There's a constant stream of new videos, podcasts, articles, and other material coming out about the Enfield case. There are certain skeptical misrepresentations that are recurring themes. I've addressed many objections to the case here and elsewhere over the years, but my material has been scattered across a lot of locations. I want to gather in one place some concise responses to particular objections, including some of the most common ones, with links to lengthier responses for those who are interested.
The objections vary a lot in their quality, but they're ones I think are worth responding to because of their popularity or for whatever other reason. Sometimes an objection is inaccurate because it's assigned too much significance to one degree or another, even though it would be accurate if kept in proportion. Since some otherwise valid objections seem to often be taken out of proportion, that's one of the problems I want to address here.
This post is meant to give people a better understanding of the case, whether as a cure for the myths after encountering them or as an inoculation before encountering them in the future. I'm not trying to resolve every issue here. You can read my other posts on Enfield, like the ones linked above, for more.
Each myth will be summarized in bold print, followed by a response. I'll probably add responses to more myths as time goes on. Below is a list of each one, with a link that will take you to the relevant section of the post.
The Hodgson girls confessed to faking the whole case.
The inauthentic events make it likely that the case as a whole is inauthentic.
All or almost all of the Enfield events happened when one or more of the Hodgson children were nearby.
The lack of photographic evidence of paranormal events is suspicious.
In the photographs of Janet supposedly levitating, her hair has moved in a way that's inconsistent with levitation.
The photographs of Janet allegedly levitating look like a girl jumping from her bed.
In Stewart Lamont's video footage of the poltergeist speaking, you can see Janet's lips and throat moving. That proves the voice was being faked, and the faking of the voice proves that the entire case is fraudulent.
The conceptual content of the voice is different than what you'd expect from a poltergeist.
Some of what the voice claimed about Bill Wilkins is inaccurate, which disproves its claim to be Wilkins. That undermines the credibility of the voice.
Some singers perform songs with the sort of deep and raspy voice involved in the Enfield case, and others have produced a voice like the Enfield one by normal means in other contexts.
The girls' demeanor in the Lamont video, such as smiling and laughing so much, lessens the credibility of the case.
The events shown in the Nationwide television program that aired in November of 1977 seem to be fake. For example, Maurice Grosse seems to prepare himself for having the shoe thrown at him around 4:08 in the video, which suggests he knew the shoe was going to be thrown.
The fact that the family stayed in the house is suspicious. Why not move?
The witnesses could be wrong. People sometimes lie or are honestly mistaken. And because of how unlikely it is that anything paranormal would occur, the possibility of lies and honest mistakes on the part of the witnesses is more likely.
People like Anita Gregory and Milbourne Christopher debunked the case decades ago.
Maurice Grosse was biased because of the death of his daughter shortly before he started on the Enfield case. He was desperate to find evidence of an afterlife, so his bias casts significant doubt on his Enfield work.
Enfield was the first paranormal case Maurice Grosse worked. His inexperience weakens the credibility of the Enfield case.
- The Hodgson girls confessed to faking the whole case. That never happened. And that sort of confession wouldn't make sense, since many of the events occurred when the girls weren't around or occurred in such a way that the girls would have been unable to fake the event for some other reason. (More about that below.) Janet and Margaret both stand by the authenticity of the case, as their participation in Apple TV's 2023 documentary illustrates, for example. I've often seen the confession claim made without any attempt to document it. When there is some effort to document it, the most plausible candidate cited is Janet's "It's not haunted." line in her interview with the BBC's Stewart Lamont in 1978, in response to the question "How does it feel to be haunted by a poltergeist?". You can click on the link just supplied to see that segment in the interview. The evidence suggests that Janet was making a distinction between a haunting, which involves place-centered paranormal events, and a poltergeist, which involves person-centered paranormal events. She wasn't denying that paranormal events were occurring. In fact, she goes on to discuss some of them just after the comment in question. (The failure of skeptics to realize or acknowledge that the sources they're citing are inconsistent with their claims is a recurring theme, as we'll see below. Enfield skeptics have a bad habit of taking things out of context, sometimes to the point of portraying sources as saying the opposite of what they actually said.) I discuss that portion of the Lamont interview in depth here, in a section of the post you can find by doing a Ctrl F search for "footage". Go here for a further discussion of the interview, including what Lamont told me about it in an email exchange. Janet has acknowledged in various interviews that a small percentage of the Enfield events were inauthentic in one way or another (joking, hoaxing, etc.), and you can read about those occasions and the fraud issue more broadly here. That's far from a confession that the whole case was faked.
