The house is a council house at 284 Green Street, Enfield, in north London. In August 1977 a single mother, Peggy Hodgson, lived there with her four children: Margaret, 13, Janet, 11, Johnny, 10, and Billy, 7. That month the family began to report that the furniture was moving on its own.
This is the case behind The Conjuring 2 (2016), directed by James Wan. The record holds a family’s account of knocking, thrown objects and a voice that lasted into 1979; two investigators from the Society for Psychical Research who stayed with it for more than a year; a signed statement from a police officer; a set of newspaper photographs; Maurice Grosse’s tape recordings; and, from Janet, a later admission that a small share of it was faked. What it does not hold is agreement about the rest.
What the family said happened
The family said it began with sounds and furniture. There was knocking. Furniture moved across rooms with nobody near it. Objects were thrown, or were found where they could only have landed by being thrown.
Then the reports centered on Janet, the second daughter. The family said she was thrown from her bed, and at times described her as floating above it. In the months that followed, a voice began to speak through her: gruff, male, nothing like a girl’s. It gave itself a name, Bill Wilkins, and said that he had died in the house.
That is the core of the account, and every retelling since has started from it. Each piece of it comes from the people who lived there, and some of it from people who came to watch.
The two men from the Society
The Society for Psychical Research had been examining reports like these since 1882. Two of its members, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, took the Enfield case and did not let it go. They spent more than a year on it, returning to the house and recording what they could.
Playfair wrote the case up as This House Is Haunted, published in 1980. It is the fullest account from inside the investigation, written by one of the two men who stayed longest, and it is the book most later versions draw on, directly or not. Read it knowing where its author stood: in the house, beside the family, over many months.
Grosse’s contribution was the tape. He recorded the household, the questions and the answers, and the voice. Those recordings outlasted both men, and they matter again at the end of this story.
A constable and a photographer
Two people from outside the family and outside the investigation left records that are still cited. Carolyn Heeps, a police constable called to the house, signed a statement that she saw a chair move across the floor. It is one chair and one floor, in front of one officer. It is quoted in almost every telling of the case because of who signed it.
Graham Morris, a photographer for the Daily Mirror, took the photographs of Janet apparently in mid-air. They are the images most people know from the case, and they reward being looked at as frames rather than as a story. They show a girl off the mattress, limbs in motion, at a single instant. A still photograph cannot show how a body got into the air, whether it was lifted or launched from the bed, and the pictures have been read both ways ever since. We look at images like these, frame by frame, in our footage section.
About two percent
Janet grew up, and in later interviews she said some of it had been faked. She and Margaret, she said, staged a small share of the incidents, “about two percent” in her words, to see whether the investigators would catch them. They always did, she said.
That admission cuts two ways, and both sides of the argument have used it. To those who doubt the case, it shows that the girls could fake phenomena and were willing to. To those who don’t, it shows that the investigators caught the fakes, which suggests the rest was not produced the same way. Janet’s own number holds both halves at once.
Two claims from the case, set against what the record itself shows:
| Claimed | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Janet was thrown from her bed and floated above it | Graham Morris’s photographs show her off the mattress at a single instant; a still frame cannot show how she got airborne |
| A chair moved across the floor with nobody touching it | A signed statement from PC Carolyn Heeps says she saw one chair move, on one floor, in front of one officer |
| A gruff male voice, “Bill Wilkins,” spoke through Janet | Maurice Grosse’s tapes hold a voice; nothing on the reels says who was speaking |
The doubt did not come only from outside. Anita Gregory, also of the Society for Psychical Research, was among the skeptics who believed that much of what happened at Green Street was fabricated. The society’s own members did not agree about the case, and the disagreement is part of the record, not a footnote to it.
What the Warrens actually did
Ed and Lorraine Warren, the American investigators at the center of the Conjuring films, visited Enfield briefly in 1978. Playfair said they stayed about a day and that their role was minor.
In The Conjuring 2 they are the heart of the story, and Enfield becomes a chapter in theirs. That is the largest distance between the film and the record, and it is the first thing to know before reading one against the other. The film’s Enfield is built around two people who, by the investigator’s account, passed through; the record’s Enfield is built around a family and two men from London who stayed.
The case on screen
- August 1977 The Hodgson family, at 284 Green Street, reports furniture moving on its own.
- 1978 Ed and Lorraine Warren visit Enfield briefly; Playfair says their role was minor.
- 1979 The reported events die down; the case closes.
- 1980 Guy Lyon Playfair publishes This House Is Haunted.
- 2015 The Enfield Haunting, a British television drama.
- 2016 The Conjuring 2 puts the Warrens at the center of the story.
- 2023 The Enfield Poltergeist, a documentary series built from Grosse’s own tapes.
Three productions have told the story. The Enfield Haunting (2015) was a British television drama. The Conjuring 2 (2016), James Wan’s film, moved the Warrens to the center. The Enfield Poltergeist (2023) is a documentary series, and the closest of the three to the source: it is built from Grosse’s own tape recordings. Our films section follows the other true stories that reached the screen.
Each version chose a narrator. The drama chose the investigators, the feature chose the Warrens, and the documentary chose the tape, which is the only narrator that was in the house the whole time it was running.
The tapes
For anyone who wants to know what happened at 284 Green Street, the tapes are where the case is strongest and where it stays open. They hold the household as it sounded then: the family, the questions put by the investigators, and the voice that called itself Bill Wilkins.
A tape is not a verdict. It records a sound, not where the sound came from or what made it. What a recorder picks up, and what it cannot, is set out in our guide to ghost hunting equipment; why a household like this one gets called a poltergeist case at all is in what is a ghost.
The voice is still on the reels, rough and male, saying it died in the house. Nothing on the reels says who was speaking.