Ghosts

 ‘Strange patterns’

I WAS EXPECTING the British Library to be a huge, crannied and spired book-cathedral. It would be riddled with corridors and ante-rooms, all dotted about with green leather, inkwells and filled with still, church air. I’d work in hallowed silence in a long-forgotten ghost wing, the cuddle of light from my desk lamp the only illumination in the room.

But it’s nothing like that. From the outside it looks like an immense warehouse on an industrial estate, built only for the eyes of fork-lift drivers and twilight hauliers. It’s all sheer redbrick walls and no visible windows, and its only architectural feature is its brutish featurelessness. It’s a joy-killing place of deadeningly functional aesthetics. If the British Library was a book, it would be the Yellow Pages.

And it’s no better on the inside. It feels like a drab municipal sports centre, filled with students and their dreamy musk of stale alcohol, cheap food and sex. Worst of all, instead of there being a long-forgotten ghost wing, there’s a computer screen into which I have to type to order my choice of book. It’s like Argos.

I’m here for the purposes of research. Now that I’m fully equipped with four psychic protection techniques, I thought it was time I tooled myself up with some proper knowledge. For half a moment, I thought that Stephen the Druid might have nailed the whole ghost problem with his Stone Tape theory. But then I realised that this only really explains replay hauntings. It doesn’t actually discount any of the things I witnessed in  Philadelphia. For that, I need the assistance of the massed ranks of the planet’s ghost researchers. And I need their help quick. Because for me, on the day to day, things are starting to get weird. The more I explore this murky and ancient cellar of the human experience, the less everything else makes sense. The steely, rational scaffold poles that used to structure my ordinary life are slowly breaking down, and through all the holes that have appeared in my world, the ghosts are swooping in. I can feel their chilly slipstreams on my skin as I lapse into yet another daydream in the office. I sit at my desk and ruminate on death, hell and my earthly moral legacy, and I wonder if they can see you in the bath.

By the end of the morning, I’ve gone order crazy, and there’s a toppling pile of ghost knowledge on my desk. The first thing I learn about is crisis apparitions. These are one of the most commonly experienced ghostly phenomena – and the saddest. They involve a person seeing the spectre of somebody at the moment of their death. Usually, these ghosts appear to people that they loved in life. It’s a final goodbye, often accompanied by a soothing reassurance that death is not life’s windy, desolate terminus. Diana Norman, wife of famous film critic Barry, has spoken about a ‘smart, intelligent’ friend who told her this story: ‘I was at school at a convent. My favourite teacher was a nun called Sister Bridget. Then I got ill and had to spend some time in the convent infirmary. One day I looked up to see that Sister Bridget had come into my room. She smiled at me and I smiled back. Then she turned away and just walked through the wall. I began to scream at that, and the nuns came running in to see what was the matter. I told them that I had seen Sister Bridget and that she had disappeared. Then they told me that Sister Bridget had been taken ill and had died, a few minutes before I saw her.’

On the opposite end of the horror-scale are poltergeists. These are the terrifying bully ghosts that descend into people’s lives and cause havoc in their houses. Poltergeist is German for ‘noisy ghost’ and one of their chief distinctions, as Lance told me in Michelham, is that they are people- rather than place-centred. Every case has a  human ‘epicentre’, most often a teenager, usually a girl on the verge of negotiating puberty. In a book called Deliverance, an expert churchman called Canon Michael Perry explains:

The single most frequent cause of appeals for help are poltergeists. An attack often begins with small noises such as bangs, rattles, knockings, thumps or clicks … after that, the effects rise to a climax and may include any of the following:

•   Rappings and knockings.

•  Objects may be seen to move of their own accord and in a bizarre way, defying the laws of motion and gravity, sailing in curved trajectories, or changing course at a sharp angle.

• Usually, however, the movement itself is not observed, but only inferred from the results of it, so that the object is suddenly found in an unusual place only a second after it was seen elsewhere.

•  Objects appearing from ‘nowhere’.

•  Glass, furniture, crockery being broken.

•  Doors being opened or closed; curtains billowing when there is no draught causing the movement.

•  Missiles directed at a person with great speed, but usually narrowly missing. Objects may refuse to move when watched, as if ‘shy’, but will immediately move when the observer is momentarily distracted.

•  Water dripping or pools of water appearing.

•  Rarely, spontaneous combustion.

•  Cold spots and, rarely, smells.

•  Sounds of music and jangling of bells.

• Voices, or baby and child-like sounds such as sucking, smacking of lips, occasional crows and chuckles.

• Very commonly, interference with electrical apparatus – lights switched on and off, domestic apparatus set in operation, record players and tape recorders made to fluctuate in speed, electric clocks working in reverse, telephones ringing for no reason, bells going haywire.

 Reports of noisy ghosts go back to Roman times and incidents are recorded in the medieval histories of Germany, China and Wales. One of the earliest fully documented poltergeist cases was investigated in 1877 by a founder of the Society for Psychical Research called Sir William Barrett. It occurred in the Irish home of a widower and his five children. Barrett discovered that if he asked the ghost to knock a certain number of times, it would do it. He then realised, to his astonishment, that it would even knock the right number of times if he merely thought the instruction.

In a meticulously researched book called In Search of Ghosts by Ian Wilson, I find a spectacular report from Long Island in America in 1958, in which flying objects and unexplained noises caused mayhem in a family home. All the scary fuss was witnessed by researchers and the local police, led by a Detective Joseph Tozzi, who went to incredible lengths to uncover the source of the disturbance. With the help of a small army of specialists, he tested for high-frequency radio waves, abnormal electrical activity, structural problems, water issues and local flight paths. He found nothing. The paranormal researchers who were documenting the nasty goings-on noted that only certain objects (including a record player, a night table and almost every bottle in the house) would be affected. This, coupled with the fact that the same things would be repeatedly thrown, signified that there was a process of selection going on. And that is the frightening part. Because it means that whatever was stomping invisibly around the house had intelligence.

Next I read about a haunting in a Cardiff car workshop in the early nineties, which appears to prove a link between poltergeists and apparitions. For over two years, many observers, including Professor David Fontana who is a fellow of the British Psychological Society and chairman of the SPR Survival Research Committee, saw a huge volume of phenomena, including bombardments of flying stones that would come from one corner and would last for hours, and coins appearing on request (all of which dated from 1912). The family who owned the garage and  the shop attached to it assumed the spirit was a young boy because of its childish behaviour. This view was strengthened after an incident that followed the disappearance of a large rubber ball and a teddy bear from their shop. After hearing the sound of a bouncing ball coming from inside the suspended ceiling, the owner, Paul, got his ladder out and went up to investigate. The missing items were there. Then, towards the end of the haunting, Paul saw a full apparition of a boy, who was about twelve years old, sitting in the corner where the stones were thrown from.

If you take this evidence in conjunction with the findings of Sir William Barrett and others, it means that poltergeists are invisible, sentient ghosts of dead humans that can breeze through the laws of physics and read the minds of the living, and whose simple aim is often simply to persecute a person with massive terror.

Still in America, I find the true tale behind The Exorcist. The epicentre of the real attack was actually a thirteen-year-old boy, who had been experimenting with a Ouija board. It was 1949 when the family of Roland Doe first started to hear scratching noises in the walls. After that, furniture started moving, his bed would shake in the night and his sheets would be torn off, sometimes with the boy still inside them. He would also fall into trances, drool rivers of phlegm and would be mysteriously injured with scratches and cuts all over his body. A Lutheran minister, the Reverend Schulze, decided he was possessed by demons and led several exorcisms which, eventually, stopped the phenomena. In contrast with the film, however, Schulze managed to survive the encounter.

Another ghostly celluloid legend I looked into was Spielberg’s Poltergeist. In primary school a friend once gave me nightmares by telling me that all the actors in the film had been killed by a curse. You can understand why I was scared. Just as in the movie, evil’s malevolent claw had come right out of the TV screen and pulled the doomed innocents back in with it – probably to hell. Except, I now discover, that it didn’t. Only four of the cast died early. The girl, Heather O’Rourke, died of intestinal stenosis in  1988, aged twelve. The woman who played her older sister, Dominique Dunn, was murdered by her ex shortly after the film’s release. And Will Sampson, who played a ‘good spirit’, and Julian Beck, who played a ‘bad spirit’, died of heart and lung trouble and cancer respectively. All of which, it seems to me, lie well within the floodlit ballpark of simple coincidence. In the end, the most alarming thing I could discover about Poltergeist is that it was a PG.

The case behind another famous ghost movie is far more murky. In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into a house on 112 Ocean Drive in Amityville, the place where a man called Ronnie DeFeo had murdered his entire family. That much appears to be true. But the Lutzes then told the world they had suffered twenty-eight days of the most bizarre haunting phenomena, which included green slime spewing down the stairs, a spectral marching band, and possession of the girl by an evil pig called Jodie. Their spin-off book and film of these ‘experiences’ made millions. This resulted in law-suits ping-ponging about the place, including, interestingly, an action by Ronnie DeFeo’s lawyer who claimed that he had approached the Lutzes with a concept for a ghost-based money-making scam in the first place and that they had done it without him. The Lutzes then countersued. In one of the cases, Judge Jack Weinstein stated for the record ‘the evidence shows fairly clearly that the Lutzes during this entire period were considering and acting with the thought of having a book published’. The family who moved into Amityville after the Lutzes found nothing paranormally wrong with the house. The only thing that disturbed their peace was the constant stream of ghost-tourists knocking on the window. So, they decided to sue the Lutzes …

I move on. And am disappointed to find that Ghostbusters apparently has very little basis in reality. Rent-A-Ghost has none.

The Exorcist, though, unwittingly resembles a genuine incident from the nineteenth century more closely than it does its actual source. I find a report by a German doctor called Justinus Kerner  who describes how an eight-year-old girl ‘suddenly was tossed convulsively hither and thither in the bed, and this lasted for more than seven weeks; after which suddenly a quite coarse man’s voice spoke through the mouth of this child’. Another case, in 1889, told of eleven-year-old Dinah Dragg: ‘A deep gruff voice, as of an old man … instantly replied in a language that cannot be repeated here.’ A different case again was documented, of a priest trying to exorcise a young girl. When the priest asked her, ‘As you know so many things, do you also know how to pray?’, the girl replied, ‘I shall shit down your neck.’ Just like Kathy Ganiel.

Then I come across the chilling story of a British man called Andrew Green. Born in 1927, he is one of the country’s best-known ghosthunters. His father had been a rehousing officer and in 1944, when Andrew was in his teens, he accompanied him on an inspection of an empty property. Nobody had lived in 16 Montpelier Road in Ealing for a decade and builders who’d been working in it had complained of the sounds of footsteps, things being moved about and doors slamming in places where doors had been removed. One group of workmen fled after three hours. So Andrew’s father asked a friend at the Met to check out the history of the house. He reported back that there had been a murder there, of a baby that was thrown from the property’s seventy-foot tower. And there was more. There had been twenty suicides at the house, all of which involved people hurling themselves off the same place.

Their curiosity ignited, Andrew and his father went back to Montpelier Road for a poke about. When Andrew reached the stairs that led up to the tower, he felt invisible hands pushing him up. On reaching the top, he heard a powerful voice in his head telling him the garden was only twelve inches below and that he wouldn’t hurt himself if he jumped. Andrew was only slapped aware of the deadly height of the drop when his dad realised what was about to happen and yanked him back from the edge. He’d saved his life. From that moment, Andrew Green has been obsessed with ghosts.

