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Paul_finch (Paul_finch)
Username: Paul_finch

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Sunday, December 13, 2009 - 04:32 pm:   

Don't know if anyone else caught this reassessment of the famous London haunting on satellite TV the other night.

It didn't add a great deal to the mythos already surrounding the case, other than to allow various witnesses from the time to reiterate their statements, apparently as convinced now as they were in 1977 that they had experienced something supernatural. A skeptic was brought in to add balance, but wasn't able to say much other than that nothing had been proved.

With nearly a dozen witness testimonies (from such 'reliable' types as police officers, newspaper and TV reporters etc), audio recordings of an eerie voice spouting profanities and photographs of people levitating, you wonder how much proof some people actually need. But that said, the girl at the centre of the case, who's now a middle-aged woman, seems a little odd - and the more the family's difficult circumstances at the time were laid out for us, the more I felt those youngsters had something to gain - i.e. attention and concern.

I remember the original incident quite well - it featured on national news bulletins for several nights. But in our more cynical 2000s, the tape recordings of the voice now seem a little ridiculous to me. Okay, some of the stuff the 'ghost' said was apparently factual about a man who had died in the house years earler, and it seemed unlikely the children would have known about that, while numerous tests were made which seemed to certfiy that the children themselves were not producing the weird voice - but to see old news footage of a BBC reporter having a conversation with someone who wasn't there, while the kids sat on the couch next to him looking as if they were about to burst out laughing, was almost comical.

The jury's still out for me on this one. On the surface it looks like an elaborate hoax, but to be fair to the paranormal investigators, they seemed to do as much as they could to try and expose trickery, and failed.

A very curious case, though the documentary itself was a little disappointing as it presented all the known facts but made no further investigation.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Sunday, December 13, 2009 - 06:45 pm:   

I saw this a few weeks ago, Paul. Fascinating, wasn't it? Although flawed. It made me want to read the book that guy wrote about the case.
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Paul_finch (Paul_finch)
Username: Paul_finch

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Monday, December 14, 2009 - 10:18 am:   

It's a very unusual case, Gary, in that it's proved so difficult to debunk.

When the Amityville backlash started, the whole thing seemed to unravel at incredible speed. Only the slightest pressure needed to be applied to so-called witnesses, and they began to admit to huge exaggeration or, in some cases, downright lies. With Enfield, everyone still sticks rigidly to the script, and of course there is a mass of documentary evidence, much of which defies explanation.
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Skunsworth (Skunsworth)
Username: Skunsworth

Registered: 05-2009
Posted From: 78.148.14.70
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - 08:42 am:   

The Lyon Playfair book is really quite good, and he struck me as trying quite hard to take a rational approach to something he wanted desperately to be true. Worth hunting out if you can find it - and I'll keep an eye out for this doc!

S
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - 09:15 am:   

What's the book called again, Unzo?
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Skunsworth (Skunsworth)
Username: Skunsworth

Registered: 05-2009
Posted From: 78.148.14.70
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - 12:51 pm:   

This House is Haunted (or possibly This Place is Haunted) - my parents bought it in hardback when I was about 4, but it mysteriously found its way to my house when I moved out...

S
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - 01:31 pm:   

Just checked, and it's out of print...very pricey.. :-/
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Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch)
Username: Mark_lynch

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.171.129.74
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - 04:10 pm:   

Will Storr in his book Vs The Supernatural comes away from his initial skeptical approach to the whole supernatural question quite prepared to believe in the who shebang. That's worth a read, despite certain presupositions he introduces regarding the afterlife, and the duff cover.

I was a bit spooked reading it because of things that tied in with odd experiences Michelle and I had in THAT house in Wiltshire a few years ago, particularly concerning the 'three' symbolism.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.153.151.209
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - 05:05 pm:   

Damn! I used to have that book. The Playfair one, that is. I have the Storr (which is actually better).

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