Green Street, Brimsdown — the Enfield poltergeist

OVERVIEW

A terraced council house on Green Street in Brimsdown, Enfield, home in 1977 to Peggy Hodgson and her four children. Between August 1977 and 1979 more than thirty people — neighbours, a police constable, Daily Mirror reporters and photographers, and the Society for Psychical Research investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair — said they saw or heard heavy furniture move, objects thrown, knocking, and a gruff male voice that seemed to come from eleven-year-old Janet. The SPR has since catalogued and digitised the tape recordings. The entry is placed on Green Street, not on the house.

HISTORY

Grosse and Playfair (This House Is Haunted, 1980) believed some events genuine while conceding the girls faked others; SPR members Anita Gregory and John Beloff, the magicians Milbourne Christopher and Ray Alan and the sceptic Joe Nickell concluded the case was children's pranks and ventriloquism, pointing to photographs of Janet 'levitating' as bouncing off the bed and to the voice being produced by the false vocal cords. The voice called itself Bill Wilkins; a BBC programme in 2024 reported that a listener had identified it on air as his father, William Charles Wilkins, who died in the house in 1963. The case was retold in The Enfield Haunting (2015), The Conjuring 2 (2016), an Apple TV series (2023) and a West End play (2023–24).

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The reports are the case: knocking, moved furniture, thrown Lego and marbles, a fireplace torn from the wall, the voice. What is established is that a great deal was witnessed and recorded and that the witnesses disagree about what it was. The entry records the case and the argument; it does not decide it.

VISITING

A private family home on an ordinary street. Do not visit, photograph or knock. The entry exists for the record.