The Enfield Poltergeist: Inside the Real Story that Inspired The Conjuring 2

Summoning 2 gave horrophiles a chance to enter the “house of strange happenings” … if only on the big screen.

The 2016 film stars Madison Wolfe, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson and focuses on one of the most infamous supernatural cases in history: the Enfield poltergeist. The story of a young girl thought to be possessed by a demon in her London home baffled the nation, later inspiring Summoning 2several series and plays with Catherine Tate in the lead role, The Enfield Haunting.

The case involved strange voices, levitation, flying objects, furniture moving through the air, cold breezes and more – and while some have called it a hoax, many others are convinced it’s one of the most convincing supernatural cases ever documented.

So what really happened in the Enfield poltergeist case? Here’s an inside look at the real story that inspired it Summoning 2.

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Peggy Hodgson was the first to hear the strange noises coming from her daughters’ bedroom

Children’s bedroom where many events took place, around September 1977.

Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo

It all started in an unusual house in Enfield, London in 1977 when Peggy Hodgson, a single mother of four, heard loud noises coming from her daughters’ bedroom. When she went to tell her daughters Margaret, then 13, and Janet, then 11, to settle down and go to sleep instead of walking around, she found them huddled in a corner with terrified expressions on their faces.

“Me [told our mom] the dresser was moving towards the bedroom door,” Janet recalled while speaking on iTV1 in 2012. “She said, ‘Oh, don’t be funny.’ ”

However, Hodgson then witnessed the drawers being moved towards the door by a seemingly invisible force, almost as if some supernatural presence was trying to trap the girls into the room. When she tried to push herself away from the dresser, it didn’t budge.

The horrified Hodgson family ran across the street to seek help from neighbors Vic and Peggy Nottingham. When Vic went to the house to investigate, he too said he heard strange noises from around the house. The Hodgsons called the police, and although one officer claimed to have seen a chair move across the room, they decided it was not a police matter.

According to the family, that was just the beginning of what would become their nearly 18-month exile.

The siege of the Hodgson family lasted a year and a half

Peggy Hodgson (right) and others examine a carpet at the Hodgsons’ home in Green Street, Enfield, on 17 February 1978.

Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo

“We didn’t understand what was going on,” Margaret told PEOPLE on The Enchanting 2 premiere in Los Angeles in 2016. “We went through periods where we just couldn’t believe what happened, really. It’s scary. We didn’t like being on [our] own in the house or anything.”

When the strange incidents continued, the Hodgsons decided to call the popular British publication The Daily Mirrorcome and investigate alleged supernatural phenomena. However, when the reporter arrived, the house was quiet for hours. Something happened only when the journalist started.

“The photographer came back and a lego hit him above the eye. He still had the mark a few days later. And then Maurice Grosse got involved,” said Janet, per The Telegraph.

The Daily Mirror he called the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which sent Grosse to investigate the case. During his time at the house, Grosse said he witnessed more than 2,000 incidents of paranormal activity.

“Furniture spinning, cups filled with water, fires going, voices, levitation,” Janet recalled to iTV1. “The most terrible [encounter] it was when the curtain wrapped around my neck next to the bed.”

During his stay in the house, the alleged poltergeist began to speak through Janet.

Janet Hodgson claimed she was possessed

Janet Hodgson sits in her home in Green Street, Enfield, on 17 February 1978.

Graham Morris/Mirrorpix via Getty

Janet would often go into a trance-like state where she would speak in a deep, raspy voice, claiming to be the spirit of a man named Bill Wilkins, who had died in the house several years before. (It was later proven that a man by that name had once been a resident of the house and had bled to death while sitting in the living room.) Janet claimed that the ghost would “talk” through her for hours.

During the 18-month experience, several additional paranormal investigators visited the house, including famed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. Although the 2016 film takes liberties with the timing and extent to which the Warrens were involved in the case, they have publicly stated their belief that the supernatural is responsible for the strange happenings in the house.

“Those who deal with the supernatural on a day-to-day basis know that the phenomena are there — there’s no doubt about it,” Ed said, according to All That’s Interesting.

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Janet Hodgson admitted to faking some supernatural incidents

From left: Margaret, Billy and Johnny Hodgson sit on the sofa at their home in Green Street, Enfield, on 17 February 1978.

Graham Morris/Mirrorpix via Getty

Of course, many doubted the events, claiming that the children were behind an elaborate hoax and were faking their demonic symptoms. Two SPR experts persistently questioned Janet’s gruff voice and later caught the children bending spoons on their own.

In fact, Janet admitted that she and her siblings made up several events. “Oh yes, once or twice [we faked phenomena]just to see if Mr Grosse and Mr Playfair will catch us,” she told ITV News in 1980. Daily Mail. – They always are.

She later stated that “two percent” of the events in the house were faked.

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Even after all this time, Janet and Margaret said that while they were able to move on from that traumatic period, that haunting “stays with you.”

“Every step of the way,” Margaret told PEOPLE at the film’s LA premiere Summoning 2 in 2016. “It’s really like death: It gets a little easier as time goes on. But the fear and the memories of it and what happened never leave you.”

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