The House That Would Not Be Quiet**
*Enfield, London — 1977–78*

It had begun when Janet Hodgson was eleven.

She lived with her mother **Peggy** and her siblings in a small, unremarkable council house at **284 Green Street, Enfield, North London** – the kind of unremarkable terraced house that lines street after street across working class London. Single mother. Four kids. Not much money. Getting by. There was nothing in the family or the house to indicate anything unusual was coming.

Something came anyway in the summer of **1977**.

—

It began with moving the furniture.

One night Peggy Hodgson heard noises of shuffling from the children’s bedroom. She went upstairs, and saw a heavy chest of drawers slide across the floor by itself. She batted it away. It shifted. She took her children and went next door to the neighbors who came back with her, stood in the bedroom, and watched the same thing happen in front of them.

They called the cops. One officer, **WPC Carolyn Heeps**, who was called to the house, stood in the living room and saw a chair slide several feet across the floor by itself. She gave a written statement of what she had seen. A policeman. A written statement.

Then it was worse.

—

The house echoed with knocking sounds, loud and rhythmic, moving from room to room. Toys, books, small pieces of furniture flew across rooms, viewed by neighbours, investigators and journalists who came to see for themselves. In the night the children were thrown from their beds. Fires began and went out on their own. No source, but water on the floor.

And then **Janet** began talking in a voice that was not her own.

It was deep, raspy, and sounded old, not at all like the voice of an eleven year old girl. It introduced itself as a man called **Bill** who said he would lived in the house before the Hodgsons, who would died of a brain hemorrhage in the downstairs living room, sitting in his chair.

Later, investigators discovered that there had indeed been a man called **Bill Wilkins** who had lived and died in that house. His son came forward and confirmed his father had been dead from a brain hemorrhage in the downstairs living room.

Janet hadn’t been told any of that.

—

**The Society for Psychical Research** sent investigators, including a researcher named **Guy Lyon Playfair** and **Maurice Grosse** who spent months in the house documenting everything. They recorded hours of audio and took hundreds of photos. **Daily Mirror** journalists came and saw flying objects. Janet appeared to be floating above her bed — mid air, hair splayed, eyes shut — in a photograph taken by a photographer.

It became a cause célèbre throughout Britain and eventually the world.

Sceptics came too. Some investigators caught Janet bending spoons herself and admitted that she and her brother had faked some of the phenomena when they thought nobody was looking. Janet herself later confessed that they had faked some things out of boredom and mischief.

But Maurice Grosse, who spent more time in that house than anyone, maintained until his death that the bulk of what he saw could not be explained away by fraud. Too many people in front of too much going on for trickery. The voice was never satisfactorily explained as something an eleven year old girl could produce naturally, it was recorded on tape and studied by audio experts.

—

By 1978 the activity was over. The family remained in the house. Life slowly returned to something like its normal state. Janet grew up, moved away, and spent much of her adult life not looking for attention for what happened, nor running from it. She talked about it occasionally in interviews, calmly and without drama, just saying that it was real, that it happened, and that she wished people would remember it was a frightening experience for a child, not just an entertaining story.

That is something to sit with.

Whatever was happening in that house, there was an eleven year old girl at the center of it, scared, confused, and living through something no child should have to live through – real or otherwise.

—

That house at **284 Green Street** is still standing in Enfield today. People still drive by it. The current residents have reported strange things over the years, knocking sounds and objects moving, though nothing on the scale of 1977.

The Enfield haunting was more thoroughly investigated than almost any other case of its kind. It was seen by police officers, journalists, researchers, and neighbors.” It was recorded, photographed, documented throughout almost a full year.

And it was never quite explained.

—

The Enfield Haunting (1977 to 1978) 284 Green Street, Enfield, London
*Janet Hodgson · 11 years old*
*Investigation of the case. Never conclusively cracked. * * *