The Enfield Poltergeist

I watched The Conjuring 2 on DVD recently and really enjoyed it.  I hadn't heard of the case investigated in the movie, but was intrigued by it and decided to do some research to share with you.

This is the story behind the case:

In August 1977, Peggy Hodgson called police to her council home in Enfield, England, after two of her four children claimed that furniture was moving, and knocking sounds were heard on walls. A police constable said that she saw a chair slide on the floor and "was convinced that nobody there had touched it."  Later claims included allegedly demonic voices, loud noises, thrown rocks and toys, overturned chairs, and children levitating. These claims attracted considerable press attention, and the story was covered in British newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, until reports of these incidents came to an end in 1979. (Source: Wikipedia)

The case has been widely discredited as a hoax--similar to the Amityville horror alluded to in the beginning of the film. The main reason for this is that Janet Hodgson admitted to and was caught on tape fabricating some of the events. However, she claims to have invented only 2 per cent of them because she was afraid that investigators would not believe her. She maintains to this day that the majority of the supernatural events did happen. To read a recent interview with her, please click here.

The psychic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, convincingly played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, have also been dismissed as benign, but delusional in their search for ghosts and demons. But others such as Maurice Grosse of the British Society for Psychical Research steadfastly maintained the authenticity of the events. (Grosse, a character in The Conjuring 2, died in 2006.)

You be the judge after listening to the actual voice recordings at the time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OWgImgIRic

Annabelle the Doll

Annabelle in the Warren's Occult Museum in Connecticut

If you've watched The Conjuring and its spinoff/prequel Annabelle, you've heard of Annabelle the Doll.

Annabelle is a rag doll rather than the porcelain doll depicted in the two movies. It originally belonged to a nursing student named Donna--a gift from her mother. The doll was reputed to move about in her apartment and to change its poses, as well as leaving cryptic notes saying HELP on pieces of parchment.

When Donna came home to her apartment one day and found drops of blood on the doll's hand, she called upon the services of a psychic. The medium advised Donna that the doll was haunted by the spirit of a dead child named Annabelle Higgins (hence the name given to the doll).

When the doll later became violent towards her roommate's boyfriend Lou, Donna contacted demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. They advised her that the doll was not inhabited by the spirit of Annabelle Higgins, but was in fact possessed by a devil. At Donna's request, they removed it from her apartment.

The doll now resides in an occult museum owned by the Warrens. According to Ed Warren, Annabelle was responsible for the death of a young man who visited the museum and taunted the doll, daring it to do its worst to him. The man died three hours later in a motorcycle crash.

There's lot of reading/viewing material on Annabelle, including videotaped reenactments of its history on YouTube.

To learn more of the doll's story, please click here and here. And you can also contact the Warren's Occult Museum through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Warrens-Occult-Museum/126070474135029.

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