October 21, 2025 • 32 mins
Before The Conjuring 2 terrified moviegoers, there was a real family living through something no one could explain.
In 1977, the Hodgson family of Enfield, London reported furniture moving on its own, voices echoing from the walls, and violent disturbances witnessed by police, reporters, and paranormal investigators.
But what really happened inside that house?
In this episode, State of the Unknown host Robert Barber uncovers the true story behind The Conjuring 2, the real Enfield Poltergeist case. You will hear what the investigators documented, what skeptics uncovered, and what the surviving witnesses still believe nearly fifty years later.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:03):
It starts with a crash in the middle of the
night.
Not thunder, not a dream.
A sound like furniture slidingacross the floor.
Heavy and deliberate.
In the next room,eleven-year-old Janet Hodgson
sits straight up in bed.
Her sister's awake too.
(00:23):
They both stare into the dark,waiting to hear it again.
And then it comes.
Bangs on the wall, one afteranother, like someone knocking
from the other side.
Their mom rushes in, turns onthe light, and everything is
still.
The dressers moved.
(00:44):
The girls are crying.
And that's the night theHodgsons say it all began.
Within weeks, newspapers areoutside their house.
Neighbors are watching from thestreet.
And investigators are recordingvoices that sound like they're
coming from inside an11-year-old girl.
(01:04):
It was called a haunting.
It was called a hoax.
But in 1977, it was all anyonecould talk about.
The Enfield case is one of themost famous hauntings in the
world.
It's been studied, recorded,debunked, and retold for nearly
(01:25):
50 years.
But the story we've all heard,the one that inspired the
Conjuring II, doesn't alwaysline up with what really
happened.
Tonight, we're going back to thebeginning, to hear the story the
way the Warrens told it, andthen what the records actually
(01:45):
say.
(02:19):
This is the story of JanetHodgson in the case that became
known as the Enfieldpoltergeist.
And this is State of theUnknown.
(02:49):
Inside lives Peggy Hodgson, asingle mom doing her best to
raise four kids.
Margaret, age 13, Janet, age 11,Johnny, age 10, and Billy, age
seven.
They've got an old TV,mismatched furniture, and not
(03:10):
much else.
Just an ordinary family.
Until one night when the girlsstart yelling from upstairs,
Peggy hurries in, expecting afight over the radio.
Instead, both girls are frozen,staring at the heavy dresser
near the door.
They say it moved.
(03:30):
Peggy laughs until it movesagain.
A scraping sound, slow and deep,sliding across the floor by
itself.
She shoves it back.
It moves again.
When she pushes harder, it feelslike someone or something on the
(03:50):
other side is pushing back.
That's when she grabs the girlsand bolts next door to the
Nottinghams.
Her neighbor Vic Nottingham goesin to check for burglars.
He hears three deliberate knocksecho through the walls.
No one's upstairs, no pipesrattling, just the sound.
(04:12):
Knock, knock, knock.
He comes back out pale and says,You've got something very
strange in there.
The police are called.
Constable Carolyn Heaps shows upa little after 1 a.m.
She takes down the familystatement while Peggy and the
(04:33):
girls huddle together on thesofa.
And right there, in front ofeveryone, a wooden chair slides
two feet across the living roomfloor.
No one's near it.
Heaps just freezes.
She later signs a written reportsaying exactly what she saw,
that the chair moved severalfeet across the floor without
(04:55):
anyone touching it.
After a few minutes, theofficers check the walls, the
floorboards, even the backgarden, trying to find a cause.
Nothing.
In the end, there's not muchthey can do.
Heaps tells Peggy the activitydoesn't fall under police
jurisdiction.
It's not really a police matter,Mrs.
(05:16):
Hodgson, she says, and advisesher to call the church if it
continues.
Then the squad car pulls awayand the house goes quiet again,
at least for a little while.
After that, the nights getlouder.
Knocks and threes, marblesfalling from nowhere, Legos
(05:37):
hitting the floor and then notrolling.
The family sleeps with thelights on.
On the fifth night, Peggy hearsshuffling upstairs.
She calls out, Who's there?
A single bang answers her, soloud the ceiling dust falls.
Word spreads down Green Streetfast.
(05:59):
Reporters show up from the DailyMirror, Douglas Bence and Graham
Morris.
They come in skeptical, camerasready.
They don't stay that way long.
While they're standing in thegirl's bedroom, a Lego brick
whips across the room and hitsMorris square in the face.
He yells, a welt risesinstantly.
(06:20):
He snaps a photo just as Janetlifts off the bed, hair flying
and legs out.
That picture runs the nextmorning under the headline House
of Strange Happenings.
The welt on Morris' face runs inthe paper too.
Proof, at least, that somethingphysical hit him.
Soon after, investigator MauriceGross from the Society for
(06:43):
Psychical Research moves in.
He sets up tape recorders,cameras, temperature sensors,
and everything he's got.
For two nights, nothing happens.
Then, at 2 AM, three heavybangs.
He asks, if you can hear me,knock once.
(07:05):
Bang.
He grins, half scared, halfthrilled, and keeps talking.
Two knocks for yes, one for no.
And the thing starts answeringhim.
From there, it escalates fast.
Crosses twist upside down on thewalls.
Peggy says she found a Biblefallen open the next morning,
(07:28):
pages torn loose.
Cold spots appear that make yourbreath show in the middle of
August.
One night, Peggy swore acrucifix shot across the room
and hit the wall hard enough tochip the paint.
Janet starts waking up in otherrooms.
Once even found asleep on top ofthe radio in the living room.
(07:50):
She tells her mom she dreams ofan old man who sits in the chair
downstairs.
