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The Enfield Poltergeist

Paul_Exeter said:
Also Grosse and Playfair were undoubtedly asking them leading questions that by their nature provided 'fuel' for the children's imaginations, e.g. something along the lines of. "Has the poltergeist spoken to you yet?"

I also remember that as a child myself and my siblings were much more aware of what was going on in our house than our parents ever gave us credit for, especially in terms of listening in on conversations downstairs. Would not surprise me if Janet and Margaret had listened in on Grosse and Playfair talking to mum about what a poltergeist was, how it might develop and the theory about polts and girls going through puberty (including menstruation).

Seems to be a good case that was too eagerly and intrusively investigated and thus the children felt under pressure to perform.
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I have said that numerous times on this forum. People forget that children's hearing is a lot more acute than adults, so adults thinking they are having a 'quiet, private conversation' downstairs, can be perfectly audible to kids, especially as the 'quiet, private' nature of the conversation they are trying to have is naturally going to attract the attention of curious kids.

And I also think that, as in so many cases of the paranormal, something weird happens first, but then becomes elusive. The same thing happens with psychic/telepathy - a couple of instances of something unknowable happening and then it stops. So to those it has happened to, it is frustrating because nobody believes them. So they try to 'help things along' just so they are believed for the first, real, occurance.
 
Also to add: the things that children overhear, they often don't understand because they don't have the background knowledge or the understanding of how the world works. As an example, I once, at the age of about five, overheard my mother say 'my heart missed a beat'. I didn't know that was a common saying, or what it meant. As a result, I spent ages thinking my mother had had a heart attack.
 
Just remembered our cigarette kiosk time-slipping Ray Alan visited the Enfield house and dismissed the alleged channelling of gruff male voices by the girls as them enjoying the attention:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2012/07/enfield-poltergeist/

Have to say the video clip earlier in this thread of Janet channelling a gruff-voiced man named Steve very much fits with Ray's conclusion. Although Grosse offered £1,000 to anyone who could recreate the gruff voices, it is noticeable Janet has a significant overbite. You do do this for yourself: try a gruff voice with your jaw in its 'normal' position and then do it again simulating an overbite, it is definitely easier and gruffer whilst doing the latter.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Just remembered our cigarette kiosk time-slipping Ray Alan visited the Enfield house and dismissed the alleged channelling of gruff male voices by the girls as them enjoying the attention:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2012/07/enfield-poltergeist/

Have to say the video clip earlier in this thread of Janet channelling a gruff-voiced man named Steve very much fits with Ray's conclusion. Although Grosse offered £1,000 to anyone who could recreate the gruff voices, it is noticeable Janet has a significant overbite. You do do this for yourself: try a gruff voice with your jaw in its 'normal' position and then do it again simulating an overbite, it is definitely easier and gruffer whilst doing the latter.
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I remember seeing Ray Alan's ventriloquist act - he was very clever. And I'd have thought he'd be well placed for identifying its use in others.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Also Grosse and Playfair were undoubtedly asking them leading questions that by their nature provided 'fuel' for the children's imaginations, e.g. something along the lines of. "Has the poltergeist spoken to you yet?"
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^This^ definitely. I was thinking that but forgot to say. I have seen your specific clip several times and the kids are not asked "What did you hear?" What did you see?" "Tell me what happened." But Grosse directs them with agreeing or disagreeing with his descriptions of what supposedly happened. He never, in this clip, asks them what happened, nor does he give them the opportunity to tell their stories as they experienced them.

Very poor interviewing technique to get someone's subjective experience.

As to saying that the girls would not know of poltergeists or of the paranormal or of ghosts, please:roll:. In that interview, Margaret does start to speak of spirits, but is not allowed (or it is ignored) to explain what she is saying. And, for all of us on this forum, think of what you were interested in at these ages. I can say that by 11 I knew much about ghosts, ghouls, vampires werewolves etc.
 