 Green’s investigation into Montpelier Road never reached a satisfactory conclusion. But a chance meeting with an ex-maid, years later, did suggest a possible occult explanation. She told Green that she remembered a strange routine that took place every Friday. The butler would leave the tower holding two silver candlesticks with black candles in them, as well as a mat covered in ‘strange patterns’ that she had to clean. Was this evidence that satanic rituals were taking place in the tower? Had the owners, with the connivance of the butler, summoned something evil that had remained, lurking amongst the dust and corners of the abandoned house?

One of the most disturbing aspects of my time in Philadelphia was Lou’s live recording of Electronic Voice Phenomena. So after a lunch of two sandwiches, one coffee and some uneasy rumination, I decide to leap haphazardly into their history. EVP were first discovered in 1936 and, even though huge amounts of research has since been carried out on the subject, in Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, France and America, still nobody knows where the voices come from.

It was twenty-three years after their discovery, in 1959, that EVP became an international phenomenon. A Swedish documentary-maker called Friedrich Jurgenson was taping some twittering birds in his garden for use in one of his films, and when he played his recording back he was annoyed to find the sound of a man talking about ‘nocturnal birdsong’ in Norwegian all over the top of the tweeting. So, he did it again. And again. And the voices kept coming. Eventually, Jurgenson realised that they didn’t belong to any living human. And his curiosity turned to shock when the voices started talking directly to him, using his familial pet name and mentioning the names of several dead relatives.

Still, sceptics insist that EVP are just roaming radio waves that have become lost in the ether, or meteors bouncing around the earth’s atmosphere. This is despite more recent research by an American called Raymond Bayless, who has recorded voices under extremely rigorous laboratory conditions, and the Galileo  Ferraris Electrotechnical Institute in Turin, who found there was a complete absence, in the voices, of the fundamental frequency that is emitted by human vocal chords. This finding has been backed up by a spaceman. Alexander MacRae worked for NASA on voice authentication programmes on their Skylab project and has confirmed this, as well as discovering several other key differences between EVP and earthly voices.

Even minor celebrities aren’t immune to the phenomena. When comedienne Sandi Toksvig went on location to a haunted castle, to record an episode of the show Excess Baggage for Radio 4, she and her crew were staggered when they heard strange whispers on their tapes. And this wasn’t the first time EVP have found their way onto the radio. In the mid-eighties, a consultant electrical acoustic engineer called Hans Otto König tried to make a machine that enabled a two-way conversation with the voices (this has been attempted before – in 1977, an electronics engineer called Bill O’Neil had some success with a device he called a ‘Spiricom’). König was invited onto Radio Luxembourg (which was, at the time, one of Europe’s premiere radio stations) to demonstrate his invention to a sceptical crew and the DJ, a man called Rainer Holbe.

Holbe and a team of technicians watched König set his kit up and, for extra anti-fraud safety, the technicians refused to let König anywhere near his machine during the broadcast – only they were allowed to touch it. Then, during the show, one of the Radio Luxembourg crew asked if there was anybody there, and everybody heard a voice saying, ‘Otto König makes wireless with the dead.’ It answered the next question by saying, simply, ‘We hear your voice.’ By this point, the DJ was physically shaking. He told the listeners, ‘I swear by the life of my children nothing has been manipulated. There are no tricks. It is a voice and we do not know from where it comes.’ Following the broadcast, Radio Luxembourg released a statement confirming that the show was fully supervised and that all the technicians and engineers present were convinced that the EVP were paranormal.

 There have been more recent experiments with two-way EVP conversations. Dr Anabela Cardoso, one of Portugal’s most senior female diplomats, began experimenting with the voices in 1997. Instead of trying to get them to show up against a background of the ‘white noise’ that you find on a cassette tape, she used a detuned radio. She’s chatted with several people who were previously unknown to her, and also many family members. Recently, Professor David Fontana (who also investigated the Cardiff poltergeist) travelled to Lyon, where Dr Cardoso is stationed as consul general, to listen to her tapes. He confirmed that the voices were loud and clear, and that many of them give their names, comment on events in Dr Cardoso’s studio and have given information that she didn’t previously know – such as the full name of the maid she’d just hired. (An interesting side-note: Cardoso sometimes talks to the EVP about the nature of the afterlife. They’ve told her that survival is a natural law for all beings, and that suffering in this world is important for spiritual development.)

EVP can come in any language, and you can get men, women and children. Sometimes, they even sing. In the early seventies, an SPR researcher called D.J. Ellis conducted his own investigation into EVP. After two years, he concluded that they were ‘highly subjective’ and existed only in the imaginations of the desperate listeners. All this puzzles me. Because what I heard in Philadelphia wasn’t my imagination. And it wasn’t an actual talking voice, either. In fact, we couldn’t make out what any of the voices were saying. Not really. All that was apparent was that they were voice-like and that they sounded evil and angry and scary beyond words. Many other famous EVP experiments, including Dr Cardoso’s, have produced solid, unequivocal voices. The ones that were broadcast on Radio Luxembourg were said to have sounded just as clear as those of the DJ.

As technology has grown and more electronic devices are invented, the spirits of the dead have discovered new ways of saying hello to the living. In 1985 a startled German called Klaus Schrieber received contact from two of his dead wives on  his television. Voices have also been picked up on PCs, radios, telephones and videos. Computer printers have even been known to spontaneously spew messages from the deceased. I look around me, at all the students in the library. I watch them reading, their internal voices all chattering silently to themselves as their eyes pick over the words. I imagine the air around me filled with more chattering tongues than there are in the room. I start to sweat slightly, and decide to stop imagining things.

In 1967 the ghost of Thomas Edison appeared to a German and announced that anyone could contact the dead simply by tuning their TVs to 740 megahertz. That didn’t work. But, when he was alive, Mr Edison had been convinced that the afterlife could be contacted. In 1920 he wrote in the Scientific American that he was working on a machine that could do just that. Unfortunately, his death came before the invention’s completion.

Edison, I learn, isn’t the only person of legend to believe in the supernatural. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes books, was a believer in Spiritualism, the ghost-based religion. During a séance in Wales, a grief-ravaged Doyle was convinced he heard the voice of his dead son, Kingsley, speaking to him from heaven. And then, two years later, during a séance with a pair of celebrated mediums called William and Eva Thompson, he embraced the fully materialised spirit of his mother. However, a couple of days after this beautiful reunion, the Thompsons were caught red-handed with a load of wigs, fluorescent make-up and a dead-mother costume. Incredibly, this didn’t dissuade Conan Doyle, despite his wife grumbling to him that his new hobby was ‘uncanny and dangerous’. And he remained convinced until his death – an event his son witnessed. ‘I have never seen anyone take to anything more gamely in my life,’ said Adrian Doyle, who went on to claim that he was convinced his father would return to see his family. ‘Why of course!’ he said. ‘There is no question that my father will speak to us just as he did before he passed over.’ They were so convinced of this that an enormous ‘Sir Arthur  reunion’ night was arranged at the Royal Albert Hall. An empty chair was left for Doyle in the middle of the huge Victorian coliseum. Sadly, he didn’t show up. As a postscript to all this, it’s probably worth pointing out that, when he was alive, Doyle also believed in fairies.

A far less ludicrous but equally renowned paranormalist I read about is the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Growing up, Jung was surrounded by so many supernatural happenings that his mother had to keep a logbook of all the inexplicable events that would take place in the family home. Despite this, Jung saw a ghost only once. He had a long stay in a haunted house and experienced gradually worsening phenomena. On the first night, he heard water dripping. Then he smelled something strange. Then, towards the end of his stay, while trying to sleep, he was assailed with creaks, bangs, rustles and raps on the walls, both inside and outside the room. When Jung opened his eyes he saw a head on the pillow next to him. Half its face was missing and its sole eye was staring at him. He was so scared that he had to spend the rest of the night with the candles on.

On reflection, young Jung decided that the experience had been triggered by the smell, which had reminded his subconscious of an old patient of his. He claimed that the knockings were his heartbeat and the rustlings were miscellaneous room sounds that were amplified and morphed by the power of the hypnogogic (half asleep) state. He was stumped by the dripping water, though, because he was wide awake at the time and a thorough investigation of the area revealed neither a water source nor a mechanism for its drippage.

In 1919, Jung gave a lecture to the SPR, in which he claimed that there were three sources for belief in ghosts – dreams, apparitions and ‘pathological disturbances of psychic life’ (which, simply translated, means – I think – being a bit mad).

Abraham Lincoln believed in ghosts and so did Jesus. The King of the Jews spends a good deal of time in the Bible exorcising possessed people – who were presumably poltergeist  epicentres. There’s even a quote in the Book of Job (4:15): ‘Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up.’

Next, I set out to find ghost stories from the most distant reaches of history and geography. And I soon discover that the whole world is haunted. In ancient Egypt, the high priest of Amun was visited nightly by the irritable spirit of the ex-chief treasurer to King Rehotep. Chronicles from Roman times tell of a struggling philosopher called Athenodorus who bought a house on the cheap, only to find that the reason for its bargain price was there was someone dead living in it. The ancient Greeks, too, suffered from lingering dark traces. The site of the Battle of Marathon was a no-go area for years as 10,000 men were slaughtered there and it was as if the sound of the massacre became soaked into the wind that blew around the blood-drenched acres. ‘Every night,’ wrote witness and chronicler Pausanias, ‘you may hear horses neighing and men fighting.’

Over in China, a friend of Confucius called Chu His wrote in 5BC, ‘If a man is killed before his life span is completed, his vital spirit is not yet exhausted and may survive as a ghost.’ Tibetan Buddhist funeral rites include post-mortal ASBOs that prevent dead people from doing any haunting, and some South American tribes put thorns on the feet of corpses to prevent their souls from rising and committing any upright mischief.

In Central and South America, they dread the ‘Cihuateteo’. Jamaicans have their ‘Goopies’, Mexican tribes ‘Tlaciques’, Haitians ‘Bakas’, the Bantus of Zambia the ‘Mudzimu’, the Zulus ‘Inzingogo’ and in Guyana the ‘Sakarabru’. The ruins of Babylon, in the south of Iraq, are haunted by two spirits known as Utukku and Ekimmu. In Taiwan, in the Tianan Taoist Temple, an apparition of a man is seen to this day, standing beside a huge stuffed crocodile. Visitors to the Kali Temple of Dakshineswar in Calcutta regularly report seeing and feeling the presence of Ramakrishna, a kindly man who was head priest in 1856.

On the other side of the planet in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1999, the council had to call paranormal investigators in to their head  office after employees experienced apparitions disappearing in the middle of hallways, disembodied whispering voices, footsteps and phones that would ring and ring only for nobody to be on the other end. In Guanajuato, Mexico, the Museo de las Momias is filled with corpses that have been dug up from the nearby Pateon cemetery. Relatives of the deceased that lie in the mountain-top plot have to pay a grave rent, and those who default have the bodies of their loved ones removed and displayed in the museum. In 1969, the ghost of a woman was seen acting frantically in the area of the gnarled exhibits on the baby shelf. Witnesses said it was as if she was searching for her child. More regularly, visitors and staff members often say they hear voices in the empty rooms, as if the corpses are whispering to each other.

