The Enfield Poltergeist: A North London Haunting and a Girl's Voice

On the night of 30 August 1977, in a council house at 284 Green Street in Enfield, north London, Peggy Hodgson called her children back into the bedroom because something was wrong with the beds. Peggy was a single mother of four — Margaret, thirteen; Janet, eleven; Johnny, ten; and Billy, seven — and she had been in the house long enough to know its ordinary creaks. This was different. Janet and Margaret said their beds had jolted and slid. There was a shuffling noise, then a series of loud knocks that came from inside the walls, moving along them, answering nothing. Peggy fetched a neighbour, Vic Nottingham, a builder, who went through the house looking for the joker he assumed was hiding somewhere. He found no one, and he heard the knocking too.

Over the next eighteen months the Hodgsons and a rotating cast of witnesses recorded what would become the most heavily documented poltergeist case in British history: marbles and Lego bricks flung across rooms, furniture that moved or overturned, a heavy chest of drawers that slid from the wall, cold that arrived without a draught, and — the detail everyone remembers — a deep, gruff, male voice that issued from Janet Hodgson, an eleven-year-old girl, claiming to be a dead man. It is a case that two experienced investigators watched at close range for months and came away certain was real, that other serious people watched and came away certain was theatre, and that the children at its centre have spent the rest of their lives being asked about. Understanding Enfield means holding those things together rather than resolving them into a headline.

The house on Green Street

Two nights after the beds moved, Peggy Hodgson called the police. WPC Carolyn Heeps and a colleague came to the house, and Heeps later gave a signed statement that she saw a chair move across the floor — she watched it slide roughly three or four feet, checked it for wires and found none, and could not explain it. That statement matters because Heeps had no stake in the story, no book to sell and no belief system to defend; she was a constable filing what she had seen and admitting she could not account for it. The police, reasonably, said a moving chair was not a crime and left.

The Hodgsons then went to the press. Reporters from the Daily Mirror, Douglas Bence and George Fallows, arrived with the photographer Graham Morris, and Morris’s camera became one of the case’s few pieces of hard evidence — his motor-drive caught small objects apparently in flight, and later a sequence of Janet seemingly airborne above her bed. It was the Mirror team, out of their depth, who suggested the family contact the Society for Psychical Research, a body founded in 1882 to examine claims of this kind with some rigour. The SPR sent Maurice Grosse.

Grosse is central to everything that followed, and worth pausing on. He was a retired inventor and engineer, a practical man with patents to his name, who had joined the SPR only recently. He had also, the year before, lost his own daughter — named Janet — in a motorcycle accident, and some who knew him thought the coincidence of the name bound him to the case in a way he did not fully examine. Grosse committed himself to Green Street almost daily, and was soon joined by the writer Guy Lyon Playfair, whose 1980 book This House Is Haunted remains the fullest account. Between them the two men filled well over a hundred hours of audio tape, logged hundreds of individual incidents, and interviewed dozens of witnesses, including neighbours, a passing baker and social workers. Whatever else Enfield was, it was watched and recorded with unusual patience.

The voice

The phenomenon that pushed Enfield past the usual repertoire of knocks and thrown toys arrived in the autumn of 1977, when Janet began to speak in a voice that was not hers: a rasping, elderly, unmistakably male growl, produced while she could apparently hold a conversation or even sip water. The voice gave names. The one that stuck called itself Bill and described its own death in the house — going blind, having a haemorrhage, dying in a chair in the corner of the room downstairs. Playfair recorded a man named Terry Wilkins saying that his father, Bill Wilkins, had indeed died in that house of a brain haemorrhage, a detail the family maintained the girls could not have known.

Investigators tested the voice as best they could. A speech specialist explained that a sound like it is produced with the false vocal folds — the ventricular folds sitting above the true cords — a technique used by throat singers and some actors, and one that ought to become painful, even damaging, with the sustained use Janet gave it over weeks. That she could keep it up for such long stretches without apparent harm was offered as evidence that something abnormal was happening. Others heard the same recordings and heard a clever, frightened girl doing an impression, the kind of guttural voice children produce for effect, sharpened by practice and by the attention it commanded from a house full of grown men with tape recorders.

Where the evidence thins

Enfield’s honest difficulty is that the strongest phenomena and the clearest evidence rarely coincide. The moments most likely to convince — Janet flung across a room, an iron fireplace apparently wrenched from the wall — tended to happen at the edge of vision, in a snatched second, or just after the camera had been looking elsewhere. Graham Morris’s famous photographs of Janet aloft are real photographs of a real girl in the air; sceptics point out that a girl bouncing hard off a bed, caught at the top of the arc, produces exactly that image, and that Janet herself, jumping, would look identical to Janet thrown.

