A Skeptic's Concessions About The Enfield Poltergeist

The Uncanny podcast recently did an episode on Enfield. The podcast is hosted by Danny Robins and includes analysis from a couple of paranormal researchers, Ciaran O'Keeffe (representing the skeptical perspective) and Evelyn Hollow (representing belief in the paranormal). There was a segment with Graham Morris as well, a photographer who covered the Enfield case for the Daily Mirror and witnessed some paranormal events. He made some significant comments, including ones I hadn't heard before, from him or any other source.

I'll be responding to several aspects of the program and other people's responses to it, but I want to begin where the video linked above does. It begins with a clip of some of O'Keeffe's concessions. He didn't even come close to offering a good skeptical explanation of the case, and he made some significant concessions about the quality of the evidence for it.

The video starts with O'Keeffe's comment about how he "defies other skeptics" to offer an explanation for the October 26, 1977 incident involving a fireplace being ripped out of a wall it was cemented into. Hollow is nodding her head while he makes that comment. They're not the only paranormal researchers who have brought up the significance of that event, including how difficult it is to explain from a skeptical perspective. If you click on the link above, you can read an article I wrote several years ago that analyzes the event, based on the audio recording of it produced by Guy Playfair, which I've listened to, and other evidence. That article cites some comments on the event from other paranormal researchers. It's not the most famous event in the case, but it's probably the one skeptics respect the most.

Near the beginning of the episode, there's a discussion of the significance of Enfield. Go here to watch Robins, O'Keeffe, and Hollow discussing how important it is. Keep that in mind when you read the typical contemptuous and dismissive comments skeptics make when Enfield comes up, such as in the comments sections of YouTube videos or on Facebook or Twitter. Because the behavior of Enfield skeptics is so bad, I put together a collection of responses to skeptical myths about the case. Go to any discussion of Enfield on YouTube, a message board, Facebook, or wherever else, and you're likely to find the same kind of ignorance, misinformation, bad argumentation, and other forms of bad behavior repeated again and again and again. Part of the problem is that believers in the case's authenticity are themselves so ignorant and unwilling to speak up and, if they do speak up, unwilling to persist in carrying through with discussions rather than abandoning them prematurely. The next time you see skeptics making their usual comments about Enfield on YouTube, in a skeptical magazine, or wherever else, remember what O'Keeffe acknowledged (to his credit) about how pleased his fellow skeptics would be if he could offer a good skeptical explanation of the case, which he can't. At least he's more honest about it than skeptics usually are. How did O'Keeffe get the impressions he has about his fellow skeptics (how they view Enfield) if the skeptics are as confident in dismissing Enfield as they often suggest they are?

But he goes on to make some dismissive comments about certain parts of the case elsewhere in the program, and he puts forward potential skeptical explanations of what happened in certain contexts. I want to interact with some of those comments. There are other issues I want to address before that, though.

Be careful about what O'Keeffe said here. He speaks highly of the testimony of the police officers who went to the Hodgsons' house on the night of August 31 to September 1. Go here to read an article I wrote about those officers and other officers involved in the case. It's good that O'Keeffe speaks so highly of them. But he seems to have gotten his information about the male police officer from a book that's apparently incorrect in what it reports about that officer. For a discussion of the subject, go here.

Robins asked the audience what they thought of some famous photographs of Janet Hodgson in the air in her bedroom in the context of some throwing incidents (allegedly being thrown across the room by the poltergeist). Unsurprisingly, as you can see played out in so many internet forums over so many years now, the skeptics in the audience were more vocal than the believers in response to the photos. There seems to be a widespread skeptical mindset that looks for something to latch onto in order to quickly and easily dismiss any paranormal case, and the levitation photos are often used to that end in the Enfield context. What skeptics seem to be doing is isolating the photos from their surrounding context and judging them by an initial impression of whether the photo could be faked by doing something like jumping off a bed. But you can't ignore the surrounding context. And you have to go beyond initial impressions. I've written multiple posts over the years arguing for the authenticity of the levitation photos, and I won't link all of them here. But go here for a representative example. There are several lines of evidence that need to be addressed, and I've never encountered a single skeptic who's even come close to taking all of the relevant evidence into account, much less has offered a good skeptical explanation of that evidence. I saw some people on Facebook asking to see Graham Morris' multi-photo levitation sequences in their original form, side by side. If you go to my page linked above, you'll see two of his original photos side by side, two that he said were taken one-sixth of a second apart.

