by Michael Hellicar

THE first sign that something was amiss came when the children’s Lego bricks were hurled at me by an unseen hand. The next came a few minutes later, when a heavy kitchen cabinet crashed to the floor at my feet. Yet I had been alone in the room — or so I thought. Scariest of all, though, was the very palpable atmosphere of fear. A malevolent spirit seemed to have taken up residence, moving the furniture, emptying drawers, sprinkling water, lighting matches and causing general mayhem, forcing the terrified Hodgson family who lived there to huddle together in dread. It seemed to centre its attention on 11-year-old Janet, who was levitated above her bed, sent into violent trances and made to speak in a rasping male voice. Many of the 1,500 psychic occurrences there were not only independently witnessed but are verified by investigators’ photographs and audio tape.

no wonder the Hodgsons’ unremarkable council semi in Green Street, Enfield, north London, became notorious as the most haunted house in Britain. The story is being told in a three-part drama which starts on TV next month. Timothy Spall and Matthew Macfadyen play psychic researchers called in to investigate the haunting, and Janet is portrayed by 13-year-old Eleanor Worthington-Cox, who won an Olivier Award for best actress in the title role of Matilda in London’s West End.

It is creepy stuff, with moody music, special effects, dramatic acting, emotionally- charged dialogue and skilful editing; a mix that will ensure viewers go to bed afterwards — if they dare — with goosebumps.

However, for all the technical trickery and artistic licence, it is nowhere near as horrifying, nor as mystifying, as the real events on which the story is based.

I know, because as a newspaper reporter sent to write about the hauntings, I witnessed many of them first-hand as they unfolded 38 years ago in the summer of 1977. So did some 30 other people including police officers, neighbours, other journalists and BBC staff and even passers-by.

The Enfield Poltergeist, as the ghostly visitor became known, first made its presence felt soon after Janet and her older sister Margaret, 12, played with a ouija board.

‘The girls were changing into their nightclothes and complained something was making their beds wobble,’ their mother Peggy (played on screen by Rosie Cavaliero) explained to me after the haunting began. ‘I told them to stop messing about.

‘The next night, I heard screaming and banging coming from their room after they had gone to bed. When I went in, a heavy chest of drawers was sliding by itself across the floor, trying to block the doorway. The girls were terrified.

‘I pushed the chest back against the wall, but it slid towards me again. I tried, but I couldn’t stop it. I wondered if my two younger boys [Johnny, ten and Billy, seven] were playing pranks, because they also slept upstairs, but they weren’t anywhere near the room.’

Over the next few weeks more furniture moved of its own accord; plates, cutlery, toys and books would go flying, and one night things were so bad Peggy called the police, who arrived to see a sitting-room chair lift off the carpet and move towards them.

One of the officers, WPC Carolyn Heeps, later reported: ‘It came to rest after about 4ft. I checked it for hidden wires or any other means by which it could have moved, but there was nothing to explain it.’

In desperation, the family called in the scientifically respected Society for Psychical Research, who sent two members, Guy Lyon Playfair, the Cambridge-educated author of several books about psychic phenomena, and businessman Maurice Grosse to investigate.

Playfair, portrayed in TV’s dramatised version by Matthew Macfadyen, said: ‘I went in a few weeks after the trouble started. I had an open mind, and looked for a logical explanation. I soon found there wasn’t one.’

His first experience of the Enfield Poltergeist was when a marble appeared from nowhere and dropped like a stone at his feet on the lino floor. Over the next 14 months he would visit the house on almost 120 occasions — sometimes the ghost would be quiet, but on many others it would be running rampant.

On my first visit, it was as if the Lego throwing was an initiation — a newspaper photographer, Graham Morris, had already had a block hurled at him. Even more puzzling, the blocks were hot. And when I checked the wall fixings of the cabinet that had fallen to the floor, the screws were still in place. Janet was dismissive when I told her what happened. ‘Oh, that’s not unusual,’ she said. ‘What’s really annoying is when it pulls out all the drawers and leaves everything on the floor.’

On subsequent visits I experienced cold draughts, graffiti, water puddles appearing from nowhere, bad smells, and chairs and tables moving of their own accord. Other witnesses reported physical assaults, matches bursting into flame and fleeting glimpses of different apparitions, including an old woman and a man.

Spookiest of all, an imprint of a body would be found on one of the beds, as if someone had been sleeping there. Peggy would straighten the sheets, only to find the shape back again later.

