Foil Hat Ninja

“Just before I died, I went blind, and then I had an ’emorrhage and I died in the chair in the corner downstairs.”—Joe Watson, ghost

 

Shortly after Janet began showing signs of possible episodes of spirit possession, she started to produce drawings while in a semi-trance state. All of them were somewhat gruesome, and one of them depicted a woman with blood pouring from her neck. Janet wrote the name “Watson” underneath it. When Peggy Hodgson was asked if that name meant anything to her, she replied that Watson was the name of the elderly couple who had owned the house before her. A little checking revealed that Mrs. Watson had died from throat cancer.

In December of 1977, the poltergeist began making whistling and barking sounds. While auditory manifestations are rare, these are often precursors to actual speech. Perhaps with this in mind, Maurice Grosse asked if it could say his name. What followed this is a bit unclear. Some reports make it sound as if the voice came from out of the air, and the gradual buildup from random noises to actual speech would be consistent with this. However, Janet later stated that the voice spoke through her. She says that she was aware of what was going on but was unable to control it. She also said that it felt like there was a presence standing just behind her during these episodes. Could it have been a combination of both: a disembodied voice that later switched to using Janet as its conduit? That’s sort of the impression that I originally got, but now I doubt it. Janet was probably the ventriloquist’s dummy all along. 

In any case, the reply to Grosse’s request to say his name was a halting “Maurice…O.”  When asked to give its own name, it spoke right up and said “Joe Watson.” Asked if he knew that he was dead, the response was an unenlightening “Shut up!” Requests for him to leave the house were met with profanity. Since the voice would only speak while Grosse and Playfair were out of the room, they were naturally suspicious that Janet might be having a laugh at their expense, but the voice was guttural and had the unmistakable tone of an old man. It also had an oddly electronic sound to it, which is typical in these atypical cases (see The Bell Witch and Gef the Talking Mongoose). Another paranormal investigator who was a friend of Playfair’s listened to a recording and said the voice reminded him of another tape that he had of a computer singing “Daisy, Daisy.”*

Eventually, Joe became a little more forthcoming. He confirmed that his wife had died from a tumor in her throat. He also confessed to knowing that he was dead and informed them that he had died from a hemorrhage while sitting in a chair in the living room, which turned out to be accurate. Shortly thereafter, the voice changed and now identified itself as one Bill Wilkins and claimed to have a dog named Gober the Ghost, although no canine related ghostly manifestations were ever reported. When asked where he was from, he replied “From the graveyard.” More specifically, he later clarified that he was from Durant’s Park, which was a nearby cemetery. Some checking revealed that there was a William Wilkins buried there and that he had lived in the neighborhood. I’m not sure if they were ever able to confirm the existence of Gober.

When he was asked why he was there, he answered that he was looking for his family, but that they were no longer there. As to why he shook Janet’s bed and threw her out of it, he said that he was trying to sleep there and wanted her out. When Janet asked why he played games with them, he said “I like annoying you.” Since he obviously knew that he was dead, he was asked why he didn’t just move on. His reply was “I don’t believe in that,” and “I’m not a Heaven man.” Tapes of these conversations reveal that the voice spoke haltingly, producing words one at a time and in a breathless fashion, as if speaking aloud was a laborious process.

When Grosse’s son Richard paid a visit to the house, Bill (or Janet?) seemed to take a liking to him. They had a lengthy conversation, and Richard was even allowed to be in the same room at the time. However, if he looked Janet in the face, the voice would immediately stop speaking. Then he noticed that all he had to do was think about looking at Janet and it would also stop, as if it could somehow read his mind. This sort of thing has also been reported in other poltergeist cases.

It also liked investigator David Robertson and allowed him to be in the same room for their conversations. But when he asked the spirit to levitate Janet and have her draw a circle around a light on the ceiling, it would only do so if he left. He went outside and then heard what sounded like Janet bouncing on the bed, followed by a loud gasp. When he tried to go back in, the door wouldn’t open. When it did open, he found that a red circle had been drawn around the light fixture, and Janet claimed that she had passed through the wall into the Nottingham’s bedroom (the house was a duplex). She described the room as being all white. The Nottinghams happened to be there at the time, and Mrs. Nottingham asked her to try to do it again. She then went home to see if Janet would show up. She didn’t, but the spirit’s favorite book, Fun and Games for Children, was already there. It had been in Janet’s room only moments earlier.

