Skeptical Myths About The Enfield Poltergeist

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.

Where should Enfield research go from here?

This is the last of my monthly posts on the Enfield Poltergeist, though I intend to continue posting about the case periodically as circumstances warrant it. There's another Enfield documentary on the way, and I suspect there will be more around the time of the case's fiftieth anniversary in 2027. I expect to post about those. But this marks the end of the monthly posts I've been doing for most of these past six years in which I've been writing so much about Enfield. I want to offer some concluding thoughts here and outline what direction I think future work on Enfield should take.

The Quality Of The Initial Enfield Investigation

Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair have often been criticized for how they went about investigating the Enfield case. You can find a lot of examples in my previous articles, like this one on Anita Gregory and this one on Joe Nickell. I've mentioned some of my own disagreements with Grosse and Playfair, though I have a generally positive view of how they handled the case. They acknowledged that they made some mistakes. Nobody would be one of the lead investigators of such a large and complicated case without getting some things wrong. The quality of their work is often underestimated, though, largely because so many of the relevant details haven't been publicized much. What I want to focus on in this post is the evidence we can gather on this subject from Grosse and Playfair's tapes. I'll use "MG" to designate Grosse's tapes and "GP" to refer to Playfair's, which means that MG99B refers to Grosse's tape 99B, and GP51B refers to Playfair's tape 51B, for example.

Think of the significance of how I just concluded the paragraph above. The fact that we have so many audio recordings related to the original investigation of the case, including recordings of so many allegedly paranormal events, is a testament to the quality of the investigators' work. And I had to distinguish between the tapes and other sources above because there's such a large amount of material outside of the tapes as well. The amount of tapes, signed witness statements, notes, transcripts, and other documentation Grosse and Playfair produced is highly impressive and, in some ways, unprecedented.

I can't be exhaustive, but here are several examples of the quality of their work from the tapes:

Some Enfield Photos Rarely Seen

In 1983, the now-defunct magazine The Unexplained ran a series of articles on the Enfield Poltergeist. The first two were written by Guy Playfair, and the third was written by Anita Gregory (vol. 11, issue 121, "Enfield: The Trouble Begins", 2401-5; vol. 11, issue 122, "Enfield: Whatever Next?", 2426-29; vol. 11, issue 123, "Enfield On Trial", 2458-60). All three articles feature a lot of photographs, with accompanying captions providing some context. Many of the photos are ones I'd never seen before. What I want to do here is post several that I consider the most significant ones. I don't think they're available anywhere else on the web. I'll provide some additional information based on what I know of the context of the photos. I also want to discuss some significant information provided in the caption for one of the photos that's better known.

Go here to see a floor plan of the house where the poltergeist's activities typically occurred. References to Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's tapes will use "MG" to designate Grosse's tapes and "GP" to designate Playfair's. MG43A is Grosse's tape 43A, GP32A is Playfair's tape 32A, etc.

What's below is a picture of Janet Hodgson either leaving a bed or landing (on her neck or head) during a throwing incident. The photo is attributed to Grosse. I doubt he'd have told the magazine (or have told Playfair, if Playfair gave Grosse's photo to the magazine) that Janet was being thrown if that wasn't the context. Based on what I know of his behavior on his tapes and elsewhere, I'd expect him to have had good evidence that what he was photographing was a throwing incident. When the subject of levitation comes up, people usually talk about the photos of Janet in a posture that resembles jumping, but the poltergeist lifted her or threw her in a large variety of ways. There are some photographs, like the one below, in which Janet's posture doesn't resemble jumping. (And see here for evidence that the ones with a jumping posture are authentic.) The magazine has two photos overlapping. The upper right portion of the photo below is covered by the bottom left of another one:

More Enfield Audio Digitized

Earlier this year, I wrote about funding a project with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to digitize Maurice Grosse's collection of audio cassettes from the Enfield Poltergeist case. Guy Playfair's tapes have now been digitized as well. I'd like to thank the SPR again, especially Melvyn Willin, who did most of the work.

There are around 100 cassettes in Playfair's collection, beginning in September of 1977. The tapes recorded in the Hodgsons' house apparently end in October of 1978, but there are some tapes of radio and television programs about the Enfield case from later years as well. He also recorded a couple of radio programs on Enfield from the first half of September of 1977, including the one that persuaded him to get involved in the case. Playfair's collection has some duplicates of the tapes in Grosse's, and some of Playfair's duplicates are better copies of tapes that have poor audio quality in Grosse's collection. So, the duplicates have proved useful. And much of the material in Playfair's collection isn't found in Grosse's. That includes, to cite a few examples, a recording of the incident in which the poltergeist ripped a fireplace out of a wall it was cemented into, Playfair's conversation with Milbourne Christopher about his visit to the Hodgsons' house as he drove Christopher back to his hotel, and Playfair's visit with Janet Hodgson when she was being examined by Peter Fenwick's team at the Maudsley Hospital.

Alan Murdie wrote Playfair's obituary in the July 2018 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (vol. 82, no. 3). The closing line of the obituary is applicable to Playfair's work on the Enfield case: "Guy’s life was about finding proof and for many of us his findings succeeded in removing many doubts." (192)

I thought of what Hernani Guimarães Andrade, who had taught me all I knew about psychical research, had often said to me while I was working with his research group in Brazil. 'When spontaneous cases come up, we drop everything and go after them. They will not wait for us.' He had made it sound like a moral obligation.

I stopped searching the pages of the classified advertisements for a cheap flight to Portugal, and went indoors. Here was a colleague [Maurice Grosse] who clearly needed help, and I reckoned my holiday could wait a few days….

