Post by Supernatural Empress on Dec 18, 2005 21:40:42 GMT -5
The Enfield Poltergeist was a period of poltergeist activity in England between August 1977 and September 1978, with an added outburst in August 1980.
The activity occurred in Enfield, North London, in a council house rented by Peggy Harper, a divorcee with four children. Peggy was unemployed, and the family lived on a nominal state benefit.
The occurrences began in late August of 1977 when Peggy had put her four children to bed. Later that night, two of her children, eleven year old Janet and ten year old Pete shouted to their mother that their beds were "jolting up and down and going all funny". The disturbance had apparently stopped just before Peggy reached the room causing her to dismiss it as childish pranks.
The disturbances continued the following night, however, when a shuffling sound woke the children who called for their mother once again. After removing a chair from the room, thinking it the reason for the sounds, Peggy returned to the room to put the children back to bed when she herself heard the odd shuffling. The source of the sound, likened to someone "shuffling across the room in their slippers", was not found when the light was turned on. After turning the light off again, the sound returned, along with knocks on the walls and once the light had been turned on again, a heavy set of drawers was seen to move 18 inches across the ground and would not be moved back to it's original position. The police were summoned and unexplained activity continued in their presence including more moving furniture and knocks on the walls.
The "attack" occurred for three days during which small objects such as lego bricks and marbles were thrown around, often at visitors or residents. These objects were found to be hot when picked up. Vicars, mediums, reporters and photographers filed through the house, but no one was able to stop the bizarre occurrences.
On September 5th, a week after the disturbances began, Maurice Grosse, a member of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) arrived at the house to investigate the occurrences. However, after being there for 3 days, without any activity at all, Grosse started to become skeptical. Then on the 8th of September, the activity returned when the investigators heard a loud crash from the upstairs bedroom of Janet and Pete. They found a sleeping Janet and a chair that had been thrown four feet across the floor. Over the course of the night, they were witness to moving furniture, flying marbles and unexplainable chilled breezes.
Over the next two years knocking on the walls became an almost nightly occurrence, drawers were pulled from cupboards, furniture was thrown down stairs, unexplained puddles of water appeard on the floor, fires were set and then mysteriously extinguished and toys flew across the room. More terrifyingly, Janet claimed to have been picked up and hurled across the room by the entity. Both of Peggy's daughters claimed to have been levitated out of their beds in the middle of the night, to wake elevated 3 feet off the ground and suddenly dropped.
Soon the entity seemed to manifest itself in form of a harsh male voice, eminating from Janet's throat, over which she claims she had no control. The entitiy identified itself as "Bill" and claimed to have died in the house, an event none in the Harper household knew about. Maurice Grosse spoke to speech therapists who suspected that the voice was not coming from Janet’s usual vocal chord equipment but by the second set of vocal chords all people have. Actors can be trained to speak using these ‘false chords’ to produce a deep gravely voice, however it can be a painful process. This theory was soon backed up by a recording of ‘the voice’ on a laryngograph (registers patterns made by frequency waves as they pass through the larynx). However to keep up this ‘gravely’ voice for hours on end would naturally have consequences on Janet’s normal voice. But Janet’s voice did not seem to be affected.
Over the two years of activity, numerous experiments were undertaken on both the entity and Janet, thought to be either the source or focus of the activity. During the six weeks that Janet spent in Maudsley Hospital in South London undergoing all manner of physical and psychological testing, the occurrences ceased. Indeed many people were certain Janet was the source of the activity which seems to be backed up by the other investagators from the SPR who routinely caught Janet creating noises and throwing objects in an effort to fool them.
One theory about the occurrences is that Peggy, to satisfy her need for attention, faked the poltergeist activity together with her children. One of the investigators (Guy Lyon Playfair) wrote a book about their experiences named This house is haunted, which billed itself as "even more terrifying than Borley Rectory!"