Other incidents resisted the tidy explanation from the opposite direction. Investigators logged marbles and coins that were found hot to the touch after they landed, curtains that twisted and knotted while no one stood near them, and a small fire in a grate that appeared to start and then smother itself. The SPR sent a younger researcher, David Robertson, who set deliberate tests — asking the entity to move marked objects while the room was watched, sealing rooms, timing events — and reported results he could not explain, including apparent movements that happened while the obvious suspects were in view. Most disputed of all were claims that Janet was somehow deposited in odd places, once said to have been found by a neighbour after being flung from her bedroom. Every one of these has a sceptical answer, from conjuring to distorted memory under stress, and none was captured in a way that closes the argument; together they are why two careful men stayed convinced long after the cameras left.

The children admitted to some of it. In a filmed interview, Janet said plainly that she and Margaret had faked things — bending spoons, producing knocks — sometimes, she said, to see whether Grosse and Playfair would catch them. Sceptics treated this as the whole answer; Grosse and Playfair treated it as the ordinary noise around a real signal, arguing that frightened, exhausted children who are believed will still occasionally play up, and that catching them in a few tricks does not explain the incidents witnessed by police officers and strangers. The SPR itself split. Anita Gregory, a member who filmed at the house, grew convinced the girls were performing and wrote a critical academic study; the philosopher John Beloff was unpersuaded; the magician and investigator Melvin Harris and the American sceptic Joe Nickell later argued that everything at Enfield fell within the range of a determined child and a suggestible audience. The case did not produce a verdict the field could agree on, and it never has.

How Enfield left the house

Green Street quietened by 1979, and it might have stayed a locally remembered oddity if the record had not been so rich. Playfair’s book kept it alive through the 1980s; the tapes sat in the SPR archive. Then the wider culture came back for it. Sky’s 2015 drama The Enfield Haunting cast Timothy Spall as Maurice Grosse and treated the family with some tenderness. The following year The Conjuring 2 turned Enfield into a Hollywood horror engine, inserting the American demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren — who had no meaningful role in the actual case — as its heroes and inventing a demon, a possession and a rescue that the historical record does not contain. Most people who now know the phrase “Enfield poltergeist” know it through that film.

In 2023 the documentary-maker Jerry Rothwell took the opposite path with the Apple TV+ series The Enfield Poltergeist, building the show around Grosse’s own surviving audio and lip-syncing actors to the real voices on a reconstructed set, so that viewers heard the family as they actually sounded in 1977. The effect was to return the case to its texture — a tired mother, bickering children, credulous and sceptical adults talking over each other in a small house — and to strip away the demon the cinema had bolted on. Each retelling reshaped Enfield to the needs of its moment, and the girl at the centre grew more famous and less heard with every version.

The girl at the centre

Poltergeist cases have a habit the folklorists noticed long before Enfield: they gather around a child, very often a girl near the edge of puberty, in a household under strain. The Bell Witch settled on a farmer’s daughter; the Rosenheim disturbances of 1967 clustered around a young clerk; parapsychologists gave the pattern a clinical name, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, and placed a human “focus” at its heart. Whatever one thinks the force was, the sociology repeats. At 284 Green Street the focus was Janet, and the surrounding facts are stark: a mother recently left to raise four children alone, on a low income, in a council house, in a hard winter, suddenly the object of national attention and, for once, of belief.

That is the part the demon films erase. For a family that had been easy to overlook, the haunting brought a builder, then the police, then reporters, then two educated men who came every day and wrote down everything the children said and took it seriously. Janet, interviewed as an adult, has been strikingly candid — that some of it was faked, that much of it she cannot explain, that she found the fame frightening and would not wish the experience on anyone, and that she is telling the truth about being terrified whatever the cause. Her mother, Peggy, stayed in the house until her death there in 2003, never recanting and never cashing in. Those are not the actions of a family running a con; they are the actions of people who lived through something they could not name and were then handed to the culture as raw material.

The lasting interest of Enfield lies in that human weight rather than in whether a chair truly slid unaided. A frightened household in 1977 produced eighteen months of noise that some careful people believed and other careful people doubted, and the tapes are still there to be argued over. The case sits alongside the other durable domestic hauntings this desk has traced, from the talking disturbance of the Bell Witch to the doorstep dread of the black-eyed children, and it shares their real subject: what happens when a family in trouble is finally, urgently believed, and what we are willing to hear a child say when a rasping voice says it instead. The single strange sighting that never returns, as with the Dover demon, can be waved away; eighteen months of tape from a house full of witnesses asks something harder of us, which is to sit with a story that will not close.