Between 1977 and 1979, a seemingly ordinary London home was allegedly tormented by the Enfield poltergeist — and dozens of witnesses backed up the claims.
The Enfield haunting began with a bang — literally. In the summer of 1977, Peggy Hodgson heard loud noises coming from her daughters’ room, upstairs at their house at 284 Green Street, in Enfield, North London. Hodgson went upstairs to investigate and to tell the girls, 12-year-old Margaret and 11-year-old Janet, to quiet down and go to bed — only to find them cowering in fear.
The girls breathlessly told their mother that some unseen force was dragging a chest of drawers across the room, pushing it toward their bedroom door as if it wanted to trap them in the room. At first, Peggy dismissed the girls’ story as nonsense. But then she witnessed the chest of drawers slide across the floor all on its own. To make matters even stranger, Peggy couldn’t move the chest of drawers herself, no matter how hard she tried.
That was terrifying enough, but then the family — Peggy, her daughters, and her two younger sons — started hearing knocking noises throughout the entire house. They quickly fled and reported these chilling incidents to their neighbor, and soon even enlisted the help of the police.
TwitterThe house at 284 Green Street, where the true story behind The Conjuring 2 allegedly took place.
For 18 months afterward, the hauntings continued. In the end, more than two dozen people — from police officers to lawyers to paranormal investigators — claimed to have witnessed bizarre events unfold inside the house. These included furniture flipping over, cups suddenly filling with water, random fires, levitations, and more. Whatever was haunting the Hodgson family seemed to especially target 11-year-old Janet, who began to speak with a deep voice, even when investigators taped her mouth shut.
The Enfield haunting eventually attracted the attention of famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who flew to London in 1978 to see what was happening for themselves. Their investigation, which was dramatized in the 2016 film The Conjuring 2, concluded that there was indeed a paranormal presence at the family’s Enfield home.
Ed Warren later said: “Now, you couldn’t record the dangerous, threatening atmosphere inside that little house. But you could film the levitations, teleportations, and dematerializations of people and objects that were happening there — not to mention the many hundreds of hours of tape recordings made of these spirit voices speaking out loud in the rooms.”
This is the true story of the Enfield haunting, the poltergeist that plagued the Hodgson family between 1977 and 1979.
Discover the story of the Enfield haunting that inspired The Conjuring 2
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