Serious doubt as to the authenticity of the phenomena was raised when one of the children (Janet) confessed to investigator Anita Gregory that they had invented the occurrences. Later, another of the children, fourteen-year-old Rose, confessed to a reporter from the News of the World (London) that they had been responsible for the activities. Doubt has also been cast on the impartialness of Maurice Grosse, the lead investigator for the SPR, who lost his own daughter Janet in a car accident when she was young.
The family later retracted these statements.
Statement by Maurice Grosse: Chairman. Spontaneous Cases Committee Society for Psychical Research. December 2005.
There has been a considerable amount of misinformation published regarding this famous poltergeist case investigated in 1977 by members of the Society for Psychical Research, led by Maurice Grosse and assisted by Guy Lyon Playfair. As a well known author Playfair wrote in his book "This House is Haunted", a detailed account of the phenomena that took place in this small council house in England.
It has been alleged that the children confessed to faking. This is totally untrue. When asked whether they played tricks at any time Janet said, “Oh yea, once or twice just to see whether Mr Grosse or Mr Playfair would catch us and they always did.” An allegation (source unknown) that the mother was implicated in any deceit is not only ridiculous but totally libellous. This also applies to the statement that 14 year old Rose, confessed to a reporter from the News of the World (London) that they had been responsible for the activities. The investigators have in their possession a statement from Mrs Peggy Nottingham, the next door neighbour, that a News of the World reporter offered her £1000 to say that the activities were faked. She was offended at this bribe and refused.
In contrast to the over five months that the chief investigators spent with the family, often night as well as day, other investigators, including Anita Gregory, only spent a matter of hours with the family, except for an investigator David Robertson from the Physics department of Birbeck College, London University who experienced very positive anomalous phenomena. The Society for Psychical Research set up a special team under the supervision of Society’s vice president Mary Rose Barrington, a lawyer, whose conclusions on the evidence after interviewing approximately 30 witnesses was uncompromisingly positive.
The evidence from this case, including numerous photographs and tape recordings recorded on site during the activity, has been widely published throughout the world. The following, under the heading THE ENFIELD CASE is an assessment of the case and its possible relationship to survival, by Professor David Fontana in his latest reference work "Is there an Afterlife", published in England by “O” books.
Professor Fontana is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and founder chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section, Past President and present Vice President of the Society for Psychical Research. He is Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cardiff University, and Professor of Transpersonal Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University.
THE ENFIELD CASE
“This case is chosen as it is one of the best-known cases to have occurred in the last half century. The case is reported by Guy Lyon Playfair, well known author and psychical researcher. Together with Maurice Grosse, a council member of the Society for Psychical Research and presently Chairman of the society’s Spontaneous Cases Committee, who led the investigation, Guy Playfair researched the case intensively for more than a year in spite of controversial criticisms of the methodology used (criticisms firmly rejected by the investigators). During the course of the investigation, a range of incidents were witnessed by more than 30 people, and in the view of the investigators these cannot be accounted for by fraud or any other normal explanation.
“The family in the Enfield case consisted of a mother and two daughters) real names, Margaret aged 12, a younger sister Janet 11, Johnny aged 10 and Billy aged 7. Billy had a speech impediment. Johnny featured only marginally in the inexplicable events, at least 26 of which the investigators considered could not be accounted for by fraud. These included movement of small and large objects, interference with bedclothes, pools of water on the floor, apparitions, physical assaults, graffiti, equipment malfunction and failure, spontaneous combustion, disappearance and reappearance of objects, and apparent levitations.
“Particularly remarkable were the gruff male voices that came through Janet when she was apparently taken over (possessed) by the entity thought to be responsible for the disturbances. Such voices would be very difficult for a young girl to produce by normal means, and even more difficult for her to sustain for a minute or two owing to the strain on the vocal folds, yet the entity spoke through her up to three hours on occasions, during which time her mouth barely appeared to move. Professor Hasted, then of Birkbeck college in the University of London, who investigated this particular phenomenon, established that the voices came from what are known as false vocal folds, which normally become inflamed very quickly if used in this way, rather from her vocal chords. Certainly if one hears the tapes of these voices without first knowing all the details, it is difficult to suppose that they came from a young girl rather than an elderly, gruff voiced man. The voices also gave certain details of the entity to whom they claimed to belong, information that applied correctly to a neighbour who had died some while previously (although the details given may have been previously known to her and her family).
