Enfield real story. Ed and Lorraine Warren are famous paranormal investigators: Annabelle, The Perron Family, Amityville, Enfield Poltergeist. How it all started

In the 70s of the last century in Enfield (Enfield), located in one of the northern districts of London, there was probably one of the most famous cases of poltergeist manifestations, which attracted the attention of the whole country, and later became world famous. Witnesses of paranormal activity then were not only residents of the house in which everything happened, but also journalists, specialists in the occult, psychics and even policemen. The real events of this story later formed the basis of the horror film The Conjuring 2.

It all started in August 1977, when the Hodgson family moved into a low-rise apartment building at 284 Green Street. The family consisted of a 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 some noise upstairs, which greatly alarmed her. When she entered Janet's bedroom, she saw that the chest of drawers was moving without anyone's help. Not understanding what was happening, she tried to put the dresser back in place, but some invisible force kept pushing it towards the door. Janet later mentioned this evening in her notes and added that at the moment the chest of drawers moved, she distinctly heard the shuffling of someone's feet.

After that, paranormal phenomena did not stop: the children heard terrible sounds that they were not allowed to sleep, objects flew around the room. One evening, the family had to put on slippers and dressing gowns and go out of the house to the street. The Hodgsons turned to their neighbors for help, and they decided to look into what was happening.

Commentary 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. When I heard them, I got a little scared.” Margaret, Janet's sister, recalls: “He said to me: I don't know what's going on there. For the first time in my life I saw a healthy man so frightened.

Many years later, Margaret, Janet's sister, will tell that every day the poltergeist manifested itself more and more actively, so the Hodgsons decided to turn to neighbor Vic Nottingham for help. Then the family called the police, but they also could not help them, saying that such cases were not within their competence.

The poltergeist manifested himself in different ways. With numerous eyewitnesses (there were about 30 people), things and furniture flew around the room, danced in the air. A drop in temperature was felt, inscriptions appeared on the walls, water on the floor, matches ignited spontaneously. The attack also took place on a physical level.

Daily Mirror photographer Graham Morris, who also visited the house, claimed that there was chaos there - everyone was screaming, and things just flew around the room, as if someone simply moved them with the power of thought.

The BBC film crew set up 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 still decided to turn to their last hope - the Society for the Study of Psychic Phenomena, which studied human psychic and paranormal abilities. They sent investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, who stayed at the Hodgson home for two years and subsequently wrote a book about the incident called "This house is hounted" ).

Maurice's comments on the paranormal activity in the house:

As soon as I crossed the threshold of the house, I immediately realized this was not a hoax, but real case The whole family was in a terrible state. Everyone was in terrible anxiety. On my first visit, nothing happened for a while. Then I saw how Lego pieces and pieces of marble began to fly around the room. When I picked them up they were hot.

Then it got worse and worse: large objects began to fly around the house: sofas, armchairs, chairs, tables, the Hodgsons seemed to be thrown out of their beds on purpose. And once a completely unthinkable story happened: two specialists heard Billy cry for help: “I can’t move! It's holding my leg!" The men barely managed to free the child from captivity.

Also worth noting is the knocking that didn't stop and was one of the most unnerving aspects of the case.

The researchers tried their best: they recorded everything on voice recorders and cameras. Bottom line: they witnessed 1,500 paranormal events that took place in the Hodgson house.

The poltergeist pursued all family members, police officers who came to visit family, neighbors and journalists from time to time. But 11-year-old Janet Hodgson got the worst of it: she could enter a terrible trance, somehow scatter objects that even an adult would not pick up, and also soar in the air.

Once, the girl even spoke in the gruff male voice of an Enfield poltergeist, whose real name was Bill Wilkins (Bill Wilkins): "Before I died, I was blind from a cerebral hemorrhage, I fainted and died in a corner."

The police after this incident met with the son of the deceased old man to check the truth of the words that came from the girl and exclude the possibility of a simple hoax. However, the son confirmed all the details of the story.

