Something Ghostly This Way Comes: The Enfield Poltergeist
In The Enfield Poltergeist, Jerry Rothwell uses over 250 hours of audio recordings made by paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse to revisit the case of 284 Green Street in Enfield, North London. There, for a period of eighteen months starting in August 1977, the Hodgson family witnessed furniture move of its own accord, objects get thrown across rooms, and heard disembodied voices speak.
Or did they?
Some investigators were convinced, others were not. In The Enfield Poltergeist, Jerry builds a replica of the Hodgson family’s house in order to recreate what – is alleged to have – happened, and he joins Matthew Sherwood to go behind-the-scenes of his film. They explore the mystery of poltergeists, disruptive activity that often centres on young people, the effect of the supposed hauntings on the Hodgson children, and how the Green Street case captured the imagination of the British press.
Jerry reflects on his own background and how it might have influenced his decision to make The Enfield Poltergeist. He and Matthew also discuss the high-level background of the British Society for Psychical Research, of which Maurice Grosse was a member.
Was 284 Green Street haunted? Is the question even relevant? Whatever your view, enter into the spirit of the season with The Enfield Poltergeist.
“I think what's interesting is... how and why do a people - a group of people in a house come to believe something. [This] for me says a lot about all kinds of things in our modern world... why do we believe what we believe?... the evidence for those things is as much in the stories we tell, and are told, as in, you know, the hard scientific phenomena.” – Jerry Rothwell
Time Stamps
00:00 – Trailer for The Enfield Poltergeist
01:31 – Matthew Sherwood introduces this episode’s guest, Jerry Rothwell
03:19 – Jerry explains what The Enfield Poltergeist is about
05:40 – Jerry discusses the background to the making of The Enfield Poltergeist
09:02 – Exploring Jerry’s recreation of 284 Green Street for the docu-series
10:04 – How Jerry got involved in the making of The Enfield Poltergeist
11:42 – What The Enfield Poltergeist offers viewers that other programmes about the same subject don’t
13:35 – Why Ed and Lorraine Warren barely appear in the series
14:41 – Did Jerry believe in ghosts or was he a sceptic before making The Enfield Poltergeist
16:24 – Jerry’s view of what really happened at 284 Green Street
17:12 – The profound impact the events at 284 Green Street had on all those there, especially the Hodgson girls
19:52 – Discussing the Society for Psychical Research
21:52 – Maurice Grosse, the investigator
24:13 – The Truth: Can we ever know it?
25:55 – What next for Jerry
Resources:
The Enfield Poltergeist
MovieMaker Magazine
Innersound Audio
Alamo Pictures
Connect with Jerry Rothwell
More from Factual America:
Are We Alone? UFO Encounters from around the World
Transforming the Planet: Discussing the Human Footprint
Last Flight Home: The Death and Life of Eli Timoner
Transcript for Factual America Episode 144: Something Ghostly This Way Comes: The Enfield Poltergeist
Matthew Sherwood 00:00 (01:31)
This is Factual America. I'm your host, Matthew Sherwood. Each week, I watch a hit documentary and then talk with the filmmakers and their subjects. Our topic today is the paranormal. Specifically, the seemingly supernatural events that took place at 284 Green Street in Enfield, North London. These have inspired fictional films such as The Conjuring 2, and still haunt people 46 years later. Join us in this Halloween edition of Factual America, as we talk with the award-winning director Jerry Rothwell, about how he turned 200 hours of recordings made in the house into a four-part docu-series that brings the events to life. Stay tuned.
Matthew Sherwood 00:45
Jerry Rothwell, welcome to Factual America. How are things with you?
Jerry Rothwell 00:49
Hi, Matthew, good to talk to you.
Matthew Sherwood 00:51
It's great to have you on. We're talking about The Enfield Poltergeist, a four-part docu-series, premieres on Apple TV Plus on October 27. So, welcome again to Factual America, and congratulations on the release of your doc. You must be pretty happy about that.
