This show is sponsored by Better Help Online Therapy. Visitbetterhelp dot com. Forward slash Unexplained one zero because honestly, being a human can be exhausting. You're listening to Unexplained, Season six, Episode four, The Widening Gyre, Part three of three. Morris and Guy watched from the back of the kitchen, along with Peggy and Margaret, as Janet sat in silence at the table with a look of extreme concentration on her face.
In front of her lay a thin strip of metal on which an electrical sensor known as a strain gage had been attached, which in turn fed out to pulse counter. Sat beside Janet was David Robertson, a student of physics at London's Burkbeck University, who kept his eyes fixed firmly on the counter reading. David had joined the investigation at the Hodgson's home in early December nineteen seventy seven at the request of Professor John holsted one of his teachers
at Burkebeck. Holstedt had been contacted by Guy on account of the work he'd done a few years earlier examining the apparent psychic abilities of paranormal celebrity Uri Geller, in particular his supposed ability to bend metal with his mind. David, who'd agreed to spend a week living with the family to monitor the strange activity, had designed the metal strip test to see if Janet had similar powers. After five minutes of trying, however, the reading remained unchanged. Janet sighed loudly.
I'm bored, she said, turning to leave the table, when suddenly a metal tin on top of the fridge bounced into the air, causing them all to flinch. Did you see it, said David with excitement. Yes, said Morris. It happens all the time. But David wasn't talking about the tin jumping. He was pointing to the counter. Just when the tin moved, he explained, the reading went up. Then, thinking quickly, David instructed Janet and Margaret to go upstairs.
As the girls duly disappeared out of the door, The others looked on with amazement as the reading on the counter began to fluctuate the further away they got. Then, just as the girl's footsteps could be heard entering the bedroom above. As they drew closer and closer to the area by the kitchen table, the reading began to fluck
eight once again. David Robertson's arrival at two hundred and eighty four Green Street marked a renewed effort to uncover the true nature of what exactly was happening there, as Guy and Maris continue to invite people to the house
provided they had a scientific interest in the case. Though many of the events seemed to suggest to Guy and Morris the Janet was somehow psychically responsible, the recent knocking, communications and strange mutterings of Margaret in her sleep had for them considerably strengthened the other tantalizing possibility that they
were potentially dealing with genuine spirits of the dead. On the night of December tenth, it was the turn of psychologists Anita Gregory and doctor John Beloff, who were also members of the Society for Psychical Research, to make their
assessment of the events. Things began routinely enough, with the usual knocking sounds and objects being flung about the place, then later with Gregory and Belof joining the others on the landing outside the bedrooms, they all listened to the sound of Janet and Margaret being seemingly flung out of the bed by an invisible force, since nothing happened in any one's direct line of sight. However, Gregory and Belov remained deeply unimpressed throughout, even less so when the barking began.
It had started a few days previously after Janet agreed to undergo a session of hypnosis, during which she claimed to have heard the sound of a dog barking while she and the family were away in Clacton on Sea. Not long after this session, the barking was then heard in the Hodgson's house, occurring intermittently whenever Janet was around. As yet another bark was heard coming from the girl's bed, Morris couldn't help but feel frustrated by Gregory and Belov's
distinct lack of interest. Of course, he knew how suspicious it all seemed, the way they were always forced to be out of the room whenever anything substantial happened, but to dismiss it all on account of one evening's observations seemed distinctly unscientific to him. Having finally had enough, Morris headed into the bedroom and demanded that Charlie, the name they decided to give, whatever it was that was communicating with them, make the sound of the bark in a
different bedroom. Maurice stood completely still, keeping both Janet and Margaret in his sights, as the others outside the room waited with bated breath for the sound to come again. After a few minutes of silence, however, Maurice gave up and then turned to leave the room, but just then another two bark rang out from behind him. It came from under Janet's bed, said Margaret, looking suddenly scared. Well, if you can whistle and bark, maybe you can speak,
said Morris into the air. Gone say my name. The girls stared blankly up at Morris from under their covers as he waited expectantly for a reply, but nothing came back. Back on the landing, Morris was in the process of filling Gregory and Belof in on what else had been happening when a strange gruff sound was heard coming from the other side of the door. It said Morris shouted Janet. This was followed by a flurry of activity as Janet's
bed was heard creaking and rattling. Telling the others to quiet and down, Morris called out again for the boys to say something gross came back. The reply in a strange, doglike rasp. Then Morris asked Charlie to tell them their actual name. Joe came back the rough barked reply, Joe Willikins. It was the same name that Margaret had said out loud the week before when apparently talking in her sleep, the name of a man who'd supposedly died in the
house twelve years before. Though Anita, Gregory and doctor Beloff remained convinced that the girls were merely playing a trick on everyone, Morris and Guy persisted with their questions to the voice as it came to be known, which only seemed to grow in confidence as the days went by. At first, the exchanges only took place at night, and always from outside the bedroom. Over time, however, they were able to into the bedroom to continue speaking with it.