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brownmane said:
As to saying that the girls would not know of poltergeists or of the paranormal or of ghosts, please:roll:. In that interview, Margaret does start to speak of spirits, but is not allowed (or it is ignored) to explain what she is saying. And, for all of us on this forum, think of what you were interested in at these ages. I can say that by 11 I knew much about ghosts, ghouls, vampires werewolves etc.
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I was only a couple of years older than Margaret and I knew ALL about spirits, and other such. It was the height of Weird TV, we had Ace of Wands a few years prior, Sapphire and Steel, Dr Who... and goodness knows how many children's TV programmes. I was absolutely hooked. 1977 was practically Peak Hauntology, wasn't it?
 
Nah.
I was in the St. Johns Ambulance Brigade 'on duty' at one of his shows in Woolwich.
After the show, I wanted his autograph so another (adult) St. John's member took me backstage.
No dummy visible, he shook both our hands, signed my autograph book (long lost) and declared he absolutely appreciated what the First Aid staff did in public events. He was genuinely nice.
 
catseye said:
I was only a couple of years older than Margaret and I knew ALL about spirits, and other such. It was the height of Weird TV, we had Ace of Wands a few years prior, Sapphire and Steel, Dr Who... and goodness knows how many children's TV programmes. I was absolutely hooked. 1977 was practically Peak Hauntology, wasn't it?
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I was obsessed with Appointment With Fear.

 
Listened to this podcast again:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09yck6b

The testimony of the reporter who got hit above the eye with a lego brick states that all the children were present as they were carried in asleep by the neighbours (where they had sought refuge from 'it'). So this answers one of my personal 'red flags' that the two young boys may have been catapulting objects from the top of the stairs (or somewhere else out of line of sight) whilst all the attention was focused on Janet and her sister. In fact, he states that it was the moment Janet was carried in after her siblings that the activity started up as lego bricks and marbles launched themselves around the room and that he took a deliberate step back to ensure he had all the children and adults in sight.

Another personal 'red flag' is Janet and the voice allegedly emanating from "the back of her neck" and against her will by 'Bill'. In the film footage I have seen you can clearly see her Adam's apple in her throat moving. Yet the witnesses in this podcast are quite categorical that the voice was emanating from "within the room" but they ere unable to specify where. So one possibility here is that Janet could mimic Bill's gruff voice* when she was put under pressure to perform. Another is that there was a hidden speaker and a person unknown was generating replies to Maurice's questions (i find this unlikely).

So have to say I was quite pleased on a Fortean level that the boys could be accounted for during activity witnessed by so many people. Still a bit conflicted about the gruff male voices of Bill and others, especially as some of the details communicated by Bill were later found to be incorrect.
 
Thing is, something was happening and not all of it was faked by the girls.
In their eagerness to please (?) or to confirm the experience, they messed around - and got caught each time.
But the brush-off "It was the girls wot dun it" doesn't negate any other independently reported events.
 
Stormkhan said:
Thing is, something was happening and not all of it was faked by the girls.
In their eagerness to please (?) or to confirm the experience, they messed around - and got caught each time.
But the brush-off "It was the girls wot dun it" doesn't negate any other independently reported events.
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Nah, I'm not having any of it. Silly Season rubbish, splashed by the Daily Mirror to fill up pages until the real, political news restarted after the Parliamentary summer break.

Remember, some of us read all about it at the time. The information was carefully released over the summer. Even back then it was obviously tosh. The adults involved were either taken in or making it up, all with a dose of wishful thinking.
 
escargot said:
Nah, I'm not having any of it. Silly Season rubbish, splashed by the Daily Mirror to fill up pages until the real, political news restarted after the Parliamentary summer break.

Remember, some of us read all about it at the time. The information was carefully released over the summer. Even back then it was obviously tosh. The adults involved were either taken in or making it up, all with a dose of wishful thinking.
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Really interesting point of view, I was a bit too young and my stepdad had the Telegraph with the Mirror deemed subversive...!

If it was orchestrated by the Mirror then they must have had the inspiration from another high profile case, also how do you explain the independent witnesses to the classic poltergeist activity?

Have to say I do have reservations about the "hours and hours" of Bill talking, this is unprecedented in paranormal research and does seem to be beyond the vocal chords and even false vocal chords of Janet (although I'm convinced she did fake a man's gruff voice during that TV footage). So was it simply a hidden speaker and someone out of sight with a smoker's voice fooling Maurice?
 