On another night when the family were together in the sitting room with me, there was a slow rapping coming from Janet and Margaret’s bedroom, directly above. We dashed upstairs, but no one was there.

A few nights later, Guy Playfair heard ‘a tremendous vibrating noise’ coming from the same empty room. ‘It was as if someone was drilling a great big hole,’ he reported. He went in to find the fireplace torn out from the wall, where it had been cemented in. ‘It was one of those old Victorian cast iron fires that must have weighed 60lb. The children couldn’t have ripped it out of the wall, but in any case they weren’t there.’

On another occasion, with all the children in bed, the other SPR investigator, Maurice Grosse (portrayed by Timothy Spall in the TV drama), was downstairs compiling notes when he heard Janet screaming. He ran to see her being dragged out of her room by an unseen force. She was then hauled down the stairs and dumped at his feet.

Like so many of the ghostly incidents, it was recorded on audio tape, and some were caught by a remote camera set up by Graham Morris.

not that the Enfield Poltergeist made it easy — Morris would set up his expensive equipment with flash guns powered by freshly charged batteries, only to find them quickly draining. Tape-recording was often difficult, too — a BBC team’s state-of-the-art machine, which worked perfectly outside the house, would sometimes inexplicably jam once inside.

Pictures show Janet being levitated off the bed, curtains twisting themselves into a spiral, pillows being thrown, sheets being pulled off the sleeping children. When I asked Janet if she realised she had been whirled across the room in her sleep, she said she had somehow drifted through the wall into the house next door.

‘I can tell you exactly what I saw,’ she said and described where various objects were situated. I checked with the neighbours, Vic and Peggy nottingham, who confirmed everything in their bedroom was placed just as Janet had told me.

Another time, two passers-by, a lollipop lady and a baker, looked up at the house and through a first-floor window saw Janet spinning around and bumping against the glass. A cushion also seemed to materialise on the roof.

But everything took a serious turn when Janet began to lapse into violent trances, swearing and hurling insults in disembodied voices quite unlike her own.

‘This thing never seemed to know who it was,’ Playfair said. ‘It would claim to be all different people, speaking in many different voices, and much of what it said through her was nonsense. It was as if Janet was being taken over.’

But one night an eerie message — captured on tape — came out of Janet’s mouth loud and clear, and what it said sent a chill through all of us. ‘My name is Bill,’ rasped a voice. ‘Just before I died, I went blind and then I had a haemorrhage and I fell asleep and died in the chair in the corner downstairs.’

none of this meant anything to the Hodgson family or their neighbours. But when the tape was played on the radio, a man got in touch to say he recognised his father’s voice. ‘His name was Bill Wilkins,’ he said, confirming his father had lived at the Hodgsons’ house many years earlier — before Janet was born — and he had died exactly as he had described.

Playfair, 80, wrote a book about the Enfield Poltergeist — This House Is Haunted — which became a bestseller. The new drama is based on it and sticks to the basic story, but inevitably ramps up tension — Playfair says a few psychic scenes didn’t happen but were written in by the TV people.

Maurice Grosse, who died in 2006, had only become interested in the paranormal the previous year, after his journalist daughter — also called Janet — had been killed in a motor cycle accident and the family began to experience psychic happenings.

He was convinced she was trying to send messages from beyond the grave to him and his wife Betty (played in the TV series by Truly, Madly, Deeply star Juliet Stevenson).

Grosse and Playfair came to believe it wasn’t so much Peggy Hodgson’s house that was haunted, but Janet herself, and to a much lesser extent, her older sister Margaret. Indeed, one night we had all gone out to visit Janet’s uncle, a few doors away, and the ghostly tricks continued there. ‘ This is person-centred,’ Playfair told me. ‘It doesn’t stay in the house, but follows Janet around.’

For myself, I wasn’t so sure. The Hodgson house had a very strange atmosphere whether Janet was there or not. I always felt as if we were being watched by a malignant spirit.

It was never comfortable for me — especially after I discovered the corner where Bill Wilkins died was where I invariably sat! I was worried, too, that the poltergeist might attach itself to me, just as it apparently had to Janet.

I had a young family; what if it left the Hodgsons alone and took up residence in my house? So even after all these years I understood Spall’s concern when he was asked to play Grosse.

‘It frightened the life out of me’, he admits. ‘I’m scared of anything like that in case it leads to me being haunted. I didn’t want to wake up at night with the doors opening and shutting.’

He asked Playfair if he was ever worried