Jerry Rothwell 01:12
Yeah, I think it drops in 104 countries at the same time. So, I'm used to kind of making feature docs, which kind of come out in a much slower, a slower way through festivals. So, yeah, it's quite a new experience for me.
Matthew Sherwood 01:24
So, well, again, what - so, welcome again, and just for our listeners and viewers, many of them will have not - maybe not had a chance to see this yet. Maybe you can tell us what is The Enfield Poltergeist all about?
Jerry Rothwell 01:40 (3:19)
So, what's known as the kind of Enfield Poltergeist events were a set of events that happened in London in 1977. In August, end of August, 1977, a woman and her family started to kind of see strange phenomena in their house. I think it began with knocking that would kind of follow them around the house, and then furniture, heavy furniture started moving around the room, is what they reported. Then gradually over the next 18 months, more and more people visited this house; it was visited by, obviously, the kind of ghost hunters but also by journalists, by police, by physicists who are fascinated in these phenomena. And the phenomena kind of escalated. And in a way it's the story of those 18 months.
Matthew Sherwood 02:24
Okay, and maybe to get really basic here: what is a poltergeist?
Jerry Rothwell 02:29
Well, a poltergeist is a - it comes from the German word meaning a noisy spirit. And these phenomena which, you know, are kind of, as I say, kind of knockings, the movement of objects, sometimes people being thrown around, sometimes voices appearing, are things that have been experienced since - they've been reported, I think, since Roman times, or certainly since the Middle Ages, often centering on young people, particularly young teenage girls, and, you know, I don't think there's any kind of adequate explanation for them out there, or any definitive explanation.
Matthew Sherwood 03:06
Okay. And you have - I mean, there's even many of your subjects that come on: I think even one said it was even hard for her to define exactly what it is. But it is what you've just said, but I guess what ties them all together, all these events, is that you've got these noises, and family tensions, and children, and adolescents, basically.
Jerry Rothwell 03:30
Exactly, yeah, yeah. And I mean, in this case, you know, maybe you're about to say this, but, you know, for us, it was the fact that there were these 250 hours of tape recordings, which had been made during this period of time, that was the kind of starting point.
Matthew Sherwood 03:45
Yeah, well, I was gonna ask you about this. So, you dig deep into this one particular event, in Enfield, in North London, and, you know, why this particular case, and why now?
Jerry Rothwell 03:59 (5:40)
So, I think it's probably one of the most well-known and certainly well documented cases. I mean, I can remember as a 15 year old, this case hitting the front page of the Daily Mirror, which at the time was, like, the biggest selling newspaper in the U.K. So, a whole generation, my generation of teenagers, had our view of reality shattered by these events that were being reported from the house in Enfield. And then, you know, fast forward 45 years, my producer and I discovered that there are these tapes made by a British inventor called Maurice Grosse, who had his own reasons for being interested in the supernatural, or interested in, let's say paranormal phenomena, because I think he would say they must be natural phenomena, they can't be supernatural, there must be an explanation. And he set about incredibly diligently recording and taking notes. And I guess, why now. It's a story that's been revisited, you know, several times over the last 40 years, particularly in fiction, I think the difference with ours is what we're trying to do is assemble all this documentary material. We use a technique in the series where we started from these tapes, but then we thought, okay, well, if we build a replica of the house, and we kind of fill that with the sounds of these recordings, which are incredibly ambiguous, you know, sound is always, you know, makes you - demands images, but you can't necessarily tell where a sound is coming from. And then we work with actors to lip-sync the audio recording, so what you have is a series which has a kind of actuality about the sound and a layer of interpretation about the picture on top of that, and that felt like an appropriate way of thinking about, and dealing with, and exploring ghosts.
Matthew Sherwood 05:47
No, it's - and I have seen the, as we were discussing earlier, I have seen all four episodes; it's quite remarkable. I mean, must have a lot of fun as a documentarian to play...
