I haven't listened to many of their other episodes, probably some single-digit number. Maybe I'm not aware of some aspects of what the podcast is supposed to be, its background assumptions, what they've said in previous episodes about how they operate, and so on. As I said above, it's easy to get some things wrong in a context as large and complicated as Enfield. And you have to allow for some degree of fictionalizing in contexts like reenactments, leaving out some details when summarizing events, etc. But there's only so much you can get wrong. And if you're fictionalizing in some way, there has to be a reasonable means by which the audience can discern it. People expect some fictionalizing when doing reenactments in a documentary, for example, such as actors approximating somebody's facial expressions or tone of voice. But that doesn't mean you can go on to fictionalize when the narrator is speaking and the audience would typically expect material of a non-fictional nature. And getting a few facts wrong that are easy to get wrong over a two-hour documentary isn't the same as getting dozens of facts wrong, including ones that are hard to miss, in a half-hour program. If the differences between how Haunted Cosmos presented Enfield and what actually happened during the case are due to some fictional genre I'm not aware of, if they intended to present the case in a highly fictionalized way, I doubt that they're adequately communicating those intentions to their audience. From what I've seen of their other episodes, what I've read on their web sites, the comments I've seen other people make about the podcast, and so forth, I get the impression that people are expecting the podcast to be more non-fictional.
I sent Haunted Cosmos an email last Tuesday, asking what sources they used for their Enfield episode. I haven't gotten a response.
To give you some idea of what I'm objecting to, click here to watch a segment consisting of the following:
The concentrated activity toward Janet gave Grosse the idea of putting his recording equipment in her room. What he captured there remains the stuff of visceral horror for all who hear of it.
You see, since Peggy heard the disembodied voice nearer to the start of the haunting, and since the kids heard the voice a little bit as well, no other speech had been heard from the entity, but that was about to change in a big way. On September 22nd, 1977, it was 2:45 A.M. Grosse's tape recorder flickered with a faint red light in the corner of the girl's room, betraying that it was recording. Janet woke and opened her eyes to quiet darkness. A nauseating pain beset her stomach. Tired and hardly lucid still, she started to moan and twist around in her bed to get a little bit comfortable, but nothing worked. Janet steadily became more and more aware of her situation, and the moaning grew louder. Her breathing was heavier. Her movements were more and more desperate, turning here and there without a moment's rest in between. The moaning turned into a choking cough. And it was at this point that Grosse, seated downstairs and asleep, was woken by the speaker right next to him. The speaker was, of course, attached to the mic in Janet's room. He was now listening to the girl struggle. It was as though Janet was dry heaving, but the noise was more grinding like stone on stone. It was both human and not simultaneously. Suddenly, there was silence. Grosse leaned in. The quiet, he could tell through the radio, was not a calm one. All at once, there came a voice so deep and guttural and strained. "This is my house."
Grosse jumped out of his seat and ran up the stairs. He flung open Janet's door, turned on the light, and cradled the girl. She was half conscious and waking from a stupor. Her eyes, when they finally opened, spun around the room before finally settling with wide fear on Grosse. He whispered her name until she finally calmed down and descended right back into a deep sleep. She had no memory of the voice after this ordeal.
Grosse connected the dots. The moaning and the coughing that had been in her voice, the jerky stirring in her bed, the silence, then the intruder speaking. Janet Hodgson had suffered the possession of the poltergeist.
I've done a lot of research on the Enfield case. The events Haunted Cosmos describes above aren't on any of Grosse's tapes or Guy Playfair's. I've never seen the events described in any credible book or article, mentioned by anybody involved in the original events, etc. As far as I can tell, and according to what every relevant witness I've heard from has said, the embodied poltergeist voice originated on December 10 of 1977, with no mention of a manifestation like the one Haunted Cosmos is attributing to September 22 of that year. I mentioned credible books above. There's one that's not credible that makes claims similar to the ones made by Haunted Cosmos, and I'll discuss that book later. But even that book doesn't include some of the details that are in the podcast.
There are a few other parts of the program that give similarly detailed accounts of events that, as far as I can tell, never happened. Even the parts of the episode that are largely factual have dozens of errors mixed in with what's reported accurately: wrong dates, witnesses in the wrong places, etc. Go here for a reference to how only Peggy Hodgson and Carolyn Heeps were in the house when Heeps saw a chair move on its own. (Other people were present as well, and that fact has been widely reported for decades.) Or here for Peggy Hodgson calling the Daily Mirror on September 7 of 1977. (Peggy Nottingham called them on September 4.) There's then a highly inaccurate account of what happened when Douglas Bence and Graham Morris of the Daily Mirror visited the house for the first time. Or click here for a reference to "two thousand hours of audio". (If he's referring to the number of hours extant on Grosse and Playfair's tapes, which is what people typically refer to, the actual number is in the low hundreds. If he has some other kind of audio in mind, it's something I haven't heard of before, and it seems highly suspicious.) And so on.
There's been an unusual number of new books on Enfield in recent years, as you can see if you run some searches on Amazon and Google Books. Melvyn Willin's is good, but at least some of the others aren't. (I haven't read all of them, but most of the ones I've seen are or seem to be self-published, have gotten no or poor Amazon reviews so far, came out around the same time, etc. Among the ones I've read in part or in whole, there's a lot of suspicious content. Two or more of these books could easily be from the same author under different names.) See my review of Lee Brickley's book here.
It looks to me like a large percentage of what Haunted Cosmos discussed in their recent podcast is found in Gavin Wagstaff's The Enfield Poltergeist (Seattle, Washington: Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2025). It's a self-published book that describes itself as a "True Story" on the cover and in its subtitle. That description, like the rest of the book, is unreliable. Like Brickley, Wagstaff has published many other books on paranormal issues in rapid succession. And his Enfield book, like Brickley's, is short and uses various means of wasting space even in that short length (large print, large spaces between lines, many one-sentence paragraphs, etc.). At least in the Kindle edition I have, Wagstaff doesn't give us any significant information about his background, and he provides no documentation for any of his claims. Given how inaccurate, suspicious, and unsubstantiated the book is, it seems that either he or one or more of his sources is a liar, mentally ill, or some such thing. Many of the problems with the Haunted Cosmos podcast can be traced to Wagstaff's book, but I can't trace all of them to it. (For example, I don't recall seeing Wagstaff make Haunted Cosmos' claim that only Peggy Hodgson and Carolyn Heeps were in the house when Heeps saw a chair move. Maybe somebody misremembered what he read in Wagstaff's book, maybe the claim came from some other source, or whatever. Another example is found on page 12 of the Kindle version of Wagstaff's book. He ends his account of Peggy Hodgson hearing heavy breathing outside her bedroom door without saying anything about her opening the door. But Haunted Cosmos continues beyond that point and claims that the door was opened. Where did they get that information?) I suspect Haunted Cosmos used Wagstaff. But maybe they used some source closely associated with him instead (one of Wagstaff's sources, a source who drew material from Wagstaff, etc.). If they used Wagstaff's book, they could and should have noticed a lot of problems with it, like the ones mentioned above. Much of what Haunted Cosmos got wrong could easily have been corrected if they'd consulted more and better sources.
I don't know how much their treatment of Enfield is representative of their coverage of other paranormal issues.
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