The Enfield Poltergeist: Unraveling the True Haunted History Behind The Conjuring 2

Before The Conjuring 2 terrified moviegoers, there was a real family — living through something no one could explain.

In 1977, the Hodgson family of Enfield, London, reported furniture moving on its own, voices echoing from the walls, and violent disturbances witnessed by police, reporters, and paranormal investigators alike.

But what really happened inside that house?

In this episode, State of the Unknown host Robert Barber uncovers the true story behind The Conjuring 2, the real Enfield Poltergeist case. You’ll hear what the investigators saw, what skeptics uncovered, and what the surviving witnesses still believe nearly fifty years later.

🎧 Listen now — and decide for yourself what haunted 284 Green Street.

Chapters

• 0:03 A Night Of Knocks Begins
• 4:26 Police See The Chair Move
• 6:08 Reporters Hit By Flying Legos
• 7:45 Investigators Move In
• 10:25 The Voice Of Bill Wilkins
• 12:27 Chaos Peaks, Warrens Drop By
• 14:24 Three Stories Of Enfield
• 17:04 What Records Actually Show
• 19:46 Doubt, Fakery, And Data
• 22:08 Emotional Fuel Or Phenomena
• 24:23 Hollywood Versus The Case File
• 28:12 Myths: Nuns, Levitations, Exorcisms
• 31:23 The Messy Ending And Aftermath

