All language subtitles for Hauntings.S01E01.WEBRip.x264-ION10

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

- It was 1977, and I was
working as a photographer

on "The Daily Mirror"
newspaper.

And I was doing
the late shift.

You'd be just sitting there
on call

waiting for anything
to happen.

Could be parties,
celebrities,

car crash, plane crash,
murders.

It could be absolutely
anything at all.

And then, quite late at
night,

this one call had come in
from a family in Enfield

saying that weird things have
been happening in their
house.

Furniture had been
moving around on its own.

And, of course,
nobody really believed it.

A lot of people
phone up newspapers

and tell you
all sorts of things,

so we didn't know
what to believe.

But a second call came in
where a neighbor had said

that the police had seen
things move around the house

and they were
convinced there was

something strange happening
in the house.

♪ ♪

- The local police reported
seeing an armchair levitate

across the Hodgson's
living room.

- It came off the floor, oh,

maybe a half inch,
I should say,

and I saw it slide off
to the right

about 3 and 1/2 to 4 feet
before it came to rest.

Um, I checked to see
whether or not

it could possibly have slid
along the floor.

I placed a marble on the floor
to see whether or not

the marble would go in the same
direction as the chair did,

and it didn't,
didn't roll at all.

I couldn't find
an explanation at all.

♪ ♪

- I drove up with the
reporter, Doug Bence.

We had no idea what we'd find
when we got there.

We pulled up at Green Street,
Enfield,

jumped out.

♪ ♪

The house looked
perfectly normal.

Didn't look anything--
anything special.

Peggy Hodgson was a mother,
single mother,

trying to bring up
a family of four on her own.

She couldn't cope.

- When I did see
the dressing table moving,

I just couldn't believe it.

In fact,
I pushed it back twice,

and the third time,
I couldn't move it.

But while I was doing it
and while I was in the room,

I was literally trembling,

and my mouth went
completely dry

because I didn't really know
what I was up against.

It's almost as though
someone's standing there

with an invisible hand
and lifting it

from one place to the other.

- It was decided that I
would go into the house

first of all,
and I planted myself

right in the very far corner
of the kitchen.

Then the family came in,

and nothing happened really.

That was--that was it.
Nothing at all

until the last child, Janet,

who was about 11 or 12,
she was brought in.

Suddenly things just took
off,

flew around the room as if
you fired them out of a gun.

You know, it was sort of
marbles and LEGO bricks.

They were really moving,
hitting the walls,

hitting windows.

I remember Janet screaming
and covering her face.

She seemed to be
the epicenter of everything.

[child screaming]

And then, suddenly
I got hit by a LEGO brick.

And it brought a lump up
on my right eyebrow.

If it weren't for having
the camera up over my face,

that force,
I would have been blinded.

I have no idea if any of
those pictures are gonna come
out.

It was quite frustrating
because it was just

shots of the family there

rather than seeing marbles
whizzing across the room.

Looking back at it,

I still haven't got
the faintest idea

of what happened
in that house.

[dramatic music]

- Britain today is
on the red line.

[indistinct chanting]

Confusion and anxiety
are everywhere.

As people search for meaning,

many have become fascinated
by the supernatural,

the occult,
and the paranormal.

- Blockbuster horror films
had people fainting in the
cinema.

- Beat down Satan
under our feet!

- And we've had
regular reports

of hauntings and possessions.

♪ ♪

- The Hodgson family
from Enfield in North London

aren't getting on too well
with what they believe

to be a poltergeist.

- A poltergeist is a ghost

which makes its presence
known through noises.

- Those who've studied
the phenomenon say

it concentrates its attention
on adolescent children.

11-year-old Janet Hodgson
appears to be the focus

of many of the strange
happenings in Green Street.

- I was a reporter
for BBC "World at One"

and "World This Weekend,"
and I was working

on "World This Weekend"
on the Saturday

when "The Daily Mirror"
had this headline:

"The House
of Strange Happenings."

You don't usually get
kind of ghost stories

on the front page, do you?

