If you open Google Maps, and go to the road where, at the end of the 1970s, the Enfield Poltergeist is said to have haunted the Hodgson family, and if you scroll along the pebble-dashed semis, now poshened slightly with UPVC windows and Sky dishes, you will see a blur where No 284 should be. Upon arriving at this picture one night on my laptop, I felt a certain chill.
Without really realising it, I’d been immersing myself in various horrors of the 70s every evening for some weeks. My eyes had browned. My fingers had yellowed. I became briefly yet powerfully northern. First, I’d watched The Reckoning, the Steve Coogan drama about serial rapist Jimmy Savile on the BBC, then The Long Shadow on ITV about serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, then, on Apple, a documentary series about the Enfield Poltergeist, the case where Janet, a young girl, appeared to be possessed by an old man called Bill. “I was used and abused,” she said in 2018 of the experience. I’ve written before about what this case meant to me, its questions around collective hysteria, repressed adolescent sexuality, class, fear, the suburbs as a site of darkness and performance, and so on, and on. I’ve revisited the story frequently, ever since I was a similar age to Janet. For my degree show at art college, I built Janet’s bedroom, and filled it with a sound frequency said to produce feelings of fear. I almost failed the course, but I had a lovely time.