The original audio recording of conversations with Bill Wilkins while Janet Hodgson was in a trance became available on the Internet:

Years later, she spoke about it:

I felt that I was controlled by a force that no one understands. I really don't want to think about it too much. You know, I'm not entirely sure that this something was genuine "evil". Rather, he wanted to be part of our family. It didn't want to offend us. He died in this house and now wanted peace. The only way he could communicate was through me and my sister.

Despite such a variety of manifestations of the phenomenon, many researchers believed that the phenomena in Enfield are nothing more than a protracted children's prank organized by Janet Hodgson and her older sister Margaret. Skeptics claimed that the girls surreptitiously moved and broke objects, jumped on the bed and made "demonic" voices. Indeed, on several occasions researchers caught girls bending spoons. In 1980, Janet admitted that she and her sister 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 falling into a trance until the pictures were shown to her. And about her "flights in the air" she spoke like this:

Levitation was scary because you don't know where you're going to land. In one of the cases of levitation, a curtain wrapped around my neck, I screamed and thought that I would die. Mom had to make a lot of effort to break it. And Bill, who spoke through me, was furious that we moved into his house.

For some time after the incident, Janet had to spend psychiatric hospital in London, where she was declared sane. She later recalled:

This was hard. I spent some time in London, in a psychiatric hospital, where they braided my head with electrodes, but everything was normal.

The girl herself made it to the title page of the Daily Star with the glib title "Devil Possessed." Janet's school was also "not sweet." Childish cruelty was shown to her in full:

I was teased at school. Nicknamed "ghost girl". Calling names, they threw various things at my back. After school, I was afraid to go home. Doors opened and closed, they came and went different people and I was very worried about my mother. As a result, she had a nervous breakdown.

At 16, she left home and soon got married. Her younger brother Johnny, nicknamed "The Ghost 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 bit.

I did not want to experience it again while my mother was alive, and now I want to tell everything. I don't care if people believe it or not - it happened to me, it was all real and true.

After Janet's mother died, Claire Bennett moved into the house with her four sons. “I didn’t see anything, but I felt strange. Someone's presence was clearly felt in the house, it constantly seemed to me that someone was following 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 happening. The family left this house 2 months after the move.

Claire's 15-year-old son named Shaka recounted this:

The night before I left, I woke up and saw a man entering the room. Running into my mother’s bedroom, I told her about what I saw and said: “We need to leave,” which we did the next day.

Now another family lives in the house, but how the Enfield poltergeist reacted to their move is not yet known. 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 been saved where you can look at all the main participants in this unusual story. By time:

00:00 Opinion of Maurice Grosse (researcher of the paranormal)
04:27 Janet and Margaret as children (recorded by BBC)
11:27 Margaret and her mother Peggy Hodgson
13.06 Interviews with the police
13.34 Interview with Janet in 2014 (recorded by itv1 channel)

In 2015, the series "The Enfield Haunting" / "The Enfield Haunting" was released, based on the events described above.

In 2016, the movie "The Conjuring 2" / "The Conjuring 2" was released, which refers to this particular case. The directors very accurately showed all the real events that happened to the Hodgson family.

In preparing the article, materials from

Who are Ed and Lorraine Warren - everyone who watched the dilogy The Conjuration of James Wan knows - a frightening story of famous paranormal researchers who have been hunting ghosts since 1952, when demonologists founded the Society for Psychical Research and the Warren Occult Museum, which contains hundreds of satanic objects rituals and demonic artifacts.

Ed and Lorraine Warren's investigations:

According to the demonologists themselves, they account for more than ten thousand episodes of encounters with otherworldly phenomena. However, throughout their long careers, Ed and Lorraine Warren's investigations were accompanied by attacks and criticism from skeptics, atheists, envious people, competitors. We will never know the truth about the adventures of ghost hunters, so we can simply believe or deny. In any case, in the books of the Warren duo, the most prominent examples of the supernatural are the following horror stories.

