Further Reading For The Enfield Poltergeist
This House is Haunted: The True Story of the Enfield Poltergeist by Guy Playfair
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Peggy Hodgson, a resident of Enfield, England, called the police in 1977, after her children reported seeing furniture in their home moving around and hearing sounds in the walls. Responding officers were able to confirm this report, but being police and not ghost busters, didn’t really know what they could do about it. Over the course of the next 18 months, dozens of people would witness poltergeist activity in the Hodgson home and the event came to be known as The Enfield Poltergeist.
Member of England’s Society For Psychical Research, Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair mounted a months long investigation of the haunting, documenting dozens of incidents of moving objects, sounds, including the spirit of a man that identified itself as “Bill” speaking through one of the children. Due to significant tabloid attention in the UK, many buzz kill skeptics, among them other paranormal researchers, thought this to be a hoax and at least one incident of what was alleged to be ghosts knocking on pipes in the walls was, in fact, proven to be the act of the Hodgson children. Unlike total hoaxes, such as The Amityville Horror, there were many, many witnesses to actual items around the house, some of them very heavy, moving on their own.
Reports of the haunting eventually came to an end in 1979 and media attention drifted away. Playfair and Grosse, who had become like members of the Hodgson family, sadly packed up their equipment and left. Like many explorations of poltergeist activity, the haunting energy in the house seemed to coincide with the presence of girls in the young teens. Once they had passed out of that phased, the hauntings also passed.
Episodes: 279 & 280
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