Enfield Poltergeist: The True Story Behind The Conjuring 2 | The Warrens' Paranormal Case Revealed | Ep #35 - Madame Strangeways: True Spooky Paranormal Stories

Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Oh, I didn't hear you come in. What's that?
You've got a true strange story of the unexplained you'd like to
hear narrated on the show. e-mail it to me,
madamstrangeways@gmail.com. Welcome strangers, strange
cetera, stranger Reno's and stranger Rangers.

(00:24):
Is that something? No, OK.
Welcome to Madam Strange Ways, where I usually narrate your
true strange stories of the unexplained and share my strange
thoughts and observations while dragging you down strange rabbit
holes kicking and screaming. You're the one kicking and
screaming. I'm doing the dragging.

(00:45):
This, however, is a deep dive episode about the allegedly true
case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, specifically the story
of the Enfield Poltergeist. I'll still drag you down a slew
of strange rabbit holes though. Fear not.
But first, a strange shout out to my Patreon patrons TJ Hotter,

(01:07):
G Man Music, Ted, Keith, and Tori.
Thank you so much to my Feral Fiendish 5 for supporting the
show. Do you want to hear your name at
the beginning of every episode? Or how about an exclusive
sticker or even access to Madam Strange Notes AKA Strange bonus
content? Join the Patreon today at

(01:29):
madamstrangeways.com or patreon.com/madam Strange Ways.
And now on to the true strange story of the Enfield Poltergeist
here on Madam Strange Ways. The Enfield Poltergeist On

(02:12):
Thursday the 1st of September atapproximately 1 AMI was on duty
in my capacity as a policewoman when I received a radio message
to 284 Green St. Enfield.
I went to this address where I found a number of people

(02:33):
standing in the living room. I was told by the occupier of
the house that strange things have been happening during the
last few hours and that they believed the house was haunted.
Myself and another police constable entered the living
room of the house and the occupier turned off the lights.

(02:55):
Almost immediately I heard the sound of knocking on the wall
that backs on to the next door neighbour's house.
There were 4 distinct taps on the wall and then silence.
About two minutes later I heard more tapping, but this time it

(03:15):
was coming from a different wall.
Again, it was a distinctive peelof four taps.
The police constable and the neighbors checked the walls,
attic and pipes but could find nothing to explain the
knockings. The police constable and the

(03:37):
neighbors all went into the kitchen to check the
refrigerator, pipes, etcetera, leaving myself and the family in
the living room. The lights in the living room
were switched off again and within a few minutes the eldest
son pointed to a chair which wasstanding next to the sofa.

(03:58):
I looked at the chair and noticed that it was wobbling
slightly from side to side. I then saw the chair slide
across the floor towards the kitchen wall.
It moved approximately 3 to 4 feet and then came to rest.

(04:19):
At no time did it appear to leave the floor.
I checked the chair but could find nothing to explain how it
had moved. The lights were switched back
on. Nothing else happened that
night. Although we have later reports
of disturbances at this address.WPC Carolyn Heaps didn't know

(04:47):
the half of it. In the days following her visit
to Green Street, the unexplainedactivity escalated.
Marbles and Lego bricks catapulted around the room as if
launched by invisible trebuchets.
The knockings continued. The settee in the living room
was upended. Missus Hodgson, the single

(05:08):
mother who lived there with her four children, called a local
priest who blessed the home. And yet the activity only
intensified. The Hodgson family was on edge
all hours of the day and night, with the crashing and chaos
always worst. At bedtime, out of desperation,

(05:32):
the Daily Mirror was called out.The reporter and photographer
were so shocked by the flying objects and furniture moving
that they wasted no time callingthe Society for Psychical
Research, the world's oldest organization dedicated to
studying claims of psychic and paranormal phenomena.

(05:55):
Morris Gross was sent to investigate immediately.
He was convinced this was no hoax.
He explained to the family that this was what was called a
poltergeist, something none of the family had ever heard of
before. Shortly after, another SBR
investigator, Guy Lyon Playfair,joined the investigation.

(06:20):
The presence of the two men seemed to only provoke the
poltergeist. It was not happy.
Phantom faces were seen through the windows.
The knocking sounds ramped up until they shook the whole
house. The settee that had been thrown

(06:40):
prior began to levitate off the floor.
Janet, the second oldest child, was bodily ejected from her bed
night after night. Other times she would be
forcibly thrown through the air,terrifying the 11 year old girl.
Even more terrifying, multiple curtains in the home began to

(07:05):
wrap themselves around her neck to strangle her.
The furniture in the home may have been to blame.
Mr. Hodgson, before leaving his family, had bought some pieces
of furniture that had belonged to a man who had, after killing

(07:26):
his young daughter, taken his own life.
Afraid it was possessed by a harmful spirit, they took all of
the offending furniture and decor and burned it in the back
garden. It didn't help the knocking in
the home seemed to become sentient.

(07:48):
Gross would ask it questions andit would answer.
One knock for No2, knocks for yes.
From there it escalated again. The poltergeist began to speak
in a low, gruff voice. That voice came primarily from

(08:08):
Janet, though sometimes her older sister Margaret.
They said that when the voice spoke, it felt like it was
coming from the back of their necks and that they had no
control over what the voice said.
The voice was rude and vulgar and sounded nothing at all like

(08:33):
how the girls normally spoke. The.
Spirit claimed to have been a man named Bill Wilkins when he
was alive. He claimed he had lived in their
house on Green Street and was there looking for his wife.
Then he told the frightened family.

(08:56):
Just before I died, I went blind.
Then I had an hemorrhage and I fell asleep and I died in the
chair in the corner downstairs. As it turned out, the
poltergeist had been right. Bill Wilkins lived and died at
284 Green St. Janet began to fall into trances

(09:22):
and had fits. She drew violent artwork.
She shrieked and screamed threats of death as multiple
grown men had to hold her down. Missus Hodgson reported that a
knife had gone missing from the kitchen, and she was
understandably worried that Janet had taken it.

(09:46):
The family suffered sleepless nights in constant states of
hyper vigilance, with the only reprieve being a short family
vacation and when Janet was sentto a psychiatric hospital for
testing and observation. Though the activity nearly
stopped in her absence, it picked up again when she

(10:08):
returned to Green Street. The poltergeist was not yet
through with her. It seemed a Swedish medium who
had attempted to cleanse the house on a prior visit returned
to try again nearly a year aftereverything started.
He sat in Janet and Margaret's bedroom and spoke to the spirit

(10:32):
haunting the house that time. It listened.
But some things never really leave you.
The story of the poltergeist that ruled the Hodgson's lives
for so long would follow the family forever.

(11:06):
Welcome to the latest deep dive episode about the true case
files of Ed and Lorraine Warren.This is the fourth episode in
that series, and though for somereason I have accidentally
decided to do the cases alphabetically instead of
chronologically, I do recommend listening to the other episodes

(11:26):
if you're interested in tasty little morsels about the
Warrens, which I have sprinkled throughout.
So it starts with Amityville, then Annabelle, then The
Conjuring One AKA the Perrin family, and now we're on to The
Conjuring 2. The Enfield Poltergeist.
As the theme of this podcast is scaring you while also reminding

(11:51):
you that you can feel afraid andnot be in danger, revealing the
true aspects of the Warrants case is a perfect fit.
I talk about it in a little moredepth in the Annabelle episode,
but in a nutshell, I have a personal grievance with the
Warrens even though I never met them directly.

(12:13):
OK, it's fine. I can say you know what?
I don't need to meet someone to not like them.
So when I was a wee Madam growing up in the mumble mumble
mumble, my mother got caught up in the fear mongering of the
ripples left by the Satanic Panic.
So as a child with undiagnosed complex PTSD and intense anxiety

(12:36):
and mild OCD, the last thing that my strange little brain
needed was for my mother, an authority figure, telling me
that demons existed and that I needed to be constantly vigilant
against their satanic forces. She wasn't doing it maliciously.
All right, I understand. I get it.
Nobody's PO. But he's nerfict.

(12:57):
I understand she wasn't doing itmaliciously, she thought she was
protecting my soul, but as questionably well intended as
she may have been, it still costa lot of damage that I am still
now having to undo and figure out.
So I have to ask myself if this is all just some spooky

(13:21):
butterfly effect. I guess.
Would a spooky butterfly be likea Death's Head moth?
All right, so I have to ask myself if this is all some
Death's head moth effect. If the Warrens hadn't found
their niche by way of using haunted houses as a gimmick to
sell people paintings to get their foot in the door, would my

(13:41):
Catholic raised mother have everbeen exposed to crazy demon
warfare rhetoric in the 1st place?
Maybe. I mean there were a lot of
cultural bits and bobs that fed into the Satanic panic.
Obviously it wasn't just the Warrens.
But as a result there's very little I hate more than fear

(14:04):
mongering, especially spiritual and or paranormal fear
mongering, which was the real product.
Ed and Lorraine Warren peddled fear mongering.
That being said, right up top, Ido want to say that you may have
noticed in the story that I justread that the Warrens are not

(14:24):
really in this story. They're really only in it for a
tiny blip they visited Enfield for like.
Between a day and four days split between 1978 and then
again in 1979 after the activityhad stopped and the Warrens
visits. Were not only uninvited, but

(14:44):
they were so a noteworthy that, at least prior to the press
junket for The Conjuring 2, noneof the Hodgkins even recalled
meeting them. So it's not Ed and Lorraine at
the focus of this story, as The Conjuring 2 would leave you to
believe, but actually the Hodgson family and the two

(15:04):
psychical researchers who were ultimately responsible for
catapulting this story to what has become today.
The Warrens weren't really involved.
And and though they weren't actually all that involved in
this story, Ed still somehow manages to come off like a
greedy con man, as you'll see. I thought though, that this

(15:26):
would be a perfect opportunity to show you that you don't
actually need to have bad intentions to do harm,
especially when it comes to the supernatural or paranormal.
Ed and Lorraine were always after fame and fortune,
regardless of what their apologists will claim, and they
employed fear mongering and phlegm flammery, which is a

(15:49):
technical term to get it. So as you'll hear, the Warrens
do try to sink their weird little phlegm flammy claws into
the case, but Ed and Lorraine's charm they don't seem to work.
Doesn't seem to work. The charm does not seem to work
very well in foggy London town. But I will say I can't.

(16:12):
I could totally picture this oddCouple style brick com starring
Morris Gross, the psychical researcher as the laced up
Englishman and Ed Warren as the loud slobbish oddball American.
I got to say I would watch it. I would watch it.
I bet they'd have some good monster of the week stories.

(16:33):
But I think Ed Warren saw the Enfield case for what it truly
was. Game recognizes game and all
that. Now I'm not OK, OK, OK, OK, OK.
I'm not saying that poltergeistsdefinitely don't exist.
That is not what I'm saying. However, it is my personal
opinion that that that it's my personal opinion that the

(16:56):
Enfield case is not the ironcladcase that so many make it out to
me. I would love to hear your
thoughts, by the way, if you hadthoughts going into the episode,
I'd like to hear them. And if they're any different
from the thoughts you had after the episode, wow, I would
definitely really like to hear from them.
Hear from you. I should say. e-mail me
madamstrangeways@gmail.com. Now.

