The Conjuring 2: what really happened during the Enfield Haunting?

How the haunting began, Janet couldn’t exactly recall. She knew that she was in bed, in the room she shared with her 10-year-old brother Johnny at a house in Green Street, Enfield, when something strange happened. They became frightened. As soon as they called their Mum, it stopped. “It was a bed shaking, something like that,” said Janet. “I mean, we’re talking 25 years or more, aren’t we? I can’t remember everything. But I can remember the main events because, you know, they leave scars.”

I’d been searching for Janet Hodgson for months. She was at the epicentre of what, depending on who you believe, was either the longest and most witnessed poltergeist case in history, or the greatest paranormal wind-up. I’d been researching a book about the truth of ghosts and had finally tracked her down to Clacton-on-Sea, where I’d convinced her to give her first interview about the events in the north London council house that still provoke fascination today and form the basis of Sky Living’s three part TV dramatisation The Enfield Haunting, and the Hollywood filmThe Conjuring 2.

The woman who met me was barely recognisable as the girl in the photographs of the time. They show her in the air above her bed, apparently terrified and being hurled about by unseen forces. Here was a married mum of three, slim with long blonde hair, in a Nike T-shirt and dun-coloured three-quarter-length shorts. She led me to a cluttered conservatory, explaining quietly that she didn’t like talking about the haunting in front of her children, the youngest of whom hadn’t yet been told about it.

The night after that first, half-forgotten disturbance was the 31st August 1977. Janet was 11. “I was due to start senior school the following week.” When she and Johnny heard a shuffling in the dark, they called for their mother again, who came upstairs once more and ticked them off for mucking about. But when she left, the sound returned.

They sat up in bed to see a chest of drawers slide from the side of Janet’s bed towards the door. “We shouted ‘Mum! Mum!’,” said Janet. “We were sort of frightened, but also intrigued. It’s so vivid, some of it.”

What was your Mum’s reaction? “She was dumbfounded, really. She pushed it back and it started to move again. She tried to push it back again and it wouldn’t move. So she said ‘Right, we’ll go downstairs.’ We was very nervy. There was a funny atmosphere in the house. And then the knocking started.”

Janet’s mum, Peggy, thought there were burglars in the house. She called the neighbours in. They all searched and found nothing. But the knocking continued. “It sounded like it was coming from the outside wall, but it was like it was inside as well,” said Janet. “And sometimes, it sounded like it was coming from underneath the floorboards.” Peggy called the police. The officer who arrived, WPC Carolyn Heeps, reported witnessing a chair rise up and move across the floor on its own, in full view of everyone.

“She was astounded,” Janet says. “We were all astounded.” But she didn’t know how to help, and nor did anyone else, so she decided to call the Daily Mirror. “They came down and nothing much happened. And as soon as they went to their car, it all started.” What did? “Lego bricks, marbles flying about. The photographer came back and a Lego brick hit him above the eye. He still had the mark a few days later. And then Maurice Grosse came in on the case.”

Maurice Grosse was a member of the world’s oldest paranormal research organisation, the Society for Psychical Research. Founded in 1882, the SPR counts two prime ministers (Balfour and Gladstone) as well as Freud, Jung and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle among its alumni. Grosse, who died in 2006, was a formidable man, a successful industrial designer who served World War II with the Royal Artillery. He’d investigate the case, with his colleague Guy Lyon Playfair, for six months. When I met him, he was a bright and energetic 85.

“When I first got there, nothing happened for a while,” he told me, over tea and ginger cake in the lounge of his Muswell Hill home. “But then I experienced Lego pieces flying across the room, and marbles. And the extraordinary thing was, when you picked them up they were hot, which is relevant to poltergeist type activity. I was standing by the table in the kitchen and a t-shirt leapt off the table and flew into the other side of the room whilst I was standing by it. I thought, ‘Well that’s good. Now I’ve really seen something’.”

The knocking, according to Grosse, could come from several places at once. “If you go and listen to it in the wall over here,” he said, “it’d suddenly come from the wall over there.” A run of knocks would often fade in, louder and louder, and then, slowly, out again. But that was just the start of it.

Over the coming months, he’d see sofas floating and tipping over; beds, tables and chests of draws spinning on the spot and flung over; stones flying right over the house; coins dropping out of the air in front of him; dogs barking in the middle of completely dogless rooms - all phenomena that have been recorded in poltergeist cases going back to Roman times.

On one particularly frantic day, Maurice and a neighbour heard one of the daughters crying out “I can’t move! It’s holding my leg!” They rushed out to find Janet’s sister Rose standing on the staircase on one leg, with the other leg stretched out behind her. The neighbour grabbed one small wrist and Maurice grabbed the other. They both pulled as hard as they could. Rose didn’t move.

