by Will Storr
‘You can imagine what sort of a state we were in.’ Maurice pauses to release a long sigh that’s gathered deep in his chest. ‘She was only twenty-two.’
I nibble nervously on some ginger cake and look around me. The house is immaculate. There’s a smart seventies suburbia feel to the décor in here, an illusion that’s only broken by a large, modern television and DVD player. On the other side of the settee is a bar, complete with half-drunk bottles of Scotch, Gordon’s and a soda squirter. The only clue in this room to Maurice’s strange vocation is the enormous moustache that lives underneath his nose. It’s exactly the sort of moustache that you’d expect a paranormal legend to wear. It’s as neat and preened as his sitting room, as plump as his sofa and if it were any larger, it would probably draw stares.
‘So,’ he continues, suddenly bucking up a little, ‘because of all these things that happened, I thought, well, I don’t know. Is this a sign from Janet? So I decided to join the Society for Psychical Research. I thought, if I’m going to study the psychical, I better do it seriously. Ha, ha,’ he laughs and looks at me. ‘Makes sense.’
There were ten ‘coincidences’ in all that compelled Maurice to join the SPR (which is, incidentally, the world’s oldest and most respected paranormal research organisation, and the only one that counts two prime ministers – Balfour and Gladstone – amongst its alumni). To be honest, a lot of these coincidences, to me sound just like coincidences. The fact that Janet died on her brother’s birthday; that Maurice was unexpectedly asked to take part in a Jewish ceremony that required him to enter a state of ‘mourning’ a few hours before the crash; that his sister-in-law’s clock stopped at 4.20 a.m. – ‘approximately’ twelve hours after she died. Sad, if unsettling, accidents of circumstance. Other occurrences do, however, seem curious. There was a punishing drought during the summer of 1976. One day, Maurice mused to himself that, if Janet really was trying to give him a sign, she’d make it rain. The next morning, he was astounded to find that the roof of his kitchen, which extended into the garden below Janet’s bedroom window, was, inexplicably, soaking wet. And yet the drought wasn’t to break for several weeks.
With his impressive personal credentials – Maurice is a fiercely intelligent Second World War veteran and a highly successful inventor – the SPR took their newest recruit seriously enough for him to be sent on the next investigation that came in.
I hadn’t heard of the ‘Enfield poltergeist’ when Lou mentioned it back in Philadelphia. But it was headline news back in September 1977, after two Daily Mirror reporters and two photographers witnessed some terrifying incidents in the home of the Hodgson family. It was these journalists who called in the SPR, at a complete loss to understand the things that they’d seen.
‘As soon as I got there,’ Maurice says, settling back in his shirt and slacks, ‘I realised that the case was real because the family was in a very bad state. Everybody was in chaos.’
During the next few months Maurice, along with over thirty other witnesses, would see almost every symptom of a poltergeist infestation that has ever been recorded.
But things began slowly.
‘When I first got there,’ he says, ‘nothing happened for a while. And then I experienced Lego pieces flying across the room, and marbles, and the extraordinary thing was, when you picked them up they were hot – which is relevant to poltergeist-type activity. They appeared to come out of nowhere. I was standing in the kitchen and a T-shirt leapt off the table and flew into the other side of the room while I was standing by it. I thought, well, that’s good. Now I’ve really seen something.’
I sit back and listen to him recount his astonishing story. Along with his SPR-assigned partner, a highly experienced poltergeist researcher called Guy Lyon Playfair, Maurice watched the case gathering slowly, like a diabolical black storm. Sofas would levitate and tip over in front of them; beds, tables and chests of drawers would be spun on the spot and flung; small rocks would fly right over the house; Janet and Rose, the two young daughters, would be hurled out of bed; coins and stones would drop out of the air; dogs would bark in the middle of completely dogless rooms. On one particularly frantic day, Maurice and a visiting neighbour called Peggy heard Rose crying out, ‘I can’t move! It’s holding my leg!’ They rushed out to find her standing on the staircase on one leg, with the other leg stretched out behind her. Peggy grabbed one small wrist and Maurice grabbed the other and they both pulled as hard as they could. Rose didn’t move.
