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Sunday, May 01, 2022

The Best Arguments For The Enfield Poltergeist

In a post last year, I made some recommendations about how to begin studying the Enfield case. What I want to do in this post is make some suggestions about how to argue for the case's authenticity.

Because the evidence for it is so multifaceted and so strong in so many contexts, and because there's some variability in which arguments will persuade which people, there are many approaches you can take that would have some merit. I'm not suggesting that the approach I'll outline below is the only one that should be taken. You can make whatever adjustments you think are appropriate to my recommendations, but I'll discuss a few of the arguments I would include. I'll start with a couple that I think would be the easiest to use, then mention some that are harder to articulate, but have a lot of value.

- The number and variety of witnesses. See here. A good way of illustrating the force of the argument is to use percentages. For example, a large percentage of some of the groups involved in the opening days of the case reported that they witnessed what seem to be paranormal events. In some contexts, everybody in the group involved or a large percentage reported apparently paranormal experiences: all of the Hodgsons, all of the Nottinghams, all of the police officers who came to the house on the night of August 31 to September 1, all of the Burcombes, at least most of the Daily Mirror staff, etc. People sometimes hallucinate, perpetrate hoaxes, or are honestly or dishonestly mistaken in some other way. But it's extremely unlikely that such a large percentage of the groups just mentioned would all be mistaken in so short a period of time and in such similar ways. Much more could be said, and I've written more about issues like these elsewhere, but I'm summarizing here.

- Hostile corroboration. That can take on a couple of forms. Some witnesses were initially skeptical of the case, but became convinced of its authenticity later. Some accepted the authenticity of some of the phenomena, but rejected many of them as well. See here, for example, for Graham Morris discussing how he's convinced that he witnessed paranormal events, even though he's so skeptical and expects a scientific explanation for what he experienced to eventually be found. And some skeptics of the case remained skeptical, but corroborated its paranormality in some way. See the examples discussed here.

- Events involving the operation of machinery. See here. Because such a large number and variety of machines were affected in an apparently paranormal manner under such a number and variety of circumstances, it would be very difficult to argue that one or more people faking the case had the knowledge and other resources needed to manipulate the machinery in the relevant ways. It's also highly unlikely that some combination of faking and coincidental malfunctions would be an adequate explanation. The acoustic properties of the recorded knocking incidents can still be measured, so, in that sense, we have an ongoing ability to use machines to measure the phenomena. Even where we have to be more dependent on past testimony and past instrumental measurements, such as with the metal-bending and weight-gain experiments done on Janet Hodgson, why think it's likely or that there's a 50/50 chance that all of the witnesses were mistaken about what happened and that all of the instrumental measurements were faked or misinterpreted?

- Events involving animals. See here. Much of what can be said of events involving the operation of machinery can be said of the involvement of animals in the case, though, to my knowledge, a much smaller number and variety of animals than machines were involved in the relevant contexts. So, I'd assign less significance to this category than the one involving machines. Still, the involvement of animals is a strong argument, and it adds a substantial layer of complexity to any fraud hypothesis or any non-paranormal view of the case involving coincidences, honest mistakes, and such.

Something the last three categories mentioned above have in common is that they involve evidence that wouldn't have been controlled much by the people most likely to have faked the case or to have been honestly mistaken about it. And these categories are ones that don't get discussed much in the context of Enfield, which means that bringing them up will tend to get more attention accordingly and that skeptics will be less prepared to address them.

It's also useful to have some arguments of a more defensive nature. Sometimes people will be more open to evidence like what I've cited above if you first address some objections they have.

