It's been more than two years since I posted the last entry in this series. I have enough material to justify another one now, so I'm picking up where I left off.
(See part 1 here for an explanation of what this series is about. The other parts in the series can be accessed through the following links: two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. I'm going to make reference to Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's tapes. The tapes from Grosse's collection will be referred to with "MG" [e.g., MG44A is Grosse's tape 44A], and Playfair's tapes will be designated by "GP" [e.g., GP3A is Playfair's tape 3A].)
Video Footage Of The Hodgsons' House And Nearby Areas
I recently came across the best video footage I've seen of the outside of the Hodgsons' house and some relevant areas nearby. I think it was filmed in 2024. There's been some remodeling of buildings since the 1970s, new structures put up, and so on, but what's seen in the video should be mostly the same as what was there in the 1970s. There's footage of the house from multiple angles, the school across the street, some local graveyards (including the one where Bill Wilkins was buried and his gravesite), etc.
A 1981 Presentation By Maurice Grosse
I've also come across an audio recording of a 1981 presentation by Maurice Grosse titled "The Poltergeist Enigma". It addresses the Enfield case, but also some others. It includes some of Grosse's audio recordings from his investigations. Some of the recordings are ones I don't recall having heard publicly aired before. Go to the 5:49 mark here, for example, to listen to a discussion of some fire-related incidents. He addresses a case he investigated at the same time Enfield was going on and some material from the Enfield case. He plays a recording of a discussion he had with two firefighters who worked on the fires involved in the other case, including "the chief fire prevention officer for the whole of London". They refer to how they have no explanation for the fires, how unusual they were, and their consistency with a paranormal explanation. Go here for Grosse playing a recording of what seems to be a disembodied voice in the Enfield case. It's not the best audio of a disembodied voice in the Enfield context, but I don't think the recording of the best one has ever been released to the public. You can read more about that one if you go here and do a Ctrl F search for "best" and read what follows the first result of that search. Though the recording Grosse plays in his 1981 presentation isn't the best one, it does seem authentic. Not only does it sound like a voice saying "No.", but it also sounds highly similar to what the voice was like when it manifested in an embodied form through Janet, even down to the tone and pace the voice would often take when saying "no" on other occasions. The timing of the apparent voice and its multiple similarities to what the embodied voice sounded like when manifesting through Janet seem unlikely to be coincidental. I'm highlighting some portions of Grosse's presentation here, but the whole thing is worth listening to.
The Underestimated Photographs
When Apple TV's Enfield documentary came out in 2023, I discussed a significant segment in which Graham Morris talked about a sequence of photos in which Janet moved from lying in her bed to an upright position above the bed in one-sixth of a second. Since then, after listening to a 1996 television program again, I noticed some corroboration of Morris' claim from Maurice Grosse. Go here to listen to Grosse referring to how there are photos showing Janet "going from horizontal to vertical in a sixth of a second". That's not the same as video footage, but it's close. Go here for further discussion of the photographic evidence for the levitation episodes.
In one of my earliest Enfield posts, I discussed an exchange Guy Playfair had with Melvin Harris in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. They were discussing a couple of Graham Morris' multi-photo sequences, in which a series of photos were taken in rapid succession (less than a second between each). The two sequences are the ones featured in Playfair's book, one involving allegedly paranormal curtain movement and the other involving allegedly paranormal movement of some pillows. You can read my post linked above for further details. I think both sequences likely show paranormal events, but Harris' alternative explanation is possible. As far as I know, Harris never addressed any levitation sequences, like what I discussed above.
But I want to bring up a point I didn't make in that 2017 post. You have to consider the cumulative effect of all of the photographs. For a discussion of the subject, see my two comments starting here, especially the second one.
I also want to revisit a photo I posted in 2019. Go here and scroll down to the two photos of a couch, one showing it moving through the air and the other showing it after it landed on the floor. The magazine I got the photos from (cited in the post) explains (in its photo credits after the cover page) that the photo sequence in question was taken by Grosse. If you're familiar with the layout of the Hodgsons' house (see here for a floor plan), you should recognize that the first photo is taken from a position well within the room. So, it seems that Grosse had to be in the room when the couch started moving. How would one or more of the children throw an object as large as a couch without Grosse noticing? This is a photo sequence that seems to require you to assign a highly unusual amount of incompetence or dishonesty to Grosse in order to dismiss it as not paranormal.
Who turned the lights off?
In March of 1978, Grosse went as far as to say that there hadn't yet been a single night when the lights in the Hodgsons' house were turned off deliberately (MG83A, 17:57). That makes sleeping harder and faking things more difficult. It doesn't just allow people in the house to be able to see faking more easily, but also makes it easier for people outside to see what's happening in the house. (It was a busy street.) On one occasion, after a bulb had gone out, Janet commented that she didn't like being in the dark, and her mother got a new bulb to replace the old one (MG33A, 11:31). The family's desire to keep the lights on makes much more sense if the poltergeist was genuine than if it was faked. I've mentioned other types of behavior of the family that likewise make more sense if the case was genuine. They were afraid to go upstairs or to other parts of the house alone, for example, and tried to get one or more other individuals to go with them (GP34B, 35:13; GP39B, 31:51). On one occasion, they made such comments when there were multiple lines of evidence that they didn't know they were being recorded, as discussed here, which adds further evidence that they were sincerely afraid. They weren't just putting on an act. See the post just linked for other evidence to that effect.
But notice Grosse's qualifier that the lights weren't deliberately left off. They were sometimes turned off by the poltergeist. Peggy Hodgson referred to how the poltergeist did so on multiple occasions, repeatedly doing it after she got in bed (GP30B, 34:20). On another occasion, she refers to the poltergeist doing something to a light when nobody was near it (MG56A, 27:08). There are other occasions as well when there are references to a light going out, apparently in a paranormal manner (GP31B, 30:04, 56:13). In his book, Playfair discusses a visit to the house by John Hasted, a physicist at Birkbeck College. Playfair explains that a ceiling light had been seen swinging around with nobody near it (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 229). The bulb in the light went out, and Hasted examined it. He found that the manner in which it had broken was "very rare". As Playfair goes on to explain, "It was strange that this happened in the presence of an investigator who would have thought of examining the bulb to see exactly what had broken." I doubt that the entity behind the poltergeist just happened to have studied lightbulbs at some time in the past, had come across such detailed knowledge of lightbulbs in the afterlife, or some such thing. It seems that telepathy is the best explanation for how the poltergeist knew how to break the bulb in a way that would be significant to Hasted. It got the information from Hasted's mind. So, there are multiple lines of evidence that this light incident was paranormal (the light moving with nobody near it, the light going out in a "very rare" way that somebody present at the time, who wasn't at the house on any other occasion, knew about and would be interested in discovering).
Notice that these instances of the poltergeist interfering with the lights involve the lights being on to begin with. So, that's further evidence that the family did regularly keep the lights on. The combination of the family keeping the lights on so much and the poltergeist sometimes turning them off in paranormal ways is a good illustration of how unlikely it is that any fraud hypothesis can explain the whole case.
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