What do you think about this?
In August 1977, in a modest council house on Green Street in Enfield, north London, a single mother named Peggy Hodgson called the police. Furniture was moving on its own. A chest of drawers had slid across the floor in front of her children. The constable who answered the call later signed a statement saying she watched a chair lift, slide about four feet across the floor, and settle, with no one near it.
What followed became the most heavily documented haunting in British history. For roughly eighteen months, investigators from the Society for Psychical Research camped in that house with tape recorders and cameras. They logged knocking in the walls, cold spots, objects flung across rooms, and above all a guttural male voice that came out of eleven year old Janet Hodgson, claiming to be a man named Bill Wilkins who had died in the house. A former resident’s son later confirmed his father had indeed died there, of a brain hemorrhage, in that chair.
Skeptics have a strong case too. The girls were caught faking some incidents, and admitted it, saying they did it to see if the investigators would notice. The voice, some argue, was produced with false vocal folds, a real and learnable trick.
Could it be that both are true, that two bored children embellished something that had already started on its own, and the embellishment is all anyone remembers?
An elaborate hoax by two clever girls, or something in that house that nobody ever explained? What do you think happened on Green Street?
What do you think about this? The Abenaki spoke of something in Lake Champlain long before Europeans arrived, and Port Henry still keeps a sign counting sightings. In 1977 Sandra Mansi photographed a long neck and a dark hump, and no hoax was ever found in it. Log, or a real animal?
What do you think about this? In 1579 Francis Drake beached the Golden Hind somewhere on the northern California coast and claimed the land for England. Nobody can say which beach. A brass plate found in 1936 was celebrated for decades, then proved a hoax. Point Reyes, or somewhere else?
What do you think about this? Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, one is engraved on copper instead of parchment, and it is a treasure map. It lists 64 hiding places holding tons of gold and silver. Not one has ever been found. Real temple gold, or an ancient legend set in metal?
What do you think about this? On August 15, 1977, an Ohio telescope caught a 72 second burst from Sagittarius, 30 times stronger than background, right on the hydrogen frequency. The astronomer circled it and wrote Wow. It never came back. Fluke, or one word of a conversation?
What do you think about this? The Shroud of Turin carries a full length image of a man that behaves like a photographic negative, which nobody noticed until it was first photographed in 1898. Carbon dating said medieval. Nobody can explain how the image formed. Artwork, or something else?
What do you think about this? In December 1900 three lighthouse keepers vanished from a rock off Scotland. Door shut, meal uneaten, clocks stopped, one oilskin still on its hook, so a man walked into a storm without it. No bodies found. Rogue wave, or something stranger on that island?
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