Nephew of the Enfield Haunting girls recalls the moment he saw Janet Hodgson, 11, levitate from her chair and ‘turn around’ and says the atmosphere in the house was ‘terrible’

One of the biggest horror mysteries to grip the nation is revisited on today’s episode of This Morning.

The so-called Enfield Haunting took place in the summer of 1977, when two sisters Janet Hodgson, 11, and Margaret Hodgson, 13, were photographed flying through the air in their north London home, along with furniture, drawers and even water .

Today their cousin Paul Burcombe – who was 13 at the time and lived around the corner – sat down with presenters Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary and reporter Roz Morris to retell the terrifying experience that changed their lives forever.

Both Paul and Roz will also reveal their encounters in a brand new Apple TV docuseries titled Enfield Poltergeist, a Halloween special that airs for the first time tomorrow.

Speaking on This Morning, Paul told of the fateful night: ‘It was one evening my Aunt Peggy came to ours quite hysterical and very upset and she said there was a noise going on on the top floor of the house.

“And she asked if we could go there. And I don’t know why, but I went there with my dad – I was 13 – and we lived just a few doors away. So I went to the house and we went upstairs.

‘In the back bedroom there is a very large oak wardrobe and that was moved to the middle of the room and that was actually the beginning. The whole house was just real – the atmosphere was terrible. It was very scary.

“We didn’t know what was going on and we were skeptical about what was going on. But really, we needed to know “what’s going on here” because the girls are clearly very scared, and so is Peggy. She was very upset. There was just a very cold atmosphere in the house.’

Peggy Hodgson, a single mother of both girls, lived with her children at 284 Green Street in Enfield, London.

The mother-of-four called the Metropolitan Police to complain about furniture being moved, while two of her children said they had heard strange noises coming from the walls. Paul himself witnessed a bank being ‘turned over’.

“We were all sitting in the living room and the houses are very small,” Paul began. ‘There was a leather two-seater and it literally turned upside down.

‘At that stage we were all trying to support the family and trying to get answers to what was going on. That was the most important thing. I suppose my father and I were trying to support Margaret, and that which had no father.”

Paul also shared the moment he witnessed a scared Janet ‘walking around the room’ saying: ‘We were in the same room, same lounge and she was sitting on an old fashioned chair and she had her feet off the ground and resting on the pedestals. At the bottom.

‘She was literally moving around the room and then fell off the chair, but her feet weren’t on the floor at all and she was quite relaxed, but she was walking around the room and then turned around.’

In response to Dermot asking if he jumped away in fright, Paul replied: ‘I stayed there’.

And while he couldn’t say how often this happened, he confirmed that special events continued to happen after that one day.

Former BBC Radio 4 journalist Roz was tasked with reporting on the event and met the girls after visiting their home.

“After the girls went to sleep, there was a huge bang upstairs,” she remembers. ‘It appeared that while they were sleeping a chair had been moved across the room.

‘Now I haven’t seen it, but it sounded quite strange and I made a report about it and went back a few months to make a radio documentary about it.

“I recorded the knocking on the walls and the strange voices the girls seemed to have produced.”

Roz said the ordeal was ‘terrifying’ but her decision to focus on getting the shots kept her going.

The news comes as the photographer who took the infamous ‘floating girl’ photo of Janet said he believes she had telekinesis powers like Stephen King’s Carrie.

Photographer Graham Morris was in his twenties when, in 1977, while working for the Daily Mirror, he was sent to the semi-detached house with a reporter at around midnight after their neighbours, Vic and Peggy Nottingham, called for help when the terrified Hodgson had relatives sought refuge with them.

To prove their theory, a camera on a tripod was set up in the corner of the nursery, activated by a button on a long cable running to the living room, while an audio recording was also made.

‘As soon as I hear something, like a bed spring shaking or someone moaning or screaming, a bang or a bang… whatever. I pressed the button,” Mr. Morris said.

This created the famous photo seen around the world of Janet supposedly ‘floating’ and ‘flying through the air’. Mr Morris recalled hearing a scream or shout and then nothing for a second before a huge crash.

“There was no way she was doing this for fun,” he said. ‘You have to be angry if you really want to do something like that. It was a completely darkened room.

“When she was jumping, she would launch herself into a brick wall or a pitch black door.”

They ran upstairs and found Janet in a “mess,” collapsed on the floor on the other side of the bedroom.

He denies ever saying she was jumping and left it to the experts at the Society for Psychic Research to decide whether she was floating or not.

Mr. Morris has his own theory and openly admits that he does not believe in ghosts.

“I think this girl has some power,” he said.

He believes the house was not haunted because things would happen whenever Janet was there, whether at school, at the neighbors’ house or in the shops.

Instead, he compared it to Stephen King’s character Carrie, who can move things with her mind by harnessing her telekinesis powers.

‘[I think] Janet has this kind of kinetic energy, she’s really smart,” he said. ‘Like I said, she can’t talk to her dad – he’s not there – mom is too busy, her sister is crying, one brother has a speech impediment so bad I doubt she can even understand what he’s saying , and the other brother is talking. a special school.

“And she’s desperate for this… whatever it is. This energy, this power, whatever she has, over and over to communicate with people. And it comes out in different ways, with a kind of force. Like a kinetic energy where things are moving.”