It quickly became clear that the voice was coming from Janet. However, both Morris and Guy were adamant that when it came, the shape of her mouth never corresponded to the words that came out of it, as if they theorized something was using her vocal chords to speak. We often talk about how the advent of streaming has revolutionized the way we engage with audio and visual content, placing countless numbers of films, TV shows, and music tracks at our fingertips.
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Although it was hard not to suspect Janet was merely making the raspy voice herself Morris and Guy were continually perplexed at how a child could keep up such as charade for three hours at a time without any hint of wear on her vocal courts. It was all the more strange when the children started talking to it too, including Janet, who seemed to switch seamlessly from her own gentle,
higher voice to the other, strange and unnerving rasp. The voice's language was often coarse and explicit, to a marked contrast to Janet's far more childish manner. In time, the voice would claim to be other identities, including a man
called Fred and a five year old boy called Tommy. Mostly, it would claim to be a seventy two year old man named Bill Wilkins, who explained that he traveled to the house from nearby Durrance Park Cemetery to see his family, but had been left saddened when he arrived to find they'd all gone. While Morris and Guy debated the significance of the bizarre voice, David Robertson, who was still staying with the family at the time, set his sights on
another experiment. Having been intrigued by Margaret and Janet's claims that they were being molested by invisible forces. David asked Janet to try and harness the force somehow, either through her own power or that of whatever apparent entity was doing it to her, and see if she could use it to levitate. With Janet in the bedroom and David outside, David suggested she begin by bouncing up and down on
her bed to see what might happen. After a short bout of jumping, Janet cried out that it was working. When David tried to get into the room to witness it, however, the door suddenly refused to budge. By the time he made it inside, Janet was back sitting down on the bed. It was Peggy, Nottingham's idea, who joined soon after from next door to give Janet a red pen, suggesting that she draw a line around the light fitting on the ceiling Janet couldn't possibly reach from the bed, as proof
that she had indeed levitated. With David, Peggy and Margaret back out on the landing, David gave Janet the signal to try it again, then pressed his ear to the door and listened intently to the creeks and strains of the bed as Janet began to bounce. Once more. At the same time, two doors down, a neighbor's dog became suddenly agitated and ran to the back door, barking wildly.
Unable to get the dog to calm down, the neighbor opened the door and watched with confusion as it ran straight out into the garden toward the fence they shared with the hodge Sun's garden. As the dog started to scrape at the fence and continued barking in the direction of the Hodgson's house, the neighbor gazed into their garden, but no one was there. Back upstairs on the Hodgson's land, David, Peggy, and Margaret listened as the creaks and strains continued from
the other side of the door. When suddenly they stopped. Janet asked David, but there was no reply. David hurriedly tried the handle, but once again the door wouldn't budge Janet. He cried out again, when suddenly they heard the sound of something heavy falling to the ground and the door finally opened. Inside the room, they found a breathless Janet lying exhausted on her bed, while up on the ceiling, a red line had now appeared around the light fitting
I've been through the wall, said Janet. Finally, as Janet later explained, after apparently leather tating in the air, she'd suddenly found herself inside what she took to be Peggy Nottingham's bedroom, so there was no way to verify this. When Peggy went back home soon after, she found the book Fun Games for Children, last seen sitting on the mantelpiece in Janet and Margaret's bedroom on her bedroom floor.
Unsure what to make of it all, David then handed Janet a small red cushion, asking her or the entity to try and do something with that too. Taking the cushion, Janet headed back to the bedroom as David and the others took their places on the landing. Moments later, out in the street, local resident John Rainbow was just about to walk past the Hodgson's home when out of nowhere, he saw something appear suddenly at the corner of the roof.
