Last Update on the Left - Episode 2 - Enfield Poltergeist Strikes Back
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That's when the cannibalism started. Last update on the left. You and Brad's gonna get, we're gonna get it right, eh? We're gonna get a bit of ready then.

We're going to get 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. Boy, I got the inner mask, kid. I did. I did.

That's the thing. So he gets the part. Yeah. Just a British man with a head injury and IBS. Welcome to the last update on the left, ladies and gentlemen. Last update on the left. I put a different word in there. It's not like we haven't done that before with two other things. Hey, it is incredible.

extremely original name for a brand new show. Yeah. It's not Last Comic Book on the left. It's not Last Stream on the left. It isn't. It's not Last Podcast on the left or Last Book on the left. Yes, or maybe hopefully one day Last TV Show on the left. Or Last Pornography on the left. Oh, finally. We made that?

Hmm. Have we made that? Not publicly. You guys, you know, I can't tape me having sex. I mean, I do truly one day. I somewhat pray for the porno parody. Remember the transmetropolitan porno parody? Yes. I somewhat. This ain't last podcast on the left. Can someone do it? I bet it exists.

And someone's private collection. Between him and two other very questionable men. Ed, have you ever been privy to any of the slash fic? The last podcast slash fic people have written? I'll send you some. It's disgusting. It's not good. All right. I'll read it just for fun. Do you want to read a detailed description of Henry and I making love?

And like romantic love? Yeah, like making love. Not fucking or... It's nothing... I wish it was dirty. It's really weird. Like, I don't, but I do? Yeah, sure. I'll send you something in an email. Yeah.

Now, this is not the only haunting thing we're going to talk about today. No. We are coming back to a subject. When did we cover the Enfield Poltergeist back in the day? I think it's 2016 or 2017. I know I was in L.A. I know I was already in L.A. And we have decided to revisit this topic for a new series because a series came out for Apple+.

I believe it's just called the Enfield Poltergeist. Yeah. Right? It doesn't have any sir titles. It's not like Enfield Poltergeist. When Raglan goes viral. Also, thank you. Big shout out to the Loserville Animation guys that animated a big...

the rag-long bit from the original Enfield Poltergeist series in which I portrayed the mother of the family as a woman with crooked back and broken ankles and a big bucket filled with dirty wash water. And that's mostly what she did. She said, I'll wash and grind every day. I'll get up and make a bane. 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, Userville Animation, 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 accurate.

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. Yeah.

As far as going through and 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. And then we'll get to why. Sure. The reason for the seasons.

This is everyone's favorite barking ghost. 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. The Hodgkin family, we moved. It's 284 Green Street. Yeah, 284 Green Street. And it's like your classic poltergeist haunting where it starts very slow with furniture moving around and then shit starts flying around the room. With credible witnesses. A cop saw a chair fly. Menarche is everywhere. Menarche hasn't started yet.

It hasn't? No. Menarche is the first period woman. Oh, okay. It's out. Yeah, it did not start with the Menarche. The Menarche came about halfway through, actually. Cool. Rock and roll! Bill, is that you? Yeah, let me see the tempered.

Oh, I wish I was your temper. But as the haunting went on, the mother called up the Daily Mirror, one of the newspapers, one of the tabloids in London, in England, and asked, like, hey, do you guys know anybody that might know something about this? Yeah. Of course, the Daily Mirror did not help them, instead sent out a report.

Yes.

The other reporter. 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,

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 in there. 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 document. I love him. He's a hero. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Paranormal research. He was a skeptic.

Well, he was interested. He was not a skeptic. He was not a skeptic. His daughter died. So his daughter, Janet Gross, died in, I believe, it was a car accident. It was a motorcycle accident. It was like a year before this case. It was 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 had sent. It wasn't to him. I believe it was to her brother. Her brother, yeah. 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 unopened.

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 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. Right.

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, 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, you know, the fact that at the time that she, uh, had the motorcycle accident, it was like 4 20 PM. Uh, I can roll. Yeah. Dude, I'm in the fucking clouds, man.

But her mother felt like so sick at the beach. She felt so sick that Maurice almost called an ambulance and a clock at their home that had always worked perfectly stopped at 4.20 p.m. Always 4.20 somewhere, man. Yeah.

But that got Maurice very, like he needed to know, at that point he was like, I need to know if there's something going on here. Because he was a very curious man. He was an inventor. He was a businessman. He just had a curious mind. So he went to the Society for Psychical Research. Just to kind of figure out what else was going on. Just in the universe, he was super curious. And then he was at a meeting, like they were talking about, I guess it was like a big discussion. It came up.

