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The Enfield poltergeist

104 replies

elprup · 30/10/2023 00:07

I’ve just been reading this (probably not the best timing as I’m about to go to bed 😳) I can’t believe something like this could happen, but there do seem to have been a number of witnesses! What do you all make of it?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12686497/Enfield-Poltergeist-child-TERRIFYING-ordeal-haunted-house.html

Enfield Poltergeist child reveals TERRIFYING ordeal

Among the pre-war homes lining Green Street in Enfield, there is little to distinguish number 284. It was once the centre of one of the most baffling ghost stories.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12686497/Enfield-Poltergeist-child-TERRIFYING-ordeal-haunted-house.html

OP posts:
markusdam · 31/10/2023 10:02

The house is opposite Brimsdown primary school

MermaidEyes · 31/10/2023 10:05

Also, for anyone interested, the original Conjuring movie was based on the true story of the Perron family farmhouse in Rhode Island. One of the daughters, Andrea Perron, wrote a trilogy of books called House of Darkness House of Light, about their time living there. They can be quite repetitive in places and could probably have been condensed into one book but well worth a read if you like that kind of thing.

Hungrycaterpillarsmummy · 31/10/2023 10:07

Lol that Wikipedia page just obliterates the whole thing. Janet was a clever trickster.

Interested in this thread?

Then you might like threads about this subject:

MermaidEyes · 31/10/2023 10:09

markusdam · 31/10/2023 10:01

To be fair back in 1967 everyone looked so much older than we do today.

Yes dh and I often say that! We'll see a photo of some old woman in a housecoat and headscarf and turns out she's only 25 😆

Readingineading · 31/10/2023 10:19

I have the Guy Lyon Playfair book about this case , its called This House is Haunted.

He is less emotionally involved than Maurice Grosse was and its a good read.

As someone who lived , as a child, in a house where some weird shit happened I am a cautious believer in woo, but it is true that the girls faked some incidents.

As another poster said, the case is still interesting wether it was genuine or completely made up.

Pixiedust49 · 31/10/2023 13:38

Anyone know why the house has been blurred on Google Streetview?

bruffin · 31/10/2023 13:44

Pixiedust49 · 31/10/2023 13:38

Anyone know why the house has been blurred on Google Streetview?

I assume the owners have requested it

WitchyFingers2 · 31/10/2023 13:49

BlueThursday · 30/10/2023 20:10

Available online btw I haven’t watched it fully in about 10 years since a loaned out my DVD so might treat myself this weekend

Yes its still free on the Internet archive. I watched it last year and it really is scary, very well done. They were clever to get Parky to host, everyone believed him.

OldBilge · 31/10/2023 14:13

Readingineading · 31/10/2023 10:19

I have the Guy Lyon Playfair book about this case , its called This House is Haunted.

He is less emotionally involved than Maurice Grosse was and its a good read.

As someone who lived , as a child, in a house where some weird shit happened I am a cautious believer in woo, but it is true that the girls faked some incidents.

As another poster said, the case is still interesting wether it was genuine or completely made up.

Far more interesting regarded as a manifestation of psychic dis-ease or unease, whether conscious or largely not.

See also Kate Summerscale’s The Haunting of Alma Fielding, about a working-class Croydon housewife who in 1938 became the centre of strange disturbances — furniture hurling itself around, plates smashing, objects appearing out of thin air. She was investigated by Nandor Fodor, a Jewish Hungarian refugee who was an investigator at the Society for Psychic Research who had written masked several famous frauds, and later, partly as a result of this investigation, became a psychoanalyst. She was a skilled trickster, but also expressing a desire to break out of her life — lost children, impotent, hostile husband, a mastectomy, the removal of all her teeth, an affair with the lodger etc etc. Fodor was sympathetic and didn’t denounce her, but started to regard her psychoanalytically rather than as an instance of the supernatural. Summerscale makes parallels between a Jewish refugee who was about to lose half his family to the Nazi camps, and a powerless, angry woman with few ways of taking control of her life.

I imagine you could make a similar case for the investigator who fronted the Enfield case, and who had lost his own daughter traumatically.

I really recommend the book.

herts · 31/10/2023 14:30

bruffin · 31/10/2023 13:44

I assume the owners have requested it

It’s a council house.

bruffin · 31/10/2023 14:46

herts · 31/10/2023 14:30

It’s a council house.