Annabelle

One of the most sinister exhibits of the Museum of Occult Artifacts is the Annabelle doll with the inscription “Do not touch with your hands” on the stand. Tony Spera, the Warrens' brother-in-law and museum manager, declares that Annabelle is the scariest item they've ever had. An excerpt from the book of researchers of paranormal manifestations:

In 1968, two female roommates began to notice that the Raggedy Annie model doll they had been given began to inexplicably change its location. Then scraps of paper began to appear in different parts of the room with the words “Help me” written in clumsy handwriting. Further, Annie began to leave traces of blood, which horrified the neighbors, who hurried to turn to the medium. The specialist they invited stated that Annie was possessed by the spirit of a little girl named Annabelle Higgins. Having learned about the mystical Annie-Annabel, the Warrens joined the process, who concluded: the sinister toy must be put in a cage until the ghost spread from the doll to people.

More details - in the movie "Annabelle's Curse".

Perron family

In January 1971, the Perron family, Caroline and Roger, moved with their five daughters to big house in Harrisville, Rhode Island, USA. Almost immediately, the family felt signs of a demonic presence in the rooms, basement and attic of the dwelling. The mop was gone, doors were slamming, books were falling off the shelves, paintings were falling off the walls, there was a clatter, a clatter, screams, laughter. Caroline turned to the history of the building and learned that it was previously owned by several generations of the same family, many of whose members died as a result of violent death, drowned or hanged themselves. After learning the shocking details of their new home, the Perrons turned to professional demonologists who discovered a paranormal presence in the form of a witch who had lived in these parts since the nineteenth century. The Warrens held seances, but they did not use exorcism, but were forced to admit defeat, advising the Perrons to leave the cursed haunted house. What the family did in 1980. Other details - the film "Conjuring".

Amityville

George and Kathy Lutz bought the infamous High Hopes House in 1976, a year after Ronald Defeo Jr. shot and killed his parents and siblings, killing six people. Confessing to the crime, Defeo repeatedly claimed that the voices that whispered to him from the walls of the house forced him to kill his family. Spouses Lats also heard voices and other otherworldly signs, after which they decided to resort to the help of priests. In vain. Without waiting for a repeat of the Amityville Horror, the Lutzes moved out of High Hopes, finally contacting the exorcists. The Warrens arrived in Amityville twenty days later and met with the most notorious case in their history.

enfield poltergeist

In 1978, the Warrens visited England, where the Enfield poltergeist showed up in north London, a sinister spirit that had kept the Hodgson family in fear for a year. The hardest hit was 11-year-old Janet Hodgson, who showed many signs of demonic possession. This paranormal case has many witnesses, including among police officers who repeatedly came to calls and saw incredible scenes at the Hodgson estate - slamming windows, flying chairs, a girl Janet speaking in an incomprehensible language in a male voice. Rumors about the Enfield poltergeist reached America, from where honored paranormal workers urgently left for London, about the otherworldly adventures of which the picture Spell-2 tells. True, unlike the horror movie in reality, the Warrens were not even able to enter the haunted house, because the owners refused the help of American guests.

On August 23, 2006, Ed Warren died, after which his widow Lorraine left her career as a medium and researcher of paranormal events, although she still runs her own Museum. The family occult enterprise was inherited by the son-in-law, who worked alongside father-in-law and mother-in-law for thirty years, and now independently continues active research into otherworldly phenomena.

Everything that happened in the distant 1970s in Enfield, located in the north district of London, was very reminiscent of a horror movie scenario. But the events, unfortunately, were quite real. The phenomenon almost immediately became known as the Enfield poltergeist. The public was shocked by this scary story. And it was one of the most deeply investigated cases of its kind.