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

It starts with a crash in the middle of the night. Not thunder, not a dream. A sound like furniture sliding across the floor. Heavy and deliberate. In the next room, eleven-year-old Janet Hodgson sits straight up in bed. Her sister's awake too. They both stare into the dark, waiting to hear it again. And then it comes. Bangs on the wall, one after another, like someone knocking from the other side. Their mom rushes in, turns on the light, and everything is still. The dressers moved. The girls are crying. And that's the night the Hodgsons say it all began. Within weeks, newspapers are outside their house. Neighbors are watching from the street. And investigators are recording voices that sound like they're coming from inside an 11-year-old girl. It was called a haunting. It was called a hoax. But in 1977, it was all anyone could talk about. The Enfield case is one of the most famous hauntings in the world. It's been studied, recorded, debunked, and retold for nearly 50 years. But the story we've all heard, the one that inspired the Conjuring II, doesn't always line up with what really happened. Tonight, we're going back to the beginning, to hear the story the way the Warrens told it, and then what the records actually say. This is the story of Janet Hodgson in the case that became known as the Enfield poltergeist. And this is State of the Unknown. Inside lives Peggy Hodgson, a single mom doing her best to raise four kids. Margaret, age 13, Janet, age 11, Johnny, age 10, and Billy, age seven. They've got an old TV, mismatched furniture, and not much else. Just an ordinary family. Until one night when the girls start yelling from upstairs, Peggy hurries in, expecting a fight over the radio. Instead, both girls are frozen, staring at the heavy dresser near the door. They say it moved. Peggy laughs until it moves again. A scraping sound, slow and deep, sliding across the floor by itself. She shoves it back. It moves again. When she pushes harder, it feels like someone or something on the other side is pushing back. That's when she grabs the girls and bolts next door to the Nottinghams. Her neighbor Vic Nottingham goes in to check for burglars. He hears three deliberate knocks echo through the walls. No one's upstairs, no pipes rattling, just the sound. Knock, knock, knock. He comes back out pale and says, You've got something very strange in there. The police are called. Constable Carolyn Heaps shows up a little after 1 a.m. She takes down the family statement while Peggy and the girls huddle together on the sofa. And right there, in front of everyone, a wooden chair slides two feet across the living room floor. No one's near it. Heaps just freezes. She later signs a written report saying exactly what she saw, that the chair moved several feet across the floor without anyone touching it. After a few minutes, the officers check the walls, the floorboards, even the back garden, trying to find a cause. Nothing. In the end, there's not much they can do. Heaps tells Peggy the activity doesn't fall under police jurisdiction. It's not really a police matter, Mrs. Hodgson, she says, and advises her to call the church if it continues. Then the squad car pulls away and the house goes quiet again, at least for a little while. After that, the nights get louder. Knocks and threes, marbles falling from nowhere, Legos hitting the floor and then not rolling. The family sleeps with the lights on. On the fifth night, Peggy hears shuffling upstairs. She calls out, Who's there? A single bang answers her, so loud the ceiling dust falls. Word spreads down Green Street fast. Reporters show up from the Daily Mirror, Douglas Bence and Graham Morris. They come in skeptical, cameras ready. They don't stay that way long. While they're standing in the girl's bedroom, a Lego brick whips across the room and hits Morris square in the face. He yells, a welt rises instantly. He snaps a photo just as Janet lifts off the bed, hair flying and legs out. That picture runs the next morning under the headline House of Strange Happenings. The welt on Morris' face runs in the paper too. Proof, at least, that something physical hit him. Soon after, investigator Maurice Gross from the Society for Psychical Research moves in. He sets up tape recorders, cameras, temperature sensors, and everything he's got. For two nights, nothing happens. Then, at 2 AM, three heavy bangs. He asks, if you can hear me, knock once. Bang. He grins, half scared, half thrilled, and keeps talking. Two knocks for yes, one for no. And the thing starts answering him. From there, it escalates fast. Crosses twist upside down on the walls. Peggy says she found a Bible fallen open the next morning, pages torn loose. Cold spots appear that make your breath show in the middle of August. One night, Peggy swore a crucifix shot across the room and hit the wall hard enough to chip the paint. Janet starts waking up in other rooms. Once even found asleep on top of the radio in the living room. She tells her mom she dreams of an old man who sits in the chair downstairs. Her brother Johnny says he's seen him too. Gray skin, one eye half closed, mouth drooping on one side. The voices come next. At first, a rasp under Janet's breath, then a full-on growl. I used to live here before I died, Janet says in a voice not her own. When they ask its name, the voice says Bill Wilkins. He claims that he died in that house in the corner chair from a brain hemorrhage. Weeks later, a neighbor confirms there really was a man named Bill Wilkins who died there years earlier. Reporters, priests, and even skeptics crowd the little semi-detached council house. The Daily Mirror comes back with photographers. They catch