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Enfield Revisited.
#1
I remember this and it's still unexplained.


Quote:I never believed in the Enfield Poltergeist… until I heard strange scraping on the floorboards and
recorded the ‘ghost’s’ demonic voice.

Roz Morris was one of the first reporters to look into the case of the Enfield Poltergeist and -40 years later
-she's still baffled by it.

'Mum-of-four Peggy Hodgson had just put her daughter Janet to bed when she heard loud scraping sounds
coming from the room the 11-year-old shared with Johnny, 10.

The single mum ran upstairs to see what the kids were up to but was stunned when she opened the door to
see a heavy wooden dresser sliding unaided across the room with the children watching aghast from their beds.

Peggy pushed the chest back into place, but it moved again as soon as she let go, and the sounds of someone
(or something) knocking frantically against the walls reverberated around the council house.
Terrified and confused, she gathered Johnny, Janet and her other kids -14-year-old Margaret and seven-year-old
Billy -and fetched her neighbour for a second opinion.

[Image: attachment.php?aid=3570]
[Image: attachment.php?aid=3571]

Janet supposedly 'levitating' in a bedrom.

Later that night, on August 31 1977, the police were called to 284 Green Street, in the London borough of Enfield,
where the first officer on the scene reported that she too had seen furniture dancing around the room -as if carried
by a ghost.

It was a proper paranormal mystery - the next day the story was in the papers and the legend of the Enfield Poltergeist
was born.

Sounds of terror
Between the years of 1977 and 1979, the house remained the scene of strange goings on, centred around sisters Janet
and Margaret. Eerie banging sounds could be heard throughout the house, chairs tipped over without warning, and a deep,
demonic voice started coming from Janet without any sign of the girl opening her mouth.

"Just before I died, I went blind," the gravelly, threatening voice started out in one particularly distressing outburst from Janet's
direction, although her lips never moved. "And then I had a haemorrhage and I fell asleep and I died in the chair in the corner
downstairs."

Reporters went on to capture the voice on tape -recording it telling interviewers to "shut up" and singing nursery rhymes,
as well as alluding to a past life in the house.

Roz Morris, then a reporter for BBC radio, was among the many investigators dispatched to look into the reports of otherworldly
horrors... and she would never forget what she uncovered. The journalist entered the house a sceptic, like many people who
suspected that the story had been exaggerated, or that the weirdness was the result of children playing an elaborate prank
on their mother.

[Image: attachment.php?aid=3574][Image: attachment.php?aid=3575]

Roz Morris Then and Now.

But Roz left insistent that the case of the Enfield Poltergeist was more than a con or childish tricks -and she even returned to
record the husky voice which followed Janet around for a BBC documentary on the haunting.

Evidence from Enfield
Now, reflecting on the story 40 years later, reporter Roz told Sun Online: "I recorded the voices and a thumping, knocking noise
on the walls. "There was this very strange voice coming from near Janet. She wasn't moving her lips but the voice would just
appear, talking for hours. "The voice would say a lot of childish stuff -swearing as well. It was very disturbing.
"Something strange was happening which just wasn't normal."

[Image: attachment.php?aid=3569]


Things only got weirder when Janet started having violent trances and claims soon spread that the 11-year-old could levitate,
supposedly hoisted into the air by a mischievous energy. A famous photo of Janet "hovering" in the middle of her bedroom
was soon published as evidence, taken remotely by a camera set up in Janet's room by snapper Graham Morris.

The spooked photographer said he knew something was up when he first opened the door to 284 Green Street to a barrage
of marbles and Lego bricks, which he says were hurled by the same spirit which tormented Janet.
And now he had what many believed was photo evidence which was stacked in a file bulging with over 2,000 separate reports
of paranormal activity at the Enfield home, supplied by over 30 eyewitnesses to the unusual goings on.

Interviewing a poltergeist
The story of the Enfield Poltergeist has stuck with Roz ever since and she appeared this week on a BBC Radio 4 show,
The Reunion, to look back on the case. Photographer Graham appears on the show as well, having also experienced
the strangeness of the whole saga firsthand.

He says: "I stood in the gloom in the kitchen and one by one they brought the children into the adults' arms and the last one
to come in was Janet. Suddenly things just took off and started flying around the room.
"Everyone wanted to see it. They came in as sceptics and left believing they had seen something."

In the following months things got even more sinister as Janet started claiming that she was being "used" by the poltergeist
while the strange bangs and knocking sounds persisted.

And then came the interview.
Maurice Grosse, a former inventor and leading paranormal investigator, had based himself at the house and was joined in the
investigation by poltergeist expert Guy Playfair, who sadly passed away at the weekend.  While they were at the home the
researchers reported a series of "curious whistling and barking noises coming from Janet’s general direction" which were
attributed to the mysterious spirit.

And so it was decided that the TV cameras should be fired up for a world first: a recorded interview with the poltergeist,
where Grosse tried to pin down who could be behind the hauntings which were gripping the nation.