Her brother Johnny says he'sseen him too.
Gray skin, one eye half closed,mouth drooping on one side.
The voices come next.
At first, a rasp under Janet'sbreath, then a full-on growl.
(08:14):
I used to live here before Idied, Janet says in a voice not
her own.
When they ask its name, thevoice says Bill Wilkins.
He claims that he died in thathouse in the corner chair from a
brain hemorrhage.
Weeks later, a neighbor confirmsthere really was a man named
Bill Wilkins who died thereyears earlier.
(08:37):
Reporters, priests, and evenskeptics crowd the little
semi-detached council house.
The Daily Mirror comes back withphotographers.
They catch Janet mid-air again,multiple frames this time, like
she's being thrown forward, notjumping.
The skeptics say it's faked, butothers in the room insist they
(08:59):
saw her lifted clean off thebed.
Maurice Gross's notebook fillswith incidents.
A pillow hitting him square inthe head while he's alone, a pen
vanishing from his hand andreappearing behind him.
A heavy dresser tipping forwardlike something shoved it.
The SPR calls in Guy LionPlayfair, another investigator.
(09:25):
He records hundreds of hours ofknocks, voices, and temperature
drops.
They even tried an informaltest.
Having Janet hold water in hermouth while the Bill voice
continued meant to challenge theidea that she was just throwing
her voice.
It wasn't scientific, but itshut people up in the moment.
(09:48):
Priests visit and bless thehouse.
A psychic describes, quote, aman who thinks he still owns
this place.
One night, Peggy finds all hercrucifixes on the floor and the
curtains tied in knots.
On December 15th, 1977, theyhear a crash upstairs.
(10:08):
Janet's tangled in the curtaincord, halfway out the window,
gasping for air.
Everyone else was downstairs.
After that, Peggy sends the kidsto stay with relatives for a
week, just to rest.
The house goes quiet.
But the moment they come back,it starts again.
(10:29):
Around this time, Ed andLorraine Warren arrive from
America.
They aren't officially invitedby the SPR, but they show up
anyway, saying they were drawnto help.
Lorraine later says she felt thepresence of pure evil as soon as
she crossed the threshold.
Ed claims something cold brushedpast him, whispering, get out.
(10:52):
He records growls on hisreel-to-reel and tells the
family they're dealing with aninhuman, demonic spirit.
Doors slam so hard the framescrack.
Janet's pinned beneath adresser.
(11:13):
Her sister Margaret screams shesaw gray hands holding it down.
Furniture levitates inches offthe ground and drops.
Gross noted in his diary that hesaw the sofa lift off the floor
while everyone else stood acrossthe room.
For months, it's cycles.
Quiet spells, then nights ofpure mayhem.
(11:37):
By spring, Gross had loggedhundreds of hours of recordings.
By then, dozens of people,neighbors, reporters, clergy,
even a police officer saidthey'd seen or heard something
they couldn't explain.
Then, just like that, it startsfading.
(11:58):
By the summer of 78, the voicesweaken, the raps thin out.
Janet says Bill Wilkins toldher, it's over.
But it isn't.
At least not completely.
In 1979, faint knocking returns,toys move, beds tremble for a
(12:19):
few weeks, then silence.
(13:03):
The Hodgsons stay until 1981before moving away.
The next tenants later say theysometimes felt something cold in
the back bedroom, but nothingmore.
Eighteen months of terror, fourkids, dozens of witnesses, and a
story that even now no one canquite explain.
(13:27):
You can hear it in everyretelling.
It sounds like something out ofa movie.
Beds floating, a girl speakingin a man's voice, crosses flying
off the walls.
And for a long time, that's howpeople talked about it.
As if all of it had happenedexactly that way.
But when you start digging intothe records, the witness
(13:50):
statements, the SPR notes, andthe recordings, you realize
something else.
This haunting wasn't one story.
It was three overlappingversions of the same event.
The one the family livedthrough, the one the
investigators documented, andthe one that would eventually
make its way into movies andbooks.
(14:12):
So let's step back to thebeginning and look at what we
actually know.
When you strip away all theheadlines, the Enfield haunting
stops sounding like the Exorcistand starts looking a lot more
like what it really was.
A long, confusing, very publicfamily crisis that nobody quite
(14:34):
knew how to handle.
So let's just walk through whatwe actually know.
First off, a few things are onrecord.
A police officer named CarolynHeaps really did visit the house
on August 31st, 1977.
She signed a written statementsaying she saw a chair move
(14:55):
across the floor, about three orfour feet, with nobody near it.
That's in the official report.
That part is real.
There are also hundreds of hoursof audio tapes, over 700
actually, recorded by twoinvestigators named Maurice
Gross and Guy Lion Playfair fromthe Society for Psychical
(15:18):
Research.
You can still hear them today,knocking sounds, voices,
conversations between the girlsand something unseen.
Whatever was going on, theydocumented it carefully.
And yes, that Bill Wilkins voiceeveryone talks about.
Turns out there really was aBill Wilkins.
(15:40):
His son later told reportersthat his father died of a brain
hemorrhage in that very house.
So a moving chair, a pile oftapes, and a real man named Bill
Wilkins.
Those are the solid pieces youcan point to.
Everything after that gets alittle fuzzy.
(16:02):
Maurice Gross was convinced itwas genuine.
He practically lived there for ayear, sleeping on the couch
sometimes, watching it happen.
He swore he saw furniture slide,toys launch across the room, and
cold spots appear out ofnowhere.
He didn't think the kids werefaking it.
(16:22):
He thought Janet, the11-year-old, was just the focus
of the activity.
