Enfield Poltergeist: challenge to Jason Engwer

UPDATE July 27, 2019

Since authentication of evidence is everything in investigation by outsiders, especially in this Enfield poltergeist case that Engwer himself admits involved fakery by the main players, I hereby request Jason Engwer to provide to me ALL of the audio, video, testimonial and documentary evidence he has obtained in the matter of the Enfield Poltergeist case.  Will Engwer comply?  Or will he argue that skeptics are being irrational by asking for the most authenticated forms of the relevant evidence?

Please contact me by email to barryjoneswhat@gmail.com, to discuss possible ways you can communicate this evidence to me.
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Over at Triablogue, Jason Engwer has reached a new low with his obsessive need to attack naturalism and prove that the supernatural exists.  His latest?  An endless amount of blogging to defend an alleged incident of poltergeist activity that happened between 1977 and 1979 in England, known as the Enfield Incident.

One wonders whether Engwer could put his sophistry skills to convincing use telling us that the Lutz family attorney was more than likely just kidding when confessing that the Amityville Horror was a hoax.  Anything to keep sinners interested in the supernatural, amen?  God surely approves of the honorable lie, doesn't he?

Anyway, this exposè will be updated regularly.  Here's the story:

In 1977, a poltergeist allegedly invaded a house in England occupied by a divorced mother and her two daughters.  Read the Wikipedia article for quick introduction.  Read the Rational Wiki article for a more cynically skeptical view.

For the next two years, this phenomena was investigated by various people.  Most came away skeptics, but a few kept this matter alive by their conclusions that the haunting was real.

Jason Engwer claims that he funded the digitization of the certain audio recordings of this incident made by Maurice Grosse.

First, a question:  Jason, how do you think the god of the Old Testament feels about you putting forth substantial amounts of Christian money and effort to prevent the destruction of things that allegedly testify to activities promoted by devils and spiritists?

 27 'Now a man or a woman who is a medium or a spiritist shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones, their bloodguiltiness is upon them.'" (Lev. 20:27 NAU)

 10 "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer,
 11 or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.
 12 "For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD; and because of these detestable things the LORD your God will drive them out before you. (Deut. 18:10-12 NAU)

Second, I'm sure you will, like a cheap lawyer, trifle and pretend that because you do this in the effort to achieve the apologetics goal of proving the supernatural to be real, your bible-god thus approves of your expenditure of time and money this way. Sorry, that's not likely:  in Acts 19, despite the possibility that apostle Paul could have preserved the books on magical arts owned by recent converts, ostensibly so that he could expose truths about the devil, no, Paul's converts decided that permanently destroying such things was best:

 18 Many also of those who had believed kept coming, confessing and disclosing their practices.
 19 And many of those who practiced magic brought their books together and began burning them in the sight of everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
 20 So the word of the Lord was growing mightily and prevailing.   (Acts 19:18-20 NAU)

Third, if you are so damn sure that the standard apologetic fare you push through your website (i.e., the NT documents are historically reliable, atheism is logically fallacious, Jesus' resurrection is a secure fact of history,  etc, etc.) is seriously in accord with truth, and if you believe god blesses your efforts through such arguments, can you really say that the benefit of resurrecting what you think are the devil's works outweighs the risk that some of these recordings will motivate non-Christians to dive even more deeply into spiritualism and other forbidden areas?  Are standard Christian apologetic arguments not enough, that you have to resurrect gossip about the devil's activity in the world?

If you are doing just fine with your standard pop apologetics, can you really say that more is always better?  Can you really say that any evidence of the supernatural is always best displayed to the entire world?  Sorry, Jason, the bible does not express or imply that god will lift the ban on materials in support of idolatry/spiritism/satan merely because the Christian plans to use them for a godly purpose.  You don't believe yourself deficient in holy and godly arguments and evidence for Christianity, you don't think you are so lacking as to need the help of materials that have far greater potential to lure your non-Christian readers deeper into the occult. 

Or did you suddenly discover what a convenient blessing it can be to become a Calvinist and insist that everything you do, including even drawing people's attention to the tricks of the devil, was predestined by God and thus unavoidable?  I think its funny that you and Steve Hays have such violent disagreement on whether Calvinism is biblically justified.  Sort of warns the non-Christian reader that by becoming genuinely born again, we gain NO ability to correctly discern any biblical thing.