Jerry Rothwell 05:58
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was certainly intense as a shoot. You know, an awful lot of material to do. But a really interesting thing to do, and kind of as the more and more we listened to and explored the tapes, you know, the more and more things you would notice, and the more and more it almost felt like the tapes, were directing the series, you know, someone moved from left to right - suddenly, you'd realise that, you know, an extra person was in the room, or, you know, that someone had moved from one side of the room to the other. And these things are kind of important when you're talking about unexplained phenomena. So, yeah, it was fascinating.
Matthew Sherwood 06:33
And what's interesting is also is that it's more than just a soundstage for recreation, it becomes almost - it also becomes a memory triggering device, as well for the subjects that end up showing up in your series.
Jerry Rothwell 06:48
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think in some ways it's like the actors are kind of haunted by these sounds. There's something really uncanny about this technique, but also, yeah, the series talks to people who actually went to the house and experienced it, and we take some of them back into this set, and use the set as a way of telling their stories.
Matthew Sherwood 07:08 (09:02)
And because as you said, and as you remember it as a 15 year old, this was extremely well documented at the time, certainly through Maurice Grosse's sound recordings, but also with the Daily Mirror's photography and stuff like that. So, you just literally, you had a photo and you recreated the bedrooms and the kitchen and the living room, didn't you?
Jerry Rothwell 07:32
That's right. Yeah, I mean, our production designer, Natalie O'Connor - Maurice was a very kind of diligent, scientific guy. So, one of the first things he did was a sort of architectural plan of the house, you know, with all measurements on it, where the furniture was and how far away it was, and if it moved, how far it was thought to have moved. And so, we were able to essentially use that plan as the starting point for our design, our set design. And then Natalie kind of - we had these photographs, which enabled us to source, you know, the wallpaper, the carpets, the pictures. Plus, we worked with Janet and Margaret who are the two young girls at the centre of the story, and they lent us things from the actual house. So, in the set, there are actually things that were in the house in Green Street. It's a strange hybrid of fiction and documentary.
Matthew Sherwood 08:18 (10:04)
So, you were saying you and, I think one of your producers came across these, is that how this all started? How did you become involved with the project?
Jerry Rothwell 08:27
Yeah, really from those tapes. I'm always interested when there is a kind of a large archival source to explore something, you know, perhaps an archival source that hasn't been looked at before. And, you know, particularly - I guess a lot of my documentaries are about the kind of point where, you know, reality and our ideas about reality meet, you know, what's in our heads and what's out there. And these tapes are kind of exactly on that line, you know, they're - what Maurice did was he would interview anyone who had experienced a phenomenon, often, immediately afterwards, you know, so you will have these kind of breathless comments on something that's just happened. But he also left the tape running, you know, he would just leave the tape running for, you know, half an hour, an hour at a time. So, you get the kind of context of family life, of occasionally a scream, a knock, or bang, something falling over. You know, and it felt the combination of these sounds and stories was just a really fruitful thing to explore in a documentary because documentaries are always about kind of what's real, you know, we always ask the question, what's real, and that hopefully is what the series does.
Matthew Sherwood 09:48
And for - I mean, as you already know, there are a lot of people who know about this story and will have watched the you know, the fictional films, and also, I'm sure there's loads of YouTube videos and stuff out there, but what is it that they're gonna see or hear that they haven't - that they've not experienced before, you think is the main point?
Jerry Rothwell 10:11 (11:51)
I mean, I guess because it's a documentary we try not to add the kind of, the flowerings of kind of horror on top of this story. You know, we try to stay true to what actually happened as reported or what was reported. And what we give people is, I suppose an enormous kind of array of the evidence that was used at the time and I think we leave an audience to make its own judgments about what was happening in the house.
Matthew Sherwood 10:41
Okay. I'm gonna give our listeners a quick break here, but we'll be right back with Jerry Rothwell, director of The Enfield Poltergeist, four-part docu-series, premieres on Apple TV Plus on October 27.
Factual America Midroll 10:58
You're listening to Factual America. Subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on Facebook, Instagram or X. To keep up-to-date with new releases for upcoming shows. Check out the show notes to learn more about the programme, our guests, and the team behind the production. Now back to Factual America.