And then there was the knocking. It was loud and could come from several places at once. ‘If you go and listen to it in the wall over here,’ says Maurice, ‘it’ll suddenly come from the wall over there’. And (and I find this detail unaccountably chilling) a run of knocks would often fade in, louder and louder, and then, slowly, out again. As well as all that, there would be electrical disturbances, doors would mysteriously slam, faces would appear in reflections in the windows, brand-new batteries would drain instantaneously.
Most of the activity, however, centred around the eleven-year-old (and somewhat coincidentally named) Janet. She would be thrown out of bed almost every night, go into violent trances and even appear to speak for the thing. One night, to test the poltergeist’s power, Guy removed everything from Janet’s bedroom to see what would happen if it had nothing to throw. Later that evening, the family was disturbed by a violent wrenching sound coming from upstairs. The iron fireplace had been completely pulled out of the wall.
‘Janet was seen levitating at one point,’ Maurice tells me. ‘Flying round the room.’
‘She was actually floating?’ I say, putting my tea cup down, carefully.
‘Horizontally!’ he says.
Thursday, 15 December was a big day for Janet. It was both the day that her first period came and when the strangeness in her Enfield council house reached its climax. David Robertson (the assistant to a professor of physics from Birkbeck College who was also studying the case) was preparing an experiment in a bedroom with her, when she started speaking in the guttural voice of the poltergeist.
‘Fuck off, you,’ it growled. (This bad language was out of character for Janet, but not for the voice. In common with Kathy Ganiel and the cases I found at the British Library, this possessive ghost had a filthy gob on it. Once, it embarrassed both Janet and her mother in a supermarket by telling a passing shopper to, ‘Shit off, you old sod.’)
So, obediently, Robertson fucked off out of the room and closed the door behind him. Then, he shouted in to Janet to ‘just start by bouncing up and down on the bed’. And as soon as he spoke, he heard the bed creak.
Then, Janet gasped, ‘I’m being levitated.’
Immediately, Robertson tried to open the door. He couldn’t. He could just hear Janet inside, gasping and whimpering quietly. Downstairs, on hearing the panic, Rose dashed next door to fetch the ever-helpful neighbour Peggy. And then, suddenly, the door opened. Janet was lying on the bed.
‘I been floating in the air,’ she said.
‘Everything all right?’ said the voice of Peggy, running up the stairs.
‘Fuck off, you,’ said the voice.
Despite having witnessed the full panoply of phenomena at the house, Peggy was sceptical about this. So, she gave Janet a red Biro and asked her if she could levitate again, but this time draw a line around the light on the ceiling. There was no way she could get that high, she reasoned, without noisily dragging a bed across the floor. So, they left the room again, heard the quiet gasps and groans and then, silence. Eventually, they heard Janet land and say, ‘Oh!’ They burst into the room.
Janet looked at Peggy. ‘I been through the wall,’ she said. ‘I went in your bedroom. It was all white and it had no windows.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said the scientist, ‘that room is just like this one, except backwards.’
‘I did,’ she insisted, ‘and I dropped my book.’
So, Peggy trotted next door and upstairs to her bedroom – a place she was sure Janet had never
been. And there, in the middle of the floor, was her book, Fun and Games for Children.
At the very instant a mystified Peggy was picking the book off her floor, David Robertson was yards away, next door, looking up at a thin red line that had been drawn around the light fitting.
‘Now,’ says Maurice, abruptly. ‘How do you account for that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, frowning a little. ‘Um … nobody actually saw her float, did they?’
‘Ah,’ says Maurice with a smile. ‘That was the next thing. David took a heavy red cushion from the armchair downstairs – it was about as big as this cushion here.’ He pats the seat of the sofa next to him. ‘He told Janet, “I want you to throw this out of the window, with the window closed.”’
But it wasn’t Janet who answered. It was the voice.
