Supernatural thriller The Conjuring 2 reopens the case files of renowned paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren to explore their most terrifying case yet – when they’re summoned to north London to help a single mother and her four children struggling to hold together in a house plagued by malicious spirits. Based on true events, the film draws from the experiences of the Warrens and accounts of sisters JANET WINTER and MARGARET NADEEM, who were 11 and 13, when the activity began, and have maintained their stories for 40 years.
New Line Cinema’s supernatural thriller The Conjuring 2, from master of suspense James Wan (The Conjuring, Insidious), reopens the case files of renowned paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren to explore their most dangerous and terrifying case yet – when they’re summoned to north London to help a single mother and her four children struggling to hold together in a house plagued by malicious spirits.
Based on true events, the film draws from the fascinating experiences of Lorraine Warren and her late husband, Ed Warren, as well as the accounts of sisters Janet Winter and Margaret Nadeem, formerly Hodgson, who were 11 and 13, respectively, when the activity began, and have maintained their stories for 40 years.
We sat down with Janet and Margaret for a brief chat when they visited the set of The Conjuring 2 on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California.
QUESTION: What was it like for you to walk onto the set of The Conjuring 2 and to meet Madison Wolfe and Lauren Esposito, who are playing you in the film?
JANET WINTER: It definitely feels like going back in time to when we were children. There’s a lot of likeness in the dresses. Spot on. I think it’s fantastic.
MARGARET NADEEM: They did a really good job setting up the house with the two bedrooms and the chest of drawers. And the actors – the children that play us – everything is the same. The clothes are exactly right: Janet’s trousers, my trousers, my tank tops, my hair, my tallness and slimness, Janet’s face, her character…
QUESTION: In allowing your experiences as children to be the basis for this feature film, what is most important to you that the filmmakers convey?
MARGARET NADEEM: It’s important to us that they show people from other countries – not just Britain – that all of this really happened, and how it was for us. If they can put that into the film, maybe it doesn’t do any harm after all. Maybe it does some good.
JANET WINTER: That’s very important to me as well. There have been documentaries about Enfield and the recent TV miniseries, so a film would be something else. I’m quite surprised that nothing has been done before now. It’s been very widely documented.
QUESTION: Is it a little bit surreal to see your lives recreated?
MARGARET NADEEM: It’s bit weird after all that time. You never really forget it, but coming back to it brings it all into place again and it’s a rollercoaster of emotions. We went through quite a lot of things in that house. We’ve come through it, but we don’t really know how, to be honest. People were very skeptical at the time; they made light of it. But it was a very bad experience and serious thing.
QUESTION: Can you talk about what life was like for your family in August of 1977, before the activity started?
MARGARET NADEEM: We were a normal family – looking forward to Christmastime as children, playing together in the garden, sometimes fighting each other, having happy times together.
JANET WINTER: I’d just left primary school and was due in September to start secondary school. That was a very big thing for me, so what was about to happen left a big impact. I went to secondary school, but it wasn’t easy for me at all. It was all over the front of the paper – my face, ‘Possessed!’ Then I’d go to school and I’d see people with the paper looking at me…
JANET WINTER: There would be kids making fun of us outside the house. The press and people in London treated it a bit like Piccadilly Circus: ‘What tricks are they going to do next?’ and ‘Are the girls faking it? Yes, they are.’ And that was quite hurtful because we were already afraid and desperate. And you worry about school and what your friends think.
QUESTION: How did it start? What’s the first thing that you remember?
JANET WINTER: The chest of drawers that moved. My brother and I were in bed; he was laying on the right side and I was on the left side. We were just lying there, settling down to sleep, and we could hear a shuffling noise. And because we were energetic children, Mum thought we were just muckin’ about, which we often did before bedtime. Just kids’ stuff.
Then this chest of drawers started shuffling and we called, ‘Mum! Mum! We can hear a noise!’ And when she came to the bedroom door, this chest of drawers moved towards it. My mum looked horrified and she pushed it back. Then it moved towards the door again and she couldn’t push it back. And, not knowing what else to do, she said, ‘All right, everybody downstairs.’