Singapore is said to be the most haunted country in Asia, but Japan is also crammed with ghosts. On 23 June 1590, Hachioji Castle in Tokyo was attacked by the fearsome army of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hachioji’s female inhabitants, desperate to avoid the inevitable rape and torture that would precede their soon-coming deaths, flung themselves en masse off the ramparts and onto the jagged rocks below. After this horrific event, the castle was deserted for 400 years, because nobody could bear to hear the sound of the screams and the thudding of bodies on the rocks that still echoed through the valley. The sound can be heard, I read, to this day.

Those wars, though, are ancient. Vojvode Putnika Boulevard in Sarajevo, which became known as Sniper Alley during the recent conflict in Bosnia, is said to be haunted with new ghosts from the nineties. Similarly, nearby in Bijeljina, the spirit of a man who was killed by a Serbian strike force is said to stalk the night streets. He’s been identified by witnesses as a Muslim called Mehmed.

And Muslims, it seems, do suffer from the same nightmares as Christians. To my surprise, I discover that exorcism isn’t, as I’d assumed, just a biblical tradition. I find a report in a newspaper from Kuala Lumpur about the long tradition of Muslim exorcists, who recite verses from the Koran before demanding that the demon leaves its writhing victim.

 Finally, at the end of the day, I pick up a book called This House is Haunted, by Guy Lyon Playfair. It’s a first-hand account of the poltergeist case in Enfield, north London in 1977. It documents things that happened to the author and his fellow investigator, Maurice Grosse. Maurice, I remember, is the man that Lance from the Ghost Club called ‘our most distinguished living investigator of polts’. This is the third time I’ve stumbled across this troubling story. And, remembering what Lou Gentile told me about things that happen in threes, I open the book gingerly and decide to pay this case the strictest attention possible.

Will Storr vs. The Supernatural 

**Ten Naughty Things

In December 1977, the Enfield case reached its climax. The first three months, in retrospect, can be seen as the warming-up period, for it was in the middle of December that the poltergeist showed us what it could really do. It also showed us that at least one theory was right, that there can be some link between the physical phenomena — the flying marbles and slippers and the overturning chairs and tables — and the physical state of the epicentre as she reaches maturity.

As if to compensate for Janet’s return to a relatively normal state after her spell of hysteria, schizophrenia, possession, or whatever it was, some of the incidents became even more violent. One day, the heavy refrigerator lurched out from the wall, its door shooting open and slamming into the edge of the gas cooker so hard that the door was dented. On another occasion, the huge double bed turned up on its side, frame and all.

At the same time, the less violent but equally baffling activity went on much as before, with a few variations. The lavatory cistern would flush by itself, coins would drop from the ceiling as if they had materialised in mid-air (one did this while Grosse was in the room) and finally, perhaps to show that it was keeping up to date with trends in paranormal phenomena, the poltergeist began to bend spoons. The girls kept on being flung out of bed, sometimes ten times in a night, and complaining that their beds were being shaken, the sheets and blankets pulled off, and the pillows snatched from under their heads. They also claimed they were being pinched, slapped, or stuck with needles, and now that we had Graham Morris’s photographs as good hard evidence, we were more inclined to believe such accounts.

Once, while I was in the bedroom trying to persuade Rose to resist being chucked out of bed every time I went out of the room, she cried out and said she had been slapped hard on the eye. Indeed, she seemed to be in some pain, and was in tears. And Mrs Harper gave me a vivid description of what she felt was being done to her while I stood right in front of her.

‘It feels just as though there’s a great big hand going like that,’ she moved her hand across her leg above the blanket, ‘and you put your hand down there, and there’s nothing,’ she was saying. Then she winced. ‘You pinch me! You dare pinch me! You know, you really are the limit. Now go away! It’s taken a fancy to my skirt,’ she explained. (She was sleeping fully dressed at this time).

‘It’s not hurting me, really,’ she went on, ‘just trying to torment me, to get me out of bed. In other words, it’s trying to frighten me, but it won’t succeed any more.’

While she was giving me this description, I was standing at the foot of the double bed, right under the ceiling light which by now was being left on all night, I put my notebook down on the bed, well away from her foot and a good yard away from those of Rose, who was in the other half of the bed, and I was about to lean forward and see if I could feel any movement on the bed when my notebook jumped off the spot where I had carefully placed it, swished through the air and landed on the floor about three feet away. It had moved towards the head of the bed.

This took place literally under my nose, in a strong light, and any lingering doubt I might still have had about the genuineness of such incidents was finally dispelled. Even if Mrs Harper, for some unimaginable reason, had got her foot under the notebook and kicked it, it could not have moved towards her. Nor could it have swished through the air as fast as it did. Luckily, my tape recorder was right by the bed, and picked up the sound perfectly.

On another occasion, while we were all in the kitchen, a whole pile of clothes hopped off the kitchen table and landed five feet away on the floor, still neatly folded. So I had two more ‘close encounters’ to add to my growing list of incidents that were quite definitely genuine.

One morning, we had indications that the poltergeist, or one of them at least, was trying to be helpful. Mrs. Harper wanted to get rid of the large dining table, which was far too big for the room, and was wondering how she was going to get it out to the back garden. Just after that thought had passed through her mind, the table, which must have weighed well over a hundred pounds, shot across the room, tilted half over and came to rest wedged against the small table by the front window. Then Mrs. Harper noticed that the table could be dismantled quite easily.

‘It seemed to me as though it heard me and said “right, we’ll do it”’, she told me, quite amused. Even after all she had been through, this amazingly resilient woman could see the funny side of things.

But not all such incidents were funny. On 2 December, Grosse arrived at 8.30 pm, then went down the road to see the Burcombes, leaving his recorder running in the Harper’s living room. Thus he was able to record a complicated episode that frightened Janet more than anything that had happened to date. Here is exactly what happened:

Rose and Janet decided to pop next door and see Peggy Nottingham.

‘You ain’t going and leaving me on my own,’ Mrs. Harper said. She hated to be alone in that house, and would often spend the whole day with the Burcombes when the children were at school.

‘Oh, you go then,’ said Rose to Janet. ‘Ask her if she’s heard any noises, or anything.’

Janet left the house. Thirty seconds later, there was a piercing scream and a clattering noise coming from the staircase.

‘What’s the matter?’ Mrs. Harper called. ‘Did Peggy come in?’

‘Mum! Mum!’ Janet yelled. She sounded absolutely terrified, and was panting for breath as if she had just run a mile.

‘What’s the matter?’ Mrs. Harper repeated, rather crossly

Janet burst into tears, which was not like her at all. (Neither Grosse nor I once saw her cry except during her trances). ‘I can’t tell you,’ she sobbed.

‘What happened?’ said Rose sharply.

‘Peggy’s front door,’ said Janet, between sobs and gasps, ‘It opened, on its own, and … oh!’ she wept uncontrollably.

‘What, this one?’ said Mrs. Harper.

‘No!’ Janet screamed. ‘Peggy’s! I looked behind, and there was no-one there, and it just shut!’

‘Go and get Mr Grosse,’ said her mother.

‘I’m not going on my own,’ said Rose.

‘Jimmy, you go with her.’ Rose left, with her little brother.

‘It frightened the life out of me,’ Janet complained, already beginning to calm down. ‘Is Peggy in?’ Mrs Harper asked.

‘No-one’s in. I looked in the front room, and no-one’s there!’

‘Is that why you come in screaming?’

‘Yes! When I come in, someone lifted me upstairs and I come rolling down. I nearly fell down dead when that happened.’ She began to cry again, but by the time Grosse arrived she was able to give him a more coherent account of her experience.

‘I knocked on the door, loudly,’ she told him, ‘and the door opened, and I looked in and said “anybody there?”, and I looked behind the door and the door just shut on me, and I come here and as I come in I got lifted half way up the stairs and I come down again.’

This was not the only incident to take place near the front door. Four days later, Brenda Burcombe knocked on the Harpers’ front door at about 9.30 pm. There was no reply, but she knew her father was in the house, so she knocked again.

The curtain of the living room window was pulled back, and she saw Grosse’s face looking at her. Then, through the glass panel of the door, she clearly saw Grosse walk upstairs, turn, look at the door, then turn again and go on up the staircase. Totally bewildered as to why he should refuse to let her in, she knocked a third time, loudly.

Mrs Harper came down from the bedroom and let her in. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Brenda asked at once. ‘Who?’

‘Mr Grosse. Why didn’t he open the door?’

It was Mrs. Harper’s turn to be bewildered. ‘Mr Grosse? He’s up in the bedroom with us!’ Brenda looked as if she were about to faint. She was a tough and self-possessed girl who had seen a great deal of activity throughout the case, but this episode really shook her.

‘Well, it seems I’ve got a double,’ said Grosse when she repeated her story to him. He laughed, breaking the tension, and Brenda soon got over it, though she was certain she had not only seen a ghost, but the ghost of a living person.

The third major episode of the first week of December was by far the most complicated to date, and not only was it tape recorded in full and described in detail by Mrs. Harper as it happened, but it was immediately repeated.

It was 1.20 am on 3 December. Grosse was in the living room, hoping he could soon leave after an evening of very intense activity, when he heard a loud commotion from upstairs.‘Janet!’ Mrs. Harper exclaimed. (Grosse’s recorder was still running in the bedroom). ‘Where is she?’ Janet was nowhere to be seen.

Grosse and John Burcombe found her lying head downwards on the staircase, slowly sliding down it, apparently still half asleep.

‘How the hell did you get there?’ Grosse asked. But at first she could not tell him.

‘The door opened,’ said Mrs. Harper as Grosse and Burcombe came in, carrying Janet between them. As she got there, it opened.’

‘The door opened and let her out?’ Grosse could not believe it.

‘Yes,’ Mrs. Harper insisted.

Grosse gently coaxed Janet’s own version out of her. She looked extremely frightened.

‘I was in bed, asleep,’ she panted. ‘All of a sudden I felt something pull me - by the arms - out of bed and I tripped over - and I went – there - and then it lifted me up and the door opened and I went flying downstairs.’

‘I saw the door open.’ Mrs. Harper insisted once again.

‘That’s incredible!’ Grosse exclaimed. ‘So she went round the two beds, through the door, round two corners … Feeling all right, Janet?’

‘I’ve got a stomach ache,’ said Janet.

Grosse laughed. ‘I’m not surprised!’

‘What is it going to do next?’ Mrs Harper asked. She did not have to wait long to find out, for three minutes later it did almost exactly the same thing again, and this time she was fully awake and clearly saw the whole episode.

‘I saw that door open,’ she told Grosse immediately afterwards. ‘But she was on her feet this time, and it seemed as though she was being pulled along the floor.’ This is exactly what it sounds like on the tape.

Shortly after Janet’s last brief trance the day after the Brazilians’ visit, she and Rose began to have a series of what looked like shared dreams. They would call out loud to each other while both were apparently asleep, and during one such episode Rose became quite agitated, bouncing violently up and down in her bed.

‘Go away, you ten little things!’ she called. ‘Running about destroying people’s things.’

I woke her up, with some difficulty.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked,

‘Yeah,’ she replied indignantly. ‘What did you wake me up for?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but you were having a nasty dream, weren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Those tables and chairs jumping about. Trying to smash them to bits …’

I did not notice it at the time, but just as I woke Rose, Janet called out ‘Rose, where are you? Where’ve you gone?’

