No haunting in Britain has been recorded in more detail, or argued over for longer, than the one reported at 284 Green Street, a council house in the Brimsdown district of Enfield. It began with a noise in a bedroom and grew into a two-year investigation that produced more than 180 hours of audio tape, newspaper photographs, a BBC radio documentary and, decades later, films, television dramas and a West End play.
What happened
Peggy Hodgson lived in the house with her four children. On the evening of 31 August 1977 her daughters Janet, aged 11, and Margaret, 13, said a chest of drawers had shifted across the floor on its own, and knocking sounds were heard in the walls. Early the next morning Mrs Hodgson called the police. WPC Carolyn Heeps later gave a signed statement that she had watched a chair slide several feet across the floor with nobody touching it and had found nothing to account for the movement.
The family called the Daily Mirror. After its staff had spent time in the house, the paper asked the Society for Psychical Research for help. Maurice Grosse, an inventor who had recently joined the Society, took on the case in September 1977. The author Guy Lyon Playfair joined him a few days later. Between them they made around 180 visits, including 25 all-night vigils.
Over the following months witnesses described toys thrown across rooms, chairs overturned, persistent knocking, and Janet apparently lifted from her bed. In December 1977 a harsh, elderly male voice began to speak through Janet. It called itself Bill Wilkins and said it had died in the house. A man of that name had in fact died there, something the investigators said the family did not know at the time. Activity tailed off through 1978 and had largely ended by 1979.
The investigation
Grosse recorded almost everything, and those tapes are now the core of the case. Doctors, a speech specialist and a professional ventriloquist examined the voice. A laryngograph test suggested it was produced with the false vocal cords, a trick that is physically possible but hard to sustain. Grosse pointed out that the voice continued when Janet’s mouth was taped or filled with water. The ventriloquist concluded it was a vocal trick. A BBC Scotland interview captured Janet apparently cueing the voice with her hand.
In May 1978 the Society set up a committee to review the work. Its members found much of the witness testimony credible and judged there was good evidence for unexplained events, but reserved judgement on incidents that had not been clearly observed and were cautious about the voice. Two senior members who visited in December 1977, Anita Gregory and John Beloff, were far more doubtful. Gregory wrote that the girls enjoyed play-acting and that a relative had told her Janet had taught herself the deep voice. A camera in an adjoining room caught Janet bending a spoon by hand and trying to bend an iron bar. Grosse himself saw her banging a broom handle on the ceiling and hiding his tape recorder.
The girls admitted to journalists that they had sometimes played tricks. Grosse and Playfair accepted this but argued the fakery was rare, clumsy and quickly caught. Janet, as an adult, has put the faked share at around two per cent and maintained that the rest was real. Playfair’s 1980 book This House Is Haunted set out the investigators’ side and remains the standard first-hand account.
The explanations
Sceptics have focused on method rather than motive. Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry noted that the disturbances tended to happen when nobody was looking, and traced the famous malfunction of a “haunted” tape recorder to an ordinary reel jam. Deborah Hyde, writing in The Guardian in 2015, argued that nothing happened under controlled conditions and that people in a charged atmosphere see what they expect to see. The psychologist Chris French listed five reasons to call the case a hoax in 2016: the admitted trickery, the famous levitation photograph that looks like a girl jumping off a bed, the voice’s unusual interest in menstruation, the unreliability of eyewitnesses, and the way schoolgirl pranks escalate once adults take them seriously.
The investigators’ reply was that trickery by two children could not account for everything described by more than thirty adults, including a police officer, neighbours, tradespeople and journalists with no stake in the outcome. That argument has never been settled, because the evidence that would settle it was not collected: no incident was ever produced on demand under conditions that ruled the girls out.
Where it stands
Peggy Hodgson avoided publicity after 1978 and died in 2003. Grosse died in 2006 and Playfair in 2018. Interest revived sharply in the 2010s with a Sky drama and the film The Conjuring 2, which built its story on the brief visit of Ed and Lorraine Warren rather than on the SPR investigation. In 2023 Apple TV+ released a four-part documentary built around Grosse’s original recordings, and a stage play starring Catherine Tate opened in London that November. The tapes are held by the Society for Psychical Research. They show a frightened family and two dedicated amateur investigators; whether they also record anything beyond adolescent mischief is a question the material cannot answer on its own.