Matthew Sherwood 11:16 (13:35)
Welcome back to Factual America. I'm here with Jerry Rothwell, award-winning director of The Enfield Poltergeist. It's a four-part docu-series, premieres on Apple TV Plus on October 27. So, we've been talking about these events in 1977. I think they then go into 1978 as well, with the Hodgson family in Enfield. One thing that struck me, maybe not too much of a spoiler alert, but, you know, you've already talked - this has inspired some fictional films, something like Conjuring 2, and what I noticed is that that's about Ed and Lorraine Warren, who are quite famous, but they barely get more than a mention in four hours' worth of filming! So, why is that?
Jerry Rothwell 12:06
Well, Ed and Lorraine Warren visited the house twice, I think. Maurice Grosse was there three, four days a week for 18 months, you know, so Maurice and Guy, his associate in this, really took on the bulk of the investigation. By the time Ed and Lorraine Warren turned up it was, I think, mid '78 was their first visit, maybe May '78, by which time actually the phenomena were largely over, you know. So, yeah, for us, it's the story of the kind of Maurice's investigation and of Maurice's encounter with the family, and it's not the Conjuring version.
Matthew Sherwood 12:54 (14:41)
But they had enough material to make a film out of it, obviously, and run with it, but - so, what were your thoughts on this subject going in? I mean, were you a believer, a sceptic?
Jerry Rothwell 13:06
I mean, I often wonder what attracted me to it. I think there's a thing, my grandfather was a vicar, and my mum grew up in an old vicarage. And as a child, she would tell me these stories about what she felt were the hauntings in this house. So, one night, I remember, she told me, she had woken up and her bed was entirely surrounded by the - all the furniture in the room had been moved to surround her bed.
Matthew Sherwood 13:32
Right.
Jerry Rothwell 13:33
So, I had these kinds of stories as a kid, and I guess, as a kid, you're always thinking, Well, you know, hang on, what really happened there? I wonder sometimes whether those kind of stories are the things that kind of has taken me into documentary making, into this thing where you're trying to find the truth of a situation amongst all of the stories that people tell about it. So, I guess that sort of, possibly is what attracted me to it, attracts me to it as a subject. Yeah, you know, I suppose I'm - you know, what we try and do in the series is kind of give space to both those who believe that the phenomena are supernatural, and to those that dismiss them altogether, and say that they're entirely kind of social, psychological explanations of this. You know, and for me, I don't kind of fall completely on either side of that, I think. You know, I think there are lots of possible explanations on either side of those arguments. I think at 40 years distance - I mean, one of the fascinating things about it is it's kind of intangible, and all we have is these stories.
Matthew Sherwood 14:42 (16:24)
Right. So, I mean, what do you think happened at 284 Green Street?
Jerry Rothwell 14:47
You're going to push me into it?! I've spent a long time trying to keep an audience on that knife edge between belief and disbelief! I don't want to diminish their experience. I actually couldn't - I don't think I could tell you. My answer would last, like, two hours, far longer than this podcast, and would waver between kind of one thing and another. It'd be 'but this, and then there's that'. And, you know, which I think is how a lot of people think about these things. I mean, I think one of the - you know, there's a great book, and it's called The Natural History of Ghosts, where the guy in his introduction says, you know, the kind of least interesting thing you can say about ghosts is whether they exist or not; you know, ghosts exist because people see them. And so, the question is, in a way, what do they mean, and why do we need them?
Matthew Sherwood 15:31 (17:19)
I mean, I think - I mean, I guess what is obviously true is that whatever you think, though, and what the docu-series shows is that all those who were involved were profoundly impacted by it.
Jerry Rothwell 15:45
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly for Jen and Margaret, who are at the centre of this. Yeah, it's profoundly affected their lives in various ways. You know, and some of that is because of the events themselves, and some of it is because of people's reactions to the events, you know, so of course, there's a fascination with this story. And often people don't really think about the impact of this story on two young girls, and the impact of the fascination as well.