I rang Maurice Grosse and asked if he needed some help. He did, he said.

And so, on Monday 12 September 1977, I postponed (as I thought) my holiday plans, and went along to the 'house of strange happenings.'…

Of one thing I was quite certain: for nearly four months, the [Hodgson] family had undergone a series of experiences totally inexplicable in terms of presently known science. Incredible things had happened, and Maurice Grosse and I knew they had happened, some right in front of our eyes. But what did it all mean?

The sad part of it was that so few people seemed to be interested in finding out, and how fortunate it was that Grosse had seized upon the case with such enthusiasm, and kept going despite all obstacles. Had he not done so, I hated to think what state the [Hodgsons] might be in by now….

We arrived at Bounds Green underground station just in time for my last train into central London. It was nearly empty until it reached Piccadilly Circus, when it suddenly filled up with lively theatregoers clutching programmes, and talking excitedly about the show they had just seen. I envied them, in a way, though I too was on my way home from the show I had been going to two or three times a week for nearly six months. 'Show' is a suitable word, for it was clear that the poltergeist, whoever or whatever it was, needed an audience, and I had to admit that it had a sense of timing and a control of its audience that any professional actor would envy.

And yet, I thought, as I listened to the happy voices around me, by the time the final curtain comes down at Enfield, if it ever does, then I will have had a lot more to think about than if I had spent a night out in the West End….

I felt I had reached the limit of what I could do, by getting the facts of the Enfield case on record. From now on, it was up to the real experts.

We said goodbye and headed for our respective homes. The Enfield case might have ended, but the search for the explanation of it had barely begun. I hope that this book will encourage others to join in this search.

(Guy Playfair, This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 30, 175, 195-96, 269)

Dragged Out Of Bed By A Poltergeist

One of the most memorable incidents described in Guy Playfair's book on the Enfield Poltergeist is an occasion when the poltergeist pulled Janet Hodgson out of bed and dragged her out of the room, around a few bends, and partway down the steps. Less than ten minutes later, she was dragged out of bed again (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 101, 212-13). Both events were caught on audio tape, and you can listen to some brief sections of the recording in a documentary here.

The vast majority of Enfield skeptics I've encountered just ignore these events. They don't even attempt to explain them. A rare exception is Deborah Hyde, who made the remarkable suggestion that Janet was suffering from sleep paralysis.

Unfortunately, both Playfair's book and the documentary linked above leave out a lot of significant evidence for the authenticity of these dragging incidents. I want to discuss several lines of evidence, some of which I've never seen addressed before, derived largely from the audio of the events.

They occurred starting at about 1:20 A.M. on December 3, 1977. The recording is found on tape 32B of the digital version of Maurice Grosse's Enfield cassettes. The audio is about 26 minutes long. The first dragging incident occurs at 9:55, and the second occurs at 16:32. Click here to see a floor plan of the house, which will help you visualize what happened. The family was sleeping in the front bedroom upstairs, and, by this time in the case, the beds were arranged differently than you see in the floor plan. My understanding is that the bed Janet was in at the time required her to move or be moved a large distance and around some objects and bends (around one of the beds, around the door, down the first flight of steps, and around to the second flight of steps; Grosse describes the sequence at 52:28 on tape 83A). Go here to see video footage of the staircase in question. And go here, here, and here to see video footage of the room in question, footage that apparently was taken the month before the events under consideration. But the beds were frequently rearranged, so we can't assume that they were positioned the same way on December 3. In fact, the beds are in different positions in different segments of the same television program linked above. So, we have to go by descriptions of the events on the night in question to determine where the beds were at the time.

David Robertson On The Enfield Poltergeist

Shortly after Guy Playfair's death, I received an email from David Robertson. He's the last of the major initial investigators of the Enfield case who's still alive. He's also done other paranormal research with John Hasted and in other contexts. In addition to being the last of the major initial investigators of the Enfield case, he's the individual who was most involved in the efforts at filming the poltergeist and, to my knowledge, the last person alive who's seen some of the videos that weren't released to the public. His filming work has had a major role in how Enfield has been analyzed over the years. Anita Gregory cited some of his videos as evidence against the authenticity of the Enfield case, Gregory and Maurice Grosse carried on a public exchange about those videos for years, and The Conjuring 2, a popular movie loosely based on Enfield, makes reference to Robertson's videos. He performed scientific tests on Janet Hodgson that provided evidence of her paranormal abilities. He spent a lot of time in the Hodgsons' home and was largely responsible for arranging and documenting the events of December 15, 1977. You may have heard or seen him in Enfield documentaries over the years. For example, here's a video of him discussing the testing he did to demonstrate Janet's ability to bend metal paranormally. And here you can listen to him discussing the December 15 events.

Robertson has given me permission to post some of what he wrote in our email exchange. His comments are lengthy, they address a large number and variety of topics, and some of what he mentions about Enfield has, as far as I know, never been said publicly before. Much of it is highly significant.

Two independent sources have verified that the email address of the individual who contacted me is Robertson's. There's also good internal evidence, within the emails, that the individual is Robertson.

Since his comments are easier to understand if you know the general layout of the Hodgsons' house, here's a floor plan from the original edition of Playfair's book (This House Is Haunted [Briarcliff Manor, New York: Stein and Day, 1984]):

Click the floor plan for a larger image of it.

I'll occasionally interrupt Robertson's comments to offer some explanatory material, but the large majority of what follows will be what he wrote.