“The argument for paranormality in this case is difficult to contest if one studies the published records in detail, listens to the recorded voices, and discusses the details with the investigators, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair. There is also an interesting follow up to the case that occurred 16 years after the haunting came to an end. Both Maurice Grosse and I were invited speakers at a conference held by a section of the Mensa Society (the UK society for those with an IQ of 140 plus) on aspects of the paranormal.
“Maurice’s talk focused on the Enfield poltergeist case and, using a reel-to-reel machine he played a tape of one of the gruff voices that had come through Janet. While the voice was speaking the tape recorder suddenly jammed. I was sitting in the audience at the time and went onto the platform to see if I could help Maurice rectify matters. But on examining the machine we found to our surprise that the tape had become jammed by winding itself backwards (i.e. in the opposite direction of travel between the two reels) around the stanchion above the tape head. Such a thing, as we ascertained, is mechanically impossible by normal means unless one stops the machine, unwinds the tape completely from one of the reels, and then winds it manually around the stanchion in the opposite direction to the travel, before reconnecting it to the reel. Such a manoeuvre takes several minutes of concentrated effort to accomplish, and would have been impossible under the circumstances in which it happened during Maurice’s talk. We ascertained, together with an independent witness from the audience, that both ends of the tape had remained firmly wound around both reels during and after the jamming took place, which happened almost instantaneously. In addition, both Maurice and the machine were in full view of the audience throughout, and when we disconnected the tape and laboriously unwound it from the stanchion we counted more than 40 windings, a number that emphasised even further the length of time it would have taken to produce this puzzling effect by hand. I published a full report of this incident in one of the SPR’s publications (Fontana, 2001) and invited anyone who could do so to duplicate the phenomenon by sleight of hand. There have never been any takers.
“Does the Enfield case throw light on the survival question? Eminent neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick and colleagues at London’s prestigious Maudsley Hospital confirmed after a range of tests that Janet was not suffering from any form of brain defect. Guy Playfair reports that at various times during the case he had the impression that he and Maurice Grosse were dealing ‘with fragments of confused minds’ (more voices than one came through Janet during the investigation) ‘that once belonged to ordinary men and women who just don’t understand their present condition’. He also quoted Alan Kardac to the effect that such surviving spirits are sometimes used by other spirits ‘to play fun and games for their amusement’.
"If Guy Playfair and Maurice Grosse were wrong and discarnate minds were not responsible for the phenomena, a large number of which were considered by the investigators and many other witnesses as inexplicable by normal means, then who or what was? Energy exteriorised unconsciously by Janet and other family members (some things happened while Janet was not present)? This might account for some of the disturbances but not for others, many of which were witnessed by Maurice Grosse during the many hours he spent observing the family. In particular, it cannot explain the voices that came from Janet, and which appeared to be beyond her ability to produce by normal methods of vocalization. Could her unaided energies, even if operating paranormally, have been responsible? It seems unlikely, and even if they were, why should her supposedly
"Paranormal energies, instead of being exteriorised into the environment in the form of psychokinetic activity, be diverted into producing spurious voices? And what of the incident of Maurice Grosse’s tape recorder at the Mensa conference? No normal explanation has been forthcoming for what seems a physical impossibility. Assuming paranormality, from where did the energy come that produced the malfunction of the tape recorder? Janet and other members of the family were not present at the Mensa conference and the event was long after the Enfield case had come to an end. Was one spirit, whose gruff voice was recorded on the tape, attracted (and enraged) by Maurice’s attempt to play it to the conference?
"Unless we decide in advance that survival is an impossibility, it does appear to be one of the plausible explanations for the events at Enfield and the Mensa conference. The other explanation is that of Super Extra Sensory Perception, the exteriorization of paranormal energies from the living.”
