Last Podcast On The Left
Last Update on the Left - Episode 2 - Enfield Poltergeist Strikes Back
Mon, 12 May 2025
In a council house in London, horrifying things were happening to a mother and her two daughters between the years of 1977 and 1979… But was it GHOSTS? Or just a very bored, very clever little girl? In this episode of the Last Update on the Left, Marcus, Henry, and Ed revisit the Enfield Poltergeist, originally discussed in Episode 279 of Last Podcast on the Left. For Live Shows, Merch, and More Visit: www.LastPodcastOnTheLeft.comKevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of Last Podcast on the Left ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts discussing the Enfield Poltergeist?
Last update on the left. We're going to get ready. We're going to get a bit ready then. We're going to get ready to, we're getting ready to call then.
14 years, still hasn't improved.
What do you mean? It's not wrong with this.
It's been his whole life.
I know.
He had theater training where they like sat down and they were like, Henry, this is a British accent.
It is a British accent. Was it like this in Murder Fist? Like, would you ask him like, hey, Henry, we need a British character for this sketch and... Still better than mine.
It is. Yeah. That's the thing. So he gets the part.
Just a British man with a head injury and IBS update on the last update on the left.
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Chapter 2: What is the background of the Enfield Poltergeist case?
I'll make a bane for my daughter. And then like, you know, but then when you watch the documentary, you realize she did sound quite a bit like that. Yeah. She was very close to that. So Loserville animation, our, our, our exhibition of this woman's behavior was actually quite accurate.
Yeah, it's quite accurate. I like how you're saying that with a straight face and you're staring at me like I told you that it wasn't quite accurate.
I feel that there are, again, there are bigger truths inside of fiction.
And that's somewhat...
I wouldn't say the point of this series, but there is, you know, with the Enfield Poltergeist documentary, it's definitely talking a lot about how there is much more to, I guess, paranormal investigation than we can really understand as far as going through and like figuring out what exactly happens with these investigations and what the proper way to do these investigations are.
What do you want to do? Give them a quick run up. Sure. Just to remind everybody what the Enfield Poltergeist is and kind of why. Again, and then we'll get to why. Sure. The reason for the season.
This is everyone's favorite barking ghost. Oh, oh.
Oh, I thought it was Oliver, Angie Harmon's dog. Really sad. Really sad story we covered this week.
Well, the Enfield poltergeist case was in 1977 in Enfield, which is, I think, a suburb of London. You know, it's a part of London in which this family, a mother and her two daughters and their son briefly, but mostly centered around a mother. The Hodgkin family. Yeah, the Hodgkin family.
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Chapter 3: Who was Maurice Gross and what was his role in the investigation?
And one of the big things before they came was that a lot of Lego pieces and toys and marbles and shit were flying around. Yeah. And when the reporter was there, apparently they were hit with a Lego piece. Yes. And it could have only come from the other reporter. Yeah. So either the other reporter was throwing a Lego piece and fucking with this guy or something paranormal had happened.
It really, this is one of the, now with the documentary, this new documentary that has been released, like we are seeing something like 200 hours.
Over 200.
Of recorded activity. Now this came from the, so after the reporters came. And did this story, which I do find really interesting because even the reporters in the documentary talk about how freaked out they were when they arrived. At first, like they thought it was a bullshit assignment.
Yeah.
And then when they got there, they were like, oh, this is kind of crazy. Things are flying around here. The way that the word that keeps getting used is tension. They said they walk into this house and it feels tense and it feels crazy. The energy feels crazy. And they keep talking about like that.
And that got the attention of a paranormal investigator, brand new on the scene by the name of Maurice Gross. Maurice Gross is, I actually now, with the redo of the documentary. I love him. He's a hero. Yeah. Of paranormal research. He was a skeptic. Well, he was interested. He was not a skeptic. I would say he was not a skeptic.
Okay.
His daughter died. So his daughter, Janet Gross, died in, I believe it was a car accident.