It wasn't necessarily news
in the sense that--

not hard news anyway--

and I was threatened all day
with, if nothing else
happens,

you'll have to go and cover
this ghost story in Enfield.

It's well known that
when a reporter is sent out

to a ghost story,
absolutely nothing happens.

I mean, it's really, you know,
difficult to report on.

So I didn't really want
to do it at all.

But in the end,
nothing else happened that day,

so I went out to Enfield
on a Saturday evening

and was quite skeptical

and thought,
well, what's gonna happen?

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

I thought Mrs. Hodgson seemed
a very sensible woman.

She seemed very normal and
ordinary and down-to-Earth.

She had four children.

Johnny was ten,
Billy was seven,

Margaret was 13,
and Janet was 11.

♪ ♪

Mrs. Hodgson was divorced,
and her husband wasn't there,

and the family were
obviously quite poor.

And there didn't seem
anything remarkable about the
family.

Just what was happening
to them seemed remarkable.

At the time,
I was just focused

on the fact that I needed
to get something

that could go
on the program the next day.

It's now about half an hour
since the family settled down

for the night, and Janet,
who's the 11-year-old,

the one we've been
watching most,

she now seems to be asleep.

She's not really
moving around very much.

[knocking]

[knocking continues]

I was in the front room,

and it was really quite loud

and quite persistent
sort of knocking.

It wasn't like a knock
on the door.

It was like a knock
on the wall,

and sort of high up
on the wall sometimes.

[knocking]

You could never tell
where it was.

[loud thud]

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

We've just heard a noise
having come downstairs.

We've just heard
a noise upstairs.

And the chair which was
standing by Janet's bed

appears to have moved.

Now the chair was by the bed,
and it's now by the door.

Well, Janet appears to be
sleeping quite peacefully.

Well, I'm hoping I'm not
getting the microphone

shaking in my hand
because that was rather

an unnerving experience.

- Roslyn, you're looking
fairly fresh, I have to say,

after that night and being up
till 5:30 this morning.

Are you persuaded?

- I think I more or less am,
yes.

♪ ♪

I couldn't explain
what had happened that night.

It did all seem extremely
odd.

And I thought there really
was something strange

going on in that house.

- As a couple
of "Daily Mirror" hacks,

you know,
we were out of our depth,

so we had no idea
what this was about.

So we decided that the
Society for Psychical
Research

had to get involved.

They'd studied this sort
of stuff over the years

in lots of different countries
around the world,

and they knew
what they were doing.

And we certainly didn't.

♪ ♪

- The Society
for Psychical Research,

which was founded
in the 19th century,

does research into a whole
range of different types

of alleged
paranormal phenomena.

So this can range
through the whole gamut

of apparitions, poltergeist,

spiritual mediums,

extrasensory perception.

Just about you name
any anomalous phenomena

that you can think of,
and the SPR is interested

in investigating it
in a scientific manner.

My role in the SPR
is the honorary

archive liaison officer,
which means that I basically

collect archive material,
catalog it, conserve it.

Well, this is where I keep
a lot of the paranormal,

shall we say, archive.

Up here we have
the Enfield box,

which has the items
that were thrown around

in a poltergeist-like manner.

So here we have
the LEGO bricks.

And one of the first times
that anything flew in the air

was when a piece of LEGO brick
hit the photographer,

Graham Morris, brought up
a bit of a bruise on him,

and with such a volition

that it couldn't have just been
sort of chucked in the air

and hit him on the head
or something.

It had to be thrown very hard.

And at the time,
everybody was in view.

There were quite
a few people there.

So I don't think he ever
managed to explain how,

other than through
some paranormal force,

this thing managed
to throw itself across the room

and hit him.

The posh words for this,
psychokinetic energy,

which means things that get
thrown around, basically.

The explanations are
the same as they are

for all of this sort
of phenomena,

ranging from fraud
at one extreme

to spirits
at the other extreme,

and plenty of other things
in between the two.