- The inauthentic events make it likely that the case as a whole is inauthentic. The inauthentic aspects of the case leave too much unaddressed to justify dismissing everything. Similarly, it would be simplistic to say that the cheating of one student in a school justifies rejecting all of the results of every test ever taken by any student in that school, including students who are significantly different than the cheater and who took their tests under significantly different circumstances. It's easy to reconcile the authenticity of the Enfield case as a whole with the presence of some inauthenticity. Again, see the article I cited earlier on fraud issues for more about the subject.
- All or almost all of the Enfield events happened when one or more of the Hodgson children were nearby. Even when they were nearby, it doesn't follow that their faking the event is the best explanation of what happened. And the "almost all" qualifier raises the question of how a skeptic explains the events that happened without the children around. More significantly, though, even the claim with the "almost all" qualifier is highly inaccurate. There was at least a quadruple-digit number of events in the case. I would estimate that the number that occurred without any of the Hodgson children around in any relevant way was in the triple digits at a minimum and could easily have been in the quadruple digits. Events continued to happen while the children were at school and their mother was the only one in the house; on the two occasions when the whole family was away on vacation, a vacation in 1977 and another one in 1978; in neighbors' houses while the Hodgson children weren't there; in rooms of the Hodgsons' house where none of the children were at the time, sometimes with none of them even on the same floor; for a double-digit number of years after Johnny had died, Janet and Margaret had moved out, and Billy was in his adulthood; after all of the Hodgsons were gone and the Bennett family moved in; etc. My post here provides some examples of such events.
- The lack of photographic evidence of paranormal events is suspicious. The chief investigators of the case began efforts at filming events, with both still photos and videos, in September of 1977, the month they began their investigation. A filming crew from Pye Business Communications reported that, while attempting to capture the poltergeist on video in the Hodgsons' house, their equipment malfunctioned in extremely unusual ways that they described as "absolutely impossible" and "one chance in a million". Others who worked on the case, including professionals whose jobs involved using the equipment under consideration, made similar comments. So, there's strong evidence that something paranormal was involved and didn't want to be filmed. But they did occasionally capture something significant in videos or photographs. See my discussion of the Stewart Lamont video here, which captured knocking phenomena occurring elsewhere in the house while all of the Hodgson children were accounted for, including film of the girls sitting on the couch, far away from the knocking as it occurred. Or do a Ctrl F search for "symposium" here to read about David Robertson's footage of the poltergeist voice manifesting through Janet with her mouth fully taped shut. Many still photographs of the phenomena also have evidential significance, such as Graham Morris' rapid-succession photo sequences that resembled video. For an overview of the photographic evidence, see the section titled "The Underestimated Photographs" here.
- In the photographs of Janet supposedly levitating, her hair has moved in a way that's inconsistent with levitation. No, the hair movement isn't a problem. The levitation in question involved throwing, and it was typically throwing done at a high speed. (John Burcombe, who witnessed multiple throwing incidents, referred to how Janet was thrown from her bed "like a rocket", and there was more shaking of the floor and a louder sound upon landing than there was with normal jumping, which also suggest that the girls were thrown with more force than normal jumping involves. See here, among other posts, for more information on the subject.) While levitations sometimes involve a sort of movement that wouldn't result in Janet's hair moving as it does in the photos, the sort of throwing incident the photos under consideration have captured would produce that kind of hair movement.
