The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 72 - The Enfield Poltergeist

Nov. 20, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:15:46

Edition 72 - The Enfield Poltergeist

This time we talk with London based Author Guy Lyon Playfair who investigated one of theworlds longest and most intense paranormal cases – The Enfield Poltergeist. Guy even spent time livingwith the family whose lives were – literally – turned upside down by it.

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for keeping the faith with my show, for the lovely emails that you've been sending in from every part of the world.
	We seem to be making a big hit in North America now.
	And that is so gratifying for me because when I set this thing up, I aimed to be able to compete on equal terms with the big guys in America.
	Part of me never thought we could do it, but with a certain amount of ability, a lot of help from Adam Cornwell of Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who gets the show out to you on the internet and has designed the great website we've got, with a lot of goodwill from you and a certain amount of goodwill from other quarters, we've done it.
	We're there, and the show is expanding exponentially almost, more and more people discovering it every week.
	This has been a great week for emails, and I did promise you that I would mention some of the people who've emailed recently.
	I'll get around to that in just a second.
	It can only really be a small snapshot of the emails because I've had so many.
	But I do look at every single one and either get back to you directly or I'll mention you here or action what you suggest.
	I do those things, so please know that that happens.
	Life is very busy.
	I have to work to eat and I would like to do more of these shows, but at the moment, because of work commitments and the fact that times are hard, I can just about do the amount of shows that I'm doing.
	But next year, I want to expand it and I want to make a plan for that.
	That is always the aim to turn this into something much bigger.
	And I'll tell you something, I am determined to do it.
	And especially in the light of what is happening in the world, the anti-capitalist so-called demonstrations that we've had around the globe, especially in London and New York City, but other American cities like Chicago I see in the last few days and other places in the world too, they prove to us that there is something going on here.
	And our ability to trust the politicians and the bankers and officials and anybody with a title seems to be being very quickly, I'm not even going to say gradually, quickly eroded.
	And politicians in this country, maybe that goes for the US too, seem to be unable to explain to us exactly what is going on and what they believe is going to happen.
	And I think there's a very simple reason for that.
	I just don't think these guys know.
	That's a difficulty.
	And so maybe the protesters, both sides of the Atlantic, are trying to highlight that, along with the other gripes and grumbles that they have about the way things have gone and about the fairness of the system over the years.
	There have been developments this week.
	You know that I work on news radio in London.
	So on, was it Tuesday of this week?
	Gee, the week's gone so fast.
	There was a session of the London Assembly.
	That's London's local government here.
	It's a big organization.
	And it was interrupted by some anti-capitalist demonstrators, heckling.
	And I was able to talk to the person who started it as soon as he was ejected from the chamber.
	And he said to me, we've got other plans.
	And I said, what are those other plans?
	And he said, well, you'll have to wait and see.
	Well, by yesterday, I'm recording this on Saturday, Friday, the anti-capitalist demonstrators who don't call themselves that anymore, they are much more wide in their aims these days, they don't want to be called anti-capitalists anymore, they've gone and occupied a building in Hackney in London belonging to the bank UBS, financial organization UBS, which has a huge, large empty property in Hackney.
	And they left it that way.
	So these guys have walked in there now.
	They're occupying it.
	The law will be used to get them out, but that's a really long process.
	Plus, the protesters have got legal support of their own.
	The court fight is going to go on for a long time, and they're determined to stay there at least until the new year.
	So let's watch how that goes.
	And they've got community groups in there.
	They've got teaching sessions happening in there, a library in there.
	So it is becoming something very new worldly.
	I'm watching this with interest.
	Let's see what happens about all of this.
	I also watched and reported on what happened in New York with the removal, albeit temporarily, of protesters from the encampment there.
	They were told that they could go as long as they didn't come back with their tents, isn't that right?
	While the area was cleaned, they had to go away.
	So a lot of stuff is kicking off, as we say here in the UK, and I don't think we've seen anything yet.
	And I do think we need to get some fast answers from politicians and others about where they see things going.
	Because I really don't think, and these are things I can't say on the radio, but I can say them here.
	I don't think we're being told the truth.
	I think they need to level with us.
	I heard a great interview only last night with a former British prime minister who's got a great economics background, in fact, for a time.
	If my memory serves me right, he was the chancellor, the finance guy in the government here, John Major.
	And he explained what the crisis with the Eurozone is about more clearly than I've heard any of our current politicians do.
	I think that interview, which was with David Frost on Al Jazeera television, really should be replayed everywhere because it gave me more of a handle than I had.
	And I still think we're only scratching the surface.
	I don't think we know as much about this.
	I'm dying to get Gerald Salente back on this show.
	Look him up on the net, Gerald Salente, C-E-L-E-N-T-E.
	He is a man who I'm sure has got a take on this, but by looks of things, he's incredibly busy right now, but I want to get him back on here.
	Also, Simon, thank you very much for your email.
	You've suggested Max Kaiser from RT Television in Russia.
	I think Max Kaiser is great.
	I'm going to put a bit in for him as soon as I get a moment because I'd love to get him on here.
	He's saying stuff that others are not saying.
	So let's get to the emails.
	As I said, this is only a snapshot of them, but thank you to the anonymous emailer from Canada in the last 12 hours or so who's making a donation to the show.
	Thank you very much.
	If you'd like to make a donation, go to www.theunexplained.tv.
	You can do it there and thank you.
	Joel, who emails about Beatles conspiracies.
	Joel, two years ago, we had Joe Nazgoda on about the John Lennon prophecy, but yes, I would like to look into what you're researching.
	Mark makes some suggestions about 9-11.
	We need to do more about 9-11.
	We need to do something about the JFK assassination again at some point when we get the chance.
	But Mark, 9-11, absolutely.
	That's a future project.
	Simon, yes, we mentioned Simon.
	Vicky, Aloha in Hawaii.
	Lovely to hear from you, Vicki.
	As I told you in my email Back to you.
	I did a broadcast from Maui some years ago, but I have never, ever forgotten it.
	It is a very spiritual place.
	A lot of ghost stories on Maui, and I guess on the Big Island, too, but I'd love to come back one day, Vicki.
	Beth in North Carolina, thanks very much for your lovely email, Beth.
	Nick, who emails about my newsletter.
	Nick, thank you.
	Points taken in your email.
	Carl in Arkansas, thank you very much.
	I'll be in touch about what you suggest.
	Jeff, suggesting we do something about Bigfoot.
	You're right, Jeff.
	We haven't done it up to now, either on the radio show or online here, so we need to.
	Also to Ryan, thank you very much indeed for your email.
	And that is just a small selection of the many emails that I've had.
	If I haven't mentioned you, I will either reply to you in person or mention you here on the show.
	But certainly I'll action what you suggest.
	It's just a work in progress at the moment.
	Life is very busy.
	News very busy in London.
	And as I said on the last show, I'm having to work fairly hard just to make a living and to scrape by.
	But I want to keep this show going.
	I think it's terribly important.
	And I love the fact that we are now reaching the world with the show.
