Great Ghost Story

The BBC recently posted this intriguing interview with photographer Graham Morris, who took pictures at the scene of the (in)famous Enfield Poltergeist case, in which police officers, neighbors, investigators and an entire family claimed to witness a wide range of paranormal phenomena, including levitating objects, unexplained noises and even, well, floating children. Last spring, I interviewed journalist and paranormal researcher Guy Lyon Playfair for Skeptiko. This interview, from the BBC, is briefer and in its way more powerful.

Playfair has been talking up the Enfield case for decades, but Morris has been less heard from.

"We'd all been told it centered around the daughter, Janet," Morris tells Radio 5′s Stephen Nolan. "I said, 'Give me two minutes to get ready,' and they all came in one at a time and as soon as Janet came through the door, bang! Things took off."

Nolan, who at one point says, simply, "I don't believe it," asks Morris if he actually saw things flying across the room, to which Morris replies in the affirmative and goes one further, saying he got hit by a lego brick so hard it left a mark that lasted for a few days. Ouch.

I won't blow the ending: Does Morris believe the place was haunted? But I will mention that Morris is absolutely convinced none of the house's Earthly occupants was perpetrating a hoax. He calls the idea that someone was throwing objects around "Impossible!" And he goes out of his way to exonerate Janet, the person most often accused of faking the haunting. "I was watching the children," he says. "They were petrified standing with their hands over their faces, their fingers in their mouths."

Go listen here.