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.

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?