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No ancient hills tonight, no distant centuries. Tonight Grim takes you somewhere far more frightening: a pebble-dashed council house in north London, in nineteen seventy-seven. The kind of house your nan lived in. And for eighteen months, something was in there with the family.

This is the Enfield Poltergeist — one of the most witnessed and best-documented hauntings in British history, and one of the most fiercely argued-about. Which is exactly why Grim and Mark do it properly: both sides, like grown-ups, and you decide.

A skint single mother, Peggy Hodgson, and her four children. A chest of drawers that slides across the floor and won’t be pushed back. A police constable who signs a statement saying she watched a chair move on its own. Two investigators who practically move in — with tape recorders running and a camera firing every fifteen seconds. Flying objects that land hot and don’t bounce. The famous photograph of eleven-year-old Janet, caught mid-air. And the growling voice of a dead man that came out of a little girl — a voice that named itself as Bill Wilkins, who really had died in a chair in that very house, years before she was born.

Then the other side, at full strength: the girls’ admitted fakery, the investigator who caught Janet cheating, the “levitation” that might just be a kid bouncing on a bed, the ventriloquism verdict. The sceptics land real punches here — and we don’t flinch from them.

But strip away everything they can touch, and a stubborn residue remains that “probably” can’t quite cover. And underneath the puzzle is the bit everyone forgets: a terrified family who never asked for any of it, and a little girl who got a lifetime of being “the Enfield girl.”

Every thread, explainable. The whole knot, for eighteen months, in front of thirty witnesses? That’s where even the clever money goes quiet.

From the shadows. Check the landing before you go up — and if a growling voice answers back, don’t engage it in conversation. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time...

🎧 The Evident Conspiracy Files · TheECF.co.uk · Follow us on X

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The Witching Season runs every Saturday through October — and the big one lands on the 31st. Follow so you don’t miss it.

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Last week, the cosy one — the sweets, the turnips, the dead nan in the yard. Tonight, Grim takes you somewhere much colder and much more real: a wet hill in Lancashire in 1612, to watch the state hang ten people for a crime that does not exist, well, not in this case.

Because here's what nobody tells the children in the pointy hats: the witch was real. Not the broomstick — the person. Poor, frightened, mostly elderly country folk, dragged to a gallows on the word of a nine-year-old child.

Grim and Mark walk the whole terrible machine, step by step, from the documented record. Two feuding families of village "cunning folk" — Old Demdike and Old Chattox, both ancient, both half-blind, both scraping a living from other people's superstition. A pedlar who collapses on the road seconds after a young woman curses him. An ambitious local magistrate who smells a career. A king — James the First — so obsessed with witches he literally wrote the manual. A grief-stricken family dinner reframed as a satanic sabbath. And at the centre of it, little Jennet Device: nine years old, stood up on a courtroom table and used to send her own mother, brother and grandmother to the rope.

Ten were hanged on Gallows Hill in the August of 1612. Not witches — just the powerless, destroyed by the powerful, on evidence that proved nothing, before a court that had already decided. And the whole triumphant story comes to us through one book, written by the men who did the hanging. The accused never get to write the book. They just get the rope.

So this Halloween, when you see the pointy hat — spare a thought for who it really was.

From the shadows. Be kind to the frightened old women in your life — and never let them put a child on a table. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time.

🎧 The Evident Conspiracy Files · TheECF.co.uk · Follow us on X

The Witching Season runs every Saturday through October — and something big is coming on the 31st. Follow so you don't miss it.

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Welcome to The Witching Season. For four Saturdays this October, Grim takes the reins of the show — and on the first night, he reveals what you're actually celebrating when you carve that pumpkin and knock on a stranger's door.

You think Halloween is American. It isn't. You think it's about sweets. It isn't. You think it was invented to sell greetings cards. It wasn't. Halloween is one of the oldest surviving festivals in the Western world — and most of the things you still do every October are the fossilised remains of ancient rituals to protect yourself from the dead. You just forgot that's what they were.

Tonight, Grim and Mark trace the real story: the Celtic fire-festival of Samhain, and the night the veil between the living and the dead was believed to thin. Why we light bonfires and wear costumes. Where "trick or treat" really comes from — mumming, guising, and the medieval soul cakes given for prayers. Why the first jack-o'-lanterns were carved from turnips, not pumpkins — and the bleak Irish tale of Stingy Jack, locked out of Heaven and Hell, wandering the dark with a stolen ember. And how the Church stacked All Hallows' Eve directly on top of the old festival of the dead… and never quite managed to tame it.

Because here's the chill: they spent a thousand years trying to sand the magic off this night. And every October, without being told why, you do the old rituals anyway. That's what a real haunting looks like — a festival of the dead that refused to die.

Strip away the plastic and the marketing, and underneath is the oldest and truest thing the night was ever for: remembering the ones you've lost.

From the shadows. Keep a candle lit for the ones you've lost — and don't answer the door if it knocks after midnight. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time.

🎧 The Evident Conspiracy Files · TheECF.co.uk · Follow us on X and Facebook

The Witching Season runs every Saturday through October — and something big is coming on the 31st. Follow so you don't miss it.

Support the show

Our new show - GRIM STORIES - is now available... https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/grim-stories/id6794635228