The protagonists of the tragedy that broke out on August 30, 1977 were Peggy Hodgson and her four children: Johnny, Janet, Billy and Margaret. The family, shortly before the events, moved into a small apartment building in Enfield. As usual, in the evening, the mother put the children to bed and was about to leave the nursery, when Janet began to complain that her and her brother's beds somehow vibrated strangely. Entering the room, the woman froze in fear. The heavy chest of drawers moved across the floor on its own. Trying not to scare her daughter even more, she tried to return the furniture to its place, but no luck. The chest of drawers resisted, someone or something continued to push him towards the door. Janet later mentioned this evening in her notes and added that when the chest of drawers moved, she distinctly heard the shuffling of someone's feet. And her sister Margaret recalled that the house was increasingly filled with strange sounds, so the children could not sleep for a long time.
The poltergeist manifested himself in different ways. With numerous eyewitnesses (there were about 30 people), things, furniture flew around the room, danced in the air. A decrease in temperature was felt, inscriptions appeared on the walls, water on the floor, matches ignited spontaneously. Physical attack.
The poltergeist focused his main attention on the youngest daughter Janet. The girl often fell into trance states and showed all the signs of an obsessed woman: levitation, inarticulate growls, seizures and bouts of aggression. Quite often, Janet spoke in a "rough male voice" on behalf of a certain Billy Wilkins, who died a few years before the events in Enfield. The police even met with the son of the deceased old man to check the truth of the words that came from the girl and rule out the possibility of a simple hoax. The son confirmed all the details of the story.

We can say that all this looks like a fiction, a rigged trick, as 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 off 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 intentionally hurt himself.
The photographer Graham Morris himself said that when a poltergeist appeared in the house, real chaos was created, people screamed in fear, things moved through the air, as with telekinesis.

Despite such a variety of manifestations of the phenomenon, many researchers believed that the Enfield apparitions were nothing more than a prolonged children's prank organized by Janet Hodgson and her older sister Margaret. Skeptics claimed that the girls surreptitiously moved and broke objects, jumped on the bed and made "demonic" voices. Indeed, on several occasions researchers caught girls bending spoons. In 1980, Janet admitted that she and her sister simulated some incidents, but only in order to test the researchers themselves.
“I felt that I was controlled by a force that no one understands. I really don't want to think about it too much. You know, I'm not entirely sure that this something was genuine "evil". Rather, he wanted to be part of our family. It didn't want to offend us. It died in this house, and now it wanted peace. The only way he could communicate was through my sister and me.”

"This was hard. I spent some time in London, in a psychiatric hospital, where they braided my head with electrodes, but everything was normal. Levitation was scary because you don't know where you're going to land. In one of the cases of levitation, a curtain wrapped around my neck, I screamed and thought that I would die. Mom had to make a lot of effort to break it. The man Bill, who spoke through me, was furious that we were living in his house.
I was teased at school. They called me the "ghost girl", calling me names, they threw various things at my back. After school, I was afraid to go home. Doors opened and closed, different people came and went, and I was very worried about my mother. She ended up having a nervous breakdown."
Janet's brother was nicknamed "the freak of the haunted house" and was spit on by passers-by. The girl herself made it to the title page of the Daily Star with the glib title "Devil Possessed." At the age of 16, still quite young, she left home and got married. The press soon calmed down, and the younger brother died of cancer at the age of 14.
Janet's mother also died of breast cancer in 2003. Son Janet died at the age of 18 in his sleep.
Janet denied that the whole story was a fabrication and a hoax to earn money and fame.
“I did not want to experience it again while my mother was alive, now I want to tell everything. I don't care if people believe it or not - it happened to me and it was all real and true."

Is there a poltergeist living in the house today?
After the death of Peggy Hodgson, Claire Bennett moved into the house with her four sons. Here is what she said: “I didn’t see anything suspicious, but I constantly felt uncomfortable. Someone's presence was clearly felt in the house, I always felt that someone was looking at me.
At night, her children often woke up and heard someone's voices below. Claire became interested in the history of the house when she heard about the Enfield poltergeist, and everything fell into place, she says.
The family moved out after 2 months. 15-year-old Shaka's son Claire says: “The night before I left, I woke up and saw a man enter the room. Running into my mother’s bedroom, I told her about what I saw and said: “We need to leave,” which we did the next day.
Now another family lives there. 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."

edited news LjoljaBastet - 28-06-2016, 05:41

The rough male voice made everyone in the room go cold with fear. Having shown up, he brought news from behind the tombstone, describing in detail the moment of his death. "Before I died, I went blind, I had a hemorrhage, I passed out, and I died in the corner below." The eerie voice, which can still be heard on tape, is thought to be Bill Wilkins.

