Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (36 page)

They decided to ask the ghost to write out a message, and left a pencil and paper.
A few minutes later, they found that someone had written:
“I will stay in this house.
Do not show this to anyone else or I will retaliate.”
Another message read:
“Can I have a tea bag.”
Mrs.
Harper placed one on the table and, a few moments later, a second tea bag appeared beside it.

When Mrs.
Harper’s husband came to call to pay his maintenance money, he expressed disbelief in all this, and Mrs.
Harper showed him the message—forgetting that it had ordered her not to.
She said out loud: “I’m sorry, I forgot.” Another piece of paper appeared on the table:
“A misunderstanding.
Don’t do it again.”

A few days after this, the Society for Psychical Research sent a team of investigators to look at the place.
They had evidently decided that the poltergeist activity was all due to the girls.
Balloons full of water were placed under the beds for some reason; and, when they burst, water dripped through the ceiling.
When the team had left, Grosse and Playfair—who had been present—had some irritable things to say about the SPR’s obsession with fraud.

By now it was very clear that Janet was the poltergeist’s main target.
She was often thrown out of bed seven or eight times before she succeeded in getting to sleep.
When she fell asleep, she twitched and moaned; Playfair began to feel increasingly that she was “possessed.” He recalled the case of Maria Ferreira, the South American girl who had been driven to suicide by a poltergeist, and felt some misgiving.
On one occasion, with a photographer in the bedroom, Janet was hurled out of bed—the event was photographed—and then, as the photographer and Maurice Grosse tried to hold her, she went into convulsions, screamed hysterically, and bit Grosse.
When finally put back into bed, she fell asleep.
Later, there was a crash, and they found her lying on top of the radio set, still fast asleep.

The following night, Janet had more convulsions, and wandered around, talking aloud.
“Where’s Gober.
He’ll kill you.”

Two of Playfair’s friends from Brazil, who happened to be in London, called at the Enfield house, and succeeded in bringing Janet out of one of her trance-like states.
Their view was that Janet was a powerful medium and ought to be trained to use her powers.
One of the two Brazilian mediums wrote on a sheet of paper: “I see this child, Janet, in the Middle Ages, a cruel and wanton woman who caused suffering to families of yeomen—some of these seem to have now to get even with the family.” Soon after this, Janet began producing drawings, in a state of semi-trance; one of them showed a woman with blood pouring out of her throat, with the name “Watson” written underneath.
Other drawings continued this theme of blood, knives and death.
When Playfair asked Mrs.
Harper if she knew of a Watson, she replied that it was the name of the previous tenants of the house.
Mrs.
Watson had died of a tumor of the throat.

Playfair asked Janet if she could bend a spoon like Uri Geller.
He glanced away for a moment, as Mrs.
Harper spoke to him; when he looked back, the spoon was bent in the middle—it was lying in the center of the table.
Janet said she had experienced a sudden feeling of headache as the spoon bent.

In December 1977, the poltergeist began making noises—whistling and barking sounds.
Maurice Grosse decided to try asking it to speak.
“Call out my name, Maurice Grosse.” He went out of the room, and a strange voice said:
“Maurice .
.
.
O .
.
.”
Grosse asked it to say its own name.
“Joe Watson.”
When Guy Playfair asked: “Do you know you are dead?” the voice said angrily:
“Shut up!”
And to further requests that it go away, it replied:
“Fuck off.”
Joe seemed to be incapable of polite conversation.
When another researcher, Anita Gregory, asked it questions she was told to bugger off.