Guy Lion Playfair agreed atfirst.
He described marbles droppingfrom midair, doors slamming and
a chill that would fill thewhole room.
But as time went on, even headmitted something didn't always
(16:44):
add up.
He caught Janet bending spoons,hiding his tape recorder, even
giggling before one of thebangs.
Later, both girls admitted theysometimes faked things, just to
see if the men would notice.
That's straight from the BBCinterview in 1982.
(17:04):
Still, Playfair said it wasn'tall tricks.
His line was maybe 2% mischief,98% unexplained.
Not everybody bought that.
Another researcher from the samesociety, Anita Gregory, said it
was nothing more than childishpranks.
(17:25):
She caught the girls bendingspoons, staging photos,
pretending to be thrown byinvisible hands.
And yeah, some of that happened.
But then you've got theneighbors, reporters, even a
priest who stop by, all sayingthey saw or heard something they
couldn't explain.
(17:45):
So it's one of those storieswhere the truth seems to slide
back and forth, depending onwho's telling it.
Now about the Warrens.
They did visit the house, that'sconfirmed.
But they weren't running theshow like the movies make it
seem.
They weren't part of theofficial investigation.
(18:07):
They just showed up, uninvited,while the Society for Psychical
Research was already there.
They stayed a day, maybe two,and then left.
Lorraine later said she felt thedemonic presence immediately,
called it one of the mostviolent hauntings she'd ever
walked into.
(18:27):
Ed claimed he recorded growls ontape, but none of those
recordings have ever surfaced.
Guy Playfair later said EdWarren pulled him aside and
suggested they could, quote,make a lot of money off the
story.
Playfair said he told him toclear off his exact words.
He wrote later that the Warrensseemed more interested in
(18:51):
publicity than data.
After that exchange, they werenever invited back.
So despite what the movies show,this wasn't the Warren's case.
They were visitors passingthrough and not especially
welcome ones.
The grind, the long nights, theendless notes, the 700 hours of
(19:14):
tape that belonged to gross andplayfair.
Even among the SPRinvestigators, not everyone saw
the same thing or the samecauses.
Anita Gregory thought thehaunting might have been less
supernatural and more emotional.
She described Peggy Hodgson, themother as suggestible,
(19:37):
overwrought, and inconsistent,and wrote that her anxiety could
have been fueling the activity.
She didn't accuse Peggy offaking anything, just of being
caught in something she couldn'tcontrol.
Other observers noticed the samepattern.
When Peggy calmed down, thehouse seemed to quiet too.
(19:58):
When she was frightened orupset, things escalated again.
Still, most witnesses,neighbors, clergy, even the SPR
men themselves, said she lookedgenuinely terrified, worn down,
and desperate for help.
Whatever else people believeabout this case, that part has
(20:20):
never really been disputed.
So what was really going on inthat little council house on
Green Street?
Psychologists who studied therecordings years later said it
could have been stress.
The mom raising four kids alone,money tight, and Janet right at
the age where emotions run wild.
(20:41):
They thought it might have beena mix of psychological pressure
and what some people callpoltergeist phenomena.
Energy that sort of acts out oftension in a family.
And Janet herself, when she gotolder, said something that
pretty much sums it up.
She said, some of it was real.
Some of it we made up.
(21:02):
The more attention we got, themore it happened.
Even with that confession, shenever took back what she felt.
I know what I saw, she said, andwhat I felt.
So what do we do with that?
Because that's really the heartof the story.
You've got things people sworethey saw, chairs sliding,
(21:25):
knocks, cold air, and you've gotproven hoaxes, little stunts.
Nobody ever proved it wassupernatural, but nobody could
disprove it either.
And that's where the Enfieldhaunting still sits, halfway
between history and legend.
Part documentation, partfolklore.
(21:46):
A story that's too strange tofully believe, but too well
recorded to completely dismiss.
And that's the version Hollywoodwalked into.
Messy, uncertain, full ofcontradictions.
Which means when the movie got ahold of it, they didn't just
tell the story, they built awhole new one.
(22:12):
You know, the thing aboutstories like this is, the more
you dig, the more tangled theyget.
Everybody saw something.
Nobody saw everything.
And over time, those gaps, thelittle blanks no one could fill
in, start getting patched withbelief.
That's how the Enfield hauntingwent from a handful of strange
(22:35):
nights in North London to one ofthe most famous paranormal cases
in the world.
By the time Hollywood got holdof it, the truth had already
started to blur.
So let's talk about what theworld thinks happened.
Because when the Conjuring IIcame out, it didn't just retell
(22:56):
the Enfield case, it rewrote it.
When the Conjuring II wasreleased, it opened with the
tagline based on the true casefiles of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
And technically, that's true.
But the story it tells isn't theone that actually happened.
(23:16):
See, in the movie, the Warrensare the heroes.
They get the call, hop a planeto London, and suddenly they're
in the middle of it all, livingwith the family, fighting the
demon head on.
In real life?
They drop by uninvited andstayed briefly.
The real work, all the latenights, the notebooks, the
(23:40):
recordings, that was done byMaurice Gross and Guy Lyon
Playfair with the Society forPsychical Research.
They were there for months.
The Warrens weren't even part ofthe official investigation.
And that's kind of the themehere.
Holly didn't just dramatize thestory, it completely rewired it.
(24:02):
In the movie, there's this big,terrifying nun, the demon Valak,
stalking Lorraine throughvisions.
There's a scene where crossestwist on the walls, the air
turns black, and the nun lungesout of the shadows.
None of that ever happened.
There was no nun.
No demon's name written on awall.