	I always knew we could.
	I've got a great one for you this time.
	I've been to visit a man who was part of probably the most frightening, certainly the most well-known and most widely reported poltergeist cases the world has ever seen.
	The Enfield poltergeist is very famous in the United Kingdom.
	It happened at the back end of the 1970s.
	And for a period of more than a year, a family in their ordinary home in London, Enfield, which is sort of North London, were under siege from something.
	Guy Lion Playfair went there, stayed with the family, researched it for 14 months.
	And we're going to talk to him because he's got an updated version of his book out called This House is Haunted.
	Great title for a book.
	So Guy Lion Playfair at Earl's Court in London.
	I went to visit him a few days ago and he very kindly gave me a lot of his time and showed me some of his research.
	Guy is getting up in years now but is still researching and still has a very keen recollection of exactly what happened in that house back in the 1970s.
	This is one that you've just got to sit down and really take in.
	It's a good show coming up.
	Guy Lyon playfair about the Enfield poltergeist.
	Just to say, if you want to make a donation to the show, go to www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who is, Adam, a top guy who does the best work.
	Thanks, Adam, for everything that you've done for me.
	And Martin, thank you again for the theme tune.
	I hope you're keeping well and thank you to you for listening.
	Right, let's get now to Earl's Court in London and let's speak with Guy Lyon Playfair.
	Thank you very much for talking to me here on The Unexplained.
	A pleasure to meet you and if I may say so, your house is a home, clearly a place that you've lived in for a while.
	Yes, about 30 years now.
	Surrounded by books here, a beautiful pair.
	I always remark on these things, the vintage loudspeakers.
	And your whole life is in this place by the looks of it.
	Well, certainly all my books are, the top two shelves over there, and all my tape recordings from the Enfield poltergeist filmers to that cupboard.
	And all those boxes of tapes.
	And I've still got a lot of old notes and things that I made back in the 70s.
	So what you've got here really is effectively an archive.
	In the future, have you made plans for that archive?
	Most of it will end up in the Society for Psychical Research archive in Cambridge, University Library, where all our old stuff is kept.
	And we do try to save first-hand evidence for anything especially interesting.
	And some of it we keep here in London in the office in Kensington.
	And some of it goes off to the sort of deep freeze in Cambridge.
	Because it is an amazing story, and I'll tell you, I get across my desk at home.
	These days, since I've been doing this show for a few years now, publishers tend to send me books in the hope that I'll do shows on them.
	And when I read the description of this one, I thought, well, here's another second-hand book written by somebody who's not involved in the thing and maybe has talked to a few people who were involved in the thing.
	And this is going to be a second-hand book and a third-hand tale.
	Yes, there are plenty of those around.
	Plenty of those around at the moment, especially these days, everybody thinks that they can write them.
	However, this is very different.
	This is, as I said in the introduction, 300 very nearly pages of the most incredibly detailed dialogue and photographs.
	And the one thing, before we talk about the Enfield-Poltergeist case itself, which we'll be able to talk a long time about, I know, the amount of detail you have in here is staggering.
	I write for a living as a journalist, not in the way that you write.
	I have to write those short, snappy news sentences.
	But the recollections that you have of conversations are staggering.
	Well, they're all taken straight off the tape.
	I didn't change anything.
	I did editing, obviously, because, I mean, if I transcribed all the tapes, the book would be about 2,000 pages, which would not be practical.
	So I did a sort of edit job, just like you would with a news broadcast.
	So the Enfield Poltergeist case was unique, I suppose, at the time, and this was more than 30 years ago, in that it was documented in a way that probably nothing else had ever been documented before.
	Yes, I think so.
	I mean, there was one precedent back in the 30s with a fellow called Nandor Fodor who wrote a book called On the Trail of the Poltergeist.
	But he was a psychoanalyst, and he had this sort of obsession with psychological explanations, which are rather out of fashion these days.
	And he did accompany a rather minor case in South London and wrote it up.
	But it was very different.
	He didn't have sort of action and excitement like we had with furniture flying around and things going through the wall and landing on the roof and goodness knows what else.
	And Maurice Gross was very lucky to get in there within a few days of the case coming to notice through the front page of the Daily Mirror.
	And I turned up a week later, so I was there a week after it Began and stayed in touch for 14 months and stayed to end it.
	It is an amazing case.
	I'm trying to find a word, a superlative, to describe it, but it is an amazing case.
	And I have, I was quite young when this happened, but I have dim recollections of newspaper pieces that my mum and dad would show me about this, things that would periodically appear on the television about it.
	But I think the Enfield Poltergeist case was trivialised a little by the media.
	They didn't really know how to get hold of it.
	They didn't do too badly, actually.
	We had very fair treatment initially from the Daily Mirror, who they discovered the case.
	And their chief reporter, who's sadly no longer with us, George Fallows, was a very nice, considerate man.
	And he was the one who called the SPR.
	The Society for Psychical Research.
	Psychical Research, yes.
	I mean, not many journalists would think of doing that.
	He was very concerned about the effect it was having on the children.
	And he wanted to help them, and he thought we were the right people.
	And in fact, we're the only people, because what many people don't seem to realize when they're all having a good giggle in their armchairs and saying, ah, it's this little girl's playing tricks and so on, they don't seem to realize that these things cause real distress to people.
	I mean, it's like having a burglar in your house for about three months.
	But a burglar that you can't hold down, you can't see.
	You can't tell you, you can't arrest him.
	You call the police, which they did at Enfield.
	And the police, this was on the very first day, the woman police constable actually saw a chair sliding along the floor without anything attached to it.
	And she signed a statement for us to that effect, which is nice.
	It's always nice to get a statement out of the police instead of giving them one.
	But very rare, actually, and especially in those days, for somebody in uniform to admit to it, to want to put it down in writing.
	Yes, and I'm afraid she wished she hadn't because she got all kinds of stick from her colleagues and some quite nasty kind of reactions, which people do get.
	And that happens even today, sadly.
	Well, you see, I mean, in addition to all the other problems you get having a poltergeist invade your house, is you get some po-faced psychologist idiot on television saying, oh, well, we know the explanation of these things.
	And that really makes that day.
	You know, that's all they need.
	And I'm afraid it still goes on.
	I needn't mention names, but it's pretty obvious because he's on the box frankly every day.
	And it just doesn't help.
	It's avoiding the issue, and it's just sort of showing off your own ego.
	And it does not help the victims of poltergeists who really do need it.
	We have to go back to a previous era when this thing happened.
	It was mid to late 1970s.
	London, a very different place, vibrant capital city as ever, but we didn't have the communication, the internet or anything else.
	It was a different kind of place.
	This is North London, residential kind of area, and not the sort of place perhaps that you would associate with phenomena.
	Well, it was a council house, and the family were on benefits because the parents were recently divorced, and the mother was on her own looking after four children.
	And it was a very, very nice house.
	I mean, if it was in Chelsea, it would be worth a million pounds plus.
	And it was a nice street.
	The neighbours were very pleasant.