Janet mid-air again, multiple frames this time, like she's being thrown forward, not jumping. The skeptics say it's faked, but others in the room insist they saw her lifted clean off the bed. Maurice Gross's notebook fills with incidents. A pillow hitting him square in the head while he's alone, a pen vanishing from his hand and reappearing behind him. A heavy dresser tipping forward like something shoved it. The SPR calls in Guy Lion Playfair, another investigator. He records hundreds of hours of knocks, voices, and temperature drops. They even tried an informal test. Having Janet hold water in her mouth while the Bill voice continued meant to challenge the idea that she was just throwing her voice. It wasn't scientific, but it shut people up in the moment. Priests visit and bless the house. A psychic describes, quote, a man who thinks he still owns this place. One night, Peggy finds all her crucifixes on the floor and the curtains tied in knots. On December 15th, 1977, they hear a crash upstairs. Janet's tangled in the curtain cord, halfway out the window, gasping for air. Everyone else was downstairs. After that, Peggy sends the kids to stay with relatives for a week, just to rest. The house goes quiet. But the moment they come back, it starts again. Around this time, Ed and Lorraine Warren arrive from America. They aren't officially invited by the SPR, but they show up anyway, saying they were drawn to help. Lorraine later says she felt the presence of pure evil as soon as she crossed the threshold. Ed claims something cold brushed past him, whispering, get out. He records growls on his reel-to-reel and tells the family they're dealing with an inhuman, demonic spirit. Doors slam so hard the frames crack. Janet's pinned beneath a dresser. Her sister Margaret screams she saw gray hands holding it down. Furniture levitates inches off the ground and drops. Gross noted in his diary that he saw the sofa lift off the floor while everyone else stood across the room. For months, it's cycles. Quiet spells, then nights of pure mayhem. By spring, Gross had logged hundreds of hours of recordings. By then, dozens of people, neighbors, reporters, clergy, even a police officer said they'd seen or heard something they couldn't explain. Then, just like that, it starts fading. By the summer of 78, the voices weaken, the raps thin out. Janet says Bill Wilkins told her, it's over. But it isn't. At least not completely. In 1979, faint knocking returns, toys move, beds tremble for a few weeks, then silence. The Hodgsons stay until 1981 before moving away. The next tenants later say they sometimes felt something cold in the back bedroom, but nothing more. Eighteen months of terror, four kids, dozens of witnesses, and a story that even now no one can quite explain. You can hear it in every retelling. It sounds like something out of a movie. Beds floating, a girl speaking in a man's voice, crosses flying off the walls. And for a long time, that's how people talked about it. As if all of it had happened exactly that way. But when you start digging into the records, the witness statements, the SPR notes, and the recordings, you realize something else. This haunting wasn't one story. It was three overlapping versions of the same event. The one the family lived through, the one the investigators documented, and the one that would eventually make its way into movies and books. So let's step back to the beginning and look at what we actually know. When you strip away all the headlines, the Enfield haunting stops sounding like the Exorcist and starts looking a lot more like what it really was. A long, confusing, very public family crisis that nobody quite knew how to handle. So let's just walk through what we actually know. First off, a few things are on record. A police officer named Carolyn Heaps really did visit the house on August 31st, 1977. She signed a written statement saying she saw a chair move across the floor, about three or four feet, with nobody near it. That's in the official report. That part is real. There are also hundreds of hours of audio tapes, over 700 actually, recorded by two investigators named Maurice Gross and Guy Lion Playfair from the Society for Psychical Research. You can still hear them today, knocking sounds, voices, conversations between the girls and something unseen. Whatever was going on, they documented it carefully. And yes, that Bill Wilkins voice everyone talks about. Turns out there really was a Bill Wilkins. His son later told reporters that his father died of a brain hemorrhage in that very house. So a moving chair, a pile of tapes, and a real man named Bill Wilkins. Those are the solid pieces you can point to. Everything after that gets a little fuzzy. Maurice Gross was convinced it was genuine. He practically lived there for a year, sleeping on the couch sometimes, watching it happen. He swore he saw furniture slide, toys launch across the room, and cold spots appear out of nowhere. He didn't think the kids were faking it. He thought Janet, the 11-year-old, was just the focus of the activity. Guy Lion Playfair agreed at first. He described marbles dropping from midair, doors slamming and a chill that would fill the whole room. But as time went on, even he admitted something didn't always add up. He caught Janet bending spoons, hiding his tape recorder, even giggling before one of the bangs. Later, both girls admitted they sometimes faked things, just to see if the men would notice. That's straight from the BBC interview in 1982. Still, Playfair said it wasn't all tricks. His line was maybe 2% mischief, 98% unexplained. Not everybody bought that. Another researcher from the same society, Anita Gregory, said it was nothing more than childish