(17:16):
The Enfield poltergeist being the most well documented account
of paranormal activity ever, particularly in British history.
There's such an overwhelming amount of claims in this story,
like truly overwhelming information overload, etcetera.
There is so much stuff happeningin this story that this would

(17:41):
have to be a 42 part episode series.
This would have to be a 42 part series if I wanted to cover
everything, which I do, but I'm not going to because you know
what? I'm no Dan Carlin, or am I?
Maybe I am. Maybe I am a spooky Dan Carlin.

(18:01):
I don't think so though. You know what though?
If you want to hear more, if youwant to hear even more detail
about the Enfield case then you hear in this episode, let me
know. Madam Strange.
We set gmail.com. In the meantime, however, I will
just keep it to this one single episode.
However, unfortunately, as much as it pains me, that means that

(18:22):
I can't cover every single aspect of this story, even some
of the ones that I really wantedto.
They're left on the cutting roomfloor.
It pains me. So before we get to the good
stuff, let's take a peek at the two strange men at the forefront
of this case who practically moved into the Hodgson home,

(18:43):
which is weird. OK, it's weird.
I understand it's in the pursuitof of science and psychical
etcetera, but it's weird. All right, so Morris Gross and
Morris is actually spelled Maurice, but every single person
that talks about him says Morris.
So I'm going to say Morris, Morris Gross and Guy Lyon

(19:06):
Playfair, which is such a cool name.
I would not have expected him tobe a psychical researcher
though. All right, so they are both
members of the Society for Psychical Research in London.
And can I just say I love psychical?
What a fun word. Fun to say, fun to type.
Sounds very smart. Like which would you rather be a

(19:30):
member of the Society for Psychic Research or the Society
for Psychical Research? Obviously the latter, obviously
the latter. So good job naming that in 1880
something when that was founded.Good job, guys.
OK, so back to these two. Morris, Gross, Guyline,
Playfair, otherwise known. You'll hear me just refer to

(19:52):
them for the rest of the episodeas Gross and Playfair.
So unlike Ed Warren, Gross and Playfair weren't angling to have
their stories made into made forTV movies, let alone Hollywood
films. Well.
OK, hold on. Playfair had actually already
published at least two books about the paranormal prior to

(20:13):
1977, and he did go on to write an entire book about the Enfield
story afterwards that would later in 2015 get turned into a
British six part miniseries. So maybe it's not conjuring too
tight money, but that ain't nothing.
OK, so for Playfair, while I can't say that he was entirely

(20:33):
there out of the goodness of hisheart, he also didn't completely
fabricate stories just to sell books like some people.
I mean, Ed Warren, if that wasn't clear.
Whereas Gross, on the other hand, was already well off.
He was a military man. He was actually at Dunkirk.
He was literally at Dunkirk. So he was a military man turned

(20:57):
confectioner turned inventor turned paranormal investigator,
which really that's the ideal career path for a paranormal
investigator. That's just how I feel.
He made a good living filing mechanical patents and even
founded his own design and engineering consultancy
business. So he was doing well.
He even drove a showy sports cara row.

(21:20):
A red. A red E type roadster.
I was going to say Rd. A Rd.
E type redster is, I think what I was trying to say, a red E
type roadster. Which doesn't really mean
anything to me, but I bet it means something to someone.
Also, it sounds fancy and expensive, which it was both.
Unlike the Warrens, though, Gross wasn't chasing fame, and

(21:44):
he wasn't trying to fool anyone except maybe himself.
You'll find out in a second. Keep listening.
And while I think that he was ultimately successful in in
fooling himself, this wasn't a victimless crime.
Unfortunately so. Gross and Playfair recorded

(22:06):
around 140 hours of tape recordings between 1977 and
1978, with 180 total visits to the house on Green Street and 25
all night vigils AKA sleepovers,which puts the combined
investigation time at a minimum of 1000 hours.

(22:29):
These two men were constantly monitoring the family, making
audio recordings, taking pictures, occasionally recording
video, though never when anything unexplained happened.
Which is interesting. The Hodgson kids must have
started to see Gross and maybe even play fair as father
figures, authority figures, considering that their own

(22:50):
father was an absent piece of shit and apparently abusive,
like I said, a piece of shit when the father had actually
been there. Unfortunately for the Hodgson
kids, Gross's affection was alsoconditional, specifically
conditional upon the quality of the paranormal hijinks.

(23:10):
In multiple recordings, you can hear him angrily berate Janet
and Margaret when the poltergeist activity doesn't go
exactly to plan, or when the girls are acting like, oh, I
don't know, children. And if the poltergeist activity
were to stop, Gross and Playfairwould leave, just like the

(23:31):
children's father had. But Gross didn't want to leave
any more than he wanted to consider the whole thing a hoax.
It's why you see him time and time again, time and time again,
dismiss what should have been damning evidence of trickery as
some quirk of the poltergeist's abilities to control Janet.

(23:53):
Or actually, in some cases, whathe sees that should be evidence
of a hoax actually somehow solidifies his belief that it's
not a hoax. It's weird, but the man, I'm
telling you, human brains very powerful.
So OK, there's the sunk cost fallacy with the situation,

(24:16):
sure, where you know he's already put this much time and
effort into something. He doesn't want it to not be
true. He needs it to be true.
I mean, also think about it likehis reputation is tied to it.
His future with the SPR, the Society for Psychical Research,
like that's obviously tied to itas well.

(24:36):
You don't want to have egg on your face when it comes to
poltergeists. And, and maybe there was a point
in which he probably should havejust cut his losses.
But again, some cost fallacy. It makes it really difficult to
do that. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe,
maybe. That's all it is.
Sure. Except with Gross, it's
definitely more than that. C Gross only took up an interest

(25:00):
in paranormal investigating after the tragic loss of his
daughter at the age of 22 in a motorcycle accident.
Her name was also, coincidentally, Janet.
In August of 1976, within a month of his daughter Janet's

(25:21):
death, Gross joined both the Society for Psychical Research
and the Ghost Club. Which side note, the Ghost Club
also solid name. Sounds like a great time.
Honestly. But he wasn't having a great
time because he was obviously grieving for his daughter.

(25:41):
He also became convinced, along with some of his other family
members, that his daughter Janetwas trying to contact him and
send him a message from beyond the grave.
And let's not forget, Gross is an engineer by trade.
He's a problem solver. And I'm sure I know, having done
this research, that he was like a dog with a bone.

(26:02):
But he was mourning. He was definitely in mourning.
And he was absolutely, definitely not allowing himself
to actually mourn. And that never ends well.
Gross did insist, right up untilhis death, that losing his
daughter Janet didn't in any waycloud his judgement.

(26:24):
But I don't know. I mean, I don't know about that.
If Gross and Playfair had just packed up and left after a few
days of monitoring the poltergeist, would the supposed
poltergeist activity have just died down on its own?
I mean, we'll never know. But if you think about this time

(26:45):
and time again, media attention of a poltergeist case ends up
escalating the alleged activity,regardless of whether it's due
to spirit energy feeding off theattention of all of the humans
watching or because it just emboldens the children or people
behind the activity. Now, I do want to make clear

(27:07):
because it OK, look, it's very important to me that y'all
understand that I don't think that Janet or Margaret are con
artists or hucksters or flim flam mams.
I don't think that. I don't think they did anything
out of malice. I think they were just kids
having a really difficult time. And the problem is actually the

(27:30):
adults in the case that were whipping everything up into the
frenzy that it became. None of the Hodgson's, not even
Janet, who's like the star of the show.
Not even Janet has gotten rich off of the Enfield Poltergeist
fame. And unlike Andrea Perrin, one of
the children in the Perrin family hunting, AKA The
Conjuring One True story, none of the Hodgson's siblings ever

(27:51):
wrote a trilogy book series, anddefinitely none of them took
said trilogy on the paranormal convention circuit, again,
unlike Andrea Perrin. But I will say Janet, Margaret
and Billy were credited as consultants on The Conjuring 2
film. And Janet and Margaret featured
in the Apple Plus documentary with Billy's name mentioned of

(28:14):
the credits as well. So they must have gotten some
compensation. But you know what?
Good for them, good for them forall that for for all that
they've had to put up with for 48 years at the time of this
recording. I think they've earned it,
Especially Janet. Right.
So here we go. We will talk about poltergeists,

(28:38):
parakeets, psychical research. OK, that was in a written
alliteration because the P is silent.
But on paper it looks like a great, a great alliteration.
But when I say it out loud, it doesn't really translate.
It's fine. Don't worry about it.
And of course we will talk aboutBill.
But first here is a non exhaustive list of sources that

(29:00):
I used for the episode. First, we've got This House is
Haunted by Guy Lion Playfair. There is ES PS Sears and
Psychics by Melbourne Christopher, an American
illusionist and president of theSociety of American Magicians,
which reminds me of Poof, which Joe Bluth was a member of before
he got kicked out. The Enfield Poltergeist tapes, a

(29:24):
book by Melvin Willen Melvin Willen being the custodian of
the Enfield Poltergeist tapes inthe wake of the death of Morris
Gross and guideline play fair. There is also of course my
favorite book, the exorcist effect by Eric Harrelson and
Joseph Laycock. Shout out love it.

(29:44):
Of course the Enfield poltergeist documentary on Apple
+2023 a slew of I say slew a lot.
I don't know. I don't know what it is.
It's there. I it's just, it's fine, don't
worry about it. A bunch of BBC and like UK
recordings between 1977 and 1976.

(30:05):
So many sources. I'll try to link them all in the
show notes. All right then before that
sorted, let's crack on. What even is a poltergeist
anyway? OK, firstly and most
importantly, let's talk about it.
What is a poltergeist? Poltergeists and humans go way
back, like 800 BCE, which is basically in Homer's The

(30:30):
Odyssey. Apparently there's a reference
to a poltergeist in the Odyssey.However, the first account of
what sounds like our modern day understanding of a poltergeist
was actually an 800 AD ish in Germany, which I'm just not
realizing must be why Germans are the ones who got to name the
poltergeist. Because Polterne is German for

(30:52):
noisy and Geist is ghost. Hence noisy ghost or
poltergeist. Also Speaking of Geist, now that
I'm breaking this out into two words, Geist.
OK, also in the Geist is also inzeitgeist.
So what is zeitgeist? Let's find out what is Zeit?
Something Geist. Zeit Ghost.

(31:16):
I don't know what Zeit means. OK, Google.
What is Zeit in German? Zeit means time in German.
Time, time ghost. OK, that's kind of fun.
And I love these weird little German words.
Thank you, Germany, for these strange words.
Time ghost. Anyway, Poltergeist.