(24:25):
No master's spirit pulling thestrings.
The only voice anyone ever heardcalled itself Bill Wilkins, an
old man who said he died in thechair downstairs.
That's the voice on therecordings.
Not a demon, a dead man.
Or at least that's what Janetsaid.
(24:47):
And yeah, that voice was real.
You can hear it on the tapes.
It's deep and rough like a manwho smoked for 50 years.
Janet could hold that raspingvoice for long stretches.
A speech therapist who had heardthe recording said it would be
unusual for a child to sustainthat kind of sound without
(25:07):
damaging her vocal cords.
So whatever it was, a trick, areflex, something stranger, it
was weird.
That part's true.
The movie turns the small Londonhaunting into a full-blown war
between good and evil.
You've got Ed performing anexorcism in a lightning storm,
(25:30):
Lorraine shouting the demon'sname to send it back to hell.
In the real case, there was noexorcism.
No priests casting out spiritsin Latin.
What actually happened wereblessings.
A few visits from clergy whoprayed with the family and told
them to keep faith.
That's it.
(25:51):
And let's talk about thoselevitations.
In the movie, Janet's floatingthrough the air, spinning in
slow motion, screaming asfurniture flies around her.
In real life?
There are photos of her inmidair, yes, but they're split
seconds stills.
If you look closely, she's in ajumping position, arms out,
(26:14):
knees bent.
Some say she was thrown, otherssay she jumped.
Even the investigators couldn'tagree.
So no graceful cinematicfloating, just a messy snapshot
that no one's ever explainedcleanly.
Another big one.
In the movie, Ed nearly dies,hanging out a window while
(26:36):
Lorraine screams his name.
Yeah, that never happenedeither.
No collapsing house, no lastsecond rescue.
And by then, the Warrens weren'teven there.
But maybe the biggest differenceis how the film treats the
family.
In The Conjuring II, it's allfaith and bravery.
(26:57):
The Warrens arrive, help theHodgsons believe again, and love
saves the day.
In real life, it was messier.
The family was worn down, broke,and tired of reporters camping
on their street.
There wasn't one big momentwhere it all ended.
It just stopped, faded out aftermonths of noise and sleepless
(27:21):
nights.
Janet, the girl at the center ofit all, she's grown now.
She's talked about it ininterviews.
And she said something thatsticks with me.
She said, some of it was real.
Some of it we made up.
She never backed down frombelieving something truly
strange happened in that house.
(27:42):
But she also admitted they fakedparts of it, mostly when they
felt people were starting todoubt them.
And honestly, that kind of makessense.
Imagine being eleven, everyonecalling you a liar, and the only
way to make them believe you isto give them something to see.
So the movie took all of that,the long, uneven truth, and it
(28:07):
boiled it down to one neatstory.
A single villain, a singleexorcism, a clean ending.
The real case wasn't clean atall.
There wasn't one big showdown.
There were just weeks and monthsof confusion, fear, curiosity,
and exhaustion.
(28:27):
And then it faded away.
You know, that's what alwayshits me about the Enfield story.
In the movie, it's simple.
Evil shows up, faith wins.
But in the real world, the evilpart was never clear.
It could have been grief,stress, loneliness, or maybe
(28:50):
something else entirely.
Nobody ever proved what it was,but nobody ever proved it
wasn't, either.
Because sometimes the scariestthing about stories like this
isn't the haunting.
It's that there's just enoughtruth in them to keep you
wondering what really happenedwhen the lights went out.
(29:16):
Every time I go back over thiscase, I find myself stuck
between two thoughts.
On one hand, you've got theskeptics, people who say it was
all just kids seeking attention.
And on the other, you've gotinvestigators who swore they saw
things that defied explanation.
Both sides sound so certain.
(29:38):
But certainty's tricky, isn'tit?
Because when you listen to thoseold recordings, the knocks, the
voices, the heavy air in thatlittle house, there's something
real in there.
Maybe not supernatural, butreal.
The fear is real.
The exhaustion is real.
And so is the hope thatsomebody, somewhere, might
(30:02):
finally understand what'shappening to you.
I think about Janet a lot.
Eleven years old, her dad'sgone, her mom's just trying to
hold it together.
The house is cold, crowded, andsuddenly everyone's staring at
her like she's the key tosomething dark.
Imagine how confusing that wouldbe to not even trust your own
(30:26):
senses anymore.
It makes me wonder if that'swhat most hauntings really are.
Not demons, not ghosts, but theweight of fear, grief, and
pressure.
Up until it spills out in wayswe can't explain.
And once belief takes hold, itstarts feeding itself.
(30:48):
Because once enough peoplebelieve a place is haunted, it
kind of is, isn't it?
Maybe not by spirits, but by thestories that never quite leave.
That's what Enfield feels liketo me.
A haunting made of real people,a scared family, a few true
believers, a handful ofskeptics, all trapped in
(31:12):
something bigger than they couldmake sense of.
And maybe that's why it stillechoes after all these years.
Because deep down, every one ofus knows what it feels like to
live with something we can'tprove, but can't quite shake
either.
(31:33):
This has been State of theUnknown.
A quiet house in North London, afamily under pressure, and a
story that grew so large itescaped the walls it started in.
The Enfield poltergeist became alegend.
Not because it was proven, butbecause no one could quite prove
(31:54):
it wasn't.
Some say it was fear.
Some say it was faith.
And maybe, in the end, it wasboth.
If you've been enjoying State ofthe Unknown, thank you for
listening.
And for helping this little showkeep growing week after week.
The best way you can support itis simple.
(32:17):
Leave a quick rating or review.