On another of these occasions, Rose sat up in bed and called ‘Water, water!’, and when Grosse fetched a glass of water, she took it and drank some, apparently sound asleep. We used all the tests we could think of to see if the girls really were asleep, shining a torch in their eyes, tickling their armpits and the soles of their feet, and even forcing their eyelids apart and examining their pupils.

Then Grosse had an idea. When Rose again sat up in bed, he put a pencil into her hand and guided it onto a sheet of paper. She promptly wrote the figures 1 to 10, which seemed to tie in with her fixation on those ‘ten naughty things.’

John Burcombe asked who the ten were, and Rose, still apparently asleep, reeled off a description. ‘Number one is a baby, number two is a little girl, three is a big girl, four is a very young girl about fifteen, five is a very old lady, six is a young boy, seven is getting on to about eighteen, eight is an old man.’ She paused. ‘Number nine, I don’t know what it is, he hasn’t got a face, and number ten has gone away.’ Then she suddenly exclaimed ‘Frank Watson’. We had said nothing to her about Janet’s drawing with the name WATSON scrawled on it. ‘Who’s he?’ Burcombe asked.

‘The man who died in the chair downstairs,’ Rose replied at once. We already knew that Mr Watson had died in the house, but we did not then know where, or what from. It was several months before Mrs. Harper learned from a neighbour that Mr Watson had in fact died right where Rose said he had, in his chair in the living room.

During one of the girls’ shared dreams, Rose kept saying ‘I want to speak to Peggy next door’ over and over. On an impulse, I went down to the kitchen, where Mrs. Harper was tidying up, and asked her to try some automatic writing. I showed her how to do it, and the very first words she wrote, in the characteristic form of his type of writing which I am sure she could not have faked, were: ‘I want to speak to Peggy next door.’

This seemed a remarkable coincidence. She could not hear Rose from the kitchen, and I was tempted to go on with the experiment. But I decided against it for two reasons; I was afraid it might upset her, and I had a better idea. I was going to hypnotise Janet.

Since she was becoming so talkative in her sleep, I reasoned, it might be possible for us to control her wandering mind and learn something useful from her under hypnosis. But Grosse was uneasy. ‘It’s very dangerous, especially with a child,’ he warned me. ‘Suppose you dig up some ghost or secondary personality or whatever, and find you can’t get rid of it?’

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘But this is a dangerous case. We’ve seen that. And it could get worse. We’ve got to do something. We’re the experts, remember?’

Janet was terrified at first at the thought of ‘hypnotisation, as she called it, but after I had explained what I wanted to do both to her and to Mrs. Harper, they both agreed, and Grosse was reassured by the fact that the hypnotist I brought along on 8th December was well suited for the job. Dr Ian Fletcher was not only a senior member of the SPR, a qualified doctor and surgeon, and an experienced hypnotist, but he was also a member of the Magic Circle and a very shrewd observer of human behaviour. He was also extremely open-minded about cases such as this one.

Dr Fletcher took forty-five minutes to get Janet into a suitably relaxed, though still fully conscious, state and begin his questioning. And as soon as he did so, a remarkable change came over Janet, who normally talked so fast that it was often difficult to understand her. But now, she replied to Dr Fletcher’s questions slowly and clearly.

‘Now,’ he began, ‘what’s been happening here?’

‘I got slung out of bed,’ she replied. This had happened shortly before Dr Fletcher arrived, and was the most recent incident.

‘What did you feel?’

‘Cold hands, round the stomach, arms and legs - different times.’

‘How were you lifted?’

‘On me back.’

Dr Fletcher’s quiet voice droned on. He took care never to ask leading questions, for he knew that people under hynosis tend to tell the hypnotist what they think he wants to know when the answer is suggested to them. For instance, had Dr Fletcher asked Janet if she were possessed by the spirit of Adolf Hitler, she might well have said she was. But of course he asked no such loaded questions. Instead, he asked Janet if she had any idea who might be causing all the trouble.

‘Yes,’ she replied at once. I leaned forward to catch every word, for she was talking quietly.

‘Who?’

‘Me and my sister.’ Janet’s answer startled me. Oh dear, I thought, here comes the confession. But Janet made no confession, and it became clear she had nothing to confess. She did, however, seem to understand that the atmosphere in the family was somehow partly responsible for the activity, as the following dialogue indicates. Dr Fletcher asked why she thought she and her sister were to blame.

‘Don’t know,’ said Janet.

‘Who started it?’ the hypnotist asked.

‘None of us. At first it happened in my room when Pete was here.’ She went on to give a very accurate description of the early events, adding nothing to the evidence we had taken down at the time. I felt certain she was telling the truth.

Dr Fletcher tactfully steered his questions back to the cause of all the trouble.

‘An increase in unhappiness,’ was her surprising reply She explained that both she and Rose were frightened of their father, and it was always worse after his weekly Saturday visits. Both the girls would do their best to be out of the house when he called with his maintenance money.

I had promised Dr Fletcher not to interrupt his session, and had given him a list of written questions beforehand, so I was able to learn several things I particularly wanted to know.

I discovered, for instance, that Janet did not seem to take much notice of Grosse or myself. This was good to know, because we had heard (at second-hand) from the local welfare psychiatrist that he considered the trouble would stop if we just went away, for, he alleged, we were encouraging the phenomena just by being there. I suspect that this man, who had in fact been a member of the SPR at one time, knew very well that poltergeist cases generally end in one or two months, and that if he did nothing, this one would just go away. When it did not go away, he simply had no idea what to do, and thought it safest to eliminate anybody who seemed to be doing his job for him.

When Grosse telephoned him about a year later and asked if he had any comment on the case for the record, the man whose job gives him responsibility for the mental health of the children of Enfield said that there was really nothing he had to say. I am sure he was telling the truth. He had never said anything in the first place.

I was glad to hear that Janet regarded us as part of the furniture rather than as father-substitutes, and it must be said that almost never did she try to show off about the activity. Quite often we had some difficulty in getting her to talk about it, and she eventually lost interest in the whole affair long before either her mother or her sister.

I was also interested to learn, through Dr Fletcher’s gentle but insistent questioning, that although she said she believed in ghosts, she showed little interest in them. A school friend of hers had told her about some funny things that had happened in his home, which sounded to me like very minor poltergeist stuff, but Janet clearly knew very little about the subject, and kept talking about ‘polka dice’.

Yes, she had heard of Matthew Manning. ‘He was on telly’. I specially wanted to know this, for I had discovered an article torn from an old copy of a women’s magazine during one of our searches of the house. It was written by the mother of this well known and highly articulate poltergeist victim, who has written a fascinating book, The Link on his own experience.

Mrs Manning mentioned that one of the first things to happen in their case was the disappearance of a teapot. As this was also one of the very first incidents at Enfield, I wondered if Janet had read the article and set out to imitate its contents, deliberately or otherwise. But Janet did not seem very interested in Matthew, who was just another face on the telly — she had seen his recent appearance on the Russell Harty programme, but had not commented on it to us subsequently. (Mrs. Harper, on the other hand, had been very interested in the programme and told me she would very much like to meet Matthew one day). As this was the first time Janet had been hypnotised, Dr Fletcher took care not to ask any questions that might upset her. There was much more I wanted to know, especially concerning her trances. If we could regress her to one of those possession states, I thought, we might be able to talk to whatever it was that had taken over, whether secondary personality or invading entity, and find out what it really was. But that would have to wait.

Dr Fletcher closed the session with the suggestion that she would have a good night’s sleep, and that she should try and resist the poltergeist. Didn’t she want it all to stop?

Janet repeated what she had often said to me. ‘I want it to stop by Christmas. I want to have a nice Christmas.’

Shortly after Dr Fletcher’s visit, Mrs Harper went along to her G.P to ask him to refer Janet to the Maudsley Hospital, where Dr Fenwick had told me there would be a bed for her. Unfortunately, she became confused, and instead of giving Dr Fenwick’s name, she asked the doctor to call Dr Fletcher at the Maudsley, where of course they were unable to locate him. And when she came to collect the letter, she found to her dismay that her doctor had referred Janet to, of all people, the local welfare psychiatrist!

This was the man who had taken Pete away from home, and she wanted nothing to do with him. We tried to sort things out, but the GP refused to cooperate. This was a major setback; I had hoped it would be possible to continue the hypnosis in the Maudsley, but it seemed possible that our first attempt to give Janet specialist treatment by a sympathetic psychiatrist had failed.

We told Mrs Harper that the local welfare psychiatrist had asked us to withdraw from the case, and she made it clear that if we were to leave, she feared she might crack up altogether. Both the Nottinghams and the Burcombes agreed.

So we stayed, and early in December we were joined by David Robertson, the student physicist Professor Hasted had promised to assign to the team. He was a most welcome addition to the team, and promptly moved in with the Harpers, staying in the house for a whole week, day and night. His patience was soon rewarded, for he was able to witness probably some of the most astonishing phenomena any scientist has ever seen.

It seemed that the poltergeist must have known about David’s work with Professor Hasted in the controversial field of paranormal metal bending, for almost as soon as he had moved in, metal began to bend all over the place.

I had asked the children to try and bend spoons, as they had seen Uri Geller do on television. This was partly to keep them happy with a new game, and partly a serious attempt to draw the poltergeist energy away from more destructive phenomena, and it was a complete failure.

On the morning of 7 December, however, after we had finished breakfast, I took a teaspoon, put it in the middle of the table, and asked Janet to bend it without touching it. Janet, who was sitting next to me, turned half round in her chair and put her one hand over her eyes. Just then, Mrs. Harper, who was at the stove behind me, asked if I would like some more coffee.

“Thanks, I wouldn’t mind,’ I replied, turning my head for a second.

When I looked back at the spoon, it was arched in the middle like a frightened cat. Janet had not touched it. ‘Did you see that?’ I asked Mrs. Harper, who had been looking straight at us.

‘I did, yes,’ she said. ‘And I felt that headache come and go just as it bent.’

I handed Janet the spoon and asked her to straighten it out again. She went into the living room and sat in an armchair beside her record player, her back to the metal magazine rack. I kept my eyes on her. Nothing happened to the spoon, which she held all the time in one hand, but I noticed that one side of the V-shaped magazine rack was almost flat on the shelf. Janet had been blocking it from my view, and however it got bent I am certain it was not done by her; it needed two hands and quite a lot of strength to straighten it, and Janet had not turned round. This was quite impressive at the time, though it could be said that somebody had bent it before breakfast, so I cannot claim it as an adequately witnessed phenomenon. The spoon, however, I am certain she never touched. Later, Mrs. Harper found another spoon bent in a drawer, and told me she had seen a third bend on its own. I noticed that all three spoons were bent in exactly the same way, so that they fitted together perfectly.

There are several ways of bending spoons and keys by sleight of hand, and when I saw magician James Randi doing this on television I had not difficult in seeing how he did it. If Janet used sleight of hand that morning, I can only say that she has a great career on the stage awaiting her. The same can be said for an English woman I have known for ten years who bent a succession of metal objects in front of my eyes in my own kitchen, then snapping one alloy spoon in half as she held it between thumb and first finger of one hand. (Unfortunately, she was thoroughly upset by the phenomenon and refused to do any more).

It became more likely to presume that the spoon-bending at Enfield was genuine when another object that could not have been deformed by normal physical strength was found to be considerably out of shape.