pranks. She caught the girls bending spoons, staging photos, pretending to be thrown by invisible hands. And yeah, some of that happened. But then you've got the neighbors, reporters, even a priest who stop by, all saying they saw or heard something they couldn't explain. So it's one of those stories where the truth seems to slide back and forth, depending on who's telling it. Now about the Warrens. They did visit the house, that's confirmed. But they weren't running the show like the movies make it seem. They weren't part of the official investigation. They just showed up, uninvited, while the Society for Psychical Research was already there. They stayed a day, maybe two, and then left. Lorraine later said she felt the demonic presence immediately, called it one of the most violent hauntings she'd ever walked into. Ed claimed he recorded growls on tape, but none of those recordings have ever surfaced. Guy Playfair later said Ed Warren pulled him aside and suggested they could, quote, make a lot of money off the story. Playfair said he told him to clear off his exact words. He wrote later that the Warrens seemed more interested in publicity than data. After that exchange, they were never invited back. So despite what the movies show, this wasn't the Warren's case. They were visitors passing through and not especially welcome ones. The grind, the long nights, the endless notes, the 700 hours of tape that belonged to gross and playfair. Even among the SPR investigators, not everyone saw the same thing or the same causes. Anita Gregory thought the haunting might have been less supernatural and more emotional. She described Peggy Hodgson, the mother as suggestible, overwrought, and inconsistent, and wrote that her anxiety could have been fueling the activity. She didn't accuse Peggy of faking anything, just of being caught in something she couldn't control. Other observers noticed the same pattern. When Peggy calmed down, the house seemed to quiet too. When she was frightened or upset, things escalated again. Still, most witnesses, neighbors, clergy, even the SPR men themselves, said she looked genuinely terrified, worn down, and desperate for help. Whatever else people believe about this case, that part has never really been disputed. So what was really going on in that little council house on Green Street? Psychologists who studied the recordings years later said it could have been stress. The mom raising four kids alone, money tight, and Janet right at the age where emotions run wild. They thought it might have been a mix of psychological pressure and what some people call poltergeist phenomena. Energy that sort of acts out of tension in a family. And Janet herself, when she got older, said something that pretty much sums it up. She said, some of it was real. Some of it we made up. The more attention we got, the more it happened. Even with that confession, she never took back what she felt. I know what I saw, she said, and what I felt. So what do we do with that? Because that's really the heart of the story. You've got things people swore they saw, chairs sliding, knocks, cold air, and you've got proven hoaxes, little stunts. Nobody ever proved it was supernatural, but nobody could disprove it either. And that's where the Enfield haunting still sits, halfway between history and legend. Part documentation, part folklore. A story that's too strange to fully believe, but too well recorded to completely dismiss. And that's the version Hollywood walked into. Messy, uncertain, full of contradictions. Which means when the movie got a hold of it, they didn't just tell the story, they built a whole new one. You know, the thing about stories like this is, the more you dig, the more tangled they get. Everybody saw something. Nobody saw everything. And over time, those gaps, the little blanks no one could fill in, start getting patched with belief. That's how the Enfield haunting went from a handful of strange nights in North London to one of the most famous paranormal cases in the world. By the time Hollywood got hold of it, the truth had already started to blur. So let's talk about what the world thinks happened. Because when the Conjuring II came out, it didn't just retell the Enfield case, it rewrote it. When the Conjuring II was released, it opened with the tagline based on the true case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren. And technically, that's true. But the story it tells isn't the one that actually happened. See, in the movie, the Warrens are the heroes. They get the call, hop a plane to London, and suddenly they're in the middle of it all, living with the family, fighting the demon head on. In real life? They drop by uninvited and stayed briefly. The real work, all the late nights, the notebooks, the recordings, that was done by Maurice Gross and Guy Lyon Playfair with the Society for Psychical Research. They were there for months. The Warrens weren't even part of the official investigation. And that's kind of the theme here. Holly didn't just dramatize the story, it completely rewired it. In the movie, there's this big, terrifying nun, the demon Valak, stalking Lorraine through visions. There's a scene where crosses twist on the walls, the air turns black, and the nun lunges out of the shadows. None of that ever happened. There was no nun. No demon's name written on a wall. No master's spirit pulling the strings. The only voice anyone ever heard called itself Bill Wilkins, an old man who said he died in the chair downstairs. That's the voice on the recordings. Not a demon, a dead man. Or at least that's what Janet said. And yeah, that voice was real. You can hear it on the tapes. It's deep and rough like a man who smoked for 50 years. Janet