TV News London’s Managing Director, Roz Morris, speaks as an eyewitness in a new documentary about the Enfield Poltergeist which is part of the Hauntings series streaming on Paramount+. She has also been giving media interviews about the programme and her own experiences of what she describes as “the most extraordinary story I’ve ever covered”.
As a young BBC radio reporter Roz reported on strange events happening in the Hodgson family house in Enfield in the later 1970’s and she also wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the Enfield Poltergeist.
In the Paramount+ documentary Roz explains that she only went to investigate the reports of unusual things happening at the Hodgson family house in Green Street, Enfield in North London, because it was a very slow news day, and the production team didn’t have enough stories to fill the World This Weekend programme. On Saturday 10 September 1977, the Daily Mirror had a front-page story about ‘strange happenings’ at the house and Roz was told that if no big news stories occurred on the Saturday she would have to go to the house and report on ‘the ghost story’. No other story came up, so she went to Enfield with her radio recording equipment.
She reported on what she found both in her report on Sunday 11 September 1977 on BBC World This Weekend programme and the following year in her BBC Radio 4 radio documentary. While making the documentary she visited the Hodgson’s house many other times in 1977 and 1978 making recordings and interviewing 15 eyewitnesses to strange events. Her radio documentary was aired twice on BBC Radio 4 and twice on the BBC World Service.
“I’ve never known anything like it before or since” Roz says in the Paramount+ documentary. “I couldn’t explain what happened. I think there really was something strange going on in that house.”
Roz Morris
In a round of interviews promoting the ‘Hauntings’ series, Roz spoke on Talk TV to Howard Hughes the presenter of the weekly programme ‘The Unexplained’. In her half-hour interview, she explained how she went to meet the Hodgson family for the first time and produced her report for BBC Radio 4 World This Weekend. This included interviews with paranormal investigator, Maurice Grosse, and with Peggy Hodgson, the mother of the family who lived in the house, who had only weeks before first begun to see very strange things happening in her home. These included furniture moving apparently of its own accord and toys being thrown about without any visible person doing this.
“I think the interesting thing about the Enfield Poltergeist is that people wanted to be interviewed because they had never seen anything like it” Roz told Howard Hughes. During her visits to the house, Roz recorded loud knocking sounds on the walls and also made recordings of the unusual deep voices which appeared to come from the two Hodgson girls, Janet and Margaret, and which claimed to be the voices of ghosts. These are the first broadcast recordings of poltergeist activity on British media.
She also interviewed engineers and scientists who ran tests and experiments in the house, as well as a world expert on poltergeists.
Speaking to Martina Fowler of the magazine Total TV Guide, Roz told her that reporting on the poltergeist was disturbing because so many odd and inexplicable things happened. “I absolutely did not want to be a paranormal investigator afterwards. I don’t know how people do it.”
Asked what she would say to people who maintain that the Enfield Poltergeist was all a hoax, Roz said:
“I’d say you can think it’s a hoax if you want, but you weren’t there. And everybody who saw strange things has stuck to their story. Something very odd was going on in that house. But we don’t know what caused it.”
If you’d like to know more about the Enfield Poltergeist, here’s the link to Roz’s radio documentary programme on the BBC website.