	And luckily, it's essential if you have a poltergeist is to have a sympathetic neighbour, not somebody who goes around screaming that you're possessed by the devil.
	I think you probably need somebody to run to.
	Yes, you do.
	Well, you do.
	And luckily, Mrs. Hodgson, the mother, her brother lived just down the road, a few doors down.
	And he was wonderful.
	John Berkham was a real hero.
	He was always there when needed.
	And he kept in touch practically daily.
	I mean, he and the other neighbour, Vic, Dottingham, and Peggy, they were perfect neighbours.
	I mean, they're the kind of neighbour you should have, and they were very lucky to have had them.
	Let's take it back to the very beginning, then.
	We have a family before you were involved, before anybody was involved, a family who become the focus of something in their home.
	Yes, we don't really know very much about, well, we certainly don't know what poltergeists are.
	It's just a word we use to describe something we can't explain.
	Although some people think they can, they can't really.
	Causes not really known either.
	There were suggestions that one of the girls had been playing around with a Ouija board, which has been linked quite often with this sort of thing, but not quite on this scale.
	I certainly wouldn't advise teenagers to go anywhere near a Ouija board, because it can definitely do damage.
	But that was actually quite some time before the trouble started, so I don't think there was a direct cause there.
	No, it came completely out of the blue.
	It's just one night when the girls were up and gone to bed.
	They said they heard something shuffling was the first thing.
	The youngest girl, Janet, said, I can hear noises, something shuffling.
	So the mother came up, had a look around and couldn't see anything shuffling, just sort of said, well, you know, imagination or mice or something, go back to sleep.
	And then this knocking on the wall started, and that was different.
	And then the mother witnessed this chest of drawers sliding across the bedroom and blocking the door, and that was enough.
	She said, right, everybody out.
	And they went next door and got the neighbour, Vic, who's a builder and a very fearless fellow, as you can imagine.
	He's a specialist in roofs.
	And he came in and searched around everywhere.
	And knocking went on.
	And then they got really scared.
	And I think that's when they called the police.
	I think it was the same night.
	And these two police officers came round.
	And they were very kind and said, well, we Don't see anybody breaking the law here, so there's not much we can do.
	We could only deal with this world.
	It's interesting, isn't it?
	Because if it happened today to somebody, people are much more savvy.
	Perhaps they wouldn't call the police because they would assume there's nothing that the police can or would want to do.
	But in that era, my dad was a copper in that era.
	The police had to pick up everything.
	Whether it was a road accident, somebody reporting that they've lost the dinner or their cat, or psychic phenomena, your neighbourhood bobby had to go and deal with it.
	Cat up a tree, yes.
	Well, today it is different.
	For some reason, we don't seem to be getting so many cases.
	We do get reports of them, but quite often the people concerned don't want to talk.
	The SPR had a very interesting report last year up in the north, which sounded to us like the right stuff, and we went to some lengths to contact the present occupants, and they just wouldn't talk, scanned the phone down.
	So that suggests to me that there was something going on.
	They didn't want to admit, or it was frightening, or they for some reason just wouldn't talk about it.
	It makes researching quite difficult.
	So it could be that there are the same number or even more cases happening, but people don't want to be turned into a media circus.
	They don't want to be trivialised.
	They don't want to be laughed at, so they don't report them.
	Well, of course, by definition, we don't hear about the cases we don't hear about, do we?
	But sometimes we do.
	And I've heard of sort of second-hand accounts of cases that broke out in rather posh homes where the people just simply refused to discuss it.
	And I think I heard of it from a relative of one of them.
	They would talk to him, but they wouldn't talk to me.
	So you do come up against quite a lot of brick walls in this business.
	And we were extremely lucky, really, from our point of view, that the whole family at Enfield were extremely cooperative and very easy to get on with.
	And they gave Maurice Gross and I more or less free run of the house.
	And I spent several nights sleeping there and even spent the night when they were away on holiday for a week, which I was hoping.
	Dear, what was that like?
	Well, I was a bit disappointed.
	Nothing happened at all.
	So, now, isn't that interesting.
	If nothing happened for you and they were away, could that be the case that the family and the children in particular were the focus of whatever it was?
	They were drawing it.
	Well, nothing happened to them while they were on holiday either.
	They went off.
	The local welfare very kindly arranged for holiday because we persuaded them that that was really the only way to the only emergency way to stop a poltergeist is to go away.
	And if necessary, break up the family.
	If you've got more than one child, send one of them off to an uncle or somewhere and just separate them.
	Because it's a kind of collective thing.
	Poltergeists don't break out in houses with just one person in them.
	It has to be a family and preferably a family with a state of some kind of tension, which they certainly were after the breakup of the marriage.
	But reading the first few chapters of your book, I mean, these people lived with this day in, day out, night in, night out, didn't they?
	It almost became normal to them.
	Well, it was terribly intense.
	It was by far the most...
	I remember once trying to make a big effort to write down everything because I kept getting my colleagues from the SPR saying, oh, don't forget to take proper notes and say exactly where you were and measure exactly how many feet you were from the fireplace and all that rubbish, you know, which doesn't really tell you anything.
	And when stuff is happening around you, how can you make time to take measurements?
	Well, as I say, the night when I decided I was going to try, I actually recorded, I think, 11 incidents in the space of one minute.
	Lord.
	Well, you know, you can't write anything in one minute, really.
	I mean, certainly not 11 things.
	And when we talk about the things that happened there, we hear poltergeist cases and we hear of cups being thrown across rooms and that sort of thing.
	But this became on a scale that is utterly unimaginable to most people.
	Well, where it became really interesting, I mean, after we had all the kind of routine stuff like chairs falling over and even the heavy sofa being overturned, which was impossible for one person to do, we had the really interesting things began where objects would disappear from one room and turn up in another one through the wall.
	And even Janet herself, according to her, went through the wall into the house next door.
	And sure enough, when we managed to contact the owner of the house next door, who was out at the time, she went up to her bedroom and found a book belonging to Janice, which had previously been in her house somehow it had got itself into the house next door.
	Well, you explained that one.
	Did you ever think, when you were there and talking to these people and looking into the whites of their eyes, that they might be faking this?
	Yes, they played a couple of rather amateur tricks.
	They were absolutely hopeless at it.
	This is much later when things had slightly quietened down.
	I remember one occasion I went out for a meal at the pub and left my tape recorder running.
	And when I got back, it was not where I'd left it.
	And I think one of the girls said, oh, yeah, apologize for taking it away.
	And I thought, well, hang on, there aren't too many places to hide a tape recorder.
	So I found it almost immediately and it was still running.
	And I played it back.
	There was all the evidence.
	It was really not a very...
	Well, Janet has been very consistent in the very few interviews she's ever given.
	I think only about three or four ever.
	But she was on the news at six in 1980 when the paperback came out.
	And she was interviewed by Rita Carter, who was very nice and got on very well with the girls.
	And she said, in the way the TV people do, you know, oh, come on, you can tell me now.
	I bet you've played a few tricks now and then, didn't you?
	Come on, nudge, nudge.