(31:38):
So another word for poltergeist that fell out of favor, but I
think that we should consider bringing back in favor is
rumpelgeist, meaning rattling ghost instead of just noisy
ghost. But I actually read that Germans
don't even use the term poltergeist or rumpelgeist when
they're talking about poltergeists and goats in

(31:58):
general, and instead they just say spook.
Spook. Is that right?
Are you German? Do you know?
e-mail me madamstrangeways@gmail.com let
me know what word you use to explain to poltergeist.
Anyway, etymology aside, poltergeists aren't generally
considered to be ghosts at all. One theory by Nandor Fodor of

(32:23):
Jeff the Talking Mongoose fame, not Nandor de la Rentes fame, is
that poltergeists are effectively repressed energy.
I'm just going to read this verbatim from the wiki.
Poltergeists are quote UN quote external manifestations of
conflicts within the subconscious mind rather than

(32:45):
autonomous entities with minds of their own.
OK, that's cool. And I definitely understood
everything that was just said. External manifestations of
conflicts within the subconscious mind rather than an
autonomous entity. OK, without a mind of their OK,
that's the I'm with you. I'm with you Nandor.
I was meeting with you, Nandor. Fucking guy.

(33:10):
Probably the most common theory about poltergeists, though, is
that although poltergeists aren't spirits themselves, they
are a sort of spiritual energy that is unknowingly manipulated
by a person, usually a child or a teenager, and usually one
around puberty. It's especially common for

(33:30):
people to say that girls who arestarting their periods for the
first time are especially attractive to poltergeists,
which is just kind of weird and gross.
And really, when you say it out loud the way that I just did, I
hope that it does sound weird and gross because it feels weird
and gross. Not the period part.
That's not gross. It's almost like a lot of men,

(33:50):
especially you're the types thatare going to go into psychical
research, are scared of women's bodies.
Go figure. All right.
But look, in a nutshell again, OK, how many nutshells do we
have? A lot of them.
But the point is, the theory is that during the time of a
child's life in which they are going through puberty, things

(34:10):
are really stressful and they'refeeling a lot of feelings that
they've never felt before, including a special kind of
impotent psychokinetic rage. And they're somehow able to
inadvertently channel this impotent psychokinetic rage
without realizing that they're doing it.
Psychokinesis being, of course, the ability to control and
manipulate or move things purelywith your mind.

(34:34):
Think Jean Grey or Ness from Earthbound or Smash Brothers
when he's like BK Thunder. That's him.
He's using psychokinesis when he's doing that.
So the standard fare for a poltergeist is what we heard in
the Enfield story. So it starts off with knocking,
things get knocked over, then things start flying around,

(34:54):
fires break out, water appears from thin air, but somehow never
directly over the fires that getstarted, and people occasionally
levitate. Some famous poltergeist cases
you may have heard of are the Black Monk of Pontefract, Borley
Rectory, Jeff the Talking Mongoose.
Note that's spelled GEF, which might be the least ridiculous

(35:19):
thing in that story. Also the Bell Witch of Tennessee
and I had to include this. As soon as I read this story I
had to include it. Sorry.
It's just I'm I'm apparently I'm12, I'm a 12 year old boy
because I had to include the Cock Lane ghost AKA the Fanny
scratcher which I am not making up.

(35:41):
It's an actual thing. You can Google it maybe with
safe search on, but it's not, it's not X-rated.
That's just the name of the street.
All right. Anyway, there are countless
poltergeist stories. Countless truly.
There are so many. I mean, there's even you may
have heard of the movie creatively titled Poltergeist,

(36:02):
which is based loosely ish on the poltergeist case of the
Hermann family. No relation to Pee Wee, but the
movie did come out not long after Enfield, so it very well
could have influenced part of the movie.
What a poltergeist definitely isn't, however, is the ghost of
a dead man who used to live in the council house the Hodgesons

(36:25):
lived in. Janet actually started out
trying to excitedly explain the paranormal activity as the ghost
of a young girl who had lived near the family before being
murdered by her own father. And for a while, everyone
involved with the case kept referring to the poltergeist as
a female spirit until eventuallyit switched between about, I
mean, at least a dozen differentnames.

(36:46):
And then finally, they landed onBill Wilkins, which is not how
poltergeists work. So listen, look, if you have a
poltergeist, you can name your poltergeist.
That's fine. I'm not saying you can't name
your poltergeist. But I feel like poltergeists are
kind of like stray cats. So you can name a stray cat,
Misses Meow Meow, but when she saunters by the house next door,

(37:08):
they don't know that her name isMisses Meow Meow because she's a
stray cat. So they call her Mr.
Mustophiles, and they have no idea that she has a different
name. That's how I that's how I feel.
Cats and poltergeists are just little agents of chaos.
And you can really just name them whatever you want, but that
doesn't mean that they have a name.

(37:29):
OK, I know this isn't a perfect analogy.
I just, you know, me. I love cats.
The point is, the spirit of BillWilkins is not a poltergeist.
So which is it? Is it a poltergeist or is it a
ghost? Interesting.
Next, I want to give some cultural and historical context

(37:52):
to kind of anchor us in the story and really make sure that
we all understand everything that is happening in the world
in 1977 while this is all happening.
So the year is 1977. Queen Elizabeth the Second has
been Queen for 25 years, which means celebrating her Silver
Jubilee, which is apparently a super big deal.

(38:14):
Across the pond, The Clash releases their self-titled debut
album and the Sex Pistols released their album Never Mind
The Bollocks, which was so cool that it was banned by the BBC
and so many other radio stationsto the point that it was deemed
the most heavily censored recordin British history.
Fleetwood Mac releases their Rumors album, Queen releases We

(38:37):
Are the Champions, and in hopefully less exciting news,
serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, AKA the Yorkshire Ripper, is
still active and at large murdering women.
The first Star Wars film comes out.
Bell bottoms are beginning to disappear, though.
Try telling that to Ed Warren. Soon.

(38:57):
Shoulder pads and the first pairs of designer jeans will
take their place. For the first time, there are
more color TV's in use in the UKthan black and white TV's.
There's only three channels on those televisions, by the way.
BBC One, BBC Two and Nope, not BBC Three, ITV.

(39:20):
In August, just a month or so before the Enfield Haunting
began, a horror anthology TV show called Supernatural aired
its final episode in my in my script I have parentheses
Supernatural reference here, which I definitely did not
prepare. Sammy, carry on my way.

(39:43):
OK, continuing. We're moving on.
That's unrelated. Listen here we go all show on
TV. Uri Geller, the famous
self-proclaimed psychic, has been bending spoons with his
mind for years. And just three years earlier, in
1974, The Exorcist film was released and heavily protested

(40:06):
across the UK by the nationwide Festival of Light, a Christian
public Action Group. And the movie was even banned
from some parts of Great Britainaltogether just one year
earlier, in 1976. Morris Gross's daughter dies in
a motorcycle accident and that same month he joins the SPR and

(40:27):
the Ghost Club. Three years earlier, again in
1974, Mr. Hodgson leaves his wife and moves out, leaving
Peggy Hodgson to raise her four children alone.
And also in 1974, the eldest Hodgson boy, Johnny, is sent to
a boarding school for maladjusted boys for reasons

(40:48):
unknown. But residential schools like
that had become more and more common in the 70s.
The. Hodgson family lived at 284
Green St. a council house in Brimsdowne, Enfield, London,
England. They had lived there for 13
years without any activity and the council house had been built
in the 1920s or 30s. What is a council house, you

(41:12):
say? Is that right?
Did I hear you right? Did I hear you just ask what a
council house is? Well, that info dumb will come
later, but in yet another nutshell, council houses or
council estates are public housing or social housing built
and managed by local government,funded by the central
government, for working class families, the ill or the

(41:32):
disabled. OK, there's a small info dump.
You know what? We're just going to get out of
the way right now. We're going to get out of the
way right now because I have heard some Americans compare
council houses to Section 8 housing in America, which really
isn't true. Section 8 allows tenants to
choose their own housing within the price private rental market
because America, whereas councilhouse tenants reside in

(41:53):
government owned properties thatare built explicitly for the
purpose of public housing. And though this story happens in
1977, when you look to 1981 in three households in England and
Wales lived in council houses and actually 50% of houses in
Scotland lived in council houses.
So at the time it was extremely common for a family, especially

(42:15):
one with a single mother, to live in a council house.
Even comparing council houses tothe projects in America isn't
really an apples to apples comparison either for many
reasons. But OK.
OK, I'm sorry, I'm going to write it in.
While we're on the topic of council homes though,
historically there's actually a stereotype that families living

(42:35):
in council estates were much more likely to experience
ghostly or poltergeistly phenomena.
Specifically either because theywere seen to be more
superstitious and uneducated, which is rude, or because people
said that these families living in these council homes were
trying to get the local council to move them to a different,

(42:58):
possibly better slash not haunted flat.
The term was even coined councilestate ghost and has even led to
at least a handful of modern dayhorror movies, namely His house
which was horrifying and I couldn't finish it.
It was too scary for me. Also the discovered and

(43:20):
creatively named A haunting and council house, which feels a bit
on the nose, but I'll allow it. All right.
Where were we before? OK all right, all right, all
right, right. Right.
Enfield, London. Enfield is in North London so
it's about an hour ride N on thetube from Buckingham Palace,
which when I wrote this for somereason I felt like Buckingham

(43:43):
Palace was a good frame of reference for you in terms of in
terms of where in London Enfieldis.
Hopefully that's true. The time the setting is late
August. Janet will be starting at a new
school the next week, something she is very much not looking
forward to. And inside the council house at

(44:06):
284 Green St. on the 31st of August.
Peggy Hodgson calls Emergency Services 999 and the rest is
literal paranormal history. Fiction versus reality.
So if you've seen The Conjuring 2, you may think you know this

(44:27):
story, and that would be fair. Not only is the movie said to be
based on a true story, but the end credits intersperse real
photos taken in 1977 and 1978 alongside modern staged photos
that are meant to look like legitimate photos.
And I've talked before about howcommon it is in horror movie to

(44:49):
claim that a story is based on atrue story, regardless of how
true the true story actually is.Like The Amityville Horror and
The Exorcist. Though for me it was The Blair
Witch Project that left me psychologically scarred as I
fully believed the found footagepremise but showing the real
photos beside the staged ones. It's clearly intended to give

(45:12):
the audience the impression thateverything in the movie really
was true. And not just the movie either.
The movie was based on the Enfield story as published in
The Demonologist by Gerald Brittle.
The allegedly true case files ofthe Warrens Reminder Gerald
Brittle has, since writing the book, called Everything in The

(45:32):
Demonologist complete fiction. Ed and Lorraine didn't write
their own books, you see. They had their agents hire
authors to write the books for them.
The tall tale told in the The tall tale told The Demonologist
is mostly nonsense, but it does provide a fairly accurate
transcription of the recordings that Ed made of Janet and Co.

(45:53):
At least when it comes to The Conjuring 2, the third movie in
The Conjuring franchise that earned $321.8 million in the box
office. The demon hunting elephant in
the room is of course the Warrens themselves.
Famous self-proclaimed demonologist Ed Warren, who only

(46:15):
started calling himself a demonologist after the
popularity and widespread panic of The Exorcist mind you.
And Ed's wife Lorraine, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant and
light transmedium, did in fact visit the Hodgson family for
like a few hours, maybe a coupledays.

