In a seven-part series written for the weekly newsmagazine The Leader, he exposed the phony levitations, table-rappings and other shabby tricks of a number of fashionable psychics. At séances, he was open to the voices of the dead emanating from the afterlife, but still prepared to uncover and debunk fraud. Spiritualism, Conan Doyle said, was “a breaking down of the walls between two worlds … a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.”Ī journalist by profession, Fodor was no pushover. He had long dabbled in spiritualism, but he embraced it more fully when his eldest son, weakened from his war injuries, died of the flu in 1918. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of these believers. After suffering the loss of three-quarters of a million friends and family members in the Great War, and about 250,000 more in the influenza epidemic that followed, the grieving families, friends and sweethearts left behind yearned for any connection, however morbid, with their lost ones. ![]() So were many other Britons, who saw spiritualism as an uneasy fusion of religious conviction and harmless entertainment. But although he took up Alma’s case in hopes of uncovering authentic otherworldly origins, he was also up for “action, laughter, adventure.” In other words, Fodor had the misfortune to be living in interesting times. Mussolini was making bellicose threats in Italy, Hitler had massed 80,000 troops on the Austrian border and England’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was anxiously gnawing his cuticles over these ominous threats of a second world war. In 1938, Londoners didn’t really need a psychiatrist to tell them why they felt jumpy all they had to do was look around. In fact, he was hoping to find proof of his theory that “repressed traumatic experiences could generate terrifying physical events.” But if Alma’s mischievous poltergeist was the invention of her own agitated psyche, then what memory was she suppressing? “A séance room was a permissive place,” according to Summerscale, “mystical, tactile, erotically charged.”įodor was keen to catch the poltergeist that was creating havoc at Alma Fielding’s home, but he wasn’t exactly bringing an open mind to the investigation. But it wasn’t until he moved back to England that he immersed himself in the spiritualist movement, joining the Ghost Club, the London Spiritualist Alliance and other organizations of true believers, writing for their publications and attending séances. ![]() Fodor had first become interested in the paranormal while working as a journalist in New York City. The chief spook hunter in Kate Summerscale’s delightful period piece, “The Haunting of Alma Fielding,” is Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian-born investigator at the International Institute for Psychical Research in London. What do you think - time to call Ghostbusters? And here comes a big chunk of coal, hot from the fireplace, headed straight for somebody’s skull. ![]() There goes an egg, sailing across the living room to smash into a sideboard. THE HAUNTING OF ALMA FIELDING A True Ghost Story By Kate Summerscale
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