The Enfield Voices – When the Walls Began to Speak

It was August 1977, in the small North London town of Enfield, when the Hodgson family began hearing strange noises in the night. At first, it was nothing more than faint knocking on the walls — soft taps echoing through the rooms of their modest council house on Green Street.

But as the days went on, those knocks grew louder… and angrier.

The family of five — Peggy Hodgson, a single mother, and her four children — didn’t know what to think. Maybe it was the old pipes. Maybe the wind. But when furniture started moving on its own, even Peggy couldn’t deny that something sinister was happening inside her home.


The First Night of Fear:

One night, as Peggy tucked her daughters, Janet (11) and Margaret (13), into bed, she heard a loud crash from their room. She rushed in — only to see the dresser sliding across the floor by itself, stopping inches from the door as if trying to trap them inside.

The girls screamed. Peggy pushed the heavy piece of furniture back, only to watch it move again — as though invisible hands were pushing from the other side.

Terrified, she ran to a neighbor’s house. The police were called. When two officers arrived, they too witnessed something they couldn’t explain: a chair moved across the room, untouched. One of them later testified, “It moved approximately four feet across the floor — and no one was near it.”

That night marked the beginning of what would become Britain’s most famous haunting.


The Voices Begin:

Over the next few weeks, chaos consumed the Hodgson home. Toys flew through the air. Doors slammed without warning. Janet was sometimes thrown from her bed by an unseen force.

But then came something new — something far more terrifying.

Janet began speaking in a deep, gravelly male voice, one that didn’t sound like her at all. The voice claimed to be Bill Wilkins, a man who said he had died in the house years earlier. “I went blind,” the voice said once. “Then I had a hemorrhage and I died in that chair in the corner.”

Researchers from the Society for Psychical Research were called in. One of them, Maurice Grosse, recorded hundreds of hours of audio inside the house. You can still hear those tapes today — the deep, unnatural voice of “Bill,” coming from an 11-year-old girl.

When scientists tried to explain it, they said maybe Janet was faking it, using her vocal cords in a strange way. But doctors who examined her said it was impossible for a child to produce such sounds for long periods without damaging her throat.

And Janet did it for hours.


The Investigations:

News spread fast. The media surrounded the house, and soon, photographers began documenting strange happenings — objects flying, curtains twisting, toys levitating midair. One photo in particular, published in the Daily Mirror, appeared to show Janet being lifted into the air by invisible hands, her face frozen in terror.

Skeptics accused the family of hoaxing the whole thing. But investigators who lived in the house for weeks reported seeing and hearing things that defied logic.

One night, a large iron fireplace ripped itself from the wall and flew across the room, narrowly missing a reporter. Another time, a cross hanging on the wall began spinning, and the temperature in the room dropped to freezing.

But perhaps the most disturbing incident came when Janet began speaking multiple voices at once — overlapping, whispering, mocking.

Recordings from that night still send chills down the spine. In one clip, the voice said:

“They think I’m a joke. But I am real. You’ll see.”



The Poltergeist’s Last Words:

By 1979, the haunting began to fade. The activity slowly decreased, and life in the Hodgson home returned to a fragile normal.

Years later, Janet claimed that she had been possessed, that something dark had taken control of her. She said she remembered being pulled from her bed, feeling cold hands grip her neck, and waking up hours later in different rooms.

In interviews as an adult, Janet admitted that she and her sister sometimes exaggerated things to “keep the investigators interested” — but she swore that most of it really happened.

Even Maurice Grosse, the main researcher, insisted until his death that he had seen genuine paranormal activity. “It was real,” he said. “I saw things move that could not have moved by human hands.”


Echoes from Enfield:

Today, the house at 284 Green Street still stands. Families have lived there since, most reporting nothing unusual — but a few tenants say they sometimes feel watched, or hear faint tapping in the walls.

The case became so infamous that it inspired books, documentaries, and even a movie — “The Conjuring 2.”

But while Hollywood dramatized it, the truth remains darker.

The Enfield haunting wasn’t just about ghosts — it was about a family crushed under fear, grief, and something no one could fully explain.

Whether it was a hoax, mass hysteria, or a real haunting, one thing is certain: the walls of that small London house once spoke — and the world listened.

Even now, late at night, paranormal investigators claim that if you play the old recordings backward, you can hear another whisper — not Janet’s, not Bill’s, but something deeper.

Something that says,

“I’m still here.”