Deborah Hyde:

"In addition, expectation can inadvertently prime a situation’s participants. I perceive several examples of this at Enfield, including at (5:16), where Janet says that “One night Mr Grosse was talking about it … he said ‘All we need now is the voices to talk’”. The voices obliged shortly afterwards."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/01/the-enfield-poltergeist-a-skeptic-speaks

This is the same Deborah Hyde who has featured on 'Uncanny':

https://deborahhyde.com/
 
I suspect that the case has been sucked into the Fortean ambiguity trap, I am on the side that something did happen but perhaps as is so often the case there were some embellishments in order to make a saleable story

As an aside Playfair is one of my favorite Fortean authors his books on Brazil and spiritism are really good
 
Robbrent said:
I suspect that the case has been sucked into the Fortean ambiguity trap, I am on the side that something did happen but perhaps as is so often the case there were some embellishments in order to make a saleable story

As an aside Playfair is one of my favorite Fortean authors his books on Brazil and spiritism are really good
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Would it have been hard to find an older man with a raspy smoker's voice in the cigarette and alcohol haven that was any tabloid's offices back in the 1970s? No. Mirror reporter knocks on a few doors and finds out about old Bill. Reporters are aware Maurice wants the poltergeist to talk and with some simple electronic equipment, voila! we have Bill making contact. His voice is reported to come from "somewhere" within the room and Janet learns to mimic it. Result is plenty of newspapers sold and a big p*ss-up for the lads at the Mirror....
 
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I agree that there was 'something' to start with. Poltergeist activity, or maybe something else that scared the children, genuinely. Then maybe a little of them playing up to newspaper reporters, culminating in them having to get more and more creative and 'extreme' in order to keep that interest (Janet's 'Bill voice' I think was a natural progression). They felt safe with people in the house, they felt protected and that people were taking an interest in them - and that's heady stuff for pubescent children who are being brought up by a single mother in impecunious circumstances.
 
catseye said:
I agree that there was 'something' to start with. Poltergeist activity, or maybe something else that scared the children, genuinely. Then maybe a little of them playing up to newspaper reporters, culminating in them having to get more and more creative and 'extreme' in order to keep that interest (Janet's 'Bill voice' I think was a natural progression). They felt safe with people in the house, they felt protected and that people were taking an interest in them - and that's heady stuff for pubescent children who are being brought up by a single mother in impecunious circumstances.
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Nothing genuinely supernatural needed to have happened to start it off. Kids are easily scared by what they've seen or read and taken out of context.
Those of us who are parents will remember being woken in the night to soothe a child who'd had a nightmare about some slightly exciting or upsetting TV scene or incident in an age-appropriate book.

If the children had talked this up amongst themselves and been overheard by adults, things could have got out of hand.

As for independent witnesses - yeah right.
 
titch said:
so you will automatically discount the police officer who seen a chair move across the floor? and the 12 adults who seen a heavy table tip over when nobody was near it?
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I tend to agree. The journalist's, the two police offices present (the female officer swore an affidavit that the chair moving incident really did happen)

The later stuff I'm not too sure about though.

Daily mail article from May 2015: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...year-old-North-London-girl-levitated-bed.html

Who lives in the house now I wonder..?
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Really interesting point of view, I was a bit too young and my stepdad had the Telegraph with the Mirror deemed subversive...!

If it was orchestrated by the Mirror then they must have had the inspiration from another high profile case, also how do you explain the independent witnesses to the classic poltergeist activity?

Have to say I do have reservations about the "hours and hours" of Bill talking, this is unprecedented in paranormal research and does seem to be beyond the vocal chords and even false vocal chords of Janet (although I'm convinced she did fake a man's gruff voice during that TV footage). So was it simply a hidden speaker and someone out of sight with a smoker's voice fooling Maurice?
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IIRC it was Vic the Neighbour who suggested the Mirror got involved. I think the rather mild mannered mum wouldn't have probably gone there. Like you, I wouldn't normally have seen The Mirror but my dad (floating voter) got the Express because he liked the crossword, and remember reading The Mirror round my aunty's house and feeling incredibly subversive. Paper did indeed send someone out as they were at a loose end - but it was a good story - who wouldn't run with it? I think the whole thing, with the writer and the local psychic investigators and all the publicity, snowballed out of mum's (or anyone's) control, but it doesn't look like she was seeking that atttention and the kids maybe started making things up just so they would get caught out and left alone?