	And Janet immediately, without hesitation, said, Oh, yes, once or twice, just to see if they would catch us, and they always did.
	So that's the end of that one.
	And yet, that's still not good enough, you know, for some TV psychologists.
	The fact that they played one trick means that the other 2,000 incidents didn't happen.
	But there was one member of the family who seemed to be immune from it, Jimmy, from what I read in the book.
	Jimmy was extraordinary, yes.
	I mean, he was really quite out of it.
	He used to go to bed and wrap himself up in his dressing gown around his head.
	I know Janet described him once as looking like a snowstorm.
	Snowstorm.
	Rather nice.
	And things would sort of whiz over his head.
	And on one occasion, a piece of the fireplace actually landed on his pillow, you know, the ash pan, an old-fashioned coal fire.
	But the way I read this, that Jimmy went from having no involvement in sleeping through it all to being right in the thick of it.
	It was as if whatever was there, whatever force or malevolent force, whatever you want to call it, wanted to get his attention.
	Yeah, see, he was very young.
	I think he was only about six or seven when it started.
	And he was far more interested in his Lego bricks.
	He was a genius.
	I'm sure he's a great architect by now because he used to put together the most incredible constructions.
	And that's really his great passion.
	And he didn't care about all these sort of tables turning over.
	You know, you want to get on with his building.
	I thought, great.
	I suppose if you're six and you've lived with it for a bit, it becomes normal, doesn't it?
	You do, yes.
	Children can accept anything, really, within reason.
	But reading through the book, it escalated.
	It got more and more out of hand.
	Yes.
	Yes, it escalated for about three months.
	All around Christmas was very, very active.
	And a few weeks afterwards.
	And then we managed to get Janet taken into the Maudsley Hospital Institute of Psychiatry, where she was given a complete MOT by Dr. Peter Fenwick, who was extremely sympathetic and very knowledgeable about any kind of brain disorder.
	And he just couldn't find anything wrong with her.
	And it gave her a completely clean bill.
	And while she was away from home, there was practically nothing happened.
	As soon as she came back home, it all started again.
	So that assessment of her at the Maudsley Hospital, which is very, very famous, I know it well, gives the lie to the statements that are made sometimes where people say those who are the focus of this kind of activity are in some way mentally disturbed or unbalanced.
	Janet wasn't unbalanced at all.
	She was very bright.
	She was quite good at school.
	She was.
	And we haven't said how old was she?
	She was 12 when it began and 13 when it ended.
	And she was certainly not stupid at all.
	She was very athletic, quite good at sports and very active and lively and basically pretty well behaved.
	And I got on very well with her.
	She's a very nice, nice kid.
	And we're still in touch.
	And she's living far from Enfield and does not want to be bothered by anybody, so she won't be if I can help it.
	We know what the media are like with the book out.
	And I think there's a movie coming out, a lot of attention coming back on the Enfield protein.
	Let me put in a word about this film, which has been attracting all sorts of publicity.
	This is not a film of my book.
	No.
	So I can't comment on it really, because it's nothing to do with me at all.
	And being a film, like there was a movie about the radio industry, The Boat That Rocked, last year, it was not exactly true to what life in radio is like.
	So who knows what a film about this will be like?
	Hopefully it'll be accurate.
	Well, no, it won't actually.
	I mean, to be fair to them, they're not claiming to make a film about book because they've been spoken to by a lawyer.
	And they are apparently making a fictional film about a supposed sequel, a sort of Amityville Horror 2.
	That's only going to muddy the waters, isn't it?
	Well, it's selling quite a few books, so I'm not complaining.
	But no, I think if, well, to start with, there's no guarantee that they are going to make it.
	They haven't, as far as I know, haven't got the money yet.
	And I'm also in negotiation with a proper filmmaker who will make the book.
	Well, I'd like to see that film made.
	I'd also like to see the fictional one, but I'd like to see the film of your book.
	I've written down here, which is probably the shuffling noise that my listeners can hear.
	I'm just flicking through pages of the book here.
	We get to halfway through the story, roughly page 129, and you say, then came the big day, Thursday the 15th of December, 1977, which you said around Christmas.
	The events of this and the following day were so chaotic that I had some difficulty in sorting out exactly what happened.
	Gosh, yes, that was the one with the cushion on the roof.
	And our colleague David Robertson, who is a physicist, he was particularly interested in this question of matter going through matter.
	And it was during the day, Janet was staying off school for some reason.
	And David got one of these huge cushions from the sofa downstairs, a big heavy thing, about a yard square.
	And he left it with Janet in the bedroom and said, see if you can get this to end up downstairs in the living room where it should be.
	And he shut the door and went downstairs to hope it's going to come through the ceiling.
	He thought it'd be fun to see that.
	And the next thing we knew, the lollipop lady across the road, directly across from The house saw Janet floating around in mid-air, just like something out of the exorcist.
	And she gave numerous, we interviewed her absolutely to pieces, and she's been interviewed several times since, including quite recently.
	And she saw Janet floating in the air, period.
	And the hallmark of somebody who's telling you the truth is that you ask them today, tell me the story.
	You ask them tomorrow, tell me the story, and the next day, and it's the same story.
	It's the same story, and don't forget that she is virtually a police officer.
	She's an official warden.
	And then we had the baker.
	This was the best of a lot, really.
	The baker was walking along with his bread and stuff towards the house, although they were not clients of his, he was going to the house next door.
	And he had the house in full view, absolutely straight line from where he was.
	And he said that suddenly this great big, huge red thing appears on the roof.
	The poltergeist cooperative as always, instead of making it go downstairs to the living room, made it go upstairs to the roof.
	And there it was on the roof.
	And we had great difficulty in getting it down, actually.
	I remember leaning out of the bedroom window with quite a steep overhang.
	And I had to reach out.
	And I think somebody was holding my legs.
	It was really quite tricky.
	There was just no way that Janet could have leaned out of the window without anybody seeing.
	This is not a main road.
	Well, if you couldn't get it down unobtrusively and without risk to yourself, then neither could she have got it up there.
	No, no way.
	It was a very heavy cushion.
	I mean, you couldn't do it with one hand.
	You'd need both.
	And it was well on top of the roof.
	It wasn't just sort of perched on the edge.
	And that was rather difficult to explain.
	This was a council house.
	It was public housing, yep.
	Did the council at that time, what Enfield Borough, whatever it was, did they not consider rehousing this family?
	Did they want to move?
	No, this is this.
	Everybody asked me that.
	It is quite common for council tenants who want to move to go along and say, oh, I think this house is worth it.
	They do, yes, and most councils are well aware of that.
	So when Maurice and I went there, in fact, I think it was the first night, we asked Mrs. Hodgson innocently, would you like us to ask the council to get you rehoused?
	It was a deliberate sort of trick question, if you like.
	And she was very indignant.
	She said, absolutely no way.
	This is my home and I'm going to stay here.
	You were such a part of this, almost integral to it as a researcher.
	I want to know why you wanted to get involved with something like this.