It was 10.15 am on 6 December 1977. Janet was leaning on the kitchen worktop, and her mother was sitting down. Both were out of reach of the stove. Suddenly, they both heard a noise coming from the teapot — the same metal one that Grosse had seen rocking in front of his eyes. Mrs. Harper picked up the pot and found that its stout metal lid had arched upwards just as the spoons had done, bending right out of shape, so that it no longer fitted the pot. I took the lid in both hands, and even using considerable force I was unable to bend it back. I told David Robertson that we must try and get some instrumental evidence for this force, and he duly brought along some apparatus which, for once, had been well tested. It consisted of a pulse counter connected to a strain gauge on a strip of metal, set up in such a way that any unidentified force acting on the metal would be registered on the pulse counter.

David put his apparatus on the kitchen table and asked Janet to try and make the metal strip bend without touching it. She tried for about five minutes, then lost interest and turned away. As she did so, a small tin standing on the refrigerator jumped about two inches into the air. Grosse witnessed this and noted that Janet was nowhere near the fridge while David, who never took his eyes off his pulse counter, saw it register a sharp increase as the tin jumped. Either the metal strip had started oscillating on its own, or else the counter was being influenced directly. David then asked the girls to go upstairs, and as they went up the staircase the oscillation faded, picking up again as they walked directly overhead. He could not think of any normal explanation for this effect.

Encouraged by these observations, David set up a fully instrumental metal-bending session, using a three-channel chart recorder connected to two strain gauges embedded in a piece of metal known as eutectic alloy. This is specially made so that if bent manually, it will snap. He then asked Janet to try and make the metal bend without touching it, after running the machine for twenty minutes to make sure all was in order and there was no electromagnetic interference, which would have registered on the recorder’s third channel.

For about two hours, during which time Janet’s hand never came within less than six inches from the metal, the two charts connected to it showed almost continuous deflections, while the third channel ran in a perfectly straight line. Finally, David saw the metal bend through about fifteen degrees and then break in two. He was fully satisfied, he assured us, that he had obtained hard evidence on well-tested equipment, for the presence of a totally unknown force.

‘We’ve proved that there really is something around,’ I commented to Grosse.

‘Maybe we have,’ he replied with a laugh, ‘but we knew that already, didn’t we?’ We did indeed, but Grosse still felt he should try and repeat David’s experiment on his own, using the same equipment. He did this, and at first it seemed nothing was going to happen. But while Janet was trying to affect the molecular structure of the metal strip, as she had apparently done for David, Rose went into the toilet. As she pulled the chain, Grosse saw the chart register an unmistakable deflection, and when Jimmy went into the toilet a few minutes later, exactly the same thing happened. So although Grosse failed to repeat David’s experiment, he was able to come up with equally convincing evidence that unidentified forces were at work on the metal strip.

Encouraged by these experiments, we decided to go on trying to make contact with the Thing in a more satisfactory way than by knocking, and we asked Professor Hasted if he had any suggestions.

‘There is no reason why you should not be able to establish direct contact,’ he said in his usual calm and confident manner. ‘Challenge it directly and see if you get a response.’

I could not help wondering if he was serious, yet I did not have to wait long before discovering that he certainly was, for on 10 December 1977 this is just what we did.

This Houseis Haunted

The Amazing Inside Story of the Enfield Poltergeist

GUY LYON PLAYFAIR

**

‘They called me Ghost Girl’

SHE WEARS A thin gold necklace with a pendant that rests in the cup of her collarbone. It spells out her name in happy, bulbous cartoon script. The letters increase in size, from the first to the last, and they glint in the light as the movement of her slow talking makes them shift on the surface of her skin. Its comic rendering is like the logo of an iconic superhero and, over the months, that’s almost what this pretty, firm and frequently sorrowful woman has become to me.

Janet. I’ve finally been granted an audience with Janet.

As I sit here, on a creaking wicker chair, between two cat baskets and a washing machine, it feels as though this boxy conservatory in Clacton-on-Sea is the destination of a long pilgrimage. Janet holds enormous power because she holds all the answers. The endless battle between the sceptics and the believers raged around her when she was eleven years old, and she knows who was right and who was wrong. All the answers are here, in front of me, drinking tea and wearing dun-coloured three-quarter-length cargo pants and a tight Nike T-shirt.

‘I mean, we’re talking about twenty-five years or more, aren’t we?’ Janet says quietly, with her tough, thin fingers pushed through the handle of her mug. ‘I can’t remember everything. But I can remember the main events because, you know, they leave scars.’

Janet has a way of looking at me that I find acutely unsettling. It’s as if she’s run a cold hose straight into my marrow. She keeps reminding me of someone, and I can’t think who. It’s her fragile, birdlike quality and her gentle, sad way of speaking, but, most of all, it’s the cavernous gaze that you’ll suddenly find yourself trapped inside. I’m sure I’ve seen it before.

After my meeting with Maurice, I ended up deciding that the Enfield case was so extreme in what it required me to believe that my credulity just shut down, and I went to see a psychiatrist. But, since that encounter with Dr Salter, there have been a couple of incidents which have caused me to call those uncompromising sceptical beliefs into question. Firstly, there’s Milton’s testimony. And, secondly, I met up with one of the doctor’s recent patients. Frances, the logic goes, is just like Debbie, Derek and all the other mediums and supernaturalists that I’ve met. The only difference is that Frances has been cured. My meeting with her was sad and surprising and terrifying. Frances was a highly regarded teacher when she started hearing voices in her head. And now, months later, she’s barely recovered. When I spoke to her, she appeared bashed about with shame and shock over what had happened. It was as if her mental illness was a deranged clown that had jumped into her driving seat and joy-ridden all over her preciously tendered life, with her strapped, a helpless witness, into the backseat. And now he’s gone, and all she can do is look over the wreckage and wonder.

Frances would be ‘possessed’ every day. And, like my paranormalist friends, she’d hear the voices of the things that were possessing her. But Frances’s voices told her that she was God and that she’d started the earth. They also told her that an organisation called Atlantis Revisited had been listening to her thoughts and that witches were attacking her, stealing parts of her body. She’d call Scotland Yard obsessively and ask to be put through to the ‘Dewitching Department’. And that was just the start of it.

I think there are some important differences between Frances’s mental state and those of my witnesses. For one thing, when Frances was going through all this, she was catastrophically paranoid. For another, she was terrified. And for yet another, she was completely out of control. But most of all, Frances was acting without any logic at all. Her mind was loose and free-styling, like an experimental jazz trumpeter lost in space. Debbie, Lou, Dave and all the rest are functioning people. They have beliefs that fit into a pre-existing world with rules. Frances’s world, though, was self-created and utterly anarchic. I thought, for a while, that it was simple, that Frances was just a lot more unwell than my supernaturalist friends. But then I found out that Frances didn’t actually see any witches or ghosts or demons. She didn’t even see anything move across a sideboard. So, as profoundly sick as Frances was, she actually experienced far less than these other people, who, while doing what they do, continue to be attentive parents, successful small businessmen and lead guitarists in Spider Monkey.

So, my meeting with Janet has come at an expedient time, because if I’m to let the Enfield case make me a true believer, I need to examine it more closely. And the research I’ve done since my visit to Maurice’s has led me to believe there is plenty more examining to be done.

‘I remember when it first started,’ Janet says, in a voice that’s so quiet it’s temporarily drowned by the miaow of an overweight ginger cat that’s just crawled in through a window behind her. ‘I was due to start senior school, I think, the following week. It was the thirty-first, no … ’ she says, and touches her forehead with the tips of her fingers, ‘the twenty-eighth of August. No … it was the thirty-first. The thirty-first of August nineteen seventy-seven. I slept in the back room with my brother Johnny, and we was laying in bed and we sort of heard something and Johnny said, “What’s that?”’

Depending on who you believe, this moment marked either the beginning of the most widely witnessed and documented haunting in history, or one of the most successful wind-ups. The night before this, Janet and Johnny had had another small disturbance which their mother had given short shrift. And when they complained this time, she told them, yet again, to get to sleep. Then the children saw a chest of drawers slide from the side of Janet’s bed towards the door.

‘We shouted, “Mum! Mum!”’ Janet says. ‘Because we were sort of frightened, but also intrigued by what we were seeing. It’s so vivid, some of it,’ she says, as the late autumn sun begins to set over the kids’ bikes and plastic tractors in the garden behind her. ‘And Mum did see it moving in the end.’

‘What was her reaction?’ I say.

‘Well, she was just dumbfounded, really. And she pushed it back. And then it started to move again – like it was trying to block her out of the room, like it wanted me and Johnny to itself. And she tried to push it back again, and it wouldn’t move. So she said, “Right, all get out of your beds and we’ll go downstairs.” We was very nervy. There was a funny atmosphere in the house. And then the knocking started. And Mum said, “Well, what’ll we do now?”’

She decided to fetch her neighbours, Peggy and Vic Nottingham.

‘I think they thought there might be someone like a burglar in the house,’ Janet says, ‘but they couldn’t find no one. There was just, like, this knocking. It sounded like it was coming from the outside wall, but it was like it was inside as well. And sometimes it sounded like it was coming from underneath the floorboards.’ She puts her mug on a small table by the side of her chair. ‘It was a big shock to us all, really. We didn’t know how life was going to change.’

Peggy decided to call the police. One of the officers who responded saw a chair rise up and move across the floor on its own, in full view of everyone. ‘Well, she was astounded,’ Janet says, ‘we were all astounded.’ But she didn’t know how to help. So, at a loss, they decided to call the Daily Mirror. ‘They stayed for quite a while,’ Janet says, ‘and nothing much happened. And as soon as they went to go, it all started.’

‘What did?’ I ask.

‘Lego bricks, marbles flying about. And then the photographer from the Mirror came back and I remember that very well,’ she says, ‘because a Lego brick hit him right above the eye. He still had the mark a few days later. And then Maurice Grosse came in on the case. And then there was so many people that come. I think it got to the stage where more and more people were coming in and out, and my mum never had a man behind her because she was divorced and it was starting to become, like … ’

Through the window, behind her, one of Janet’s children has come into view. He’s holding a thin sheet of metal and is standing with his legs apart in front of a life-sized pottery leopard. To occupy himself while he’s waiting for his dinner of oven chips and frozen pizza, he wobbles the sheet backwards and forwards so that it makes a sound like Aboriginal thunder music. We’re shut away, out here in the conservatory, because Janet doesn’t like talking about the haunting in front of the kids. In fact, Janet and her husband have, so far, only told the two older ones about it.

‘I mean, you know,’ she continues, pushing a line of blonde, waist-length hair out of her face with a finger that has several gold rings around it, ‘everybody wanted to come and see it, you know, but that was making things worse for Mum, not being able to cope. She was glad of Maurice’s support. But it has been said, right, that he was keeping it going. But, I mean, how can you keep something going like that? It starts and it stops when it wants to, you know?’

It was Anita Gregory who published the theory that Maurice Grosse was somehow ‘keeping it going’. She was Enfield’s most vigorous critic and, over the last few months, I’ve been desperately searching for her banned thesis. It’s been difficult. The SPR refused to tell me when it was written or which college Anita was attending when she wrote it, except to say that it was possibly a London one. They wouldn’t even give me its title. So, I called all the colleges in London. Some of them looked and couldn’t find anything; others refused to do even that, because I wasn’t a student. Next, I went back to the British Library, as I was told they keep all theses produced in the UK. This, I thought, was my last chance. I sat down at a monitor, logged on to their ‘inclusive catalogue’ and typed in Gregory, Anita. A book about a medium popped up, which was published in the mid-seventies. And that was it. I just stared at the screen for ages. Then I clicked furiously on the name, over and over, clicking on the mouse. This must be my Anita, I thought. It must be. But where was her thesis? Where was her fucking thesis? I was about to give up when a staff member in remarkable glasses walked past.