This story. The Enfield case. Yeah, the Enfield came up at a meeting. He was like probably his first or second meeting at the Psychical Research Meetup group or whatever. And they were like, we got this crazy case. Does someone want to cover it? And he was like, I'll fucking go do it. And then this guy is a baller. We've covered him. He's fucking, you know...

Looks great. Big mustache. Looks great. He's got the fucking wax. Waxes that fucker up. Exactly what you'd want him to look like. Scary red sports car, which they always kind of said was like a pop of color because they wasn't in like, it's all brown. Yeah, it looks like he's about to find the jewel of the Nile. You've discovered so much of the UK is when you're driving between major cities is just brown. It's brown bricks mixed with weird-

bogs mixed with like an old lady going mind the sausage gang mind it it's drawing don't put your feet on it you know i mean it's a lot of no wonder they wanted to conquer the entire world just to get the fuck out you know oh here's no it's just all my year we go down to africa you know uh but they uh so that he embedded himself so it's gross just started taping

Everything. And then I guess like, you know, then Guy Playfair is a very interesting character. He was they called him ethereally pale. Like he was like very, very mystical. Like where I will pull out. I honestly truly believe Maurice Gross brought the sex. Guy Playfair brought the mystic.

Yeah, yeah. He seemed strong, too. He was a big guy. Yeah, he was a big guy. Yeah, and Guy Playfair wrote the book that really brought this thing into the world of serious paranormal research. It's called This House is Haunted. It's really fucking good. It's a great book. Actually, this case, you'll find this interesting. This is a fun little factoid, is that this case was where Dan Aykroyd got the name Gozer. Oh!

Yeah, during one of the, when Guy Playfair, or I think it was either Guy Playfair or Maurice Gross, was talking to the entity that, you know, we'll get into here in a second. Yeah. He was like, my name is Goza. And?

And Dan Aykroyd was reading This House is Haunting. He's like, that's the name. That's awesome. That's the name of my fucking demon in Ghostbusters. The demon had a lot of names, though, right? Yeah. Because, well, as Maurice Gros started. The haunting developed. The haunting developed over time. It just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And more people just kept coming in and out of the house. A lot of Brazilian psychics. Yeah.

Guy Playfair. Two Brazilian psychics. A pair of Brazilian psychics. I suppose it's because Guy Playfair, he wrote a book. I think it was called The Flying Cow. Yeah, it's called The Flying Cow. That was all about how Brazil is the most psychic country. Yeah. He loved Brazil. He really did. Hey, man, I think he just, he's just like, what's a good British word for beautiful butt?

butt. Some of the women around here can. Crazy psychic. Can. Look at a can. Heine maybe? No, that's a little too. Heine! Oh, nice Heine there! Well, yeah, they had like ventriloquists come in and magicians come in. They were really trying to figure out if Janet was lying or not. Yeah, they really were, but they were also bringing in other psychical researchers. And the main thing was that Bill, so now they believe that there was a connection between

Yeah.

Yeah. And Bill was talking through Janet, who was an 11-year-old girl. And it was this very deep voice like, buckle. Like it sounded like that. It sounded very, it was scary. It's a scary voice. It's a good ghost voice. It's a great ghost voice. It's very deep, though. It definitely doesn't seem like something a little girl could recreate.

Well, they did bring in a speech therapist to study how this little girl could possibly do it. And she may have been able to do it if she would have been speaking from the very back of her throat. I mean, it's like expert ventriloquist.

Yeah. Very, very difficult and also impossible for her to do for hours on end because she would talk in this voice for hours on end. And she used to say that it felt as if the voice was speaking from the back of her neck. Okay. He said, you know, his name is Bill Wilkinson. You know, he was a bit of a, he was a little dirty sometimes. He liked to say, fuck off.

Yeah. And he wrote the word he wrote the word shit in the wall in shit. And then he did a bunch of other weird stuff. And the guys of through the body of Janet, quote unquote, if that is true. I find it very interesting because now, like, so I guess we can yada, yada, yada a little bit. Is that the whole case got debunked?

in a way. Well, by this Ventriloquist says that this is a part of 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 how Menarche's cause a lot of chaos in homes. And now, 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 you're talking about. I haven't heard about that. There was this video that said that there was, I think it was a rumor, that there was a video of Janet bending spoons, doing some stuff, because they did one reaction. Because

In the poltergeist activity, it had 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. That is a weird thing that was with the Legos. Yeah. In this case, they also had coins fall from the ceiling. Fall from the ceiling. And there was also an instance in which they actually asked the poltergeist to make a red pillow, a red cushion disappear. And they...

