284 Green Street — The Enfield Poltergeist
The 1977–79 case at the centre of the world's poltergeist literature: a single-parent family, two daughters at the eye of it, and the most investigated haunting ever recorded.
Case File No. 182
FILE 01 The Legend
On 30 August 1977 the Hodgson family — Peggy, with Margaret (13), Janet (11), Johnny and Billy — reported furniture moving in their council house on Green Street, Enfield. Over eighteen months the case became the most investigated poltergeist claim in history: Maurice Grosse and Anita Gregory of the Society for Psychical Research logged hundreds of incidents — levitating objects, knocking that answered questions, Janet speaking in the deep male voice of 'Bill', an old man said to have died in the house, and the famous photographs of Janet apparently thrown mid-air. Neighbours, police officers, journalists and a BBC crew all witnessed or recorded events; Guy Lyon Playfair's 'This House is Haunted' made the case a global reference, and the 2015 and 2023 dramatisations kept it one.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The record is the Hodgson household's eighteen months: bricks and marbles falling indoors, armchairs tipping over, Janet's trance voice and the witnessed levitations — a police constable saw an armchair skid across the floor and never retracted the account. Neighbours reported knocking patterns through the party wall, and a BBC crew taped raps answering questions. Janet passed some tests under observation and failed others; activity faded as the girls grew older.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The case against Enfield is as thick as the case for: the girls were caught manufacturing incidents on camera — acknowledged even within the SPR investigation — Janet's 'spirit voice' was shown to be producible by a gifted adolescent's ordinary anatomy, and analysis of the BBC tapes matched the raps to the sound of knuckles. Anita Gregory's report read the affair as the psychology of a distressed, entertained household rather than a haunting; Grosse and Playfair's conviction is the standing counterweight. It remains the paradigm case precisely because both files are full — a haunting and a hoax at the same address.