Poltergeist

 Author’s Preface

What would you do if a piece of your furniture suddenly slid along the floor on its own in front of your eyes? Think for a moment and be honest with yourself. What would you actually do?

Maybe, after getting over the initial shock, you would shrug your shoulders, assume it must have had something to do with mice or an earthquake, and just hope it doesn’t happen again.

But it does happen again. And again. And all sorts of even odder things happen as well. Stones fall on your kitchen floor, as if they had come through the ceiling. Somebody – or something – starts banging on the wall. Things disappear and reappear somewhere else. Before long, you realise that it can’t be anything to do with earthquakes or mice, but must be something else, something wholly inexplicable and very frightening. You know these things can’t happen yet you also know they are happening.

Whatever you would do next, or like to think you would, I can tell you what people who have found themselves in this predicament have done.

Quite often, they have simply panicked. In 1978 a Birmingham family abandoned the house in which they had lived happily for eleven years, refusing to set foot in it again. A South London couple rushed out of their brand new council flat leaving their furniture and most of their belongings behind, and were never seen in the area again.

Others have appealed for help from neighbours, the police, priests, doctors and newspapers, but in vain. Sometimes, in fact, such appeals have only made things worse. As word spreads around that something spooky is going on in your house, you suddenly find your friends pointedly looking the other way when you pass them in the street. People give you funny looks in the local shops. Passers-by stop and stare at your house. You receive malicious phone calls and threatening letters. In short, your life is ruined. This has all happened.

Some have been even more unfortunate. They have been referred to psychiatrists and locked up in mental homes, as happened to a London woman in 1977. Then to crown it all they see some ‘expert’ on television, usually a psychology professor, explaining that it’s all due to imagination or naughty children.

Yet a few are lucky. They find somebody who explains that what has been going on is known as poltergeist activity and is willing to help. Cases of such activity have been reported, often in considerable detail, for at least 1,500 years. It usually stops as suddenly and mysteriously as it starts, typically after a few days or maybe a couple of weeks, and it seldom does any serious damage. There are of course exceptions, and this book is about one of them.

‘Very briefly, can you explain what a poltergeist is?’

I often get asked this question and my answer is invariably ‘Very briefly, no. Nor can anyone else’. As Bertrand Russell commented about the subject of electricity, it is not a ‘thing’, but ‘a way in which things behave’.

I can at least explain what the word means. It comes from the German verb poltern – to make a racket – and Geist — spirit or ghost. I can also describe how poltergeists behave. They seem to come in three or four varieties. They can be merely mischievous, they can give the impression that they just dropped in by chance, they can even be benevolent – in an extraordinary case in South Wales investigated by my late colleague David Fontana in 1991, quite a large sum of money in the form of coins and even banknotes was provided by the obliging spook. Yet they can also be thoroughly hostile and destructive, as on a case I helped investigate in Brazil in 1973 when a family in the town of Suzano had much of their furniture destroyed by repeated outbreaks of fire and several windows and roof tiles smashed by stones thrown by invisible hands.

What they generally do most often is knock on walls and floors, throw things around, overturn chairs and tables, set things on fire, and occasionally, as we shall see, give the impression that they are spirits of the dead, for want of a more precise description.

Poltergeist activity is in fact what doctors call a syndrome, which means a group of symptoms that indicate a certain disease or an abnormal condition. And it is not only abnormal, meaning not normal, but also paranormal. This means that it cannot be explained in terms of established science, which in turn means that established scientists tend to ignore it altogether and pretend that it doesn’t exist (because they can’t explain it), leaving the work of investigation to individuals like myself who are intrigued by areas of human experience that scientists generally cannot reach.

The Enfield poltergeist made the front page of a national newspaper ten days after it began in 1977. It has been the subject of numerous radio and television programmes and even more numerous newspaper and magazine articles all over the world. It is also the subject of a full-length book – this one.

The reason for all this attention is that an enormous amount of very anomalous activity took place over a period of some fifteen months in 1977 and 1978, including examples of just about every ‘psychic’ phenomenon on record. Much it was taperecorded as it happened, and some of it was photographed by an experienced professional. Some was even captured on film, and a great deal of it was witnessed in good conditions by at least thirty people including myself. Andrew Green, a leading authority on these matters, described the case in New Psychologist (January 1979) as ‘promising to be the most exciting poltergeist case yet’. I hope this book helps fulfil that promise.