Went out of the room, came back in, the red cushion was gone. And there were 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 open. Yeah. People with no reason to lie. Yeah.

People who don't want a ghost in their neighborhood. Nobody wants. That's the great thing about watching this documentary series is because all of these people, all these interviews were recorded and all of them, as they're talking about it, they're not talking about like, bro, this fucking, I was outside and this fucking cushion was on top of the house. Like it was fucking great. No, they're all very coy. It's like,

I was outside and I saw there was this cushion out there and I don't ever want to see anything like that again. It's so subdued. Yes, very haunted British people. Like again, you know why ghosts feel comfortable there? By the British people that were in this documentary. But the guy, the ventriloquist who supposedly debunked it, that was, this guy, he was a

A famous television ventriloquist. And the Daily Mirror had sent him out there to get another story. Like, basically, this infield poltergeist thing has gone on long enough. Let's put an end to it. Let's get one big story where we say this thing is over. Because now the BBC had sent somebody already at this time who had said that she believed the bad BBC reporter...

straight up says that a chair flew across the room without the child getting out of bed. They're all watching, and you hear them talking. You hear her be frightened in the documentary. When the BBC reporter does the thing with being like, I don't know if you can hear my hand shaking the microphone right now. It's great. It's really creepy. Daily Mirror, they're not really credible, right? No. It's a tabloid. But they sent out this ventriloquist, this TV ventriloquist who just shows up like...

pulls up to this like council house in this poor neighborhood in a limousine. Yeah. And he just like 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. 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, okay, 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, you know,

Yeah, it was us this whole time. And what if he was doing Ventriloquist's voice in the room, making them say their things to him? 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 puppets?

I'm a Terry Fader man. Okay. But they brought the girl like that same day, you know, a guy play fair and Maurice gross, like talk to the girls and like, Hey, what the fuck? Like what happened here? Uh, and in the documentary, you actually, they record this conversation and the girls are like, no, we didn't say that at all. She, uh, Margaret, especially she was like,

I didn't know what he was talking about. He was just talking. He was talking about a bunch of things that I didn't understand. He was probably talking about ventriloquism techniques and asking them about like what they knew. And she said, I was thinking about what I had to go, what I had to do in school the next day. And I was nodding off, literally nodding. Yeah. And he took that as them saying, yes, we did fake everything.

And why would they say it to this stranger and nobody else? Yeah, why would they choose that moment? That fucking greaseball showing up in a goddamn limousine. 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 debunk?

Just completely changed their entire persona, their entire attitude. Like, because he said they were giggling. Yeah, we did it. Like, it was just a couple of girls, like, 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. Why do they need spoons? I don't know. Because, well. It's a 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,

That's my opinion. I'm certain that Benning Spoons has been around for a long fucking time, but Uri Geller was the guy that made it a common trope of people faking psychic activity by Benning 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 all I know! Dude, that's some fucking shit, man. Fucking glued or welded tooth. He's like, yes, and these are spoons. I bent many of these spoons. Many of these spoons. It made you smile, right? It's a fun car. These are spoons. You should see my jacket. Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean.

He can't go to the airport. So they asked her, they went and they put out a bunch of spoons and they, you know, they put sensors on her head and they, they asked her to bend the spoon. So they said, Hey, come bend these with her mind, with her mind. And they said, according to these tests, uh,

Her, like, however they decide that your psychic energy is, like, fluxing. It's some kind of, like, beta wave, alpha wave. And they're like, she has very strong indications of when we see, like, this type of, like...

She is, her brain is subconsciously trying to psychically bend the spoon. Well, she broke the machine. Yes, and she's trying to bend the spoon. It is happening. There is something happening. She is a sensitive. And we don't know if it's just because of that fucking crazy ass Menarche and the stuff it brings with it, or if it's just you have this kind of weird latent psychic ability. And something happened in this house because the...

It shows, when you were saying at the very top about what it reveals about haunting research and investigations, they are boring. The key for psychic... Yes. Yeah, it's a lot of patience. The key for psychic research and any form of ghost hunting and stuff is patience. Is that you do have to... And it is boring. Psychic activity is extremely subtle. There's a lot... Obviously, we all want the thing. We all want...