The recording was made in the 70s in Enfield, north London, a few years after his death. Most frightening, however, was that the voice was coming from the body of an 11-year-old girl named Janet Hodgson. It looked like she was possessed. It could have been a scene from The Exorcist, but it was all real. What was it? This was the case of the Enfield poltergeist, which 30 years ago intrigued the whole country, puzzled the police, as well as psychics, specialists in the occult phenomena and all the usual journalists.

Poltergeist displays included levitation as furniture flew through the air and things bounced around astonished bystanders. There was a cold shower, a physical assault, graffiti, water on the floor, and even matches exploding on their own. A female police officer, under oath, stated that she saw the chair move. In total there were about 30 witnesses of strange phenomena.

Most inexplicably, the girl at the center of the action served as something of a mouthpiece for Bill Wilkins, the grumpy and tongue-tied old man who died in this house years ago. Those investigating this case met with his son, and he confirmed the details of his stories. Many still doubt whether this case was a hoax, but no evidence has been provided for this, and the paranormal version remains the only plausible explanation.

So what happened in Anfield then, many years ago? Where are the Hodgsons now, have they got rid of their ghosts, and who lives at this address now? The story itself, according to the Hodgsons, began in 1977. The family at that time was unusual, as the single mother had four children - 12-year-old Margaret, 11-year-old Janet, 10-year-old Johnny and 7-year-old Billy. It was the evening of August 30, 1977, and Mrs. Hodgson was trying to put her children to bed.

She heard Janet complain that her bed and her brother's were vibrating. Mrs. Hodgson told her to stop complaining. However, something more frightening happened the next evening. Mrs. Hodgson heard a loud noise upstairs. Crossing herself, she told her children to calm down.

Entering Janet's bedroom, Mrs. Hodgson saw that the chest of drawers was moving. She put him in his place, but found that an invisible force was again pushing him towards the door. Many years later, Janet will tell: “It all started at the end of the bedroom, the chest of drawers was moving, and you could hear shuffling. We told my mother what was happening, and she came to see everything with her own eyes. She saw that the chest of drawers was moving. When she tried to push it back into place, she couldn't."

Janet's sister, Margaret, tells how the manifestations began to increase in intensity. “Various strange sounds were heard here and there in the house, it was not clear what was happening. None of us could sleep. We put on bathrobes and slippers and left the house.” The family turned to their neighbors Vic and Peggy Nottingham for help. Vic, a hefty construction worker, went to their house to do his own research.

He says: “I went into the house and heard these sounds - they were heard from the walls and from the ceiling. Then I got a little scared.” Margaret tells: “He said: I don't know what's going on. This is the first time I've seen a healthy man so scared." The Hodgsons called the police, who were equally puzzled. After some time, the policemen left, saying that such incidents were not within the jurisdiction of the police. The Hodgsons later contacted the press.

Daily Mirror photographer Graham Morris, who was at the house, says: “It was chaos. Things suddenly began to fly around the room, people screamed. Some of the incidents were captured on camera. One of the photos shows Janet being thrown across the room by something. On the other, her face is contorted in pain.

A photo

A BBC film crew came to the house, but they found that the metal components of their equipment were warped and the recordings had been erased. The family then turned to the Society for the Study of Psychic Phenomena for help. They sent researchers Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, experts on poltergeists, who later wrote a book about the case called This House Is Possessed.

Grosse (who has now died) said: “As soon as I got into the house, I realized that this was a real case, because the whole family was in a bad state. Everyone was in terrible confusion. When I first arrived, nothing happened for a while. Then I saw Lego elements flying around the room, as well as pieces of marble. The most amazing thing is that when I picked them up, they were hot.

