The Enfield poltergeist

A run of knocks, slammed doors and thrown objects reported at a family home in Enfield, north London, from 1977, and argued over ever since.

The Society for Psychical Research's encyclopedia says that from 1977 a home in Enfield, a suburb in north London, saw loud knocks with no clear source, doors moving by themselves and small objects flung across rooms. A 2016 Guardian piece on the film The Conjuring 2 says the Hodgson family lived there and dates the events to 1977 and 1978. The Guardian piece lists what was reported: flying furniture, children lifted into the air and a gruff voice coming from the younger daughter, then 11. It says the investigator Maurice Grosse gathered 180 hours of tape over a year.

The society's own members split. Wikipedia says Grosse and the writer Guy Lyon Playfair thought the events were real, while Anita Gregory and John Beloff had doubts and found signs the girls had staged incidents for reporters. Joe Nickell, writing for the Center for Inquiry in 2015, says the magician Milbourne Christopher saw one girl sneaking about, and that a ventriloquist by trade concluded the girls made the voice. Nickell adds that one girl was caught cheating and that both sisters admitted pranks to the press. He says Playfair later got them to take it back.

Playfair's book This House Is Haunted told the case at length. In 2019 Melvyn Willin's The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes, reviewed by the society, summed up the report of the society's own Enfield investigation committee, which can be read only at its library.