‘Are all Ph.D. theses stored on here?’ I asked.

‘Most of them,’ he said, touching his thick circular frames, self-consciously, ‘but not all of them.’ He pointed to a small sub-room in the corner. ‘You could try one of the computers in there.’

I’d already given up. But I went in anyway and sat down and logged on again, with the sticky fog of an angry sulk fast descending.

‘Gregory,’ I typed in. ‘A.’

Hundreds of titles fell down the screen in old boxy type.

A. Gregory: ‘Farm Income Inequality & Stability’.

I kept scrolling, my eyes running off the titles like rain down a gutter. No, no, no, no. That’s not it, no. The first hundred went. Then the second hundred.

A. Gregory: ‘The Effects of Barbiturate & Other Sedatives on Fish Retinal Neurones’.

And then I saw it.

A. Gregory: ‘Problems In Investigating Psychokinesis In Special Subjects’.

This had to be it. Psychokinesis is the ability to move objects with the power of your mind and if Anita was sceptical about the case, this could well be what she thought was behind it. And ‘special subjects’ – that could be Janet. And if she was writing about ‘problems in investigating’ the case, she could well have used Maurice’s attempts as examples and that, right there, is why he took such offence at it. I filled in my request form and paced over to the counter to hand it in. The man looked up at me with coal-dead eyes and said that there was no ‘shelf number’ on the entry. And that meant they didn’t have it. But … but … but … it’s really important, I said. He replied that he was sorry. But he didn’t look sorry. And then I went home, in the rain.

So, I decided to join the SPR. Perhaps, I thought, there might be something in their archives that could give me a clue as to what Anita had said that enraged Maurice so much. Eventually, I discovered a series of letters to and from Grosse and Gregory. Dated from the early eighties, they were published over several editions of the SPR’s quarterly journal. I was thrilled. This was the argument that must have led to Maurice’s patience finally erupting. I read the letters with a mixture of triumph, fear and fascination all boiling up in my blood. By the time I’d finished, that toxic slurry of emotions had fermented into pure liquid shock. It was devastating. The longer the polite but furious scrap went on, the more sceptical Anita became. And by the end, she had become extremely sceptical. Over the course of the exchange, she says, in print, in front of all of Maurice’s SPR colleagues, among them the most esteemed paranormally curious minds in the world, that the evidence gathered at Enfield is ‘questionable’, ‘greatly exaggerated’ and, ultimately, ‘pathetic’.

In one of the letters, Anita claims that she interviewed WPC Carolyn Heeps, the police officer who saw the chair move. Apparently, she told Gregory that she thought it was the children playing tricks. Anita also records a comment made to her by the neighbour, Peggy Nottingham, on 15 January 1978. ‘Mrs Nottingham told me that what was going on now was “pure nonsense” and it was “kept going by the investigators”.’

I ask Janet, ‘Do you remember Anita Gregory?’

‘I think I can remember her having black hair and glasses,’ she says. ‘She was very much a sceptic. I think she found the voices … I mean, she seemed OK, but it was like, what was going on was beyond her – it couldn’t possibly happen. And she went away very, very sceptic.’

I can understand why. I pull photocopies of the correspondence out of my bag and read Janet a section where Anita comments on the fact that nobody was allowed in the same room as her and her sister when they were speaking in the gruff ‘old man’s voice’ that was supposedly possessing them. I also find this incident dodgy in the extreme.

‘Yes,’ Janet says, ‘I think Anita Gregory thought that as well. But in the beginning, it was pretty much the same thing. Like, the lights had to be out before the knocking started.’

I look at Janet and think about what she’s just said. I still find it dodgy. Not least because there’s worse to come. You see, Anita was eventually allowed in the bedroom to ask questions. ‘Provided, that is,’ she wrote, ‘I faced the door and covered my head with the girls’ dressing gowns.’ And when she did, ‘slippers and pillows were shied at me’.

Janet smiles and then breaks out into a tender laugh. It’s as if she’s amused by her younger self and greatly affectionate towards her.

‘I can’t remember that,’ she says.

‘But you do remember the fact that people had to be looking away before the voice spoke?’ I ask.

‘I think that maybe it didn’t want her to see because she would go away sceptic.’

‘But surely if it let her watch, then there would be more chance of her believing it?’ I say.

Janet’s eyes widen. ‘But Graham Morris had the proof,’ she says, ‘he had the photos.’

‘I know there are photos,’ I say, ‘but I’m still not clear why you wanted people out of the room before the “voice” spoke. Was it you talking when they were told to leave? Or was it the voice of the spirit, talking through you?’

‘The voice of the spirit,’ she says.

‘So you don’t know why it asked people to leave?’ I suggest.

Shit.

‘No,’ Janet says.

I’m an idiot. I’ve just fed her the ‘right’ answer, the one I thought would explain it best. Inwardly, I’m furious with myself. I stare, angrily, at the ginger cat on the floor and decide to move on, to the most damning evidence that Anita provides. This concerns an incident where the researcher David Robertson set up some hidden video equipment and filmed Janet bending a spoon with her hands and then jumping up and down on her bed and flapping her arms like wings. She was, Anita says, caught ‘merrily cheating away and giving not the slightest indication that she was aware of being filmed’.

‘I remember that one,’ Janet says, smiling, blushing and nodding deeply. ‘I thought, Christ, here we go. Maurice was annoyed with me. Yes, I remember that well. I had some felt-tip pens in my hand, he come down and he says something like, “I’m not very pleased with you, Janet.”’

‘So why did you do fake stuff?’ I ask.

‘Well,’ she says, her hands cupped on her lap in front of her, ‘there was times when things would happen and times when they wouldn’t and sometimes, if things didn’t happen, you’d feel that somehow you’d failed.’

‘So you’d feel obliged to make things up?’ I ask. ‘Because you didn’t want people to be sceptical?’

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘that’s pretty much it. Plus you’d get bored and you’d get frustrated at all the people coming and going. I mean, life wasn’t normal. But the incident you were saying about, David Robertson, even at that age I thought, God, what’s he on about? You have more respect for people as you grow up, you know, but there’s some people you just can’t stand.’

‘So, you decided to wind him up because you didn’t like him?’

‘Yeah. He was just sort of … dozy.’

So eleven-year-old Janet, already frustrated at the disruption to her life, comes across yet another researcher creeping about in her house and implying she’s a liar. And this one really irritates her. So she decides to fuck with him. This, I think, I can believe. It’s just so human. Moreover, it’s just so eleven-year-old human.

‘How much of the phenomena at Enfield was faked, then?’ I say. ‘As a percentage?’

 ‘Hmm,’ Janet exhales and looks into her lap. Her chin creases with the concentration. ‘I’d say two per cent.’

I decide to hit her with the rest of Anita’s moody opinion, just to see what’ll happen. ‘It wasn’t just the voices, you know. Did you know that Anita ended up being sceptical about all of it?’ I ask her, flicking through the sheets on my lap and reading out comments that I’ve underlined. ‘She says it “withers away under close inspection”, that it was a “poorly researched and doubtful case”, that it was “pathetic” … ’

By the time I look up, lines of hurt and anger have tightened Janet’s face.

‘Yeah, but she wasn’t the one there, was she?’ she says. ‘She wasn’t the one who experienced it. There’s so many people that did come round and see things. What’s she saying, then? They’re all pathetic? They’re all liars? They’re all wrong?’

Certainly, I think there was nothing mentally wrong with Janet at the time: the neuro-psychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick and his team submitted her to a battery of tests at the prestigious Maudsley Hospital and confirmed that there was nothing broken in her brain.

It’s almost ten o’clock now, and the last train from Clacton leaves in half an hour. I don’t want to get stranded here, amongst the cats and the kids and their mother’s sad memories. But there is one more thing I want to check before I go. If Lou Gentile was researching this case, it would have been his first question.

‘Before this all happened,’ I ask, ‘did you ever use a Ouija board?’

‘Oh, we both did, yeah,’ Janet says. ‘Me and Rose did it with a couple of friends in the school hut. And when we were doing it, the glass tipped over and smashed and there was, like, a face at the window. We was frightened at the time, but we didn’t think anything more of it.’

‘Do you think this could have had anything to do with the poltergeist?’ I ask.

‘It could have done,’ she says, with a loose shrug, ‘but there can be a lot of coincidences in life, can’t there? Mind you, the same thing did happen with my friend and it’s only just died down now.’

‘What?’ I ask. ‘Tell me.’

‘She did a Ouija board and got the spirit of a young girl. After that, she’d be frightened to stay in the house on her own. She’d hear footsteps and see apparitions. She’s got four children and it got to the stage where they didn’t want to sleep in their room, you know?’

Janet tells me that her friend eventually got her house straightened out by an exorcism. It was also, she says, a priest’s visit that led to the Enfield haunting ‘quietening down’. I note to myself that both these cases are bookended with a Ouija board and an exorcism, just as Lou and Father Bill and the rest would predict. Then I look up and just listen to Janet’s quiet talking.

‘I was always the strong one,’ she’s saying. ‘You look at photos that were taken at the time and I was the one who always smiled through. And yet life wasn’t all that. I was bullied at school. They called me Ghost Girl and put crane flies down my back. And I’d dread going home. The front door would be open, there’d be people in and out, you didn’t know what to expect or what was happening inside, and I used to worry a lot about Mum and what effect it was having on her. She had a nervous breakdown, in the end. But I’m not one for living in the past. I want to move on. But it does come to me now and again. I dream about it, and then it affects me. I think why, why, why did it happen to us?’

As I listen to Janet, it strikes me that it really doesn’t sound like she revelled in the experience, as a hoaxer might. Right now, she sounds like a woman talking about any bitter trauma. In fact, she sounds just like she did when she told me about the death of her son. And, it seems, Janet and the rest of her family have continued to suffer since then. She tells me about her brother, who stayed in Enfield until Mrs Hodgson’s death.

‘He’d hardly ever go out because he’d have to keep looking over his shoulder,’ Janet says. ‘People didn’t forget. They’d take the mickey out of him, spit at him. And on the bus, you’d get people peering at you. They wouldn’t say nothing, but they’d peer at you. My brother’s sensitive to all that. It brought him down a lot. He couldn’t go to pubs because he’d get in fights. They’d be like, here he comes, freak boy from the ghost house. He went to college and they’d start on him. In the end, he left. They’re more refined here, out of London. People don’t know the past.’

Up until her death, Janet’s mother would tell her that there was still something in the house. She’d hear footsteps on the stairs, and doors would open and close on their own. She didn’t mind so much, though. Compared to the hell that had ripped through the place during those months at the end of the seventies it was easily ignorable.

Janet says, ‘Even my brother, until the day he left that place after Mum died, he’d say, “There’s still something there.” And there was. Put it this way, you’d feel like you were being watched.’

‘And do you ever feel there’s something still with you?’ I ask.

‘Sometimes,’ she says. She’s speaking very softly, reluctantly, now. ‘I do. Nothing nasty, but I do. I can honestly say, though, that I’m not possessed. I … ’

She looks at me, and then, with the wrecking ball of realisation almost knocking me through the window, I finally get who it is that Janet reminds me of.

