THE ENFIELD POLTERGEIST CASE, cont'd
Grosse was later joined in the investigation by writer Guy Lyon Playfair, and together they studied the case for two years. "The knocking on walls and floors became an almost nightly occurrence, furniture slid across the floor and was thrown down the stairs, drawers were wrenched out of dressing tables. Toys and other objects would fly across the room, bedclothes would be pulled off, water was found in mysterious puddles on the floors, there were outbreaks of fire followed by their inexplicable extinguishing."
The case became decidedly unnerving when the spirits revealed themselves - through Janet. Speaking in a deep, gravely voice through Janet, the spirit announced that his name was Bill and had died in the house - a fact that has been verified. The voices and the phenomenon have been recorded on tape and film, and Playfair has written a book about the case called This House is Haunted.
Despite the documentation, however, much controversy surrounds the case. Skeptics claim that the case is nothing more than the work of a very clever and mischievous girl - Janet. The poltergeist activity always stopped when she was watched closely, and when she was taken to a hospital for several days to be tested for physical or mental abnormality, the phenomena ceased in the house. Some researchers believe that Janet taught herself to speak in the strange male voice, and that photos of her levitating in her bedroom merely caught her jumping off her bed. Was this poltergeist case just the result of an attention-seeking 11-year-old?
THE DANNY POLTERGEIST CASE
In 1998, Jane Fishman, a reporter for the Savannah Morning News, began a series of articles about a possibly haunted antique bed in the home of Al Cobb of Savannah, Georgia. Cobb bought the vintage late-1800s bed at an auction as a Christmas present for his 14-year-old son, Jason - a purchase he later regretted.
"Three nights later," Fishman reported, "Jason told his parents he felt as if someone had planted elbows on his pillow and was watching him and breathing cold air down the back of his neck. He felt sick. The next night he noticed the photo of his deceased grandparents on his wicker nightstand flipped down. So he righted it. The next day, the photo was facing down again.
Later that morning, after leaving his room for breakfast, he returned and found in the middle of his bed two Beanie Babies - the zebra and the tiger - next to a conch shell, a dinosaur made of shells and a plaster toucan bird. That got his parents' - and his twin brother, Lee's - attention. Trying to make sense of the irrational, Al called out, 'Do we have a Casper here? Tell me your name and how old you are.' Then he left some lined composition paper and crayons and, with his family, walked out of the room. In 15 minutes they returned and found written vertically in large block childlike letters, 'Danny, 7.'"
With his family out of the house, Al Cobb decided to continue trying to communicate with the spirit of Danny. With the same kind of notes, Danny indicated that his mother had died in that bed in 1899, and that he wanted to stay with the bed. He also made it clear that he didn't want anyone else sleeping in it. "The same day they found a note reading, 'No one sleep in bed,' Jason, who had moved out of the room, decided to stretch out and pretend to take a nap. That, says Al, was a mistake. 'I doubled back in the room to pick up my clothes,' remembers Jason, 'when this terra cotta head that had been hanging on the wall came flying through the room, just missing me before it smashed on the closet door.'"
"No one really knows," Fishman writes in her second installment, "who - or what - is leaving the copious notes, moving the furniture, opening the kitchen drawers, setting the dining room table, flipping over the chairs, lighting the candles, arranging the posters to spell out a person's name, Jill, then hanging the finished product on a bedroom wall. Jason also spoke of other spirits: 'Uncle Sam,' who had come to reclaim his daughter he said was buried under the house; 'Gracie,' a young girl whose sculpture sits in Bonaventure Cemetery; and 'Jill,' a young woman who left a number of handwritten messages, among them one inviting the Cobbs to a party in their living room."
Parapsychologist Andrew Nichols, head of the Florida Society for Parapsychological Research, investigated the case. "What happened at the Cobbs," he told Fishman, "- more specifically to Jason - would have happened without 'Danny,' or the bed. It was the electromagnetic energy of the wall - that Jason started sleeping next to when they moved the bed there - that charged a psychic ability that the boy already had."
