Poltergeist voice

I recently watched a 1964 British movie, DoYou Know This Voice? The plot involves a couple kidnapping a child, and making ransom demands over the phone to the parents. The woman who makes the calls adopts a creepy-sounding voice, and I was struck by how similar this voice sounded to the Enfield Poltergeist voice of ‘Bill’, adopted by Janet Hodgson, captured on reel-to-reel audiotape by investigator Maurice Grosse.

The creepy voice in question appears twice in Do you know this Voice? Firstly, through the phonecall made to the kidnapped child’s parents at the 13:25 point of the movie, and then at 23:57, when the police broadcast a reelto-reel tape recording of the voice on TV and radio, to appeal for witnesses to come forward. It was the latter scene which reminded me of the Enfield poltergeist ‘voice’; the reel-to-reel tape machine playing the eerily-distorted voice... so uncannily reminiscent of the film footage I’ve seen showing Maurice Grosse playing his own reel-to-reel recording of ‘Bill’.

You might think that this somewhat tenuous and superficial link with the Enfield haunting is just down to my own personal reaction. However, a check on BBC Genome reveals that DoYou Know This Voice? was broadcast only once: BBC 2, Sunday 13 March 1977, in their Midnight Movie slot. This just happens to be less than five months before the events of the Enfield haunting began. I don’t wish to attempt to debunk the work of Mr Grosse, for whom I have enormous respect; sadly, he is no longer with us to give his views on this. However, I am curious to know if either he or Janet Hodgson saw this movie on TV in 1977, and whether their experiences of this creepy-sounding voice unknowingly played a part in the manufacture of the voice of Bill.