- The photographs of Janet allegedly levitating look like a girl jumping from her bed. Some do, and some don't. How many of the photos have you seen? And is your explanation of the photos consistent with all of the evidence that has to be taken into account: the positioning of her feet, how fast she moved (as evidenced by photo sequences taken in rapid succession), the condition of the bed covers, the testimony of eyewitnesses who saw some of these throwing events happen, etc.? Jumping from a bed is a poor explanation for the photos as a whole and the evidence pertaining to the Enfield levitations as a whole. See here for more about the subject.
- In Stewart Lamont's video footage of the poltergeist speaking, you can see Janet's lips and throat moving. That proves the voice was being faked, and the faking of the voice proves that the entire case is fraudulent. Though the voice manifested in a disembodied manner on some occasions, the voice in Lamont's video is embodied, and everybody involved knew it was embodied. Go to the segment of Lamont's video here to see Guy Playfair commenting to the voice, "I'd like to know how you make this noise without bashing Janet's vocal cords to pieces." Anybody who expects the voice in the video to manifest without any movement of Janet's body is ignorant of or disregarding the surrounding context (as evidenced by the remainder of the video, Playfair's book on Enfield, the Enfield tapes, etc.). And even if the voice or some portion of it was faked, it wouldn't follow that the whole case was faked. See my article on fraud issues that I linked earlier.
- The conceptual content of the voice is different than what you'd expect from a poltergeist. That depends on what you think the source behind the poltergeist was, and that's a highly disputed issue. If the poltergeist in the Enfield case was a paranormal manifestation of the mind of one or more of the Hodgson children, that would be different than the manifestation of the spirit of a deceased adult or a demon, for example. And if a living human is behind the poltergeist, it could be a conscious or subconscious manifestation or some of each. And so on. There are a lot of explanatory options. And there's a large amount of evidence for the Enfield voice that skeptics typically leave entirely or mostly unaddressed. My article on the voice here discusses many of the issues involved.
- Some of what the voice claimed about Bill Wilkins is inaccurate, which disproves its claim to be Wilkins. That undermines the credibility of the voice. The honesty and accuracy of the source behind the poltergeist are distinct issues from whether the source was paranormal. The voice was a habitual liar. It made all sorts of identity claims. Wilkins wasn't the first identity claim it made, it got his name wrong when it first claimed to be him, and I'd estimate that it spent far more time claiming to be somebody else than it spent claiming to be Wilkins. The paranormality of the voice doesn't depend on the truthfulness of its occasional claims to be Wilkins or its other identity claims. See my voice article that I cited earlier for more details.
- Some singers perform songs with the sort of deep and raspy voice involved in the Enfield case, and others have produced a voice like the Enfield one by normal means in other contexts. Much of the evidence for the Enfield voice consists of things like paranormal knowledge, coordination with other paranormal events, and manifestation in a disembodied form on some occasions, qualities that aren't paralleled in the normal contexts the skeptic is appealing to. See my article on the voice here for more information. But concerning the aspects of the Enfield voice that are being paralleled by normal means, there are some contextual factors that are often neglected by skeptics. The Hodgson girls were girls, they were in their early adolescent years, and they weren't professional singers, so factors like those need to be taken into account when comparing them to adults, especially adult men, who are professional singers or who have received some other relevant kind of training that the Hodgson girls didn't have. And different individuals have different physical attributes. So, an examination of the Hodgson girls in particular, especially at the time when the voice was manifesting through them, would be more valuable than an analysis of a more abstract nature. And they were examined, such as by Daphne Pearce, a professional speech therapist who was working for the Middlesex Hospital in London at the time. See my discussion of her analysis of the girls and the work that others did on the voice by doing a Ctrl F search for "Pearce" in my voice article linked above. The ability of some people to reproduce some aspects of the Enfield voice by normal means doesn't justify the conclusion that the voice as a whole was normal rather than paranormal. If an adult male who's a professional singer produces a voice for a lengthy period of time that sounds similar to the Enfield voice, let's keep in mind that he's only duplicating a small portion of what the Enfield voice did, and even that small portion is being done under significantly different conditions.