Fraud could have been,
in an extreme circumstance,

somebody palming
a piece of the LEGO,

waiting until they were pretty
sure that nobody was looking,

and then throwing it
as hard as they could,

aiming it at poor old Graham,

it hitting him so that it
brought up a bruise on him.

Graham didn't know
what was going on,

so he contacted the SPR.

And then the SPR contacted
Maurice Grosse to say,

you live relatively near--
he lived in Muswell Hill--

would you like to go along
and investigate?

Maurice had not been
a member of the SPR

before this case
for very long.

The first job that Maurice
had in the SPR

was actually the Enfield
case.

[soft inquisitive music]

♪ ♪

- My father was 20 in 1939,

and he joined the Royal
Artillery straight away.

And in fact, he was
in the expeditionary force

to Dunkirk.

He ended as an acting
captain.

And at the end of the war,

he was in retail,
designing and inventing.

And then my father showed
interest in psychic phenomena

and joined the Society
for Psychic Research.

And after a period of time,

he realized that the only way
to really get anywhere

with this subject was
to research it on the ground.

And he'd been badgering
the secretary for a case.

And the secretary had
got in touch with him

and said, Maurice,
there's something going on

in Enfield in Middlesex.

Would you like to go
and have a look?

So he jumps
at the opportunity.

And he marshaled
his resources,

jumped into his car,
and went off to Enfield.

And there started the story.

[music building]

♪ ♪

[knock on door]

- I found chaos.

And there were a lot of very,
very frightened people there,

so we sat down, and we talked
about what was happening.

And I began to realize
that here we had

a classic poltergeist case
on our hands.

- My father was a scientific,
rational person,

no one more so.

Um, and he would have been
looking at everything

with a very critical eye,

learning each hour, each day,

and assessing each event
as it came along.

- I have actually seen myself
marbles being thrown about

because they'd
been thrown at me.

I've seen the door moving
backwards and forwards

as though the wind
was blowing it.

I've seen a T-shirt jump
off the table onto the floor.

The door chimes on the wall,

I've seen them moving
on their own.

I've also experienced
the reduction of temperature.

- Janet was the focal point
of activity.

My father became clear about
that from relatively early
on.

His enthusiasm
was unbounded here.

I mean, I would come back
from a discotheque

at 3:00 in the morning, and
he'd be going off to Enfield.

We have our morning debrief
sessions over breakfast,

and out would come the tapes,

and he would
tell me the stories,

the new events,
the progressions.

♪ ♪

[footsteps]

- And it is one of the
extraordinary coincidences

that his very first
case should be

one of the most
important cases

in the history
of paranormal phenomenon.

[electric crackling]

[eerie music]

- We were there
just about every night.

It was too fascinating not
to.

- We'd be sitting
in the sitting room

for hours and hours

just waiting
for something to happen.

And then, bang!

Got upstairs to find this bed
that turned itself sideways

and was stood up
against the wall.

And we couldn't have
done that between us,

and let alone children.

And heavy chests of drawers,

big pieces
of furniture would move.

Chairs would slide
across floors staying upright.

My role then was to do
sort of continuity pictures.

So I'd go into the house,
and I'd take a picture

of each room, showing
everything that was there.

And then when something
happened,

piece of furniture moved
or whatever,

I'd be the first one to go back
in and take a picture again.

Everywhere Janet went, it
seemed to follow her around.

That was quite frightening
for her.

She hated that.

There was just so much of it.

We were seriously worried
that somebody at some point

could get hurt
and could be badly hurt.

♪ ♪

[soft scratching]

[ominous music]

[loud scraping]

- There's an old fireplace
in the bedroom.

Janet said to me, "I can
hear this scraping sound."

And she says, "Oh, my God,
the fireplace is moving."

And all at once, the front
of the fireplace lifted up,

and it lifted right
over the double bed

and right onto the side
of the camp bed

because Billy was next to me
at that time.

We just sat there
looking at one another.

We didn't know what to do.
We were so scared.

- A fireplace had flown
across the room and almost
hit Billy,

the seven-year-old boy,
in the face.

