The photographer who took the famous photo of a girl ‘floating’ in an Enfield house and allegedly being chased by a poltergeist has denied she ‘just jumped’ and believes she had telekinesis powers like those of Stephen King’s Carrie.
The Hodgson family were at the center of a media frenzy in the 1970s when their council house at 284 Green Street was allegedly haunted by former tenant Bill Wilkins who had died there.
Peggy Hodgson’s 11-year-old daughter, a single mother of four, found herself at the epicenter of the unknown forces supposedly present in the house, as furniture flew and Bill’s raspy voice was channeled through the young girl.
The Enfield Poltergeist phenomenon inspired the Hollywood horror film The Conjuring 2, several documentaries, and next month The Enfield Haunting with Catherine Tate will hit the West End.
Photographer Graham Morris was in his twenties when, in 1977, while working for the Daily Mirror, he was sent to the semi-detached house with a reporter at around midnight after their neighbours, Vic and Peggy Nottingham, called for help when the terrified Hodgson had family sought refuge with them.
The children were returned to their home, but it was only when Janet walked in that spooky events began, the now 69-year-old told MailOnline.
Photographer Graham Morris captured Janet Hodgson appearing to ‘float’ in the bedroom of her council house in Green Street, Enfield, while her siblings cowered in their bed
The nursery was covered with posters of Starsky and Hutch where many of the events took place
“Scared, things started flying all over the place,” he said. ‘I stand in the corner and look through my lens. I can see everything. Nobody throws this stuff. Nobody does anything. They don’t try to do anything for fun or for laughs or whatever.
“They were all, especially the children, absolutely shocked.”
Terrified Janet, her 13-year-old sister Margaret, and Johnny, 11, began screaming, crying and biting their fingernails as a Lego brick flew and hit Mr Morris in the head, leaving a nasty lump above his right eyebrow for four days .
Their brother Billy, seven, was at boarding school at the time.
Fascinated by what happened, the skeptical Mr Morris returned home for the next 18 months – even as The Mirror dropped the story – for up to four evenings a week, sometimes helping the children with their homework.
The family’s problems left “smart” Janet barely able to communicate with her siblings and mother, while her sister “cried whenever she was spoken to.”
The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), full of “very smart guys”, got involved to document what happened, while experts from universities also tried to solve what happened to the family “desperate to find a end’.
A cast-iron bed fell on its side and a fireplace was torn from the wall – but investigators’ attention was drawn to Janet when they said they discovered she was ‘floating’.
284 Green Street, in Enfield, was believed to have been haunted by former tenant Bill Wilkins, who was said to have made his voice heard through Janet
Paranormal researcher Maurice Grosse (right) of The Society for Psychical Research was called in to try to find out what was happening at home
An iron bed fell on its side and a fireplace was torn from the wall – but investigators’ attention was drawn to Janet when they say they discovered she was ‘floating’
To prove their theory, a camera on a tripod was set up in the corner of the nursery, activated by a button on a long cable running to the living room, while an audio recording was also made.
‘As soon as I hear something, like a bed spring shaking or someone moaning or screaming, a bang or a bang… whatever. I pressed the button,” Mr. Morris said.
This created the famous photo seen around the world of Janet supposedly ‘floating’ and ‘flying through the air’. Mr Morris recalled hearing a scream or shout and then nothing for a second before a huge crash.
“There was no way she was doing this for fun,” he said. ‘You have to be angry if you really want to do something like that. It was a completely darkened room. When she was jumping, she would launch herself into a brick wall or a pitch black door.”
They ran upstairs and found Janet in a “mess,” collapsed on the floor on the other side of the bedroom.
He denies ever saying she was jumping and left it to the SPR experts to decide whether she was floating or not.
Mr. Morris has his own theory and openly admits that he does not believe in ghosts.
“I think this girl has some power,” he said.
He believes the house was not haunted because things always happened when Janet was there, whether at school, at the neighbors or in the shops.
Instead, he compared it to Stephen King’s character Carrie, who can move things with her mind by harnessing her telekinesis powers.
“(I think) Janet has this kind of kinetic energy, she’s really smart,” he said. ‘Like I said, she can’t talk to her dad – he’s not there – mom is too busy, her sister is crying, one brother has a speech impediment so bad I doubt she can even understand what he’s saying , and the other brother is talking. a special school.
“And she’s desperate for this… whatever it is. This energy, this power, whatever she has, over and over to communicate with people. And it comes out in different ways, with a kind of force. Like a kinetic energy where things are moving.”
Catherine Tate will star opposite David Threlfall in the West End production of The Enfield Haunting later this year
The Enfield Poltergeist saga has been the subject of many documentaries and drama series. Timothy Spall starred in Sky’s three-part miniseries The Enfield Haunting in 2015 (Photo: Juliet Stevenson, Timothy Spall and Matthew Macfadyen)
The series is based on the book This House Is Haunted by Guy Lyon Playfair
He doesn’t think the mystery of the ‘Enfield Poltergeist’ will be solved in his lifetime, but in a hundred years it will be considered something simple.
Mr Morris spoke to no one about what happened on Green Street, while his own family only discovered his involvement when they saw him in a documentary.
“The whole thing was too crazy, too weird… just too far away,” he said. ‘Everyone who heard about it wanted to be there to see it with their own eyes. They wouldn’t take anyone’s word for it. You just had to witness it yourself.
“I have very good friends, relatives and all kinds. They believe everything you say, but they had to go and look and they didn’t want to believe my word or the pictures. It was becoming, I’m afraid, a Victorian freak show.”
The year-and-a-half-long scary photos on Green Street have remained etched in Mr. Morris’ memory for the past four decades.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before or since,” he says before taking an audibly rapid breath.
‘It was just the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me. And that’s why I wanted to stay there and go through it and find out what it was – as much for me as anything else.”
Although he was initially scared on the first day after witnessing things floating and flying around, he feels that the period has hardened him from a child afraid of the dark to a fairly bulletproof sense of most things.
He chuckled: ‘You see those strange programs on TV where you have to sleep in a haunted house and you think, “Hey, come on. After Enfield it should be a piece of cake.”
Instead, he takes a scientific approach to things and laughs at Halloween movies. He even says he would probably be thrown out of the latest West End production of Enfield Haunting for giggling in the audience.
“This (Enfield) wasn’t Hollywood,” he said. “They didn’t have CGI. They (the Hodgson family) weren’t pretending.’
Mr Morris added: “There is something going on in that house that we haven’t discovered yet. We haven’t figured out yet what it is and how it happened.
“If that happens, we’ll all probably look pretty stupid and say, ‘I’m crazy, why didn’t I think of that?’ And that’s the thing, we just don’t know.
‘In the coming years we will all be doing it: teleporting or moving things with our fingers ten meters away. But we just don’t understand it.
“I don’t know how it works or how it happens, but I knew at the time that the kids weren’t letting these things happen on purpose. There could be a certain power, a force, a brainwave coming from one of them: Janet.”