But before I get down to a thud-by-crash account of all the activity and excitement, a word of caution is needed. If you are not sated by all the horrors and occult titillations of books or films such as The Exorcist and its host of imitators, and are still hungry for more exotic thrills, then this book is not for you. Readers may find some of it rather dull, with a not very good plot and some terrible dialogue.

This is because This House is Haunted, plot, dialogue and all, is true. And while truth may be stranger than fiction, as indeed it can be, it is also far less well organised. It can be very repetitive, even monotonous. It is exciting enough when a table or a sofa leaps into the air and flips over, but when such incidents keep on happening week after week, it becomes a bit of a bore.

So, if you are tired of all the over-dramatised versions of what were sometimes true events, and would like to know what really happens on a poltergeist case from start to finish in some detail, please read on, but bear two things in mind:

Firstly, repetitiveness and general confusion are well-established features of poltergeist activity, and I have felt obliged to record the tedious episodes of this very complex case as well as the many exciting ones.

Secondly, whether it is being tedious or exciting, the poltergeist represents a tremendous challenge. It shows that there really is a direct link between mind and matter, and that there are forces and dimensions in our world that are not yet even dreamed of in our established philosophies. To me, the prospect of exploring those dimensions and harnessing those forces to make them work for us rather than against us, as we have done very successfully, for instance with electricity and magnetism, is far more exciting than the mere sight of a chair falling over. This prospect, I believe, is now a very real one.

If this were a novel, this is where I should state that ‘all characters are imaginary and bear no intended resemblance to any person living or dead’. Yet it is not a novel, and all the characters are real. (All the living ones, that is. I cannot vouch for the true identities of those who claim to be dead). Some names have been altered at the request of those concerned, and these are indicated by an asterisk when first mentioned. All other names are real, and all quoted dialogue is taken either from tape recordings, signed written statements or my own notes taken at the time. Some dialogue has been edited to the extent of removing repetitive or nonessential material, but I have added nothing. I hardly need to, since the transcripts of our tape recordings cover more than 600 singlespaced typed A4 pages. So I have plenty of words to choose from.

Special thanks are due to the two people who made this book possible: my late colleague Maurice Grosse (1919-2006) and Peggy Harper, who is also sadly no longer with us.

Peggy was a woman of great courage, strength and determination who survived an ordeal that no mother should ever have to face. She was wonderfully cooperative and hospitable throughout the case, and managed to keep going when a less resilient soul might well have suffered a nervous breakdown.

Maurice was an exemplary researcher, devoting a great deal of his spare time to the case while somehow managing to run his business. He showed great concern for the well-being of the family, and considerable skill in preserving order during some of the most turbulent times. He was in effect a volunteer social worker for more than a year. It was both a privilege and a pleasure to work with him.

Thanks are also due to all those directly involved in the case: Professor John Hasted, Dr Peter Fenwick, Dr Ian Fletcher, David Robertson, Hugh Pincott, Lawrence Berger, Elsie Dubugras, Luiz Gasparetto, Gerry Sherrick, George and Annie Shaw, Peter Liefhebber, Dono Gmelig-Meyling, Richard Grosse, George Fallows, Matthew Manning, Graham Morris, Ron Denney, Hazel Short, WPC Carolyn Heeps, Vic and Peggy Nottingham, and John, Sylvie, Denise and Paul Burcombe.

Though I neither sought or received any financial help from anybody during the two years spent researching and writing this book, I gratefully acknowledge help in other forms from members of the Society for Psychical Research, especially Dr Eric J. Dingwall, Eleanor O’Keeffe, Renée Haynes and the members of the committee chaired by John Stiles who carried out a lengthy re-investigation of the case.

When the first edition of this book was published in 1980, I agreed not to mention the real names of the members of the ‘Harper’ family, other than Janet, whose real first name I have used for reasons that will become clear, or their real address, and have not done so here.