On Spotify, it's just a tap.
On Apple Podcasts, a few wordscan make a huge difference.
I read every single one, and Ican't tell you how much it
means.
Until next time, stay curious.
Stay unsettled.
(32:38):
And whatever you do, don'tlisten too closely when the
house goes quiet.
It starts with a crash in the middle of the
night.
Not thunder, not a dream.
A sound like furniture slidingacross the floor.
Heavy and deliberate.
In the next room,eleven-year-old Janet Hodgson
sits straight up in bed.
Her sister's awake too.
(00:23):
They both stare into the dark,waiting to hear it again.
And then it comes.
Bangs on the wall, one afteranother, like someone knocking
from the other side.
Their mom rushes in, turns onthe light, and everything is
still.
The dressers moved.
(00:44):
The girls are crying.
And that's the night theHodgsons say it all began.
Within weeks, newspapers areoutside their house.
Neighbors are watching from thestreet.
And investigators are recordingvoices that sound like they're
coming from inside an11-year-old girl.
(01:04):
It was called a haunting.
It was called a hoax.
But in 1977, it was all anyonecould talk about.
The Enfield case is one of themost famous hauntings in the
world.
It's been studied, recorded,debunked, and retold for nearly
(01:25):
50 years.
But the story we've all heard,the one that inspired the
Conjuring II, doesn't alwaysline up with what really
happened.
Tonight, we're going back to thebeginning, to hear the story the
way the Warrens told it, andthen what the records actually
(01:45):
say.
(02:19):
This is the story of JanetHodgson in the case that became
known as the Enfieldpoltergeist.
And this is State of theUnknown.
(02:49):
Inside lives Peggy Hodgson, asingle mom doing her best to
raise four kids.
Margaret, age 13, Janet, age 11,Johnny, age 10, and Billy, age
seven.
They've got an old TV,mismatched furniture, and not
(03:10):
much else.
Just an ordinary family.
Until one night when the girlsstart yelling from upstairs,
Peggy hurries in, expecting afight over the radio.
Instead, both girls are frozen,staring at the heavy dresser
near the door.
They say it moved.
(03:30):
Peggy laughs until it movesagain.
A scraping sound, slow and deep,sliding across the floor by
itself.
She shoves it back.
It moves again.
When she pushes harder, it feelslike someone or something on the
(03:50):
other side is pushing back.
That's when she grabs the girlsand bolts next door to the
Nottinghams.
Her neighbor Vic Nottingham goesin to check for burglars.
He hears three deliberate knocksecho through the walls.
No one's upstairs, no pipesrattling, just the sound.
(04:12):
Knock, knock, knock.
He comes back out pale and says,You've got something very
strange in there.
The police are called.
Constable Carolyn Heaps shows upa little after 1 a.m.
She takes down the familystatement while Peggy and the
(04:33):
girls huddle together on thesofa.
And right there, in front ofeveryone, a wooden chair slides
two feet across the living roomfloor.
No one's near it.
Heaps just freezes.
She later signs a written reportsaying exactly what she saw,
that the chair moved severalfeet across the floor without
(04:55):
anyone touching it.
After a few minutes, theofficers check the walls, the
floorboards, even the backgarden, trying to find a cause.
Nothing.
In the end, there's not muchthey can do.
Heaps tells Peggy the activitydoesn't fall under police
jurisdiction.
It's not really a police matter,Mrs.
(05:16):
Hodgson, she says, and advisesher to call the church if it
continues.
Then the squad car pulls awayand the house goes quiet again,
at least for a little while.
After that, the nights getlouder.
Knocks and threes, marblesfalling from nowhere, Legos
(05:37):
hitting the floor and then notrolling.
The family sleeps with thelights on.
On the fifth night, Peggy hearsshuffling upstairs.
She calls out, Who's there?
A single bang answers her, soloud the ceiling dust falls.
Word spreads down Green Streetfast.
(05:59):
Reporters show up from the DailyMirror, Douglas Bence and Graham
Morris.
They come in skeptical, camerasready.
They don't stay that way long.
While they're standing in thegirl's bedroom, a Lego brick
whips across the room and hitsMorris square in the face.
He yells, a welt risesinstantly.
(06:20):
He snaps a photo just as Janetlifts off the bed, hair flying
and legs out.
That picture runs the nextmorning under the headline House
of Strange Happenings.
The welt on Morris' face runs inthe paper too.
Proof, at least, that somethingphysical hit him.
Soon after, investigator MauriceGross from the Society for
(06:43):
Psychical Research moves in.
He sets up tape recorders,cameras, temperature sensors,
and everything he's got.
For two nights, nothing happens.
Then, at 2 AM, three heavybangs.
He asks, if you can hear me,knock once.
(07:05):
Bang.
He grins, half scared, halfthrilled, and keeps talking.
Two knocks for yes, one for no.
And the thing starts answeringhim.
From there, it escalates fast.
Crosses twist upside down on thewalls.
Peggy says she found a Biblefallen open the next morning,
(07:28):
pages torn loose.
Cold spots appear that make yourbreath show in the middle of
August.
One night, Peggy swore acrucifix shot across the room
and hit the wall hard enough tochip the paint.
Janet starts waking up in otherrooms.
Once even found asleep on top ofthe radio in the living room.
(07:50):
She tells her mom she dreams ofan old man who sits in the chair
downstairs.
Her brother Johnny says he'sseen him too.
Gray skin, one eye half closed,mouth drooping on one side.
The voices come next.
At first, a rasp under Janet'sbreath, then a full-on growl.
(08:14):
I used to live here before Idied, Janet says in a voice not
her own.