Fourth, I detect nothing in the New Testament that expresses or implies that God approves of methods of promoting Christianity that involve giving money to non-Christian organizations that specialize in preserving evidence of the devil's activity on earth (thus, satanic organizations).  Jesus and Paul did plenty of evangelism and apologetics.  Don't you think the bible's inerrant record of this model is sufficient for your faith and practice?  Apparently not.

Fourth, Jason, at any time in your communications with SPR, did you evangelize them or make any attempt to persuade them to repent and accept the gospel, yes or no?

Fifth,  I decided to do my own research into the Enfield Follies with as much of the first-hand evidence as possible.  So I sent the following request to SPR, the same organization Engwer paid to digitize the Grosse-tapes:

-----------beginquote

Hello,

I am interested in researching the so-called Enfield Poltergeist, the matter you advertise at

https://www.spr.ac.uk/news/enfield-haunting

A man named Jason Engwer is claiming to have funded the digitization of the Maurice Grosse's Enfield tapes.

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-enfield-poltergeist-tapes-made-more.html

I request the following materials in my attempt to investigate that phenomenon.  Please let me know which materials are not free, and what the cost would be, if any.

If any of the below-requested materials cannot be produced, please explain why.  For example, they are copyrighted, or the owner refuses to give permission to distribute, etc.

1. A full unedited copy of the contract and any other documents Mr. Engwer signed with you or with other organizations/persons/agents.  How much money has he paid you so far to digitize the Grosse-tapes?
2. A full unedited copy of all other communications you sent to or received from Mr. Engwer at any time, whether by letter, email, internet post, or otherwise.  I would like to know how extensive Mr. Engwer’s requests for evidence were.
3. Links to all the audio files concerning this incident that you have already made available to, or that you intend to make available to, Mr. Engwer.  I have found some websites that purport to host some downloadable versions of those tapes, but I would feel better if I could obtain those digital files from you directly.
4. Downloadable versions of any notes, diaries, investigative files or other written memoranda created between 1970 and 1987 by any investigator before, during and after they visited the house where the poltergeist allegedly was.
5. Any BBC broadcasts on radio and television you have, which mention the incident, or interview witnesses, etc.
6. All video and audio evidence that you believe is not available elsewhere.
7. All photographic and video files that anybody ever made of this phenomena at the house in question, between 1970 and 1987, including the photos allegedly depicting levitation, object movement or any other type of allegedly paranormal  activity.
8. All information and facts you have about the mother Peggy Hodgson,  the daughters Margaret and Janet, their father, and any family members, friends or neighbors.
9. Any reports filed by any police or welfare or social workers who may have made some type of inquiry or investigation into this incident at any time.
10. The most extensive biographical information you have about Maurice Grosse, John Burcombe, their investigations into any other incidents of alleged paranormal activity, and information on anybody else not already identified, supra,  who attempted any type of inquiry or investigation at any time into this incident.
11. I also seek your opinions on Jason Engwer's arguments that this was genuinely supernatural activity.  Does anybody at SPR suspect that the the Hodgson children were responsible, to any degree, for faking or attempting to fake any type of supernatural phenomena?  Does any of the evidence establish that anybody engaged in any type of deception or foul play between 1974 and 2005 concerning this incident?
12. All documents containing your answers or rebuttals to any skeptics who argue that this entire incident is just one giant hoax.
13. A listing and description of all the Grosse-tapes and any other audio recordings made between 1977 and 1980 relative to this incident, that is, the recordings that you decided not to digitize, the dates those tapes were originally recorded, and your reasons for not digitizing them.
14. References to any other persons, organizations, websites or companies that have audio, video, written, photographic or other source material you do not have about this incident.
15. The current mailing address, telephone number and any email addresses of Margaret and Janet Hodgson, or, if they wish not to be contacted, why they wish not to be contacted.

I'm sure you can appreciate why serious investigation requires that I obtain the evidence from sources as close as possible to the original authors.  Finding some of that stuff on unauthorized internet sites might make for interesting viewing, but can only hamper the investigation when the questions of authenticity inevitably arise.

Thank you for your help,

Barry Jones

-------------endquote

I sent that email today, August 13, 2018, so we'll have to wait and see how willing the SPR is for unbelievers to evaluate their claims using as much of the primary source material as possible.  I'm hoping they don't get commercial on me and insist that most of the requested evidence is proprietary and costs money.  