Violent paranormal activity swirled around the researchers: the sofa levitated, furniture tossed and thrown across the room, and at night someone threw the whole family out of bed. One day, Maurice, along with a neighbor who came in, heard one of the children shouting “I can’t move! It's holding my leg!” and they had to wrestle with what they insisted felt to be invisible hands. The constant knocking was one of the most unnerving aspects of the case. He descended the walls, subsided and increased, as if deliberately playing on the nerves of the whole family, which was already so frightened that everyone slept in the same room with the lights on.

The main activity took place around 11-year-old Janet. She went into trances that were scary to watch. In one case, the iron grate of the fireplace in her rooms was torn out by an invisible force. “I felt like I was being used by a force that no one could understand. I really don't want to think about it too much. I'm not sure that the poltergeist was a real "evil". Rather, he wanted to be part of our family. “It didn’t want to offend us. It died in this house, and wanted peace. The only way it could communicate was through me and my sister.” However, some people doubt these events.

Two researchers caught the children bending spoons and asked why no one was allowed to enter the room when she spoke in her low voice, which was supposedly that of Bill Wilkins. And indeed, Janet admits that they set something up. In 1980, she said: “Once or twice we faked some incidents. We wanted to see if Grosse and Playfair caught us. They always bit us." She is now 45 years old and lives in Essex with her husband.

“When I heard about the film, I didn’t really like it. My father had just died, and it was hard for me to go through all this again.” She describes the manifestations of the poltergeist as traumatic. “It was an extraordinary case. This is one of the most widely recognized cases of paranormal activity in the world. But for me it was pretty hard. I think he left his mark - poltergeist activity, press attention, all these people that passed through our house. It wasn't a normal childhood."

When asked how many of the poltergeist manifestations they faked, she said, "I think about two percent." She also admitted to playing around with the summoning board just before these phenomena began to occur. She says she didn't know she was going into a trance until the pictures were shown to her. “I know that when there were voices, there was a feeling that something was inside me. They did various tests, told me to take water in my mouth and all that, but the voices continued to sound.

This was hard. I had to spend some time in a psychiatric hospital in London, where they wrapped electrodes around my head, but tests showed that everything was normal. Levitation was scary because you don't know where you're going to land. I remember the curtain wrapped around my neck and I screamed and thought I was going to die. My mother had to use all her strength to tear it apart. The man who spoke through me, Bill, he was angry because we lived in his house." All this had a great impact on the family.

Janet says: “I was teased at school. They called me a ghost girl, and they threw things at my back. I was afraid to go home. The doors were constantly opening and closing, different people came and went, you don’t know what to expect the next moment, and I was very worried about my mother. She eventually had a nervous breakdown. Her brother was called "The Ghost House Freak" and people on the street spat at him. Janet herself landed on the front page of the Daily Star with the headline "Devil Possessed." Quite young, at the age of 16 she left home and got married. Soon the attention of the press began to fade, the younger brother Johnny died of cancer at the age of only 14 years.

Subsequently, Janet's mother developed breast cancer and she died in 2003, and Janet herself lost her son, he died in his sleep at the age of 18. She rejected any suggestion that the whole story was made up in pursuit of money or fame. I didn't want to relive this while my mom was alive, but now I want to tell my story. I don't care if people believe it or not - I experienced it, and it was all true." Asked if the house is still haunted, she said, “Many years later, when my mother was still alive, there was always a presence there—there was always a look.

As long as people don't interfere, like we did with the summoning board, it's pretty quiet. It is much calmer now than when I was a child. But it's still there." Who lives at 284 Green Street now? After Peggy Hodgson died, Claire Bennett moved into the house with her four sons. She says: “I didn’t see anything, but I felt uncomfortable. Someone's presence was clearly felt in the house, I always felt that someone was looking at me. Her children woke up at night and heard someone talking downstairs. Claire decided to find out about the history of the house. “Suddenly everything fell into place,” she says.

