Peter Rhodes on ghosts, phones and a chilling level of ignorance about the Holocaust

You can't keep a good ghost down. Long after the events of 1977, the so-called Enfield Poltergeist is the subject of a documentary series and two new plays. Back in 1980 I reviewed This House is Haunted, the book based on the happenings. Two issues stick with me.

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Supporting image for story: Peter Rhodes on ghosts, phones and a chilling level of ignorance about the Holocaust
Birth-control device?

The first is that the quest seemed compromised by tragedy. The psychic investigator, the late Maurice Grosse, had lost his daughter in a motorcycle accident the year before and seemed desperate to find proof – any proof - of life after death. The second was the much-denounced photo of one of the children in the house “levitating.” I thought then, and now, that this looks like a child bouncing on her bed. It would have been far more convincing if it had happened in a room not containing a sprung mattress. Not a ghost of a chance of that, eh?