Interview with a Poltergeist

[fluffet]

Documentary on the Enfield Poltergeist case showing now on Discovery +1. Interviews with the now adult Hodgson girls, the police, investigators and press involved at the time and since with Chris French offering his thoughts on the case.

Think it may be a new one as so far i dont think ive seen it before.

Anyone else watch it earlier ?

Edited to add it might be the channel 4 one done previously after seeing ten mins but still worth a second watch if you havent seen it .

[morganp]

It is the CH 4 one shown previously. Very interesting doc but doesn't throw any new light on this classic case which despite the girls fakery and the misperception of key events by witnesses still has some genuinely unexplained aspects to it.

morganp

[fluffet]

I think for me the only thing it provided that was new was a chance to see and hear the girls particularly Janet as adults.
She cuts a very broken and nervous figure in much of segments filmed as an adult, damaged comes to mind when i watch her face and hear her voice, curiously childlike for a lot of it with vague flickers everynow and then that betray her real age and perhaps her knowledge of what really went on.
When they mention she was sent for evaluation as a child at the time yet they found her completely normal i find this in itself a little strange, her behaviour and the family situation and history previous to the events alone would have had some effect on her , indeed by her own and her mothers admission the divorce and subsequent behaviour of her father distressed her and the family deeply.Let alone the events after regardless of their cause coupled with much of her language and behaviour did not denote to me a kid that was untouched in anyway by events in her life.

This seems evident in her even now, on camera as a woman herself now she looks, acts and sounds like a person who suffers from depression and or even other forms of psychological problems ....only when she admits to testing the investigators or playing with them at times does a flicker of the smirking cockier teen we see in the old footage fleetingly appear...her other sister by comparison does not appear so strange and distant as she does.

The female journalist and male photographer both reasonably young and skeptical at the time and to this day are to me the best commentors on the case in that they clearly were there to do a job one neither were that keen on taking either , the scoop of course is always a draw yet they failed to capture what they really needed to impress their editors , rather than fabricate it they to this day simply say they cant explain it but feel much of it particularly in the later stages was dubious .
The do seem genuinely still confused and perturbed by the bits they witnessed that they couldnt explain easily, but still chose to evaluate the other evidence from the investigators rationally....it would have been all to easy for them to have got swept up in it all but instead i think what they did do was seperate what they had personally seen from what others had collated or seen and after researching the family themselves as well as the other evidence felt as time wore on that this was not a genuine case of poltergeist or possession but rather a distressed and troubled family who were in the midst of something altogether less paranormal.

The thing is there are still certain events and witnesses evidence that are unexplained...or at least arent easily explained that leave that doubt there in the minds of those who were there but a little less bias towards wanting it to be real....the answers lie with Janet ....and im not sure from seeing her recently that they will be forthcoming in any reliable way .

[den]

I found watching that documentary quite sad. I was intrigued by all the 'happenings' but when it came to watching the two sisters my heart sunk a bit. Janet in particular seemed like a hurt, almost bitter & broken person with elements of child like behaviour .... Dunno if that made any sense.

As far as the poltergeist activity goes, I think it was faked (the voice, flying across the room e.t.c.) Technology was quite poor back then & they didn't have motion sensor cameras so by the time the guy heard noises & pressed the button the activity had already started.

If a family claims to have paranormal activity in their home nowadays it's usually dismissed pretty quickly by scientists. If the present day technology had existed back in the 70's I think the poltergeist activity would have been explained by now.

There are one or two things that seem unexplainable but I think that's because it wasn't recorded as evidence so nobody really knows how accurate their recollection of the events are.

The only thing I'd like to know is, why was the second phone call they made to the press? Why not the local church? Was the mother so frightened & confused that she thought the only way to get help was to go public in the hope or was it attention she was seeking? Her demeanor says no to attention seeking but she was experiencing extreme stress at the time and stress can severely mess with the mind.

I love when things can't be explained, especially paranormal activity but it's getting to the point where the majority of things can be explained thanks to the bleddy scientists
I don't think there will be another interesting documentary such as the Enfield poltergeist for a long time which is sad for the brain & imagination well, mine anyway. ;D

*Edited because of mistakes.

[morganp]

I thiink you're quite right there Den. Grosse and Playfair are to be commended on their documentation of the events that played out during this case but it was very much limited to observation, notes, basic camera work and subjective interpretation of the phenomena.

In many respects it's a very complex case that needs to be properly analysed on several levels by psychologists, scientists and experts like Chris French and Wiseman. Like most Polt cases there were deep emotional issues at work between the main protagonists that I feel didn't get the depth of investigation that the events warranted.

Unfortunately the river has time has put a distance between the then and now and we are limited to speculation and the evidence documented at the time. But it remains a very interesting and fascinating case over thirty five years later.

morganp

[den]

Y'know when I think about it, I'm glad that it all took place in the 70's. I kinda like the fact that we have been left to make up our own minds about what happened in the bits that are unexplainable