The Enfield poltergeist: the best-documented case, and the admission at its centre

Between 1977 and 1979 a family in Green Street, Enfield, reported sustained poltergeist activity: furniture moving, knocking, objects thrown, and eventually a gruff male voice apparently coming from one of the children. It became the most investigated case of its kind in Britain and probably in the world.

What is documented

Two investigators from the Society for Psychical Research, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, spent extended periods in the house over eighteen months and recorded a large quantity of audio tape. Police attended early on and an officer signed a statement about seeing a chair move.

Journalists, neighbours and other witnesses were present at various times. The volume of contemporaneous documentation is exceptional — this is not a case reconstructed from memory decades later.

The admission

Janet Hodgson, then eleven, later acknowledged that she and her sister had faked some of the phenomena — bending spoons, producing noises. Her own estimate, given in interviews years afterwards, was that a small proportion of the events were manufactured.

This is the single most important fact in the case and it needs stating plainly rather than defensively. Children in the house were, by their own account, producing some of the effects.

What the admission does and does not settle

It establishes that faking occurred, that the investigators did not always detect it, and that any individual event is therefore suspect unless independently controlled.

It does not, by itself, dispose of the case, for a reason that is easy to state and hard to act on: demonstrating that some events were faked does not demonstrate that all were. Investigators of these cases have long observed that children who begin with a genuine anomaly frequently supplement it once attention arrives, which is a psychologically ordinary thing for a child to do and an evidential disaster.

What remains unexplained

Honestly, the parts witnessed by adults who had no stake in it — the attending police officer among them — and the sheer duration. Sustaining a deception across eighteen months, under observation by two experienced investigators, is a substantial undertaking for two children in a difficult household.

Our reading is that Enfield is a case of genuine uncertainty rather than a solved fraud, and that its value is less in what it proves than in what it shows about investigating anything under these conditions.