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Nov. 1, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
31:05
Edition 676 - Roz Morris - Enfield Poltergeist
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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 Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being with me every step of the way for the nearly 17 years that I've been doing this podcast.
Now, very important news.
There will be a break in the Unexplained schedule for a couple of weeks now.
There won't be any TV shows for two weeks, and there will be no podcasts until, I think, approximately the 13th or so of November.
And we start the new run, got some good guests in the new run, starting with Paul Sinclair, a special with him at the beginning.
But that's all still to come.
So, as you know, I'm hosting the 2E Morella Unexplained Cruise.
And we've got guests including Dr. David Whitehouse, of course, former BBC Space and Science editor, Claire Broad the Medium, Nick Pope is flying in from America, and Dr. Melvin Willen will be coming to us to talk about the Enfield poltergeist and other material.
So that's what I'm going to be doing.
And, you know, it is a little stressful at the moment.
I'm trying to get myself sorted out for it all.
So I hope you'll understand that.
This edition, slightly shorter than normal, but it's a conversation that I wanted to leave you with.
This is Ros Morris from my TV show.
Ros Morris was a BBC radio reporter who in 1977, reluctantly, was sent to cover the Enfield Poltergeist case.
This was the case of an ordinary London family, including two daughters, who seemed to be seriously affected by something within their home on a long-term and intensifying basis.
Something that would throw objects, levitate people, do all kinds of things, even project items through walls, it was claimed.
The national media got involved, starting with the Daily Mirror, then the TV and the radio.
That's where Ros Morris comes in.
It was a story that continues to grip the United Kingdom.
I've never spoken with Ros Morris before.
I think it's amazing to hear from the person who actually went there to report it.
So this edition, even though slightly shorter, is Ros Morris telling you her story, in her words, more than four decades on, of the Enfield-Poltergeist case.
Thank you very much for being part of my life over these near 17 years.
We're going to step forward into new things in 2023, I hope.
And, you know, even though times have been challenging one way and another, and fun as well, you know, you've been with me all the way.
And some of you have been with me since edition one, which is just amazing, really.
Okay, thank you to Adam, my webmaster.
The website is theunexplained.tv and the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
From my TV show now, talking about her involvement in the Enfield Poltergeist case, former BBC radio reporter Roz Morris.
Now, the Enfield Poltergeist, along with Bowley Rectory and one or two others and the regular happenings in Glasgow, in the subterranean parts of that city, but the Enfield Poltergeist is reputed to be the spookiest story of recent years.
It was a headline maker in the 1970s and indeed has continued to be so as more people come up with their remembrances and their recollections of what happened there.
If you can imagine an ordinary house and an ordinary family with two daughters being beset by happenings that are just beyond the normal in the truest sense of that phrase.
Bangings and crashings and people ascending into the air.
Even at one point it's claimed a book that was able to teleport itself through a wall.
Now these happenings made the news in the late 1970s and the news media in those days of course took an interest in these things, in particular at the beginning of the Daily Mirror.
Reporters were deputed and members of the Society for Psychical Research and even a reporter from the British Broadcasting Corporation on a slow news day was sent out there to record the events and record the stories of the events from the people who were there.
Her name is Ros Morris.
We'll hear from her in a moment.
She is a former BBC radio reporter who now runs a media training company called TV News in London.
But first, here's a little clip from the documentary that we'll be showing on Paramount Plus this week.
Just take a look at this.
What was interesting about all this was that people who had no skin in the game were prepared to be interviewed about it because they'd seen something so extraordinary.
The lollipop lady and the baker both believed that they saw Janet actually in the horizontal plane going up and down rather than this sort of straight up and straight down, almost like a triangle shape, which it looks like from Graham's photographs.
If Janet was physically fit enough, then there is a possibility that she could have been manufacturing this herself.
And this sort of correlates, if you like, with the Exorcist film, which came out in 1974.
And it's possible that Janet may have seen the film or seen clips of it somewhere or the other, and that she was therefore trying to copy what was going on there.
There were several members of the SPR who, without displaying a corporate viewpoint, as individuals, felt that it was not real, the levitation, and they put that into print occasionally and defended their case.
Morris was very upset about some members being so hostile to his interpretation of what was going on.
So the controversy raged backwards and forwards.
Well, that is part of the documentary that will be airing on Paramount Plus TV.
It is a series called Hauntings that starts on Friday, the 28th of October.
And this will be one of those, the Enfield Poltergeist.
And a person who you saw in that is online to us now, Roz Morris, former BBC reporter.
Roz, thank you for doing this.
Hi.
