New series The Enfield Haunting begins on Sunday night, and is based on supposed poltergeist activity. But what does science say about such phenomena?

A couple of years ago I was asked to appear on ITV’s This Morning to discuss the Enfield ‘poltergeist’. It’s not an unusual request per se: as editor of The Skeptic I get to be the freethinker-du-jour in various media from time to time.

But there were two things that made this one odd. The first was that the focus of the famous 1977-79 ‘poltergeist’ case – Janet Hodgson – was making a rare public appearance. (She has appeared in a documentary or two and had been filmed heavily in shadow for Jane Goldman Investigates but doesn’t make a habit of it.

Secondly, I was asked by the producers to be very gentle with her, to try to keep to the principles of how people can come to believe in the supernatural when ghosts - in all probability - don’t exist.

The reason for the producers’ concern became obvious in the green room. Janet seemed very pleasant … and very, very nervous. Guy Lyon Playfair, one of the case’s two lead investigators and author of This House is Haunted: The True Story of the Enfield Poltergeist, was heavily preoccupied with the subject of trying to sell the idea of a dramatic adaptation of his book.

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It seems he has succeeded! The first installment of Sky Living’s The Enfield Haunting airs on Sunday. As well as writing and talking about why people believe in the malign supernatural, I coordinate and production manage TV and film departments including special makeup effects ones: think zombies, vampires, ghosts at work … and then at home too. So I have a professional interest in this series, and from more than one angle.

In summary, The Enfield Haunting was very enjoyable. Like all adaptations, it is miles better for the narrative enhancements, hence the ever-present ‘based-on’ disclaimer adorning such productions. The fact that the two lead investigators, Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse, met each other at a Society for Psychical Research meeting rather than one flamboyantly turning up at the haunted door to challenge the other, for just one example, is a forgivable alteration for pace and impact. Real-life rarely falls so beautifully into place, so don’t expect a faithful adaptation of the paperback this Sunday evening.

Eleanor Worthington-Cox as Janet is absolutely superb. The atmosphere is good and the creepiness well-managed. The cinematography in the opening sequence is absolutely beautiful. I’m looking forward to seeing the other episodes.

Would I have been as thrilled to attend the events of ’77-’79? Probably not. There is evidence that a range of reasonable factors that can lead perfectly sane people to believe they are in the presence of a supernatural force. Guy Lyon Playfair may have thought that “established scientists tend to ignore it altogether and pretend it doesn’t exist” in the ’70s, but if it was true then, it certainly isn’t now. Psychologist Chris French runs a university department devoted to anomalistic psychology; I’ve participated in creepy experiments with neuroscientist Jason Braithwaite; psychologist Caroline Watt is a founder member of The Koestler Parapsychology unit and pioneer Susan Blackmore has helped to clarify the reality behind many weird phenomena from out-of-body-experiences to telepathy.

They are the tip of an iceberg. So what would a scientist say about the Enfield phenomena? The ‘poltergeist’ annoyed a family of one mother and her three children (another child was away at school) for two years between 1977 and1979, and seemed to focus around the two pubescent sisters, Margaret and (mostly) Janet.

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The first thing to note is that the occurrences didn’t happen under controlled circumstances. People frequently see what they expect to see, their senses being organised and shaped by their prior experiences and beliefs in a process called ‘top-down processing’. There was a particularly interesting example of expectation fuelling perceptions reported by a French botanist, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, in the seventeenth century in connection with a “vampire”.

Lyon Playfair pointed out that eventually “… the whole family … was seeing visions or apparitions of faces at windows, shadowy figures on the stairs …” This wouldn’t surprise a psychologist: an experiment by Richard Wiseman at Hampton Court concluded that believers reported significantly more anomalous experiences than disbelievers, and were significantly more likely to indicate that these had been due to a ghost.

In fact it was hard to see how more rigid data-collection could have occurred at all, as the site was a home with an understandably protective mother. “Mrs Harper made it very clear to Grosse [the other investigator – DH] and I … that while we … were welcome at any time, she did not want the others in her house again” wrote Playfair in the aftermath of a visit from doubters who thought the girls were playing up.

In addition, expectation can inadvertently prime a situation’s participants. I perceive several examples of this at Enfield, including at (5:16), where Janet says that “One night Mr Grosse was talking about it … he said ‘All we need now is the voices to talk’”. The voices obliged shortly afterwards.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An interview with Janet. Note Janet’s statement at 5:16.