	What was it that drew you to it?
	I didn't want to get involved at all.
	What happened was, well, it was a series of really quite bizarre coincidences in August of 1977.
	I'd recently joined the Society for Psycho Research and I'd been to the monthly lecture in August, which happened to be on poltergeists.
	And we heard a very scholarly talk by our librarian, all the history and so on, and it was very interesting.
	And at the end of it, another new member called Maurice Gross jumped up and said, I'm working on a case right now in Enfield, and it looks very interesting, and I'd like some help.
	And there was dead silence.
	I think one old fellow up front saying, the possibility of hallucination must be considered.
	And I was sitting right in front of Maurice and I hardly knew him.
	I was planning to go on holiday because I'd just finished a book which had taken me a very long time and was very exhausting and I wanted to go off next week on holiday.
	And then I heard Morris on the radio on Sunday, the midday news programme, where the BBC had sent along a reporter the night before who managed to record some actions.
	And I realised this is a proper case and it can't be missed.
	So I just forgot about my holiday and joined in on the Monday and hung on for 14 months.
	It is amazing.
	And it's a time of my life when I was finishing school and moving on to university.
	But it seems like another world we were in there.
	Because like I said, at the top of this, we didn't have the internet.
	You couldn't find out information instantly.
	So often you would find out about things like this simply through word of mouth and rumour and one person talking to another person and stories would become embellished and that was the way things worked.
	Yeah, oddly enough, the press in those days was far more sympathetic than they are today, particularly the tabloids.
	They often get a lot of sticks like they've been getting recently with all this stuff at News International.
	But I give the Daily Bureau full marks for their coverage.
	It was very accurate.
	They didn't sensationalize it unduly.
	And one reporter in particular who you mention in the book, and he does something, as you said, I think is very creditable.
	A lot of reporters, even today and certainly back then, they would have said, here's a story.
	I'm going to milk this story.
	Who cares where it goes?
	I'm not going to do the decent thing and bring experts into it.
	I'm just going to get my fun out of this and get my column inches and make my editor happy.
	This guy actually helped.
	George Fellows, yes, he did.
	He was very considerate, and it was thanks to him that we heard about it because he telephoned the SBR office.
	And again, as it so happened, another coincidence, Maurice Gross had been pestering the secretary of the SBR to find him a case within reach of his home.
	And he lived up in the north of London and had a very fast E-type jaguar, so it didn't take him long to get there.
	And it must have been the fastest turnout in the history of the SBR because they called, fellows called at about 10 o'clock one morning and Morris was in the house by 11.
	So I mean that was, you can't offer that kind of service every time, I should say, but that's what happened then.
	He went there like a shot and he realised this was what he always wanted, a case of his own to investigate, which he did superbly, in my opinion.
	I can't remember another case in the UK as well documented or as in the media as this one.
	No, or anywhere else, really.
	The only one that comes close is the book called Unleashed, which is very well written by William Roll, who's one of the leading authorities on poltergeist.
	And there are quite a few in Germany, but not much of much of it's been translated, investigated by Hans Bender, whom I knew.
	And there's also a very good French investigator who's a gendarme called Émile Thizanet, who's written a couple of excellent books on haunted houses, as he calls them, which he investigated himself.
	And he should be much better.
	I don't think he's ever been translated into English, but he should be better known than he is.
	This could be the time.
	The Enfield case, then, you used the phrase haunted house.
	You believed that it was some kind of spirit, perhaps malevolent.
	Well, I should say I have to blame Mrs. Hodgson for the title because it was after something or other had happened in the house.
	She came up with a remark and said, I think this bleeding house is haunted.
	So I thought that's not a bad title for a book.
	It's a beautiful title, because.
	I wish you had to.
	But, you know, there's a commercial on television over here that says it does what it says on the tin.
	And what's inside this book is what's on the front cover.
	this house is haunted.
	Well, I suppose, strictly speaking, it was the family that was haunted, not the house, because, as I say, when I...
	When I stayed, there had nothing at all, no.
	And yet when the family was on holiday by the seaside, nothing happened to them there either.
	So it was...
	We know they're not mental ones because they were examined and checked.
	What is that confluence of factors that come together to make these events occur?
	Well, the only clue I can think of is that I think it's well known that if you have any sort of problem or even a sort of slight illness or whatever, if you have a complete change of surroundings, like a holiday for example, that does make you feel different.
	You tend to forget all your problems, or you should do if you're on holiday with your toes in the sand on the beach and reading some rubbish.
	And you're not worrying about financial problems at home and so on.
	You shouldn't be.
	And yet, as soon as you get home, it's all back.
	Yeah, so I think that was something similar happening.
	Well, when they went back from holiday, was it worse for a time?
	It was very bad, yes.
	That was, let me see, I think as soon as they got back, it was the night when the big sofa was turned over with about 10 people in the room.
	And all sorts of things, the kitchen table was flung over, which I tape recorded, and made a deafening racket.
	So this phenomenon, these phenomena, were around this family who they go away and forget their problems, and then just as we all come back from holiday and we think, oh, I've got to go back to work or whatever, it all comes flooding back.
	So then the phenomena are worse.
	Do you believe that they, collectively as a group of people, were opening some kind of door, portal or gateway to something that you really shouldn't invite in?
	It's very difficult to answer that, you see, because you've got two completely contrasting attitudes to the whole question.
	I mean, one is the sort of group tension, I think what psychiatrists call confrontation syndrome or something equally meaningless.
	And then you've got the other theory, which is good old-fashioned spirits.
	And they're very much out of style these days, but I wouldn't rule them out.
	I mean, see, poltergeists do so many things that we can't do, like throw cushions on the roof through a closed window or float up and down in the air.
	I think you're bound to think that there's got to be some extra dimension of physical reality.
	There were conversations that were had.
	Ah, well, yes, that comes later.
	That's when we had this famous voice, which turned up quite several months after the beginning.
	Well, how that came about was that I'd been in touch with an old friend, Dr. Eric Dingwall, who was a veteran researcher.
	He was about 90 years old.
	He'd known everybody since William Crookes.
	And he was also dean of the Magic Circle, so he knew all about trickery.
	And he wouldn't give away any secrets, but he would tell me what to look for if there was any suspicion.
	And he was wonderful.
	And I was telling him, I used to phone him up quite often and tell him what was going on.
	He was extremely interested in the case.
	And I'd say, we had strange noises the other night, sounded like a dog barking.
	And also whistling noises that seemed to come from the mid-air.
	And so Dingwall said, well, if it can whistle and bark, it can talk, so tell it to talk.
	So we thought, all right, it was his idea.
	You know, Dingwall, the great sort of art sceptic and magician and all that, but he knew his stuff and he knew what he was talking about.
	So we did that.
	And Maurice Gross said to the, when we heard these sort of growling noises that seemed to come from Janet, Maurice said, well, come on, if you can whistle and bark, you can speak.
	So say my name.
	And it did, sort of gross.
	And it built up from there.
	And then we had a speech therapist came along, John Berkham, who worked at the local hospital.