MARGARET NADEEM: She was looking for mice, my mum. A normal reaction. But she was terrified. She was trying not to look scared, but I could see it in her face.
QUESTION: What went through your minds after watching that happen? Did you know what you were dealing with?
JANET WINTER: Something obviously extraordinary because a chest of drawers doesn’t just do that under normal circumstances. The neighbors, Peggy and Vic Nottingham, came over and he and his son searched the place. They went all around the house and outside, and they couldn’t find anything. And then this knocking started on the walls and under the floors.
MARGARET NADEEM: And he was a big bloke, Vic. If we weren’t scared enough before, now he was scared and that wasn’t like him. He was a roofer and he wasn’t scared of anything – he’d go up high rises, on roofs, you name it. He took chances. In the end, he said, ‘Well, I’ve checked everything. I’ve been around the back, Peg’ – that was mum’s nickname. But it kept up, so they called the police.
The police came and checked the house, the back and everything. The constable was standing in the living room when the baby chair moved about a meter and she sort of jumped back. I remember her name significantly – WPC Carolyn Heeps. She couldn’t explain it, and looked really uncomfortable. They didn’t know what to do with us, or how to help us. They said, ‘Well, look, we’re here, but we have to go. We just don’t know what this is. There’s nothing we can do.’
JANET WINTER: ‘This is not a police matter,’ yeah … so we were at our wit’s end. But our neighbors were still with us and we all went to their house because we didn’t want to be alone. We didn’t know what to do – what do you do?
MARGARET NADEEM: We’d run out in the street and go next door to our neighbors at one o’clock in the morning, banging on the door: ‘Please help us! Something’s happening and we’re scared.’ Mum didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t sleep in there – we’d sleep on the streets if we had to.
JANET WINTER: It was desperation. Then Peggy suggested calling the national newspaper. I spoke to them and explained what was happening, and the first thing they said to Peggy was that they thought she was drunk; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen.
QUESTION: And how old were you at the time?
JANET WINTER: Eleven. I was turning 12 that year.
MARGARET NADEEM: I was thirteen. I was the eldest of the four children.
QUESTION: It must have been traumatic to have to deal with something so heavy at that age.
JANET WINTER: Yes, it was. But now we’re free. The actual trauma of going through that was thinking: Why? Why us? Why me?
MARGARET NADEEM: We weren’t evil; we weren’t bad. We were just a normal family. And we just didn’t know when it was going to end.
I remember I was in the front bedroom on my own and there was a chair near the window, and I could hear someone breathing. And I was very brave – I didn’t want to believe I was hearing it. But this presence was definitely there; there was something in there with me. The investigators said to us, ‘Try not to show fear because it plays on your fear.’ So I tried not to show fear, but the fear I felt inside … it was very bad.
QUESTION: Looking back on that time, what sticks with you the most?
JANET WINTER: The most terrifying thing, for me, was the fire grate that came out of the wall and hit my brother’s head. We didn’t know if it had damaged him, which it didn’t, but it frightened our souls. Even the paranormal researchers were very upset.
Also, the levitation, obviously, and the voice as well. It became very personal. I also remember the curtain – it wrapped itself around me. I still wonder what would have happened if my mum hadn’t of come in, and her maternal strength hadn’t set in to pull the curtain off her child. What would have happened to me?
QUESTION: Can you talk about the voice that we hear coming through you in the audio recording, which was linked back to the previous resident of your home. What was that experience like for you?
JANET WINTER: It was like a deep black forest. It’s hard to explain. It didn’t even feel like it was coming from me, even though it was; it just felt like it was behind me. One of the investigators decided to tape my mouth shut, but it would still speak. They’d pour water in my mouth and it would still speak. And the voice was so clear. I just thought, ‘Why is this happening to me? Why am I the chosen one? Am I possessed?’ There was a lot of skepticism over it because it wouldn’t always talk in front of people.
MARGARET NADEEM: I was skeptical at first, to be honest with you. I didn’t believe her. Then one day Janet and I were in the garden and a voice came from my back. Then the fear just went through us, and we both took off running in different directions. I was shaking. And I realized that it was true. I couldn’t believe it myself but don’t see how anyone could have done that.