The activity occurred in Enfield, North London, in a council house rented by Peggy Harper, a divorcee with four children. Peggy was unemployed, and the family lived on a nominal state benefit.
The occurrences began in late August of 1977 when Peggy had put her four children to bed. Later that night, two of her children, eleven year old Janet and ten year old Pete shouted to their mother that their beds were "jolting up and down and going all funny". The disturbance had apparently stopped just before Peggy reached the room causing her to dismiss it as childish pranks.
The disturbances continued the following night, however, when a shuffling sound woke the children who called for their mother once again. After removing a chair from the room, thinking it the reason for the sounds, Peggy returned to the room to put the children back to bed when she herself heard the odd shuffling. The source of the sound, likened to someone "shuffling across the room in their slippers", was not found when the light was turned on. After turning the light off again, the sound returned, along with knocks on the walls and once the light had been turned on again, a heavy set of drawers was seen to move 18 inches across the ground and would not be moved back to it's original position. The police were summoned and unexplained activity continued in their presence including more moving furniture and knocks on the walls.
The "attack" occurred for three days during which small objects such as lego bricks and marbles were thrown around, often at visitors or residents. These objects were found to be hot when picked up. Vicars, mediums, reporters and photographers filed through the house, but no one was able to stop the bizarre occurrences.
On September 5th, a week after the disturbances began, Maurice Grosse, a member of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) arrived at the house to investigate the occurrences. However, after being there for 3 days, without any activity at all, Grosse started to become skeptical. Then on the 8th of September, the activity returned when the investigators heard a loud crash from the upstairs bedroom of Janet and Pete. They found a sleeping Janet and a chair that had been thrown four feet across the floor. Over the course of the night, they were witness to moving furniture, flying marbles and unexplainable chilled breezes.
Over the next two years knocking on the walls became an almost nightly occurrence, drawers were pulled from cupboards, furniture was thrown down stairs, unexplained puddles of water appeard on the floor, fires were set and then mysteriously extinguished and toys flew across the room. More terrifyingly, Janet claimed to have been picked up and hurled across the room by the entity. Both of Peggy's daughters claimed to have been levitated out of their beds in the middle of the night, to wake elevated 3 feet off the ground and suddenly dropped.
Soon the entity seemed to manifest itself in form of a harsh male voice, eminating from Janet's throat, over which she claims she had no control. The entitiy identified itself as "Bill" and claimed to have died in the house, an event none in the Harper household knew about. Maurice Grosse spoke to speech therapists who suspected that the voice was not coming from Janet’s usual vocal chord equipment but by the second set of vocal chords all people have. Actors can be trained to speak using these ‘false chords’ to produce a deep gravely voice, however it can be a painful process. This theory was soon backed up by a recording of ‘the voice’ on a laryngograph (registers patterns made by frequency waves as they pass through the larynx). However to keep up this ‘gravely’ voice for hours on end would naturally have consequences on Janet’s normal voice. But Janet’s voice did not seem to be affected.
Over the two years of activity, numerous experiments were undertaken on both the entity and Janet, thought to be either the source or focus of the activity. During the six weeks that Janet spent in Maudsley Hospital in South London undergoing all manner of physical and psychological testing, the occurrences ceased. Indeed many people were certain Janet was the source of the activity which seems to be backed up by the other investagators from the SPR who routinely caught Janet creating noises and throwing objects in an effort to fool them.
One theory about the occurrences is that Peggy, to satisfy her need for attention, faked the poltergeist activity together with her children. One of the investigators (Guy Lyon Playfair) wrote a book about their experiences named This house is haunted, which billed itself as "even more terrifying than Borley Rectory!"
Serious doubt as to the authenticity of the phenomena was raised when one of the children (Janet) confessed to investigator Anita Gregory that they had invented the occurrences. Later, another of the children, fourteen-year-old Rose, confessed to a reporter from the News of the World (London) that they had been responsible for the activities. Doubt has also been cast on the impartialness of Maurice Grosse, the lead investigator for the SPR, who lost his own daughter Janet in a car accident when she was young.