(46:35):
OK, four days at most, with mostof that time being after the
activity died down. The Warrens didn't even show up
at infield until like 8 months into the investigation.
The Hodgson's told Play Fair that they didn't even remember
talking to the Warrens at all, but we do have audio recordings

(46:57):
of Ed interviewing them, so I guess that that just means that
the Warrens weren't that memorable.
I do find it particularly noteworthy, however, that in the
press kits. For The Conjuring.
Two, that Janet and Margaret both recorded video for in order
to be used as promos at various media outlets that they both

(47:17):
tell a very different story. Suddenly, Janet says that
actually she remembers them veryclearly because when Ed and
Lorraine showed up, they broughtwith them a quote UN quote warm
comfort and that she could tell that they were there to actually
help the family, not just to gawk at them.
Now, does that not fit just a little too conveniently with the

(47:39):
sanitized Warren lore that Lorraine had baked into her life
rights agreement? We even see in another promo
video for The Conjuring 2 that Margaret fangirls about seeing
Lorraine. But what she actually gushes
about isn't how much she missed Lorraine because she remembered
Lorraine and because they had obviously interacted when she
was a child going through a particularly traumatizing period

(48:03):
of her life. No, actually, Margaret just
fangirls because she says I've seen your movies.
I've seen you in the movies. So the girls, now women, even
walked the red carpet with Lorraine for the opening of The
Conjuring 2 movie all dolled up.It was actually kind of cute.

(48:25):
This is just, however, another example of the movie showing
real photos alongside staged photos.
An example I'm pretty sure of ostension, which is effectively
fiction reversing into reality. See the recent scary movies and
TV shows use occult consultants or religious advisors isn't

(48:46):
because they feel passionate about getting it right.
It's actually done to conflate fiction and reality, especially
via authority bias. Sure, maybe a witch who's acting
as an an occult consultant for the Craft doesn't sound like an
authority figure. She's not a doctor or a cop or a
politician or whatever, but she is an authority on witchcraft.

(49:10):
So yeah, authority bias. These movie makers really do
know exactly what they're doing.So let's just be clear.
The Warrens were not household names, especially not in the UK.
No one invited them to investigate.
The Society for Psychical Research had that covered, and
they definitely wouldn't ask some American hucksters to muck
about in their business. The movie The Conjuring 2

(49:32):
portrays Ed and Lorraine as heroically showing up and
solving the case. Because obviously it was demons
that was the problem the whole time.
And then Ed and Lorraine, especially Ed, warmed the
children's hearts with a stirring rendition of Elvis.
No, really, they have a whole scene where Ed is playing an

(49:54):
acoustic guitar in the Hodgson'sliving room while singing I
Can't Help Falling in Love With You while Lorraine gazes
lovingly at her husband with stars in her eyes and remind
reminder, this is the husband who she definitely didn't need
to put a clause in her life rights about to ensure that

(50:14):
their relationship was portrayedsolely as wholesome and saintly
and that no movie could ever depict Ed having an affair or
sex with minors. Oh, wait, no, Lorraine did have
to do that. Yeah, she definitely did.
Interesting, another detail thatirritated me about the movie was
the ham fisted edition of a Ouija board as the cause for all

(50:37):
the activity in the home. Like yes obviously it's a good
plot device because we've seen it in the Exorcist in Paranormal
Activity, but why do we need it here?
There is no Ouija board in the real Enfield case, so why
include it? I have a hunch it's because the
activity starting out of the blue just doesn't make sense,
narratively speaking. There needed to be a catalyst

(50:58):
for one, and they needed to makesure that the audience
understood that the entity in this house was demonic, hence
readily defeated by Ed and Lorraine.
Except, hold on a second, wait aminute.
I had AI had a thought and I just checked my copy of the
Demonologist, The allegedly truestories of the Warrens, and
according to the Demonologist, it was Ed.

(51:21):
Yeah, Ed says in The Demonologist that it was all
caused by Ouija boards. So that's where the Ouija board
concept came from. That actually makes way more
sense. He had way more motivation to
convince people that the poltergeist is actually a demon
than the film makers did, Although I'm sure it was
convenient for the film makers too.
Also, fun fact, in 1967, according to Parker Brothers,

(51:43):
Ouija boards outsold Monopoly, and that was before the Exorcist
movie even came out. Annoyingly, I can't find any
data that shows whether sales dipped or climbed in 1971 or
1973 when the book and movie TheExorcist came out, but I bet
they were flying off the shelvesliterally.

(52:06):
All right, you know what else? You know what else grinds my
Garrus is? There was no Crooked Man figure
in the real case. This was a character.
If you haven't seen The Conjuring 2, clearly that's what
I've been talking about. But in The Conjuring 2, there is
this Crooked Man character in the movie who is very creepy and
actually my favorite part of themovie.

(52:28):
But it just seemed unnecessary or excessive, perhaps redundant.
What was the point? We didn't need, we don't, we
didn't need the Crooked Man. We had Bill Wilkins.
I just didn't think we needed it.
But he was very spooky and it was, it was done to good effect.
It was just not accurate whatsoever.
I don't know, maybe they were thinking that they could do a

(52:49):
spin off movie about the CrookedMan.
Maybe they still plan to becauseyou know, they have like a 40
year plan like with the Marvel movies, you know they have like
the next 500 films already planned in The Conjuring
universe. Now Ed in The Demonologist
claims that he travelled to Enfield on three separate
occasions and during one of those trips spent an entire week

(53:12):
there. If he did spend a week there, he
must have been sightseeing because he wasn't spending any
of that time investigating the Hodgson home or Janet.
Ed claimed that during his investigation that a rock the
size of a softball materialized out of thin air in front of him
and dropped to the ground. And of course, when she'd know

(53:34):
it, when he took it to an unnamed geologist at the
University of London, which he apparently has connections at,
this mysterious geologist claimed that it was a type of
rock that could only be found inone place in the entire world,
the Isle of Wight, an island offthe South Coast of England.

(53:54):
I feel like he could have gone bigger with that fib.
I'm actually not even sure that Ed would even know what the Isle
of Wight is or that it exists. So I kind of suspect that that
was a detail that Brittle came up with when he was writing the
book for them personally. That's just my take.
Even in the short time that the Warrens spent investigating the

(54:16):
case, Ed was so rude and so ungrateful that Peggy, Janet's
mom, had a go at him. Which if you're British, you
know, that's a big deal. Having a go, that's huge.
Peggy was even quoted saying that she hadn't wanted the
Warrens there in the 1st place. Playfair said of the Warrens

(54:37):
that they just wanted to make some money out of it.
In fact, he stated that Ed specifically said to him, in a
way I imagine as Sato Vache, we could make a lot of money.
And not only that, but Janet's aunt and uncle who lived down
the street, Sylvia and John Burcombe, reported that Ed
consistently and persistently wanted to talk money with them,

(55:01):
with John specifically saying that Ed was trying to capitalize
on the case. They described Ed's dishonesty
and arrogance, but they definitely did not describe was
Ed serenading them with Elvis. And now let's move on to
evidence. There's quite a lot of low

(55:21):
hanging fruit when it comes to dodgy evidence.
The Enfield case, which I think is completely fair considering
the sheer overwhelming amount ofstuff that they recorded,
probably the lowest of said low hanging fruit would be the
photographic evidence of Janet levitating quote UN quote or
being thrown quote UN quote fromher bed.

(55:44):
If you've only ever seen one or two shots of these photos, you
might consider it to be legit. But if you look at it in the
context of the other photos thatwere taken around it, because
this was shot from a camera witha remote control that would
allow the photo to take like a burst of photos one after the
other. If you actually look at all the

(56:05):
photos taken in succession. And actually, if you, if you
want to just find, you just Google this because there's GIFs
out there that people have made of putting all the photos
together as like a stop motion. And it is just very clearly like
unquestionably cut and dry. A little girl jumping out of

(56:27):
bed, like literally, you know, like kids do how they jump from
a bed because it's like a trampoline.
That's literally all that it is.There's no question.
And the way that her hair falls,the way their hair moves like in
with gravity, like her, her hairon the clothes, her the way her
knees are bent up. There's just, it's
unquestionably not paranormal. This is the most mundane thing

(56:50):
that happened. Just kids jumping on beds and
claiming that they weren't. I mean, come on.
What is more, what's more classic of a childhood
experience than jumping on the bed and claiming that no, it
wasn't. It wasn't jumping on the bed.
She was, she was just jumping onthe bed.
So you know what? Google it.
I guarantee you, you're going tobe like, never mind.
Those pictures aren't scary anymore.

(57:12):
So the famous photos that peopleassociate with the case are
really just Janet being a kid and having a laugh.
But as we see time and time again in this case, the people
who wanted to believe did. Oh boy, did they.
And they do. Not that there's anything wrong
with them. Much is made about the police's
statement about the activity that was witnessed in the house.

(57:34):
WPC Carolyn Heaps did go on record and camera asserting that
she really had seen a chair moveand had heard mysterious
knocking on Green Street. But I've seen so many people say
that like, oh, it was just so suspicious about the case.
I wasn't really sure about it, you know, I don't know, I wasn't
sure. But then WPC Heaps, her

(57:55):
testimony convinced me. OK, I mean, I kind of get that
right, because, like, cops have seen some shit and they're
trained to see things that are out of the ordinary.
But are they trained to see the supernatural?
Are they trained to figure out if something paranormal is
happening? You know, I don't know about
that. I know they see stuff, but, you

(58:16):
know, I don't know. And also, this has always
bothered me personally. Like, I didn't share where this
is coming from, but I do find itstrange that we consider
authority figures to be more trustworthy sources when it
comes to the paranormal. As if doctors and cops can't be
superstitious or religious. I mean, even scientists can be
super religious. And I think that that has

(58:37):
something to do with it. It's actually called something,
a little something you might have heard, a little ditty you
might have heard called authority bias, which I didn't
mention earlier. So authority bias is human
tendency to be more influenced by the opinions and judgements
of authority figures. And part of authority bias
includes uniforms, meaning an authority figure in a uniform

(59:00):
has even more weight than everyone else.
So for this case to start out right out the gate with a police
officer in uniform speaking on camera to the news, making a
statement that something unexplained happened in that
house might really have just doused loads of petrol on the

(59:22):
fire. Also, I think it's worth noting
that the police visited the house around 1:00 AM, which is a
spooky time of day. And you know, on top of that,
they were told that in order forthe knocking sounds to happen,
the lights needed to be turned off.
Why? Why do you think that would be?
Were we trying to hide something?

(59:45):
Is it because maybe the people that are doing the knocking are
not yet good enough at it and they need the lights to be off
otherwise someone will catch them knocking?
I don't know, just a thought. I'm just footballing.
I don't know, what do I know? So I think understandably WPC
Heaps was spooked and as I always try to remind everybody,

(01:00:05):
you can feel afraid and not be in danger.
So her belief that what she saw was unexplainable doesn't make
it actually unexplainable, it just means that she didn't have
an explanation for it at the moment.
And I would just behoove anyone that's listening to this that
might find themselves afraid of anything.