- The girls' demeanor in the Lamont video, such as smiling and laughing so much, lessens the credibility of the case. Yes, it does, but not much. The video was filmed in February of 1978, about six months after the case began. The girls had about half a year to get accustomed to the poltergeist, learn more about the issues involved, etc. At the time of the video, the lights were on, they were surrounded with adults, the poltergeist was only doing things they'd experienced many times before, people off camera were doing things they were responding to (including things they were smiling and laughing at), and so on. For further discussion of the issues pertaining to their demeanor in the video, see here. That post includes some comments from Stewart Lamont, the man who conducted the interview, regarding why he doesn't think the girls' behavior is a significant problem. People often behave that way on camera, especially if they don't have much experience being filmed.
- The events shown in the Nationwide television program that aired in November of 1977 seem to be fake. For example, Maurice Grosse seems to prepare himself for having the shoe thrown at him around 4:08 in the video, which suggests he knew the shoe was going to be thrown. You can watch the program here. The reason why the events shown on video seem fake is because they're reenactments. They're not meant to be taken as footage of paranormal events. The audio is what was recorded of paranormal events during the case, but the video footage consists of later reenactments. Yet, I've repeatedly seen critics of the Enfield case take the reenactments as video footage of events that are supposed to be paranormal. Then they use that false premise as a basis for casting doubt on the case's authenticity.
- The fact that the family stayed in the house is suspicious. Why not move? They did initially leave the house, on the night of August 31, 1977, when they first realized that paranormal events were happening there. But they apparently were told less than a day later that what they were experiencing seemed to be a poltergeist and that it probably would go with them if they moved. (Poltergeists are often thought of as person-centered, whereas hauntings are place-centered.) For more on this topic, see the section on why the family didn't move here.
- The witnesses could be wrong. People sometimes lie or are honestly mistaken. And because of how unlikely it is that anything paranormal would occur, the possibility of lies and honest mistakes on the part of the witnesses is more likely. Even people who are unusually dishonest are highly selective in what they lie about. They don't have a motive to lie about most things. And human faculties like eyesight and memory are usually reliable. To go from the possibility that the witnesses are wrong to a probability, you need much more than the fact that they could be wrong. A small percentage of the population is dishonest and otherwise unethical enough to do something like perpetrate a largescale hoax, and a small percentage is highly susceptible to hallucinating, mentally ill, etc. But it's extremely unlikely that such a high percentage of people within the small social circle in which the Enfield case occurred would have the characteristics of that small percentage of the population who perpetrate largescale hoaxes, are mentally ill in a relevant way, etc. For example, all eleven of the people who were at the Hodgsons' house on the night they became aware that something paranormal was occurring - all five of the Hodgsons, all four of the people living in the Nottinghams' house at the time, and both of the police officers who went to the house - thought they experienced something paranormal there during that night. It's extremely unlikely that all eleven of them happened to be part of one or more of the relevant categories that would be dishonest or honestly mistaken to such a large extent. That's even more the case when the witnesses would be expected to initially be skeptical (especially the police officers) and later said that they were initially skeptical. (Listen to the opening minutes of the documentary here, for example, where Peggy Hodgson and Vic Nottingham refer to their initial skepticism and efforts to find a normal explanation and the initial skepticism of the police.) You have to go beyond the fact that people are sometimes wrong and look at the characteristics of the witnesses involved and their circumstances. Part of what has to be taken into account is the involvement of machines and animals, which can't be dismissed as perpetrating a hoax, hallucinating, and such as a human witness could be. Any fraud hypothesis, hypothesis involving honest mistakes, or hypothesis involving both is going to have a significant problem addressing the nature of the individuals and events involved in the Enfield case. The authenticity of the case makes far more sense of the evidence if we judge things as we normally would. Any high prior improbability that's going to be assigned to the paranormal has to be argued for, not just asserted. Even if there were such a high prior improbability, a position I reject for reasons I've explained elsewhere, the quality of the Enfield evidence is good enough to overcome even an extremely high prior improbability. See my discussion of issues like these near the end of my post on the December 15, 1977 Enfield events, for example.