Rather than assuming that Janet had physically passed through a wall, Playfair notes that some who claim to have had out-of-body experiences have also reported seeing a lack of color while in that state. He believed that this was what Janet experienced and that this explanation accounts for why she described the room as being “all white.” How the book got there is a different matter. There was also a pair of complete strangers who happened to be walking by the house that night and saw Janet floating around her room through the window. Maybe they’re all liars? If so, there certainly was a lot of lying going on in Enfield back then, including some by the police, the press, the neighbors, and at least two disinterested bystanders who just happened to be strolling by at the right time.

After this, some of the manifestations became more hostile. Some curtains wrapped themselves around Janet’s neck and her mother had to tear her loose. A knife allegedly chased Janet around the house one night. Bill Wilkins claimed that these instances were the work of another spirit named Tommy. They also began finding feces smeared on the walls and floor and there were several fires that appeared to have been started inside of drawers. These all burned out quickly without causing too much damage.

Another psychic, this one named Gerry Sherrick, came to the house and proclaimed that the whole family had all been together in previous lives and that the girls had been involved in witchcraft. (Interestingly, two friends of Playfair’s who were visiting from Brazil made a similar claim months earlier. They said that Janet had been a witch in another life and had caused much suffering. According to them, the haunting was the work of spirits that she had harmed then getting back at her in this life.) Sherrick felt that the spirit of a rather unpleasant old woman was involved in the haunting and that she had lived next to a nearby market. He then asked if they had experienced the smell of rotting vegetables in the house. The family replied that the house had been filled with a stench like rotten cabbages several times in the previous few weeks. Sherrick then went into a trance and announced in the voice of an old woman “I come here when I like…I not bleedin’ dead and I’m not going to go away.” So another psychic found yet another spirit. What are we to make of that?

Alleged psychics do tend to be a rather “hit and miss” bunch. Skeptics attribute all of their “hits” to being nothing more than vague generalizations, picking up on certain mundane clues, and/or plain old lucky guesses or outright lies where applicable. I, of course, wonder a bit. Doubtless there are plenty of frauds out there, but one counterfeit $20 bill does not prove that all $20 bills are fakes. Some of them might be legit. Enter Dutch clairvoyant Dono Gmelig-Meyling.

In the summer of 1978, Janet was admitted to the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital for an evaluation. They found nothing wrong, but the rest and time away seemed to do her good after nearly a year of living in constant turmoil. Playfair expected that all unusual activity in the house would cease in Janet’s absence, but he was mistaken, although it was somewhat diminished. For the most part, it remained that way even after Janet returned home, with one notable exception.

The night before Gmelig-Meyling’s first visit to the house was an active one. Furniture was overturned, there was persistent knocking, footsteps were heard along with the sound of heavy breathing, and feces was smeared on the floor. A Dutch journalist who was interested in the case showed up the next day with Gmelig-Meyling in tow. He looked around the house, then returned to his hotel where he later told Playfair that he went on an astral trip, the impression being that he was gathering information about the spirits in the house on another level. According to Playfair, upon his next visit to the house, Gmelig-Meyling told him that he was confident that he could bring an end to the haunting by an intervention on the astral plane. He then went up and sat alone in Janet’s bedroom for a time. When he came down, he spoke to Playfair again and implied that it was all over. And he was right. All unusual activity in the house came to a sudden halt. Colin Wilson later reported that he did this by convincing the entities in the home that they were dead, although at least two of them had claimed to already know that but were still unwilling to leave.

This marked the end of the Enfield poltergeist story…for the most part. Margaret and Janet both stated much later that they could still feel a presence in the house, but there were no more paranormal disturbances. Their youngest brother Billy remained in the house until their mother’s death in 2003 and confirmed to them that the feeling of someone else being there with them never went completely away. The family that moved in after this, also a single mother with several children, stayed in the house only two months. They apparently had some experiences much more tangible than simply feeling a presence, but nothing on par with what the Hodgson family endured. Clearly they were of less hearty stock, or perhaps they had more options. The next family to move in, yet another single mother and her kids, remained there at least a few years. This mum has declined to speak publicly about their situation or the house’s past for fear of frightening her children. Can’t say I blame her.