I wouldnt have thought it mattered, I think anyone can request to have a property blurred

markusdam · 31/10/2023 14:47

If you look on street view on earlier dates it is shown on those

smartpocketwatch · 31/10/2023 15:02

I've name changed for this but as a student in the 90s I lived in a house which has some strange goings on. Knockings and things moving by themselves. The knockings I suppose could be explained away but I don't see how the things moving could be, you could see items literally slide across the kitchen table from a totally static position and drop on to the floor. We also had occasions where we would all go out for the evening together and when we came home together things would have been moved in the house which was completely locked up and empty.

It never escalated beyond that and would sometimes not happen at all for weeks and I never felt any sense of presence. Our university had a parapsychology department who I did speak to about it and as a result myself and my flatmates were subjects in a test called a Ganzfeld Experiment where one person would be the receiver and the other a sender, in different parts of the building. One of use would watch a random film clip and would send it to the other mentally who was under Ganzfeld conditions. My self and my friend both did very well on these tests always being able to correctly describe the film clip being sent to us. Our other two flatmates were more hit and miss. It was a strange experience but it did convince me the humans do have some innate telepathic ability which at times can be quite pronounced especially in the case of close family and friends and I have experienced what I believe to be telepathic dreams, not prophetic dreams but as if a friend was talking to me, giving me unexpected and dramatic information that later was found to be true and I don't think those experiences are that unusual. After moving out of the house non of us ever had any experience of objects moving again as far as I know, we also never lived together and I never heard of any one else experiencing things in that house.

So I do tend to the idea that these things are related to currently unknown or rather unproven powers of the human mind. So I think that what happened in the Enfield Poltergeist was some kind of telekinesis which happened spontaneously initially and was genuinely frightening to the family and I think then in order to please the investigators and perhaps to maintain their attention the kids perpetuated and escalated the activity to include more dramatic things and the suggestion of a ghost.

I am not convinced by ghosts as in dead people hanging around houses after death, there might be something going like some kind of time slip or dip into the collective unconscious to see things past. I am also unconvinced by precognition but telepathy I think is a definite ability humans have and telekinesis is a maybe.

bibop · 01/11/2023 01:58

smartpocketwatch · 31/10/2023 15:02

I've name changed for this but as a student in the 90s I lived in a house which has some strange goings on. Knockings and things moving by themselves. The knockings I suppose could be explained away but I don't see how the things moving could be, you could see items literally slide across the kitchen table from a totally static position and drop on to the floor. We also had occasions where we would all go out for the evening together and when we came home together things would have been moved in the house which was completely locked up and empty.

It never escalated beyond that and would sometimes not happen at all for weeks and I never felt any sense of presence. Our university had a parapsychology department who I did speak to about it and as a result myself and my flatmates were subjects in a test called a Ganzfeld Experiment where one person would be the receiver and the other a sender, in different parts of the building. One of use would watch a random film clip and would send it to the other mentally who was under Ganzfeld conditions. My self and my friend both did very well on these tests always being able to correctly describe the film clip being sent to us. Our other two flatmates were more hit and miss. It was a strange experience but it did convince me the humans do have some innate telepathic ability which at times can be quite pronounced especially in the case of close family and friends and I have experienced what I believe to be telepathic dreams, not prophetic dreams but as if a friend was talking to me, giving me unexpected and dramatic information that later was found to be true and I don't think those experiences are that unusual. After moving out of the house non of us ever had any experience of objects moving again as far as I know, we also never lived together and I never heard of any one else experiencing things in that house.

So I do tend to the idea that these things are related to currently unknown or rather unproven powers of the human mind. So I think that what happened in the Enfield Poltergeist was some kind of telekinesis which happened spontaneously initially and was genuinely frightening to the family and I think then in order to please the investigators and perhaps to maintain their attention the kids perpetuated and escalated the activity to include more dramatic things and the suggestion of a ghost.

I am not convinced by ghosts as in dead people hanging around houses after death, there might be something going like some kind of time slip or dip into the collective unconscious to see things past. I am also unconvinced by precognition but telepathy I think is a definite ability humans have and telekinesis is a maybe.

That's fascinating.

There's a book (Real Magic) by a physicist Dr Dean Radin who has extensively studied telepathy and there's tons of evidence for it. Every time the Wikipedia entry on telepathy gets altered with results of real studies, someone alters it back as if the studies didn't occur.