Maybe Jason will say I am unreasonable to bother these nice folk because I could get much of this off of the internet.  That's right Jason:  If its found on the internet, skeptics have no choice but to admit it's true.  What's next?  Gonna start tithing to Ron Wyatt's ministry?  Skeptics can't refute that picture of a chariot-wheel at the bottom of the Red Sea, so Wyatt has surely been used by God to smack down atheism and extol the inerrancy of the bible?

For now, Jason entitled one of his posts as The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes Made More Accessible

Jason, are you going to make those digitized audio files more accessible to the public?  Or is there a limit to how accessible you think these critically important tapes should be?

For now, yes, you guessed it, Mr. Engwer seriously believes that the iconic photo of a girl standing above her bed proves that she was levitated or at least "thrown" by paranomal powers:

What Burcombe witnessed, corroborated by Peggy, demonstrates that the poltergeist had an interest in levitating people in the manner reflected in the photographs.

Ready to see a picture that proves levitation can be done by ghosts?

















Maybe Jason can tell us how suspicious we should be that an alleged levitation that a regular camera caught, could not be caught on a video camera.  Until that day, assuming these pictures are accurate copies of the originals, this is nothing but girls jumping on beds.  It's also an otherwise smart apologist allowing his deluded religious zeal to cloud his brain.

Jason's god is apparently capable of creating the entire universe, parting the Red Sea, taking people up into heaven by whirlwind and chariots of fire, even causing the earth to stop turning just so Joshua has enough time to complete a battle....yet Jason's god apparently wants Jason to refute atheism by arguing that a picture of a girl above a bed is depicting levitation, not jumping, and hence the supernatural realm exists.  Does this send me running to repent in dust and ashes?



Hey Jason, how hard do you think it would be for a jailhouse lawyer to get some attention by arguing that the accidents that happened on the set of the original Exorcist movie cannot be explained on purely naturalistic grounds?  Yeah, go google that shit and discover the 67th book of the bible.

And while you are at it, assure skeptics that they have no hope of being able to debunk the fanciful miracle accounts in evangelist Mel Tari's 1971 best seller "Like A Mighty Wind".  The last I heard, those miracle stories were told by "eyewitnesses" and "corroborated", so atheists simply have no choice: god exists.

Updated regularly.

Update: July 27, 2019

Engwer got his shovel, apparently, and started digging into the bottom of the credibility barrel, once again.  He has posted a long rambling article doing what he does best, trifling about largely unknown events that he apparently gained knowledge of by listening to audio recordings made in 1977.  See here. 

I will respond point by point, not to the entire article, but to his own admissions that some of this stuff is baloney, since, as I will argue, such admission fully justifies broadbrushing the entire Enfield incident as a mixture of foul play and one paranormal researcher looking for fame and money.

First, there is the New Testament.  Nowhere does the text express or even imply that a follower of Christ should spend their time gossiping about paranormal events to the degree that Jason Engwer trifles about the details of this bullshit Enfield Poltergiest yarn.  Go ahead, read your NT, then ask yourself what Jesus wants the Christian teacher to focus on.  "Gossip about evil spirits as originally conveyed by a non-Christian person who had an interest in evil spirits" is not even close.

Second, the obvious:  the main players, to my knowledge, have never given their testimony under oath, in situation where they stood a risk of going to jail for lying.  So you'll excuse me if I don't give a shit about the girls being willing 40 years later to maintain their supernatural explanations while talking to tabloid tv reporters.

Third, I tried to gain the same tapes, videos and evidence from the same source Engwer allegedly got them, and after being told my request was being routed to others, received no more response.  That ought to tell you how interested the custodians are in allowing the evidence to be evaluated by disinterested parties.  They stand for paranormal activity.  They don't allow skeptics to see the most authenticated evidence, and Christians don't allow Mormons to interrupt Sunday services.

Fourth, to my knowledge Engwer has never provided any authentication for these "tapes".  I don't mean that he is lying about having such tapes.  Unless he thinks "authentication" a negligible issue, the lack of authentication automatically justifies wholesale skepticism (i.e., not suspension of judgment, but judgment that the incident was completely faked with no supernatural anything to it).