At some point, Janet and Margaret both confessed to having dabbled with a ouija board, which they say coincided with the beginning of their troubles. In Janet’s most recent interview, she stated that while she thinks that there has always been and will always be an unsettling presence in the house, it was their experimentation with the board that brought about the physical manifestations. Needless to say, neither woman advocates the use of any sort of spirit communication device, particularly in their old house.

My biggest question about this case is the one that everybody just sort of skims over (if they bother to mention it at all), perhaps because they don’t know the answer: Who was Dono Gmelig-Meyling, and how exactly did he put a stop to all of this? You can look him up online if you want, but you’ll find precious little information. For those who say that psychics are all frauds looking for money and/or notoriety, I know that he didn’t get any money in this instance. As for fame, as I said, you can look him up online, but what you’ll find is no more than what I’ve already told you. As far as I know, he has never spoken publicly about this case to anyone. He just got on a plane and went back to Holland.

The other question that I would ask of those who believe that this was all a hoax is why they would have smeared their own walls and floors with feces? Surely an effective fraud could have been perpetrated without resorting to such disgusting measures. I suppose that the answer could be that Janet was a far more deeply disturbed individual than anyone suspected, but I’ve found nothing concerning her life subsequent to these events to back up such an assumption. One would think that the skeptics would have been quick to point these out had her life since then been plagued by a continuing pattern of instances of disturbing behavior. It’s not like they don’t know who she is. The fact that she agreed to be interviewed by a reporter in 2007 clearly demonstrates that she can’t be that hard to track down and check up on.

The End

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*Conversely, a magician who was given a tape to analyze disagreed. He thought that this voice could have been fairly easily produced by an adolescent girl, but stage magicians are some of the most notoriously harsh and condescending critics of all things paranormal. I think it’s because they do tricks that everyone knows aren’t real for a living, and for some reason, they take it as a personal affront to their craft and their self-worth that actual “magic” (aka the supernatural) might exist. That’s your free psychological evaluation of occupational personality traits for the week. Take it for what it’s worth.

†Some sources completely omit Joe Watson and only mention Bill Wilkins, saying that he was the former resident of the house. I’m pretty certain that this is the result of sloppy reporting on their part, and I mention it only to avoid any possible confusion. Also, determining the actual names of the people involved is somewhat difficult in some cases. Playfair appears to have used pseudonyms for almost everyone involved (he changed the family’s name from Hodgson to Harper in his book), and these two men have also been referred to as Frank Watson, Bill Haylock, and Bill Hobbs by various writers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I ain’t got many friends left to talk to. No one’s around when I’m in trouble.”—John Spinks

 

The Enfield poltergeist case is one of the most famous and unusual hauntings on record. Its fame is the result of its comparatively long duration for a poltergeist disturbance, which allowed it to be witnessed and investigated by many different people, including local police. It’s unusual in that, unlike most cases, the entities involved claimed to be the spirits of formerly living residents from the area whose existence could be verified, thus making this case a kind of haunting-poltergeist hybrid.

The name by which this case is generally known refers to the Borough of Enfield on the north side of London where the events took place. The house where they occurred belonged to Peggy Hodgson and her children Margaret (13). Janet (11), Johnny (10) and Billy (7). As is almost always the case, most of the disturbances centered around one of the children, in this instance Janet. One of the differences is that things sometimes happened even when Janet wasn’t around, which is quite unusual in poltergeist cases. Nevertheless, there are some who claim that all of this was nothing but a series of pranks perpetrated by her, which I intend to demonstrate is a ridiculous notion. She may have gotten some perverse pleasure out of all of the attention that she received. She might have even embellished her accounts, but this doesn’t even come close to accounting for most of the events as reported by the witnesses.

The first sign of trouble began on the night of August 30, 1977 when Janet and Johnny, who shared a room, called out for their mother when their beds began shaking. This had stopped by the time she got to the room and she assumed that they were playing childish games with her. The next night, there was a shuffling sound in the room. When Peggy came in to tell the kids to quiet down, the noise stopped, but it started again as soon as she turned off the light. She described it as sounding like someone in slippers trudging across the floor. Then there were four loud knocks,* and when Peggy turned the light back on they saw that a dresser had moved about 18 inches. Peggy pushed it back into place, and it immediately slid back to where it had been. She tried to move it again, but now it wouldn’t budge. Whatever had moved it had obviously decided that they liked it better there.

