormal events that had occurred in connection with the poltergeist, which wouldn't make much sense if she had just said that there was no poltergeist. What did the "It's not haunted." line mean, then? She likely was referring to the distinction between a haunting and a poltergeist, which Grosse had often brought up. As early as the first half of September of 1977, the Daily Mirror wrote, "Mr. Grosse said: 'I believe that genuine poltergeist-type phenomena is occurring, but it does not mean it is a haunted house. This type of manifestation is attached to people, not places.'" ("The House Of Strange Happenings", September 10, 1977, p. 1) There are multiple indications in the video of how much influence Grosse had on the girls. Janet's "It's not haunted." line is surely another example of that. For more about that line and its surrounding context, see my post here. That post includes some excerpts from an email exchange I had with Stewart Lamont, the man who interviewed the Hodgson girls in the video under consideration. He didn't think the girls were admitting a hoax, as he told me in our email exchange and as the video itself suggests. If the girls had been admitting a hoax, as skeptics so ridiculously claim, that admission would have gotten a much different reaction than it did by Lamont's team, the people who were following the Enfield case at the time, etc. The idea that the girls had confessed to a hoax is a later figment of the imagination of skeptics. It's embarrassing that they've been trying to keep up their obviously false interpretation of that segment of the video for so long.

And Wikipedia, like other skeptics, ignores other aspects of the video that are far more significant and support the authenticity of the case. See my post linked above for more about those other aspects of the video. It's remarkable that skeptics who claim that the Hodgson girls faked the case have nothing to say about a video that records what sounds like typical poltergeist knocking phenomena occurring elsewhere in the house while the girls are being filmed sitting on a couch, with the other Hodgson children accounted for as well.

A few years before the first edition of Wikipedia's Enfield article went up, Maurice Grosse wrote:

On a more personal note, I have another concern. I am now in my 83rd year, and I suspect that when I am no longer here to refute the sometimes vicious criticisms of my investigations, particularly of the Enfield Case, the floodgates of uninformed scepticism will be opened and the bigots will have a field day. (The Paranormal Review, Issue 24, October 2002, "After 120 Years Of Psychical Research — Confusion Abounds!", p. 9)

There's a lot of uninformed skepticism at Wikipedia.