Showing posts with label Maurice Grosse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maurice Grosse. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Graham Morris On The Reliability Of His Levitation Photographs

My last post discussed some significant comments Graham Morris made about his famous photographs of Janet Hodgson allegedly levitating in the context of the Enfield Poltergeist. I want to quote some of his relevant comments here.

Aside from the importance of his comments in the context of his levitation photos, there's the issue of the general quality of Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's investigation of the case. They've been criticized a lot over the years - by Anita Gregory, Tony Cornell, and others - for allegedly handling the Enfield case poorly. You can click on the links just provided for responses to their criticisms. (And I've written other responses.) Some of the criticisms have had some validity, like what I've discussed here and in other posts, but the criticisms have been largely inaccurate. Many of the best aspects of Grosse and Playfair's work have been overlooked or underestimated. See my discussion with David Robertson about the scientific documentation they gathered for Janet's paranormal abilities, for example, such as testing her ability to bend metal at the Hodgsons' house in 1977 (as described in the video clip here) and a weight gain experiment conducted at Birkbeck College (part of the University of London) in 1982. Skeptics often object to the lack of video evidence, but Grosse and Playfair arranged for a video team from Pye Business Communications to come into the house the same month the investigation of the case began. Go here to listen to Ron Denney of Pye describing how their camera equipment malfunctioned in apparently paranormal ways while they were in the house, ways he describes as "absolutely impossible" and "one chance in a million". And Stewart Lamont's video captured what seems to be the poltergeist's knocking occurring elsewhere in the house while the Hodgson girls were being filmed sitting on a couch (with the other Hodgson children also accounted for), contrary to the typical skeptical argument that they faked all of the phenomena. I've discussed other examples of the quality of the investigation here. Graham Morris' recent comments about how they handled photography issues, quoted below, are worth adding to the list.

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

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.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

A Response To Tony Cornell And Ben Machell Regarding The Enfield Poltergeist

Ben Machell recently published a book about the paranormal that's focused on the late paranormal researcher Tony Cornell, titled Chasing the Dark (New York, New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2025). I found Ben's book to be good for the most part and would recommend it as a resource on the paranormal and on Cornell in particular. But its material on Enfield is bad enough to warrant a response.

Thursday, July 03, 2025

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.

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Enfield Miscellany (Part 11)

It's been more than two years since I posted the last entry in this series. I have enough material to justify another one now, so I'm picking up where I left off.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

A New Enfield Poltergeist Documentary Next Month

Apparently, it's the one that's been discussed for a few years now. It's set to appear on Apple TV+ in late October. Here's a Reddit thread about it. And a short description here explains, beneath a photograph from the documentary:

"By rebuilding the 1977 Hodgson home and casting actors to synchronize performances with real audio, the series plunges viewers back into this incredible story of two hauntings: the haunting of the youngest Hodgson daughter, Janet, and the haunting of the main paranormal investigator and father figure, Maurice Grosse."

I had a brief email exchange with one of the individuals who was working on the documentary a couple of years ago. And I had a discussion about it with one of the people interviewed for it after the interview. I've also seen some comments Melvyn Willin and Douglas Bence have made about the documentary at different stages in its production. But I don't know a lot about it. I want to watch it, and I'll probably post about it here if it's worth commenting on, which it probably will be.

For those who don't know, I've done a lot of work on the Enfield case and have a large collection of articles on it here. Here's a page with some recommendations about how to begin studying the case.

Monday, December 26, 2022

Howard Hughes' Interview With Paul Burcombe About Enfield

Howard Hughes of The Unexplained podcast recently did an interview with a significant witness in the Enfield case, Paul Burcombe. Paul is the son of John Burcombe, and he was often at the Hodgsons' house with his father and in other contexts. I wrote a tribute to his father a couple of years ago, which you can read here. Paul hasn't spoken publicly about the case much, and his comments during the interview suggest that there hasn't been a lot of effort made to talk to him about the case since it was at its height in the late 1970s. He says near the end of the interview that he'd be willing to discuss the case more. I hope that will happen.

