"11-year-old London girl levitates!"
The reported Enfield Poltergeist case is one of the top most discussed and disputed poltergeist cases of all time.
In 1977, a single mother called the police to report that some of her four children were reporting furniture moving and knocking on the walls. One arriving officer saw a chair move across the floor. More reports came from the family of demonic voices, rock throwing, overturned furniture and levitating children.
It goes without saying that these stories got picked up and created curious attention. Soon, reporters were wanting a piece of this spectacle. Paranormal investigators were sent out to evaluate the property and events.
Some investigators believed that one of the children was exerting influence and staging things to get attention. Ed Warren, of the American team of Ed and Lorraine Warren, said that one child levitated while sleeping. He then proclaimed it was demonic possession.
Now, let's also put this in the context of the times. "The Omen" and "The Exorcist" had been in the theaters only years before. It was a hot topic still. This is kind of like how when "Ghost Hunters" show came on TV, there were tons of people claiming ghosts in their houses.
Below is an audio recording of the supposed ghost.
It was the daughter, Janet, who was the focus of much of the supposed torment. She would go into trances in which supposedly objects moved and reportedly a fireplace was yanked from the wall. The photo (above) was said to show her levitating, but appears to be nothing more than a child bouncing off the bed.
Today, a grown adult, Janet reports she would like to leave the past alone, but also worries it may not have gone away. Her family was plagued with bad incidents, like her brother dying as a young teen of cancer, her mother dying of cancer, and her own son dying at the age of 18.
Another family moved in after Janet's mother finally moved from the place. That family reported uncomfortable feelings, hearing voices, and the like. They found out about the history of the home, and left. The present day owners say they do not want their children knowing about it and do not wish to discuss the subject.
Is it possible that a family with members who have the right sensitivity could move into a home with a dark history and it can activate latent abilities such as channeling or psychic powers like psychokinesis? It's possible. Many try to claim the supposed Amityville case was such an incident in which George Lutz was affected by the dark history in the house.
There are more skeptics than believers in this case, it would seem. It took a great deal of criticism from skeptics and from reporters who were keeping a tight eye on Janet and looking for genuinely unexplained events. Like most hauntings, the stories are anecdotal. Even having a witness such as Ed Warren on hand, his tendency to declare most everything demonic, made his views easily dismissed.
What would it take to prove a true poltergeist incident? It would take an extraordinary circumstance of highly objective witnesses, complete and total evaluation of every explainable reason, complete documentation with video and audio and the scrutiny of those in the scientific community. As this holy trinity of circumstances had not yet presented itself, the likelihood of proving any poltergeist incident as legitimate is exceedingly low.
But, it is something like this. When it comes to the subject of Bigfoot, there are believers and then there are those of us who have seen one and know them to exist. Those of us who have witnessed poltergeist activity firsthand know of its existence, but just because one sees a Bigfoot, not everything you run into in the forest is a Bigfoot and not everything that seems to be moving on its own is a poltergeist.
No doubt this case will stay alive as an example to some as a perfect textbook case for poltergeist activity and for others it will represent a ridiculous hoax. Future generations of people living in that building might reveal more to the story as proof and to those who believe in the genuineness of the Enfield Case, they might explain lack of activity as the haunting finally moving on.
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