The family later retracted these statements.
Statement by Maurice Grosse: Chairman. Spontaneous Cases Committee Society for Psychical Research. December 2005.
There has been a considerable amount of misinformation published regarding this famous poltergeist case investigated in 1977 by members of the Society for Psychical Research, led by Maurice Grosse and assisted by Guy Lyon Playfair. As a well known author Playfair wrote in his book "This House is Haunted", a detailed account of the phenomena that took place in this small council house in England.
It has been alleged that the children confessed to faking. This is totally untrue. When asked whether they played tricks at any time Janet said, “Oh yea, once or twice just to see whether Mr Grosse or Mr Playfair would catch us and they always did.” An allegation (source unknown) that the mother was implicated in any deceit is not only ridiculous but totally libellous. This also applies to the statement that 14 year old Rose, confessed to a reporter from the News of the World (London) that they had been responsible for the activities. The investigators have in their possession a statement from Mrs Peggy Nottingham, the next door neighbour, that a News of the World reporter offered her £1000 to say that the activities were faked. She was offended at this bribe and refused.
In contrast to the over five months that the chief investigators spent with the family, often night as well as day, other investigators, including Anita Gregory, only spent a matter of hours with the family, except for an investigator David Robertson from the Physics department of Birbeck College, London University who experienced very positive anomalous phenomena. The Society for Psychical Research set up a special team under the supervision of Society’s vice president Mary Rose Barrington, a lawyer, whose conclusions on the evidence after interviewing approximately 30 witnesses was uncompromisingly positive.
The evidence from this case, including numerous photographs and tape recordings recorded on site during the activity, has been widely published throughout the world. The following, under the heading THE ENFIELD CASE is an assessment of the case and its possible relationship to survival, by Professor David Fontana in his latest reference work "Is there an Afterlife", published in England by “O” books.
Professor Fontana is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and founder chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section, Past President and present Vice President of the Society for Psychical Research. He is Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cardiff University, and Professor of Transpersonal Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University.
THE ENFIELD CASE
“This case is chosen as it is one of the best-known cases to have occurred in the last half century. The case is reported by Guy Lyon Playfair, well known author and psychical researcher. Together with Maurice Grosse, a council member of the Society for Psychical Research and presently Chairman of the society’s Spontaneous Cases Committee, who led the investigation, Guy Playfair researched the case intensively for more than a year in spite of controversial criticisms of the methodology used (criticisms firmly rejected by the investigators). During the course of the investigation, a range of incidents were witnessed by more than 30 people, and in the view of the investigators these cannot be accounted for by fraud or any other normal explanation.
“The family in the Enfield case consisted of a mother and two daughters) real names, Margaret aged 12, a younger sister Janet 11, Johnny aged 10 and Billy aged 7. Billy had a speech impediment. Johnny featured only marginally in the inexplicable events, at least 26 of which the investigators considered could not be accounted for by fraud. These included movement of small and large objects, interference with bedclothes, pools of water on the floor, apparitions, physical assaults, graffiti, equipment malfunction and failure, spontaneous combustion, disappearance and reappearance of objects, and apparent levitations.
“Particularly remarkable were the gruff male voices that came through Janet when she was apparently taken over (possessed) by the entity thought to be responsible for the disturbances. Such voices would be very difficult for a young girl to produce by normal means, and even more difficult for her to sustain for a minute or two owing to the strain on the vocal folds, yet the entity spoke through her up to three hours on occasions, during which time her mouth barely appeared to move. Professor Hasted, then of Birkbeck college in the University of London, who investigated this particular phenomenon, established that the voices came from what are known as false vocal folds, which normally become inflamed very quickly if used in this way, rather from her vocal chords. Certainly if one hears the tapes of these voices without first knowing all the details, it is difficult to suppose that they came from a young girl rather than an elderly, gruff voiced man. The voices also gave certain details of the entity to whom they claimed to belong, information that applied correctly to a neighbour who had died some while previously (although the details given may have been previously known to her and her family).
