World’s Most Haunted House

A refrigerator floating in mid-air. A child rising from her chair and being thrown across a room. Furniture moving by itself while police officers watched in disbelief. These aren't scenes from a horror movie—they're documented events from one of America's most extraordinary paranormal cases.

William J. Hall, author and professional magician, takes us deep into the remarkable story of the 1974 Bridgeport Poltergeist on Lindley Street. What sets this haunting apart isn't just the spectacular nature of the phenomena, but the unprecedented number of credible witnesses. Police officers, firefighters, priests, and over 2,000 onlookers all observed impossible events in this small, unassuming cottage—events that made headlines worldwide.

The story centers on the Goodin family and their adopted daughter Marcia, whose presence seemed to trigger increasingly violent paranormal activity. What began as mysterious knocking evolved into full-blown poltergeist phenomena that defied explanation. Most compelling is Hall's access to approximately 40 hours of original witness interviews conducted at the time, preserved by investigator Boyce Beatty. These aren't vague recollections but detailed accounts from multiple observers seeing the same impossible events simultaneously.

As a professional magician with decades of experience detecting deception, Hall brings a uniquely qualified perspective to this investigation. His analysis focuses on specific details that rule out trickery or misperception—the hands-in-lap position when a chair moved, the multiple observers in the room during levitation events, the sheer impossibility of faking a floating refrigerator in a modest home with no special equipment.

Though authorities eventually labeled the case a hoax after a single incident with Marcia, Hall's research reveals this was more about crowd control than truth. The chief of police himself admitted, "We did the best with what we had. We had to get rid of the people." Meanwhile, the unexplained phenomena continued even after the "hoax" announcement.

Fifty years later, this extraordinary case continues to challenge our understanding of reality and what's possible in our physical world. Through meticulous research and firsthand interviews with witnesses, Hall presents not just a ghost story, but a documented case study that asks us to reconsider the boundaries between the known and unknown.

Discover the full, astonishing story in Hall's interview with Stan Mallow on Paranormal Yakker and see for yourself why the Bridgeport Poltergeist remains one of America's most compelling paranormal mysteries.

Chapters

• 0:00 Paranormal investigator William J Hall interview on Paranormal Yakker
• 0:26 Synopsis of The World’s Most Haunted House
• 2:33 Lindley Street paranormal events that inspired author William J Hall
• 3:56 Undertaking the writing of The World’s Most Haunted House
• 5:17 Researching the Bridgeport Poltergeist on Lindley Street
• 6:39 When things started to go bump in the night
• 8:41 Not your conventional haunted house
• 9:56 Events the author uncovered that surprised him
• 12:57 Demonology & exorcism experts Ed & Lorraine Warren
• 16:20 Professional magician Hall looks into trickery & deception
• 19:35 Disturbing paranormal events
• 21:10 Police deliberately label the Lindley Street poltergeist a hoax
• 24:04 The never-ending fascination with the hauntings on Lindley Street
• 25:28 50th anniversary companion book to The Bridgeport Poltergeist
• 26:53 Where to buy The World’s Most Haunted House