Roz, I guess, look, where do we begin with this?
I think probably we ask you, how did you, as a young reporter, become involved in this story?
Well, it wasn't something I've ever expected to be involved with.
What happened was that it was a Saturday.
I was working for World This Weekend, which as you know, still goes out on Sundays.
Radio 4.
Radio 4.
And so we were working on Saturday preparing the programme.
And it was a very slow news day.
There wasn't much happening.
And you could tell that because the headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror was about what we then thought was a ghost story.
So the headline was The House of Strange Happenings.
And it was about the fact that their reporter and photographer had been to this house in Enfield and toys had been thrown at them and all sorts of things had happened, which they couldn't explain.
And the family had been experiencing, apparently, strange things happening, furniture moving, toys thrown around, all sorts of things since August.
Anyway, so nothing happened.
So in the evening, I was threatened all day, you'll have to go and cover this ghost story if nothing happens.
And of course, I didn't want to do it, not because I mean, I had an open mind.
I mean, you know, I was reasonably skeptical, but I knew that when a reporter goes to cover a ghost story, usually absolutely nothing happens.
So it's really, really difficult to cover.
So anyway, I went off to Enfield and I interviewed Mrs. Hodgson, who was the mother, and I interviewed Maurice Gross, the psychical researcher, as you mentioned.
And also, by then, it was sort of the middle of the night because they'd been at LBC Radio doing an interview about it.
And then they came back and I interviewed them.
And then some sort of weird things happened.
It appeared that furniture was thrown across the room and so on in the girls' bedroom.
But I didn't actually see that, but I did hear his massive thump when this happened.
So it did seem quite strange.
Anyway, I then went back with my recordings and compiled a report and did a live interview at the end of the report with the then presenter of World This Weekend, Gordon Clough.
And it took up, you can tell it was a slow news day.
It took up 10 minutes of the program.
10 minutes, my God.
And look, the approach to news then, and, you know, very much the program that you talk about was one of the programmes that helped to shape me.
I would listen and, you know, try to copy the way that they did things when I was a kid.
But the attitude to it all was completely different then.
I mean, I can remember my first working with the BBC, not at the level nationally that you were working.
I was working in local radio.
It was some years later than that.
But there was great scepticism of anything that appeared to be like this.
You know, a general mockery of subjects like that.
I can remember being sent out in Brighton to interview a psychic, somebody who was doing palm readings locally in Brighton.
And, you know, there was a lot of, I think I got it because I was the youngest person there and they just needed to fill a slot on the breakfast show the next day, I think, was the truth of this.
You know, I found it quite interesting, but at that time I wasn't really interested in those things.
But I'm just interested in the whole mechanic of you being sent there and allowed to do this as a serious story.
You know, that was pretty unusual for the time.
Well, it was unusual, yes.
I mean, but the thing was, luckily, a few things did happen.
So I was able to produce something reasonably convincing that there was something odd going on, which is all I could say.
But what happened after that was that I pitched the idea, because it seemed to me having talked to people, that there was a lot going on and a lot of witnesses.
And therefore, there was a good idea for a radio documentary.
So I pitched the idea of a radio documentary about this.
And then I, and that was accepted.
And then I went back and started recording.
And when I went back in the October, the following month, that's when I first heard and recorded the knocking sounds on the walls, which is extremely strange.
And, you know, I was in this world then.
I was a kid.
My colleagues are laughing about that, but I was.
And I don't remember it at all.
So I don't know.
Was it getting saturation coverage?
Were all the media talking about this?
The Daily Mirror was talking about it.
Some of the other popular papers dipped in and out of it.
The BBC did what you did.
Was there a lot of coverage?
Because I simply don't remember it.
Yes, there was.
There was, well, there wasn't a lot.
I mean, it's not like nowadays where you've got far more channels and so on.
But there was coverage.
Yes, there was a reporter from BBC Scotland called Stuart Lamont who did a report about it.
I think Nationwide did a report.
Nothing happened when they went.
And there were, yes, there were a few other reports.
When Guy Playfair's book was published, which was 1980.
This house is haunted.
Yes, that got reviewed in the Daily Telegraph and it got reviewed in some other places and it even made the National Inquirer in the States, which of course we'd all not heard of then, but we're soon to hear a lot more of.
Well, I think at that time we thought of the National Inquirer as being shopping trolley on moon sort of story.
I interviewed Guy Lyon Prayfair a couple of years before he died.
I went to his home in Earls Court in 2011 and it's interesting for me to talk to you tonight because you were part of the media reporting and I've never spoken with anybody who was part of the media coverage of this.