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Chapter 4: What paranormal phenomena were reported during the Enfield haunting?
It was a motorcycle accident.
Motorcycle accident.
And it was like a year before this case. It's like 1976.
Yes. And so his daughter, when she died, it was like, you know, obviously very tragic for him. But then there was an unopened birthday card that his daughter I'd sent. It wasn't to him. I believe it was to his brother, her brother. And it's, In it, it's like when she died, her body, when they found it, she had two giant black eyes because her face had hit the pavement.
It was like a part of like the head injury that killed her. But on the birthday card that she had sent to her family member that was unopened on the front end, a person in a hospital gown with bandages around their head.
and two black eyes that had read i was going to send you a bottle of toilet water but the lid fell on my head happy birthday but it was a super strange coincidence and it made maurice gross get he was like maybe there's something more to life well it wasn't just that i mean it was also um the fact that you know when they went and saw her in the hospital she had two black eyes she had the bandages on her head and then she had written like a little postscript she had
pointed in the birthday card, she put an arrow towards the word head and wrote, and soon there won't be much of that left either. And that wasn't just the only coincidence, or not coincidence, synchronicity. Synchronicity.
Do you think the motorcycle accident could have been suicide?
No. No, no, no. She was a very happy, loving... She was a very up-and-up girl. And the other one was like there was a huge drought that year. It didn't rain all summer. But right after she died, the roof above her room was completely wet, although nothing else was wet. There was the fact that at the time that she had the motorcycle accident, it was like 4.20 p.m. Cock and roll.
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Chapter 5: How did the Daily Mirror and the ventriloquist attempt to debunk the case?
Well, the, by this ventriloquist says, okay, that this is a part of the, the, the debunking of the story was that they believe that the girls faked it and that it was the use of voice throwing and characters and about the diabolical nature of Menarche's right. And now Menarche's cause a lot of chaos in homes.
Yeah.
Um, and now, uh, Though, we have this footage. So, one thing I was looking for that I couldn't find is that apparently there was some footage the guy Playfair had that did totally disprove everything. But I can't find everything. I don't know.
What are you talking about? I haven't heard about this.
There was this video that said that there was, I think it was a rumor, that there was a video of Janet playing. Bending spoons, doing some stuff because they did one reaction because in the poltergeist activity, one was one and a lot of classic stuff. So in poltergeist activity, you have things like dematerialization, stuff that falls from the ceiling, stuff that comes out of nowhere like that.
That is like a weird thing that was like with the Legos.
Yeah. In this case, they also had coins fall from the ceiling. And there was also an instance in which like they actually asked the poltergeist to make a red pillow, a red cushion disappear. And, you know, they went out of the room, came back in, the red cushion was gone.
And there was some people outside like a crossing guard and a tradesman that said, like, we were looking at the house because we had heard there was a lot of weird shit going on there. And then suddenly a red cushion appeared on the roof of the house without the window opening.
Yeah, people with no reason to lie. Yeah. People who don't want a ghost in their neighborhood.
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Chapter 6: What evidence supports the authenticity of the haunting?
I don't know if you can hear my aunt shaking the microphone right now. It's great. It's really creepy.
But Daily Mirror, they're not really credible, right? No.
No. It's a tabloid. But they sent out this ventriloquist, this TV ventriloquist, who just shows up, pulls up to this council house in this poor neighborhood in a limousine. Yeah. And just pops out like, ha-ha!
Hello, everyone. Everybody loves a man who doesn't talk, but he's also talking, eh? Come on, now. I'm a lawyer, professionally.
And so he takes the two girls in the room, Margaret and Janet. Janet is the one who the entire activity is kind of centered around. She's 11 years old. Margaret's a little older. I can't remember exactly how old she is. I think 14, 15. Yeah. And he closes the doors and he talked to them for a while. Nobody knows what exactly was said in that room.
And he comes out and he's like, OK, I talked to him. I'm getting out of here. And then the next day, the Daily Mirror runs a story in which this ventriloquist claims that the girls told him explicitly. Yeah, it was us this whole time.