Fifth, Engwer tells the reader nothing about why historians and courts of law agree that second-hand testimony is generally considered inferior to first-hand.  Had he done so, he'd risk some of his readers asking "why don't you conduct a personal interview with the main players who are still alive?".  Then Engwer would have to disagree with historians and legal authorities and pretend that second-hand evidence, whose authenticity he has no personal knowledge of, is "just as good" as under-oath testimony from the main players.

Sixth, I would like Engwer to make available to me ALL of the audio recordings, video recordings, and any other documentary or testimonial evidence that he has obtained about the Enfield incident.  If he wants to be taken seriously when he pretends this crap was likely genuinely paranormal, he will not fear investigation into the matter by somebody who does not subscribe to the paranormal.  Any refusal of Engwer to fork over said evidence, shall be taken to mean that he is fearful that a purely naturalistic explanation of the evidence would be equally if not more reasonable than his own. 

I've only given a few examples of the sort of qualifiers that could be added to what I said earlier about Margaret and Janet's suspicious behavior. I wouldn't claim that these qualifiers satisfactorily explain everything. But I do think they satisfactorily explain some things.

Then we have a problem not different from that facing the jury after they heard the rape-victim admit she has lied repeatedly in the past about rape.  Does it prove the current rape didn't happen?  No. Would it intellectually justify the jurors who choose to find her lacking in credibility?  Yes.  In a rape case where the physical evidence only shows sex and it is only the woman's testimony that says "rape", you cannot blame the jurors who, upon hearing her confess to lying about rape in the past, to consider allowing a potentially guilty rapist go free to be a higher priority than jailing a potentially innocent man.

My overall assessment of the altered states of consciousness is that it's highly probable that at least much of what happened was paranormal, but that some of it is suspicious, sometimes even highly suspicious.

Then you cannot blame the atheist or skeptic who uses their intentional fakery to broadbrush all the evidence, call it bullshit, and forget about it.  The issue is not whether lawyers who specialize in sophistry can always raise trifles that skeptics cannot completely blow out of the ballpark.  The issue is whether insisting on the purely naturalistic basis for all the Enfield Poltergeist activity is "reasonable".  It is.  In Engwer's word, nobody is reasonable to be skeptical of a story until they have taken several years to do doctoral-level research into it and extracted reluctant confessions of foul play from all of the the main players.  Well fuck you, reasonableness in skepticism doesn't require such extreme analysis.  Otherwise, you are a dipshit to ever render a skeptical opinion about anything, since in all likelihood you didn't exhaustively investigate it beforehand.

A lot of what occurs during these episodes is trivial, immature, vulgar, nonsensical, and embarrassing.

And yet you expect us to believe the girls made free choices to fake some symptoms while sincerely believing the poltergeist was genuinely supernatural?  Where exactly do you think skeptics go wrong by using the "highly suspicious" and "nonsensical" acts of the girls to broadbrush the entire matter as fake?

I'd expect many people to dismiss the phenomena because they're so different than what's commonly expected from a poltergeist.

There are no reliable records of genuinely poltergeist activity in the first place, so the fact that the Enfield phenomenon involved elements no present in movies entitled "poltergeist" means exactly nothing.

But common expectations are often poorly informed.

A rather stupid statement given that because they are "common", they represent the collective wisdom of a lot of adults, and therefore usually aren't poorly informed, at least when it comes to ghosts.  non-Christian adults have lots of morally and intellectually justified "common expectations" (the dangers of joining cults, unprotected sex, drunk driving, college education gives you a boost in the job market, etc).

And the suspicious aspects of the phenomena have to be evaluated alongside the evidence we have for the paranormality of the events.

And the woman's testimony that she was raped needs to be evaluated alongside her confession that she has lied about rape in the past.

You can't focus on the former while ignoring the latter.

You don't cite to any rule of historiography or rule of evidence that prohibits smart people from using some evidence of foul play in the record to broadbrush the entire matter as fakery and delusion.  I really hope you don't become a judge...you'd have to first do doctoral level research into a litigant's credibility before you could issue a ruling during an evidentiary hearing.  Sorry, but in the real world, credibility determinations can be reasonable even if they don't answer every trifle a Pharisee could possibly raise.

I've made some comments in the past about why the poltergeist may have behaved as it did on occasions like these.

Jesus also said God was his Father.  Like it matters.