The full-on librarian ghost from Ghostbusters. We all want that. But that's just not how it really works. 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 call, 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

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 fucking around. It is, it jumps off the step and makes no sense. And so,

That's ghost activity. It is about embedding yourself in a psychic scenario. It's 50% happening outside of this room. 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...

extension of Janet's mind. Like it's, it's, 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 a guy play fair thought. He said that he thought that Bill was a part of Janet's subconscious, but,

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 in a chair. 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 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 not, you know. That actually, I mean, that's a good question. But he died in, he died 15 or 13. He died in 63.

Okay. Oh, that's far enough away. Yeah, it was far enough away. She wasn't even alive yet. 14 years later. There was nothing nefarious about him necessarily. No, not really. And the other cool thing about it is that one of the big poltergeist activities that they had in the house was like consistently like three knocks on the wall. And the son told Maurice Gross that-

His father was an air raid warden during World War II. You know, air raid wardens when the Germans would come and start bombing. Blitzkrieg. Yeah. No, that's just the Blitz. That was Africa. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. And France. Oh, wow. Yeah. The Blitzkrieg. Lightning War. That's tanks and planes. Yeah, tanks and planes. This is just the Blitz.

the London Blitz. Gotcha. So when, you know, the Germans would come and bomb the fuck out of London, they'd turn on the air raid, and then the wardens would go outside and they'd tell everybody to get inside, get inside. You know, they were the people that, you know, saved lives. And both Bill Wilkins and his next-door neighbor, who he shared a wall with, were both air raid wardens. So when the air raids would go off...

They wouldn't go over to the door and say, like, hey, let's go. They would knock on the wall three times. And that is literally exactly what the neighbors were reporting that they were hearing coming from inside of the house. They were saying that other neighbors were hearing knocks on the walls onto their fucking side. Three times. So the neighbors were... They shared a wall. It was like a townhouse. Yes, it was semi-hatched or whatever the term is. But yeah, you just...

They just hear that same shit. And the cool thing about poltergeist knocks, before you get to that, the cool thing about poltergeist knocks is the sound waves are actually different from regular knocks. In regular knocks, you get like the big pop on the sound wave right up top and it goes down. But in poltergeist knocks, if you look at the sound wave, the sound begins before the knock. Okay.

So it's sort of the sound wave builds up and the knock happens and then it comes back down again. So it's a... You fucking high enough for that, dude? Hell yeah, man. You fucking know what that fucking means, man? It's fucking 420 on the clock! Yeah, it is!

No, but this is the kind of information you only get from an audio engineer. But the other one fact we were also forgetting was the furniture from the child murderer's house, which I forgot about, is that they got a bunch of furniture from the child murderer down the street. Oh, yeah. A guy had suffocated his young daughter. That's right. The father, her ex-husband. Yeah, and the woman's ex-husband. And they kept the knives, right? Yeah. Well, the woman's ex-husband just bought all of the fucking furniture from the little girl, the mother.

murder girl's house. It's cheap. And just fill the house with it. It's very David Copperfield. It feels very Charles Dickens. They ain't needin' it. They don't need these dresses no more. They don't owe for these curtains. Yeah, this fabric is cheap just like I expected. Get all their spoons and fuck them up. Yeah, but Maurice Gross, when he came into the house and they told him about this, he's like, I believe it would be in your best interest to get rid of this furniture immediately. Immediately?

They did, but it wasn't, it didn't do anything. And more, some more on the patients that it's required is that that's,

Ghosts and psychic activity require silence and space. And also because it's intimate, only someone like Maurice Gross and the way he embedded himself within the family can you really see the patterns. And also, you know what's beautiful about the documentary is hearing the emotion that Maurice Gross grew towards the Hodgson family and how much

affection he had for the kids. And I'm not, you know, like, not licking. He became a member of the family. He really did. And after the hauntings, after the poltergeist activity ended, he didn't stop. He'd go over there like once a month. He'd like bring the kids Maltesers. He'd bring the mom flowers and he'd just be like, hey, so how's everything going? You guys doing all right? They'd just catch up. He became a family friend. But a part of that is I think that's what it takes to experience what everybody else is experiencing. Because mom and daughter were sharing dreams.