QUESTION: While it was happening, even though you couldn’t see it, did you get a sense of it? Some kind of personality or evil?
JANET WINTER: Sometimes it seemed evil because I felt used; I didn’t feel in control. Other times, it felt like it was just trying to get through, like when it spoke: ‘This is my home. I resent you being here.’ It was almost as if when it tried to harm us – myself and my brother with the fire grate – it was doing it out of anger because we were still there. But Mum had no choice. We had nowhere to go.
MARGARET NADEEM: It’s a desperate thing when you can’t get away. Not knowing if it was actually going to harm any of us was a big worry for me.
QUESTION: Do you remember anything happening before September of ’77?
MARGARET NADEEM: When I was a baby and they first moved into that house, my dad used to say to my mum, ‘Margaret’s crying upstairs in her cot.’ Mum would go up there and I’d be sound asleep. She also used to say that she would hear someone going up the stairs. We thought she might be imagining it, to be honest. I was only five or six years old, and I remember thinking she was crackers: ‘You’re nuts, mom.’
JANET WINTER: And in the back bedroom where my brother and I used to sleep – the one with the chest of drawers that moved – Mum used to see an imprint on the bedspread; I remember there was a pink one and a red one. To Mum, it looked like someone had been lying on the bed, like an imprint of a person’s body. She said, ‘Well, I made that bed and it wasn’t like that when I made it.’
QUESTION: Can you talk about when Ed and Lorraine Warren came to your home in England? Were you hopeful, or were you starting to feel that no one could help you?
MARGARET NADEEM: We didn’t know what they were like or if they could help us, but we were hopeful. We always had hope, if someone new came in, that they could do something to stop it.
JANET WINTER: And when they did come, they were very warm, friendly people. Of all the people that visited in the time that the case went on, Ed and Lorraine were the ones who stuck out in my mind, very much so. They hadn’t come just to see what was going on, like a lot of them had; they were there to help us, if they could. I just felt a sense of comfort from them – the comfort of them believing us and trying to help us. And Lorraine did her best.
MARGARET NADEEM: You could see that she was trying to find out what was going on at our house. She’d sit there and go into a sort of trance-like state, and Ed would sit next to her. I didn’t understand what she was doing, really. She seemed to be gathering quite a lot of atmosphere and trying to get through to this spirit somehow, in her own way. Ed would say to us, ‘It’s all right. Just let her carry on.’ I didn’t know about spiritualists or mediums or anything like that. We were young kids.
Lorraine would say to us, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. It won’t always be like this. It’s an extraordinary case.’ She was very fascinated by it as well, but she saw the state we were in. She very significantly tried to take us out of it as well, up the road.
QUESTION: What can you recall about what they did in the house? Was there an exorcism?
MARGARET NADEEM: Lorraine came on two or three occasions and every time, she’d see these things happen. She saw Janet levitating and someone moving the bed around, and she tried to get it to stop. She was trying to get through to this spirit. They told us that it doesn’t like religion, and she carried out some sort of exorcism.
JANET WINTER: I vaguely remember it happening. I was sitting in the chair and she was in a trance. I think she was trying to heal me or to get something out from me. I only actually remember her coming once because I was in a children’s’ home at one point.
I don’t know the circumstances, but I think it was because I was becoming so drawn and tired. I was at the epicenter and it was affecting me more. My mum had her concerns and thought it would be better if I went for rest somewhere completely out of the way. And she had no other choice but the children’s home. But things were still happening in the house after I left, as I remember. It didn’t stop because I was taken away.
QUESTION: What kind of toll did it take on your mother to see her children in much distress?
JANET WINTER: It was very hard on her. She wanted to protect us and couldn’t the way she wanted to because there was nowhere to go. My mum was vulnerable. She was divorced and on her own with the four of us. We called on our neighbors quite often and quite a lot of investigators came in. In that respect, she wasn’t alone, and she took comfort in that, but, obviously, people did come and take advantage of her. People would ridicule her and tell her it wasn’t really happening, and quite a lot of people come to the house just see a piece of the action.
