Ah! It’s pointless-TV-rehashes-of-supposed-supernatural-phenomena season. Every year I long to skip from September to November and avoid all this, but I have yet to find a way of doing so. Maybe there is a time spell I can cast, or a charm I can wear that will stop Halloween rage consuming me.
Maybe not. Anyway, the stupid, infuriating season gets under way on the small screen with our publicly funded broadcaster pushing out four meaningless lengths of programming that have not a spark of creativity or wit to recommend them. The first hour-long episode of Hauntings is about the Enfield poltergeist (others look at a house in Rhode Island whose owners came to believe it was a portal to extraterrestrial activity, the disturbance of the 17th-century tomb of “Bluidy Mackenzie”, an executioner in Edinburgh, which led to blackouts and paranormal attacks, and the mysterious drownings and ghostly figures associated with Lake Lanier in the US state of Georgia since the 1950s.)
The Enfield poltergeist became a tabloid sensation in the late 70s, after single mother Peggy Hodgson of 284 Green Street in Brimsdown, Enfield, rang the police to report furniture moving about of its own volition and knocking sounds coming from the walls. In contemporary interviews, police describe the tests they did with marbles to check the floor was level – it was – and conclude that, yeah, a poltergeist was therefore most likely responsible.
The disturbance was called in to the Daily Mirror, and photographer Graham Morris – working the night shift and desperate for anything to fill the pages – and reporter Doug Bence went round to see if anything newsworthy was going on. Morris stationed himself in the kitchen and remembers that, when Peggy’s 11-year-old daughter Janet entered the room, Lego pieces began to fly around – one striking him near the eye with great force. (We are told that adolescent girls are often at the centre of paranormal activity.) Alas, Morris’s photos caught none of the commotion that seemed to pursue Janet.
It was the beginning of a lot of evidence that could never quite be captured on camera – so audio tapes are the main source of proof, then and now. Despite the best efforts of the Daily Mirror, the BBC reporter on The World This Weekend, Roz Morris (who got involved during another slow news day), and dedicated investigator Maurice Grosse from the Society for Psychical Research, by the time anyone raced upstairs or snapped the shutter on a camera to capture the source of a mysterious thump or crash, the chair was already overturned, the bed upended and the spirit gone. Janet was noted to sleep quite peacefully through all this.
They did manage to capture pictures of her levitating above her bed. To anyone who has met a child – or a bed – they look remarkably like an 11-year-old girl trampolining on her mattress, possibly waiting for the 70s to end and teatime telly to start, but Grosse added it to his pile of poltergeisty proof. It almost beat Janet’s new habit of speaking in a gravelly voice as she channelled the spirit of “Bill Wilkins”, which Grosse thought must be true as no child could have kept it up for an hour at a time as she did.
I don’t know what to tell you. Of all the subjects to pick, the Enfield business is an idiotic one. Even though this meretricious piece of programming studiously avoids any sceptical (common sense) explanations promulgated at the time, it is still so clearly a hoax by the children of the house that even the most credulous will surely find it unconvincing. The subject lacks glamour and historical patina: even if the central figure hadn’t been called Janet, this story would not live down the ages, accruing mythic status.
We are told, moreover, in a closing caption that she and her sister admitted to faking some of the acts “but stand by their version of most of the events”. Everything remains defiantly earthbound and almost as dreary as any other story coming out of Enfield in the late 70s.
There are moments begging for further investigation, but they have nothing to do with the supernatural. For one, the ancient association between female adolescence – historically a time of growing powers of all kinds being thwarted and misused by society and of frustration for their owners – and destructive acts with no assignable perpetrators. Or the fact that Grosse’s preoccupation with the case began after he lost his own daughter, also called Janet, in a car crash. Talking about the paranormal is always a waste of time. There are always real, living human stories behind them to uncover.
• Hauntings aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now