	He managed to get hold of a speech therapist to come in her own time.
	And she was totally freaked out.
	She just said, 12-year-old girls can't make that noise.
	And yet she could.
	And then it began to speak quite coherent sentences.
	And then we had this very extraordinary message where we had the name, which I won't repeat here, but he said, my name is whatever, and I come from Durance Park, which is the local graveyard, and I've come here to see my family, but they are not here now.
	Well, the son of the man mentioned got in touch with us quite some time after the book came out and said, yes, his father had lived in the house, and as he said on another occasion, he had gone blind and he had died in the armchair downstairs.
	And nobody knew that.
	Absolutely nobody.
	I mean, you don't.
	The girls hadn't been born when he died.
	And you don't normally go around telling people how your father died, do you?
	And they never met the son.
	They never met father either.
	So it was complete news, and nobody knew that.
	So that was accurate information received from what looks to me like a discarnate source, in other words, a spirit.
	What else could it be?
	How else could they have known?
	But then it would make you ask, how does that tie into the phenomena, the flinging of objects, the turning over of sofas, all the rest of it?
	But that's not connected.
	It's a bit like leaving the window open and you don't know what's going to come in.
	You see, if you go away and leave your window open on the ground floor, you'll probably get foxes and you'll get local kids looking for something to pinch, and you might get a bunch of squatters moving in.
	You might get all sorts of things.
	Which you did.
	And they're not connected with each other, but they're all targeting your home.
	And some of these conversations, vocalizations, became pretty extreme.
	I mean, it literally was like real-life exorcist territory, wasn't it?
	Oh, well, yes.
	I mean, it became extremely indecent, using the most appalling language, which the girls never did in real life, as it were.
	And the mother certainly didn't approve of and wouldn't let them get away with it.
	Do you believe at any time, as I would have believed if I was put in the middle of that, that I was dealing with something satanic?
	No.
	No way.
	I don't have any time for that sort of argument.
	I think it's more accurate to look for the answer in the traditional spiritist approach of Alan Kardec, where he writes quite a lot about unruly spirits, he calls them, who really don't know where they are and haven't quite got adjusted to the fact that they're dead, not quite sure if they're still alive or dead or what.
	And they're in a state of total confusion.
	And they just enjoy messing around.
	They haven't really got much intelligence to move on where they ought to be.
	And they don't have to abide by the conventions that you and I have to because we're in polite society.
	They're not.
	Well, I don't think they really know what they're doing.
	They're sort of rather like a bunch of kids who find a football and just start kicking it around because that's what you do with footballs and they don't really think about what damage they might do if they kick it through a window or onto somebody's flower bed or something.
	It's just an instinctive thing to do because they find a nice football and so they kick it around.
	I think poltergeist finds the right kind of atmosphere of tension and a certain amount of repression, I suppose.
	They exploit it and move in.
	It's only a theory.
	I mean, I certainly can't prove that.
	I was fascinated by the part later on in the book where you talk about the sounds that these things make.
	And you talked about the sort of the rapping noise, pardon me, that these things make.
	And with today's technology, we can see what a sound looks like on a computer screen, waveforms.
	Well, this all goes back to the early 70s when I was still living in Brazil and joined a local research group there.
	And together with my colleague, we investigated a very active poltergeist in Sao Paulo where we frequently got these knocks banging sounds on the first floor, really loud, I mean, absolutely deafening.
	And I managed to record quite a lot of them.
	And then I said to my colleague Suzuku, let's go and bang ourselves and see if we can compare the recordings.
	So I went upstairs with a broom handle and pounded on the floor as loud as I could.
	And on the tape, you can't really tell which was me and which wasn't.
	And we tried hard to find somebody with the suitable equipment and we just couldn't find it.
	Admittedly, we were all quite busy with other things, but I sort of forgot about it.
	And then just a couple of years ago, a colleague from the SPR named Barry Colvin, who's got all the gear, he owns a chemical plant and he's got a whole lab full of equipment.
	And we put together a tape of recordings that have been made in several other cases, some of them going right back to the, I think, the 1930s in Germany.
	There are some old cases that were recorded.
	And he found an interesting thing is that when he also made a tape of himself popping balloons and jumping up and down and hitting nails with hammers and so on, he found that in every case where you make a normal noise, whether it's a hand clap Or anything percussive,
	and you run it through the oscilloscope, you get a very clear signal which starts at full amplitude and gradually tapers off to nothing.
	You get almost a plosive and then a decay?
	Well, it's a bit hard to describe without showing it, but you start with a tall vertical line on the left of the page, and it gets gradually smaller and smaller until it merges with the background noise, the sort of white noise.
	Well, poltergeist noises just do not look like that.
	They're almost the opposite.
	They build up to a climax in the middle.
	I was going to say that they almost look like when I've done recordings of reverse speech, when I've played with recordings and I've turned round the waveform, they look a bit like that.
	Well, what they do look like very much, we've been told, is signals from an earthquake, remarkably similar.
	Barry managed to get a hold of a signal from somewhere or other, I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere, recordings made during an earthquake, where you typically get kind of precursor noises and then you get the main explosion, and then you get sort of rumbles that carry on.
	And the earthquakes do not start, I mean I've been in one, so I can actually assure you, they don't start with a loud bang, that's the first thing you hear, but they actually start way underground with kind of tensions and rumblings and you can pick those up on a recording anywhere in the world apparently, from the Geological Museum in London.
	It's got a huge collection of earthquake records.
	And why a poltergeist should make a similar noise to an earthquake is quite a mystery, but it's hard evidence.
	This is not sort of wild speculation.
	We have documentary repeatable evidence from something like 12 different cases, all the same, all showing the same effect.
	So that is what in science is known as a series.
	It's not just coincidence after all that time, and it's easily repeatable.
	Anybody can repeat it with simple equipment.
	The interesting thing was that this was published in July 2010.
	We sent out press releases, I think, to 32 outlets, and we heard from two of them who happened to be where I knew somebody.
	The others just not interested.
	Too complicated to explain.
	No, they've made their minds up, you see.
	They don't want to be confused with facts, like the famous Sam Goldwyn.
	They've been told by their po face on the TV that all these things are a load of rubbish, so that's the party line, you know, and whatever you say just doesn't get through the outer.
	It does seem, doesn't it, increasingly that there are, and that's why I'm doing this, and I'm not in the mainstream when I'm doing this, that these days you get documentaries about these subjects, and they start and they hook you in.
	They intrigue you with the facts and the detail, and then at the end they have to debunk it all.
	They have to come out on that kind of conclusion, otherwise they feel they won't be credible.
	They do.
	They virtually say that, admit that in their guidelines for producers.
	I think certainly BBC does.
	There's just no way they're ever going to cover a story like that.
	Well, I think even in commercial broadcasting, I've seen our guidelines, and you have to be sceptical.
	You have to be healthily sceptical, and you have to maintain that tone and tenor throughout the broadcast.
	Yeah, isn't it curious how it doesn't work the other way around?
	Yes, it is.