Matthew Sherwood 16:12
And so, I mean, you've listened to all these tapes, you had all 200 hours, I imagine, for your sins. And you've then also now interviewed and encountered people who were in the rooms and in there, I mean, what struck you, let's say about Janet Hodgson, and her family, the family members who you were able to interview who're still around.
Jerry Rothwell 16:39
Yeah, I mean, I guess first of all, to say, you know, that most of those who visited the house came out absolutely kind of believing in the phenomena...
Matthew Sherwood 16:50
... something - yeah, oh, yeah.
Jerry Rothwell 16:51
... in something. It might be that there was a tendency of those who already believed in something to visit the house, which is probably not a scientific survey. And I kind of do dis - you know, I think people want to either say this is fraud, or it's supernatural, you know, and I think that the fraud, you know, the argument that these two young girls thought up in advance this whole schema and carried it off as a fraud, you know, to me is incredible, you know, you only got to spend a very short amount of time with Janet now to realise the impact it had on her, and to realise kind of her belief in it. So, yeah, I think that's just a kind of dead end. I think what's interesting is, you know, how does a - how and why do a people - a group of people in a house come to believe something, which, for me says a lot about all kinds of things in our modern world, you know, how do we come to - why do we believe what we believe? How do we form the opinions we form? What's the kind of evidence for them, and obviously, as much - the evidence for those things is as much in the stories we tell, and are told, as in, you know, the hard scientific phenomena.
Matthew Sherwood 18:04 (19:52)
And speaking of which, and I found to be a very - as someone who's not native to these lands - we're based here in the UK - the Society for Psychical Research seemed like such a quintessential British institution, but they are these people who are doing just this, that you also encountered, that were trying to bring the scientific method, up to a point, but then also, as you say, what do you believe, what is real, what isn't real, they also came with their own biases, both for and against, when they were examining all this.
Jerry Rothwell 18:38
Yeah, I mean, the Society for Psychical Research was formed in the 1880s. You know, it's had extremely famous members, you know, from Conan Doyle, to British Prime Ministers. It got a big boost, I think, at the end of the First World War, when a lot of people had lost their sons in the war and had experiences of their sons returning to them in some form, or trying to speak to them from beyond the grave. And there was a lot of the founders, like Oliver Lodge, were also physicists. So, they had this kind of grounding in science, and they believed that there were these phenomena which weren't explained, and that's why the society existed. And within the society, there's a huge range of views from the spiritualist to the sceptic. And certainly, in the '70s, I think there was a kind of explosion of interest in these kinds of phenomena. I mean, you can see it in the culture in films like, you know, The Exorcist, that happened a couple of years before Enfield, and many of the events in The Exorcist bear an uncanny resemblance to things that happened in Enfield. But yeah, it's a strange, kind of strange and intriguing society, which as a student, actually, I did use to attend the meetings, of the Psychical Research Society a couple of times; I had some personal experience with that.
Matthew Sherwood 20:04
Were you a card carrying member?
Jerry Rothwell 20:06
I was not a card - I was a fellow traveller; I think you call a fellow traveller of someone who was a card carrying member.
Matthew Sherwood 20:12 (21:52)
And then you've got more - I mean, then you've got this character, we get back to the guy who's the source of all this, in terms of the audio, is Maurice Grosse, who's quite an intriguing character as well, who brings his own as you point out, poignantly, I think, in Episode Four his own sort of, how best to put it, but - well, certainly his own stresses - however, you put it, to the story that whether - whatever you think, either it compounded things or whatever was involved, and how he got involved, but it's an interesting sort of full circle to all this.
