Guy Lyon Playfair
Writer on the paranormal known for investigating the ghostly antics of the Enfield ‘poltergeist’
GUY LYON PLAYFAIR, who has died aged 83, was an investigator of the paranormal best known for his work on the so-called Enfield poltergeist in north London.
With Maurice Grosse, his colleague from the Society for Psychical Research, Playfair arrived at the semi-detached council house in Green Street, Enfield, days after the first reports of unexplained disturbances there in 1977.
The house was occupied by Margaret Hodgson, a divorcée, and her four children, two of whom, Janet, 11, and Johnny, 10, claimed that their beds were unaccountably shaking.
Neighbours who heard knockings on the walls searched the house and found nothing. But when a police officer arrived she witnessed a chair sliding unaided along the floor.
By the time Playfair and Grosse turned up to investigate, the disturbances were becoming more intense and more frightening. It seemed that a poltergeist was overturning chairs and tables, flinging things about, pulling off bedclothes and, in the case of Janet, levitating her and causing her to speak with the voice of an old man.
As Playfair later recalled, Janet “was always near when something happened, and this inevitably led to accusations that she was playing tricks, although Grosse was already fully convinced that she could not be responsible for all the incidents”.
Yet Playfair, who chronicled the events in his book This House is Haunted (1980), continued to harbour doubts. The “poltergeist” tended to act only when it was not being watched.
Incidents involving “curious whistling and barking noises coming from Janet’s general direction” prompted Playfair to wonder if it was not really Janet acting as “a brilliant ventriloquist”. But in the end neither Playfair nor Grosse was persuaded that the girl was faking.
Others were more sceptical, including another paranormal investigator, Melvin Harris, who called the photographed levitations “gymnastics”, adding: “It’s worth remembering that Janet was a school sports champion.”
Joe Nickell, an American paranormal investigator, claimed that Playfair was “repeatedly snookered” by the Hodgson children, and that he had “made a career of first being fooled by tricksters, and then fooling others”.
Be that as it may, Playfair and Gosse captured much of the activity at Enfield on tape and film, and transcripts of the recordings covered some 600 pages.
Hoax or no (and most of Playfair’s critics considered him both gullible and credulous) the story of the council house poltergeist came to be regarded as a classic of psychical research, the subject of worldwide press coverage and radio and television documentaries.
As well as championing the paranormal, Playfair also campaigned against what he considered the pernicious proliferation of television, a medium which, as he put it, “rots the brain”. He expanded his argument into a book, The Evil Eye (1990).
Guy Lyon Playfair was born in India on April 5 1935. His mother, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, kindled his interest in the paranormal at an early age and he remembered reading the society’s journal when he was still a child, growing up (without a television) in rural Gloucestershire.
From Cheltenham College he undertook National Service with the RAF, including a stint in Iraq, before going up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read Modern Languages and played trombone in a jazz band.
He became a freelance journalist and photographer, spending the years 1961 to 1975 in Brazil. There he worked for the American Chamber of Commerce, the press section of the US Agency for International Development in Rio de Janeiro, and the Associated Press news agency.
It was in Brazil that Playfair first encountered the concept of psychic surgery. An initial session he attended, conducted by a psychic surgeon, Edivaldo Oliveira Silva, persuaded Playfair that Silva was, as he claimed, possessed by spirits and that his surgical and healing powers were genuine. He later claimed that a British psychic surgeon, Matthew Manning, cured him of a slipped disc.
For the last two years of his time in South America, he lived in the Japanese quarter of São Paulo collecting material for the first of his 12 books.
In The Unknown Power (first published as The Flying Cow in 1975), Playfair examined the case of the psychic surgeon as well as other Brazilian examples of the paranormal, and in The Indefinite Boundary
(1976), reviewed evidence for the existence of psychic phenomena further afield.
Returning to Britain, he joined the Society for Psychical Research for whom he investigated the Enfield haunting, one of several “official” cases that he was invited to work on.
He was stung by a sceptical review of his book on the Enfield case in the Daily Telegraph, in which the novelist Francis King insisted that while some of the phenomena were genuine it was equally certain that many were not, a charge that Playfair complained was unfounded.
As well as the Enfield case, Playfair’s research activities included collaborating with Montague Keen on the Jacqueline Poole murder case of 1983, which he was convinced contained evidence of post-mortem communication between the victim and a psychic medium.
After his book on hypnotism, If This Be Magic, was published in 1985, Playfair collaborated with the spoon bender Uri Geller on The Geller Effect (1986). Ten of his books have been translated into 15 languages, and he remained involved in paranormal research into old age.
In 1992 he was a consultant on the notorious television drama Ghostwatch, broadcast on Hallowe’en and set in a supposedly haunted north London council house with a sinister past. Because of its documentary style, many terrified viewers through it was real, with the BBC reportedly receiving 30,000 complaints in a single hour.
In 2004 Playfair was elected to the council of the Society for Psychical Research, and he acted as a consultant for Sky Television’s miniseries The Enfield Haunting in 2015.
Guy Lyon Playfair, born April 5 1935, died April 8 2018