‘ … I try to convince myself that I’m not, anyway.’

It’s Kathy Ganiel.

Will Storr vs. The Supernatural 

Cambridge’s Black Time-Travelling Professor And His Many Superhuman Feats

 

[Backed into a corner, Jason was faced with only one final option: it was time to go nuclear; it was time for him to scream the word ‘racism’ as loudly as he could and then wait for the cavalry. This is exactly what he did, and he got exactly the result he had hoped for, as more than 12,000 people – including Green Party leader Zack Polanski, at least five Labour MPs and a gaggle of Cambridge academics all signed a petition set up by the Good Law Project supporting him. ]

This is the story of how Britain’s elite universities abandoned rigorous academic vetting and swallowed wild, superhuman claims as facts – all in the name of diversity.

Running a single marathon is a great achievement. Running 30 marathons is a spectacular feat. Running 30 marathons in 35 days is something only a world-class athlete could achieve. But running 30 marathons in 35 days, and running the final nine of those marathons with a broken leg – that’s an impossible feat that would require superhuman powers. But that is exactly what Jason Arday has claimed to achieve. But that’s not all, Jason Arday’s incredible feats aren’t just limited to running nearly 240 miles on a fractured leg without medical intervention, he also claimed to have run 600 miles in six days on a treadmill (without any evidence), played both football and snooker at a professional level (a boast that was apparently taken out of context), raised over £5.5 million for charity (but can’t name a single donor), managed to go 15 years with a barely a wink of sleep, and even appeared on the famous television documentary series Seven Up! – which originally premiered a whole 21 years before he was even born. This is the story of Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, who was appointed as Professor of the Sociology of Education in 2023.

Jason Arday was born in 1985 on a council estate in Clapham, South London, to Ghanaian parents – a humble beginning for a man who would go on to achieve so much. But Jason would not only achieve great feats, but he would do so against all the odds, overcoming what some may have called ‘impossible barriers’ during his meteoric rise to greatness. At just three years of age, Jason was diagnosed with global developmental delay and autism spectrum disorder, leading medical experts and therapists to predict that he would require assisted living for the rest of his life. But this wasn’t the end of young Jason’s struggles – he was completely non-verbal throughout his early childhood and communicated entirely using sign language and as a result he didn’t learn to speak until he was 11 years-old. He credited his mother for helping him break through his silence by using music, rhythm, and song lyrics to connect him to language – the power of love and song set him on the road to such success. However, due to his late language and speech development, he did not learn to read or write until he was 18 years-old. Allegedly.

And the word ‘allegedly’ should precede many of Jason’s achievements and boastful tales. It is a well-known medical and biological fact that learning to speak a language fluently after the age of 11 – if a person has been completely non-verbal since birth – is incredibly difficult due to a biological phenomenon known as the critical period hypothesis. Whilst it is not always absolutely impossible, it is one of the steepest challenges in cognitive science. This is because children’s brains form billions of neural connections specifically designed to map sounds to meaning, however, around the point when a child passes through puberty (roughly at the age of 11 to 13), the brain undergoes what is known as “synaptic pruning”. Neural connections that were not used – such as the neural pathways for processing and producing spoken speech – are cleared away or repurposed. Once this pruning happens, the brain loses the elasticity required to naturally absorb language structure.

But it’s not all just about neural pathways, when someone speaks, their brain must also simultaneously coordinate the lungs, vocal cords, tongue, teeth, and lips. This motor mapping is trained continuously through babbling and talking during infancy and childhood. A person who has been non-verbal for 11 years has not built these specific motor pathways, making the physical act of clear speech production highly uncoordinated and laborious. But miraculously, Jason beat all the odds, and at the last possible moment he learnt to speak. But the miracles just kept on coming and Jason managed to attend local schools in South London and eventually left secondary education with two GCSEs – one in Physical Education and one in Textiles. But despite the mountainous struggles that would have beaten most men, Jason was determined to go further still – and eventually, not even the boundaries of time itself would hold him back.


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Determined to pursue sports and teaching, Jason then went to a local college to study for a BTEC diploma, which allowed him to bridge the gap into higher education. This was another major milestone for the young achiever – and this herculean feat was made even greater as Jason claimed that due to his late language development, he did not learn to read or write until he was 18 years-old. Some may scoff at Jason’s two GCSEs and BTEC diploma, but to have achieved these grades whilst not even being able to read and write proved that he was nothing short of a child prodigy. Jason then went on into higher education, and graduated from St Mary’s University in Twickenham in 2008 with a BA in Education Studies and Physical Education before serving as the university’s Student Union Athletics President for a year immediately following his graduation. For many, this would be the end of a long and arduous academic road, but to Jason, it was just the beginning.

Jason then went on to earn an MA in Education and Pedagogy from St Mary’s and later completed a PGCE at the Institute of Education to become a qualified school PE teacher. At this point, after achieving so much, and overcoming so many almost insurmountable hurdles, he could have entered a well-paid role in teaching. But Jason was still hungry for more, leading to his transitioning into the subject of Sociology of Education and going on to earn a Master of Education (MEd) followed by a PhD in Education from Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. This would have been incredible enough, but due to Jason’s humble background, he had no financial backing, and whilst passing through educational institutions at breakneck speed he was forced to work part-time retail shifts to fund his higher education tuition. Not only did Jason beat all the odds as a late starter, but he was both an academic genius and a hard worker.

But looking at Jason’s impressive academic résumé, it appears that mathematical qualifications are sadly absent, and that may be why things just don’t seem to add up. We are meant to believe that a boy who was completely non-verbal due to autism and global developmental delay until age 11 and who was unable to read or write until 18, then went on to earn a PhD by the age of 29. This means that in just 11 years Jason managed to learn basic literacy and catch up on all those years of missed schooling, complete an undergraduate degree (which typically takes 3 years), complete two separate Master’s degrees (typically taking 1-2 years each), complete a PGCE teacher training qualification (taking 1 year) and then write a 100,000-word PhD dissertation (taking typically 3-4 years). In just over a decade, Jason had not only learnt to read and write, but condensed 12 years of higher education into a near record-breaking period of time that would prove his hyper-accelerated cognitive processing abilities were second to none. And he did it all whilst working multiple jobs and without sleeping.

Jason’s story was remarkable – some may even go as far as to state that it was unbelievable – but it wouldn’t be long before educational institutions up and down the country would begin falling over themselves to offer him prestigious well-paid positions. Once he had completed his PhD, Jason secured his first major permanent academic post at the University of Roehampton, entering the institution directly as a Senior Lecturer in Physical Education, and it must be noted, this rapid entry without years of junior postdoctoral research was highly unusual, but surely by this point, extraordinary achievements were nothing more than everyday occurrences for Jason. Jason then went on to join Durham University’s Department of Sociology before being rapidly promoted into an executive role. Within just a year, Durham University had promoted Jason to Associate Professor. Alongside this, he was named the Deputy Executive Dean for People and Culture within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. Interestingly, and rather tellingly, this executive role placed him in charge of institutional diversity and inclusion initiatives.

But the meteoric rise of the non-verbal black youth from inner city London wasn’t over yet. In 2021 Jason stepped into a new role at the University of Glasgow, joining their School of Education to take the position of Chair in the subject of Sociology of Education – another milestone had been achieved, as he was now a full professor. And at the tender age of 35, this appointment officially made him one of the youngest full professors in the whole of the United Kingdom. It was at this point Jason’s numerous lofty achievements and incredible superhuman feats caught the attention of officials at Cambridge University – one of the most prestigious and influential institutions of higher education in human history had now noticed him and they wanted him on their team. And in March 2023, at just 37 years-old, Jason was appointed to the prestigious Professorial Chair of Sociology of Education at Cambridge’s Faculty of Education and was then concurrently elected as a Fellow of Jesus College. This appointment broke the record for the youngest Black professor in the university’s history. Jason was now at the very pinnacle of academic excellence; his fairytale story was now complete.

This is the point where the tale should come to an end, where things should be wrapped up nicely with a big red bow and where Jason receives the applause and recognition he deserves. And that would be how the story ends, if any of his achievements could actually be verified. But at this juncture some uncharitable folk might claim that Jason was just making it all up, and that the only reason anyone believed him is because lecturers and those with institutional power wanted to promote him in order to prove a very specific and racially charged point. It has been noted that people working within modern higher education, and specifically in institutions like Cambridge, Durham, and Glasgow are highly motivated to promote ‘diverse’ talent, especially if that ‘talent’ has a powerful, motivational and inspirational narrative attached. Jason was everything that liberal multiculturalists could have dreamed of, so much so, that university officials all over the UK were so eager to celebrate the story of a non-verbal black man that had beaten all the odds, that they skipped any of the standard, rigorous vetting of his academic work that one might usually expect.

That is exactly how Jason ended up in his position at Cambridge, not so much because of Jason’s myriad of self-professed achievements, but because the institution never checked any of his claims. And this isn’t mere conjecture: the University of Cambridge has now admitted that officials did not conduct an independent textual analysis when hiring Professor Jason Arday in 2023, instead, their vetting process relied heavily on ‘institutional trust’ and ‘reputation’ rather than any raw forensic auditing. In short, because Jason had already been vetted, hired, and promoted to senior positions by three other highly respected institutions (Roehampton, Durham, and Glasgow), Cambridge’s hiring panel assumed his foundational work was immaculate. Instead, Cambridge University’s appointment panel was deeply captivated by Jason’s unique, highly inspirational backstory and the focus of the hiring process was centred on his vision for the sociology department and his high-profile advocacy work surrounding diversity and inclusion, rather than a line-by-line verification of his past work. After all, who needs to know if a candidate can actually do the job they are being hired for when they fit the diversity profile so perfectly?


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But unfortunately for Jason and his eager backers – Cambridge University, a number of other respected academic institutions and several publishers – this isn’t where the story ends, and Jason doesn’t get to leave the stage to rapturous applause. Earlier this year, allegations would emerge that suggested that Jason’s unbelievable backstory and his near impossible achievements weren’t quite as real as some claimed. An analysis of Jason’s 2015 PhD thesis, which was awarded by Liverpool John Moores University, revealed something truly shocking: the document contained 188 sentences that were identical or nearly identical to a thesis written by a student at Brunel University in 2009. But these issues weren’t just limited to Jason’s PhD, textual overlaps were then identified in several of Jason’s subsequent journal articles, leading to two separate journals issuing formal correction notes. In some papers, Jason allegedly recycled borrowed text and framed the lines as “direct quotes” from research subjects he claimed to have interviewed himself. Worse still, The Times later uncovered severe flaws in his references, including data discrepancies and the complete omission of a research participant who Jason previously claimed had taken their own life.

This would have been enough to sink any other high-profile academic. However, Jason’s run of incredible feats and unbelievable luck only continued. Cambridge University were so enamoured with Jason that when this new information came to light and accusations of plagiarism emerged, the university’s immediate institutional response was not to question Jason, but instead to defend him. Senior figures from Cambridge University completely dismissed the allegations, framing any criticism of their all-star black professor as a “vile campaign of bullying” directed at a vulnerable, dyslexic and autistic scholar. But as more and more allegations surfaced, Cambridge University officials changed their tactics, and attempted to distance themselves and the institution from the core issue by stating that investigating a PhD thesis is strictly the legal responsibility of the institution that awarded it – they were passing the responsibility back to Liverpool John Moores University.