People were... They were all kind of sharing phenomena. Yeah. And it is, in some way, I think that it's... There is a concrete group psychology thing that is happening. I'm not saying mass hallucination, but I do believe that everybody syncs up in a way. That you're all in this area, so you kind of all get on the same wavelength. Frequency, as David Icke would put it more adroitly. And that everybody... We all know how right he is. We all love his stuff. And then...

but something like that where you got to get in there and you can't just show up. So it's like, but it was also this, this case is also specifically interesting because of how many times people arrived and experienced something that weren't a member of the family. But that's the paradox of the way that Maurice Gross did it, because what you're describing as being necessary in order to investigate these cases was the exact thing that skeptics would say is the reason why none of this is true.

True. Because Maurice Gross becomes, because he embeds himself in the family and he becomes too attached to it because the skeptics, specifically this woman, Anita Gregory, who is like the biggest one. She's the one. She's the biggest opponent against this entire study. She's the one that said that there was the video saying that Janet, that I think that all this is conflating. I think that she conflated that with whatever happened with the Ventriloquist.

The thing that makes me a skeptic about this is also what makes me believe it in a weird way is that the fact that no one really would see it happen. You know, like whenever, like when his son came in and had to like look at the wall while talking to Bill and stuff like that. Yes. And like, or like, you know, it would go into the, as soon as Janet went in the room, she'd fly around and no one was in there and they couldn't open the door and stuff.

That makes me think, oh, this isn't true. But then the other side of me is like, if this is a fucking poltergeist torturing this girl, what a better way to torture somebody than to only do it when no one else is around. It's called the trickster phenomena. I'll give you a whole book, Eddie. Yeah. If you want to read about why the quote unquote capital piece. Have other people thought of my brilliant idea before? I don't know.

I'll give you this book, but the capital P phenomenon specifically does not want to be measured. It does not want to be quantified. It does not want you to get your empirical evidence. The whole point is to show that you can't catch it in a goddamn net. But that's what the skeptics always point towards. Because Anita, people like Anita Gregory say that you have to go into this thing as a complete skeptic. You have to get objective scientific evidence.

completely objective scientific evidence in order to convince people like her. She looked at the case. She listened to the tapes. She visited the house, like, multiple times. She heard the voice. You know, when she was there, like, Janet, you know, the whole thing where the door was closed and you could hear her, like, around the room, and Janet described how she gets pulled around, and Anita Gregory came to the conclusion at the very end. She said that this case is like, yes, there is...

A highly interesting and compelling case here, but she said that it withers on the vine on closer inspection due to lack of concrete evidence because the evidence that they have is eyewitness reports and audio recordings. And photographs. And photographs. And speaking of the photographs, that's one of the most interesting.

and famous things about the Enfield Poltergeist case. Because if you've ever looked into ghost stories, if you've ever looked at anything like this, you've seen the picture of Janet Hodgkin. Is it Hodgkin or Hodkin? Hodgson. Hodgson. Is it Bill Wilkinson? Yeah, it's Bill Wilkinson, yeah. Because you said Wilkins a bunch of times. His real name is Wilkins, but when he talks through Janet, it's Wilkinson. Okay, okay. Yeah, it's a whole thing.

You've seen the picture of Janet Hodgson, like, floating in the room, like, floating above the bed, screaming, looking terrified. Yeah, I've seen it. It looks like she jumped. It does. It looks like she jumped. Fuck.

But the person who was taking the pictures downstairs, he had the camera attached to a little, you know, one of those things like the clickers, the thumb clickers. And he said that the first photo in which Janet is still laying down on the bed. Under the covers. Under the covers. And the photo in which she is floating in the air is one sixth of a second, which

between those two photos. It's fucking impossible. I don't care how athletic she is. Yeah. And she was athletic. She was. She was a super athletic little girl, yeah. But that's impossible. Absolutely impossible, yeah. That's why it's like, is there something to be said about there are some... This is the issue. It's that I think that there's a world in which all of these things are real. I think that there's a way that all of this stuff comes together and that it's

But it is just going to be impossible to prove. It is just going to be. And it really comes down to... In a way that's going to satisfy skeptics. I think that this is the opposite. Where it's like watching the Enfield documentary, the Enfield Poltergeist documentary made me realize like the actual, all of that footage, it gets you closer to the center of what it's really to be like in one of these investigations. And I...

I still feel like it's the reactions from everybody around the family that still convinces me that something happened in the house. Yeah. Because they're all haunted. No one wants to talk about it to this day. And like, there's a lot of it's like, yes, they got attention for it. And this is always across the board.

You hear this from everybody who talks about any any either alien abduction or ghost haunting kind of stuff like this idea that they were going to get some big thing out of this monetarily. It did not help. They never. Well, they never asked for money. The mother never asked for money once. And at the very beginning, they thought that this was going to be a thing where a lot of people apparently in England, how they get move houses. If they're in a council house, they say that it's haunted.