Prank or paranormal?
The investigator did his research, and tried to narrow down details about the ghost based on its responses to his questioning.
He eventually deduced that the spirit must belong to 72-year-old Bill Wilkins, a man who had lived and died at the house decades
earlier. Meanwhile, for Janet, being used as a conduit for a long-dead man seemed to be taking its toll.

Her trances became more violent, and her mother allegedly once had to intervene when, during one disturbing episode, Janet
wrapped herself in a curtain - the fabric tangled around her throat.
The independent reports of strange goings on blew the story into a national sensation, and the Enfield Poltergeist has since
been dramatised in TV series such as The Enfield Haunting and films like The Conjuring 2.

But many sceptics have insisted right from the beginning that, like the exaggerated Hollywood retellings of the story, the case
of the Enfield Poltergeist is nothing more than fiction. At the time, a theory emerged that mum Peggy was behind the whole thing
as part of a ploy to get a better council house or in return for fame and money.
But she never made a penny from recounting the story to reporters, and she never moved out of the house -right up to her death in
2003.

The idea was also floated by sceptics that Janet might be a ventriloquist and could have been behind the "demonic" voices heard
by reporters. Others suggested that the most famous photo of Janet hovering above the ground in her bedroom showed nothing
more sinister than a girl bouncing on her bed, triggering the motion camera which had been set up in her room.

The sceptics' case was reinforced when the girls admitted to pranking some investigators by hiding their tape players and making
odd noises as they poked around the family home. But Janet, now in her 50s, maintains that every other detail of the haunting -from
the demonic voice to her sporadic levitation -was totally genuine.

And today the house where the hauntings took place is owned by another family, although it remains the site of intense speculation
about what really happened 40 years ago...'
SOURCE:


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Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#2
This is an interesting story, I think that on the case, noone has a clear idea of what was going on, put the disformation of the bed looks to me like she jumps up and the motion camera took the picture as she was at her peck and beginning to descend.
The families that have lived there after them ever reported anything?
Once A Rogue, Always A Rogue!
[Image: attachment.php?aid=936]
#3
(04-12-2018, 09:57 PM)guohua Wrote: This is an interesting story, I think that on the case, noone has a clear idea of what was going on, put the disformation of the bed looks to me like she jumps up and the motion camera took the picture as she was at her peck and beginning to descend.
The families that have lived there after them ever reported anything?

I agree that when looking at the events in the bedroom, initially I took it at face-value.
The 'levitation' looks like nothing more than Janet leaping off her bed and her sister pretending to
be terrified.

Janet's hair is up in the way someone's hair would be on the descent of a jump and her arms are
out in the manner that indicates automatic balancing of her body when jumping.

[Image: attachment.php?aid=3577]

There's a gif where a pillow looks like it is moving on it's own accord, but since all of the incidents
were recorded by singular photographs being taken one after the other in 15 second instances,
we all know that trickery could be used at the beginning and between shots without a camera
registering a deceitful action.

There's this one below that is curious though. The curtain is moving without assistance from Janet
and I've seen an image where it looks 'tied' for a moment or two to the top bed sheet.
The two girls are not close enough to be involved, however, those few seconds between shots can
be long enough for chicanery.

[Image: attachment.php?aid=3576]

One of the main problems was the pro-poltergeist investigators, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair.
Grosse would explain that the lack of paranormal activity during monitoring was due to the alleged
phenomena known as 'Billy', waiting until nobody was looking before throwing objects or moving
furniture.

This behavior would also be indicative of one of the girls -mainly Janet, attempting to deceive by
waiting for a moment to display her pranks. A ghost isn't needed to explain how these things happened!

Janet was seen banging a broom handle on the ceiling to imply spirits making the noise and
was taped via video camera, bending spoons. Remember, Uri Geller was all the rage in the UK during
1974-75. The movie -The Exocist was also doing the rounds from 1973 onwards and it seemed a low
hysteria was abound about demons and the devil.

With this type of swirling interest in the supernatural, the media were quite happy to portray it as a serious
investigation into a working-class family's problems with a noisy old man in the here-after! Any possible
evidence to the contrary would be just omitted for better newspaper sales.

Quote:'...Sceptic Joe Nickell examined the findings of paranormal investigators and criticised them for
being overly credulous; when a supposedly disembodied demonic voice was heard, Playfair noted
that, "as always Janet’s lips hardly seemed to be moving."

Nickell wrote that a tape recorder malfunction that Grosse attributed to supernatural activity and Society
for Psychical Research president David Fontana described as an occurrence "which appeared to defy
the laws of mechanics" was merely a peculiar threading jam common to older model reel to reel tape
recorders.

Nickell states that a remote-controlled still camera (the photographer was not present in the room with
the girls) timed to take a picture every 15 seconds that supposedly "recorded poltergeist activity on
moving film for the first time" was shown by investigator Melvin Harris to reveal the girls' pranks.

A photo allegedly depicting Janet "levitating" in mid air actually shows her bouncing on the bed as if it
were a trampoline. Harris called the photos examples of common "gymnastics", and said "It's worth
remembering that Janet was a school sports champion!"