And I specifically sitting on that old sofa in Guy's home in Earlscourt, not very far from the exhibition center, I remember asking him specifically about the media coverage.
And I think we have a sound clip from my interview in 2011 with Guy Lion Playfair talking about the way he felt the media handled this story.
Let's hear that.
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.
For 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 realise when they're all having a good giggle in their armchairs and saying, ah, it's just little girls playing tricks and so on.
They don't seem to realise that these things cause real distress to people.
I mean, it's like having a burglar in your house for about three months.
But the burglar that you can't hold down, you can't see.
You can't get a man, you can't arrest him.
You call the police, which they did at Enfield.
And the police, this was on the very first day where 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 was nice.
Guy Lyon Playfair, the man who wrote the book, This House is Haunted, what a lovely man, very much, don't you think, was in the gentleman ghost investigator tradition of the United Kingdom.
Yes, no, he definitely was.
He was a very intelligent man, and he'd already had investigated half a dozen other poltergeist cases before he came to Enfield.
In fact, he only came to Enfield because he heard my report.
He wasn't involved when I first went, but he heard my report on, well, this weekend, and he decided that he would then go and see Maurice Gross and see if he could help.
In his book and also in the interviews with me, he said I was going to go on holiday.
I didn't want to do another poltergeist, but then, you know, he felt he had to help because Maurice Gross, although he had an interest, had never encountered a poltergeist before.
So he didn't know as much as Guy Playfair did.
And Guy was a really interesting person.
And he said that they call it paranormal, but maybe it isn't paranormal.
Maybe it's just normal and we don't understand it.
Which is a view that is very much ahead of its time.
There are people saying that now and you'll read their pronouncements in the papers all the time.
To say that in the 1970s was a great rarity.
These things were either very serious stories buried away in very serious places or they were there to be mocked and derided.
This was something different.
The Enfield Poltergeist, Britain's scariest case they claim, certainly one that captivated the 1970s, the end of the 1970s and they're still talking about it now.
What a privilege to talk with Ro Morris who was reporting on the story itself for the BBC.
And Roz, you went there to do a report on it and you ended up doing a documentary.
What was that like?
Well, what I did was I went back many times in 1997 and then 19, sorry, 1977 and then 1978 and recorded interviews with different eyewitnesses.
And my radio documentary has interviews with about 15 people.
That's including the family, but then also including neighbours, people like the school crossing lady, the Baker's Roundsman, both of whom claimed they saw Janet levitating one day.
And I also interviewed some of the scientists and engineers that were brought in to do tests.
So it was fairly comprehensive.
Oh, and I also interviewed Professor Hans Bender, who was an expert on poltergeist.
There weren't many around then, but he was very good and explained about a poltergeist and the theories of what causes it, which is that it could be that often poltergeist cases,
and they've been reported for hundreds of years, often poltergeist cases involve someone around the age of puberty and something to do with the changes going on in them seems to generate some sort of energy, apparently.
I mean, I don't know, but I mean, there's a theory about that, that the energy seems to attract spirits or ghosts or whatever you want to call them.
It's often said that that is the case, and it was said that that was the case here, where you had, you know, one girl going through puberty who was seemingly the focus of all of this.
And it was interesting that they were speculating about this then.
That seems to be very advanced, that the scientists trying to find an explanation for this were speculating about that.
They weren't just saying something weird happening here.
There are bumps and bangs.
It's either being faked or it's a ghost.
Well, I think the other thing was that Maurice Gross, being himself an inventor and an entrepreneur, he had contacts with business people and people with equipment and so on.
So they were able to come and try and video things or record things.
But I mean, the other point is that Maurice Gross and Guy Playfair, between them, made thousands of hours of recordings of the Enfield.
And didn't they live there?
Didn't Maurice Gross live there for a while?
I'm not sure if he actually lived there.
He used to go there every day, but I'm not sure if he actually lived there.
I mean, it was only a three-bedroom house.
There wasn't really much room.
And there was Mrs. Hodgson.
She was divorced from her husband, so he wasn't there.
So it was Mrs. Hodgson, Janet and Margaret, and the two boys, one of whom was sometimes there and sometimes not because he was at a special school.
But that didn't leave much room for anyone else.
So I'm not sure that he did.
But I mean, I do think that Morris was really keen to find out what could be the scientific explanation for it and whether you could measure changes in temperature or whether you could measure electrical activity.
And it is interesting that my own, we had reel-to-reel tape recorders, the old-fashioned EUR.
You could record 15, people, you know, they laugh when I tell them.