- People like Anita Gregory and Milbourne Christopher debunked the case decades ago. There are a lot of problems with their Enfield work, such as the fact that they didn't even attempt to explain the large majority of what needs explained. If you look into the most significant events in the case (e.g., the ripping out of the fireplace on October 26, 1977; the December 15, 1977 events), you'll find that people like Gregory and Christopher didn't even try to explain them. See my responses to Gregory's doctoral thesis here and here. She and Christopher, along with some other Enfield skeptics, likely had firsthand experience with paranormal events when they visited the Hodgsons' house. See here.
- Maurice Grosse was biased because of the death of his daughter shortly before he started on the Enfield case. He was desperate to find evidence of an afterlife, so his bias casts significant doubt on his Enfield work. Bias is one factor among others in determining how somebody behaves. Bias can be good, bad, or neutral, and the other factors involved can be good, bad, or neutral. And bias and those other factors can exist to different degrees. A medical researcher whose child has a particular disease can have a bias to find a cure for that disease, yet that bias can be good in producing results like more carefulness, more time spent doing the research, and more persistence. If bias has distorted his work in some way, that can be discerned and corrected by other people involved. There's no substitute for examining the quality of a person's work. Accusing somebody of bias has to be accompanied by an examination of the other factors involved. And it's not as though the people analyzing Grosse and his work are unbiased. Yet, they trust their own judgment and expect other people to find their reasoning persuasive. As far as I know, Grosse's earliest comments, both privately and publicly, about the source behind the Enfield poltergeist were in support of the view that the poltergeist was being caused by one or more living humans, not the deceased. Go here and listen to his comments in a 1978 documentary regarding what he told the Hodgsons on the day he first went to their house. Five days later (on September 10, 1977), he discussed the case on a radio program, and he once again said that he was currently leaning toward the hypothesis that the poltergeist was being caused by one or more living humans. He explained, "In other words, I don't believe, at the moment, that it is a discarnate entity or a spirit, as you would like to call it. I believe that this is one of the cases where the power is coming from the people involved themselves." (0:41 on tape 35A in Guy Playfair's collection of tapes) So, in the opening days of the case, he made comments on multiple occasions, privately and publicly, favoring the living agent psi hypothesis. He would later waver on the issue, as have others who have studied the case and other paranormal phenomena, but it doesn't look like he went into the case with the worst sort of bias. To whatever extent he had a relevant bias, and he surely did to some extent, other factors involved suggest that he handled the case well overall. For more on this subject, see my comments about it here.
- Enfield was the first paranormal case Maurice Grosse worked. His inexperience weakens the credibility of the Enfield case. It does, but not to the extent critics often suggest. He'd had some experiences he'd considered paranormal prior to beginning on the Enfield case, and he had been studying paranormal issues for years. And his Enfield work went on for a long time. He began working other cases shortly after starting on Enfield, so he had experience working other paranormal cases before he finished the primary phase of his Enfield work. Besides, it's not as though Grosse was the only paranormal investigator who worked the Enfield case. The two other primary investigators, Guy Playfair and David Robertson, had done work in paranormal research before they became involved in Enfield. And we have a lot of information about Enfield from sources other than the paranormal researchers who worked the case. Grosse's initial lack of experience has some significance, but not much.
"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....Let us stop playing the sceptics' game. Let us stop falling into the trap of qualifying our positive results with an air of apology. It sends the wrong message to those who wish to listen. Let us admit openly and positively that there are such things as inexplicable phenomena. We do believe that our research is legitimate and of great importance. Let us stop apologising for the fact that we still cannot explain the phenomena, and may very well never reach that happy stage. We [the Society for Psychical Research] are not just a scientific society, but a society that leads a quest that is as important to humanity as any of the physical discoveries that dominate our lives today." (Maurice Grosse, The Paranormal Review, Issue 24, October 2002, "After 120 Years Of Psychical Research — Confusion Abounds!", p. 9)
No comments:
Post a Comment