Thursday, July 08, 2021

Video Of The Charlton House Haunting Apport

Sometime within the last few years, I read an interview with Melvyn Willin in which he commented:

A BBC Video Diary programme wanted to film Maurice [Grosse] attending an investigation. ASSAP organised one such event at Charlton House and a cup was caught exploding in a darkened room on video in a locked room with a camera man, Maurice and one other investigator witnessing it. BBC Radiophonic Workshop tested the sound patterns and concluded that it was NOT the sound of a cup being broken in the usual way and further experiments failed to replicate the circumstances. It seemed to implode rather than explode.

In my tribute to Maurice Grosse that I posted a couple of years ago, I linked some videos of the opening segments of that Video Dairies program. To my knowledge, the second half of the show, which includes the material Melvyn refers to, wasn't available on YouTube at the time. But the full program was recently put up, which I saw linked on the Twitter account of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Go here to see the beginning of the relevant segment of the program. The event in question happens at 32:12. After the event, you see some discussion of what happened among the people there at the time and a discussion among some members of the SPR's staff. (Including an argument between Grosse and Mary Rose Barrington, accompanied by a cup-throwing experiment in the SPR's facility!) There's then some intervening material on other subjects, so you can go here to see the remainder of what's relevant to the topic of this post.

For further background about Charlton House and the event under consideration here, read this article at the Occult World web site. I want to quote some comments Guy Playfair made about this incident, then conclude with some comments of my own:

Monday, February 01, 2021

Enfield Miscellany (Part 5)

(See part 1 here for an explanation of what this series is about. And here are the other parts in the series: two, three, and four. When I cite Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes below, I'll use "MG" to designate a tape from Grosse's collection and "GP" to designate one from Playfair's. So, MG1B refers to tape 1B in Grosse's collection, GP94A refers to 94A in Playfair's, etc.)

The Absurd Logistics Of A Fraud Hypothesis

Part of what makes poltergeists so interesting, and has the potential to make them so evidential, is the variety of phenomena involved. And the Enfield case has a much larger number and variety of events than the average poltergeist. Faking such a large and varied case would be more difficult accordingly. I've written about many of the traditional categories involved: levitations, apparitions, fires, etc. But some of the events don't fit into a traditional category. Or they do, but with one or more characteristics that stand out as highly difficult to fake. Those events add to the variety of the case, and they illustrate the absurdity of a fraud hypothesis that would have one or more of the Hodgson children being skilled enough to so successfully fake such a variety of phenomena. (For documentation of how often critics try to explain the case by attributing the events to trickery on the part of one or more of the Hodgson children, see the first paragraph here.)

Wednesday, July 01, 2020

A Tribute To Maurice Grosse


(I'll be citing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes. "MG" will refer to tapes from Grosse's collection, and "GP" will refer to those from Playfair's. MG28A is Grosse's tape 28A, GP11A is Playfair's tape 11A, etc.)

In the mid 1990s, Maurice Grosse appeared on a BBC television program, Video Diaries, to tell his life story. You can watch the program here and here. He discusses his background as an artist, his military service in World War II, meeting his wife, his Judaism, how the premature death of his daughter led to his work on paranormal issues, and his work as an inventor and businessman. But I know him mainly from his work on the Enfield Poltergeist. I want to say more about him from that perspective.

Hugh Pincott, who was Honorary Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) at the time when Grosse started on the Enfield case, was one of the contributors to Melvyn Willin's recent book on Enfield. Pincott recalls how Grosse became involved in the case and comments on the controversy surrounding his involvement. Grosse was a new member of the SPR and had been asking them to assign him to a case. After the Daily Mirror started going to the Hodgsons' house to report on the poltergeist that was occurring there, one of their reporters contacted the SPR to send somebody out to help the family:

Friday, May 01, 2020

What Enfield Skeptics Actually Experienced At The Hodgsons' House

Some of the most prominent critics of the Enfield case are individuals who visited the house where most of the poltergeist phenomena occurred. People like Milbourne Christopher, John Beloff, and Anita Gregory claimed to have not experienced anything at the house, and their skepticism has been cited against the case for decades. Because I've now listened to Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's audio cassettes and because of some other information that's recently come to light, I want to revisit the subject of what these skeptics actually experienced when they were at the house. As we'll see, their experiences have often been misrepresented, and they do more to support than to undermine the authenticity of the case.

It's useful to know the layout of the house, so go here to see a floor plan. I'll use "MG" to designate a tape from Grosse's collection and "GP" to designate one from Playfair's. MG8A is Grosse's tape 8A, GP21A is Playfair's 21A, etc.