After living in the house for only 2 months, they moved out. One of her sons, 15-year-old Shaka, says: “The night before we moved out, I woke up and saw a man enter the room. I ran to my mother's room and told her, "we have to leave," which we did the next day." Another family lives in the house now, they did not want to introduce themselves. The mother simply said, “I have children, they don't know about it. I don't want to scare them." Although skeptics may scoff, the frightening story of the Enfield poltergeist has not lost its force.

“Before I died, I went blind, I had a hemorrhage. I blacked out and died in the corner on the bottom floor."- such a revelation from the other world makes you numb with horror. But even more terrible is that this rough, hoarse male voice sounded from the lips of an 11-year-old Janet Hodgson. Preserved tape recordings made 2 years after the death of the owner of the voice, Bill Wilkins.

Everything that happened in the distant 1970s in Enfield, located in the north district of London, was very reminiscent of a horror movie scenario. But the events, unfortunately, were quite real. The phenomenon was given a name almost immediately. enfield poltergeist. The public was shocked, excited and puzzled by this terrible story.

The street in Enfield where it all happened (modern photo)

About 30 people witnessed the poltergeist with all the classic moments of its manifestation. It was getting colder in the room, things and furniture were moving in the air, making unthinkable sinusoids, inscriptions suddenly appeared on the walls, puddles on the floor, and matches ignited by themselves.

In addition, an unknown force grabbed those present by the leg, then by the arm, preventing them from moving. But the most terrible sight was the girl who began to speak in the voice of the deceased Wilkins. And even after death he did not skimp on obscene expressions.

Of course, there were also skeptical people who believed that all this was just a well-prepared hoax, a trick. But to prove that this is so, no one could. But the son of the deceased fully confirmed the words of his father, which came from the girl.

Conversation recording. The girl answers questions in a male voice and calls herself Bill.

FIRST CALL

The protagonists of the tragedy that broke out on August 30, 1977 were the mother and four children of the Hodgsons: Johnny, Janet, Billy and Margaret. The family, shortly before the events, moved into a small apartment building in Enfield. As usual, in the evening the mother put the children to bed and was about to leave the nursery, when Janet began to complain that her and her brother's beds somehow vibrated strangely.

Mrs. Hodgson did not attach any importance to the girl's words, and, as it turned out, in vain. In the evening of the next day, upstairs, where the children's bedrooms were, there was some kind of indistinct noise. The alarmed mother rushed into Janet's room, where she thought the sound was coming from.

Entering the room, the woman froze in fear. The heavy chest of drawers moved across the floor on its own. Trying not to scare her daughter even more, she tried to return the furniture to its place, but no luck. The chest of drawers resisted, someone or something continued to push him towards the door.

Janet later mentioned this evening in her notes and added that when the chest of drawers moved, she distinctly heard the shuffling of someone's feet. And her sister Margaret recalled that the house was increasingly filled with strange sounds, so the children could not sleep for a long time.

And sometimes it became so scary that they were forced to run out into the street in only bathrobes and slippers so as not to hear or see what was happening.

covering the tracks

The woman and children were very frightened and turned to neighbor Vic Nottingham for help. It seemed that nothing could frighten this strong, big man. However, when he entered the neighbor's house, he heard the same sounds that, according to him, rushed from everywhere - from the walls, from the ceiling.

Then Margaret recalled that she had never seen a neighbor in such confusion and horror. Nor did they help the police, whom Mrs. Hodgson called after Vic left. The perplexed police officers said that it was not their job to investigate such cases.

A still from the British mini-series (3 episodes) "The Enfield Haunting", released in 2015 based on this story.

The photographer Graham Morris himself said that when a poltergeist appeared in the house, real chaos was created, people screamed in fear, things moved through the air, as with telekinesis.

Janet during another poltergeist attack

But not everyone was lucky to get video and photo materials. Later, a film crew from a local television channel was specially invited to the house, who installed cameras everywhere in the house to record the appearance of the poltergeist.

