Fanboys Anonymous

Yes, yes. This year's Annabelle was not a masterpiece, but who cares! The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Poltergeist, set to be released on June 10, 2016, seems to have all the right elements to be as awesome (if not even better) as its 2013 predecessor, which made a whopping $318 million worldwide.

Farmiga and Wilson as the Warrens.

For starters, both the original director, James Wan, and writers, Chad and Carey Hayes, are returning for the sequel, which will focus on another case in Ed and Lorraine Warren's long list of real-life paranormal investigations. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga will reprise their roles as the two investigators.

Although the official plot of the script has not been announced yet, here is a short account of the true bone-chilling story that inspired the movie: the Enfield Poltergeist.

It all started on the evening of August 30, 1977, at a council house in Enfield, North London, England. Single mom Peggy Hodgson was trying to put her four children—Margaret, age 13; Janet, 11; Johnny, 10; Billy, 7—to bed when Janet complained about her brother's bed shaking. Peggy did not pay much attention to it, but on the following night Peggy experienced something she could not ignore.

The Hodgson Family.

After hearing a crashing sound coming from Janet's room, the single mother rushed in only to find a chest of drawers moving by itself. Suddenly, the chest was propelled toward the door by an invisible force. Scared, Peggy and her children ran to her neighbors' house.

Not knowing what to do, the frightened neighbors called the police. The attending female police constable, Carolyn Heeps, was not able to do much at the scene, since no one was breaking the law. However, she did see "a large armchair moved, unassisted, 4 ft across the floor."

Next, press. Daily Mirror photographer Graham Morris was contacted. He was able to capture some of the supernatural phenomena on camera, but things seemed to be getting worse.

After BBC visited the house to try to record some of the phenomena, the family finally sought help from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which sent investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, a poltergeist expert who subsequently wrote This House Is Haunted, to investigate.

Grosse, when interviewed by Will Storr, recorded the chaos in the house:

As soon as I got there, I realised that the case was real because the family was in a bad state. Everybody was in chaos. [At first] nothing happened for a while, then I experienced Lego pieces [and marbles] flying across the room; The extraordinary thing was, when you picked them up, they were hot.

" I thought I was going to die," Janet Hodgson.

Although many people experienced objects flying, furniture moving, and heard knocking coming from inside the walls, most of the activity seemed to be centered around 11-year-old Janet. The girl would go into violent trances and became certain she was possessed by a ghost named Bill Wilkins.

According to the paranormal investigators' reports, Janet would levitate and speak in an eerie, raspy voice when she was allegedly possessed by Wilkins. In one instance, a invisible force seemed to control a curtain, which tried to strangle her.

To this day, Janet stands by her story: "[The poltergeist] lived off me, off my energy. Call me mad if you like. Those events did happen. The poltergeist was with me and I feel that in a sense he always will be."

For a more on this true ghost story, check out the documentary below, where most (if not all) audio recordings of Janet's trances can be heard.


Cynics believe it was all a big hoax, but no one can deny the Enfield Poltergeist is one fascinating ghost story. It will make an awesome story for the Conjuring 2.

Do you believe it was real? Are you going to watch The Conjuring sequel? Leave your comments below!