(01:00:27):
Honestly, but especially around 3:00 AM, if you're afraid of
something and you're in the darkand you're alone in your house
and you're scared, honestly justremind yourself that just
because something is unexplainable doesn't mean it's
unexplained. It just means you don't have an
explanation for it in that moment.
I find that reassuring. Hopefully some of you do as

(01:00:48):
well. And actually, though, before we
move on from this, I do want to pause because Americans, you
know, we don't use the same weird police acronyms that they
do in the UK. So, you know, I kind of figured
out PC police something. What is it?
Police constable? OK, but what's the W for?
I asked myself. Woman.

(01:01:09):
It's for woman because until 1999.
Q Prince Until 1999, women in the UK police had their rank
title prefixed with the word woman or the little letter W
Wow, wow, wow, wow. The W does not stand for wow
again, the W does stand for woman.

(01:01:31):
I don't know, that's just shocking.
Like that's why was it, why did that?
Why we why were we doing that until 1999?
That feels late. I don't even like it really in I
don't really like it in 1977, honestly.
Anyway, that's what the W in WPCheap stands for.
All right, so yet another thing that seems to bring some
credibility to the story is thatthe Hodgson's original

(01:01:52):
poltergeist situation broke, quote UN quote in the paper,
quote UN quote. But which paper exactly?
Oh, here it is, the Daily Mirror.
Oh, So is that like a totally normal newspaper with loads of
journalistic integrity? Perhaps because one of the
documentaries that I watched claimed that the Daily Mirror

(01:02:13):
took itself very seriously and like didn't do fluff pieces or,
you know, whatever. No, they were a very serious
paper. So OK, let's see, let's look up,
let's look up. Let's, let's just look one up.
1979. Here's a cover from 19/19/79 of
the Daily Mirror. And here we go, the headline
above, a photo of the apparent Princess of Monaco who was

(01:02:38):
wearing a low cut revealing neckline.
The headline on the front page reads Princess Peekaboob.
Do you get it? It's like a play on Peekaboo,
but boob because she's wearing arevealing.
There's a little bit of side boob in the photo.

(01:02:59):
That's the headline on the DailyMirror.
Princess Peekaboob. And then the article goes on to
make a lot of breast puns. You know, it's it's OK.
It's kind of funny. But also, this is not a serious
paper. This is this is a tabloid.
OK, so a tabloid broke the story.

(01:03:21):
And listen, I love tabloids. I don't know, maybe some of our
younger listeners aren't even aware of what a tabloid is
because the way that news is these days, it's completely
indistinguishable from tabloid news.
But back in the day, while you were, like, at the supermarket
checkout, you would see a tabloid paper, which had, of
course, you know, gossip stuff, but it would also have creepy,

(01:03:44):
weird, strange, paranormal happenings.
So that's why I liked tabloids as a kid because there would be
like aliens and Bigfoot UFO sightings.
And I don't know why I said Bigfoot UFOI guess I was like
putting it, this isn't written. I'm just unable to speak
properly today. Anyway, weird stories or you

(01:04:05):
would hear about Elvis sightings.
And again, for our younger listeners, some people say that
there's a conspiracy that Elvis actually faked his death.
And so when you would pick up these tabloids, sometimes they
would be like Elvis sighted after faking his death.
Anyway, that's the that's the Daily Mirror.
That's what broke. That's what broke the story.

(01:04:26):
Now, did the BBC also come and interview them?
Yes, of course. Of course they did.
But you know what? What?
What are you going to do? You can't let the Daily Mirror
scoop you. Come on.
All right, so now we've talked about all that.
Let's talk about Bill. Bill Wilkins in 18.
Nope. In 19.

(01:04:47):
Yep, in December 1977, Gross hadbeen telling his adult son all
about the Enfield case, coaxing him to come visit the house with
him to see for himself. So David Gross's son, David
Gross, told his father that he'donly visit the Hodgson home with
him if the poltergeist started to talk.

(01:05:09):
What seems to have been the verynext day, Gross said in Janet's
earshot, if not directly to her.Now all I need is the voices to
talk. Well, why not?
Mr. Groff was talking about it about 8:30.
He said all we need now is the voices to talk.

(01:05:31):
And so, wouldn't you know it, later that same night, the same
night that he said I need this stuff to start talking, Janet
conveniently begins speaking in the voice for the first time.
The deep, gruff voice with a thick cockney accent that was

(01:05:52):
very clearly mimicking Morris Gross, even though the kids
themselves all sort of had a little bit of a cockney accent.
And though Gross says multiple times that she uses the voice
without so much of a tremble of her lips, there's at least one
video recording of Janet speaking in the voice, wherein
her mouth is very clearly moving.

(01:06:12):
So OK. Anyway, Margaret also began
using a version of the Bill voice, but she just wasn't as
good at it. And after a few months, even
Billy starts imitating the voice.
Shocker. Like, of course he does.
He went sit on the fun. He's probably terrified of it in
the beginning, but then, you know, probably turned into a fun
game anyway. But the voice isn't Bill at

(01:06:36):
first. No, no, no, no, no.
They run through a gamut of names.
No, I didn't say slew that. They run through a gamut of
names, all using practically thesame voice, occasionally barking
like a dog throughout or meowinglike a cat.
Before there was Bill, there was, and this is a non
exhaustive list, Joe Watson, Fred.

(01:06:57):
Tom Dirty Dick, Dirty Dick, Andrew Gardner, Stuart Certaint
or Stuart Certain misses Haylock.
Bill Haylock, Not Bill Wilkins. Bill Haylock misses Oakland,
Charlie Brown, Charlie Zebedee, Ralph, Claude and Barney, and

(01:07:19):
also more that I couldn't quite make out in some of the
recordings. And finally, the voice lands on
Bill Wilkins and largely stays there.
The family's pet goldfish died. And when Gross asks the spirit
through Janet who killed the goldfish, Janet, I mean Geoffrey

(01:07:39):
Preciale, another new name that I forgot to mention earlier,
claims that he electrocuted the fish using spirit energy.
And then when the budgie AKA Parakeet dies, it's assumed to
have also been due to the poltergeist.
Also, by the way, a note on the parakeet AKA the budgie, they

(01:08:00):
brought the bird into the house shortly before all of the
activity started. And apparently the parakeet
belonged to a woman who died. And so at first, Gross kind of
suspected that the parakeet might have been behind all the
paranormal activity. OK, back to Bill.
Something Bill once said is alsothe nail in the proverbial

(01:08:21):
coffin for people on the fence about the case.
So if it's not WPC Carolyn Heaps, it's Bill saying
something in particular that hasmade people true believers.
And what he said is definitely very scary at first blush, but
just wait. So Janet, in Bill's voice
claimed he died of a hemorrhage sitting in his chair and he was

(01:08:44):
72 years old and he died and then he went blind.
Everybody makes a really big deal about the fact that, as it
turned out, there actually had been a Bill Wilkins who lived
and died in the house. And that later Bill Wilkins son
confirmed that his dad did die sitting in a chair in that very
House of a brain hemorrhage. Except that actually Bill

(01:09:06):
Wilkins was only 61 when he died, not 72.
And according to his death certificate, which you can find
on like findagrave.com, I think it was, he died of a heart
attack, not a hemorrhage. And it's hardly supernatural for
neighbors to discuss morbid stuff like the death of a
neighbor. And it's also even less weird
for that sort of gossip to make it to the ears of the Hutchinson

(01:09:28):
kids who lived there for 13 years.
People are morbid. Kids are super morbid.
I've seen a lot of people argue that there's just no way for
Janet to have ever possibly known that information about
Bill. But like, really, it's
impossible. I, I don't know the, I don't
know, that's the word I would use in this instance.
There's a lot of really creepy stuff that happens in the infill

(01:09:49):
poltergeist. I just don't feel like this is
one of them. And it's just not, it's not,
it's not doing it for me. So Terry Wilkins, the real
Bill's son, who verified that actually, yes, that is how he
died. Terry told Gross that it didn't
sound like his father, actually,who had been a very quiet man.

(01:10:11):
But then when he hears the recording of Janet saying in her
Bill voice that he went blind and died of a hemorrhage, and
Terry Wilkins then says verbatim, that's exactly how he
died multiple times. He says it over and over on
camera. But that's not how he died, is
it? He didn't have a hemorrhage.

(01:10:32):
He had a heart attack. So I don't know.
I feel like obviously Terry Wilkins just didn't.
Maybe he just never even knew exactly what killed his father.
I mean, when the 70s, I feel like it's fair that maybe you
didn't actually know. I they probably barely spoke
about it. You know, they things were just
different back then. So I think that he's not lying.

(01:10:55):
I think this is probably a case that's more like when a psychic
is doing a cold reading and you conveniently forget all of the
misses and you only remember thehits.
That's kind of what it feels like with Terry Wilkins saying
that. And also, I should be noted that
an acquaintance of the real BillWilkins described him as
generous and respectable and said specifically that Bill did

(01:11:18):
not use foul language. And as a reminder, the bill that
Janet claimed to be speaking through her was almost entirely
made-up of foul language. Like super inappropriate
language. Very rude.
Seems uncharacteristic of the real Bill Wilkins.
I should probably specify here that all of the people involved

(01:11:40):
in the investigation that fully believed that everything was
true, they all were so convincedby Janet's voice, they were
saying there's no way that this little girl can make the scary
voice. There's no way, it's impossible,
no way this 11 year old girl could do this.
And they brought in a voice coach who said, oh, there's no
way that she could ever possiblyuse that voice for that long

(01:12:02):
without getting a sore throat and all these other things that
were. It's just, it's crazy to me.
And so I want you to hear a clipof the voice.
If you haven't heard it, this isjust.
If you have heard it, I'm going to remind you.
I want to play a clip so that you can hear what it is that all
of these adults and experts claim to be so convinced by.

(01:12:27):
No, no. Who's there?
Doctor. Doctor Who?
These choices are here. I'm invisible.
You're invisible. Why are you invisible?
I tell my GHOST. Like, OK, OK, very convincing.

(01:12:53):
So Ray Allen, famous ventriloquist, visited the house
and concluded that Janet's bill voice was just a vocal trick,
while they also had some scientists visit to prove
something about electromagnetism, I think, and
the use of Tibetan, Tibetan, wow, Tibetan throat singing
techniques. Sometimes the simplest answer is

(01:13:13):
the right answer. And listen, I never thought that
I would ever say this, but I trust the ventriloquist.
I trust the ventriloquist. Not only that, but the skeptical
magician Melbourne, Christopher wrote in his book Evidence of
Ventriloquial Fakery. I feel like I nailed.
That ventriloquial? Come on.

(01:13:35):
Evidence of ventriloquial fakerywas even taken as proof of And
then I mess up proof, Come on was taken even as proof of
authenticity. According to Playfair, the
connection between Janet and thevoice is obviously very close.
There have been several occasions when she says
something it obviously meant to say, and vice versa.