could hold that rasping voice for long stretches. A speech therapist who had heard the recording said it would be unusual for a child to sustain that kind of sound without damaging her vocal cords. So whatever it was, a trick, a reflex, something stranger, it was weird. That part's true. The movie turns the small London haunting into a full-blown war between good and evil. You've got Ed performing an exorcism in a lightning storm, Lorraine shouting the demon's name to send it back to hell. In the real case, there was no exorcism. No priests casting out spirits in Latin. What actually happened were blessings. A few visits from clergy who prayed with the family and told them to keep faith. That's it. And let's talk about those levitations. In the movie, Janet's floating through the air, spinning in slow motion, screaming as furniture flies around her. In real life? There are photos of her in midair, yes, but they're split seconds stills. If you look closely, she's in a jumping position, arms out, knees bent. Some say she was thrown, others say she jumped. Even the investigators couldn't agree. So no graceful cinematic floating, just a messy snapshot that no one's ever explained cleanly. Another big one. In the movie, Ed nearly dies, hanging out a window while Lorraine screams his name. Yeah, that never happened either. No collapsing house, no last second rescue. And by then, the Warrens weren't even there. But maybe the biggest difference is how the film treats the family. In The Conjuring II, it's all faith and bravery. The Warrens arrive, help the Hodgsons believe again, and love saves the day. In real life, it was messier. The family was worn down, broke, and tired of reporters camping on their street. There wasn't one big moment where it all ended. It just stopped, faded out after months of noise and sleepless nights. Janet, the girl at the center of it all, she's grown now. She's talked about it in interviews. And she said something that sticks with me. She said, some of it was real. Some of it we made up. She never backed down from believing something truly strange happened in that house. But she also admitted they faked parts of it, mostly when they felt people were starting to doubt them. And honestly, that kind of makes sense. Imagine being eleven, everyone calling you a liar, and the only way to make them believe you is to give them something to see. So the movie took all of that, the long, uneven truth, and it boiled it down to one neat story. A single villain, a single exorcism, a clean ending. The real case wasn't clean at all. There wasn't one big showdown. There were just weeks and months of confusion, fear, curiosity, and exhaustion. And then it faded away. You know, that's what always hits me about the Enfield story. In the movie, it's simple. Evil shows up, faith wins. But in the real world, the evil part was never clear. It could have been grief, stress, loneliness, or maybe something else entirely. Nobody ever proved what it was, but nobody ever proved it wasn't, either. Because sometimes the scariest thing about stories like this isn't the haunting. It's that there's just enough truth in them to keep you wondering what really happened when the lights went out. Every time I go back over this case, I find myself stuck between two thoughts. On one hand, you've got the skeptics, people who say it was all just kids seeking attention. And on the other, you've got investigators who swore they saw things that defied explanation. Both sides sound so certain. But certainty's tricky, isn't it? Because when you listen to those old recordings, the knocks, the voices, the heavy air in that little house, there's something real in there. Maybe not supernatural, but real. The fear is real. The exhaustion is real. And so is the hope that somebody, somewhere, might finally understand what's happening to you. I think about Janet a lot. Eleven years old, her dad's gone, her mom's just trying to hold it together. The house is cold, crowded, and suddenly everyone's staring at her like she's the key to something dark. Imagine how confusing that would be to not even trust your own senses anymore. It makes me wonder if that's what most hauntings really are. Not demons, not ghosts, but the weight of fear, grief, and pressure. Up until it spills out in ways we can't explain. And once belief takes hold, it starts feeding itself. Because once enough people believe a place is haunted, it kind of is, isn't it? Maybe not by spirits, but by the stories that never quite leave. That's what Enfield feels like to me. A haunting made of real people, a scared family, a few true believers, a handful of skeptics, all trapped in something bigger than they could make sense of. And maybe that's why it still echoes after all these years. Because deep down, every one of us knows what it feels like to live with something we can't prove, but can't quite shake either. This has been State of the Unknown. A quiet house in North London, a family under pressure, and a story that grew so large it escaped the walls it started in. The Enfield poltergeist became a legend. Not because it was proven, but because no one could quite prove it wasn't. Some say it was fear. Some say it was faith. And maybe, in the end, it was both. If you've been enjoying State of the Unknown, thank you for listening. And for helping this little show keep growing week after week. The best way you can support it is simple. Leave a quick rating or review. On Spotify, it's just a tap. On Apple Podcasts, a few words can make a huge difference. I read every single one, and I can't tell you how much it means. Until next time, stay curious. Stay unsettled. And whatever you do, don't listen too closely when the house goes quiet.