An evocative ghost story
THE HAUNTING OF ALMA FIELDING
By Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury) ★★★★✩
IN 1938 reports emerged of a house in Thornton Heath, south London, apparently occupied by a poltergeist. Alma Fielding, a married housewife, told of cups flying through the air and lights flashing on in the night.
It was far from the only instance of a haunting, either: still traumatised by World War I and becoming increasingly fearful of another global conflict, the country was seemingly in the grip of a national psychosis. Reports of haunted houses proliferated, the number of mediums exploded and a credulous public seemed ever more willing to place their faith in unknown forces than in the very real ones rendering everyday reality so scary.
Kate Summerscale (pictured above), author of The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher, uses the same novelistic technique she has perfected over several non-fiction books to place this extraordinary story within the context of its times, focusing in on the obsessive efforts of Hungarian-born ghost enthusiast Nandor Fodor to explain the Fielding phenomena. A strangely dependent relationship between the two soon developed, with Fielding experiencing ever more outlandish supernatural manifestations (birds emerging from her skirts etc) in response to his fascination and Fodor concerned his deepening interest was causing her ever greater damage.
He was also rightly suspicious and his growing conviction that a flammable mix of psychological disturbance and repressed desire rather than supernatural energies lay behind the happenings would see him lose his job at the International Institute for Psychical Research. An engrossing, weirdly timely book about the relationship between the bodily self and the trauma of a haunted mind.