‘All right, David boy,’ it growled. ‘I’ll make it disappear.’
David closed the door, as usual, and when he heard Janet call out, he turned straight back into the room. Immediately he noticed that the cushion had disappeared. As had one of the curtains.
Outside on the street, a moment earlier, a baker’s roundsman was delivering loaves. He’d heard rumours of ghostly shenanigans in the area, but had dismissed them as ‘bloody rubbish’. As he walked along that Thursday morning, he was startled to notice a red cushion suddenly appear on the Hodgsons’ roof. Then, he looked closer and saw Janet at the window.
A few days later, Maurice and Guy took a statement from the shaken baker, which is recounted in Guy’s book This House is Haunted. In it, he says he saw Janet
bobbing up and down, just as if she were bouncing on her bed. Then articles came swiftly across the room towards the window. They were definitely not thrown at the window, as the articles were going round in a circle, hitting the window, and then bouncing off to continue at the same height, in a clockwise direction. If the articles had been thrown, they would have just hit the window and fallen down. At the same time, the curtains were blowing upwards, into the room. The whole episode was very violent and I was very upset at what I saw.
‘He was terrified Janet was going to come out of the window,’ says Maurice. ‘And then, across the road, there’s a lollipop lady from the local junior school. She saw her, too. So, we had two independent witnesses who had nothing to do with this case saw it happening. Here.’ Maurice nods towards to the table. ‘Have some more cake.’
As I break off a corner of some battenberg, I get an itchy niggle. Janet. Why did she make David Robertson leave the room before she levitated? Elsewhere, Maurice had told me that some things would only happen in Janet’s presence. On one occasion, a journalist even claimed to have got a full hoax confession from Rose (although she insisted afterwards that she was just nodding as he ‘went on and on and on’).
‘Maurice,’ I say, ‘do you think there’s any chance that Janet was playing tricks on you?’
His answer surprises me. ‘Of course she played tricks!’ he roars. ‘They’re children! It would have been impossible for children not to play around. But it wasn’t the same as the real thing.’
‘What about the talking?’ I ask. ‘How could you tell that wasn’t faked?’
‘At first I thought it was. I said, “Janet, that voice is coming from you.” She said, “It’s not, it’s coming from behind me.” Anyway, we did a test. First of all, I got a microphone at the front of her throat and one on the back of her neck and I found the neck one was producing sound louder than the one on the throat. Next, I made her hold water in her mouth and then taped it up with sticky tape.’
‘And the voice was just as clear?’ I ask.
‘No,’ he says, holding a finger up to halt my assumption, ‘not quite as clear. It was a bit garbled, but it was speaking. And when I took the tape off, she spat the water out, so she hadn’t swallowed it. Well, with water in your mouth and your mouth taped over, how the hell can you speak? I don’t think there’s any conjurer in the world can do that.’
Further tests, with a Laryngogram, revealed that the sound was coming from the False Vocal Fold, which you use when you lose your voice. Try and speak with it now, and keep it up for a few minutes. Hurts, doesn’t it? According to Maurice, Janet used to speak like that for anywhere up to three hours at a time, without coughing or clearing her throat or it having any noticeable impact on her normal voice.
Guy Playfair’s book about the case is at first fascinating, then terrifying and, ultimately, a wholly depressing read. It’s the sheer exhaustion of the family that gets you. The relentless dread. The flying out of bed ten times a night. The sleeplessness. The tears. The constant intrusion. The months the entire family spent so scared that they’d sleep together in the same room with the light on. Considering all this, and all of the witnesses, is it really reasonable to suggest, as some have, that Janet and Rose were deliberately causing the mischief?
Perhaps. For a start, Janet was caught hoaxing. She hid Maurice’s tape player and, on one occasion, bent a spoon. And some credible experts did leave convinced that the children were behind the activity.
Certainly, the rational part of me seems desperate to jump on all of this apparently suspicious evidence and use it like a fire extinguisher on all the rest of the burning mysteries.