Nickell also wrote that demonologist Ed Warren was "notorious for exaggerating and even making up
incidents in such cases, often transforming a "haunting" case into one of "demonic possession".

In an interview with the Daily Mail, the adult Janet admitted that she and her sister had faked "2 percent"
of the phenomena, prompting Nickell to comment in another publication, "the evidence suggests that this
figure is closer to 100 percent."...'
SOURCE:

............................................

Still, at a time when the United Kingdom was dealing with the three-day week situation (a country-wide
attempt to conserve electricity due to the miners Union's long-term industrial action), the IRA  bombing
mainland Britain and Enoch Powell's speech about ''rivers of blood' due to mass immigration, a good old
ghost story is a welcomed relief from the negativity!

As far as 284 Green Street is concerned, there's nothing to imply the hauntings have continued.
But then again, Janet Hodgson doesn't live there anymore!!


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Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#4
I don't remember hearing this story. Very interesting. 

They could have been helping their "fame" along by adding to the "ghostly" activity, but I'd say some of it was real. They probably needed the extra push to make it into the papers, and hopefully, a movie deal. 

I know from personal experience this type of activity does happen, but it's hard to say what's real and what's fabricated for attention when you're not the one experiencing it.


Good story!!
#5
I remember many many dawns ago a family friend was suffering from poltergeist activity at there home. Now the interesting part was one of there sons was having a very hard puberty, but after a few years puberty passed and the poltergeist stopped.
Where the two connected ? was it just the boy doing it ?.
Never did get the questions answered
#6
(04-13-2018, 03:35 PM)Mystic Wanderer Wrote: ...They could have been helping their "fame" along by adding to the "ghostly" activity,
but I'd say some of it was real. They probably needed the extra push to make it into the papers,
and hopefully, a movie deal. 

I'd propose that the article about the 70's incident is really part of what some mainstream outlets
get involved with. Warner Bros. funded a 'scary' movie called 'The Conjuring' and in the first weekend
of showing, it doubled it's budget.

Because of it being a hit, a sequel 'The Conjuring 2' came out in 2017 and it was loosely based on the
Enfield poltergeist incident. This movie equalled it's $40 million budget in it's first weekend.

The male and female stars are in both movies and 'The Conjuring 3' is supposedly in the making.
...................................

Since many areas of the media have given up the ghost on reporting news, subtle promotion of shows,
movies and books is sometimes seen as the way to go. However, these same outlets believe that trickery
is better than out-right advertising and so creates a narrative with what seems, individual non-connected
stories.

Beneath this steady drip of a certain genre is a plan, a larger scheme to generate interest that a television
show, a book or movie can sate. It's old-hat and gone on for years.

Quote:The Conjuring Universe explained –The Conjuring 3, Annabelle, The Nun, The Crooked Man and more.

'We're all aware of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, even the Stephen King
shared universe (and to a lesser extent The Dark Universe, which isn't working out quite so well last we heard).

But bubbling along in the background is another potentially massive shared universe that so far is doing a
great job of making a lot of money from a series of relatively low-budget titles.

So what's it all about? Here's everything you need to know about the expanded horror franchise The Conjuring
Universe, and how it'll be taking horror cinema by storm.

The first Conjuring movie was something of a surprise hit in 2013. It's directed by James Wan who made a
massive success of the Saw franchise (which just had an eighth movie) and the Insidious franchise (about to
get a fourth), and who has more recently shifted over to massive blockbusters, directing Fast and Furious 7
and currently working on Aquaman for DC.

The Conjuring Universe is his baby and while he's only directed the two Conjuring movies, he's producer on
the two Annabelle movies and a writer and producer on the upcoming Conjuring spin-offs The Nun and
The Crooked Man, all of which will be made by New Line for Warner Bros.

Wan even says he'd be up for bringing all the characters together in an Avengers-style mash-up movie.
"If I could pull off an Avengers of the Conjuring universe, I would love for that to happen," he said. "We'll see.
It could be fun."...'
SOURCE:

And the above is true, a web of strategically-placed reports that are vaguely connected to something that
turns up later and is assumed by the viewer/reader to be eerily coincidental. Most of the 'Man-Bites-Dog'
stories or fluff-pieces are generated this way with the initial point far away from where the story ends up.

Example: Important movie star comments during an interview about his latest movie, that he rarely strays
from outside of Hollywood due to rumours of drive-by robberies from vehicles waiting at a red light.

An article appears two weeks later (it's not time-sensitive and ideal for slow-news days)... and it reports
on the worrying trend of good, middle-class people being robbed in Los Angeles when they're waiting at
the lights by MAGA baseball-cap-wearing hoodlums.
The same story drops in the original comment from the movie star.
...................................

But this one is about the Enfield poltergeist is really a small part of generating interest of a movie 'Universe'...
an X-Files Mulder and Scully-type of multiple horror-solving films.
So don't believe what you read!!
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 


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