When Graham Morris of the Daily Mirror told the girls that poltergeists caused outbreaks of fire, the Enfield entity turned its hand to pyromania. The Lego and marbles that the ‘poltergeist’ was fond of throwing seemed to materialise from nowhere. However - to risk a tautology - we don’t see things until we see them; it’s called inattentional blindness.

We don’t have the processing bandwidth to pay attention to everything all the time, and often don’t notice when things have been placed or have disappeared. It’s not that odd that witnesses were surprised to see objects appear in one place when they thought them in another. A neighbour, Mrs Burcombe, who saw a plastic rod “materialise” in front of her eyes was probably just experiencing sudden awareness of it.

Lyon Playfair was, to judge by our conversation on This Morning, resistant to the idea that he could have been fooled by children. But as I reminded him that day, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths - the creators of the Cottingley Fairy Hoax in the 1920s - pulled the wool over the eyes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of deductive reasoning’s poster-boy Sherlock Holmes.

Janet seems to have been by far the strongest focus of the events at Enfield. Lyon Playfair thought that “the Thing uses Janet’s sense perceptions. If she doesn’t know something, nor does it” and “she was developing an alarmingly accurate gift of precognition” in relation to its activities. Her mother saw crayons and bits of Lego appear and noted that “they keep coming from nowhere when Janet’s in the room”.

It seems from a torn out magazine article found in the house that Janet had probably heard of Matthew Manning another child-focus of poltergeist phenomena. Manning’s mother had reported that the first strange event in their house was the disappearance of a teapot, and it was also one of the first incidents at Enfield.

Janet complained once that “she was being stifled – somebody was putting a hand over her nose and mouth to stop her breathing” and that “there was a old man sitting on that chair”. Anyone who has ever suffered from sleep paralysis - me included – will recognise the breathing difficulties and the hallucinations that accompany the harmless and transient sleep ‘blip’. She experienced another manifestation of the same thing when she was in bed and “All of a sudden I felt something pull me – by the arms – out of bed”. She’s not short of company to judge by the between 15 and 40% (depending on the question used) of people who have suffered sleep paralysis at least once; I have felt that I was being dragged out of bed within the last month.

In short, Janet and the family were going through an extended rough patch. She was, by all accounts, a bright and energetic child. Her father and mother were divorced (unusual in those days), and not very amicably. Mrs Harper said that the situation with her ex-husband and his new partner “had a distressing effect on the children”.

Touchingly “the television … was almost the only object in the house never disturbed in any way throughout the case”. I’m the same age as Janet, and well remember the importance of the box in the corner in an age before iPads and X Boxes.

It’s worth remembering that many people who visited the house at Enfield did not favour the poltergeist explanation. Janet’s gruff voices were thought by ventriloquist Ray Alan to be an explicable vocal trick. Bill, one of Janet’s voices had a “habit of suddenly changing the topic … it was a habit Janet also had” noted Lyon Playfair. Illusionist Milbourne Christopher thought the only spirits involved in the case were the high spirits of the girls.

Several psychiatrists and health professionals thought that the whole thing would stop if Grosse and Playfair just left the situation alone. A few hundred words is an insufficient space to cover all the many ways of interpreting the reported occurrences at Enfield that don’t involve ghosts, but I hope I’ve made a small start.

Personally, I would find it plausible if somebody suggested that two bright girls, feeling abandoned by their father and given the focused attention of two kind, avuncular men (attention that would, in all probability, evaporate if the strange phenomena did) could have been motivated to manifest a poltergeist. Maurice Grosse had a long interest in the subject of the supernatural and had suffered a tragic loss, that of his young daughter (also called Janet) who had been killed in a motorcycle accident.

That day on This Morning, Janet struck me as so highly unsuited to public speaking that I wondered what – or who – on earth could have persuaded her to take the drastic (and deeply unsuited to her personality) step of appearing on live TV. She shook like a leaf after the airing, and we hugged. I hope it helped.

So what should you do if you get a poltergeist in your home? Lyon Playfair wrote: “Cramer has observed that poltergeists never seem to attack atheists, and the beliefs of families involved may well influence the course of events”.

Indeed.

Deborah Hyde can be found on Twitter at @jourdemayne

