North London, 1977. It’s 1 a.m. Janet Hodgson, 11, sleeps next to her sister, Margaret, two years older. In the room, a tape recorder, a camera and a camera record the slightest movement, the slightest sound. In the next room, engineer Maurice Grosse and writer Guy Playfair are ready to intervene. They usually.
These two investigators are dispatched by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), an organization founded in 1882 in the United Kingdom to study unexplained phenomena in a scientific manner. In the space of a year, the two men witnessed more than 1,500 so-called “paranormal” episodes in this modest house in the town of Enfield, where they had, in fact, taken up residence. Knocks inside the walls, furniture moving, Legos flying, spoons bent, Janet levitating two meters from the ground, disembodied voices coming from the two sisters… For almost two years, what the press will call “the Enfield case » or “the Amityville of England” will attract a diverse crowd: journalists, police officers, photographers, doctors, psychiatrists, physics students, mediums, exorcists, and even the most famous ventriloquist of the time, Ray Alan.
In total, 70 witnesses will attest to having witnessed these phenomena, including two police officers. All this will be recorded in thousands of notes and in nearly 200 audio recordings where we hear in particular several conversations between the two SPR investigators and “Bill”, an old man who died in the house a few years earlier, and including the deep, raspy voice belches from the mouth of frail Janet. Bill is not often in a good mood, nor is he very polite.
A format mixing fiction and reality
A story that inspired, in 2016, the second film in the franchise Conjuring, devoted to the “files” of the Warren couple, renowned mediums and exorcists (who, however, only stayed for one day with the Hodgsons), whose exploits are largely romanticized in the cinema. To immerse yourself in the twists and turns of the largest investigation ever conducted into a haunted house case, it is much more instructive to delve into the four episodes of the documentary The Enfield Poltergeist, broadcast on Apple TV+. A format mixing fiction and reality, with a particular mechanism: the original recordings are played in playback by actors (in a studio recreating on a doily near the Hodgson house) and are interspersed with testimonies from the real protagonists, forty- six years later. Janet speaks into the camera. Like his sister, Margaret, the son of Maurice Grosse, the journalist of the Daily Mirrorscientists then members of the SPR, and even the son of the famous Bill…
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