Not being one to have her furniture arranging acumen called into question, Peggy went next door to ask for help, and her neighbor Vic Nottingham and his son came over to see what was going on. They searched the house for some reason (looking for an invisible interior decorator perhaps?) but didn’t find anything. They had just finished their search when more loud knocking began. Vic ran outside to see if he could catch some prankster in the act, but of course he found no one. This was when they decided to call the police.

Everything was quiet by the time the officers arrived, but the knocking started again when they turned off the lights, and a chair was seen sliding several feet across the floor by everyone present. However, since there’s nothing that the police can do about ghosts, they left shortly afterward. Had this happened in America, they probably would have shot the unarmed chair, but I doubt that would have helped.

All was quiet until the next evening when Legos and marbles started flying around the house at high speeds. One of the children picked up one of these marbles and discovered that it was extremely hot, which is not unusual in poltergeist cases but is more common with objects that seem to materialize out of nowhere than objects that are thrown. Peggy again summoned her neighbor to come see this, and he convinced her to let him call the Daily Mirror for some reason. The paper sent over a reporter and photographer, but by the time that they arrived all of this had stopped. Just after they left, it all started back up again and Peggy ran to the door to call them back. As the photographer steadied his camera to get a picture, a Lego hit him just above the eye and left a nasty bruise. This is one of the few documented cases in which a flying object has done this. Usually they just bounce off of people and the impact is barely felt, even if the object was heavy and moving at a high rate of speed. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never let poltergeists play with Legos, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

The people at the Mirror were sufficiently impressed by the case to contact the famous Society for Psychical Research (of which Lewis Carroll was a founding member – most people don’t know that). The SPR, however, must not have been too impressed, because they dispatched a fledgling member named Maurice Grosse to investigate. Grosse had never before investigated any sort of haunting, and he quickly realized that he was in over his head. He managed to recruit veteran psychic investigator Guy Playfair to assist him after just a few days. Playfair had lots of experience with these sorts of things and had cut his paranormal teeth in Brazil, where he had become something of an expert in Umbanda – a Brazilian mixture of Catholicism, European spiritualism and West African magic.

Playfair immediately identified Janet as the being the focal point for the unusual occurrences. One night while he and a photographer from the Mirror were alone in Janet’s room, a marble fell to the floor with a loud thud. Rather than rolling away as a marble should after being dropped, this one stayed right where it had landed. Playfair tried to duplicate this without success. The photographer tried to take a picture of the mysterious marble, but all three of his flashes refused to work. All of them had been drained of power even though he had fully charged them before he arrived. This is also common, but more so in cases involving UFOs, cryptids and crop formations. I wouldn’t take any piece of electronic equipment that I didn’t want irreparably damaged into one of those.

For reasons that are not clear, at least to me, Playfair then decided to try an experiment. He tied one of the legs of a chair next to Janet’s bed to one of the legs on the bed with wire. Within a few minutes, the chair fell over, cleanly snapping the wire in the process. He decided to try it again, this time twisting the wire around itself like the knot at the base of a coat hanger’s hook so that it was several times stronger. The chair fell over again, with the wire once again snapped like a twig. An armchair then tipped over, and a book flew off the shelf, landed on the floor, and then “rolled” several times like a square wheel before eventually landing upright. The name of the book was Fun and Games for Children.

Just after this, an indentation appeared in the pillow on Janet’s bed, as if someone had laid (lain?) down for a rest. The head, if there was one, was small, giving the indication that it was that of a child. This was when Ms. Hodgson admitted that she thought that the ghost was that of a four-year-old girl that her father had suffocated in a nearby house (!?!). As it turned out, this didn’t appear to have been the case†. And somehow, they all seem to have been able to resist the urge to go jump on the bed to see what would have happened. Perhaps none of them were so whimsical as I, but as usual, I digress.

As I said, I’m not sure why Playfair decided to try this experiment with the wire, but there was obviously a method to his madness because it yielded some very impressive results. Perhaps he was daring the entity to show him just what it was capable of doing. If so, it not only took the bait, but also demonstrated very clearly that its abilities far exceeded those of any tween-age prankster. Janet may have been a handful, but unless she was hiding under the bed with a pair of wire cutters, there’s no way that she could have pulled this stunt off. And that doesn’t even take into account the trick with the tumbling book and the impression on the pillow. Perhaps she also had an invisibility ring that was slowly driving her balmy?