Transcript

0:00

Hi, everyone, I'm Stan Mallow Welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest today is paranormal investigator William J Hall. I'll be talking with him I'll be talking with him about his best selling book, The World's Most Haunted House, The True Story of the Bridgeport Poltergeist on Lindley Street. William J Hall, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Stan. Your book, Bill, reveals the full story behind one of America's most famous hauntings, the 1974 Bridgeport Poltergeist. Can you give a brief synopsis of what transpired in the house that got the attention of the media & made worldwide headlines? Well, it was a very tumultuous start to it all. The family had come back from a weekend away.& when they came into the house, Laura was in the kitchen making supper, the mother of the house& the TV came down by itself on her foot, & she actually ended up going to the hospital over it. The kitchen table flipped groceries went all over the place. Chairs flew out. The heavy 1970 recliners in the living room were opening& closing by themselves. The place was going nuts. There was a knife thing that was plugged in a set of knives that came out from the wall,& then the knives were all over the place & Gerry actually ducked. He was the man of the house& there was Marcia, who was a little girl who was still asleep in the car, thank goodness, ended up getting the attention of an off duty police officer, their friend across the street. So he came over & he went in the house& he saw these recliners opening & closing by themselves& he saw the TV float& the family was on the porch,& he didn't know it was going on. So he called it in & police came& they didn't know what to do,& they called it in.& firemen came. They didn't know what to do. So they called the clergy in. They didn't know what to do. So this thing came out& all these emergency vehicles were coming out.& as the police were coming out with their stories of what they were seeing & taking notes& words just got around& this crowd formed over 2,000 people. So that's the very brief beginning to the roughest part of the poltergeist antics. What aspects of the story surrounding paranormal events reported to be taking place in the Lindley Street house, which was not far from where you lived, led you to wanted to learn more about those events & the people who were involved with them? Well, I grew up in Bridgeport,& I was 10 when it happened. So I remember watching it on TV. I don't remember what I saw, of course, but I remember it was that's when I was first exposed to it.& while performing magic, because I was a performing magician then I did quite a lot of shows per year,& I was asked a lot about the Lindley Street house but I would tell him, I never looked into it.& I never really felt the need to, sort of say.& then I had forgotten about it,& I saw a Facebook post on it saying, does anybody remember the haunted house on Lindley Street?& now with Google you know, I ended up Googling it& I found these newspaper articles & I thought with what the police were saying& the firemen were saying,& the priests were saying, you know, what all these people were saying in the newspaper, the quotes they were putting in there, I thought it was definitely worth looking into.& if it was a hoax, it was a hoax, but no matter what, it looked like it was a heck of a story. I wasn't thinking of writing a book. I was driven to go down the rabbit hole, so to speak. Writing The World's Most Haunted House had to be a massive time consuming project to undertake. How long, Bill, did you work on the book before submitting it for publication? The good news is, before I got the book contract on it, the good news is I already had listened to & taken notes & everything,& was getting the tapes transcribed. I was already doing all that stuff. So the research part was luckily done but there wasn't very much written, just enough to get the contract. You know, that's the way it goes. You write a little bit& then you send them about 33 pages or so, & then they like it. they like the proposal, they sign you up, sort of speak. So I would say the entire, they didn't give me as much time as I probably would have asked for, but they wanted it to be a Halloween release or August. So I was given about 6 months to actually write it. But like I said, the research part was done. Luckily, through the thanks of the 30 hours of interviews,& I didn't know another 10 hours on my own. So there was about 40 hours of interviews to go through & piece this story together like an incredibly detailed, I would say, soap opera, if you will. How, Bill, did you go about researching the book& what resources did you employ in the writing of it? I had the tapes of the interviews of the witnesses, because what happened is I found a gentleman named Boyce Beatty,& he was mentioned in one of the newspapers later on.& this was after it was deemed a hoax, & I thought that was weird. So I tracked him down& I found the name of Joseph Tomick. He was one of the first responding police officers, & I spoke to him & he said, yeah, if you find this Boyce Beatty guy, he had tons of tapes of interviews.& this is a big thing. They set it up at the police department. They forced us to be interviewed. Imagine that, be enforced that.& that really piqued my interest, because that was after the hoax was announced,& he's telling me, yeah, but they're forced to cooperate to help the family. So that was rather interesting. So that really piqued me to go deep. But the interviews really is what the book is written from. That & the police reports, of course, tell part of the story Bless them for putting it in one of the best 3 page police reports I think you'll ever read in your life, is in there. They didn't want to actually accept that police report when it was handed in, but the guy said, Hey, this is what happened. Take it or leave it Both Gerard & Laura Goodin owned the house on Lindley Street. After their only child died, they adopted a little girl named Marcia, who you mentioned previously. That's when things started to go bump in the night. Prior to Marcia coming into the house, was there any inkling of paranormal activity in it or anywhere in the neighborhood? No. It was all after Marcia was adopted.