It took a moment to comprehend what he was looking at before he realized it was a small red cushion that appeared to have materialized out of thin air. Hazel Short, the road crossing supervisor for the school opposite the house,
was also nearby. At the time, Hazel was collecting her stop sign, which she kept in the Hodgson's front garden, when she noticed the cushion, too, sitting red and stark against the dull gray of the slate roof, when all of a sudden a clattering from above drew her attention to Janet's bedroom window, from behind which a number of
books were being flung against the glass. John Rainbow had seen them two only from his perspective, they hadn't just hit the window, they'd also circled in mid air around the room, having crossed the road. Hazel then looked back up to Janet's window, just in time to catch sight of the young girl seemingly bouncing up and down on her bed. What was strange, however, as Hazel recounted it a few days later, was that she was lying completely horizontal,
as if she was asleep in mid air. It was weird, too, thought Hazel, how the curtains seemed to be blowing up into the room at the time, even though the window was shut. Arriving later in the afternoon of the fifteenth, Morris and Guy were understandably disappointed to have missed all the drama. Themselves before long. However, with David Robertson's help, they quickly turned their attention to first trying to figure out if Janet had simply thrown the cushion on to
the roof herself. Interestingly, while the men found the window to be incredibly stiff and loud to open, David claimed not to have heard it opening at all in the time between Janet receiving the cushion and it ending up on the roof, and when they tried to throw the cushion out themselves, neither of them were able to get it to reach the spot where it had eventually been found.
As for the apparent bursts of levitation, the addition of Hazel Short and John Rainbow's accounts of what they'd seen to add to Janet's own version of events certainly made for compelling listening. Still suspicious, however, that Janet was responsible for the voice, which was talking more and more each day, The men attempted a number of crude experiments to see if they could allay their suspicions once and for all.
Over the next few days, they tried everything from taping up her mouth to having her keep water in it for long periods of time, none of which stopped the voice from speaking throughout it all. With Morris and Guy remembering why they agreed to help the family in the first place, they did their best to rear sure them at each turn that things would one day return to normal. In truth, however, they could make no such promises, having
assumed the activity would end after only eight weeks. By late December, they were approaching a fifth month of incessant activity, and the most troubling moment of all was still yet to occur. Despite everything, spirits were high in the Hodgson's home as Christmas approached, with Peggy doing her best to
make things as cheery and exciting for the children as possible. Certainly, the tinsel covered Christmas tree and shiny decorations that hung throughout the house did much to mask the turmoil of the last few months. This homely facade was soon punctured, however, when on the morning of December twenty third, Janet to feed her two goldfish, only to find them both floating at the top of the tank. Two days later, on Christmas Day morning, the children awoke to find their pet Budrigar,
also dead in its cage. It wasn't long after the family had finished Christmas lunch with them once again gathered together in the living room when Janet, who was sitting by the window, gave out a horrified scream as she clawed desperately at her neck. It took a moment for the others to realize that one of the curtains was now completely wrapped around it, as if it were trying
to strangle her. Terrified, Peggy rushed over to help, and together with Janet, they finally managed to pull the curtain away, leaving a stunned Janet seemingly gasping for breath. Then a few days later, it happened again, this time apparently witnessed by Peggy and Margaret, who both claimed to see the curtain come right off its wire before it once again
wrapped itself around Janet's neck. The attacks continued in Janet's bedroom, where as Peggy and Margaret also later described it, from out of nowhere, Janet was grabbed by her bedsheets and dressing gown, which then wrapped tightly around her, as the rest of the family could only look on in utter horror. As the nights grow darker and the air begins to chill. There's no better streaming surface to satiate your horror needs
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To try Shudder free for thirty days, go to shudder dot com and use promo code unexplained that's SHU d d E R dot com. Thankfully, the terrifying incidences with the curtains and sheets ended abruptly after a few days, and with the rest of the strange phenomena appearing to have died down, the family had cause for optimism as
they approached the new year together. In the evening of New Year's Eve, as midnight drew near, Peggy watched with joy as her children danced around the living room forgetting for a moment or the trouble of the last year, when she felt a strange, ominous feeling come over her and the familiar slight pressure at the front of her head. It was something she'd become aware of more and more in the last few months, like an early warning sign that something strange was going to happen. Then she heard
the banging. Looking up with dread, she saw the cupboard was now rocking back and forth, banging loudly against the wall. With the weary sense of inevitability, Peggy sent Margaret next door to apologize to the Nottinghams for the noise. Moments later, Margaret returned with Vic Nottingham and a friend of his who had come to see if they could help. As she later told it to Morris and Guy. When Vic
went upstairs to investigate further. Peggy and the children were stood in the living room with Vic's friend when suddenly the seven foot long sideboard crashed to the floor, followed immediately by the sofa and two armchairs being tipped over. The next thing, Peggy knew she was being bombarded with fruit from a bowl that had also crashed to the floor, while the curtains began rattling so hard they came down
at one end. With a peculiar sense of embarrassment as much as anything else, a weary Peggy told Vic and his friend to go back next door and enjoy the rest of their New Year's celebrations. Then, turning back to the room, she and the children simply cleared up the mess. Then the voice started up again, claiming that Tommy, the five year old boy, had done it all. No sooner had it spoken than the Christmas tree was suddenly flung from its stand on the table right across the room.
