The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
In the footsteps of the Croydon poltergeist
Was this 1930s housewife plagued by ghosts – or only haunted by a tragedy in her past? Kate Summerscale investigates
In a taxi from Cambridge railway station to the university library in January 2017, the driver asked me what I was researching. I told him that I was studying supernatural material from the 1930s. Was I an expert? he asked. No, I replied, I was new to it. He told me that, as it happened, psychical research was his speciality. He had read widely in the subject and had become pretty good at the clairvoyant skill of “remote viewing”. Sometimes he would annoy his girlfriend by calling her at work and telling her what she was doing, or which sandwich she had chosen for lunch. I asked the driver when this started. He said his greatgrandmother had been a medium. He said I wouldn’t believe the creatures he had seen in the spirit world: dragons, monsters – everything I had read about in stories. We drew up outside the library and he turned in his seat to face me.
“In fact, I’ve got one with me right now,” he smiled, “hanging round my neck.” It was an amphisbaena, he said, a twoheaded snake. According to Greek myth, the amphisbaena is the spawn of blood dripped from the Medusa’s head. It feeds on corpses and its two mouths spew poison.
Why’s it there? I asked, looking at the cab driver’s bare neck and laughing a little uneasily. Protection? “Yes,” he said. “Healing.”
Iwas in Cambridge to look up some references to the Hungarian ghost hunter Nandor Fodor, who in the 1930s had been a charismatic figure on the British psychic scene. Fodor became notorious in 1938 for his investigation of a poltergeist that had wreaked havoc on a suburban house in Croydon. The phenomena emanated from a young housewife called Alma Fielding: cups, eggs and saucers flew at walls in her presence, glasses shattered, a brass fender pounded down the stairs. Having witnessed the violence of the poltergeist, Fodor invited Alma to the seance rooms at the International Institute for Psychical Research, where he carried out his studies of paranormal events.
When the documents I had ordered were delivered to the Cambridge library’s manuscripts room, I discovered, to my delight, that one of them was Fodor’s dossier on Alma, wrongly catalogued as a holding on a “Mr” Fielding. Here were transcripts of her seances and of Fodor’s interviews with her, lab reports, X-rays, copies of her contracts, notes, sketches, samples of “automatic” writing and drawing, word association tests, and evidence of her materialisations of jewels, a key, a bird, a brush. In the course of the investigation, she told Fodor that a ghostly tiger had raked her arms and back, a phantom lover had come at night to impregnate her, and a winged creature had alighted on her neck to suck her blood. Fodor photographed the scratches on Alma’s arms and the puncture marks on her throat. He watched her belly swell before his eyes.
Some of the researchers believed that spirits were communicating through Alma. Others thought she was somehow faking her marvels. But Fodor had a more radical theory. He speculated that she was unconsciously generating the physical events around her, and that her gifts were rooted in a childhood trauma. His theories
‘As we passed, a cold cream jar jumped off the sill and came rolling towards her’
were so disturbing to his colleagues that in the autumn of 1938 they expelled him from the International Institute.
With the help of the Cambridge files, I embarked on a two-year inquiry into the haunting. I was sceptical about Alma’s manifestations but fascinated by Fodor’s ideas about her. I wanted to know what became of them both when the investigation was suddenly shut down.
I discovered that Fodor’s daughter, Andrea, was still alive. Now 93, she agreed to meet me at her apartment in Manhattan. Andrea told me that Fodor used to take her on ghost hunts when she was a girl. She adored her clever, playful, handsome father. She recalled that Alma Fielding had visited the family’s flat in London in 1938. “As we passed by the bathroom,” she said, “a cold cream jar jumped off the window [sill] and came rolling towards her.” This, Andrea said, was the only supernatural event she had ever witnessed. She let me leaf through her father’s papers, from which I learnt that Shirley Jackson’s eerie novel The Haunting of Hill House was influenced by the ideas that Fodor had developed during his investigation of Alma. Fodor proposed that a person could suffer a kind of “psychic lobotomy”, in which a devastating shock loosened an infantile, repressed part of their mind in poltergeist form. In 1963, Metro-GoldwynMayer employed Fodor as a consultant on The Haunting, the first film adaptation of
Jackson’s book.
On the wall near the front door of Andrea’s apartment was a framed, handwritten letter from Sigmund Freud. After Fodor was expelled from the Institute in 1938, his wife had turned up on Freud’s doorstep in Hampstead and pleaded with him to read the poltergeist report. A few weeks later, Freud wrote to Fodor, declaring it “very regrettable” that the Institute had failed to back his inquiries. “I also hold it very probable,” wrote Freud, “that your conclusions regarding this case are correct.” This letter was Fodor’s vindication. He sent a copy to his former employers, without comment, and a few weeks later he and his family left London for New York City.
In his writing, Fodor disguised Alma’s identity, always alluding to her as “Mrs Forbes”, but I found her real name in public records and was able to trace one of her grandsons. At his house in Devon, Barry Fielding showed me a cache of Alma’s papers, including the front page of the Sunday Pictorial that featured the poltergeist story. Barry had been wary of his grandmother, he told me, having heard stories of her spooky past, but until my visit he had known nothing about Fodor’s investigation.
In one of Barry’s photograph albums, I noticed a picture of a baby, “Laurie”. Barry told me that this child, Alma’s second son, had died of meningitis in 1926, at the age of one. The boy was mentioned only briefly in the International Institute’s files on the case. I wondered if Fodor, in his eagerness to find the buried trauma in Alma’s childhood, might have overlooked the impact of her own child’s death.
Alma’s other grandson, Leslie, spoke to me on the telephone from his home in Norway. He hadn’t believed a word of the poltergeist story, he said, until his father, Don, casually mentioned that he had seen a back-scrubbing brush float down the stairs of the house in Croydon. Don had never before expressed a belief in the supernatural, nor reported any paranormal experiences. “He said it in such a matter-of-fact way,” said Leslie, “that I believed it happened.”
In December 2017, I returned to Cambridge. Outside the station, I again queued briefly at the taxi rank, climbed into a cab and asked for the university library. As we pulled away, the driver asked me what I was researching. He turned slightly in his seat, and I saw that he was the same dark-haired man who had picked me up at the rank 11 months earlier. I was unnerved. I had recently read two short stories in which women got into cabs driven by someone uncannily known to them. In Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”, published in 1941, a married woman sees that her driver is a beau who was killed in the war; in Cynthia Asquith’s
“The Follower”, published in
1935, a woman leaps into a cab to flee a leering stranger, and sees – to her horror – that the driver is her stalker.
But my driver seemed as surprised as I was that we had met on my last visit to Cambridge. I asked him if he would tell me more about his supernatural experiences.
The cabbie said he had vampires attached to his spirit, though he assured me that they didn’t do anything horrible. “Most of my spirits specialise in healing,” he said. “The vampires are fantastic healers.” But not all his encounters were benign, he acknowledged. “For some reason,” he said, “I keep attracting demons. I did have a demon stuck to the side of my face. I could feel it clawing constantly and it took me about three months to get rid of it.” The cab driver lifted his right hand from the wheel and pressed it hard against his cheek.
The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale will be published by Bloomsbury Circus on Thursday