It could have killed him.

- The fireplace was a turning
point as to my father.

For the first time,
it was dangerous

and worried him hugely.

- Mum was beside herself.

Mum was trying to bring up
four kids, no husband,

and just didn't need it,
you know.

So it was just awful.

It was just too much for her.

[high-pitched ringing]

Janet couldn't get away from
it, couldn't shake it off.

It was just always with
her...

Whatever it was.

- As the activity gained
in momentum,

it changed.

It became more intelligent.

- Are you a male spirit?

Knock one for no
and two for yes.

[two knocks]

- Two.
- It's two.

You are a male spirit.

Did you used to live
in this house?

[two knocks]

You did.

Was it--was it more
than 50 years ago?

[two knocks]

Yes.

Did you--did you die
in this house?

Did you pass on?
[two knocks]

You did pass on in this
house.

- That's when he realized
he was dealing

with some form of entity
that could communicate.

- What happened next
was completely unexpected

and very disturbing.

- I want you
to call out my name,

my complete name,
Maurice Grosse.

- These voices came
from Janet.

And they were very strange
and gruff

and very deep
like a grumpy old man.

- Come on.
Let me hear you say my name.

- Maurice.

Maurice.

Maurice.

- I thought, well,
I've got to record that,

so with Maurice Grosse,

I went and talked to the
girl.

And the voice just
started talking.

- People say to me, where do
the voices come from?

I don't know.
They were just there.

Really strange.

I've never known
anything like it,

but then that's true of most
of the Enfield poltergeist.

I mean, I've never known
anything like it

before or since.

♪ ♪

- I was a skeptic,
absolutely skeptical,

until I stepped
into the house.

And at about 9:00
in the evening,

the kids were going to bed.

[electric crackling]

And the kids were in the
room, the door was closed,

and almost immediately
this voice started,

this old man's voice talking.

I went into the room,
and I was told

I had to stand
facing the door.

I said to him,
to the voice, I said...

I want you to tell me
whether you remember

what happened to you
when you died.

And he said,
"I'm Bill Wilkins..."

both:
"And I died 15 years ago.

"I'm 72 years old,

"and I used to live here.

"Just before I died,
I went blind.

And then I had
a hemorrhage..."

- It had identified itself
as Bill Wilkins.

The intellect behind the
voice was not Janet's.

Can an 11-year-old child
speak in a gruff old man's
voice

for literally an hour or more

and not show any sign
of distress,

not cough, not splutter?

You would say,
that is impossible,

and that's my position.

Also, the chances
of Janet even knowing

what a hemorrhage was had
to be close to zero,

so we're talking
about language and knowledge

which was outside of Janet's
experience or understanding.

Obviously, the examination
of the voice to try

and discover what it was
and where it was coming from

was of paramount importance.

They asked Janet to put
some water in her mouth

but not swallow,

and then they put some tape
over her mouth.

So the water was in her
mouth, and her mouth was
taped shut.

♪ ♪

The voice was not
coming from her.

It was coming from behind
her.

- I could see
the family deteriorating

because the upheaval
of not only

what was happening
in the house,

but also having all these
strangers coming to your
house

to do whatever
they needed to do to prove

that this thing was
happening.

Maurice Grosse was quite
excited about the whole thing

because this was suddenly
taking on a different feel.

And Janet, who was just
completely mystified,

wanted it to go away.

There she is
a 12-year-old girl

being possessed
by a 72-year-old man

who died in a chair
downstairs years before.

This was taking over her
life.

[child screaming]

Suddenly one night, there
was this enormous scream

and then a crash.

Everybody rushed upstairs
to see what had happened

and found Janet lying
facedown on the floor

in a bit of a heap.

Maurice asked her
what happened,

and she just said that
there was someone there

who had just grabbed her
and thrown her out of bed,

thrown her across the room.

So I had to then try
and photograph it somehow.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

So I set up a camera
on a tripod,

corner of the room, flash
gun.