Yes. And so they say it's on and they asked her like, do you want to move? That was the first question the Daily Mirror asked her on the first day. And she said, no, I've been here 12 years. I don't want to move. I want this thing out of here. Yes. See, that was what I was kept thinking. It's like, move. Well, it's hard. They're broke as fuck. Yeah. They're broke as fuck. Yeah. And they're not. Yeah. They weren't going anywhere. But it's.

Yeah, but I then will also add the caveat that I do understand. People do things solely for attention. I know that they do things solely for attention. But this is, when you have the whole family united on a thing, I still feel like when you look at the footage of the little girls, they're just not that sophisticated. Yeah, and I don't mean... It's not an insult. Not an insult. If you look at...

The mother. When she starts talking, like, yeah, I mean, yeah, I've seen some body cam footage.

that would mystify you because like old ladies, they firmly believe that they don't get arrested. Right? Like old women, no, they don't. They will not. They oftentimes are like, you're coming for the fucking brethren. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're an accuser of the brethren, motherfucker. But like old ladies for some reason thinks that police officers are just not going to arrest them. Yeah. But guess what, man? Sometimes they even fucking tase them.

I've seen a couple where it's just like, because also old ladies surprisingly strong, you know, because all the years of nothing to lose, I guess hitting people with spoons and pushing your cart and going like, like, you know, making gnocchi, like making your hands strong or whatever. I don't know. No, it's true. You got to do a lot of stuff by yourself. But yeah, so I'm more physically afraid of.

of the mother in this. Like, I know that she's physically capable of quite a bit. Yeah. But I don't think

She's just cunning. No, no, they're not cunning. They're not cunning people. No, I don't think that they have that sort of I don't think they have that sort of imagination in order to like completely but create this entire story. And I don't think they're going to outsmart Maurice Gross and Guy Playfair. And they're living in the house. They're living in the house. Like they did 21 episodes.

Like, full overnight vigils. Oh, just Guy Playfair alone did 21 overnight vigils. I don't even know how many Maurice Gross did. But he was in that house constantly. I mean, he was in there all the time. He would just show up at, like, 7 p.m. and then sit around to the morning, right? Yeah, and he did have, like, there was one time that he did see that, to him, like, it was sort of the exception that proved the rule, where he saw, like, he caught Janet, like, moving one of the recorders.

Like he did catch it, but he was like the ease at which I caught her and how fast she confessed shows me that this is real. Yeah. She is not very good at it. Like she tried to do it and she wasn't very good at it. And she's a terrible liar, you know? So, but you know, there's also no account for how deep,

the well of human desperation goes. So you never know the amount of people could go. I like holding nine ideas in my head at once. I do understand that there's a world where the family could just be faking this and just be a feature of them being maybe not so bright as the fact that they got nothing out of it. She could be schizophrenic. Or just the idea of just being lonely and lost. But when you watch that documentary,

And then it's like we talked about with her. If you see clips of her now, Janet, now, she's fucked up. Yeah, she is. This whole thing is like fucked her up. Well, she wasn't schizophrenic.

Because they eventually took her out of the home. Yes. Once it got bad enough. And because she was having just, I mean, just horrible nights where she was convulsing. You know, she was just like in obvious like mental and emotional anguish. So they took her out of the home and they put her in a hospital where a neurologist like looked at her, looked at her brainwaves, you know, checked her for epilepsy and they kept her under observation for six weeks. And they're like,

this is a normal teenage girl. There's nothing wrong with her. And when she was away from the house, there was a recording of her talking to Maurice Gross, and she's like, I feel so much better. She's like, I do not want to go back there. I got my own room.

Yeah, exactly. That is exactly what she said. She's like, I've got my own room. You know, like the radio can keep. I don't want to go back to sharing a room. I want to stay like this is nice. I don't want to go back there. Things are terrible back there. And they said that she was a completely different girl away from the house. But once she came back, it started up again and it continued for a little while until it just.

sort of tapered off. And she didn't really talk about, like, Janet did not talk about what happened to her very often throughout the year. She didn't give many interviews. She didn't do many documentaries. I think the longest one she did was in the DVD extras for The Conjuring 2, in which I think she was paid to say that the Warrens were there for longer than they actually were. Yeah, she must have been. Because Ed and Lorraine Warren, we talked about this in the episode, Ed and Lorraine Warren did...