“The argument for paranormality in this case is difficult to contest if one studies the published records in detail, listens to the recorded voices, and discusses the details with the investigators, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair. There is also an interesting follow up to the case that occurred 16 years after the haunting came to an end. Both Maurice Grosse and I were invited speakers at a conference held by a section of the Mensa Society (the UK society for those with an IQ of 140 plus) on aspects of the paranormal.
“Maurice’s talk focused on the Enfield poltergeist case and, using a reel-to-reel machine he played a tape of one of the gruff voices that had come through Janet. While the voice was speaking the tape recorder suddenly jammed. I was sitting in the audience at the time and went onto the platform to see if I could help Maurice rectify matters. But on examining the machine we found to our surprise that the tape had become jammed by winding itself backwards (i.e. in the opposite direction of travel between the two reels) around the stanchion above the tape head. Such a thing, as we ascertained, is mechanically impossible by normal means unless one stops the machine, unwinds the tape completely from one of the reels, and then winds it manually around the stanchion in the opposite direction to the travel, before reconnecting it to the reel. Such a manoeuvre takes several minutes of concentrated effort to accomplish, and would have been impossible under the circumstances in which it happened during Maurice’s talk. We ascertained, together with an independent witness from the audience, that both ends of the tape had remained firmly wound around both reels during and after the jamming took place, which happened almost instantaneously. In addition, both Maurice and the machine were in full view of the audience throughout, and when we disconnected the tape and laboriously unwound it from the stanchion we counted more than 40 windings, a number that emphasised even further the length of time it would have taken to produce this puzzling effect by hand. I published a full report of this incident in one of the SPR’s publications (Fontana, 2001) and invited anyone who could do so to duplicate the phenomenon by sleight of hand. There have never been any takers.
“Does the Enfield case throw light on the survival question? Eminent neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick and colleagues at London’s prestigious Maudsley Hospital confirmed after a range of tests that Janet was not suffering from any form of brain defect. Guy Playfair reports that at various times during the case he had the impression that he and Maurice Grosse were dealing ‘with fragments of confused minds’ (more voices than one came through Janet during the investigation) ‘that once belonged to ordinary men and women who just don’t understand their present condition’. He also quoted Alan Kardac to the effect that such surviving spirits are sometimes used by other spirits ‘to play fun and games for their amusement’.
"If Guy Playfair and Maurice Grosse were wrong and discarnate minds were not responsible for the phenomena, a large number of which were considered by the investigators and many other witnesses as inexplicable by normal means, then who or what was? Energy exteriorised unconsciously by Janet and other family members (some things happened while Janet was not present)? This might account for some of the disturbances but not for others, many of which were witnessed by Maurice Grosse during the many hours he spent observing the family. In particular, it cannot explain the voices that came from Janet, and which appeared to be beyond her ability to produce by normal methods of vocalization. Could her unaided energies, even if operating paranormally, have been responsible? It seems unlikely, and even if they were, why should her supposedly
"Paranormal energies, instead of being exteriorised into the environment in the form of psychokinetic activity, be diverted into producing spurious voices? And what of the incident of Maurice Grosse’s tape recorder at the Mensa conference? No normal explanation has been forthcoming for what seems a physical impossibility. Assuming paranormality, from where did the energy come that produced the malfunction of the tape recorder? Janet and other members of the family were not present at the Mensa conference and the event was long after the Enfield case had come to an end. Was one spirit, whose gruff voice was recorded on the tape, attracted (and enraged) by Maurice’s attempt to play it to the conference?
"Unless we decide in advance that survival is an impossibility, it does appear to be one of the plausible explanations for the events at Enfield and the Mensa conference. The other explanation is that of Super Extra Sensory Perception, the exteriorization of paranormal energies from the living.”