& as early as 1971 to 1973, there was these bizarre knocking sounds on the inside& outsides of the walls, that followed the family like room to room& they tried everything. They called the police, they had the firemen check it out, they had electrical engineers, they confirmed it wasn't construction, it wasn't the house. It wasn't the plumbing or anything in the house any of the systems in the house.& that was it.& then 1974 comes & in November.& before that, they had some things happen. There was kind of a slow burn, if you will, where some of these keys misplaced& just think Gerry thought he was losing his mind, he confided in a friend because, you know, I swore I put the chair in. Now it's out.& door's open, now it's closed, all those kinds of things& then they had some wet footsteps on otherwise dry surroundings, strange knocks on the door& disembodied hand they saw in the window.& those things you wouldn't believe if you didn't know the rest of the story with the amount of witnesses, because that's the unique thing about this case, is that it has so many firsthand witnesses,& on top of it, multiple people seeing the same event. So it rules out somebody just honestly misinterpreting something. But if you have 3 police officers that saw it, plus the family, now we're talking. When one thinks of a haunted house, what comes to mind for most people, I'm sure, are the massive ones you find that amusement parks, in horror movies, or TV shows like The Munsters. The house in Lindley Street was a small unassuming cottage. Were you Bill taken aback by that? No, not really. I mean, I've, I've come to learn that any place can have a poltergeist infestations. There's accounts of it even happening at the workplace where it dominates the person at the workplace& not outside the workplace. So, I mean, we've had weird cases like that.& of course, haunted house is a general term. It's a misnomer with a poltergeist it's more like a haunted family, but there are definitely things about the house that you can say could lead into that. There's an underground spring, if you're a believer in the water flow,& that contributory factor. Sandy soils, high water tables, you know, all those geo factors are there But I think if you had the right family, which is what happened, or the wrong family, for that matter, you would get that kind of outcome potentially. When researching the book Bill, did you come across any information that surprised you because you didn't expect to find it? Yeah, I would say the multiple people saying the same thing over & over. The fact that so many people saw Marcia just rise in the air,& get thrown across the room& hit her head in the wall. The fact that so many people saw that, to me is fascinating. I mean, those are the type. The refrigerator floating is another example. What surprised me, I think, the most as a magician, thinking with that mindset, is the investigation was very, very well done. There weren't a lot of leading questions. In other words, it was very well done. Boyce did exactly what I would have wanted him to do because as a magician, to the audience, a suspension& levitation are the same thing, but they're not One moves, the other doesn't. But the point being is that if somebody is just telling this is what I saw,& you say, Wow, that's interesting, they're telling you what they interpreted,& they're also taking telling you a very generic description of it. But Boyce would say, well, wait a minute, the table flipped, when you say flipped, what is the first thing you saw the table do?& what did the table when the table flipped, did it flip with the speed that you would expect it, or did it flip fast or slow?& I was like, oh, that was really impressive to me because if you want to really do your due diligence & say, this is the proven haunting, so to speak, you want to have that kind of evidence, the amount of interviews, when you get that many people& 40 hours of interviews, 8 or 9 hours at the Bridgeport Police Department, just so many people, including priests. So we've got quite a story here.& I think that's what surprised me was the sheer number of witnesses that were on taped. There was 22 cassette tapes are reel to reel, that I had to have converted. The cumulative evidence, I think, is what really is shocking, because I was listening to these tapes everywhere I went while converting them, playing in a mini cassette tape into a digital recorder, even while I was driving, because 30 hours of interviews is a lot to get through. So I was listening to them everywhere & converting them at the same time& then ultimately transcribing them.& yeah, so it was a monster, but it was thanks to Boyce Beatty for keeping all those tapes in his basement in a big box & saying, here you go. So we became good friends& we even lectured together a few times. So it was it was a lot of fun. At the time of the ghostly events taking place in the cottage on Lindley Street, Ed & Lorraine Warren were considered America's foremost experts in in demonology & exorcism They played a key role in the investigation of the Lindley Street House. What Bill was it? They were called in by a lady who knew them, who heard about the poltergeist case& saw all the emergency vehicles outside the house & called up Ed & said, You got to get down here. There's a serious poltergeist case here.& he goes, Is this a real deal, or, you know, we're kind of busy. We're kind of booked up.& she says, you don't understand. There's fire engines here, there's police cars here, there's people gathering.& he said, okay, we'll be right down there.