As I sit here considering it all, I find myself mulling over the similarities between Janet’s experience of possession and Kathy Ganiel’s. So, I decide to mention the time I spent in Philadelphia with one of America’s foremost demonologists.
And Maurice laughs. And laughs. The eighty-five-year-old is so amused he claps his hands in front of his face, his moustache quivering as if it’s being tickled.
‘Ah, ha, ha!’ he says. ‘Ho, ha, ha! What a load of rubbish!’
‘Really?’ I say.
‘Don’t go near him!’ he says, slapping his knee. ‘If he says he’s a demonologist, don’t go near him. The very word! Ha, ha! Why do you think the paranormal’s got anything to do with demons?’
‘Er,’ I say.
‘It’s just superstition!’
‘Well, there was this one woman called Kathy,’ I say, desperately trying to keep my neck above the waves of humiliation that are lapping at my jaw, ‘and she was using the Ouija board, and –’
‘Yes, yes, the usual story. Listen,’ he says, fixing me with clear, sparkling eyes, ‘I’m not criticising what happened, I’m criticising that he’s calling himself a demonologist. I mean, first of all, you’ve got to prove there’s such things as demons. Look, I’m Jewish, but I never mix my religious beliefs with what I’m doing. You just can’t do that. You’re a scientist.’
I decide to change the subject by bringing up my initial worry about his daughter. As we’ve talked, I’ve been struck by Maurice’s passion about Enfield, even now, thirty years later. He’s ferociously confident on the subject and when we touch on the sceptics, he can get defensive, verging on angry. He’s like a preacher defending his faith. Does this betray an emotional heart to what he insists is a purely scientific interest? Has his three-decades-long search for a paranormal reality actually been more about Janet Grosse than Janet Hodgson?
Maurice nods, thoughtfully. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘My scientific interest, yes, stems from the fact that these extraordinary things happened after my daughter’s death. It’s just that I felt … well, you can imagine, I was very, very distressed and it was something to grasp hold of. I thought, why are all these different, incredible things happening around her death? There must be something to it. I must take it seriously. But I’m not a Spiritualist. It’s not that I want to get in touch with her, or anything. That said, Spiritualists have produced an awful lot of evidence. I’ve been in séances where very weird things have happened.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Things that I can’t possibly explain. Like a table going up to the ceiling and turning upside down. You should get in touch with the Spiritualists’ National Union. They’ll tell you all about it.’
I wonder what Maurice thinks of
the people who, regardless of all his evidence, refuse to believe the story.
‘You have to ask yourself,’ he says, ‘why are people sceptics?’ There’s a pause. I raise my eyebrows in his direction. ‘Because they’re human beings and they cannot face the fact that there are unknown things in life. Now, ponder this,’ he says, fixing me with a look. ‘Science today is busy explaining how everything works. But does anybody know why? Science only explains how everything obeys laws. But where did those laws originate from? Did they just come out of nowhere? Think about it. But you put this to a scientist and he’ll just go, “That’s of no interest to me.”’
‘It makes you quite angry, doesn’t it?’ I say.
‘It infuriates me!’ he roars. ‘It’s absurd! It’s absolutely Luddite! These people wouldn’t believe it if it happened in front of them. That’s the attitude. It’s like this obsession they have with hoaxers. Now, I’ve been to suspected poltergeist cases where it’s turned out that they were just very disturbed people, but it’s very rare you go to a case and find that it’s an actual hoax.’
It’s getting late now and, as I prepare to leave, I wonder out loud how Janet is these days.
‘She’s had four children,’ says Maurice, ‘but, unfortunately, the eldest boy passed away when he was seventeen. Died in his sleep. Very tragic family.’
‘Do you think there’s any chance she’d speak to me?’
‘Oh, Janet’s moved away,’ he says. ‘She’s very publicity shy. You could try, but she’s never wanted to talk about it for years, since she was a child.’
As I pack my tape player and brush the crumbs off my notepad, I wonder if Maurice has any advice for me.