Janet would go into violent trances, and claimed to be repeatedly thrown out of her bed in the night. One evening, the SPR investigators removed everything from her bedroom to see what would happen if it had nothing to throw. Later, the family heard a violent wrenching sound.

Upstairs, in an empty room, they found the iron fireplace had been pulled out of the wall. It’s said to be common for poltergeist activity to centre around a female on the cusp of adolescence and, sure enough, the activity peaked on Thursday 15th December, the day Janet got her first period.

But some visitors to the Enfield house were less convinced than the family, neighbours, journalists, the police officer and other witnesses. Perhaps the case’s greatest sceptic was academic Anita Gregory. Although she’s since passed away, I found a record of her views in the form of a lengthy and increasingly irritable correspondence between her and Grosse in the SPR’s quarterly journal. She called the evidence gathered at the house “questionable”, “greatly exaggerated”, and, ultimately, “pathetic”.

“She went away very, very sceptic,” Janet nodded. Gregory wrote that Janet and her sister wouldn’t allow anyone in the bedroom with them during their “possessions” when they’d speak in gruff voices of the “spirit”. Eventually, she was allowed in, “provided I faced the door and covered my head with the girls’ dressing gowns,” she wrote, at which point “slippers and pillows were shied at me.”

“I can’t remember that,” said Janet, sniggering. What about the time another researcher secretly filmed her bending a spoon then jumping up and down on her bed and flapping her arms. She was, wrote Gregory, “merrily cheating away and giving not the slightest indication that she was aware of being filmed”.

“I remember that one,” Janet said, blushing. “Maurice was annoyed with me.” Why did you do fake things? “There was times when things would happen and times when they wouldn’t. Sometimes, if things didn’t happen, you’d somehow feel you’d failed.”

So you felt obliged to make things up so people wouldn’t be sceptical of you? “That’s pretty much it. Plus you’d get bored and frustrated at all the people coming and going. I mean, life wasn’t normal.” How much of the phenomena at Enfield was faked? “Hmm.” Janet looked into her lap. “I’d say 2 per cent”.

When I asked Grosse, he said, “Of course they played tricks! They’re children! But it was nothing to the real thing.” Gregory, meanwhile, claimed several witnesses who admitted to her they thought it all a hoax. But when Grosse checked, he claimed they denied ever telling her this. Gregory insisted WPC Heeps always believed the floating chair to have been a trick played by the children.

This is surprising considering the interview Heeps gave to BBC Scotland at the time, during which she said, “The chair was by the sofa, and I looked at the chair and I noticed it shook slightly. I can’t explain it any better. It came off the floor, oh, nearly a half inch, I should say, and I saw it slide off to the right about three and a half to four feet before it came to rest. I’m absolutely convinced that no one in that room touched that chair or went anywhere near it when it moved. Absolutely convinced.”

For my book on the supernatural, I spent more than a year searching for ghosts and interviewing the people who claimed to have witnessed them. Janet was nothing like most of the people I met, who were often obviously lying or highly suggestible, unconsciously willing themselves to believe that even the sounds of passing aircraft were diabolical “flushings of the system”. She didn’t appear to be showing off or behaving shiftily.

The story she recounted contained no obvious contradictions and suffered no reversals, even after the decades that had passed. To me, she came across like any other interviewee who might’ve suffered some sort of trauma. Of course, these are only my instincts, and are of no objective evidential value. But they add to the sense of unease that still follows me, more than 10 years after our meeting, when I think about Enfield.

I wonder how likely it is that Janet could have got away with causing many of these events, even for an afternoon. Imagine chucking Lego at a houseguest and blaming it on the dead, even once. No doubt a wickedly clever, highly trained and well-prepared illusionist such as Derren Brown could convince several adults they were witnessing a poltergeist disturbance for a few hours, maybe even a day or two. But an eleven year old girl? For 18 months?

But equally, the explanation they’ve given, which is that the disembodied consciousness of a previous occupant named Bill had possessed Janet and caused chaos in the property, is preposterous. So, I’m left thinking it was obviously just a marvellous ruse.

But, but, but… I can’t achieve resolution. And so my memories of Janet just hang there in the back of my head, bumping around every now and then, my own noisy ghost. And whenever I hear talk of it, or see fictionalised retellings in the TV schedules, I can only think, "Oh yes, Enfield. That was weird."

The Conjuring 2 is released in the UK on June 17. ?Will Storr versus The Supernatural by Will Storr (Ebury Press) is available now

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