The early stuff - reporter and copper, and maybe the passersby later on - do seem to have some credibility. I think of it as a later 20thc Cottingley Fairies - something possibly (or possibly not) real happened - children tried so hard to convince adults they ended up faking stuff - and then, the publicity machine got out of hand, overwhelming them all. They are quite parallel as stories - ordinary people and the well known - working class witnesses and posh people documenting them as if they were wildlife....

The Radio 4 thing interviewed someone who said Janet would have severely damaged her voice, if that was ventriloquism (70s was of course, the peak of vent acts so it was huge in the culture). And before she'd said that, when an old interview of Janet was played, I noticed how curious her voice was... There are elements of it like "Bill" and his voice, that are clearly poppycock. Other elements, I think had some truth to them. But essentially, what we're looking at is the 1970s' iteration of Cottingley..?

ETA: 70s' kids here - how many of you practiced ventriloquism in the playground at school? I know I did!
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
ETA: 70s' kids here - how many of you practiced ventriloquism in the playground at school? I know I did!
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There was indeed a belief that one could throw their voice, so the words seemed to come from elsewhere. You could buy books about it.
Can remember some Beano/Dandy character learning to do it and causing chaos.

As per the comic, kids believed the voice could be made to come from a milk bottle or the family dog. My assumption is that a child of that time might feel it worth a try.

Cottingley, yup. It's the same. When we strip away all the lies and credulity, we find one of the sisters claiming that it was all done because there really were fairies at the bottom of the garden.
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
IIRC it was Vic the Neighbour who suggested the Mirror got involved. I think the rather mild mannered mum wouldn't have probably gone there. Like you, I wouldn't normally have seen The Mirror but my dad (floating voter) got the Express because he liked the crossword, and remember reading The Mirror round my aunty's house and feeling incredibly subversive. Paper did indeed send someone out as they were at a loose end - but it was a good story - who wouldn't run with it? I think the whole thing, with the writer and the local psychic investigators and all the publicity, snowballed out of mum's (or anyone's) control, but it doesn't look like she was seeking that atttention and the kids maybe started making things up just so they would get caught out and left alone?

The early stuff - reporter and copper, and maybe the passersby later on - do seem to have some credibility. I think of it as a later 20thc Cottingley Fairies - something possibly (or possibly not) real happened - children tried so hard to convince adults they ended up faking stuff - and then, the publicity machine got out of hand, overwhelming them all. They are quite parallel as stories - ordinary people and the well known - working class witnesses and posh people documenting them as if they were wildlife....

The Radio 4 thing interviewed someone who said Janet would have severely damaged her voice, if that was ventriloquism (70s was of course, the peak of vent acts so it was huge in the culture). And before she'd said that, when an old interview of Janet was played, I noticed how curious her voice was... There are elements of it like "Bill" and his voice, that are clearly poppycock. Other elements, I think had some truth to them. But essentially, what we're looking at is the 1970s' iteration of Cottingley..?

ETA: 70s' kids here - how many of you practiced ventriloquism in the playground at school? I know I did!
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Good point about her natural voice and she also had a prominent overbite that may have been a factor in her ability to use her false vocal chords to produce Bill's gruff voice (if she needed to). We are told that there are tapes of 'Bill' talking for hours without any sign of Janet having throat problems or even having to clear her throat, but I haven't heard these and I'm not aware of them being in the public domain, anyone?

This is the best evidence I have seen and I can clearly see her throat move when she says "Doctor Who" and this is despite her posture, positioning of hands, polo neck and general demeanour that all seen calculated to minimise our view of her throat area:


She also states how the voices started the very same night that Maurice stated "All we need now is for the poltergeist to talk to us" (or words to that effect). You can also see evidence of sibling rivalry and gameplay as they construct the narrative, with Margaret being corrected by Janet and not looking best pleased. In fact, Margaret looks rather p*ssed-off with Janet at times, but also there are those smiles, stifled giggles and knowing sideways glances that are a giveaway in terms of them having a joke at our expense.
 
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