The investigators wondered whether Janet could be simulating this voice, although it seemed unlikely; it was a masculine growl, and had an odd quality, as if electronically produced.
(I have one of Guy Playfair’s tape recordings of the voice, and it reminds me strongly of a record I have of an electronic brain singing “Daisy, Daisy.”) The voice would not speak if the investigators were in the room.
But their attempts were rewarded with long sentences.
The voice now identified itself as Bill, and said it had a dog called Gober the Ghost.
Asked why it kept shaking Janet’s bed it replied:
“I was sleeping here.”
“Then why do you keep on shaking it?”
“Get Janet out.”
Rose asked: “Why do you use bad language?”
“Fuck off you,”
replied Bill.
And when Janet asked why it played games with them it replied:
“I like annoying you.”
“Where do you come from?”
“From the graveyard.”
It even named the graveyard—Durant’s Park, which is in the area.

At Guy Playfair’s suggestion, Rose asked why it didn’t go away.
“I don’t believe in that.”
“Why?
What’s so different about being up there?” asked Rose, and received the wistful reply:
“I’m not a heaven man.”
It went on to say in a jerky manner:
“I am Bill Haylock and I come from Durant’s Park and I am seventy-two years old and I have come here to see my family but they are not here now.”

On the tape, the words come out one by one, as if the speaker is so breathless that he can only get out one at a time.
(The voice is so obviously that of an old man that the notion of Janet producing it by ventriloquism is absurd.) Rose’s next question is interrupted by a furious outburst:
“You fucking old bitch, shut up.
I want some jazz music.
Now go and get me some, else I’ll go barmy.”

Maurice Grosse’s son Richard paid a visit to the house and succeeded in holding a lengthy conversation with the voice.
When he asked it what it had done with thirty pence that had vanished it said it had hidden the money in the radio—which is where it was found.
Asked how he had died, “Bill” replied that he went blind and had a hemorrhage—he fell asleep and died in a chair downstairs.

Richard Grosse found that if he looked at Janet’s face while the voice was speaking, it would stop.
If he
thought
of looking around, the voice would also stop, as if reading his mind.

Another researcher named David Robertson had no difficulty getting the voice to talk, although the main thing it wanted to discuss was girls’ periods.
Then the ghost was asked to levitate Janet, and then draw a line round the light on the ceiling.
Robertson withdrew outside, and heard Janet being bounced up and down on the bed.
Suddenly there was a gasp and silence.
He tried to open the door and found that it was jammed tight.
When it opened again, Janet was on the bed and there was a red line around the light.
Janet claimed that she had floated through the wall, into the bedroom of the next house—belonging to Peggy Nottingham (who was with David Robertson at the time).
She described it as “all white”—a fairly accurate description of the light wallpaper.
Peggy asked her to try doing it again, and went next door to see what happened.
Janet was not there.
But on the floor, there was the book
Fun and Games for Children
, which had been on the mantelpiece in Janet’s bedroom a few minutes earlier.

Robertson handed a red plastic cushion to Janet and said: “See what you can do with that.”
“All right, David boy,”
said the invisible entity—which seemed to like Robertson—
“I’ll make it disappear.”
Robertson went out of the room, and there was a cry from Janet.
When he went back, the cushion had vanished; the window was tightly shut.
But a neighbor who was passing the house at that moment suddenly saw a red cushion appear on the roof.
Another neighbor later testified that she had also seen the cushion as she walked past.
And looking at Janet’s bedroom window, she had seen books and cushions striking the window, and Janet rising into the air—in a horizontal position—and descending again, as if being bounced on a trampoline.
“She was definitely lying horizontal, coming up and down.” Guy Playfair tried bouncing on Janet’s bed, and found that no matter how hard he bounced, it was impossible to get up into the air.

Playfair was struck by Janet’s comment that when she had floated through the wall into Peggy’s bedroom, it was “all white” and there were no colors.
He arrived at the conclusion that what had happened was that Janet had had an “out of the body” experience—other astral travelers have observed the lack of color during “OOBs.” But this fails to explain how the book also passed through the wall.

