👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº0482
ACTIVE
Enfield Poltergeist House
Enfield Poltergeist House is a location reputed to be haunted in London, GB. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is Enfield Poltergeist House?
- Location
- London, GB
- Type
- House / mansion
- Coordinates
- 51.655, -0.035
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Enfield Poltergeist House said to be haunted?
Between 1977 and 1979, a council house in Brimsdown, in the London Borough of Enfield, became the setting for one of Britain's most discussed poltergeist cases. The alleged activity centred on two sisters, aged eleven and thirteen, and the reports coming out of the house attracted sustained press coverage across England. Several paranormal investigators took an interest in the case and reached openly divergent conclusions. Maurice Grosse, an inventor, and the writer Guy Lyon Playfair, both linked to the Society for Psychical Research, spent long periods in the property and came away convinced that the phenomena were genuine. Other researchers, among them the psychologists Anita Gregory and John Beloff, remained unpersuaded and reported finding evidence that the girls had faked at least part of the events. The dispute was never settled, and the modest suburban house remains a fixed point of reference in the literature on poltergeist claims.
What is the history of Enfield Poltergeist House?
The Enfield case is the most heavily documented poltergeist investigation in British history, and it is unusual because it split the organisation that investigated it.
It began in **1977** at a council house in Green Street, Enfield, north London, occupied by a single mother and her four children. The reported phenomena escalated through the familiar poltergeist repertoire: knocking, furniture moving, objects thrown, and — the element that made this case famous — a **gruff male voice** apparently issuing from **Janet Hodgson**, then eleven years old.
The **Society for Psychical Research** sent **Maurice Grosse**, who had volunteered as an investigator. He was joined by the writer **Guy Lyon Playfair**, and between them they spent an extraordinary amount of time in the house over the following months, recording tapes, taking photographs and keeping detailed notes. Playfair published the case in **1980** as *This House is Haunted: An Investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist*, which remains the primary account.
What gave Enfield its cultural reach was that combination: a working-class family with no obvious interest in publicity, two named investigators from a serious organisation, and an archive of recordings. It became the model for a genre — the basis of documentaries, dramatisations and, eventually, of a Hollywood horror franchise that bears very little resemblance to what Grosse and Playfair actually recorded.
What is far less well known is that the SPR itself never agreed about it.
Timeline: the documented record of Enfield Poltergeist House
- August 1977 Reported phenomena begin at a council house on Green Street, Enfield, occupied by a single mother and her four children: knocking, furniture moving and objects thrown.
- Autumn 1977 The Society for Psychical Research sends Maurice Grosse, joined by the writer Guy Lyon Playfair. The two spend months in the house recording tapes, photographing and taking notes.
- December 1977 Anita Gregory, a prominent SPR member, visits the house with John Beloff. She will call the case "overrated", several episodes "suspicious", and suggest the girls staged incidents for journalists.
- 1980 Playfair publishes This House is Haunted, the standard account of the case. The SPR is left divided: Grosse and Playfair consider it genuine; Gregory and Beloff do not.
- Later years Janet and Margaret Hodgson acknowledge faking some incidents "to see if Mr Grosse and Mr Playfair would catch us". Janet puts the proportion at around 2%, a figure there is no independent way to audit.
Is there a rational explanation for Enfield Poltergeist House?
Enfield is unusual because the sharpest criticism came not from outside the paranormal world but from inside it: from the **same Society for Psychical Research** that had sent the investigators.
**Anita Gregory**, a prominent SPR member, visited the house in **December 1977** with **John Beloff** and reached conclusions opposite to Grosse and Playfair's. She called the case **"overrated"**, described several episodes of the girls' behaviour as **"suspicious"**, and suggested they had **staged** some incidents for the benefit of journalists after a sensational story. She reviewed Playfair's book sceptically. It is hard to overstate what this means: the organisation that gave the case its credibility also contained its most formidable critic.
And then there is the admission by the principals themselves. **Janet and Margaret Hodgson later acknowledged faking some incidents** — in their words, "to see if Mr Grosse and Mr Playfair would catch us". Janet put the proportion faked at about **2%**.
That 2% is where the whole case is decided, and both arguments deserve stating honestly.
The defenders say: two per cent of fakery does not invalidate the other ninety-eight, and Grosse and Playfair always acknowledged episodes of trickery while arguing that deception could not explain the case as a whole. That is a reasonable argument.
The sceptics answer: the percentage is calculated by the people who did the faking, and there is no independent way to audit it. If two children were capable of deceiving investigators who were present and forewarned — and they were, by their own admission — then the capability is established; what remains to be determined is the frequency, and for that the same children's testimony is no use. To which can be added that the signature phenomenon, the male voice, is reproducible: it is produced with the **ventricular folds** of the larynx, anyone can learn to do it, and it is exhausting — which is exactly what was observed.
The honest conclusion is that Enfield remains unresolved, not because there is conclusive evidence in either direction, but because its archive depends on the credibility of two children who admitted lying some of the time.
Can you visit Enfield Poltergeist House?
This needs saying plainly: **you cannot visit it**, and you should not try.
The house on Green Street is a **private home** occupied by people with nothing to do with what happened in 1977. It stands on an ordinary residential street in Enfield, in a terrace of identical houses, and its occupants have spent decades putting up with strangers turning up to photograph their front wall, particularly whenever a film comes out. Going there to look is not tourism: it is bothering people on their own doorstep.
Enfield, the borough, is a perfectly visitable part of north London for other reasons — **Forty Hall**, a seventeenth-century Jacobean house with gardens and a museum, free to enter, is the best thing in it — but it has nothing to offer connected with the case, nor should it.
If your interest is serious, the material is available and abundant. The **Society for Psychical Research** holds the archive of Grosse and Playfair's investigation — tapes, photographs and notes — and its **Psi Encyclopedia** publishes a detailed article on the case that also sets out Anita Gregory's objections. Playfair's 1980 book remains in print. Between the original recordings and the SPR's own internal criticism there is a great deal more available than could ever be seen from a pavement in Enfield.
A documentary built on the original tapes was released in 2023, which is probably the most direct way to hear the material and judge it yourself.
Sources consulted
- Psi Encyclopedia, «Enfield Poltergeist — artículo del caso y del archivo de la investigación» — Society for Psychical Research, 2021 academic
- Wikipedia, «Enfield poltergeist — divisiones dentro de la SPR y admisiones de las hermanas Hodgson» — Recopilación documental, 2026 web
- Guy Lyon Playfair, «This House is Haunted: An Investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist» — Souvenir Press, 1980 book
- Wikipedia, «Maurice Grosse — el investigador de la SPR en el caso» — Recopilación documental, 2026 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-07-28 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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