It was a slow night in the Daily Mirror newsroom and reporter Doug Bence was bored at his desk, watching colleagues play dominoes.
The phone rang, with reader Vic Nottingham calling about ruckus at his neighbour’s house. Doug recalls: “He was saying ‘it’s gone potty next door. We’ve got hysterical women talking about ghosts. Something strange is happening, things are flying around and furniture is moving’. I said because there was nothing happening, I don’t mind going.”
So the young reporter and photographer Graham Morris headed for 284 Green Street, Enfield, North London. It was September 1977 and the pair were heading to cover a story which would follow them throughout their lives – that of the Enfield Poltergeist, now the subject of a four-part Apple TV+ series which airs from Saturday.
When the reporters arrived, they found Vic and his neighbour Peggy Hodgson with three of her children – Margaret, 13, Janet 11, and seven-year-old Billy – inside the small house. Doug, now 83, and living in Suffolk, said: “We went inside, we were given a cup of tea. Nothing happened at all. We spoke to the family and we got their names.
Peggy Hodgson, her children and other eyewitnesses saw and heard moving furniture, flying objects, unexplained knocking noises and even levitation (Graham Morris)“We saw the two girls and a boy playing. We met the concerned neighbour. and nothing was happening. We drank our tea and left. Just as the two Mirror men reached the car, they heard Vic Nottingham scream: “It’s happening again!” They rushed back inside to pandemonium, with objects shooting across the room.
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“Lego bricks were flying around, and Graham was hit with one,” says Doug. “It’s hard to say how many but it was quite a short period of about a minute. The young boy was playing in it. The two girls were screaming and crying. The mother was in a state. Vic Nottingham was doing his best. There is no question that they had engineered it in any way.”
With Graham suffering a bruised face, the two men immediately headed back to the office, shocked at what they had witnessed. Over the following few days, Doug returned to the Hodgsons’ house each night with Graham and senior reporter George Fallows. When nothing more happened, they enlisted the help of the Society for Psychical Research, which researches the paranormal.
Soon, the house was frequented by experts Guy Lyon Playfair and the late Maurice Grosse. Doug and George went on to report on front page of the Daily Mirror on September 10, 1977: “In the last eight days, a saucer has jumped across the kitchen, furniture has moved and marbles and toy building bricks have shot through the air.”
The house looked like an ordinary family home (MyLondon - Grahame Larter)Although Doug only bore witness to the flying lego bricks, Graham captured an image of Janet supposedly levitating. He had set up the camera on a tripod in the corner of the children’s bedroom at the modest house. Attached to it was a long cable that ran down into the living room so the Mirror photographer could capture images whenever he heard a sound from upstairs, while also recording audio on a separate device.
What transpired was a striking snap of Janet suspended in the air above her bed in a nightgown as Margaret lies across the room, contorted in a scream. It has been used by many paranormal fans to prove the presence of a poltergeist. But Doug is sceptical. “She wasn’t levitating, you can tell from the picture,” he says. He explains the angle was a part of the illusion. “If you know anything about photography, you go low and the world looks different,” he adds.
However, over the next 10 months, many dramatic and paranormal events were reported in the house, including more objects being hurled across the rooms, levitations and recordings of the daughters speaking in demonic voices. There were also reports of tapping sounds in the walls, and most terrifyingly Janet would sometimes speak in a gruff deep male voice, claiming to be Bill Wilkins, a former tenant who had died at the property.
Former Mirror photographer Doug Bence (Helen Lisk)“The girls were terrified,” says Doug. “They were clearly very troubled by this. Everything was hard for them.” The girls later admitted to hoaxing a few of the paranormal ongoings, but Doug is certain something peculiar was happening in that home. He says: “I wouldn’t use the word supernatural. There was something I couldn’t explain. There was something weird going on in that house.
“My view is that there are energies and forces that we can’t measure and we don’t understand.” Doug believes that the involvement of the Society for Psychical Research somewhat exacerbated the family’s issues. “They really latched on,” he says. “They became part of the problem.”
He experienced this willingness to suspend disbelief from Maurice Grosse. Doug recalls one night when the pair heard a loud noise coming from the kids’ room – hey ran into the room to find an upturned bedside table. Doug recalls: “One of the legs was bent, and Maurice Grosse said ‘You think little fingers have the force to do that? You’ve got to agree with that!’
“I said ‘No, because I didn’t see the table before, it could have been like that for year.’ That was the kind of thing.” He explains that the family did need help to cope, but the attention that they received spiralled after a “genuine paranormal investigation was turned into a farce”.
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Much of the poltergeist activity was centred around Janet, and in 2015 she explained “just 2 %” of it was made up. “I knew when the voices were happening, of course, it felt like something was behind me all of the time,” she said. “The levitation was scary, because you didn’t know where you were going to land. I remember a curtain being wound around my neck, I thought I was going to die.” Doug felt sorry for the Hodgson family. “For the family, it was horrible. There are forces we don’t understand. I haven’t seen ghosts but there were funny things going on in that house.”
* The Enfield Poltergeist is on Apple TV+.
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