By the end of the night, the rest of the Christmas decorations had been torn down to the litany of events that played the Hodgson's at two hundred and eighty four Green Street stretched well into the New year, and though they never quite reached the extremes of that tumultuous December, they did continue to evolve. In mid January, Margaret claimed she found the word shit written in excrement on the bathroom wall after something tapped her on the shoulder when
she was in there. A number of similar incidences continued over the next few months, in a particularly vulgar ratchet up of bizarre occurrences. More self described mediums were also brought in, with varying degrees of apparent success, though nothing seemed to bring an end to the seemingly endless disturbances.
After visiting the family again over the festive period to give them some presents, Daily Mirror senior reporter George Fallows was surprised to see how things had escalated since writing that first article about the family. A second article was duly commissioned, this time to be written by features writer Brian Rimmer. During his interviews with the family, to which it took an expert ventriloquist to assess if Janet was
indeed responsible for the strange voices. It was claimed that Margaret admitted to them finally that she and Janet had been making the whole thing up all along. No sooner
had this occurred. However, Janet and Margaret was said to have then run round to their abor's house, where they complained through tears to Peggy Nottingham about how the men from the Mirror had bullied them into saying things they didn't really mean a number of further attempts were made by Morris and Guy to have the strange voices analyzed, but nothing concrete was ever determined, and still the strange events continued, with Peggy Hodgson recording as many as one
hundred and fifty five different incidences of knockings, voices and objects being thrown in April alone, all the while Janet was becoming more and more despondent. In June nineteen seventy eight, it was decided that the best course of action would be to have her removed from the environment entirely and placed in the care of a group of Roman Catholic nuns, where she'd stayed when her mother, Peggy collapsed back in November. In late July, Janet was then admits to the Maudesley
Institute of Neuropsychiatry for further investigations. Four days later, Guy and journalist Rosalind Morris from the BBC went to speak with Janet, having not seen her for the past six weeks. When Janet was brought out to meet them, they found her completely unrecognizable, appearing far healthier and relaxed than they'd
ever seen her before. As they talked to her about the events of the last year, it was clear that she had little interest in what had happened, preferring to change the subject at any given opportunity and promising them both that nothing more would happen. In one candid moment, however, she pondered the origins of her unusual power, if that's what it was, believing it only manifested when other people like her mum were around to make her frustrated and angry.
Since coming to stay at the hospital, she said, the power had no opportunity to build up. After undergoing months of tests, Janet was found to be completely physically normal, with no sign of damage to the brain or evidence of epilepsy as some had suspected. In September, after three months away, she returned home replenished and demonstrably happier than when she'd left, and despite some minor flare ups of activity, including apparent sightings of old men, and the occasional piece
of furniture being knocked over. By the end of October, the unusual events that had so plagued the Hodgson family for over a year finally came to an end. For Guy Playfair, it was to be the last of his major efforts investigating such phenomena. Though many have questioned the veracity of its contents, his nineteen eighty book This House Is Haunted, The True Story of the Enfield Poltergeist, remains
the most prominent on the matter. For Maurice Gross, the events at Enfield proved only the beginning in what would become a lifelong search for evidence of the paranormal. Having been thoroughly inspired by everything he'd seen, and throughout it all, never far from his mind were thoughts of his daughter Janet, having noticed a number of strange things happening at his home.
During the investigation at Green Street, he'd even come to wander if Janet had somehow been guiding him throughout the whole process, perhaps even using it as a way to communicate with him. And though he never did receive concrete proof that his daughter's spirit had somehow survived her tragic accident, one final moment at Enfield gave him care to remain hopeful. It came after the last of the apparent mediums called in to help the family had made their assessment of
the situation. Dono Gamelig Mailink came over from the Netherlands to visit the family, along with journalist Peter leif Heber, the editor of a magazine about psychical research that Guy had been a fan of. Though Morris and Guy didn't think much of the shy Donoh at first, after he spent a few quiet hours in the house and some time with Janet Hodgson, he eventually gave his thoughts on
the matter. Strangely, as he told Morris and Guy later, he couldn't help but feel that Morris, who he apparently knew nothing about, was somehow connected with it all in a way they hadn't yet realized. As he went on to explain, he'd sensed many things in the Hodgson's home, amongst them the presence of a twenty four year old
woman who's being there he couldn't quite explain. Then it suddenly occurred to Morris his Janet had been twenty two years old when she died in nineteen seventy six, which would have made her twenty four when Donno visited the house. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now do so via Patreon To receive access to add three episodes. Just go to patron dot com
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