What did the Enfield Haunting have to do with Ed and Lorraine Warren?

Sky Living viewers were recently treated to The Enfield Haunting, a  mini series retelling a dramatic “real-life haunting” from 1970s Enfield, in which supernatural “goings-on” were reported by a single mother-of four, Peggy Hodgson .

The alleged disturbances, which included objects being thrown, disembodied voices and even levitation, seemed to centre around Peggy’s two eldest children:  13-year-old Margaret, and 11-year-old Janet. The case caught the imagination of Seventies Britain after it was reported by the Daily Mail and the Mirror, and was investigated by a number of sceptics and paranormal investigators, including Maurice Grosse, of the Society for Psychical Research (played in the Sky TV series by Timothy Spall).

But the case has also inspired James Wan’s follow-up to his 2013 horror movie The Conjuring. Wan’s first film famously retold a “true” case from Rhode Island, US, and featured the real-life paranormal investigators and husband-and-wife team Ed and Lorraine Warren, who will also feature in the sequel.

While they weren’t depicted in the Sky TV series, the Warrens, portrayed in Wan's film by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson – who will reprise their roles for The Conjuring 2 – were among the many investigators to visit the Hodgson’s North London council home.

A number of observers later came to believe that the Hodgson "poltergeist" was in fact a hoax, carried out by an attention-hungry Janet (who later confessed to faking some, although not all, of the phenomena). But the Warrens, who visited Enfield in 1978, remained convinced that the events had a supernatural explanation.

Here’s what Ed Warren had to say about the case (in Gerard Brittle’s The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren, via Fangoria):

“Those who deal with the supernatural day in and day out know the phenomena are there  – there’s no doubt about it. Therefore, when people tell me they don’t believe in ghosts and spirit forces, what they’re really saying to me is they’re not familiar with the data on the subject. Yet the data is there – should one care to look. In fact, much of it has been collected under such rigid conditions as to make a lot of other scientific research pale in comparison.

 For example, take a case Lorraine and I began investigating this past summer [1978] in Enfield, England, where inhuman spirit phenomena were in progress. Now, you couldn’t record the dangerous, threatening atmosphere inside that little house. But you could film the levitations, teleportations, and dematerialisations of people and objects that were happening there – not to mention the many hundreds of hours of tape recordings made of these spirit voices speaking out loud in the rooms.”

It’s worth noting that the Warrens are portrayed in The Conjuring (and presumably in its sequel) as a devout Christian couple, valiantly battling dark and unknown forces. It’s therefore extremely likely that, within the film, the Enfield case will be represented as bona fide haunting, complete with all the "levitations, teleportations, and dematerialisations" described by Ed.

But, away from the big screen, opinion on the couple remains divided: many have labelled the ghost-hunting pair, who founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952, as either unduly credulous, or as charlatans.

Ed Warren died in 2006, while Lorraine, who lives in Connecticut, is now 88. In 2013 she told The Telegraph that, while some artistic license had been taken, the majority of Wan’s first Conjuring film was “very accurate”.

A spin-off to The Conjuring, Annabelle (directed by John R Leonetti), was released in 2014.

The Conjuring 2 is released in June 2016.