(01:13:59):
Would she slip up like that if she was faking the whole thing?
I love it because the next line that Melbourne Christopher
writes is, is he kidding? Because no, seriously, is he
kidding? No, he's not kidding.
This is what I'm saying about the adult for their problem in
this story. OK, so Bill the Poltergeist,

(01:14:23):
which remember, poltergeists aren't dead people, but that's
fine. So Bill the Poltergeist claimed
a lot of nonsense. Bill the Poltergeist claimed a
lot of nonsensical things that Gross and Playfair seemed
completely unconcerned about. Like how Bill had 68 dogs which
were 6 foot tall Chihuahuas, butthen actually, no, they were

(01:14:46):
Labradors, which Janet found hilarious.
Which I get because I laugh at my own jokes all the time too.
Literally all day, every day. I'm cracking myself up.
So, Janet, I feel you, girl. And so recall that Morris
Gross's son, David Gross, said he'd only visit the Hodgson home
if the spirit started talking. And recall also that Gross and

(01:15:07):
then immediately said as much asJanet.
And then Janet immediately conjured up a scary voice that
exact same day. So David Gross, Morris's son,
visits the house just as he promised his father that he
would do now that the poltergeist was talking.
Janet, upon meeting him with just the two of them in her
bedroom, makes this man, this grown man, turn around and face

(01:15:30):
the wall in order to speak to the spirit.
Only then does she speak in the deep voice of a supposed dead
man. And what does this entity ask
poor David? Why do big girls get periods?
And also, let's not forget, why do men wear that plastic thing

(01:15:50):
when in bed with a woman? Yes, those are the questions
that Bill, the 72 year old man is asking.
So poor David calls for backup. He immediately is so flustered
and immediately opens the door. Like help, help, help.

(01:16:11):
So someone else comes in, another grown man.
I think I'm getting there's so many characters in this story so
please forgive me. Anyway, he he brings in another
grown man as backup and makes her ask this other guy the same
questions. Also having to face the wall.
I think that maybe David Gross learned how periods work along
with Janet, honestly, because hewas so flustered.

(01:16:35):
Poor guy, right? So none of the video that they
recorded captured any paranormalactivity beyond Janet's evil
little voice, but it did capturea few gems.
Like my favorite one, Janet saysyour face now ghost with a
shitty little smile. And Margaret, barely able to

(01:16:57):
contain her Glee, is giggling and tells her to shut up.
How does it feel to be haunted by a poltergeist?
It's not haunted shut. Up Why isn't it haunted?
I don't know. I mean, they were just having a
blast sometimes. I mean, sometimes they

(01:17:18):
definitely weren't, but I think sometimes they were.
And I also see comments on some of these videos saying, do you
guys not understand that laughing, that laughter is like
a nervous response and and it's a stress response and you know.
Yeah, no, for sure because I do too.
I also laugh inappropriately. Like it's really embarrassing
actually. Like, it's just my immediate

(01:17:40):
response to something stressful is to laugh.
Like what? That's not what this is.
They're having a good time. OK, They're messing around.
All right, So if you're close tothis case, I am sure that you
are probably thinking, if not screaming, But what about the
tape over her mouth experiment? OK, Jeez.
Fine. OK, let's talk about it.

(01:18:00):
So according to Gross and Playfair's own records, the
first time Gross tried the experiment to tape Janet's mouth
shut to see if she could still use the bill voice with her
mouth shut, the results were subdued, quote UN quote, which
seems to mean that she was able to make some sort of sound,
though the details really aren'tthere.

(01:18:22):
But I think the lack of detail, I feel like it's telling and
that it wasn't very successful, but it apparently wasn't a
complete failure. Trying again, Gross shifted
gears and instead had Janet holdwater or cold tea.
I've seen both referenced in thenotes in her mouth to see if she
could speak. Unfortunately she only made a

(01:18:42):
few grunts after spitting the water or tea out or swallowing
some of it, and she nearly choked trying.
It's also worth noting that the American magician Melbourne
Christopher successfully replicated Janet's success with
the tape over her mouth by usinga ventriloquist technique.
But weirdly, if you read some ofthe accounts of the other

(01:19:04):
witnesses that were there even associated with the SPR, they do
claim that Janet's bill voice was heard with total and
complete clarity, even with her mouth taped shut as as if she
were just speaking normally. It actually reminds me of
something that I read in The Exorcist Effect.

(01:19:25):
So apparently when they were making, apparently, apparently
when they were making the movie Rosemary's Baby, they couldn't
quite figure out how to manage making a baby look like it had
evil demon eyes. To the point where they were
even considering somehow figuring out how to use an
actual cat to get the effect dress.
Dressing a cat up like a baby, perhaps.
But the director, Roman Polanski, said no way, we're not

(01:19:48):
going to show the baby at all. If I do my job right, the
audience will think they saw thebaby.
And that's exactly what happened.
Y'all literally that's what happened.
Before anyone had even turned turned the coin, before anyone
had coined the term the Mandela Effect, people were convinced

(01:20:12):
that the movie Rosemary's Baby had been edited to remove the
shot of the baby that they so clearly remembered having seen.
But it was never there in the 1st place.
But they're convinced that they saw it to the point where there
was even an article published about it saying, I can't believe
that they edited this scene. Like why would they have edited

(01:20:33):
the scene out? Like that's a travesty.
You need to have that. The scene wasn't there.
The scene wasn't there. This many people just remembered
that it was there, but it was never there to begin with.
You see how you see what I'm saying about how they're maybe,
maybe they're misremembering thesuccess of the tape over the

(01:20:53):
mouth or the cold tea in the mouth experiment.
Because, look, our minds are just so much more powerful than
we give them credit for. And what really stood out to me
with this story was how adults, mostly men, kept insisting over
and over again that all the weird stuff happening couldn't
possibly be done by little girls.

(01:21:15):
Like, oh, Janet couldn't possibly have made that gruff
voice for so long. Or oh, Janet couldn't possibly
have moved that thing, it was too heavy for her.
Or Janet couldn't have fooled somany adults.
What, like it's hard? What, like it's hard?
Why are we so easily dismissing Janet and Margaret just because

(01:21:36):
they're little girls? I was a little girl once.
I know how evil they could be. Devious, cunning, and entirely
dedicated to the bit. You will not find someone more
dedicated to a bit than a littlegirl.
Little girls also lie like theirlives depend on it.

(01:21:57):
I lied my strange little ass off.
Lying is actually, by the way, ahealthy part of development for
kids. Maybe not to this extent, but
still, it's a healthy part of development.
And As for the voice of Bill, what do you mean she couldn't do
it? What do you mean?
Based on what? You know, Gross insisted that
that vocal coach had said that Janet couldn't possibly sustain

(01:22:20):
that voice for so long without damaging the vocal cords.
OK, Yeah, well whatever. He said that if he had done the
voice for just 5 minutes that his throat would be hoarse and
that was his reason for saying that she couldn't possibly be
doing that, be doing the voice that long because Morris
couldn't do that voice for 5 minutes.

(01:22:41):
Skill issue, Morris, skill issue.
Also remember, you know, they didn't have iPads back then.
OK, so the only video game even inside of any home at that point
was Atari's home. Pong.
Literally just pong. And it would have cost nearly
$600 in today's money, which a single parent family living in a

(01:23:04):
council house certainly wouldn'thave access to.
The family had only 1 shared TV.That would have been the best
form of escape for all of the Hodgson kids.
So actually, isn't it interesting that despite all of
the furniture getting tossed around, knocked over, and
generally assaulted, that the TVwas the only thing that went

(01:23:25):
unharmed the entire time? Interesting.
I just think we need to give weird little girls some more
credit here, that's all. That's all I'm asking when
Melbourne Christopher, the American magician and ardent
skeptic. And by the way, pause, pause,
pause, pause, pause. I am so here for all of these
ardent skeptics slash magicians.You've got Harry Houdini, you've

(01:23:49):
got James Rand, the amazing James Randi.
Those are the 2 that are at the top of my head.
If you want to hear more about magicians slash skeptics like
Houdini and Randy, let me know Madam strangewas@gmail.com.
So when Melbourne Christopher visited Green Street to see the
case for himself, he was unimpressed.

(01:24:10):
He even caught Janet trying to sneak down the stairs after she
pretended to go to bed, presumably to cause mischief.
He stated that quote UN quote, the poltergeist was nothing more
than the antics of a little girlwho wanted to cause trouble and
who was very, very clever. There's even historical
precedence for weird little girls outsmarting a bunch of

(01:24:33):
incredibly smart adults. Stay with me here, because we're
going to briefly discuss a few other cases if it pleases the
court. There's the Cottingley Fairies
hoax, for starters. So in 1917, two cousins, Elsie,
16, and Francis, 9, captured photographs of what appeared to
be miniature fairies dancing andposing with them.

(01:24:53):
The girls insisted that they were real, and for some reason
many people, some very smart people, fell for it.
Edward Gardner and Occultist took an extreme interest in the
photos as undeniable evidence offairies and wanted badly to have
the girls capture even more photos.
He brought them cameras and plates, because this was before

(01:25:15):
film, mind you, and he asked them to go back out into the
Glen where they'd spotted the fairies before, and capture even
more fairies. So they did.
They did just that. They took two more photos with
fairies and the photos, but theytold their mother the fairies
wouldn't show up unless the girls were left fully alone.
So off their mother went, leaving them to their Trixie

(01:25:37):
devices unsupervised. Gardner even had three
photographic companies examine the photos of the fairies to
test for tampering, including Kodak.
Kodak came back saying that while the photos didn't appear
to have been altered, they couldn't really comment on
whether that means they're actual true fairies instead of
photos. Gardner believed that the Kodak

(01:25:59):
technicians might not have examined the photographs
entirely objectively, observing that one had commented.
After all, as fairies couldn't be true, the photographs must
have been faked somehow. I don't know.
Like, how is this right? Is that the right accent for
this time period in 1917? Yeah, I'm going to.
OK, We're going to move on. I think that was right.
Gardner tried to get the girls to even take more photograph,

(01:26:22):
but the girls took no further pictures, having long tired of
the fairy shtick. They told him that they hadn't
seen any more fairies, but Gardner claimed to have actually
seen a lot of fairies himself, and then even went on to write
at length about his observationsof the fairies that he was
seeing, even when the girls had grown bored with the roost.

(01:26:42):
Which is weird. Both Elsie and Francis later
admitted that they had only played along with him out of
mischief and that they considered him a fake.
The pictures even came to the attention of author Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, who fully believed in the legitimacy of the photos,
considering them clear and visible evidence of supernatural

(01:27:03):
phenomena. Phenomena.
If you can't place where you've heard Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
name before, he literally created Sherlock Holmes.
That's what he wrote Sherlock Holmes like, super genius, mind
palace, etcetera. Sherlock Holmes, which in the
books he actually called a brainaddict.

(01:27:25):
Well, that's not quite as cool as a palace.
Anyway. Sherlock Holmes would never fall
for such trickery, but Doyle sure did.
It is worth noting that just like with Morris Gross and his
obsession with Janet and provingpoltergeists were real, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle also lost oneof his children, his son, in
World War One, which was actively happening and wouldn't

(01:27:48):
end for another year after the fairy debacle.
Grief really does do a number onus, y'all.
So those two little girls stuck their story until Holmes passed
away, only then revealing the hoax, seeing that they didn't
want to embarrass poor Doyle, who had been such a staunch
supporter of their fairy photography.