User562377 · 01/11/2023 09:45

I've been watching the Enfield Poltergeist on Apple TV. I don't quite understand it. Is all of the sound original? So the later sounds of voices and all was authentic from the 1970s?

I'm on the fence generally, I've found a few of the Uncanny stories believable, but I don't find this story believable at all.

All those people were just in and out of the family home recording and watching for weeks on end, at one point one of the adult male researchers was in the bed with one of the teenagers. No wonder they were all over the place.

I wonder if it would have been more realistic/frightening if I had just listened to the recordings without the dramatisation. I'll listen to the Reunion, I like that tv show.

And I had no idea Maurice Grosse had invented the revolving advertisement boards. What a curious man.

smartpocketwatch · 01/11/2023 10:04

@bibop Thanks for the book recommendation, I will certainly check that out!

MermaidEyes · 01/11/2023 17:54

For anyone who has Netflix there's a similar documentary called The Devil on Trial which is worth a watch, about a supposedly possessed young boy, it also features Ed and Lorraine Warren.

SisterAgatha · 01/11/2023 18:01

I live very near this (grew up a few roads down) and the book is very telling… The investigators were always drunk and always in the pub.

Lots of people locally and a bit older than me have a story of being in the house and “something happening” but some details; it’s a tiny council house. Still council. A large family like that might have been cramped and they were very poor with no dad around. I grew up roads away and sound posh in comparison. The brother was in borstal, they were under a lot of stress at the time this happened.

She would 💯 have known the details of the man who died in the house, people talk and with council, will have been in the area ages so would have stories to tell. Aside from that the graveyard is practically opposite the house at Durants and is a cut through to the park, so we always stopped and read the graves on the way so she’d have seen it. It’s very made up in my opinion. We believed it as kids because it’s sensational but looking at it now, she might even believe herself it happened because she doesn’t want to admit she was acting out of stress/unmet need.

SisterAgatha · 01/11/2023 18:05

bruffin · 30/10/2023 07:49

I went to school next to their road at the time, i think i was probably a year or so older than the oldest girl. They either went to my school or the CofE secondary school over the road , but i dont remember any gossip at the time at all and despite no internet or mobile phones gossip spread quickly. It was only years later i heard about it.

Edited

You went to my school 🥲 do you still live locally? you’d be shocked to see that high street now.

MermaidEyes · 01/11/2023 18:16

looking at it now, she might even believe herself it happened because she doesn’t want to admit she was acting out of stress/unmet need.

This is what I think after seeing her as she is today in the programme. Childhood is a long way past and you can often convince yourself things happened when they didn't. She's probably spent so many years convincing herself that 'something made her do it' that now she believes it. As another poster said, both girls definitely seem very fragile even as adults.

bruffin · 01/11/2023 18:36

SisterAgatha · 01/11/2023 18:05

You went to my school 🥲 do you still live locally? you’d be shocked to see that high street now.

I actually lived in Edmonton then so got the 279 to school every day. I moved south of the river for 10 years then back up the A10 since early 90s. I am about 5 miles away now. I havent been down there for a long time now , have passed the school a few times over the years It looks weird with the pitch roof instead of the flat roof on the block that used to be for the 1st and 2nd years, the playground is now a carpark .

bruffin · 01/11/2023 18:43

MermaidEyes · 01/11/2023 18:16

looking at it now, she might even believe herself it happened because she doesn’t want to admit she was acting out of stress/unmet need.

This is what I think after seeing her as she is today in the programme. Childhood is a long way past and you can often convince yourself things happened when they didn't. She's probably spent so many years convincing herself that 'something made her do it' that now she believes it. As another poster said, both girls definitely seem very fragile even as adults.

It's a bit like the Cottingley Fairies. They finally admitted they faked the pictures not long before they died but still insisted they had seen real fairies.

Hazey19 · 01/11/2023 18:48

the photographer is interviewed on the 3rd episode of Uncanny on iplayer now, think it’s the 3rd episode anyway, and says he didn’t believe it was fake.

qwerty123454 · 01/11/2023 18:55

I watched the series on TV a couple of years ago

I managed to find the actual house on Google street view and I remember there was something weird in one of the downstairs windows but I've forgotten what it was!