When they ask its name, thevoice says Bill Wilkins.
He claims that he died in thathouse in the corner chair from a
brain hemorrhage.
Weeks later, a neighbor confirmsthere really was a man named
Bill Wilkins who died thereyears earlier.
(08:37):
Reporters, priests, and evenskeptics crowd the little
semi-detached council house.
The Daily Mirror comes back withphotographers.
They catch Janet mid-air again,multiple frames this time, like
she's being thrown forward, notjumping.
The skeptics say it's faked, butothers in the room insist they
(08:59):
saw her lifted clean off thebed.
Maurice Gross's notebook fillswith incidents.
A pillow hitting him square inthe head while he's alone, a pen
vanishing from his hand andreappearing behind him.
A heavy dresser tipping forwardlike something shoved it.
The SPR calls in Guy LionPlayfair, another investigator.
(09:25):
He records hundreds of hours ofknocks, voices, and temperature
drops.
They even tried an informaltest.
Having Janet hold water in hermouth while the Bill voice
continued meant to challenge theidea that she was just throwing
her voice.
It wasn't scientific, but itshut people up in the moment.
(09:48):
Priests visit and bless thehouse.
A psychic describes, quote, aman who thinks he still owns
this place.
One night, Peggy finds all hercrucifixes on the floor and the
curtains tied in knots.
On December 15th, 1977, theyhear a crash upstairs.
(10:08):
Janet's tangled in the curtaincord, halfway out the window,
gasping for air.
Everyone else was downstairs.
After that, Peggy sends the kidsto stay with relatives for a
week, just to rest.
The house goes quiet.
But the moment they come back,it starts again.
(10:29):
Around this time, Ed andLorraine Warren arrive from
America.
They aren't officially invitedby the SPR, but they show up
anyway, saying they were drawnto help.
Lorraine later says she felt thepresence of pure evil as soon as
she crossed the threshold.
Ed claims something cold brushedpast him, whispering, get out.
(10:52):
He records growls on hisreel-to-reel and tells the
family they're dealing with aninhuman, demonic spirit.
Doors slam so hard the framescrack.
Janet's pinned beneath adresser.
(11:13):
Her sister Margaret screams shesaw gray hands holding it down.
Furniture levitates inches offthe ground and drops.
Gross noted in his diary that hesaw the sofa lift off the floor
while everyone else stood acrossthe room.
For months, it's cycles.
Quiet spells, then nights ofpure mayhem.
(11:37):
By spring, Gross had loggedhundreds of hours of recordings.
By then, dozens of people,neighbors, reporters, clergy,
even a police officer saidthey'd seen or heard something
they couldn't explain.
Then, just like that, it startsfading.
(11:58):
By the summer of 78, the voicesweaken, the raps thin out.
Janet says Bill Wilkins toldher, it's over.
But it isn't.
At least not completely.
In 1979, faint knocking returns,toys move, beds tremble for a
(12:19):
few weeks, then silence.
(13:03):
The Hodgsons stay until 1981before moving away.
The next tenants later say theysometimes felt something cold in
the back bedroom, but nothingmore.
Eighteen months of terror, fourkids, dozens of witnesses, and a
story that even now no one canquite explain.
(13:27):
You can hear it in everyretelling.
It sounds like something out ofa movie.
Beds floating, a girl speakingin a man's voice, crosses flying
off the walls.
And for a long time, that's howpeople talked about it.
As if all of it had happenedexactly that way.
But when you start digging intothe records, the witness
(13:50):
statements, the SPR notes, andthe recordings, you realize
something else.
This haunting wasn't one story.
It was three overlappingversions of the same event.
The one the family livedthrough, the one the
investigators documented, andthe one that would eventually
make its way into movies andbooks.
(14:12):
So let's step back to thebeginning and look at what we
actually know.
When you strip away all theheadlines, the Enfield haunting
stops sounding like the Exorcistand starts looking a lot more
like what it really was.
A long, confusing, very publicfamily crisis that nobody quite
(14:34):
knew how to handle.
So let's just walk through whatwe actually know.
First off, a few things are onrecord.
A police officer named CarolynHeaps really did visit the house
on August 31st, 1977.
She signed a written statementsaying she saw a chair move
(14:55):
across the floor, about three orfour feet, with nobody near it.
That's in the official report.
That part is real.
There are also hundreds of hoursof audio tapes, over 700
actually, recorded by twoinvestigators named Maurice
Gross and Guy Lion Playfair fromthe Society for Psychical
(15:18):
Research.
You can still hear them today,knocking sounds, voices,
conversations between the girlsand something unseen.
Whatever was going on, theydocumented it carefully.
And yes, that Bill Wilkins voiceeveryone talks about.
Turns out there really was aBill Wilkins.
(15:40):
His son later told reportersthat his father died of a brain
hemorrhage in that very house.
So a moving chair, a pile oftapes, and a real man named Bill
Wilkins.
Those are the solid pieces youcan point to.
Everything after that gets alittle fuzzy.
(16:02):
Maurice Gross was convinced itwas genuine.
He practically lived there for ayear, sleeping on the couch
sometimes, watching it happen.
He swore he saw furniture slide,toys launch across the room, and
cold spots appear out ofnowhere.
He didn't think the kids werefaking it.
(16:22):
He thought Janet, the11-year-old, was just the focus
of the activity.
Guy Lion Playfair agreed atfirst.
He described marbles droppingfrom midair, doors slamming and
a chill that would fill thewhole room.
But as time went on, even headmitted something didn't always
(16:44):
add up.
He caught Janet bending spoons,hiding his tape recorder, even
giggling before one of thebangs.