show what, like, you know, you've seen The Conjuring 2, right? Yeah, yeah, but it's been a while, though, so give me a refresher. It's the Impel Poltergeist case. Okay, great. It is the Impel Poltergeist case. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And, like, they travel to England, and, you know, it makes it seem like the Warrens were the ones that were a part of this thing the whole time. There is a Maurice Gross character, there is a Guy Playfair character, but it's framed as, like, the Warrens saved this little girl. Oh, yeah, dude, and have you ever seen the real Warrens? We're going to be working on a series on the Warrens this year, and you're, uh, you'll see that, um,

The main Warren, it's his... Ed? Ed Warren. Yeah. He looks like a Permanee sandwich come to life. Yeah. Like, he looks like a sandwich that has french fries on it, but that's a man. Yeah. And he is, but then he's played by Patrick Wilson. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then Vera Farmiglia playing Lorraine Warren is one of the biggest popcorn.

crimes. That is a Stalin-level whitewashing of history like I've ever seen. Because she looks like she should be on a fucking pancake batter box. Yeah, Lorraine Warren, yeah, very pinch-faced. But these people are grifters. And they just, they showed up for

A day. They were there for a day and they were asked to leave. Yeah. Like, you need to get out of here. You're just getting in our way. Yeah, you're getting in our way. What do you mean you guys don't got football? You guys never heard of the Pittsburgh Stellars? That's what they flew all the way to England for a day? Well, that's what they do. That's their entire life?

We'll get to that. We're going to cover that more. Yeah. Their entire lives were like, they'd hear tell us something and they'd go straight for it and see if they could insert themselves into it. See how much money they could make off of it because they were fucking grifters. Lorraine, let's go down there. Let's go out there to the UK and we'll go out there and we'll fucking tell all of them about the ghosts and stuff like that. We'll do a prayer. We'll get all these guys all ready to go. We'll go take a

back, this is Troy Riverslady. I got so many questions about them, but I'm just going to wait. We'll tell you all about them. But Janet, they bring her into this documentary series about three quarters of the way through episode three. Okay. And she is a haunted

individual. She is still a haunted individual. And the way she talks about it is like it sent chills down my spine. She said that you do not feel like you are entirely yourself. Oh, yes. And she was like, whatever myself is. She's like, you do not when this is happening, you do not feel entirely yourself. There's a

something else in there with you. And she says, and this fucking killed me, you know, she's in her, you know, 60s now. She said, it's never left me. She says it's still there. It's never left. And so what, she just knows how to suppress it now? She just lives with it.

She just deals with it. So Bill Wilkinson's followed her? Or is it like, or the weird entity? Whatever it is. Whatever it is. It's like masquerading as another. Essentially, things masquerade as things from the other side using data that they have accumulated. Like, imagine if there is, if that is true, that there's another intelligence. They are using frames that exist in real life and then they're applying themselves to those frames. So that's what we always like, one of those like dumb, funny things where you're like,

in alien abductions and shit. You're like, there's a, like a level where like you believe you've been abducted by aliens so much. You do believe that it's real, but then the aliens will like tell you a certain amount of things. And then if you're so deep in the world, you can eventually start asking the questions.

But what if these aliens are lying to me? And so you can like be like this idea of like, so what if ghosts are real, but also they're not what you think they are? Like this bill thing is a framework. It is a personality framework that was somehow something from the back of Janet's mind connected to some form of other. Maybe if we want to get super woo, we will interdimensional, but

thing or just residual energy that it takes on a bunch of different sizes. Then you have the added fuel of the furniture from the child murderer's house that sort of amplifies that sort of nasty edge to the phenomena. And then you got a super fucking productive Menarche and it's gushing and flowing and that's making you super psychic and shit. And then you got your rag woman mom. She's just coming in every day being like, you can't blow on me yet.

No, the mother did come in every day and like, and was, it would get angry with Janet. And also there was the fact that their father had left, uh, just a few, like a couple of months before. And the father was also, the father was also like very, uh, abusive while he was in the home. Uh, and he was an absolute asshole, but as far as it being, you know, this being something that she carried with her, like,

It could very well. Like I personally, I believe that a lot of this stuff has to do with the collective unconsciousness. And it could be that something like you could maybe look at it as like, say, like an infection where this big ball of energy, like Henry was talking about all this stuff coming together, you know, it infects Janet, right?

