(See part 1 here for an explanation of the series. The other parts can be accessed through the following links: two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven. I'll be citing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's tapes. The ones from Grosse's collection will be referred to with "MG". Playfair's tapes will be designated by "GP". For example, MG13A is tape 13A in Grosse's collection, GP2A is tape 2A in Playfair's, and so on.)
Early Media Coverage Of Enfield
Here's a web site with the text (and some photographs) of some early articles covering the Enfield case. You can access original articles by searching news archive sites, like the British Newspaper Archive. The first site linked above will let you read some of the articles for free, though. I've checked some of them with the originals, and it looks like the text on the site I've linked is at least mostly reliable. The March 30, 1978 Daily Mirror article differs somewhat from the digital image of the original that I have. It seems that the site I've linked is using a later version that corrects some mistakes in the first edition. The articles run from 1977 to 1980. Notice that the articles from 1979 and 1980 sometimes refer to the poltergeist's ongoing activity. There are some references to occasions when Janet Hodgson was injured by the poltergeist, despite the frequent claims that poltergeists don't injure people or that the Enfield one didn't. The Daily Star material from 1980 includes an article written by Graham Morris and some comments about his work on the case. Earlier this year, Graham was at a public event during which he commented on how he went about taking his famous photos of Janet levitating. Go here for a post I wrote about Graham's comments. Some of what he said in that context hasn't been discussed much publicly, as far as I've seen, so he could be accused of making up some or all of it. But the 1980 Daily Star article includes the following comments from Graham and the editor, corroborating what Graham said earlier this year. This is from more than 45 years ago:
"One second she was lying in bed under the covers, the next she seemed to bounce in the air. The bedclothes were hardly disturbed. It was as though Janet had come through them....During the split seconds in which the pictures were taken I don't believe there is any way Janet – or any other child – could have got out of bed, smoothed the covers and bounced on the bed. The heights she reached were far beyond where a normal 'bounce' could have taken her, and the cameras would have triggered the second she sat up....He [Graham Morris] also set up a light that cast a beam across the room. When that beam was broken by anyone, or any thing, the camera automatically took a photograph."
Enfield And AI
I've noticed a significant change in discussions of Enfield over the last few years, and I think a big part of it comes from AI. I've written about the publishing of some highly unreliable Enfield books in recent years, like here and here. I don't know how much the author(s) have used AI in the process of composing the books. I use the term "author(s)" because both books come across as dishonest, and I think there's a reasonable chance that two or more of those books and others that have been published lately are from the same person. But books like those don't necessarily involve AI. They may be attempts to make some easy money without using AI in the process. However, over the last few years, I've been coming across many Enfield sources, such as articles and YouTube videos, that seem to be largely dependent on AI. Some are pro-Enfield, some are neutral, and some are against the authenticity of the case. A skeptic can use AI to analyze the case for him and give his audience the false impression that he's gone into a lot of depth in researching the case and analyzing it, even though he hasn't. I recently came across an anti-Enfield site that seems to be heavily dependent on AI, with dozens of errors (fake quotes, inaccurate source citations, wrong names, misrepresentations of people's arguments, etc.). It's difficult to see a human making some of the mistakes in question, but it's much easier to see AI doing it. There's a lot that's good about AI, but there are downsides to it as well. It's gotten to be a major issue in the Enfield context.
A Large Collection Of Enfield Photographs
Last year, the Twitter account of the Society for Psychical Research linked a Spanish version of Guy Playfair's book on Enfield. You can read it for free online. But even if you don't know Spanish, scroll to the bottom of the page containing the book, and you'll see an unusually large collection of Enfield photos in one place. They're usually scattered around a lot of locations, so it's good to have one place to go to find so many of them together. There are other images and photos in various places earlier in the book (photos of paranormal researchers involved in the case, mediums who worked on it, etc.). Whoever produced this edition of the book clearly put a lot of work into it. It's probably the best place to start looking if you want to find Enfield photos.
No Upstairs Heating
The heating system in the Hodgsons' house is relevant in some contexts, like the allegedly paranormal temperature changes I discussed in another post and the supposedly paranormal curtain movements (e.g., whether air from a vent may have moved a curtain). They had central heating downstairs, but Peggy Hodgson commented on one of the tapes that there wasn't any central heating upstairs, though there was a fireplace, which they didn't use (MG61B, 16:31). The wall with the windows in the main bedroom upstairs, where Janet Hodgson's bed was, is the most relevant part of the upper floor in this context. You can see that wall without any bed covering it if you go to about 8:17 in the "Nationwide" television program about Enfield that aired in November of 1977. As you can see, there's no vent or other relevant source of heating on that wall.
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