MEET THE AUTHOR
KATE SUMMERSCALE discusses her new book Alma Fielding, about an investigation into a poltergeist in 1938
Why did so many people take the idea of ghosts so seriously as recently as 1938?
The main strands I found were that psychical research and spiritualism took off in the wake of the First World War, because of the huge amount of bereavement and grief in Britain. So many people had died, and so many people were gathering at séance circles and spiritualist meetings to try to contact the dead. By the 1930s, there were a lot of poltergeists being reported: destructive, noisy ghosts in ordinary homes. It seems to me that they reached a peak in the years just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when the country was braced for conflict. The poltergeists appear to have been a way of channelling anxiety and grief, as well as expressing society’s jitteriness and suspense.
Why were poltergeist hauntings so well suited to that particular time?
I was tickled by how the press reported on poltergeists in general in the 1930s, depicting them as low-class ‘gangster ghosts’ – not like the refined wraiths that floated around stately homes, but much more vulgar, coarse and physical. They would smash crockery, and basically act like vandals. They seem to have been almost representative of an aspirational working class, and also they struck in ordinary homes like Alma Fielding’s – working-class terraces and suburban houses. It was a peculiarly 1930s phenomenon.
The central mystery of the book is whether Alma was faking the haunting.
I was intrigued by the psychical investigator Nandor Fodor’s ideas. He believed that there were real supernatural events in Alma’s house, but also that she was faking some of them in order to secure the attention of the psychical researchers, and that all of it was rooted in a childhood trauma. It was a very generous interpretation that encompassed her fraud, but also tried to understand what was going on in a way that respected her intentions and feelings.
Do you believe in the supernatural?
As an objective reality, I’ve never witnessed it, I’ve no evidence of it, and that isn’t what I wanted to explore in this book. I wanted to explore what supernatural experiences express about people’s emotional worlds and feelings, and the anxieties and fantasies of the whole society at times.