I remember one morning when we went downstairs and there were just bodies lying all over our living room floor. Mum just snapped: ‘Right, everybody up. Out, the lot of you.’ People were trying to give her boxes of eggs like some sort of token. Yeah, I remember that so well. She’d had enough.
MARGARET NADEEM: They weren’t there to help; they just wanted to see it for themselves. I suppose they were inquisitive; they’re human beings, but my mum didn’t want to have all these people there with everything else we were dealing with. She was a good mum and brought us through a lot.
When I was a bit older, I remember feeling very sorry for my mother when I looked at her. It used to bother me when I left the house because she was there and we were at school. She never left us children, and she could have done. I can’t thank her enough for that – I still feel grateful to her now.
As I was growing up, I really couldn’t do enough to sort of make her happy because that part of our lives was so scary. And I sort of succeeded after it had all mostly ended. I didn’t leave home until I was 32. That was my choice, and I don’t regret that because I was able to look after my mum, and that gives me happiness. She meant the world to me. I still miss her.
QUESTION: When did you sense that things were winding down?
JANET WINTER: I had been taken out of the situation by then. I was in the hospital and the children’s home. People were brought in on a number of occasions, but I think things just gradually died down.
MARGARET NADEEM: Even after that, Mum and I used to hear voices. We still got the odd incident in that house, but it had mostly died down.
QUESTION: As adults looking back, what effect do you think these experiences had on you as people, and on your lives?
JANET WINTER: I became very withdrawn because of it. I remember just wanting to die sometimes. It’s hard to explain to anyone unless they’re going through it. You can’t tell anyone because they can’t know the way you feel. So, in that respect, there was no comfort.
MARGARET NADEEM: It stays with you. It changed me as a person. I was living a normal life but went through a very deep depression in my middle-twenties. This black cloud came over me, and I couldn’t get out of it. I was getting weak and could see myself withering away, and I just didn’t want to be like this. So I went to my doctor and he said, ‘Oh, pull yourself up. Get on with it.’ I didn’t have anyone to turn to, to be honest. So I turned to prayer.
Mum and Dad sent us to Sunday School and all that, but we’d sort of drifted away from it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I prayed for strength. And God was there. I’ve got to believe there is a God, after everything that happened in that house.
I got stronger and was finally able to face people, but I don’t like to talk about it much and hide my identity sometimes. I started to realize that you deal with people as they deal with you, by looking at them. When people come to my business and ask if it’s me, if it’s just to ridicule, straight away, I say, ‘No, it’s not me. I’ve just got the same name.’ If they come in a little bit calmer and speak to me quietly, I might say, ‘Yes, it’s me. I don’t want to tell you a lot, but it was a terrible experience.’
Before I got married, I had a job telling my husband what happened to me as a child. That was very hard. I thought, ‘Will he believe me? Or will he think I should be locked up in a mental institution?’ But he did believe me.
JANET WINTER: My husband said, ‘If it wasn’t you, I would never have believed it, but because I know you, I do believe it.’ But I think it frightened him, knowing what I’ve experienced.
QUESTION: With the Enfield story back in the news, all the details and photos from that era are coming out again, but so is the skepticism. Does that still affect you?
JANET WINTER: It was very hard for us in the past, and it’s hard seeing it all again, but what’s kept me going is this film – what we’re here for today. We couldn’t wish for better people to be handling this. We have trust and faith in everyone involved in this movie.
QUESTION: What do you hope people take away when they see The Conjuring 2?
MARGARET NADEEM: If people give us the benefit of the doubt by just understanding that it’s something that wasn’t our fault, we’re so happy. We get a little bit of sanity, and we appreciate that. I think it’s hard to accept that these things really exist. If I didn’t experience it myself, I would have been a skeptic, to be honest with you. But, in the end, seeing what can happen firsthand, what could I do? I know. I lived through it. That’s all I can say, really.
JANET WINTER: That’s exactly right. It’s in here. - Times Media Films