What follows is the original text (with minor alterations), plus a new Preface and Appendix in which I bring the story up to date.

Oh, I nearly forgot – thanks to the poltergeist, whoever or whatever you were.

G.L.P

London, 2011

*

What do you do when your home is suddenly invaded by an invisible force? If, like the Harpers, you have no telephone, you probably call the neighbours. But when neither they nor you can come up with a normal explanation for what you have just seen and heard, the next logical step is to call the police, and this is what Peggy Nottingham did.

Woman Police Constable Carolyn Heeps was in a patrol car with a male colleague when the typically terse message came over the car radio.

‘Proceed to 84 Wood Lane.* Disturbance.’

They duly proceeded there, expecting perhaps a fight outside a pub or a prowler trying to force a back window But they arrived to find seven ordinary people in the Harpers’ small room, all looking very much as if they had just seen a ghost.

They had not seen a ghost. That was to come later, along with examples of virtually every ‘psychic’ or ‘paranormal’ phenomenon ever recorded, plus a good many new ones. But they certainly thought they had heard one.

Mrs. Harper tried to keep calm. I think this house is haunted,’ she declared. ‘We’ve had some strange things happening.’ She showed the two puzzled constables the chest of drawers in the back bedroom.

‘I pushed it back, and it moved again,’ she explained. ‘It was moving out, gradually moving towards the centre of the doorway. I was really petrified. I pushed it again because I couldn’t believe my eyes.’ The police listened without comment.

Look,’ said Vic Nottingham, when they were all back in the living room. ‘I’ll switch off the light, and we’ll see if anything happens.’

He did so, and it did. As before, there were four loud knocks on the wall, Then, after about two minutes’ silence, four more — from a different wall. The light from the street lamp was enough for everybody to be plainly visible to each other.

For the second time that night, the house was searched from top to bottom. Then, while her colleague was examining the plumbing in the kitchen, WPC Heeps was in the living room when Pete suddenly pointed to one of the chairs by the sofa, clearly visible in the light now coming through the kitchen door.

Nobody was touching the chair, but it was wobbling from side to side. Then, in full view of most of the eight people in the room, the chair did exactly what the chest of drawers upstairs had done earlier. It slid along the floor towards the kitchen. WPC Heeps reckoned it moved about three or four feet, and although she immediately examined the chair, she could not explain how it had moved.

*

Grosse had already found that nothing like this seemed to happen when he was in the house, and he wondered if it ever would. He did not have to wait long, for within an hour he had witnessed more paranormal phenomena at first hand than some researchers have experienced in a lifetime.

At five past ten, a marble came whizzing towards him apparently out of nowhere. It seemed to come from over the heads of the children, and he was positive that none of them had thrown it. A minute later, the hanging chimes on the wall suddenly began to swing back and forth, and Grosse immediately checked that even when the front door bell was pushed, the chimes did not move at all.

He was still hastily writing his notes when, six minutes later, Mrs. Harper called him from the kitchen. ‘There’s a noise in the bathroom,’ she said.

Grosse and the three Harper children stood in the kitchen and listened. (Pete was still away at boarding school). All was quiet. There was no wind or rain outside, and no traffic to be heard. Then, to his amazement, Grosse saw the door of the lavatory open and close on its own. This happened three or four times. At the same time he felt a sudden cold breeze around his legs, and then around his head, This, he knew, was one of the most frequently reported phenomena on poltergeist cases.

Before he had time to write that one down, a sudden movement in the kitchen caught his eye. A T-shirt had jumped from the top of a pile of clothing on the table and fallen to the floor. Nobody could have touched it without him seeing them.

When the excitement had died down, the children got ready for bed. Rose went to the bathroom to clean her teeth, but stopped in the kitchen doorway with a cry.

‘Oh! Come and look at this!’

A mug half full of water was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor. Grosse could not see how any of them could have put it there without being noticed.

As Janet went into her bedroom, a marble slammed into the door beside her, and two more were thrown shortly afterwards. Grosse, who was nearby on the landing, noticed a curious detail; the marbles never bounced. They would hit the floor and stay put as if actually placed there by an invisible hand. Later, I was able to witness exactly the same effect.