	You know, do we ever get the chance to reply to all the distortions and the lies they tell about psychical researchers?
	No, we do not.
	That's another reason why I'm doing this.
	14 months of intensifying, increasingly frightening, I'm saying this because I'd be frightened if I was part of it, phenomena.
	How bad did it get and how did it end?
	It did get, I think the time when we began to get rather desperate was when Janet began to show signs of what's generally called possession.
	And she was just completely out of it.
	You know, it wasn't one of the normal kind of hysterics or whatever, but she would sort of ride around on the bed and sometimes three of us had to hold her down.
	And we really got quite worried.
	We called out the emergency services more than once.
	We had a doctor came over late at night and gave her an injection of valium, 10 cc as I recall, which normally sent you to sleep.
	And it worked for about 45 minutes.
	The next thing we knew was Janet had been flung across the room and ended up on the radio set.
	And our photographer friend happened to be there, Graham Morris, and he took a picture of it.
	That was absolutely authentic.
	She was totally unconscious.
	It wasn't just asleep.
	She wasn't conscious.
	And we had to carry her back and tuck her up.
	And then by yet another coincidence, again, about the 10th so far, a couple of Brazilian friends of mine were due in London the following day.
	And I went to meet them.
	And they're both spiritist mediums, who I knew quite well.
	And I said, look, sorry to regular holiday, but we've got a very hairy case going on in Enfield.
	Would you mind coming and have a look?
	And they did immediately, because they were very willing to help anybody who needs it.
	And they went and talked to the girl alone in the bedroom, mumbling something in Portuguese, which I guess she didn't understand.
	And it had absolutely immediate effect.
	And Janet promptly came back to herself and said she was very tired, went to bed and slept for 14 hours non-stop.
	14.
	It's quite hard to do that, but she hadn't had much sleep previous nights.
	As if she'd been released from something.
	Yeah, and from then on she didn't get any more of these fits.
	So is that how this started to wind down?
	It's still a bit of time to go, but I think the final blow was a tremendous anti-climax.
	A Dutch journalist, friend of mine from the Dutch paper De Telegraaf, he asked if he could come over and do the story, and he said, Could he bring a medium with him who said he can end it?
	So, of course, I said yes.
	And he turned up with this very taciturn fellow called Dono.
	I think he's the only Dutchman who can't speak English, he couldn't speak a word of it.
	But Peter, the journalist, spoke it beautifully, and we trooped off to Enfield.
	And Peter was very charming and interviewed the mother and the girls.
	And Dono went out for a walk with Janet and bought her an ice cream, I think, and then came back, presumably not having said very much.
	And then he went up to the top bedroom on his own and came down in about half an hour.
	And he simply said, it's gone.
	So I thought, oh, yeah, pull the other one.
	But I didn't want to contradict him.
	And he was right, he had.
	That's how it ended.
	So did he exercise it, or did they just simply sufficiently believe in this man who spoke no English enough to collectively, if they'd opened the door to it, they closed the door to it?
	I suspect that may have happened because I heard of something similar happening with a rather sceptical colleague of mine in the SPR who had a formula for these things where he would simply go upstairs, read the newspaper for half an hour and say he was doing some magic incantation, which he wasn't.
	And he would come down and say, well, that should have worked.
	Let me know if there's any problem.
	According to him, sometimes it did.
	Well, it certainly did work at Enfield.
	I've said no question.
	There was a very brief encore about six months later, which we decided to ignore completely.
	I think at the time we said, well, not to worry, you sometimes get this, but it'll stop.
	So we tried the same technique.
	And I may say, we also tried that early on, it didn't work.
	I remember distinctly saying to Mrs. Hodgson, these things never last more than six weeks, because in general they don't.
	It wasn't quite true.
	I mean, we had a Brazilian case that went on for four years, twice as long as Henfield, but I wasn't going to tell her that.
	And the great majority of cases, some of them only last for one day.
	And another case that I did was not even a day, it was just a single incident.
	And about a week or two is quite normal.
	And it's very unusual to go on for more than two months.
	So as we've said, 14 months, pretty exceptional.
	When it came to an end, being honest, because it had become so much a part of your life, and I can see that you thrive on these mysteries, did you miss it?
	Were you disappointed?
	Well, I have to be careful here.
	I did genuinely want to stop it.
	And we tried every means right from the start.
	We tried every means that we could think of to stop it.
	We wanted to help the family.
	I guess what I'm saying is that you were learning.
	It's clear from the book, that you were learning a little bit more all the time about this.
	And of course, when the phenomenon stops, there's nothing more to learn for now.
	Well, naturally, I was intrigued by, I mean, if it hadn't been for consideration for the family, I could have, I wouldn't have minded if it had gone on forever.
	And what became of them?
	Did they live happily ever after?
	No.
	One of the children sadly died.
	He had a brain tumour.
	It was the eldest boy.
	He was only 14.
	That was terrible.
	And the eldest girl has got married and moved out of town and don't know where she is.
	Janet has also got married and living, as I say, far from Mainfield.
	Anonymity doesn't want people to bother her about this.
	And the house, is anybody living in the house now?
	Yes, I have heard sort of rather vague reports of people who moved in after the Hodgsons moved out saying there was a sort of funny atmosphere and so on, but I suspect that was pure suggestion because they'd heard about what had gone on.
	So all these years on, I mean count the years, it's three and a half decades now, and you've got the book out.
	We're sitting in your home where you've got the archive here, and that archive will be, as you say, kept in perpetuity.
	It'll always be there to refer to.
	Is it over for you?
	Well, cases are never quite closed.
	I mean, that's the first thing I learned from my Brazilian mentor, Hernoni Guimanai Sandradi, who was a very knowledgeable parapsychologist and researcher, very good at field work.
	And he said, we just don't close cases because you get new evidence turned up anytime.
	In fact, we did get new evidence several occasions about Enfield and some of it just a couple of weeks ago when there was a feature in the Daily Mail, I think it was, that I was interviewed for, which was quite well done, an article by Zoe Brennan.
	And they had on the website, they had comments, about 300 of them, so there's a lot of interest there.
	The comments are very interesting because roughly half said, oh, load of rubbish, you know, just kids fooling around.
	And the other half saying, well, interesting, we had the same problem ourselves.
	A lot of people said that they knew exactly what the family had been through because it had happened to them.
	So it was not only the Hodgsons.
	And one of the people who sent in a comment was the grandson of the man who died in the chair.
	And he, well, he virtually confirmed everything I'd been saying.
	So it's not over, and in some ways it'll never be over.
	It'll never be over.
	There are several people still alive who witnessed things happening at the time, or whose parents did.
	And the baker, for example, he's firmly refused to talk about the incident, but he may have family, I don't know, he might have talked with them.
	And the lollipop lady is still very much alive and well, and the policewoman is still actually serving.
	So if somebody wanted to pick this up now and open it up and maybe do a documentary about it, of something like that, there are at least people surviving who were first-hand part of it.
	Well, Channel 4 did a documentary not very long ago, I think about three or four years ago, called Interview with a Poltergeist, which was pretty good.