Tuesday, March 03, 2020

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:

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

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:

Friday, December 13, 2019

Enfield Miscellany (Part 2)

(For an explanation of what this series is about, see part 1 here. I'll cite Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes below. I'm using "MG" to refer to a tape from Grosse's collection and "GP" to refer to one from Playfair's. MG13A refers to tape 13A in Grosse's collection, GP44A refers to 44A in Playfair's, and so forth.)

Apports And Teleportation

Objects would often appear in a paranormal way, such as by seemingly falling from a ceiling. Probably the most significant apports in the case were the ones that occurred on May 30, 1978, which I've discussed before (e.g., here) and are discussed in Playfair's book (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 226-27). A particularly significant episode on another occasion involved a large number of objects appearing from the ceiling and walls of the main bedroom upstairs, witnessed by a few members of the family, including Peggy Hodgson (MG84A, 4:28). The items included marbles, pieces of plastic, and Legos. Apparently, a lot of them came out of the ceiling and walls in rapid succession within a short period of time. The poltergeist would sometimes make coins appear, often dropping them from a ceiling. Talking to the poltergeist voice on one occasion, Grosse commented, "But I want to know how you make them [coins] come into this house and drop from the air onto the floor. I mean, we've seen this happen, and I've got some of those pennies." (GP24B, 4:55) Playfair refers to how John Burcombe saw a coin drop in front of him (GP26B, 23:43). Billy Hodgson saw a coin fall from a ceiling as well (MG59B, 49:25). Peggy and Margaret Hodgson saw some plastic spoons appear in a standing position (GP51A, 5:30). Shortly after (6:59), Peggy discusses an incident in which some ice cubes from the Nottinghams' house teleported through a wall into the Hodgsons' kitchen. In another context, Peggy was looking for Billy's socks, and they apparently were teleported to her and dropped at her feet while she was in one of the other bedrooms by herself (MG48A, 42:49, 44:02)! Peggy also mentions that a coin dropped around the same time the socks appeared. There were many other such incidents, like the teleportation of a cushion onto the roof on December 15, 1977, which I've discussed before. I'm just providing several examples here.

Snowman

The poltergeist voice calls Grosse "snowman" on one occasion (MG51A, 14:27). I don't think it called him or anybody else a snowman at any other point. He responded by saying he's never been called that before, and he didn't seem to understand why the voice was doing it. I suspect the poltergeist was referring to Grosse's resemblance to Sam the Snowman from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas program:


They have similar mustaches, and both wear dress clothes. I don't remember ever seeing a photograph or video of Grosse at the Hodgsons' house without a suit and tie. (Even when wrestling with Janet while she was in a trance state!) Those kinds of similarities are probably enough to explain the voice's comment, especially since the comment was made during a Christmas season (December 19, 1977), and the voice made television references in other contexts.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

The Voice And Personality Of The Enfield Poltergeist

If a poltergeist talks, there's potential to get more information from it. But the value of the information you get is going to depend, in part, on the poltergeist's personality.

One of the most controversial aspects of the Enfield case, an aspect that often gets more attention than is warranted, is the voice that allegedly was manifested by the poltergeist. Despite the large amount of attention the phenomena receive, interpretations of the voice, both in support of its paranormality and against it, are usually remarkably simplistic. That's partly because the large majority of people commenting on the subject have only heard a small percentage of what the voice said. But even what they say about that small percentage is often unreasonable.

I'm revisiting the issues surrounding the voice because I finished listening to Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes earlier this year. The voice is present or discussed on dozens of those tapes, covering many hours, so that the tapes provide a lot of additional information on the issues involved.

When I cite the tapes below, I'll use "MG" to designate a tape from Grosse's collection and "GP" to designate one from Playfair's. For example, MG102B is tape 102B in Grosse's collection, and GP59A is tape 59A in Playfair's.

I'll be including the voice's vulgar language when I quote it. I don't use that sort of language, and I disapprove of it, but it has relevance to some of the points I'll be making. And given how often the voice is vulgar, leaving out the vulgarity would be too disruptive.

I want to start by summarizing the evidence for the authenticity (paranormality) of the voice. That will provide some motivation upfront for working through these issues. I'll then move on to address some objections to the authenticity of the voice. After that, I'll discuss some other subjects. Since this article is so long, some readers may want to use Ctrl F to find what they're most interested in.

