In the 70s of the last century in Enfield, located in one of the northern districts of London, there was probably one of the most famous cases of the manifestation of poltergeist, which attracted the attention of the whole country, and later became world famous. Paranormal activity was then witnessed not only by the residents of the house in which everything was happening, but also by journalists, specialists in occult phenomena, psychics and even police officers. The real events of this story later formed the basis of the horror film "The Conjuring 2".
It all began in August 1977 when the Hodgson family moved into a low-rise apartment building at number 284 on Green Street. The family consisted of single mother Peggy Hodgson and her four children - Johnny, Janet, Billy and Margaret.
On the evening of August 30, Mrs. Hodgson put the children to bed. As she left, she heard Janet's daughter complaining that the beds in the room were vibrating on their own. The woman did not attach any importance to this, but the next day something more strange happened in the house. In the evening Mrs. Hodgson heard a noise upstairs, which greatly alarmed her. When she entered Janet's bedroom, she saw that the dresser was moving without anyone's help. Not understanding what was happening, she tried to put the chest of drawers back in place, but some invisible force continued to push him towards the door. Later, Janet mentioned this evening in her notes and added that at the moment of the movement of the chest of drawers, she clearly heard the shuffling of someone's feet.
After that, paranormal phenomena did not stop: children heard terrible sounds that were not allowed to sleep, objects flew around the room. One evening the family had to put on slippers and robes and leave the house to the street. The Hodgons turned to their neighbors for help, and they decided to figure out what was happening.
The comment of the head of the family, Vic Nottingham, after he entered the terrible monastery: “When I entered the house, I immediately heard these sounds - they were heard from the walls and from the ceiling. Hearing them, I got a little scared. " Margaret, Janet's sister, recalls: “He told me: I don't know what's going on there. For the first time in my life I saw a healthy man so scared."
Promotional video:
Many years later, Margaret, Janet's sister, will tell you that every day the poltergeist was more and more active, so the Hodgson decided to seek help from their neighbor Vic Nottingham. Then the family called the police, but they were also unable to help them, saying that such cases are not within their competence.
The poltergeist manifested itself in different ways. With numerous eyewitnesses (there were about 30 of them) things and furniture flew around the room, danced in the air. There was a drop in temperature, graffiti appeared on the walls, water on the floor, matches ignited spontaneously. The attack also took place at the physical level.
The Daily Mirror photographer Graham Morris, who also visited the house, claimed that there was chaos - everyone was screaming and things just flew around the room, as if someone was just moving them with the power of their minds.
A BBC film crew installed their cameras in the house. A few days later, it turned out that some components of the equipment were deformed, and all records were erased.
The poor family almost gave up, but nevertheless decided to turn to their last hope - in the "Society for the Study of Mental Phenomena", which studied human psychic and paranormal abilities. They sent researchers Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, who had been at the Hodgson home for two years and later wrote a book about the incident, titled This house is hounted.).
Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse.
Maurice's comments on the paranormal in the house:
House on 284 Green Street and book cover This house is obsessed.
Then it got worse and worse: large objects began to fly around the house: sofas, armchairs, chairs, tables, the Hodgson's seemed to be thrown out of their beds on purpose. And one day a completely unthinkable story happened: two specialists heard Billy's cry for help: “I can't move! It holds my leg! The men barely managed to free the child from captivity.
Also worth noting was the knock that never stopped and was one of the most unnerving aspects of this case.
The researchers tried their best: they recorded everything on dictaphones and cameras. Bottom line: they witnessed 1,500 paranormal events that took place in the Hodgson home.
The poltergeist pursued all family members, police officers who came to visit the family from time to time, neighbors and journalists. But 11-year-old Janet Hodgson got the most: she could go into a terrible trance, somehow throw objects that an adult would not pick up, and also float in the air.
We can say that all this looks like an invention, a rigged trick, as the skeptics claimed, only some of the eyewitnesses managed to take a few pictures of what was happening. One of them shows how the poltergeist lifted Janet and threw her with such force that the girl flew to the other side of the room. In the photograph, the distorted face clearly shows that she is in great pain. It is unlikely that a child would deliberately hurt himself.
One day, the girl even spoke in the rough male voice of an Enfield poltergeist, who was actually called Bill Wilkins: "Before I died, I went blind from a cerebral hemorrhage, I passed out and died in the corner."
After this incident, the police met with the son of the late old man to check the truth of the words that came from the girl and to exclude the possibility of a simple joke. However, the son confirmed all the details of the story.
The original audio recordings of conversations with Bill Wilkins while Janet Hodgson was in a trance have become available on the Internet:
Over the years, she talked about this:
Despite such a variety of manifestations of the phenomenon, many researchers believed that the phenomena at Anfield were nothing more than a protracted children's prank organized by Janet Hodgson and her older sister Margaret. Skeptics argued that the girls surreptitiously moved and broke objects, jumped on the bed and uttered "demonic" voices. Indeed, on several occasions, researchers caught the girls bending spoons. In 1980, Janet confessed that she and her sister had simulated some incidents, but only in order to test the researchers themselves.
Janet also claims that before it all started, she played with a board to summon spirits.
According to Janet, she did not know that she was going into a trance until she was shown the pictures. And about her "flights in the air" she spoke like this:
For some time after the incident, Janet had to spend in a psychiatric hospital in London, where she was declared sane. She later recalled:
The girl herself made it to the front page of the Daily Star with the glib title "Possessed by the Devil." Janet's school was also “not sweet”. Childhood cruelty was shown to her in full:
At the age of 16, she left home and soon got married. Her younger brother Johnny, nicknamed "the haunted house freak" at school, died at the age of 14 from cancer. In 2003, her mother also died of cancer. Janet herself lost her son - at the age of 18 he died in his sleep.
Janet (Hodgson) Winter.
Janet still assures that the story is completely true. She claims that something still lives in the house, but over time it calmed down a little.
After Janet's mother died, Claire Bennett moved into the house with her four sons. “I didn't see anything, but I felt strange. The presence of someone was clearly felt in the house, I constantly felt that someone was watching me,”said Claire. Her children said that at night someone was talking in the house, but when she found out what had happened in this house before, she immediately understood what was the matter. The family left this house 2 months after the move.
Claire's 15-year-old son, Shaka, talked about it:
Now another family lives in the house, but it is not yet known how the Enfield poltergeist reacted to their move. The mother of the family did not want to introduce herself and said briefly: “My children do not know anything about this. I don't want to scare them."
A video has survived where you can look at all the main participants in this unusual story. By time:
- 00:00 Opinion by Maurice Grosse (researcher of the paranormal)
- 04:27 Janet and Margaret as children (BBC recording)
- 11:27 am Margaret and her mother Peggy Hodgson
- 13.06 Interview with police officers
- 13.34 Interview with Janet in 2014 (recording of itv1 TV channel)
In 2015, The Enfield Haunting series was released, based on the events described above.
In 2016, the movie "The Conjuring 2" was released, which refers to this case. The directors very accurately showed all the real events that happened to the Hodgson family.