You could record 15 minutes, wasn't it, at a time then you had to change the tape?
Yes, I mean, reel-to-reel, it was unbelievable when you think about it.
This is even before cassettes.
I mean, there were cassettes around, but the BBC wasn't using them in the late 1970s.
But anyway, my recorder went wrong a couple of times and the tape wrapped itself around the spools, but I don't know why.
The people who were recording things, some of their electrical equipment didn't work and they had faults they'd never seen before.
So there may well have been some sort of electrical activity.
I don't know.
I mean, the thing I think that's important about the Enfield Poltergeist is that there are so many witnesses to so many things.
And people, as I said, like the school crossing lady who had nothing to do with the family, you know, and didn't need to be interviewed.
I mean, that was the interesting thing, that people were, they wanted to talk about it because they'd never seen anything like it, the things that they'd seen.
And the other point I do want to make is that sometimes people do say, oh, well, the family could have faked it.
And one of the people that was a witness said, well, if that family could have faked all those hundreds of things that happened and all that stuff, they must have been a lot cleverer than everybody thought they were because it would be really very difficult, I think, to fake things.
Now, it is true that Janet and Margaret did say they'd sort of played a few pranks and so on.
But that would only have amounted to maybe 10% of it, from what I heard.
Well, Guy, Playfair, said that he thought it was like 2%.
He thought 98% of everything, everything else, was strange things happening.
But not, as I say, they did play a few and pretend that something had moved across the room when it hadn't or whatever.
But I think the weirdest thing was, well, I mean, I did hear the knockings and that was extremely odd.
But the other thing was the voices, that the girls suddenly came out with these very strange, very deep ruffles.
Streak from the Exorcist.
Were you able to record any of that?
Yes, yes, I did.
Oh, yes, yes, I recorded a lot of that and played that on the BBC, which had never been done before.
And the point about that is that people say, oh, well, they could have faked that.
But I did try to do that myself.
I did try and, I mean, I tried to reproduce this very deep, rough voice.
And I managed it for a couple of minutes.
And then I had a sore throat the next day.
And the girls, it was going on for hours.
I think they were kids.
How would they do this, I think, is the question.
But it was also, sorry, I was just going to say also, it was when you were there, the voice sort of seemed to come from near them.
It didn't seem to come out of their mouth.
And did you check and, you know, stake the place out, check the place out to satisfy yourself that there was no, as my grandmother would have said, there was no jiggery pokery going on?
Oh, yes.
Well, no, obviously.
I mean, I made sure that what I was recording was actually happening, so to speak.
But I want to make it clear that I never myself actually saw any objects move.
I simply interviewed people who told me about it.
But I mean, so many people saw so many things that something strange must have been going on.
I remember a BBC trainer a long time ago, and I think they despaired of me rather.
I think they wrote me off as a commercial person, which I'm very proud of many years ago.
But I remember them saying, you must never ask anybody how they feel.
When you're in a situation, when you're in a situation like the one that you were in, how could you avoid that question?
Well, of course, yes, you do, but I think it's quite funny.
I remember that being banned as a reporter.
And now everybody all the time asks people, how do you feel, about absolutely everything.
So it's really come back in great force.
Well, I think the family were quite worried.
And of course, they didn't get enough sleep at certain points when things were happening.
And they couldn't, to start with, they didn't get enough sleep because they didn't know what was going on.
And then sometimes after when the girls had gone to sleep, strange things would happen.
Furniture would move, that sort of thing, apparently.
So it was a great strain.
It really was a great strain.
And I must say that, you know, people said to me after I'd done the documentary, oh, well, you could make a career out of this.
You could go on and do lots more ghost stories and whatever.
And I said, and I stuck to it.
I said, I never want to touch this stuff ever again.
It was very, very disturbing.
I really did feel it was, it's because you can't control it.
You don't know what's going on, what's happening.
There was some, I don't know what it was.
I don't know what theory I have at all, really.
But I know that there was something very strange going on in that house and lots of people saw it.
I think the phenomena, if I'm right about this, dried up or wound down as everybody in the house got a little older and then, of course, people started moving away.
Isn't that the way that it went?
Well, it went on from 1977 to part of 79.
My documentary came out in 78 and there was still stuff going on then, but less than it had been.
But I think the interesting thing for me is that this is now more than 40 years ago, which seems incredible.
Everyone's still talking about it because there's so much to talk about, but nobody has changed their story.
Nobody has said, oh, well, actually, I didn't really see anything.
I just said something for the sake of it.
No, everybody has stuck to it.
And everybody who saw something odd is still sticking to what they said, which I think is quite interesting, actually.