Theoretical invisibility rings aside, Playfair decided that the near constant knocking at this point indicated that the entity wished to communicate with them. To this end, he brought in a psychic named Annie Shaw and her husband George, who functioned as a kind of control. Upon entering into a trance, Annie suddenly shouted “Go away!” and then began cackling like an old woman. When George tried to speak to her, she spat at him and then moaned “Gozer, Gozer help me? Elvie, come here.” George then demanded that the entity depart and leave the Hodgson family alone. When she came out of her trance, Annie said that she believed that a number of spirits were responsible for the haunting, including the old woman who had spoken through her. George believed that this “Gozer” that she had mentioned (probably no relation to Gozer the Gozerian) was a nasty fellow who had been involved with black magic, and Elvie was an elemental, probably of the thoughtform variety. Both of the Shaws thought that these beings were “feeding” on energy that was leaking from Peggy and Janet. They performed a psychic healing on the two, and almost all paranormal activity in the house ceased for several weeks afterward.

It didn’t last. In late October, it came back with a vengeance. Objects flew, beds shook, and covers were ripped off of the sleeping family during the night. Grosse and Playfair recorded nearly 400 manifestations in a matter of weeks. Pools of water with sharply defined edges also began appearing, as in the Black Monk poltergeist case. One of these puddles was shaped like the outline of a person. There were also some potentially dangerous demonstrations of force. An iron grill flew across the room and landed on Billy’s pillow while he was in the bed. If it had landed a few inches further to one side, it could have killed him. The next evening, a gas fireplace was ripped out of a brick wall.

For some reason, I feel compelled to mention again that there are those who still maintain that all of this was a hoax perpetrated by Janet, at times with the help of her older sister. The commonsense question one must ask at this point is if you think that a pair of adolescent girls could yank a cast iron fireplace out of a brick wall. If your answer is yes, I don’t want to meet the kids in your neighborhood.

Since trying to communicate with the entities behind the disturbances via a psychic had yielded only limited results, Playfair decided to go old school and try to converse with them using the classic, Fox sisters system of raps, viz.: once for yes, twice for no. Unfortunately for him, he jumped the gun a bit. One of the first questions that he asked was if the spirit didn’t realize that it was dead. This didn’t go over well. It was answered with an immediate series of crashes that came from one of the rooms upstairs. When they went up to investigate, they found that one of the bedrooms had been virtually ransacked. Furniture had been overturned and items were scattered everywhere. After this, the entity would no longer communicate with him, and subsequent rap sessions had to be handled by Maurice Grosse while Playfair listened in from another room. This was somewhat of a rookie mistake being made by a seasoned investigator who should have known that ghosts usually don’t take kindly to being told that they’re dead, no matter how obvious that might seem to be from our perspective.

Over the next few weeks, the case proceeded into the next phase, albeit one that most poltergeist cases never make it to. The children began to see shadowy figures around the house, and Billy was terrified one night when he noticed the disembodied face of an old man staring at him. Janet was repeatedly thrown from her bed during the night, and one of these instances was captured by a photographer. She then went into convulsions, and Grosse and the photographer had to hold her down to prevent her from injuring herself. The next night, she suffered more convulsions, then began wandering around as if in a trance, muttering “Where’s Gober? He’ll kill you.”

Soon after this, the spirits began doing something that only occurs in a small minority of poltergeist cases. They started speaking on their own. And with that compelling tidbit now in place, this seems like a perfect stopping point. We’ll pick it up from here next week.

But before I call it a night, one final note: Since Janet and Margaret have since admitted to playing a few pranks and blaming them on the ghosts, some take this as a virtual confession that the whole thing was a hoax. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. If you would like to know more about this, you can read an article from 2007 where they discuss all of this here. There are plenty of quotes from them concerning this aspect of the case in this article, as well as others stating their insistence that their pranks constituted no more than a small percentage of the phenomena reported by Playfair, Grosse and other investigators. Since the skeptics completely misrepresent all of this (presumably out of habit), I think it only fair to ask the open-minded to read their words for themselves. The closed-minded can do whatever the hell they want.

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*Usually these come in threes.

†This piece of information came from Colin Wilson’s book Poltergeist, and he didn’t elaborate on the details surrounding this rather disturbing revelation. No other source that I’ve been able to locate mentions it at all.