Was there, Playfair asked himself at this point, any more the poltergeist could do to demonstrate its versatility?
In fact, it went on to produce a whole variety of new phenomena.
It became rather more violent with Janet, making an attempt to suffocate her with the curtains, and making a knife follow her around in the air.
(The voice claimed that this was the doing of another entity called Tommy.) It produced a biscuit out of nowhere and stuck it into Janet’s mouth.
It put butter and cheese on a piece of bread.
(When Guy Playfair tried to touch it the voice rasped,
“Leave it alone.”
) It smeared ordure around the place.
It began causing fires in closed drawers—fires which, fortunately, extinguished themselves.
It produced some appalling stinks, like rotten cabbages.
After a visit from the psychic Matthew Manning, it began scrawling obscene messages on the kitchen walls.
When the two pet goldfish died, the “voice” claimed it had electrocuted them by accident (which, if true, seems to confirm that poltergeists use some form of electrical energy).

A medium called Gerry Sherrick told the Harpers that they had all been together in a previous existence and that the girls had dabbled in witchcraft.
He also told them he felt that a nasty old woman was connected with the “haunting” and that she had lived near Spitalfields market.
Had there been any smells like rotten vegetables?
After this, he went into a trance and an old woman’s voice announced: “I come here when I like .
.
.
I’m
not
bleedin’ dead and I’m not going to go away.” Sherrick performed “psychic healing” on the family—to heal the “leaks” that were causing the trouble.
After his visit, the Enfield house became quiet for several weeks, as it had after the two previous visits by mediums.

The case was beginning to create something more like a normal haunting.
Mrs.
Harper saw an apparition of a pair of legs in blue trousers going upstairs and also saw a child.
The children continued to see old men.
A neighbor who was looking after the house when the Harpers went to the seaside saw a man in his shirtsleeves sitting at the table.
Another neighbor knocked on the front door, and through the window saw Maurice Grosse in the hall, then watched him go upstairs.
When finally admitted, she discovered that Maurice Grosse had been in the upper part of the house for the past half hour or so.
The poltergeist was “imitating” him.

In mid-1978, Janet went into the Maudsley Hospital for observation and testing.
Playfair expected the disturbances in Enfield to cease while she was away; in fact they continued, although on a smaller scale.
And Janet claimed that a number of small poltergeist incidents happened to her while in hospital.
But Janet’s spell in the Maudsley—which made her healthier and stronger—was the beginning of the end of the Enfield case.

The haunting seems to have been brought to an end by a Dutch clairvoyant named Dono Gmelig-Meyling, who was brought to the house by a Dutch journalist who wanted to study the case.
The day before their first visit had been eventful—overturned furniture, knocks, footsteps, sounds of breathing and excrement smeared on the floor.
Dono spent some time in the house, then returned to his hotel.
There, he later told Playfair, he went on an “astral trip,” and met a twenty-four-year-old girl who was somehow involved with the case.
This was an interesting new departure.
Later, Dono met Maurice Grosse, and again had a strong sense that he was somehow connected with the haunting—and not purely as an investigator.
When Grosse mentioned that his own daughter had been killed in a motorcycle accident two years before—she would have been twenty-four if still alive—Dono said: “Well that’s it.
It’s your daughter .
.
.” There was no suggestion that she was responsible for any of the poltergeist activity, only that she was somehow connected.
In the final chapter of his account of the Enfield case,
This House Is Haunted
, Playfair tries to draw together his speculations about the disturbances.
His suggestion is that Maurice Grosse’s daughter—whose name was also Janet—was involved indirectly.
It was she who had drawn her father’s attention to the case.
Janet had died after a motorcycle crash in 1976—and Grosse had been impressed by a series of odd events and coincidences.
A birthday card she had sent to her brother just before the accident showed someone
with her head swathed in bandages, and an inscription about falling on it.
Janet had died of head injuries.
Grosse found himself wondering if Janet was somehow still alive, and thought that a suitable sign would be some rain—there had been a drought for months.
The next morning, the kitchen roof below Janet’s bedroom window was wet, although everywhere else was dry.
It had been because of Janet’s death that Grosse had thought about engaging in active psychical research, and his first case had been the Enfield haunting.