The issue of Maurice Grosse's biases came up, as it often does. Supposedly, the death of his daughter shortly before he started on the Enfield case would have motivated him to want to find evidence of an afterlife. There's some truth to that. But the objection is usually overdone. Grosse already had what he considered significant evidence of an afterlife, including the postmortem survival of his deceased daughter. He had what he considered a series of paranormal experiences related to her shortly after her death, before he began his Enfield work. From his perspective, he wasn't in need of such evidence. He already had it. And, like other participants in the Enfield case, Grosse's views of the likely source behind the poltergeist changed over time. There was no one view he held consistently. The earliest view he expressed that I'm aware of was put forward on a radio program on which he appeared on September 10, 1977, less than a week after he started on the case. Grosse explained that he currently held a living agent psi view of the poltergeist, meaning that it was being produced by the mind of one or more living individuals. Here are his exact words in response to a caller on the program: "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 Playfair's collection of tapes) Yes, Grosse was biased. No, that's not an adequate response to his testimony or his Enfield work in general.

Predictably, the poltergeist voice got a lot of attention during the Uncanny program and among those who responded to it. And the embodied form of the voice got the attention, while the disembodied form was ignored. But the evidence suggests that the voice was genuinely paranormal, both in its disembodied form and in the embodied form. I've written multiple articles on the subject, the primary one being here. No, it wasn't Bill Wilkins. And, no, there isn't much evidential significance to what the voice knew about the events surrounding Wilkins' death. My article linked above is divided into many different sections, so you can scroll for what you want or do a Ctrl F search for whatever you're interested in if you don't want to read the whole thing. For another article I wrote about the voice, see here.

Go here for Uncanny's discussion of the November 10, 1977 couch levitation. O'Keeffe asks how we know how far the couch rose up, and he appeals to the potential for faulty memories. We know how far the couch went up because of what was reported by the witnesses, how far they said it went up and the distance needed for the couch to turn over as reported. In the original edition of Playfair's book, he comments, "Thanks also to John and Sylvie Burcombe and to Vic and Peggy Nottingham who, with [Peggy Hodgson] and Mr Grosse, have read the manuscript of this book and signed a statement to the effect that it is true." (This House Is Haunted [London, England: Souvenir Press, 1980], 11) That book discusses the couch levitation under consideration here (88), and it mentions that Grosse saw the event happen. He was one of the individuals who signed the statement saying that Playfair's book is accurate. Three of the others who signed that statement were also present on the occasion when the couch levitated. The incident was recorded on Grosse's tape 20Ai. The couch levitation occurs around 4:31 on that tape, when you hear a loud bang, which corroborates the claim that the couch rose high enough to make that much noise when it landed. At 6:32 on the tape, eight people are mentioned as being present: Maurice Grosse, Peggy Hodgson, Janet Hodgson, Margaret Hodgson, Billy Hodgson, John Burcombe, Paul Burcombe, and Peggy Nottingham. Those eight are mentioned about two minutes after the couch levitation, so maybe not all of them were present two minutes earlier. And just because somebody was in the room, that doesn't mean he was looking at the right place at the right time. But Grosse comments on what just happened on the tape, and Playfair's book says Grosse saw the event. Just before and just after Grosse commented on the event on the tape, you hear some people screaming or expressing distress about what just happened in some other way (4:32, 4:37), and it sounds like a minimum of two people other than Grosse did so. The screaming sounds female, and you can hear Paul Burcombe making a comment suggesting he was upset by what just occurred. Go here to watch him commenting in a 2023 interview about seeing the couch levitate. Notice the extent to which Paul says the couch moved, which involves more than just going up a fraction of an inch or some such thing. And you can go here for my discussion of the evidence that Paul's father, John, also saw the levitation. Do a Ctrl F search for "couch" to find the relevant section. That article also discusses some evidence that John Burcombe's testimony on the subject is likely honest and trustworthy. Grosse's comment about the event right after it happened (at 4:33 on the tape) refers to how the couch went up "in front of us all in the room here". Nobody on the tape corrects him. They did correct him on other occasions, when they thought he was wrong about something. Grosse and John Burcombe go on to try to calm down the people in the room, which also makes more sense if a larger rather than smaller number of people saw the event. It looks like at least a few people saw it, probably more. And even those who didn't see it had opportunity to judge the situation reliably. A couch is a large object. Turning it over would take significant time and effort. If the event was faked, there isn't much time from the banging sound at 4:31 to the screaming at 4:32 and Grosse's comment at 4:33. Wouldn't the person or people (it probably would take more than one) who faked the event be seen next to the couch at the time, with their bodies in the unusual positions they would be in just after moving such an object? The idea that nobody noticed such a faking of the incident or that one or more individuals did, but never commented on it, is absurd. And O'Keeffe's suggestion that faulty memories may be involved is likewise problematic. We have a recording of the event. That isn't just a matter of memory. As Guy Playfair told another skeptic, "My tape recorder was on practically all the time, and you can't accuse tape recorders of having false memory." And the memories of this particular event come from multiple individuals who remembered the same event in the same place at the same time. Were they all mistaken in the same series of ways? Yes, one person's faulty memory could influence what another person came to believe, but it's unlikely that multiple people would lose so much of their own memory of the event and so uncritically adopt the same other person's memory in the same way. The possibility of such a scenario doesn't make it the best explanation. And we have evidence that John Burcombe's memory of the incident was significantly independent of Grosse's, as discussed in my article on Burcombe linked above. Given that evidence of one of the witnesses' independence from Grosse, why think multiple other witnesses were so dependent on him (or that there was some other dependence scenario)? O'Keeffe says he can "easily" explain the couch incident from a skeptical point of view. Not really.