& it took them like, I don't know. It's not a far drive for them to get from their house to Lindley Street, but it took them, I think, for like an hour & a half or something of crowd.& Gerry & Laura had never heard of the Warrens, but they figured, well, no one else is at that time was able to help. They already had the fire department there. They were, you know, the police were there already.& priest was there.& so the Warrens came& they brought Father Charbonneau, as well as Paul who became a dear friend of mine. Sadly he's past recently. He was a young seminary student at the time going to go for dinner at the Warrens house. Unfortunately, he never got his dinner. Lorraine was supposedly an amazing cook& he never got his dinner. Instead, he was asked to come along, so he got in the car & they went & got Father Charbonneau& went to the house. Like I said, Laura & Gerry had not heard of the Warrens, but they figured no one else was able to help, so come on in. Ed explained if the activity gets heavy to everybody move to a different room& then I'll slow it down.& basically kept them company for a long time.& Paul's job was to watch Marcia& number one, make sure she wasn't doing it originally,& number 2 to protect her.& he had an interesting experience there, which was feeling the entities. He felt there was 4 gauzy shapes that came out of Marcia's bedroom& Paul instinctively put Marcia in back of him to protect her.& these things came around,& he put his hand out,& he felt a bony structure that's how he described it. He said, almost birdlike. He said, he doesn't know how to describe it. He's not a biologist.& that really set him back in his thinking about the paranormal. He said, you know, we used to think these things were you're demons or whatever, but these things have bone structure. It started him thinking towards the multiverse & those quantum physics theories as opposed to the traditional old school thinking that they had at the time. But these things got around Paul& picked up Marcia& threw her across the room, so that was twice she was thrown across the room,& once she floated up on a chair& Paul just slowly set it down. You, Bill, are a professional magician with over 25 years experience who is skilled at creating & recognizing illusions as well as detecting trickery or deception when you see it. How did you use those skills in determining which paranormal events in the house could not be logically explained? You have to really have to look at the totality of the evidence when you look at this. I mean, if a picture falls off the wall, & that's easy to have happen, naturally, it's easy to have set up. It's easy to do. But we had things happening in every room in that house& this was not this kind of family.& they weren't in a big mansion where you can say, oh, they paid somebody off to rig the whole place. This is not these kind of people. They don't know how to float refrigerator. I mean, I can tell you how to float a refrigerator, but you're either going to need a fake refrigerator or you're going to need hydraulics or a hologram or something& they weren't doing any of that. So as you do this process of elimination, you know these things are real.& a lot of it was looking at the detail in the interview. For example, there was one officer who was never in the house when things were going on, but he was skeptic. He told the news & the press that it was the simple job of kicking a chair with no one's looking& that sort of thing. But even he said that, oh, the refrigerator didn't float this thing happened. This isn't happened. Marcia did it all. But when you look at the data& or Marcia didn't flip in the chair, she put the chair back herself but we have 3 police officers describing the event, saying they were speaking to her & looking at her, & she had her legs crossed, what we used to call Indian style, a Native American style.& then we had the case where her hands were on her lap. So when you look at the details, it doesn't make sense. The chair went back while she had her hands on her lap, not while she had her hands to the side& was, you know, joking around or something. So you really had to look at the details,& then it's pretty simple.& the other way it helped was by knowing, although, in this case, Boyce & Gerry Sulfen, they did such a great job interviewing the witnesses at the time. I was lucky I wasn't left with those kinds of questions as to what exactly did the person see. We know what they think they saw, but what do they actually see as a magician, those are 2 very different things. So you want to know exactly what they see.& so I was lucky that those interviews were done that way,& I tried to do my interviews the same way when I reconnected with some witnesses that were never interviewed, but were there at the time,& also connected with some people who were there& had them tell the story again.& it's amazing how every detail is the same& to get their impressions of it after all these years was fascinating. Did you find any incidents that occurred in the house to be particularly more disturbing than other paranormal events that took place there? Yes, I would say at Christmas time,& this was after it was announced a hoax& stuff, but nobody told the poltergeist. At Christmas time, they had a tree,& Gerry actually put the tree in a bucket of cement because he didn't want the tree, getting wired it to the wall because everything was falling over, so to speak.& he didn't want the poltergeist to ruin Christmas, so he did that, although the tree came down anyhow. But what was really disturbing was when they came home one night in December, before Christmas, & all the bulbs were off the tree, in a little pile.