The camera was triggered
by a cable

that ran down the stairs
into the room below

where we were all sat
with a tape recorder running

where we could hear what was
happening live in the room.

And as soon
as we heard a noise,

I'd hit the button, it would
take loads of pictures.

[loud thud]

♪ ♪

When the pictures were taken,
they were at least

a sixth of a second
between each frame.

She started off
flat in bed normally.

The next shot,
the covers had come away.

Her arms were flat by her side.

There is no picture
of her between flat

and coming out of the bed.

There's not one picture
of her climbing up

or moving the covers down to
get her legs out or anything.

She's gone from that to that.

- She's literally flying...
- In a sixth of a second.

- Was that a big distance
that Janet was thrown?

- Across a room, uh,

you'd be looking
at about 3 or 4 meters.

That's quite a force
to be able

to pick up a 12-year-old
girl.

That could have done her
some serious damage.

Maurice, as soon
as he'd seen the pictures,

he then said,
oh, they're levitating.

But there were lots
of different theories

as to why they could
or could not be levitation.

- The number of people
that have looked

at that photograph and said,

"She's just jumping."

You know,
you'll get people saying,

should her knees be flexed
and so on.

You know, would her body be
in that position?

But I just looked at the face,
and I thought to myself,

mm, that's not someone
who's playing.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- It was reported
by several people

who had nothing
to do with the family

that they'd seen
Janet floating

around the upstairs bedroom.

I went and interviewed
two eyewitnesses,

one of whom was
the school crossing warden.

The house was opposite
the school.

And she had looked up

and seen Janet floating
around the room.

And she was very shaken
by this,

but she was prepared
to be interviewed about it.

- I was standing there
looking, and all of a sudden,

I saw the middle girl, Janet,

going up and down
in front of the window.

Well, I thought
that she was jumping

up and down on the bed.

But when I looked,
she was horizontal,

going up and down
with her arms

and legs going everywhere.

And I suppose she did this
about half a dozen times,

and then it stopped.

- 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 believe

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,

which she possibly was,
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.

Remember, this was all
happening in 1977,

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.

Maurice was very upset about
some members being so hostile

to his interpretation
of what was going on.

And so the controversy raged
backwards and forwards.

I think that a few members
of the SPR felt

that Janet's motive
for levitating,

if you want to call it that,

was because she wanted
to have fun.

She wanted to draw
attention to herself.

She wanted to be special,

because she was
the star of the show

for quite a bit at the time.

And I think
she probably enjoyed that

as a break
from some of the miseries

that she was suffering
in her childhood

and at the time of her life.

- I had been there
up to four nights a week

for months by the time
we got 'round to the voices.

It was getting a bit
like a circus by then anyway.

There were so many people
coming and going in the
house.

All these experts
were brought in,

doctors and voice coaches,

and all sorts of people
that would be there

to try and prove
that she couldn't do this.

It was crazy.

It was like Victorians
pitching up a Bedlam hospital,

you know, and putting up
scaffolding and looking

over the wall and watching
them for the afternoon.

Janet wanted everything
to go away.

She was scared
of the whole thing.

I was really worried
that she was gonna get

seriously hurt at some point.

- It did get worse and worse,

and Janet did actually
get quite ill.

She was getting
quite frightened

by feeling that things were
happening to her.

She felt that something was
pushing her around,

pulling her out of bed,
wrapping her in a curtain

and nearly strangling her,
making her fall down stairs.

[soft dramatic music]

She was put in the Maudsley
for two months,

which is a psychiatric
hospital in South London.

♪ ♪

I visited her a week later,

and she was calmer
and more cheerful

and said she was
getting more sleep.

And I think
it was good for her

to get away from the house

because there were
a lot of demands on her.

The doctors gave her
lots of tests,

and they decided that she was
just a normal child.

There wasn't anything
wrong with her.

And she was discharged
after six weeks.

- After Janet got back
from the Maudsley,

the activity died down.

It felt like
it was time to go.

It had run its course.

That was it.

Maurice was desperate
to see it through to its end

and found it very hard
to leave it.