Graham Morris' comments during the program (the segment with him starts here) are well worth listening to. He mentions a lot of details I don't recall having heard from anybody else before (e.g., what he and Vic Nottingham did when they first went into the Hodgsons' house after Morris arrived for his initial visit). It makes me wonder how many interviews, documentaries, and such over the years have left out significant comments he and other witnesses have made. Often, a witness will be interviewed for a long time, but only a small percentage of what he said will be aired.

Morris spends some time discussing the levitation photos (click here for the relevant part of the program), and he comments that "every" multi-photo sequence of a levitation has Janet either lying in bed or in the air (57:03). He comments on the subject again at 1:05:11. It seems that he's denying that Janet was ever caught in the process of getting up in bed or in the process of jumping, for example. That's highly significant. As I've explained elsewhere, the Hodgson children didn't have control over when the camera would go off, and the camera was sometimes triggered at random or in some other unpredictable way, so the failure to capture Janet faking a levitation on camera, if she did fake the events, is much harder to explain accordingly. At 1:05:58, Morris refers to pressure switches that were used to detect when the bed springs were released, which apparently is how some of the photos were taken at the appropriate time. Remember, the typical skeptical argument is that Janet faked every one of these events. But the camera (often filming at one shot every sixth of a second or faster) just happened to keep missing the points in time when the photos would have revealed faking? And how can moving from being horizontal on a bed to being vertical in the air in a sixth of a second or less be accomplished by normal means? It's undeniably paranormal. It seems that skeptics, if they're to maintain their position, will have to accuse Morris (and the multiple witnesses who saw some of these levitations occur, etc.) of lying, having highly inaccurate memories, using equipment that happened to malfunction in a way that makes it seem that something paranormal occurred, or some such thing.

Morris mentioned that Janet sometimes got hurt in the process of these levitations. One of the photos I've posted here shows Janet apparently landing on her head at the conclusion of one of these levitation (throwing) incidents.

Since the issue of the condition of Janet's bed covers in the photos came up, I want to briefly address it again. The levitation episodes sometimes involved teleporting through objects. When Janet levitated several times on May 30, 1978, both she and her mother reported that Janet's body passed through the bed covers rather than moving them with her (12:40 on Grosse's tape 87A). The levitations reported on December 15-16 of 1977 involved teleporting through a wall. On November 14 of that year, Janet was thrown from a bed in the Burcombes' house while the Burcombes' cat was lying on the bed with her. The cat remained there, undisturbed, which seems best explained if Janet was teleported through one or more objects in the process, possibly even through the cat (11:15 on Grosse's tape 22A). In addition to the teleportation issue, some of the photos show Janet going up from the bed in the area of her pillow (a highly unlikely location if the incidents were faked, as I've explained elsewhere). It seems that the throwing incidents often involved teleportation or being pulled out of the bed in the area of the pillow.

At the end of the Uncanny program, Morris, O'Keeffe, and Hollow were asked to provide an assessment of the levitation photo they'd been discussing and the poltergeist voice. Morris was the only one to say the photo wasn't a hoax. Hollow was agnostic about it. O'Keeffe dismissed it as a hoax without hesitation. I doubt that O'Keeffe or Hollow had fully processed what they'd just heard from Morris (about the use of pressure switches when taking the levitation photos and other issues).

I saw some skeptics commenting on the program who faulted O'Keeffe for not being skeptical enough, not making enough of an argument against the case, etc. It's not as though those skeptics made a good case against Enfield themselves. They didn't, and they can't. O'Keeffe is overly skeptical of the paranormal and of Enfield, but at least he behaves much more responsibly than so many other skeptics. And some of his comments about Enfield probably reflect how much the case troubles a lot of skeptics, even if they won't admit it publicly. Give O'Keeffe credit for conceding as much as he did and for doing it in such a public setting.