The following day, Grosse was pleased to find that Mrs. Harper had made a good start as an investigator of her own case. She showed him her notepad, on which she had neatly written:

7.57 pm. Drawer in kitchen unit opens about 6 in.

8.05 pm. Door chimes swing back and forth.

8.10 pm. Teaspoon in kitchen jumps in the air.

Earlier, a cardboard box had shot off a table as Janet went past, and it was already becoming clear that she was the main focus of incidents, or ‘epicentre’, to borrow a word from seismology. She was always near when something happened, and this inevitably led to accusations that she was playing tricks, although Grosse was already fully convinced that she could not be responsible for all the incidents. She had not touched the wall chimes or the lavatory door. She had not thrown the marble at him, and how could she have caused that sudden icy breeze? But she still had to be watched.

That afternoon, Peggy Nottingham’s father, Mr Richardson, had met the children coming back from the park and gone with them into their house, Janet went upstairs and immediately called him. Her bedroom chair was perched on top of the open bedroom door, leaning against the wall. Mr Richardson was not impressed.

‘Oh, stop playing about!’ he said, though he had to admit he did not think she had had time to put the chair up there herself. It was very precisely balanced, and a touch from his finger toppled it over. Such balancing feats were to be a common feature of the case, and once again I was later able to see one for myself. I also had great difficulty in getting the chair to stay in the position in which Janet said she had found it.

‘I didn’t put it there,’ said Janet indignantly She was already getting annoyed at being accused of playing tricks.

They went downstairs, and Janet put some stones from the park into the fish tank to keep the two goldfish company. She carefully replaced the lid of the tank and went into the kitchen. She was still there when the lid of the tank jumped off, flew through the air and landed about four feet away.

Janet appeared in the doorway. ‘Well, I didn’t do that, did I?’ she said defiantly to the utterly bewildered Mr Richardson, who had been sitting right by the tank.

Later that day, Grosse had a talk with Mrs. Harper and asked her to keep a close watch on Janet at all times.

‘I’m not saying she’s playing tricks,’ he said, ‘but we can’t rule out the possibility that this thing is working on her mind, making her do things without knowing why’

Mrs. Harper listened attentively and chose her words carefully before replying, as she always did.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘Janet hasn’t been the same these last few weeks. She’s not the girl she was. She’s somehow different…. ’

Grosse, having himself brought up two daughters, tried to reassure her. ‘It’s an awkward age. She’s just going through one of those periods of change.’

Mrs. Harper did not seem wholly satisfied. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I certainly will keep an eye on her from now on.’ As indeed she did.

On Saturday 10 September 1977, the Enfield poltergeist made the front page of the Daily Mirror, sharing the whole of it with a lurid account of the death of a politician’s drug addict son. The headline on the left of the page read. The House of Strange Happenings.

George Fallows told the story as he and his colleagues, the police and Grosse had witnessed it. He kept faithfully to the facts, and concluded:

Because of the emotional atmosphere at the house and in the neighbourhood, ranging from hysteria through terror to excitement and tension, it has been difficult to record satisfactory data. Nevertheless, I am satisfied the overall impression of our investigation is reasonably accurate. To the best of our ability, we have eliminated the possibility of total trickery….

Mike Gardiner, producer of LBC Radio’s popular Night Line phone-in programme, decided to follow up the Mirror story. Fallows had not mentioned either Mrs. Harper’s real name or her address, so Gardiner headed for the Enfield police station. There he met Maurice Grosse, who was talking to WPC Heeps and obtaining a written statement from her, which she later signed, on the events of 31 August. Gardiner duly invited Grosse, Mrs. Harper and Peggy Nottingham to be his guests on the programme that evening.

Grosse made no attempt, then or later, to contact any of the media himself. Nor did he or Mrs. Harper ever ask for a fee, although Mrs. Harper could certainly have used some extra cash, since she had four children to support on welfare and her ex-husband’s maintenance payments.

Grosse had no objection to publicity provided it were handled carefully, however, and he reckoned that a trip up to town would give Mrs. Harper a break and do her good.

