Maurice Grosse was widely admired as one of Britain’s greatest ghost hunters and leading poltergeist experts. He spent no time on theorising; rather he saw his job as an investigator to conduct field research, collect evidence and publish the results. Often impatient with academic debate, he didn’t hesitate to challenge woolly or inconsequential thinking and to correct error and falsehood, particularly on the part of sceptics.

Grosse was educated at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London. After an apprenticeship in commercial art and design, he served in World War II with the artillery and was evacuated from Dunkirk. He received a commission in 1941 and was responsible for the guarding and welfare of Italian prisoners during the rest of the war. He married his wife Betty in 1944 and they had two daughters and a son. Following the war, he took up his vocation as an inventor, filing the first of many mechanical patents in 1945. His most successful was the rotating advertising billboard, and in 1961 he set up his own design and engineering consultancy responsible for launching many patents throughout the world.

It was personal tragedy that propelled Maurice into psychical research, when his 22-year-old daughter Janet was killed in a motorcycle accident in August 1976. Following her death, members of the Grosse family experienced a number of significant coincidences and psychic events, which led Maurice to join the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). In September 1977, he took up the opportunity to investigate a poltergeist outbreak in a house in north London. This was to become the celebrated Enfield poltergeist case, one of the most significant of the 20th century. Maurice supported the family for many months, staying at the house for long periods and accumulating many hours of cassette and videotape evidence of unexplained phenomena. Many of the events are summarised in the classic book This House is Haunted (1980) by Guy Lyon Playfair, who also investigated the case. One of the most controversial aspects was a bizarre poltergeist voice resembling an old man but speaking through an 11-year-old girl who was the focus of the case. Faced with sceptical claims over the voice, Maurice offered £1,000 to anyone who could duplicate the voice by ventriloquism or trickery; there were no takers. Continue