And what if he was doing ventriloquist voice in the room, making them say the thing?
What is reality? I don't know, dude. Because. Technically, if he did make it look as if they were saying it, then he could say with truthfulness in his mind that maybe they said it.
Do you pay to see Jeff Dunham or do you pay to see the puppet? I'm a Terry Fader man, okay?
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Chapter 7: What role did psychic abilities and spoon bending play in the case?
I mean, they'd seen him on TV. That probably impressed him a little bit. But why would they choose that moment out of all moments? Like, when they know this man is here to debunk them, why choose that moment to... Just completely changed their entire persona, their entire attitude. Because he said they were giggling. Yeah, we did it.
It was just a couple of girls just casually confessing to a prank. It doesn't make any sense at all.
I think the Enfield poltergeist is the... Because of now the footage that's been released. Like... It is extremely compelling about the concept of the psychic nature of the poltergeist mixed with what if something from the outside, like an outside intelligence, hijacks the latent psychic ability of a little girl.
Like, I do actually think that there's something along those lines when you watch this. So when they were experimenting, like, they did all these different experiments on Janet to try to figure out kind of more so, like, how is she involved? And one experiment they did was that they took a bunch of spoons because there were obviously bent spoons in this scenario.
Another very common poltergeist technique.
Yeah.
And why do they get spoons? I don't know, because the whole thing, it's a whole thing. It kind of I honestly think it started with Uri Geller, who is way more of the most the I'm that's my opinion. I'm certain that bending spoons has been around for a long fucking time. But Uri Geller was the guy that like made it a common trope of people faking psychic activity by bending spoons.
Quick side note on Uri Geller. At the end of the documentary, they show kind of what Maurice Gross, his paranormal life after Enfield, and it shows a video of him going to visit Uri Geller at his house. And Uri Geller had a Cadillac that was covered in 2,000 bent spoons.
That's awesome!
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Chapter 8: How does patience influence paranormal and psychic investigations?
There was a documentary called The House in Between that I loved that is a group of guys that were, they were going, they were researching this, they were doing a full-on crazy, what they called, same thing, full embed investigation where they are staying there for days and they have cameras all over the house.
And it's an extremely boring documentary, except it has a piece of the most convincing ghost activity I have ever seen in a documentary. And it is boring. It is a ball sitting on a step and you watch this ball jump off the step and go down the stairs. It is not fascinating. fucking around. It jumps off the step. It makes no sense. And so that's ghost activity.
It is about... It's embedding yourself in a psychic scenario. It's 50% happening outside of this room. It is something... There's something now. There's more and more research showing about how consciousness is remote. It's piped in. So this is about this. I feel like it's in the realm of science that we just don't understand. And that Bill, whatever Bill was, was probably just a...
an extension of Janet's mind. Like, I don't know how to kind of put it otherwise, but it's like, it's not fully Janet, but Bill is still sort of made up.
Well, that's what Guy Playfair thought. He thought that Bill was a part of Janet's subconscious. But in 1996, Bill Wilkins, his son, got a hold of Maurice Gross. And Maurice Gross went over to this guy's house and played him the tape of him saying, my name's Bill Wilkins. And he's like, that's my father. Because he said, my name's Bill Wilkins. I died of a hemorrhage.
Yeah, a daughter of a hemorrhage in a chair in the living room. It seems weird that a ghost would know all that.
Yeah, I don't know. That's how he died. But he said that he died of a hemorrhage in a chair downstairs. And this guy was like, yep, my father was named Bill Wilkins. He died of a hemorrhage in a chair at 284 Green Street. My mother had gone out to the store. She was gone 10 minutes. She came back and he was dead.
And then they showed the fucking death certificate that showed 284 Green Street cause of death. A man named Bill Wilkins did die in that house. She had no idea. Yeah, she had no idea.
How would she, but is there a chance like a neighbor told her or something like that? She was like a little girl. Were they still getting his mail? It's like a non, you know.
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