Jerry Rothwell 20:53
Yeah. I mean, he's - Maurice is an extraordinary character. He was an inventor, he was at Dunkirk; he didn't go to university because the war interrupted that; I think, if he had, he would have become a kind of scientist or a physicist himself or something. But he had a very engineering brain, became an inventor, who invented things that we, you know, are familiar to us, you know, the rolling advertising board or the newspaper dispenser, you know, and I think he'd reached an age in which he'd had, you know, he'd had a personal tragedy, which, you know, you'll find out about in the series, which had made him convinced of the possibility that there was - that paranormal phenomena were real, and with his engineering and scientific brains, kind of set out trying to discover that, and hence his huge amounts of recording, because I think he felt that what he would be able to do is capture on tape, on tape or in photographs, something that proved, in this case, the existence of the poltergeist.
Matthew Sherwood 22:02 (24:13)
Well, I'll give you - I'll give you more than credit, but I'll give you loads of credit, because I must say, when I was watching through the whole thing, you know, whole scenes, and we won't do any spoilers here, but, you know, scenes where you're like, Well, I see why they're saying, Wow, this is obviously evidence, but then I also can see, well, I can also see how that could be staged, or, you know; I'm not talking about the girls pulling some big, vast hoax, but you can see how you can suspend disbelief and also have disbelief. And I guess this gets to this point. You said, it's something that, not to get too philosophical here, but it's something that you look - and it's certainly a subject of your films, but says a lot about human experience, how we perceive things. Can we ever really - can we ever know the truth?
Jerry Rothwell 22:49
We can certainly seek it, I think; whether we can, you know - I guess our knowledge of it is always partial. Like the - I mean, the last film I made, The Reason I Jump, was about nonspeaking autistic people, and started from a book which really, to me showed a kind of way of looking at the world without the sort of neurotypical filters most of us have, and that the world then appears very differently, you know, and what you pay attention to is very different. And I think increasingly, yeah, there's a lot of work in neuroscience that explores the way the brain is actually kind of, you know, rather than perceiving things directly is kind of creating a model for what it thinks the world looks like, and then detecting change in it, you know. So, you know, our brains are kind of like - I guess the heart of the argument around paranormality is the brain of filter? Does it only show us a bit of the world, and there's a whole bunch of the world that we can't see, you know, or does it actually make the world, is there nothing out there, and only what's in our heads?
Matthew Sherwood 23:53
Or I guess another way of looking at it is, are we really tapping the full powers of the human brain?
Jerry Rothwell 24:00
That's true, too. For sure, yeah.
Matthew Sherwood 24:03 (25:56)
So, I guess speaking of which, I'm trying to make a segue here, what is - because I'm gonna be warned here very shortly that it's time to cut our time off, but it's been great having you on. What's next for you? More ghost stories? Do you have anything in the works?
Jerry Rothwell 24:21
Yeah, I mean, after you complete something like this, you know, there's lots of people urging you to do, like, series two. A similar story for me always when I've kind of, you know, it's taken three, four years to do this, you know, you immerse yourself - the joy and privilege of documentary making is you kind of immerse yourself in a world and then can look at something different after it. And so, I'm actually about to do a series about the next moon landing, the Artemis programme from NASA; so, it's completely different, but it's about space and infinity, and maybe that has something in common with ghosts.
Matthew Sherwood 24:55
Okay, well, we'd - when that drops, we'd love to have you on, if we haven't scared you off, so thanks again so much. Jerry Rothwell, award-winning director of The Enfield Poltergeist. Four-part docu-series premieres on Apple TV Plus on October 27, just ahead of Halloween. I'm sure that's a pure coincidence! And, yeah, it's great to have you on, and we really appreciate your time.
Jerry Rothwell 25:20
Thanks, Matthew.
Matthew Sherwood 25:27
Thanks again for joining us on Factual America. A big shout out to everyone at Innersound Audio, in York, England for their great studio and fine editing and production skills. A big thanks to Amy Ord, our podcast manager, who ensures we continue getting great guests onto the show, and that everything otherwise runs smoothly. Finally, a big thanks to you our listeners. Please keep sending us feedback and episode ideas, whether it is on YouTube, social media, or directly by email. And please also remember to like us and share us with your friends and family wherever you happen to listen or watch podcasts. This is Factual America, signing off.
Factual America Outro 26:07
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