(01:28:09):
The trick they used? They traced illustrations of
fairies from a children's book and stuck them onto hat pins.
So what, like it's hard? In 1983, Elsie was quoted as
saying 2 village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle.
Well, we could only keep quiet. And in that same interview,

(01:28:31):
Francis said. I never even thought of it as
being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a
bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they
were taken in. They wanted to be taken in.
Yes, you're right, they did wantto be taken in.
Are you seeing how this is related to the current story?

(01:28:51):
They wanted to be taken in. This quote struck me by Fred
Grettings in The Unexplained. The story of the Cottingley
Fairies was only partly created by Elsie and Francis.
It was much more the creation ofthe media.
Moving on to a couple more hoaxers, there's also the Fox

(01:29:13):
sisters Kate, 16, and Maggie, 11, and their older sister Leah.
Around 1848 in Rochester, NY, the two younger girls decided to
scare their mother into thinkingthe ghost of a dead man was
haunting their house and accidentally became responsible
for the birth of spiritualism aswe know it.
Their ruse snowballed and escalated, and by 1849 they

(01:29:36):
performed their alleged mediumship to a paid audience
wherein they claimed the spiritsof the dead would communicate
with them via taps and knocks. William Crooks, the prominent
physicist and chemist who also attended the Royal College of
Chemistry, concluded the raps were genuine.
He sounds like a smart guy, so hmm strange.

(01:30:00):
In reality, the two youngest sisters had learned to take
advantage of their particular bone structure and their toes
and had taught themselves how tocrack their toe joints to make a
loud wrapping on the floor. Just like with the Cottingley
Fairy hoax, the girls tired of the game and eventually came
clean. But that ship had sailed.

(01:30:20):
It did nothing to slow down the spiritualist movement and the
new found obsession with seancesand contacting the dead.
A poltergeist was allegedly responsible, as poltergeists are
won't to do for starting fires at a farm.
In 1948 Illinois. A 13 year old girl named Wanit.

(01:30:41):
I'm not making this up. I did not just change the 1st
letter of Janet's name. Wanit also from a single parent
family, though in her case this little girl, her mother had left
as opposed to her father, so herfather was her caretaker.
So this little girl was made to move in with her aunt and uncle.
Everyone was baffled about the source of these mysterious fires

(01:31:03):
that kept appearing and hadn't started occurring until after
she moved in. And hmm, so strange.
We don't know where these fires are coming from or when they
started or why, but the fires eventually burned down multiple
buildings on the family's property, forcing them to move.
The fires started seemingly at random and seemed to only be
explained by pinning it on a poltergeist.

(01:31:25):
Which, OK, sure, this is what I'm saying about the the harm
and immediately jumping to paranormal conclusions instead
of trying to figure out what is a naturalistic explanation here.
Anyway, the local newspaper evenreported on the strange
phenomena of fires appearing somehow magically.
But when the family moved to thenew house, the Deputy Fire

(01:31:48):
Marshall had the sneaky idea to set a box of matches in
Plainview as a trap. An experiment, if you will.
Predictably, he later found thatthe matches had been moved, and
wouldn't you know it when it coincidently when it was
coincidentally nearby, she confessed to the fires.

(01:32:09):
And shocker, the poltergeist stopped lighting fires
immediately after. A psychiatrist who had met with
Janet no Wanit. A psychiatrist who met with
Wanit said she's a nice little kid caught in the middle of a
broken home. And then there's Matthew

(01:32:29):
Manning. I'm about to tie this up in a
neat little bow for you. Just wait.
The poltergeist case surroundingMatthew Manning, a then 11 year
old boy in 1967 Cambridge, England, is called one of the
most extraordinary outbreaks of poltergeist phenomena of the
20th century. Much like Enfield and many other

(01:32:51):
poltergeist cases, the activity with Matthew Manning started
with things like items being moved, knocking sounds, things
flying across the room, heavy furniture moving on its own, et
cetera. The activity, as usual, centered
around one child in particular, Matthew Manning.
His father Derek was the first to notice the unexplained
activity and it is, I think, also worth noting that Derek was

(01:33:13):
already interested in psychical research prior to his son
suddenly manifesting psychical phenomena in his own home.
Things escalated to a weird degree.
Spirits were allegedly using Matthew Manning's hand to write
messages, AKA automatic writing.Then one particular week in

(01:33:33):
1971600, some odd signatures appeared on the walls of
Matthew's bedroom, all in different handwriting, as if 600
different spirits had left theirautographs on the walls.
In 1974, just three years prior to the Enfield poltergeist case,
when Matthew Manning saw Uri Geller bending spoons on TV, he

(01:33:55):
was inspired to try it himself. Scientists and researchers even
studied Matthew's skill at metalbending.
And here's the bit with the bow that I'm tying for you.
In the Hodgson's house in Enfield, investigators with the
SPR found a torn out page of a magazine article all about
Matthew Manning's poltergeist activity and special powers.

(01:34:19):
In case I forgot to mention it earlier, Janet would bend
spoons. That was like a whole thing is
that she was able to bend spoons.
Although actually, if you look at Gross and Playfair's notes, I
think specifically she was unable to do it unless she was
left alone in a room and she wasunable to do it when supervised.

(01:34:40):
But that was one of the things that she was able to do.
Was Ben Spoons Interesting. It's almost as if Janet tore
that page out of the magazine and was like, yes, good.
This will keep me busy this summer, since the iPad hasn't
yet been invented. And to be clear, Janet and
Margaret were both caught on multiple instances playing

(01:35:01):
tricks. Playfair and Gross both reported
this, but were largely unbothered by it, dismissing
those occasions as the girls just seeing what they could get
away with. In fact, the men seem to be of
the mind that having caught the girls trying to trick them
actually made all the times thatthey hadn't caught the girls
tricking them even more likely to have been actual spiritual
phenomena. But I'm not.

(01:35:23):
Rather than having a good long think and saying to themselves,
I'm just now internally asking myself in quite a worried way
whether I might have made an error instead.
Said Playfair. And this house is haunted.
Janet's expression gave the gameaway at once, though I said

(01:35:45):
nothing about the incident. Later that day Gross gave her a
very good talking to, after which she spent a good hour in
the bathroom having a sulk. We never mentioned it again, and
I do not think she played any more such tricks.
The fact that I had spotted the trick at once encouraged me to
think that I would have spotted earlier tricks had there been
any, and the fact that Janet confessed without much prompting

(01:36:08):
suggested that she was not a natural liar.
So I've heard people, this is listen, I've heard people,
including Gross's own son, say that Gross had kids of his own.
So he was very familiar with what kids were like and he could
always tell when they were lying.
But could he? I think maybe this is OK.

(01:36:30):
I know it wasn't Gross that was saying that, but just look, bear
with me. Especially in the 70s, fathers
were more likely to be the parent working outside of the
home, leaving their wives as primary caretakers of the
children even when the fathers were home.
I mean, even today though, if a father says that his kids are so
well behaved with him while they're feral with mom, it's not

(01:36:54):
because that he's just that goodat parenting.
It's not because he's just that good with his kids.
It's not because his wife is being dramatic and that his kids
are always good. No, it's because his kids don't
feel as psychologically safe with him as they do with mom and
the instances where the mom is the main caretaker.

(01:37:17):
So obviously I'm not making a blanket statement.
If the father is the caretaker and the kids feel more
psychologically safe with the father, that is who they're
going to be less behaved with. But because this is the 70s and
that is not how it was, the mother was the main caretaker.
And so the father would be far less psychologically safe for
these kids. So if a kid doesn't feel as

(01:37:40):
psychologically safe with a caretaker, then they're not
going to be as bad, quote UN quote.
They're not going to act up as much.
It's much, it's much safer. It's it's much safer for kids to
explore limits and boundaries with the parent that they do
have a closer bond with and feelsafe enough to do so with.
So no, I highly doubt that any of the many men involved in this

(01:38:03):
case had any idea about what kids are actually truly capable
of when it comes to mischief andbad behavior.
As for how Janet and Margaret might have pulled off such a
convincing hoax, skeptical magician Melbourne Christopher
wrote about how such tricks can be done in other poltergeist
cases by other children. For instance, regarding the

(01:38:25):
Seaford, yeah, Seaford word. Regarding the Seaford
poltergeist case wherein the caps from bottles would
purportedly pop open in rooms noone was in.
This is a quote directly from his book Sears.
And hold on, I'll tell you in a second.

(01:38:47):
Here it is. I mentioned earlier that no one
saw a cap pop from a bottle. Noises were heard, then bottles
were found open on their sides. People assumed the noises were
made by the bottles. Could the bottles have been
opened and overturned before thenoise was made?
Can this simple strategy fool anyone?

(01:39:07):
Yes, it can. This is exactly the system I
used to baffle the riders and investigators who came to my
apartment. How were the Seaford noises?
Made. As Mr. Herman did not invite me
to his home to witness the phenomena, I cannot say
precisely. I do know that hearing is the
easiest of the five senses to deceive.

(01:39:29):
If a sound is heard in a house and someone says that came from
the bedroom and starts in that direction, others will follow
and accept the location. If a disturbance is expected in
a specific room, when a noise isheard, attention focuses on that
room. On one occasion, I leaned
against the door frame of my living room with my hands behind
my back when someone else was speaking.

(01:39:51):
I made a quick rap with the knuckles of my right hand
against the frame and immediately turned my head
toward the hall. This is what magicians call
misdirection, diverting attention from the place where
the secret action takes place. Quoting a different poltergeist
case that he wrote about. This is the last thing that I

(01:40:11):
will say on what? Like it's hard.
However, as another 11 year old girl insisted after confessing
to playing poltergeist to attract attention in an earlier
case, I didn't throw all those things.
People just imagined some of them.
Yep. Before we wrap up, I wonder if

(01:40:32):
if you're anything like me, which, God, for your sake, I
really hope that you're not. But if you are, you may have
noticed that everyone glosses over Johnny Hodgson.
He was a year younger than Janet.
So, you know, there's there's four kids, right?
But where's Johnny? Johnny's not mentioned anywhere.
Like, yeah, you'll hear at most people talk about how he was

(01:40:55):
away at boarding school, and then you'll barely hear another
word about him. The majority of the focus, of
course, is on Janet. It's the Janet Show.
And then a little bit on Margaret and then even less
little light smattering a focus on Billy.
But I don't know, I don't know, something about Johnny stood out
to me right away with this case.I was like, there's a story
here, I can smell it, but there's just so little

(01:41:17):
information about him. Like I wanted to know what
boarding school and, and, and why.
And at first, I thought maybe Johnny had actually started all
of this like he was home when the activity first began.
He was there when WPC heaps arrived on the scene.
And Playfair's book says that itwas Johnny and Janet who first

(01:41:38):
witnessed the strange sounds that got their mother's
attention, not Janet and Margaret.
So that had me thinking that maybe Johnny had been behind the
initial prank. You know, maybe he was
discovered. Maybe he was sent away to
boarding school as punishment. And then Janet picked up the
torch, so to speak, in which torch is not a British
flashlight. It's like the mantle Janet

(01:41:59):
picked up. She took the baton, right?
She took something in her hand. She continued.
The poltergeist prank. That's how I kind of felt about
it. I thought it was a pretty good
theory. But actually, as it turns out,
Johnny had been sent away to theWavington House School, a
residential school for maladjusted boys, a boarding
facility for up to 50 boys aged 7 to 16.

