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?
As anti-Israel demos erupt across the world, why has sympathy for Israel evaporated? A series of surveys across Europe and the United States reveals a chilling lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, Hitler's slaughter of Jews which spurred the creation of the state of Israel. In Britain a 2021 survey revealed that more than half of those questioned did not know that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. In Holland, a nation which was occupied and has good reason to remember Nazi atrocities, nearly a quarter of those born between 1980-2000 and surveyed earlier this year believed the Holocaust was “ a myth or has been exaggerated.”
