enfield poltergiest

[cav]

did anyone see the documentary about the enfield poltergiest a few months ago on channel4 and repeated several times? one of the best things i saw on telly last year. not so much that it was a great programme (a lot of the 'spooky' camerawork and music were a bit annoying) but it was such an amazing case, extensively documented and witnessed, with an unbeliveable cast of odd characters telling great stories, and fanatstic 'real' photos of poltergiest activity as well.

cav

[dem bones]

Hello Cav, seasons greetings to you!

I'm afraid I missed the programme, but I think you'd like this as it is unquestionably "more horrifying than The Amityville Horror!" but then most things are in Enfield. I think the book began life as a series of articles in The Unexplained and you had all these colour photo's of the girls jumping on their beds - I believe the scientific term is 'levitating' This House Is Haunted reprints several but they're all in black and white.

Guy Lyon Playfair - This House Is Haunted (Sphere, 1981)

Blurb:

THE INVESTIGATION OF THE ENFIELD POLTERGEIST

In 1977 life as the Harpers had known it came rapidly to an end. For their Enfield home was visited by a wilfully destructive poltergeist. Chairs were thrown and bricks hurled at visitors to the house. Bedclothes were removed, cutlery and metal fittings bent and twisted, writing mysteriously appeared on the walls and even the Harpers' teenage daughter achieved the amazing feat of levitation. And through this ordeal Mrs Harper and her family, though often frightened and worried, were firmly rationale as mediums, ghost-hunters and the Press invaded their home.

One year later the family were experts on psychic-phenomena. For the ghost was captured on tape and film by Maurice Grosse of the Society for Psychical Research and
writer Guy Lyon Playfair. More compellingly vivid than any fiction, this extraordinary story was happening here in Britain, persuading even the most case-hardened sceptic to believe that THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED

"an extraordinary book of dedicated documentation"
Daily Express

"Gripping account of astonishing paranormal activities ... backed by some impressive photographs"

Now!

[pulphack]

now here's a funny thing. i was thinking about this book recently, as it's many years since i had a copy, and i remember reading it avidly, seeing as i was born just down the road in tottenham, and remember it in the local rag.

thing is, i have this friend in enfield. only known her about a year, and i was visiting recently when she pointed out a middle-aged goth bird walking down hertford road. 'see her? i was at school with her...'

and then it comes out. my friend is mid-forties, and was born and brought up near the sportsman pub, which is just round the corner from the cemetary, and from the street where the events took place. she was at primary school with the goth, who was always a 'bit weird' (her words, not mine), and it also turns out that some of the local kids saw things flying about through the windows. whatever happened, there was some seriously odd shit witnessed by kids who didn't believe it because they thought the little girl was just looking to be 'different'(this includes my friend, who is now convinced in matters ghostly).

the little girl grew up to be a single goth, who still has trouble making friends (hmm, i think that might be my friend's view, rather than truth), and still lives in the house.

i'd love to know what she thinks about it all, thirty years on. but how do i ask? without being arrested...

[pulphack]

i know, i know, i could watch the programme... just read the first post again...
but it wouldn't be as much fun as getting arrested for harrassing a haunting, would it?

[dem bones]

lucky for you i've retired from being the UK's premier serious occult investigator (monkey's taken over) pulps, otherwise i'd be bugging you night and day until we both launched a campaign of harassment versus ms goth and then where would we? collars felt long before we made it anywhere near enfield, i suspect.

spookily, i've read the playfair book (and his collaboration with every football club's least sought after chairman, uri gellar) but never owned a copy until our recent jaunt to notting hill.

dead spooky, innit? is the cosmic joker up to his old mischief or perhaps the black alchemist is trying to upset michael fish with another hurricane ?

now that's what i call Strangely Queer.

[pulphack]

i always fancied myself as harry price - long mac, homburg, pipe, and a half-brick in my pocket for the odd 'apportment'. so ms goth is lucky i've heard about these things called restraining orders. the line between occult investigation and stalking is a thin one...

seriously, i must ask my friend if she ever talks to her old school chum. i'd love to know what she thinks of it now, and how it altered her life.

[dem bones]

Seriously, too, I think it's a great idea. These cases rarely seem to get followed up once the seven day wonder has passed.

I just re-posted Joe Cooper's The Case Of The Cottingley Fairies from the old board as a kind of illustration of what can come of talking to an eyewitness (in his case, two) years after the event. At first the old girls stuck stoically to what they'd said at the time but once they'd attained a second wave of publicity, culminating in an appearance on Nationwide, their stories fast begun to unravel. Obviously it was not a good idea for one of the sisters to get so friendly with Cooper that he became a friend and played the washboard along with her drunken singalongs or something because occasionally she'd forget herself and blurt out the "truth". They both went to the grave with conflicting and confusing versions of what "happened", sometimes admitting to a top hoax, then retracting. You didn't really need Cooper's book to make you wonder if they made it up as they went along but I'm full of admiration for him in that he managed to produce such a compelling and even handed piece of work.

[mattofthespurs]

I lived in Enfield for 36 years and everyone knew about that house. I had even been in it twice for Birthday parties before all the 'poltergeist' stuff came out.