And the response of those who should have checked his work in the first place was just as telling. Colleagues and peer-reviewers admitted to being hesitant to question Jason’s data or writing style out of fear of looking like they were attacking a vulnerable, autistic scholar – in short, no one wanted to question the black academic prodigy, they just wanted to put him on a pedestal to prove a point. But now, and rather ironically, all eyes were on Jason Arday – but not quite in the way that he wanted, as people were now increasingly focusing on the details of his work rather than his tall tales. As a result, independent researchers began feeding Jason’s published work into advanced anti-plagiarism software and the truth was plain for all to see. Several major academic publishers were forced to confront the reality that their peer-review processes had overlooked glaring and obvious anomalies. But the embarrassment wasn’t yet over, as Jason had published several highly regarded books with a company called Routledge, a leader in academic publishing. When complaints were first made regarding text-recycling and uncredited overlap in these texts, Routledge initially stood by their man. However, as the sheer volume of identical sentences became public, the publisher was humiliatingly forced to initiate a series of formal internal reviews.

Everything was coming crashing down – and there was only one thing Jason could do. And if you thought that would be to admit to his alleged wrong doings, apologise and walk things back, you would be entirely incorrect. It was in fact time to double down, and invent another story to make everyone feel sorry for him in the hope that the whole incident would just go away and people would stop talking about his alleged plagiarism. And this is where Jason would reveal a final, previously hidden chapter to his remarkable story, it was time for him to tell the world that he had of course been the victim of racism. When Jason had first joined Cambridge University as a professor, he had been the victim of a hate campaign and all this talk of plagiarism and falsified superhuman feats of endurance risked stirring up another maelstrom of bigotry. But it wasn’t enough to claim that he had merely been the victim of hate, Jason had to go further: claiming that a severed pig’s head had been sent to him as part of a sudden escalation of abuse and threats that were specifically aimed at him due to his high-profile appointment as the university’s youngest black professor.

This incredible claim would surely silence all of his critics, as once the police reports and photos of this obscene crime were made public, no one would dare to question the black genius and his remarkable stories. There was only one small problem: Jason did not report the delivery of the pig’s head to the police when it allegedly took place. He claimed that he intercepted a large cardboard box at his parents’ house in South London, on opening the box, he discovered the pig’s head and did what anyone else would do – threw it straight into a wheelie bin and waited several months before calling the police. Well, at least he reported it to the police in the end, so a crime number would back up his harrowing tale. What’s more, Jason was so sure of his interaction with the police, that he went on to claim to reporters that when the police finally investigated the hateful act, they managed to trace the animal back to a local butcher who sold a “whole hog” on the morning that the severed head was delivered to his parents’ house.

However, unfortunately for Jason, the Metropolitan Police keep records of crimes that are reported, and they revealed that after an extensive search, there was no evidence whatsoever of any such report or subsequent investigation. This surely must have been the result of institutional racism within the Met Police and officers must have destroyed all evidence of the report. But at least Jason could still rely on the butcher to confirm the details of this gruesome hate crime. Yet in a final bizarre twist, reporters from The Guardian (who were no doubt driven by a desperate attempt to prove Jason’s story to be true) visited the specific South London butcher that Jason himself had named as the providers of the hog. However, the staff at the shop stated that no police officers had ever come in to question them about a pig’s head, dryly noting, “That’s the kind of thing we’d remember.” Indeed, who could forget such a thing?

One would expect that opening a large parcel only to discover a severed pig’s head nestled within would be rather unforgettable – but in the case of Jason, this may have been just another one of many rather extraordinary occurrences. But as we live in a technological wonderland where everyone has a telephone in their back pocket featuring a high-resolution camera, this kind of extraordinary occurrence would surely result in a photograph being taken. However strangely, Jason did not even take a single picture of the offending item before hurling it into a wheelie bin and according to the police – never even reporting the incident. Strange behaviour for a man of such incredible academic stature, after all, a man who had mastered time travel could surely operate a simple device like a smartphone. It seems that just as with Jason’s academic work, accurate citations were sadly lacking. But the embarrassment was not over yet, as Jason’s friends and colleagues at Cambridge, who were interviewed by the press, all claim he never even mentioned the incident to them. It’s almost as if it never even happened.

Backed into a corner, Jason was faced with only one final option: it was time to go nuclear; it was time for him to scream the word ‘racism’ as loudly as he could and then wait for the cavalry. This is exactly what he did, and he got exactly the result he had hoped for, as more than 12,000 people – including Green Party leader Zack Polanski, at least five Labour MPs and a gaggle of Cambridge academics all signed a petition set up by the Good Law Project supporting him. What’s more, fellow black academics were up in arms about his treatment, with Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, bellowing profusely that Jason was a good boy and he didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, according to Kehinde, poor Jason was merely the victim of a “smear campaign” that was “as predictable as it is baseless”. But it wasn’t just black academics who were angered, white professors also fell over themselves to come to Jason’s defence, with Alan Lester, a University of Sussex Geography professor who specialises in colonialism, calling the entire saga a “non-story”. But the best was yet to come.

Jewish cognitive neuroscientist, Fellow of Trinity College and director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre – Sir Simon Baron-Cohen – raised important concerns about the impact that the media coverage was having on Jason and his mental health. As Jason had been through so much, and achieved so many great feats, Simon Baron-Cohen wanted everyone to just shut up and stop talking about the issue, stating: “We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards; however, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop.” According to Baron-Cohen, this wasn’t about truth, academic integrity or standards in higher education, this was now a ‘safeguarding issue’ and what’s more, it was ‘bullying’.

If Jason Arday had been white, it would have undoubtedly been the case that he would have either resigned, or been forced out of his lucrative position. However, at the time of writing, Cambridge University’s leadership is actively shielding him from any scrutiny, citing a prior institutional clearance. An academic misconduct panel at Liverpool John Moores University – which awarded Jason his PhD – reviewed the 188 copied sentences in March 2026 and cleared him of intentional misconduct, ruling the overlaps were an “honest and reasonable error” caused by a depleted student supervision team. They too wanted the world to know: Jason was indeed a good boy who didn’t do anything wrong and that the copied sentences weren’t his fault. Cambridge have now officially declared Jason the victim of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility” driven by right-wing media outlets and their Faculty of Education is actively providing him with safety infrastructure, including panic alarms and specialist staff to security-screen his mail – who are no doubt on high-alert for severed animal heads. What’s more, despite everything that has happened, the commercial book publishers he has deals with have also confirmed they are still proceeding with his upcoming titles as planned.

But even now, with all these facts, assertions and allegations out in the wild, the public isn’t left with many answers – only more questions. Was Jason Arday really non-verbal until 11 years of age? Did he miraculously learn to speak at the very last minute with the help of music? Could he really not read and write until the age of 18? If he could not read and write until 18, how on earth did he get two GCSEs and a BTEC diploma? Some of what we have been told is undoubtedly true – he did indeed go to several major universities – but that raises even more questions. How could anyone even apply to a university if they were still learning to read and write? And why would a university accept a student who couldn’t read or write properly? And if he did learn to read and write at the age of 18, how did he compress such a large amount of learning into a single year of work? So many questions, and these questions are all about events and achievements that allegedly took place before Jason even got to university and before he allegedly began copying the work of others.

But then there are a string of pressing questions about his time in higher education. Why didn’t those checking his work go over it properly? How did Jason manage to get his work through the peer review process, and who were the peers who reviewed it? What work did he present when attending interviews for lucrative and prestigious positions, and how do institutions decide whether a candidate is suitable for the role? There are people out there who can answer these questions, but they never will. In fact, the only way any of this could be verified is if we had a time machine, and there’s only one person in this whole sorry tale who claims to have broken the laws of physics and travelled back through time – and conveniently, that is of course Jason. Which all leads to only one conclusion: a young black man who was woefully underqualified ended up being ushered through educational institutions and was given a pass at every level in order to unfairly elevate him in a blatant attempt to prove a political point. Jason Arday is the ultimate token black academic, and universities built him up because of that.

And that’s really the point; this isn’t just a story about a silly man with a big mouth and an overactive imagination. This story is really about the fact that one particular silly man with a big mouth and an overactive imagination ended up as a Cambridge University Professor with a number of academic book deals. And the reason he ended up in that position is simple: it wasn’t because of his incredible achievements; it was because of his ethnic background and the sob story he sold to a panel who were no doubt overwhelmingly made up of white liberals. One of the supposed strengths of the academic system is that it is meant to have rigorous checks in place to ensure those who are underqualified do not get into positions of power or authority, and these checks and balances are not only there to ensure fairness and to guarantee that only the best of the best take the top positions in leading universities, but also to ensure that at the heart of academia is a system of structured meritocracy. This meritocracy is not only to ensure the cream rises to the top, but to create a constant upward cycle that leads to ever-increasing standards and that academic boundaries are constantly tested and pushed. But this all goes out the window if a candidate is from an ethnic minority background.

The fact that Jason Arday rose to such a position is a damning indictment of the current state of academic institutions in Britain. But this story also illustrates another important issue – this wasn’t a one-off failing involving a single university and a small number of officials, but a national systemic failing involving dozens of people at multiple top-tier universities and publishing houses. It is clear, these institutions have given up on the ideals of meritocracy and excellence, and have instead elevated diversity, equity and inclusion as the most important virtues in modern education. This is not only unfair to better and more qualified candidates who have genuinely worked harder and deserve the job in question, but it also inevitably leads to a decline in the overall quality of an institution. But the damage done is not just limited to the institution in question, but is part of a wider process of societal and civilisational decline. What’s more, it is a sign that elite institutions are no longer dominated by scholars who strive for knowledge and truth, but instead are controlled by those who have an almost religious belief in multiculturalism and diversity.


You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics here.

This religious belief is so great, that when a man like Jason Arday walks into an institution he isn’t just seen as a poster boy, but almost as a form of messiah who can do no wrong and should face no criticism. As such, those who are so eager to place him on a pedestal will not even question the incredible feats he boasts of – no matter how outlandish they are. Instead, officials within elite institutions will parrot the wild boasts of men like Jason Arday, happily spreading the word of the great miracles performed by their latest diversity hire. Officials at Cambridge University seem so in love with the idea of Jason that they appear to be one step away from claiming that after he ran his 35 marathons (9 of which were achieved on a broken leg) he then proceeded to walk on water and feed the entire university with one mackerel and a single loaf of sugar bread. Such is the unquestioning and almost religious belief in Jason Arday, that even now, the university stands by him and he will remain as one of the best paid and most highly revered published academics in Britain.

To Britain’s elite educational institutions, Jason Arday’s improbable tales of being non-verbal at 11, running marathons on a broken leg and appearing on a television show that premiered 21 years before he was born weren’t red flags – they were integral reasons as to why they embraced him and put him on a pedestal. And that leads to one final point that must be made clear – an uncomfortable issue that many won’t wish to accept. The case of Jason Arday is absolute proof that the ‘woke’ agenda and shibboleths of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ are certainly not a thing of the past – in fact they are very much alive and well. The idea spread by some within the media and in online circles that ‘common sense’ has returned and ‘woke’ politics was just a brief period of social madness is nothing more than a lie that is eagerly accepted and parroted by those who wish to believe they are winning. The notion that woke politics is a ‘thing of the past’ is as realistic as the story of a man running nine marathons on a broken leg – and anyone that chooses to believe either of those assertions is sadly only fooling themselves.

Mark Collett
https://markacollett.substack.com/