Later, both girls admitted theysometimes faked things, just to
see if the men would notice.
That's straight from the BBCinterview in 1982.
(17:04):
Still, Playfair said it wasn'tall tricks.
His line was maybe 2% mischief,98% unexplained.
Not everybody bought that.
Another researcher from the samesociety, Anita Gregory, said it
was nothing more than childishpranks.
(17:25):
She caught the girls bendingspoons, staging photos,
pretending to be thrown byinvisible hands.
And yeah, some of that happened.
But then you've got theneighbors, reporters, even a
priest who stop by, all sayingthey saw or heard something they
couldn't explain.
(17:45):
So it's one of those storieswhere the truth seems to slide
back and forth, depending onwho's telling it.
Now about the Warrens.
They did visit the house, that'sconfirmed.
But they weren't running theshow like the movies make it
seem.
They weren't part of theofficial investigation.
(18:07):
They just showed up, uninvited,while the Society for Psychical
Research was already there.
They stayed a day, maybe two,and then left.
Lorraine later said she felt thedemonic presence immediately,
called it one of the mostviolent hauntings she'd ever
walked into.
(18:27):
Ed claimed he recorded growls ontape, but none of those
recordings have ever surfaced.
Guy Playfair later said EdWarren pulled him aside and
suggested they could, quote,make a lot of money off the
story.
Playfair said he told him toclear off his exact words.
He wrote later that the Warrensseemed more interested in
(18:51):
publicity than data.
After that exchange, they werenever invited back.
So despite what the movies show,this wasn't the Warren's case.
They were visitors passingthrough and not especially
welcome ones.
The grind, the long nights, theendless notes, the 700 hours of
(19:14):
tape that belonged to gross andplayfair.
Even among the SPRinvestigators, not everyone saw
the same thing or the samecauses.
Anita Gregory thought thehaunting might have been less
supernatural and more emotional.
She described Peggy Hodgson, themother as suggestible,
(19:37):
overwrought, and inconsistent,and wrote that her anxiety could
have been fueling the activity.
She didn't accuse Peggy offaking anything, just of being
caught in something she couldn'tcontrol.
Other observers noticed the samepattern.
When Peggy calmed down, thehouse seemed to quiet too.
(19:58):
When she was frightened orupset, things escalated again.
Still, most witnesses,neighbors, clergy, even the SPR
men themselves, said she lookedgenuinely terrified, worn down,
and desperate for help.
Whatever else people believeabout this case, that part has
(20:20):
never really been disputed.
So what was really going on inthat little council house on
Green Street?
Psychologists who studied therecordings years later said it
could have been stress.
The mom raising four kids alone,money tight, and Janet right at
the age where emotions run wild.
(20:41):
They thought it might have beena mix of psychological pressure
and what some people callpoltergeist phenomena.
Energy that sort of acts out oftension in a family.
And Janet herself, when she gotolder, said something that
pretty much sums it up.
She said, some of it was real.
Some of it we made up.
(21:02):
The more attention we got, themore it happened.
Even with that confession, shenever took back what she felt.
I know what I saw, she said, andwhat I felt.
So what do we do with that?
Because that's really the heartof the story.
You've got things people sworethey saw, chairs sliding,
(21:25):
knocks, cold air, and you've gotproven hoaxes, little stunts.
Nobody ever proved it wassupernatural, but nobody could
disprove it either.
And that's where the Enfieldhaunting still sits, halfway
between history and legend.
Part documentation, partfolklore.
(21:46):
A story that's too strange tofully believe, but too well
recorded to completely dismiss.
And that's the version Hollywoodwalked into.
Messy, uncertain, full ofcontradictions.
Which means when the movie got ahold of it, they didn't just
tell the story, they built awhole new one.
(22:12):
You know, the thing aboutstories like this is, the more
you dig, the more tangled theyget.
Everybody saw something.
Nobody saw everything.
And over time, those gaps, thelittle blanks no one could fill
in, start getting patched withbelief.
That's how the Enfield hauntingwent from a handful of strange
(22:35):
nights in North London to one ofthe most famous paranormal cases
in the world.
By the time Hollywood got holdof it, the truth had already
started to blur.
So let's talk about what theworld thinks happened.
Because when the Conjuring IIcame out, it didn't just retell
(22:56):
the Enfield case, it rewrote it.
When the Conjuring II wasreleased, it opened with the
tagline based on the true casefiles of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
And technically, that's true.
But the story it tells isn't theone that actually happened.
(23:16):
See, in the movie, the Warrensare the heroes.
They get the call, hop a planeto London, and suddenly they're
in the middle of it all, livingwith the family, fighting the
demon head on.
In real life?
They drop by uninvited andstayed briefly.
The real work, all the latenights, the notebooks, the
(23:40):
recordings, that was done byMaurice Gross and Guy Lyon
Playfair with the Society forPsychical Research.
They were there for months.
The Warrens weren't even part ofthe official investigation.
And that's kind of the themehere.
Holly didn't just dramatize thestory, it completely rewired it.
(24:02):
In the movie, there's this big,terrifying nun, the demon Valak,
stalking Lorraine throughvisions.
There's a scene where crossestwist on the walls, the air
turns black, and the nun lungesout of the shadows.
None of that ever happened.
There was no nun.
No demon's name written on awall.
(24:25):
No master's spirit pulling thestrings.
The only voice anyone ever heardcalled itself Bill Wilkins, an
old man who said he died in thechair downstairs.
That's the voice on therecordings.
Not a demon, a dead man.
Or at least that's what Janetsaid.
