Inside Story: A Novel/how

mediums and fixated on sex. He needed to restore his reputation; he needed a bona-fide ghost. The Alma Fielding case, in 1938, offered just that.

Alma Fielding was an attractive young woman in her 30s, who lived with her husband, son and lodger in Thornton Heath, Croydon, in a house under siege. The air was thick with flying glasses, pots of face cream, cups and saucers, eggs and light bulbs. A wardrobe was thrown onto the bed of Alma’s son, who was so unnerved that he moved out. All the inhabitants of the house, especially Alma, from whom these happenings seemed to emanate, were frightened and anxious.

Fodor set out to investigate. Poltergeists were regarded as secondrate and vulgar, compared with good old aristocratic ghosts. But, no matter, Alma’s poltergeist looked like the real deal. Fodor witnessed smashing china and hairbrushes floating down the stairs in Thornton Heath. He took Alma to the South Kensington Institute, where she produced multiple ‘apports’ (objects from the spirit world) out of thin air. There was an outing to Woolies in Bognor Regis to see whether she really could perform ‘psychic shoplifting’ (she could).

Everyone was impressed: members of the Institute, mediums, an Austrian countess and Fodor himself. Then things got stranger. Deep scratches inexplicably appeared on Alma’s body, supposedly made by a tiger. Spirit guides started piping up.

Was it simply a hoax? Was Alma playing to her audience? Did she have accomplices – her husband? Her lodger, who was in love with her?

Disappointment is the ghost-hunter’s lot and Fodor had had plenty. The ‘flower medium’ Hylda Lewis proved a fraud – the flowers that sprouted from her body were concealed in her clothes. Gef, the talking mongoose, was stubbornly silent when Fodor went to visit him on the Isle of Man.

It emerges that Alma has been concealing apports (bits of pottery and a live bird) on her person during visits to the Institute. Fodor discovers that, as a girl, she’d worked as a trapeze artist – she’d been ‘trained in dexterity’. The whole case is thrown into doubt.

As in previous books, Summerscale is adept at turning narrative holes or failings to her advantage. Here, ‘the genuine and the fraudulent marched in queer procession’. That Alma had resorted to trickery didn’t mean that supernatural forces were not at work in Thornton Heath. Fodor felt that the fraudulent phenomena could have been ‘rooted in pain’ rather than in conscious deceit.

He began looking into Alma’s past for evidence of trauma resulting in psychic breakdown. Had she been the victim of sexual assault as a child? Could her two dead babies have been the trigger? The evidence was inconclusive and the Institute, having had quite enough of Fodor and his psychologising, fired him.

More recent research, identifying a correlation between childhood trauma and adult experience of the paranormal, backs up Fodor’s theories. Fodor went on to become a successful psychoanalyst in New York, working in a profession to which he was better suited.

Alma moved to the Devon coast and conducted occasional séances in her bungalow. Her grandson found her spooky.