And you could kind of look at this thing, if it's strong enough, as sort of a chronic illness that she has to deal with for the rest of her life. There's something in Janet's consciousness that has embedded itself there, some sort of infection, that just will not leave. That she can no longer separate herself from Janet.

that I like the word infection. I think infection is a good way to put it because I don't necessarily believe that it's a consciousness per se. It's more like, uh,

the program of a consciousness you know like you where you had like if you look at the brain as a sort of like programmer if you look at like the mind is a sort of program like that program has been installed into Janet's Kalon consciousness yeah it's from remote like a compute like a computer virus and now she just has to fucking you can't uninstall it you

You know, and she just has to deal with it. And that the reason why she knew things about Bill Wilkinson, the reason why she knew how he died, the reason why, you know, she knew like kind of his mannerisms, you know, his ways of thinking is because she had the Bill Wilkins program, the framework installed into her consciousness. So that's that's kind of how I look at this. I find it interesting. But this documentary series, again, not getting paid.

Apple Plus has not reached out. And a lot of times they do actually don't like

That we're mentioning. But what's nice is that we're actually pro this documentary. This is a great doc. This is one of the best. I saw the first two episodes. I was like, before I go into all these things as a total skeptic. Sure. And now I'm like 75% sure it happened. Yeah. Something happened in that house. I think the documentary is a really good example of an expansion of a paranormal investigation. I think that if you want to do an investigation, the stuff that like, you know, I've,

I've sang the praises of Hellier and the new Kirk's for forever. But if they have a new case, it's all about like haunted objects. And you watch like what a real paranormal investigation is. It's not a long weekend. It's not you arriving.

You as a big McGill reporter and putting up, you're like, you know, hanging out for 48 hours and be like, all right, whatever. And summing it up, you're looking at a phenomenon that is as old as consciousness and it is a part of the human story. So it does sometimes I think it takes the extra mile. Yeah. I think you've got to be in it. And then.

maybe it does convince you more, but you know, then call me convinced. Yeah. In this documentary, the way they do it is they take Maurice grosses, actual tapes, the 200 hours of tapes, and they rebuilt the poltergeist house exactly as it was completely. That was crazy. They built sets exactly as it was. And like Janet, at one point she walks into the set and she's like,

just like so fucking freaked out. And what they do is they have actors lip sync along with Maurice Grosz's tape. Very impressive. It's extraordinarily impressive. It's very good. The way they put it together is so fucking good. What am I, Drag Race? That's what Eddie said before. Yeah, man. Take me on Drag Race. Now it's time for you to lip sync with...

For your life! But yeah, so jury's out, obviously. Technically, if you want to be a skeptic, there's plenty of weighted evidence for you to say that it's not real, of course. But I think that if you look at

The material that is there that is shown in this documentary, and you have an open mind, it might convince you otherwise. In that video, I think it might prove that she wasn't bending spoons, but it does not negate in any way whatsoever the thousands of incidents that Maurice Gross recorded. Yeah, it's not just that. I feel like Janet...

if she was out to make money off of this shit would have become a ghost hunter. Yeah. You know, like the way she put it is that she moved out of that house as soon as she, she said she moved out as soon as she possibly could and never looked back.

And that has been our episode. Last update on the left. You are currently on the Sirius app. I believe that you will also be able to see us visually on the Sirius app. And won't that be incredible for you? So you go click that. Or you've been doing it the whole time. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I don't fucking know.

I don't know about that. But then go check all the other bullshit out. Go to LastPodcastOnTheLeft.com to go see us live on tour. We are going to various North American cities and also some Australian cities as well. Come and see us. It's on the website. You can check it out all there. Go to stupid ass TikTok for some reason at LPOnTheLeft.com.

We went viral, which again, I don't know what it did. Doesn't matter. Every time we go viral, I feel like we just get in trouble. Yeah. So I don't really know what's good. I don't know if it's good or not, but it's nice that it's out there. Instagram at LP on the left as well. Yeah, that's fine. And then go, yeah, patreon.com slash podcast on the left. That's where you can see the other main hub episodes and watch us flap our big chins. Mm-hmm.

Thank you all very much for listening. Hail Guignol. Hail Satan. Hail Maurice. Yeah. Bye, I miss Maurice. I miss Maurice. I wish he was my dad. I heard he lived a very nice life. He was even on Oli G once. Oh, really? Yeah. That's cool. Good for him. He had to meet well. That's nice. Good for him. Bye. Bye.

Thank you for enjoying the last update on the left. You can find other shows that you'll enjoy from the last podcast network on last podcast on the left.com. See you there.