(24:47):
And yeah, that voice was real.
You can hear it on the tapes.
It's deep and rough like a manwho smoked for 50 years.
Janet could hold that raspingvoice for long stretches.
A speech therapist who had heardthe recording said it would be
unusual for a child to sustainthat kind of sound without
(25:07):
damaging her vocal cords.
So whatever it was, a trick, areflex, something stranger, it
was weird.
That part's true.
The movie turns the small Londonhaunting into a full-blown war
between good and evil.
You've got Ed performing anexorcism in a lightning storm,
(25:30):
Lorraine shouting the demon'sname to send it back to hell.
In the real case, there was noexorcism.
No priests casting out spiritsin Latin.
What actually happened wereblessings.
A few visits from clergy whoprayed with the family and told
them to keep faith.
That's it.
(25:51):
And let's talk about thoselevitations.
In the movie, Janet's floatingthrough the air, spinning in
slow motion, screaming asfurniture flies around her.
In real life?
There are photos of her inmidair, yes, but they're split
seconds stills.
If you look closely, she's in ajumping position, arms out,
(26:14):
knees bent.
Some say she was thrown, otherssay she jumped.
Even the investigators couldn'tagree.
So no graceful cinematicfloating, just a messy snapshot
that no one's ever explainedcleanly.
Another big one.
In the movie, Ed nearly dies,hanging out a window while
(26:36):
Lorraine screams his name.
Yeah, that never happenedeither.
No collapsing house, no lastsecond rescue.
And by then, the Warrens weren'teven there.
But maybe the biggest differenceis how the film treats the
family.
In The Conjuring II, it's allfaith and bravery.
(26:57):
The Warrens arrive, help theHodgsons believe again, and love
saves the day.
In real life, it was messier.
The family was worn down, broke,and tired of reporters camping
on their street.
There wasn't one big momentwhere it all ended.
It just stopped, faded out aftermonths of noise and sleepless
(27:21):
nights.
Janet, the girl at the center ofit all, she's grown now.
She's talked about it ininterviews.
And she said something thatsticks with me.
She said, some of it was real.
Some of it we made up.
She never backed down frombelieving something truly
strange happened in that house.
(27:42):
But she also admitted they fakedparts of it, mostly when they
felt people were starting todoubt them.
And honestly, that kind of makessense.
Imagine being eleven, everyonecalling you a liar, and the only
way to make them believe you isto give them something to see.
So the movie took all of that,the long, uneven truth, and it
(28:07):
boiled it down to one neatstory.
A single villain, a singleexorcism, a clean ending.
The real case wasn't clean atall.
There wasn't one big showdown.
There were just weeks and monthsof confusion, fear, curiosity,
and exhaustion.
(28:27):
And then it faded away.
You know, that's what alwayshits me about the Enfield story.
In the movie, it's simple.
Evil shows up, faith wins.
But in the real world, the evilpart was never clear.
It could have been grief,stress, loneliness, or maybe
(28:50):
something else entirely.
Nobody ever proved what it was,but nobody ever proved it
wasn't, either.
Because sometimes the scariestthing about stories like this
isn't the haunting.
It's that there's just enoughtruth in them to keep you
wondering what really happenedwhen the lights went out.
(29:16):
Every time I go back over thiscase, I find myself stuck
between two thoughts.
On one hand, you've got theskeptics, people who say it was
all just kids seeking attention.
And on the other, you've gotinvestigators who swore they saw
things that defied explanation.
Both sides sound so certain.
(29:38):
But certainty's tricky, isn'tit?
Because when you listen to thoseold recordings, the knocks, the
voices, the heavy air in thatlittle house, there's something
real in there.
Maybe not supernatural, butreal.
The fear is real.
The exhaustion is real.
And so is the hope thatsomebody, somewhere, might
(30:02):
finally understand what'shappening to you.
I think about Janet a lot.
Eleven years old, her dad'sgone, her mom's just trying to
hold it together.
The house is cold, crowded, andsuddenly everyone's staring at
her like she's the key tosomething dark.
Imagine how confusing that wouldbe to not even trust your own
(30:26):
senses anymore.
It makes me wonder if that'swhat most hauntings really are.
Not demons, not ghosts, but theweight of fear, grief, and
pressure.
Up until it spills out in wayswe can't explain.
And once belief takes hold, itstarts feeding itself.
(30:48):
Because once enough peoplebelieve a place is haunted, it
kind of is, isn't it?
Maybe not by spirits, but by thestories that never quite leave.
That's what Enfield feels liketo me.
A haunting made of real people,a scared family, a few true
believers, a handful ofskeptics, all trapped in
(31:12):
something bigger than they couldmake sense of.
And maybe that's why it stillechoes after all these years.
Because deep down, every one ofus knows what it feels like to
live with something we can'tprove, but can't quite shake
either.
(31:33):
This has been State of theUnknown.
A quiet house in North London, afamily under pressure, and a
story that grew so large itescaped the walls it started in.
The Enfield poltergeist became alegend.
Not because it was proven, butbecause no one could quite prove
(31:54):
it wasn't.
Some say it was fear.
Some say it was faith.
And maybe, in the end, it wasboth.
If you've been enjoying State ofthe Unknown, thank you for
listening.
And for helping this little showkeep growing week after week.
The best way you can support itis simple.
(32:17):
Leave a quick rating or review.
On Spotify, it's just a tap.
On Apple Podcasts, a few wordscan make a huge difference.
I read every single one, and Ican't tell you how much it
means.
Until next time, stay curious.
Stay unsettled.
(32:38):
And whatever you do, don'tlisten too closely when the
house goes quiet.
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