I've also discussed why people would sometimes fake incidents in a genuine paranormal case.

I have to wonder...should I look up that discussion?  Or should I obey 2nd Timothy 2:14?

I'll have more to say about both subjects in later posts.
But I want to conclude this post with some comments about the personal aspect of paranormal research. I opened the post by referring to how the tapes on these altered states of consciousness are the hardest ones to listen to. That's primarily because of the personal implications involved.
Tapes 22 through 24 in Grosse's collection have stood out in my mind in this context. They were recorded in the middle of November of 1977, on a night when the Hodgsons were staying at the Burcombes' house. Janet was in one of the bedrooms, Margaret and Billy were in another, and Peggy was in the third. Peggy was ill at the time, so much so that she couldn't take care of her children. (See the segment here in a November 1977 television program that alludes to the situation.) In his book, Playfair refers to how Peggy had "collapsed in total exhaustion" and had a "breakdown" around this time (81, 88), and it's sometimes said that she had a nervous breakdown at least once during the case. Both of the girls were going in and out of altered states of consciousness, often screaming, crying, groaning, and such, with Janet exhibiting unusual strength and being violent at times, as levitations and other paranormal events went on simultaneously.

Sorry, you don't have any convincing evidence of levitations.  Yet you droll on and on, constantly peppering your evaluation with references to how paranormal acts were actually taking place. 

Grosse was frequently moving back and forth among the rooms, trying to keep up with everything that was going on, moving his tape recorder from one location to another, and directing the other people involved.

Sure is funny he never got video of the poltergiest moving or levitating objects.  The fact that the older evaluations seriously set forth a series of pictures showing a girl jumping on her bed as her being thrown around by a poltergeist, justifies full skepticism alone. The very fact that you have to admit fakery and then trifle that the fakery doesn't necessary mean there was no poltergeist, cooks your goose.

He got some help from the Burcombes, and Mrs. Edwards, who I referred to earlier, was there. But it had to be a miserable experience for Grosse.

Not if he was making money or seeking to make money/gain notoriety.

As he tells Edwards on that night, "it's a dreadful thing to watch". I don't know how anybody could listen to these tapes without having a lot of respect for Grosse and appreciation for the difficulty of the work he was doing.

Easy, Grosse was seeking to turn this spectacle into money and notoriety, which seems likely given that he was exactly an "paranormal investigator", or so all internet sources agree.

But you sympathize with the Hodgsons more than anybody else. In some ways, what Janet went through was worse than what anybody else experienced. For the most part, her trance states (as distinct from her dreams) come across as highly convincing and agonizing experiences.

Kids are sometimes very good at deceit.

But it's hard to tell just how much she was aware of at the time, and she didn't seem to remember much about the experiences afterward.

Or she remembered it all full well, but realized that by saying she was suffering amnesia, should be drastically lessen the likelihood of saying something that might contradict her earlier testimony.

By contrast, Peggy had to watch what her children were going through without being able to do much about it, and she remembered it. During one of the episodes, she commented that "It cuts you in pieces inside." (GP20B, 13:35)

Yes, some people can be gullible.

There are a lot of reasons why the neglect of paranormal research is so appalling.

But you are a "Christian".  The bible never expresses or implies that any "Christian" spend the same amount of time trifling about particular instances of alleged evil-spirit activity that you spend.  Among all truthful statements the world has ever produced, the statement "the people at Triablogue intentionally misinterpret 2nd Timothy 2:14 so they can feel better about their ceaseless sins of word-wrangling" ranks near the top.

We should think about the effects that neglect has on the people who go through these experiences.

Or you can think about preaching the wurdagawd.  Read your NT, then you tell me which one Jesus would more than likely wish for you to engage in.

We should also consider the implications for a culture when people don't care or think much about these issues.

I do.  I consider how much more advanced society would be if nobody believed in ghosts.

We should also consider what it means when an allegedly "bible-believing" Christian like Engwer devotes substantial amounts of Jesus' time and money to helping resurrect gossip about what Engwer himself admits is the activity of demons.  Had Engwer read Genesis 3, he might have figured out that focusing on the devil and what he has to say can do nothing but lead to ruin.

It is my suspicion that Engwer's motive has nothing to do with Christianity, he simply loves to create opportunities for him to 'wrangle words' with other people, which would be a violation of 2nd Timothy 2:14.