& I think that was a real disturbing part. There was another one where Mother Mary statue floated off the shelf& crashed to the floor smashing the head off,& that particularly left, I know Laura petrified after that. Those are 2 that really stick out. There's a baby carriage that was moving by itself. I mean, there's just so many things in that house. I would say that there's a voice audio phenomena. Gerry would say it was a the cat, but I don't think it was a cat. The cat was kept in the basement sometime,& these sounds came from the basement, so I think he confused the audio phenomena with the cat, which didn't help Gerry at work, as you can imagine. You have eyewitness accounts from police who investigated the events unfolding at the Lindley House Street,& they confirm the power paranormal phenomena that was happening there,& you mentioned that previously yet, at some point, they found it more advantageous to call the whole thing a hoax. What was their reasoning for doing that? It was an opportunity, actually, that came on their lap. What happened was it was Tuesday morning after the hellish weekend of heightened poltergeist activity,& the road was closed off after the first night, because there's over 2,000 people that gathered. So what happened was it was already called the Tuesday. 2 police officers came in, because the family had called for help with something.& they were always calling, they had the police stay with them a lot too.& even after it was deemed a hoax. So these 2 officers get there & Marcia's sitting on the carpet& the TV's on the floor on the carpet& he catches her kicking the TV& says, oh, you kicked the TV.& she's like, yeah.& he goes, well, why did you kick the TV, he says? I want to see if the demon would do something. So that was it. They called it in, said, oh, the little girl's doing everything.& now the chief knew that wasn't the case, because he knew his people were crazy & he had enough of them that said otherwise. But that opportunity came to blame it all on Marcia& call it a hoax. So they must have discussed it. This is the part we don't know. We don't know exactly how they approached the family on it. But they must have talked the family into it to get rid of the people. I mean, on Thanksgiving, they tried to set the home on fire. This thing was it was just so much happening there, so they really wanted to put this to bed, get the city back, the mayor, the chief,& none of those people wanted this to carry. The longer it carried on, the more people talked about, the more newspaper articles were about it. They wanted the news to kind of calm down about it, but big news So this thing, the longer it went without being solved, the worse. So when he got the call, the chief said, in his words to Gerry Sulfen when he was interviewed, Gerry called him & he said, Thank God you called. That was interesting& he said, Gerry, we did the best with what we had. We had to get rid of the people. It wasn't helping the family at all. We just had to get rid of the people.& that was the only thing we had, sort to speak. So that's how all the hoax thing happened. It wasn't actually a devious plan. It was kind of fell on his lap& he said, all right, we'll we'll go with this The hauntings that took place in the little cottage on Lindley Street was in 1974. That's a lot of years ago,& yet they still captured the imagination of the public. Will you Bill, by any chance, have an explanation as to why that's the case? I would say witnesses& then word to mouth. Robert Ripley, I know in Ripley's first book, which I know I have on my shelf here, but I know he had an experiment where. 2 people told 2 people it would take X amount of hours to go around the world, something like that, one of those things.& it's true. If you look at Roswell, if you look at Lindley Street they went countrywide very much so. Very fast. Word of mouth could be very fast.& I know it's fast now with the internet, of course, in one post & but it is amazing how word of mouth spread.& that & AP wire, of course, once it hit the AP wire, which is the Associated Press for those who don't know,& then they had the photo& the story going in every state, & even a little bit outside the country into Canada, & I heard Australia. So I''m not sure about that. I wasn't able to control him that, but it hit all the states. It was just like Roswell. It didn't take that long to go around the world. You Bill recently had published The Bridgeport Poltergeist on Lindley Street, 50th Anniversary, Investigator Companion, Guide, Photos, & Archives. What can you tell me about this new guide, your reasons for writing it,& in what way does it compliment the original book? Great question. Well, I've been asked over the years to release some of the original interviews,& I've also been asked to people want to see the photos & colors. So I decided for the 50th anniversary that I would put together a bunch of photos from the case, some old,& some newer, some fun photos. Marcia as an adult, for example, so that's a cool thing that's in there.& then there's some insights& cool parts to the photos, stories behind the photos. But there's also interviews in there, not all of them, of course, would be a& plus, I'm under contracts, so I can't release it that way. But I did include some of the original interviews, so you can hear what they said versus what I wrote. Not that it's different, but I wrote it. It's in a story style,& here you can hear their actual interviews, & Paul Eno's is especially my favorite. He's a great paranormal investigator in his own right.& that was one of his first cases he was on. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy The World's Most Haunter House, The True Story of the Bridgeport Poltergeist on Lindley Street& the Bridgeport Poltergeist on Lindley Street, 50th Anniversary Investigator, Companion Guide Photos & Archives, how Bill, can they do that? Glad you asked. If you go to HallOfTheParanormal.com& go to the book section in the upper left, there should be a little search thing, go to the book section,& you can order them there. I'd be happy to personally sign them, make them out to you& ship them right out. William J Hall, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. Yakking with you has been a most enjoyable experience. Thank you. Thank you