One of the good things, I know it is, although it's sometimes a pain to achieve, the BBC always requires you to do balance.
Everything has to be balanced.
Everything has to be multiply sourced or at least two source confirmation, they call it.
When you were involved in this, how were you able to balance what you were reporting?
How were you able to say, but on the other hand, there's a possibility it may have been caused by this?
Well, I mean, I did look into the whole thing about poltergeists, obviously, and found out that they've been going on.
There have been reports of poltergeist activity for centuries and that they did seem to follow a certain pattern.
And I did, as I said, have scientific experts.
And that was the only way, really, to bring in people who were able to look at it dispassionately, which I was doing anyway, as well.
But as I say, it's very difficult to explain.
I mean, people say, oh, the knocking, but it's just thumps on the wall.
And I mean, I don't hear that normally, do you?
You know, I mean, do you go home and have thumps on the wall?
It's very odd.
And the strange voices and all the reports of all the other people.
But I think what happened was that everybody involved gets very jumpy because it's such a strange atmosphere in the house.
Though Janet did have some treatment in the Maudsley for a couple of months, the Maudsley Hospital, which is a psychiatric hospital, where she was taken for tests.
And they pronounced her as perfectly normal.
So they didn't find out that there was anything wrong with her.
And the other one thing I would like to say in defense of Mrs. Hodgson is people said, oh, she wanted a better council house.
But actually, she loved that house.
They were very poor, the family.
They didn't have much money.
So to them, having a three-bedroom, semi-detached council house was, you know, terrific.
It was quite a substantial house.
I mean, people would, especially bearing in mind where it is, you know, people, a lot of people would give an arm and a leg for a place like that.
It was quite a house.
Well, it's a council house, you know.
I mean, the council houses in the 1920s and 30s were built as big houses.
They were built properly in those days.
What happened to the house then?
Presumably there are other people living there right now.
Yes, yes, and they still get people turning up outside and taking selfies, apparently.
And that's more so since the film The Country.
The strangest story, Roz, and it must have impacted upon you if you were told that and everybody was talking about it around and about, was the story, and let's just make sure that I've got this right.
I think it was a Bible or a book that was said to have teleported itself through a wall there to the neighbour's house.
Were you aware of that?
Because I was told that story by Guy Lion Playfair himself.
It seemed to me bizarre then and it seems to me bizarre now.
Well, yes, I mean, it was one of the things that was said to have happened.
I mean, when the school crossing lady saw Janet sort of horizontal in the bedroom and levitating, Janet said that she went through the wall into the next house.
That's what she felt she'd done.
So it got more and more and more extraordinary.
It was really extraordinary.
But Janet has said since that she did feel used, she did feel pushed about, and some of it was quite dangerous because apparently, as I say, I wasn't there for that.
It's just what people told me, that a curtain was wrapped around her and something seemed to be trying to strangle her.
And, you know, so it did get quite sort of, and throwing heavy pieces of furniture, moving heavy pieces of furniture across the room was quite dangerous.
So it wasn't all just toys, soft toys being thrown about.
You know, as somebody who works professionally in broadcasting the value of a minute, so we have about a minute.
And I'm going to ask you that question the trainers and the BBC guidebooks hated.
When you look back on it 40, what is it, 47, 46 years, 45 years on.
When you look back at it across that span of time, how do you feel?
Well, personally, you see, I tried not to talk about it afterwards because basically what happens is that if you meet people socially and you mention this or it comes up, there's two sorts of people.
One of the scientific people who look at you as though you're something off their shoe and walk away.
And the other are the people and you're still there 30 minutes later as they're telling you all their family ghost stories because there's a lot of this about.
So it's very interesting.
It's a very compelling sort of subject.
And I think people can make their own minds up by watching the Paramount Plus documentary and see what they think about it.
Totally.
And it clearly impacted your life.
Thank you very much for doing this with me, Roz.
Nice to speak with you.
Thank you.
Roz Morris, a former BBC reporter, worked for Radio 4, went to the Enfield Poltergeist House and actually did a documentary about it and came away impacted, as you heard.
And of course, Roz now runs a media training company.
If you want to see that documentary, it's on Paramount Plus and the series starts from the 28th of October.
Roz Morris, an amazing first-hand account.
That's it.
More great guests in the pipeline.
Don't forget starting with Paul Sinclair in the November run.
I've got a great lineup through November and December, finalizing some for January now.
So we're moving forward here at the Unexplained.
And I'm very excited.
Corrigo, thank you very much for being part of The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Until next we meet here, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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