Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

by Will Storr

  ‘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.

  ‘Hello, I wonder if you could help me? My name’s Will and I’m doing some research about ghosts.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘I was just talking to someone you know – Stan. You did an exorcism round his house the other day.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And I was just wondering if I could come up and interview you about it.’

  ‘No. That won’t be possible.’

  ‘Stan said it would be fine. He doesn’t mind –’

  ‘Well, Stan may well have said that, but I’m a professional –’

  ‘But –’

  ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

  ‘Hello, is that Will?’

  ‘Yes. Hello.’

  ‘Hello. It’s Stan here.’

  ‘Oh, hi. I’ve just spoken to your vicar.’