The extent to which the evidence for and against the voice is significant, or even relevant, will vary from one view of the voice to another. If somebody thinks that one or more of the Hodgson children had dissociative identity disorder or some other such condition, for example, then that view has different implications than one in which the children faked everything without any of those other psychological issues involved. I'm offering some general considerations with more than one view in mind.

Monday, July 01, 2019

The Ripping Out Of The Fireplace In The Enfield Case

A paranormal researcher who's skeptical of Enfield nevertheless acknowledged that "there were reports of activity that I'm not willing to dismiss a priori as childish trickery, such as a wrought iron fireplace being wrenched out of a wall". Mary Rose Barrington, in the committee report on the Enfield case for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), referred to the fireplace incident as "an item of poltergeistery of the first order" (cited here). See here for a brief overview of the incident in a documentary, which includes comments from a few people who were in the house at the time, most of them in the room where the fireplace was. The event was recorded on audio tape (8B in Guy Playfair's collection). This post is largely about that recording.

When I cite the Enfield tapes, I'll use "MG" to refer to a tape from Maurice Grosse's collection and "GP" to refer to one from Playfair's. So, MG28B is tape 28B in Grosse's collection, and GP93A is tape 93A in Playfair's.

Before getting to the contents of the tape of the fireplace incident, I'll quote an overview from Playfair's book. On the morning of October 26, 1977:

There was a sudden violent shaking sound, and it was immediately followed by total panic.

'Oh Lord!' cried [Peggy Hodgson]. 'That does it. All that power! I'm getting out.'…

The entire iron frame of the gas fire had been wrenched out of the wall, and was standing at an angle on the floor, still attached to the half-inch diameter brass pipe that connected it to the mains. The pipe had been bent through an angle of 32 degrees. This was a major demolition job, for the thing was cemented into the brickwork, and it was out of the question to suggest that one of the children could have wrenched it out. When we finally dismantled the whole apparatus, we found it quite a job even to move. It must have weighed at least fifty pounds. (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 60)

Friday, May 24, 2019

A Reassessment Of The Warrens And Enfield

Lorraine Warren's death last month has been getting a lot of media attention. The stories I've seen often mention the Conjuring series and the movies associated with it, including The Conjuring 2 in particular, and the Warrens' involvement in the Enfield Poltergeist. Given the success of the Conjuring series and affiliated movies (another one's coming out next month), we'll probably be hearing a lot about the Warrens over the next several years. And they'll be discussed for many years to come for other reasons. I don't know much about the other paranormal cases they've been involved with, but I do know a lot about Enfield. I recently finished listening to Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes, and some of those tapes include discussions with or about the Warrens. To my knowledge, much of the material on those tapes has never been discussed publicly, and some of it is highly significant. Since the Warrens are getting so much attention, this is a good time to address those tapes.

Some of the coverage of Lorraine's death has portrayed her positively. See, for example, this article by the Horror News Network that includes a lot of references to her kindness, generosity, and such. By contrast, a Hollywood Reporter article in December of 2017 noted:

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

A New Book By Melvyn Willin On The Enfield Poltergeist

It should be out soon. For those who don't know, Willin is an archivist for the Society for Psychical Research, and he's known some of the people involved in the Enfield case, including Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair. I haven't read the book yet, but I expect it to be good. You can read more about it here.

Friday, January 04, 2019

Maurice Grosse's Interview Of John Rainbow

I recently listened to an interview Maurice Grosse conducted with John Rainbow on April 9, 1978. Rainbow was a witness of what happened on December 15, 1977, one of the most eventful days in the Enfield Poltergeist. The interview is highly significant and includes some material I haven't seen discussed publicly.

Before I get to the interview, those who are unfamiliar with the December 15 events can go here for a brief overview from a documentary. It's mostly accurate, but not entirely. It gives the date as December 14, which is wrong. Go here to listen to Rainbow briefly describing his experience in a 1978 documentary. And here he is in a video produced many years later.

The interview between Grosse and Rainbow is about 18 minutes long, and it consists mostly of comments from Rainbow. His wife occasionally joins the conversation. Most of my citations that follow are from tape 84B in Grosse's Enfield collection.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

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)