It turned out that he also had
a daughter called Janet,

and she had died
in a car crash recently,

you know, just before
he came along to the house.

And he did mention
that he was hoping somehow

that it was his daughter
trying to contact him.

The chap who's coming along
to try and solve

the whole mystery was really
being sort of sidetracked

by this unfortunate incident

that had happened
with his daughter.

- My sister, Janet, was two
years younger than me.

She decided she wanted
to be a reporter.

She had moved on
to the Cardiff "Leader,"

and it was in Cardiff
that she was killed

in a motorcycle accident.

When Janet died, obviously,

the effect
on my parents was profound.

For my father,
he found a practical outlet.

He decided that he wanted
to look at psychic phenomena,

the paranormal,
in more detail.

When he arrived at the house,
he was struck by the fact

that one of the girls
was called Janet.

He didn't give it anything
other than passing mention,

the fact that she was
called Janet.

A lot of people thought
it was terribly important.

A lot of people tried
to attribute to him

an emotional connection
to the case,

to Janet,
to what was going on--

entirely wrongly.

It's an easy thought.

But it wasn't one
that was borne out,

because at the end of the day,

the entity was Bill Wilkins,

not Janet Grosse.

This was a statement of fact.

So therefore,
it should be verifiable.

There was
an extraordinary event

that happens sometime later.

My father was
on a talk show on OBC,

and they played
some of the tape.

- They had a phone call,
and they said,

a gentleman wants
to speak to you.

He says it's important.
So they put him on,

and he said,
well, I know that voice.

That was my father,
Bill Wilkins.

He did live in that house,
went blind,

had a hemorrhage,
died downstairs,

and he was buried
in a cemetery down the road.

"Treasured memories
of dear husband and father,

William Charles Wilkins,
died 20th June, 1963."

♪ ♪

Do I believe in ghosts?

It's hard to say no

because I've had
a conversation

with Bill Wilkins, who's
dead.

It opens the door
for such a question,

and as a result,
I can't close it.

- The Enfield tapes
are in that box.

Those are the original
reel to reels,

and these are
the Enfield cassette tapes

that belonged
to Maurice Grosse.

So they're all
in those boxes there.

So these are the recordings
that Maurice made

of just about all the phenomena
that occurred there

from an auditory viewpoint
between 1977 and 1979.

- That's a long time.
- Yeah.

- Have you listened
to all of it?

- I've listened to all
of the recordings twice.

I would say hundreds of hours
and approaching thousands

of hours have been spent
listening to it.

I'm not happy
with the voice at all

because I think that
it doesn't fit with me.

I don't like the sort of things
it was coming out with.

A lot of the time
it wanted to--

it swore a lot of the time,

very bad swearing constantly,

as if somebody is
allowed to swear

because they're not
who they really are.

So they can swear
and get away with it

because it's not
me swearing, Mummy.

It's the voice swearing.

My overall thoughts
about the case in Enfield

are that I think that
there was more playing about

going on than Maurice
believed there was,

but I don't think
it was all playing about.

The incidents that I think
from my own viewpoint

have the most credit are things
where things appeared on tape,

so you could hear them--
alas you couldn't see them,

but you could hear them,
you could hear the reactions

of the people,
and you thought, well,

there's something happening
there that just doesn't fit.

I do think some
of the activities

that occurred there were
beyond our normal senses,

and therefore needing
to be investigated more.

- I never want to do
anything like this ever again

because it was very disturbing.

It was really worrying.

It was dangerous and difficult,

and you didn't know
what was happening.

And while it was
extremely interesting

to record it as an observer,

it was very, very disturbing.

- I don't mention it.

I don't tell anyone I know.

You know,
I haven't told my wife.

I hadn't told my daughters.

I haven't told anyone really,

because they wouldn't
believe you.

If you told them what happened,

they'd just think you're mad.

It's too strange.

People can't get it
into their heads.

45 years later,
I'm no closer now to knowing

as I was on day one
when I walked into the place.

♪ ♪