(01:42:23):
He had been sent away to that when he was about 7:00.
So that was like 3 or 4 years prior to the beginning of the
activity. So that theory was out.
And then Janet, as an adult saidthat Johnny was quote UN quote,
just a handful. So they sent him away.
Oh, OK. Was it really that simple
though? So also maladjusted in the 70s

(01:42:45):
could mean anything. It could mean anything abnormal.
So one book that I that I referenced that was published in
1965 literally called Maladjusted Boys.
That's the name of the book, Maladjusted Boys.
I felt like it was definitely the right thing to be reading to
figure out what is Maladjusted Boys mean.
It mentions various phobic and anxiety states, bed wetting,

(01:43:07):
dishonesty, nervous eczema, asthma, and sexual difficulties.
So I'd also wager that kids withuntreated and unrecognized ADHD
would have ended up there too. But also, a good chunk of boys
at these schools may have also been on probation from juvenile
court. So it still doesn't explain why

(01:43:28):
he was sent away. But get this.
In the early days of the Enfieldcase, the Daily Mirror suggested
to Peggy that they contact the Society for Psychical Research
for help, to which Peggy had apparently fainted.
In response, Playfair wrote she had misunderstood what he had
just said. She thought he was going to call

(01:43:49):
in a psychiatrist when he said psychical research.
She had some reason to be wary of members of this profession,
for the local child welfare psychiatrist had apparently been
responsible for having Johnny Hodgson sent to what his mother
always referred to as residential school, which was in

(01:44:09):
fact a school for problem children.
Yet neither the psychiatrist noranybody else had ever explained
to Missus Hodgson what Johnny's problem was.
All she knew about the psychiatrists was that one of
them had taken her eldest boy from home, and that was all she
wanted to know. So that's kind of fucked up.

(01:44:29):
But Johnny did go back home to Green Street during holidays and
on some weekends though, so he wasn't completely absent from
the Enfield case. In fact, the activity would
sometimes get much more chaotic and dramatic when he was home,
to the point where Missus Hodgson would admit to being
anxious about him coming home from school because of how much
more stressful things would be when he was there.

(01:44:53):
So my personal head cannon for Johnny is that he and Janet got
along the best of the siblings and that Johnny just cracked
Janet up and that they sort of fed off of each other's mischief
making. That's genuinely just my read.
Maybe I'm projecting, but that'show I'm picturing it.
You know, my original theory involved Janet hoping to be sent

(01:45:16):
away to go to school with Johnny, even though the school
was just for boys and there was no way that that was going to
happen. That was my original read.
Was that like, she did not want to be there without Johnny.
She wanted to go be with Johnny,so she was going to also be bad,
and then maybe she would also besent up to go to school with
Johnny. I don't know.
I'm not a professional, but if you noticed earlier that Johnny

(01:45:38):
wasn't listed in the credits forany of the documentaries or The
Conjuring 2, yeah, it's not for a good reason.
Johnny died at only 14 of an unspecified type of cancer, so
we'll never know his story, but I wanted to at least shed a
little bit of very weak light onhim since he's so often glossed

(01:46:00):
over. But he was still experiencing
everything that his family did, just to a slightly lesser
extent. So this is where I was going to
originally wrap up the podcast and know that doesn't mean that
I'm not wrapping it up. What it means is that I have

(01:46:20):
come across some new informationafter I was almost finished with
this episode. So here it is.
It seems that the same year thatMister Hodgson left his family,
Johnny was sent away to Wavington House.
For the life of me, I cannot find which one happened first,

(01:46:45):
but I've got a sinking suspicionabout those things being
connected, a suspicion that started when I was watching the
Apple Plus documentary, Something About Janet.
Something in the back of my mindwas telling me that there was
something much darker and much more harmful and much more
sinister than poltergeists happening when it came to Janet,

(01:47:09):
but I wasn't sure I'd include itin the episode, as I mean, it
was just a hunch. I was just guessing.
It was just a feeling that I had, but after I discovered what
I discovered, which was me actually realizing that I had
somehow never read the book The Poltergeist Tapes by Melvin
Willen, the honorary archive officer for the Society for

(01:47:30):
Psychical Research, well, I realized I had to tell you all.
It was my duty to tell you guys.So rather than rewrite the
episode, I'm tagging it on here at the end.
And by the way, here's a triggerwarning for CSA, otherwise known
as childhood sexual abuse. According to Gross and Playfair,

(01:47:51):
Mr. Hodgson, Janet's father, wasmentally disturbed and had
needed medical treatment for an unspecified mental condition.
When Mr. Hodgson was 15, he was convicted of child molestation,
which he apparently told Janet and Margaret about.
For reasons that I just can't understand, but I guess I can't

(01:48:14):
understand the entire situation,so there's that.
Playfair stated in his own records that he thought that
Janet may have suffered a sexualattack in Durant's Park
graveyard last June when she wasbeaten up quite badly.
Reason being that in the millions of things that Bill

(01:48:37):
said, he kept talking about Durrance Park and he claimed to
have been buried in Durrance Park, which is actually
incorrect. He was buried in a farther away
graveyard, but Durrance Park is the closest graveyard to Green
Street. Anyway, with all of that
information that I just shared, combined with how obsessed the

(01:48:59):
Bill voice was with sex because it genuinely seemed difficult if
not impossible to keep Janet focused on anything not sexual.
Something you really don't see captured in the mainstream
coverage of this case, along with the extreme amount of poop
and pee in the story for that matter.
But specifically, Janet would not stop talking about sex.

(01:49:23):
It made me sick to my stomach, honestly, knowing that a child
being a little too preoccupied with sex is a sign of sexual
abuse. Now.
She was 11. OK, puberty.
OK, sure. But I don't know you guys.
She talked about it a lot. It was a lot.
It was too much. What really got me though, was

(01:49:46):
the context surrounding the classic sound bite you hear of
Janet in her Bill voice where hesays I'm invisible because I'm a
GHOST. That one.
The full context for that clip is actually that Janet, as Bill
says that he was on top of Janetand naked.

(01:50:13):
She said as Bill, I'm on top of Janet and I'm nude.
OK Gross then asks why can't Janet feel you?
And then that is why Janet says I'm invisible.
And then he goes on to say, well, why are you invisible?
And then she goes on to say, because I'm a GHOST, right?

(01:50:37):
So the context for her even saying that was Bill was naked
and on top of her. Huh.
Oh boy. At a later date, Janet again in
her Bill voice, told a woman to kiss me and take your clothes
off. And that's just one example of

(01:50:58):
many that I could share with you.
There are studies that show thatsexual trauma may be an
important contributing factor inthe development of psychosis.
So what Janet needed was help, not for her home and her life to
be turned into a circus. As I'm all about the reduction

(01:51:20):
of harm when it comes to the supernatural, Whether that harm
is strangers on Reddit replying to people's paranormal stories,
confidently claiming that the OPhas demons, or whether it's
paranormal investigators who should have realized that they
were just making things worse. I really wish things had gone
differently for the Hodgkins. Like I wish they had gone so
much differently and so much better.

(01:51:41):
Honestly. Sometimes the scariest part of a
story isn't the unexplained or the supernatural part.
Sometimes the scariest part is just humans.
Just humans. Belief in the paranormal can get
dangerous when we dismiss any naturalistic or mundane
explanations, such as in the case of Janet focusing on

(01:52:02):
alleged poltergeist activity instead of acknowledging the
abuse that she very well may have suffered through.
And just to bring this back to the focus of the series, right
at the end though the Warrens were barely involved, You just
know they can't resist A paranormal circus, which was
exactly what was happening in the Hodgkins home.

(01:52:24):
Even though they were only therefor a couple of days, they still
took credit for the investigation.
Not just in their book The Demonologist, but in The
Conjuring 2. Ed Warren did what he promised.
Playfair and the Hodgson family.They made a lot of money on this
story. Unfortunately for Ed, he
couldn't spend any of it. He died 10 years before the

(01:52:46):
movie came out. Interesting.
Thank you for joining me for more true strange stories of the
unexplained. Remember that you can feel

(01:53:08):
afraid and not be in danger. You're safe here with me.
Probably. Please follow the podcast, leave
a rating on Spotify or Apple, ortell your friends and foes about
the show. It would mean the world to me,
the underworld, obviously. I mean, come on.
Was that not? Was that not clear?

(01:53:28):
Madam Strangeways is produced and narrated by me.
Madam Strangeways theme music isby marina.ryan@marinamakes.co.
Cover art is by Andrea Chisel Roldan at Cult of Teddy on
Instagram. You can submit your own true
strange story at madamstrangeways.com or e-mail

(01:53:50):
it to madamstrangeways@gmail.com.
See you soon, she said ominously.

(01:54:20):
Hello. Yeah.
Hello. Goodbye.
How he did that. Now you're going to tell me how
you how you knocked that sexy over?
Come on, tell me how you knockedyou out.
By the button. You what?
You know what parted? By the bottom.
Yes, underneath. Underneath it, yes.
Then what did you do? Then what did you do?

(01:54:41):
Make Janet come in the room first.
Why did you make? Why did you have to make Janet
come in the room first so she gets the play?
Could you enjoy it if if Margaret came in the room first
or or if Mrs. Hodgson came in the room first, could you do it
then? No, she's too old.
She's too old. Could you do it if I came in the

(01:55:04):
room first? No.
Well. What's age got to do with it?
What? What difference does it make?
How energy? From young people, not all fun.
Oh, you only take energy? Yes.
Why can't you take energy from old?
People, I use it on the day. Pardon.
I use it all. Oh, old people use more energy
during the day and do young people stir it up then?

(01:55:25):
Yes. How do you take their energy?
Electric shocks? You take quite electric shocks.
Do you take electrical energy then?
Yes, I can. If you can, I can take you can
take electrical if you don't take the energy.

(01:55:46):
Could you tip the settee up if you didn't take the energy?
No, no, I couldn't. You could possible.
Impossible. Yes, you always have to use
energy from people. Yes.
Can't you take energy from anything else?
No, you can't. No.
What else can you do with energy?
Tip the chairs I've pulled plugsout.

(01:56:09):
If you can do other things faster.
Put books through the window I. Put books through the window.
Who put the books through the window?
I did. You did.
I took a shortcut and put it. I see.
How would you, if I'd have said to you, you put that book
through the window without breaking the window?
How would you have done it? I.

(01:56:30):
Put the window on phone. Sorry, I opened the window and
thrown you out. He would have opened the window
and thrown it out. It's.
A peggy's window fucked them. Yeah, but could you have thrown
it through the glass itself without breaking the glass?
Yes. How would you do that then?
You materialize it one night didn't.

(01:56:50):
You dematerialize it, yes. How do you do that then?
I don't know, but I taste them here, don't I?
Don't know how you do it. No.
A gift. It's a gift, is it?
But surely you should know how to do it.

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Enfield Poltergeist: The True Story Behind The Conjuring 2 | The Warrens' Paranormal Case Revealed | Ep #35

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Enfield Poltergeist: The True Story Behind The Conjuring 2 | The Warrens' Paranormal Case Revealed | Ep #35