	They had the usual compulsory po-face psychologist putting up a pretty pathetic case, I may say.
	And they gave him about half of the program.
	I got about a minute and a half.
	And they interviewed most of the original Daily Mirror team who were still alive.
	Graham Morris, the photographer, Douglas Bence, reporter, who still absolutely firmly assert that they saw what they saw.
	And of course, Graham had several pictures to prove it.
	He took several stills of things actually happening.
	He had one of these motor drive gadgets on his Nikon, where you can take five pictures at once.
	And indeed, in the book, there's a series of reproduced photographs of exactly those things happening.
	Yes, there's one where the curtain twists itself around into a tight spiral.
	And at the same time, the bedclothes are pulled off Janet's bed where she does not move.
	Yes.
	You can see her hand absolutely bang where it was.
	And the other thing is that this phenomenon, whatever, had a habit of liking to arrange things in a nice, neat line or order.
	Yes, it's extraordinary that.
	I mean, it kept on doing that.
	On the kitchen floor, you get these sort of shop window displays of things, always very precisely lined up.
	It's the kind of thing a child would do.
	Yes, well, rather better than a child, I think.
	They were really quite elaborate, and they also liked balancing things on tops of doors.
	That was another favourite.
	And balanced so that you just had to practically look at it and it would fall off, you know, exactly on the edge.
	And that was a curious habit.
	And also writing rather curious things on.
	We had a message on the bathroom door once done in insulating tape, which really must have been quite hard to do.
	I mean, something to cut it with.
	What was the message?
	What did you say?
	The message was, I am Fred.
	Not very helpful.
	I'm sure if he thought he was Fred, it was.
	But then also we had messages written in other substances, which I needn't mention.
	And one of the most interesting details, I think, were these puddles of water on the floor, which you may think are not particularly abnormal until you look at them closely and you find that they all have this hard outline.
	And you can't repeat that except by condensation of a cold mass.
	We tried fleeing water around, and you always get a splash.
	If you pour a tiny amount of water from very low down, it will either run out in all directions or it will splash.
	So this was sitting like mercury, if you pour mercury around it.
	A nice round blob with a very hard, hard differential.
	Which water can't do?
	No, unless it condenses.
	Well, if you get a cube of ice and leave it on the floor, it will eventually melt outwards and form a similar kind of pattern.
	But no normal dropping of water will end up with what we saw.
	Are you still researching these things?
	Well, I can't say I'm researching it.
	I've been doing lots of other things since Enfield.
	It's been, we say, 30 years, and I've written, I think, eight books since then.
	And currently I'm concerned with investigating identical twins, which is rather more peaceful.
	We have to talk about that sometime, I think.
	Well, there's a lot to say about that.
	Yes, that's another show.
	That's another book.
	A whole other show.
	But you're a professional author.
	Yeah.
	You're that rare breed you are.
	You make your living by writing.
	Well, that's not quite the same thing.
	No, I make my living by the stock market.
	Okay.
	But I mean...
	And looking back over the phenomena detailed in this book, and I have to say it's fabulously written and well done on this.
	Is there anything that you wish you had included and didn't, or anything you wish you had left out and put in?
	No.
	I did take quite a lot of trouble with that book.
	I determined not to leave anything out that was evidential.
	And in the new edition, I have updated it with accounts of this analysis of the rapping sounds that we made.
	And I would like to have done more kind of scientific investigation, but of course we couldn't find people to do it.
	Well, we did identify this voice.
	We had Professor Forsyn from Birkbeck College kindly lent us a laryngograph, which we managed to clamp onto Janet while she was producing this noise.
	And as you said, there was no way that a child could produce a voice like that?
	Not and keep it up a conversation for an hour in it.
	No.
	Not without getting probably a permanent damage to the throat.
	Because you've got to be a professional actor to do that sort of thing for these sort of growdy commercials.
	Well, We can all change our voices.
	I can do that, but I can only do it for a few seconds.
	You wouldn't want to do that for long.
	That's exactly the noise that she made, and this was a girl of 12.
	But she was talking for an hour like that as a girl of 12.
	What can produce that?
	Well, we did, as I say, with this narrigograph, we did establish the fact that the sound was coming from her false vocal folds, the so-called plica ventricularis, which is what you just demonstrated.
	And we did put out a challenge.
	Maurice Gross offered 500 quid to anybody who could produce a 12-year-old girl who could make the same noise.
	And no take this.
	When you challenge these sceptics, they just go away and hide.
	They don't deliver.
	It's been a pleasure to talk to you in your home in Earls Court.
	I'd love to talk to you about twins at some point.
	Well, hopefully there's so much more to say about twins than is in the book, Twins and Epithy, because I'm waiting to do a third edition, which will be out next year, I hope.
	So let's get together then.
	If anybody wants to know any more about you, do you have a website?
	No, you can type me in the Google on amazon.com and it tells you which of my books are available.
	Three of them have just been reissued, which is nice.
	This House is Haunted and The Flying Cow, which is all about Brazil.
	And If This Be Magic, which is all about hypnosis.
	Something else to talk about.
	Why it's...
	I think that's more important because it's really quite scandalous the way hypnosis has been invented and then disappeared and been invented again ever since 1784 and it's still not being used in the way it should be.
	And there are many people who could be greatly helped, perhaps even have their lives saved, if it was properly studied, which it isn't, properly taught, which it isn't, and properly practiced, which it isn't.
	So yes, that is something I feel quite strongly about.
	Well Guy, lovely to talk to you.
	Thank you very much for being part of The Unexplained and for taking time to have me in your home and to explain all of this so brilliantly.
	I have to say this, having read most of the book, I haven't quite finished the book.
	There are many more stories and there are many, many more details in the book, which is why, and I'm not your PR agent, I recommend get a copy of the book, try and see it, because it is an excellent book and it's a narrative.
	It's beautifully put together.
	One thing flows on from the next and it's a good story and it's a true story and those things are rare these days.
	Guy Lion Playfair, thank you very much for being on The Unexplained.
	Thank you, Howard.
	Pleasure.
	Guy Lyon Playfair, who made time for me at his home earlier this week in Earls Court in London.
	Lovely man, very sincere in his research and he's still surrounded in his home by all of that research and very clear memories of what went on, whatever it was in that house at the back end of the 1970s in London.
	What an amazing story.
	The book is called This House is Haunted and just put it into a search engine.
	Guy Lion Playfair is the author.
	And you'll see more about this and also more about the most chilling poltergeist story the UK ever came out with.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been edition 72 of The Unexplained.
	We're coming to the end of 2011, but we're not finished yet for this year.
	Lots of good stuff coming up.
	If you want to email the show, get in touch with me at www.theunexplained.tv.
	There you can just click on the link and send me an email or make me a donation.
	That would be great.
	Thank you very much for keeping the faith with the show, for being part of our family.
	Thank you to Adam for getting the show out there.
	But above all, thank you very much to you for listening to The Unexplained and for supporting me.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I'll be back soon.

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