If you’ve watched James Wan’s The Conjuring 2, you probably remember the terrifying crooked man and that deep, raspy voice coming out of a young girl. It’s a Hollywood masterpiece. But the true story of Conjuring 2 is actually weirder, messier, and much more controversial than the movie lets on. We aren't just talking about a grumpy ghost named Bill Wilkins. We’re talking about the Enfield Poltergeist, a case that took over British tabloids in the late 1970s and still has skeptics and believers fighting today.
Basically, it all started in August 1977.
Peggy Hodgson was a single mom living in a council house in Enfield, North London. She had four kids. One night, two of them—Janet (11) and Margaret (13)—claimed their beds were shaking. Peggy thought they were just messing around. She told them to go to sleep. But then, a heavy chest of drawers supposedly slid across the floor on its own. Peggy tried to push it back. It wouldn't budge. That was the moment things got real.
Why the Enfield Poltergeist is Still So Creepy
The haunting didn’t just happen for one night. It lasted for over a year.
Most people think the Warrens—Ed and Lorraine—were the main investigators because that’s how the movie portrays it. Honestly? They were barely there. They showed up for about a day, looked around, and left. The real heavy lifting was done by Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Grosse was a grieving father who had recently lost his own daughter, also named Janet, in a car accident. He wanted to believe. Playfair, on the other hand, was a bit more of a hardened investigator, though even he became convinced that something "not of this world" was happening in that cramped house.
They recorded everything. Thousands of hours of tape.
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You’ve likely heard the recordings of Janet speaking in that guttural, gravelly voice. She claimed to be Bill Wilkins, a man who had died in the house years prior. "Just before I died, I went blind," the voice rasped on the tape. "And then I had a hemorrhage and I fell asleep and I died in the chair in the corner downstairs." Here’s the chilling part: Bill Wilkins' son later confirmed that his father had died in that exact chair, in that exact way. Janet, an 11-year-old girl, shouldn't have known those details.
The Problem With the "True" Story
Skeptics haven't been kind to the true story of Conjuring 2.
Anita Gregory and John Beloff, two other researchers, were convinced the kids were just playing a massive prank. They caught the girls bending spoons and hiding tape recorders. Even more damning, a video camera hidden in the room next door caught Janet jumping off her bed in a way that looked remarkably like she was just... well, jumping. Not flying. Not being thrown. Just a kid leaping through the air.
Years later, Janet actually admitted to a journalist that they "faked about 2 percent" of the activity. She said they did it just to see if the investigators would catch them. But she maintained that the other 98 percent was terrifyingly real.
Think about that.
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If you're a kid and you're surrounded by adults with cameras and microphones 24/7, maybe you feel the pressure to perform. Or maybe the house was actually alive.
The Warrens' Role vs. Reality
In the film, Ed and Lorraine Warren are the heroes who fly in to save the day from a demonic nun named Valak. In the true story of Conjuring 2, Valak doesn't exist. The Nun was a late-stage addition by James Wan during reshoots because he felt the "old man" ghost wasn't scary enough for a summer blockbuster.
The Warrens were actually seen as "nuisances" by the British investigators. Guy Lyon Playfair wrote in his book This House is Haunted that Ed Warren told him he could make a lot of money out of the case. The British researchers didn't appreciate the American "ghost hunters" swooping in for a photo op. While the movie shows Ed singing Elvis songs and fixing the plumbing, the reality was mostly a lot of tea-drinking, arguing with neighbors, and listening to a little girl bark like a dog.
The atmosphere in the house was heavy.
Photographer Graham Morris, who worked for the Daily Mirror, was hit in the face by a Lego brick that flew across the room. He swore no one threw it. He was a professional, not a ghost hunter. He had no reason to lie.
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Beyond the Jump Scares: What Happened to the Hodgsons?
Hauntings aren't just about things moving in the night. They destroy lives.
The Hodgsons were bullied. People threw stones at their windows. Neighbors thought they were crazy or, worse, that they were into the occult. Peggy lived in that house until she died in 2003. She never tried to sell the story for millions. She lived a quiet, somewhat tragic life. Janet eventually moved away, got married, and left the "ghost girl" persona behind, but she’s gone on record saying the trauma of those years never really left her.
She felt used. By the media, by the researchers, and maybe by whatever was in those walls.
It’s easy to dismiss the true story of Conjuring 2 as a hoax fueled by 1970s hysteria. But when you look at the sheer volume of witnesses—police officers, doctors, journalists, and neighbors—it gets harder to explain away. Constable Carolyn Heeps signed a sworn affidavit stating she saw a chair levitate and move four feet across the floor. She checked for wires. She found nothing.
What to Look for Next
If you want to understand the reality behind the film, you have to look past the CGI. The real horror wasn't a demon in a habit; it was the breakdown of a family under the microscope of the entire world.
- Watch the original footage: There is a documentary called The Enfield Poltergeist (2023) on Apple TV+ that uses the actual audio tapes recorded by Maurice Grosse. It is significantly more unsettling than the movie because the voices are real.
- Read the source material: Get a copy of This House is Haunted by Guy Lyon Playfair. It’s a dry, almost clinical account of the events that makes the weirdness feel much more grounded.
- Compare the layout: Look at the floor plans of the Green Street house. Most of the activity happened in small, confined spaces, which makes the "hoax" theory harder to pull off without being seen.
The Enfield case remains the most documented haunting in history. Whether it was a collective delusion, a masterful prank by two bored sisters, or a genuine supernatural event, it changed how we look at the "paranormal" forever. It wasn't about a haunted house in the middle of nowhere. It was a regular house, on a regular street, with a very irregular problem.
To really grasp the true story of Conjuring 2, you have to accept that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle—somewhere between 2 percent fake and 98 percent unexplainable.