When, a few days later, they began to look at the footage, they found that all the equipment was faulty, and what they managed to shoot was erased.

"THIS HOUSE IS OBSESSED"

It became clear that one cannot do without specialists here. The unfortunate family turned for help to the Society for Psychical Research, which had existed in the UK for more than a century and was engaged in the study of human abilities, namely the psychic and paranormal.

As a result, two specialists from this society, Guy Playfair and Maurice Grosse, began to stay in the house permanently. By the way, on this occasion, they later released the book This House is Possessed.

In his book, Grosse wrote that, as soon as he was in the house, he immediately realized that all this was not at all someone's joke. He noted the constant feeling of anxiety, fear and anxiety in which the whole family lived. The author saw with his own eyes how parts of a children's designer and a fragment of marble flew around the room. Grosse was surprised that these objects were hot.

And then the poltergeist, apparently, got used to new people and made a real bacchanalia: the sofa flew from wall to wall, the rest of the furniture crawled around the room, and at night someone pushed the sleeping household and their guests out of the warm bed.

One day the men heard Billy scream. The boy screamed that someone was holding his leg and he could not escape. In the literal sense of the word, adults had to fight with an invisible force in order to take the child away from her.

The family was on the edge, especially the knocking, which did not subside for a minute, acted on the nerves. It became louder, then quieter, moved from the walls to the ceiling and back. In the end, the inhabitants of the house began to sleep in the same room and never turned off the light.

For two years, the researchers worked at the Hodgson home and carefully recorded their observations. As it turned out later, in two years they witnessed more than 1.5 thousand cases of poltergeist.

KNOT TIGHTENED

I must say that paranormal activity was directed not only at family members, but at all those in the house - guests, policemen, neighbors, journalists. But 11-year-old Janet suffered the most. When the girl plunged into a trance state, it was a terrible sight. After Janet did not remember anything and was very surprised when she was shown pictures of the poltergeist. She had her own point of view on what was happening.

She believed that the power that possesses her is not evil. And the poltergeist did not want to harm the family, rather, he wanted to become a member of the family and find peace of mind in this. And he had no other way to express it, except through Janet and Margaret. Once a curtain was wrapped around the girl's neck, and the mother with difficulty unraveled the knot that had begun to tighten.

And on another occasion, someone tore out the grate with force and threw it into a far corner. Janet believed that Wilkins, who died in the house, was angry at the misunderstanding and was defending his territory. Why did Janet choose the poltergeist? In her opinion, the reason is that she was playing with the Ouija board.

There were, of course, moments that cast doubt on the authenticity of events. For example, researchers once found that children were sitting quietly in their room and bending spoons. Or they are not allowed to enter the room when Janet speaks in a male voice.

But a few years later, the children admitted that if they had faked the pranks, it was only a couple of times to see if the researchers could distinguish a real poltergeist from a fake one. To the credit of Playfair and Grosse, they always succeeded.

LIFE AFTER CONTACT

It’s worth saying right away that Janet is doing well at the moment, she got married and lives in Essex. But the girl had to undergo treatment in a psychiatric hospital. She now describes her impressions of the events of those years as traumatic. Her portrait flaunted on the cover of the Daily Star with the caption "Possessed by the devil."

At school, Janet was teased by peers, at home it was just scary, plus enduring concern for her family, and, as it turned out, not in vain. Her brother Billy was called the "freak from the haunted house", no one wanted to communicate with him. He died of cancer at a very young age, at the age of 14. Soon after, her mother also died of cancer. And Janet's son died in his sleep when he was only 18 years old.

Now Janet continues to assert that all the events of those years are real, this is not an attempt to earn fame and money. She recalls that even when everything in the house was calm, someone's presence and a studying look were still felt. And I am sure that if the poltergeist is not provoked, as in her case, with a board for spiritualism, then you can completely coexist with him.

Currently, new tenants are living in the house, but something is happening there or not, it is not known.

Galina BELYSHEVA