The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury. 2020. 335 pp.
ISBN 978 1 4088 9544 3.
Towards midnight one night, she and her husband, Les, were woken by something shattering in their bedroom. Alma turned on the bedside light and saw shards of a broken tumbler on the floor. Suddenly, another glass flew past and shattered against the wall, and their eiderdown lifted and swam up at them and fell on their faces. Alma and Les were terrified and shouted for help. Their son, Donald, came from his room, and as he opened their bedroom door, a pot of face cream flew across the room at him. George, their lodger, also came to see what was happening and was hit by two flying coins.
Things calmed down, and the family eventually went back to sleep, but next morning, in the kitchen, an egg suddenly smashed and a saucer inexplicably snapped.
The local newspaper, the Pictorial, had been running a series on the supernatural and invited readers to contribute, so Alma called them. The two reporters who came to the house saw ornaments topple, an egg and a tin-opener flew across the room, crockery spun out of Alma's hands and smashed mid-air, and a chunk of coal lifted from the grate, shot across the room, and smacked into the wall behind them. The reporters could see no human intervention in these occurrences.
A crowd had gathered outside the house, and a clairvoyant gentleman invited into the house, saw strong "carrier ectoplasm" around Alma and told her that the disturbances were a warning from a malevolent spirit. The Pictorial ran the story the next morning, other reporters began to turn up at the house, and the news spread.
Nandor Fodor, who for four years had been Chief Ghost Hunter at the International Institute for Psychical Research in South Kensington, was fascinated by Alma's story. Fodor was a Jewish Hungarian who had studied law in Budapest. He had narrowly escaped conscription in the 1914-18 war and the subsequent "terrors," and had fled to America, where he became a journalist. When a chance interview with the British newspaper magnate, Lord Rothermere, discovered a mutual concern for the land-rights of the Hungarian people, Rothermere offered Fodor a well-paid job with Associated Newspapers in London. So, Fodor and his wife moved to London, and Fodor, who had long been making a serious study of psychic research, threw himself into the thriving psychical scene there:
Spiritualism was big business in Britain. Three quarters of a million Britons had been killed in the Great War, and another quarter of a million in the influenza pandemic that followed. Thousands of spiritualist séance circles were established by their widows, widowers and sweethearts, mothers and fathers and children. The faith offered "something tremendous," said Conan Doyle, "a breaking down of the wall between two worlds... a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction."
Fodor wrote articles about famous hauntings and started to write a guide to supernatural research. Lord Rothermere disapproved of this activity, so when in 1934 Fodor's Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science was published, Fodor applied for a job at the new International Institute for Psychical Research. The Institute "aimed to combine the spiritualist and scientific approaches to the super-normal." This suited Fodor, and he travelled the country to investigate all manner of psychic happenings. Occasionally he would take his wife and daughter with him on ghost hunts:
They stayed overnight in haunted houses, surrounded by cameras, flashbulbs, switches and timers. Andrea looked forward to these trips, partly because she hoped to see a spook, but chiefly because she adored her clever, good-looking, sociable father... (Fodor) modelled himself, he said, on the boy in the Hungarian folk tale who plays games in a haunted house, throwing skulls to the resident ghost, whooping with joy as his bed flies up and down the stairs.
At the Institute, Fodor conducted strictly monitored experimental séances, used animals to test the theory that vapors rise from the body at the moment of death, and, in order to experience an altered state, tried mescaline and "felt bereft when the drug wore off." He did much to establish the scientific credibility of the Institute, but his success in revealing frauds and tricksters was not universally popular. The Psychic News refused to publish his articles and claimed "Fodor was harsh towards his experimental subjects, excessively skeptical, and obsessed with sexual theories and technological gadgets."
In 1937, Fodor sued the Psychic News for publishing "malicious falsehoods" about him. He now "urgently needed to prove himself" to the Board of the Institute, and Alma's haunting seemed to offer him the perfect opportunity to do this. He visited Alma, saw some of the strange things which happened around her, and convinced her to let him conduct strictly monitored experiments with her at the Institute.
Alma's "happenings" became more and more bizarre. She could materialize objects—flowers, brooches, ancient coins, a live exotic bird. She began to experience possession by a spirit called Bremba, who spoke through her, and other members of the monitoring group experienced tremors when Alma went into a trance, smelled strange odors, and sometimes fainted. Fodor's testing of Alma became more and more rigorous. She would be searched by Institute women before an experiment began, sewn into garments designed to prevent her secreting objects about her person, and closely watched by several people every minute of the experiment. Yet she still managed to materialize objects, and Bremba spoke of things it seemed impossible he could know.
A few times Fodor did find Alma was tricking them, but there were still many occasions when he and the experimental group could find no explanation for what they witnessed. Fodor "had to prove himself as a scientist," so he remained skeptical. He had been reading widely in the literature of the new "science" of psychology, and had come to believe "psychic gifts were rooted in psychological disturbance." "There is a door which leads from the mind we know to the mind we do not know," he told the Daily Mirror. "Now and again that door opens. Strange things happen... Who or what opens that door? The mind itself? Or some outside agency?'
Kate Summerscale tells all of this in fascinating detail. At the same time, she skillfully captures the disturbed events going on in the world in which these people lived. The newspapers were full of Hitler's growing power in Europe, Britain was hoping for peace negotiations but preparing for war. Twenty-five million gas masks had been manufactured, "schools were being commandeered for air-raid training, and trial blackouts were being staged throughout the land." Mosley and his confederates were marching through London shouting "Down with Jewish warmongers!" and psychic mediums "were channelling the elders of other races":
In Queen's Hall, off Oxford Street, more that 2,000 people gathered in March to hear the prophecies of White Hawk, the spirit guide of the well-known medium Stella Hughes. "There will be no war," the chieftain assured his anxious audience.
Disturbed times fostered disturbed spirits: ghosts, poltergeist, spirit voices, and messages from the other-world proliferated.
Summerscale weaves literature, history, and the occult together in this book to good effect, and the "true ghost story" of Alma Fielding's haunting is a curious tale, well told. In the end, however, Fodor's investigation of Alma's haunting was terminated by the Institute. War began, and Alma and Les moved out of London to a Devon village, where Alma ran occasional séances for the villagers. Fodor moved back to the United States, trained as a psychiatrist, ran a successful psychiatric practice, and presented papers about "poltergeist psychosis" suggesting childhood trauma might explain why some people experience paranormal happenings. His study of the four months in which he investigated Alma's haunting was published in 1958 as On the Trail of a Poltergeist.
Summerscale concludes that "uncertainty continues to haunt the subject" and, perhaps suggesting ghosts and ghouls are still active in our own disturbed times, her Prologue and Epilogue tell of her own brush with the paranormal. Unusually, the same taxi driver twice picked her up from the railway station when she was researching the book. Hearing what she was researching, he told her he had vampires attached to his spirit.
He had summoned them, he said, on the recommendation of his spirit guide. "Go for vampires," the guide advised. "Stay away from fluffy bunnies and fairies. You're more suited to the darker side." Two psychics had told him that he had vampires in his bloodline. "Not that I do anything dark and horrible," he assured me. The vampires, like the two-headed snake that had dangled from his neck in January, came to relieve him from suffering.
It seems the vampire who once left "two blood-clotted punctures" on Alma's neck has not gone away.
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