The programme lasted from 10.30 pm until one o’clock on Sunday morning, and Mrs. Harper proved to be a natural broadcaster. She described her recent ordeal calmly and simply, ending with a list of incidents that had taken place that very day:

I was woken up this morning by a rattling noise, and I didn’t quite know what it was. I was going to get out of bed and investigate, when Janet came in and said to me ‘Mum’, she said, ‘it’s jumping on the bed.’ But I think she must have meant it was moving the bed.

Janet come in from school at a quarter to four, and when she come in, she went to the bird cage and sort of tapped on the cage of the budgie, and when she did that, the bell chimes hanging on the wall began to sway.

Then she went out into the kitchen to get a cup of milk from the refrigerator. I followed her out there, standing behind her. She goes past the kitchen drawer, near the sink, and one of the drawers gradually comes out. She’s drinking her milk, and she says ‘Ooh, look, Mum, the drawer’s come out!’

And she walks back to come out of the kitchen, and there’s a cardboard box standing on the table with some odd things in it, and that jumps from the table top into the centre of the kitchen floor. And this I actually saw.

Peggy Nottingham described how she and a policeman, who had come to call that morning, had gone upstairs to have a look round, and found an impression on one of the beds as if someone was, or just had been, lying there, although she was sure nobody had been upstairs since the beds had been made two hours earlier.

‘It’s strange,’ she told the programme’s estimated quarter of a million listeners, ‘because when I went up there again this afternoon, and I lay on the bed, and then I got off, and there was no shape at all where I had been lying. So how was it that other shape was there?’

Programme host Simon Reed then asked Mrs. Harper if she believed in ghosts.

‘Well,’ she replied slowly, ‘I believe in life after death, and ghosts, yes, I suppose. But if I’d have read this in the paper I think would have thought it would have been a bit too much to take in, all the activity.’

*

The Harpers hoped to find some peace and quiet in the Burcombes’ house, but it was not to be. From the kitchen, Sylvie suddenly let out a piercing scream and dropped the kettle she was holding. It was some time before she could calm down enough to describe what had happened.

‘I was just pouring the water from the kettle into the teapot,’ she said, ‘when something appeared right in front of my eyes and then dropped onto the kitchen unit top, and bounced once.’ It was a plastic rod about six inches long from one of the children’s toy sets.

‘I sort of looked down, opened my eyes, and this thing was in front of me,’ she told Grosse when he arrived shortly afterwards. ‘I screamed, shouted, I jumped back, and after I jumped back I saw the thing jump and come up again.’

Grosse questioned Mrs. Burcombe very carefully about this incident, which seemed to be a genuine case of one of the rarest of all psychic phenomena — materialisation.

The plastic rod had definitely not been thrown at her, she insisted. It had ‘just appeared’ in front of her eyes and dropped down. Everybody in the house agreed that none of them had, or could have, thrown it.

This was the first new development — the poltergeist could follow the Harpers away from their house.

*

The second new development in the case was the apparitions, and of all people to see the first one, it was Vic Nottingham. He was the last person I would have thought would ever claim to have seen a ghost. But he claimed he had, and he described it in his usual matter-of-fact way:

‘It could have been vivid imagination,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think it was. I went down to my shed, and as I came back up the garden, I seemed to see a vision at the window, the back window in No 84. It looked to me like an old lady, a grey-haired old lady.’

He mentioned this to his wife, but not to anybody else at the time. Later that afternoon, he met Mrs. Harper out in the street.

‘I just seen her again,’ she told him. ‘That old lady in the window.’ Her description of the lady matched Vic’s exactly, except that her apparition had been in a front window. This independent sighting took place, incidentally, on the same day as Burcombe’s encounter with the light on the stairs.

So, after the first month or so of the case, we had a total of fifteen people in addition to the five Harpers — the Nottinghams, the Burcombes, the Mirror team, the policewoman, Rosalind Morris of the BBC, Grosse and myself — who were satisfied that the Enfield case was genuine. Could all of us have been deceived?

It was not until 15 October, on my thirteenth visit to the house, that I was finally able to cast all doubts aside on the evidence of my own eyes and, more important still, my tape recorder.

This Houseis Haunted

The Amazing Inside Story

of the Enfield Poltergeist

GUY LYON PLAYFAIR