A good subject to bring up in this context is the explanatory options for a poltergeist. Many people don't know much about the subject or have been misled by movies, fictional books, their own thinking about what a poltergeist ought to be like, or some other factor. People are often skeptical of a paranormal case because it doesn't meet some false expectations they have. For example, it seems that a lot of people assume that the entity behind a poltergeist should be independent enough from the people around it that there won't be much overlap between the two. When they see some resemblances between Janet Hodgson and the poltergeist in the Enfield case, they take those resemblances as evidence that the case is inauthentic. So, it's useful to explain to people that there are multiple paranormal explanations of a poltergeist that are consistent with some degree of alignment between the personality of the poltergeist and the personality of an individual involved in the case. A close alignment between the two isn't much of an argument against the case's paranormality. If a poltergeist is a conscious or subconscious paranormal manifestation of the mind of one or more living individuals, as many people believe, then we'd expect a close alignment between the poltergeist and those individuals. And views of a poltergeist that involve some independent entity, such as a deceased human, could include that entity's use of the mind of one or more living individuals in some manner. I suspect that many people making judgments about cases like Enfield have never even heard of explanatory options like the ones I just mentioned.

It's good to have a concise way of addressing the fraud issue as well. Here are several examples. You can use one or more of these approaches or whatever else:

- Analogies are a useful means of getting people to understand something, so it's helpful to appeal to an analogy. I'd use one that's especially likely to resonate with people. Let's say your son was caught cheating on some tests in school. Should the school conclude that he therefore must have cheated on every test he ever took and will cheat on every test in the future, regardless of other factors involved in those other contexts? What would you think of a school that, because this student was caught cheating, assumed that cheating must have been involved in some way in the test results of every other student in the class? Or in the whole school? What if you were one of those other students or one of their parents? What would you think of the school's behavior? That kind of analogy doesn't address every relevant fraud issue in the Enfield case. But it does get at much of what's involved and may be helpful in getting skeptics to at least be more careful in their reasoning about these issues.

- Provide some sort of brief principle that will address one or more of the most important issues involved. For example: "The presence of the inauthentic doesn't prove the absence of the authentic."

- Cite Anita Gregory's comments about how the presence of some fraud in the Enfield case or some other paranormal case wouldn't prove the inauthenticity of the case as a whole. Go here for an article that cites some of her comments on the subject. The fact that Gregory held such a view doesn't prove that it's correct. But the fact that even the foremost Enfield skeptic acknowledged the principle in question should give pause to skeptics who are inclined to reject that principle.

- People often haven't given much consideration to the potential motives to fake something in a genuine paranormal case. Sometimes critics suggest that nobody would fake anything if authentic phenomena were occurring. But that's simplistic. It's easy to think of good explanations for why faking would occur in a genuine case. In a context like Enfield, involving four children as young as ages 7 to 13 when the case began, a case that spanned multiple years, it would have been surprising if some degree of faking hadn't occurred. The fact that genuine events were happening doesn't change the fact that the people involved in the case didn't have control over when events would occur, which ones would occur, and so on. It's not as though somebody like Janet Hodgson could just flip a switch anytime she wanted the poltergeist to do something. For that and other reasons, it's easy to think of multiple potential motives people would have to fake things in a case that's authentic. A good response to people who suggest otherwise is to cite Janet's comments on the subject in an interview with Will Storr. Go here and do a Ctrl F search for "fifteen years" to read the relevant material from that interview and my comments on it. In addition to quoting Janet's comments in that interview, you could cite an example of her (or somebody else's) cheating during the case, like one of the examples I discuss in the article just linked, and ask how such an example supposedly is incompatible with the authenticity of the case.

- Point out that many of the Enfield events occurred when none of the alleged fakers (typically one or more of the Hodgson children) were anywhere nearby or when they were nearby, but probably wouldn't have produced the events by normal means. See here for some examples.

- Choose a particular day (e.g., December 15, 1977; May 30, 1978) or event (e.g., the ripping out of the fireplace on October 26, 1977; the levitation of Janet witnessed by at least a few people on December 15, 1977), and ask the critic you're interacting with to provide an argument for a normal explanation of what happened. Ask how the cheating that occurred on other occasions is supposed to justify concluding that there's inadequate evidence for paranormal activity in the context you've brought up.

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