Alma Fielding, a Londoner, reported in 1938 that strange objects flew around her home and terrorized her family.
Nandor Fodor a paranormal researcher was contacted by her to look into the case.
The story of Alma, who may have been haunted by a poltergeist, is the subject of Kate Summerscale’s recent book, “The Haunting of Alma Fielding.” Kate spoke with Inside Edition Digital to tell Alma’s bizarre story.
Kate Summerscale says Alma’s story began one Friday night in February of 1938 while she and her husband, Les, were in bed in their South London home.
“She and Les apparently witnessed this bizarre poltergeist activity: objects flying across the room, like glass tumblers and light bulbs. When her 16-year-old son, Don, came to the door to see what was going on because of all the clatter and shrieking, things were thrown at them as well.”
“The whole family was very scared. When the events continued, the next morning in the kitchen, eggs flew around. So, Alma telephoned a Sunday newspaper that was running a series on the ‘super normal’ as it was then called, and invited the journalists to come and see for themselves what was going on in her house.”
Nandor Fodor was informed about the haunting. Kate explains that he was a Hungarian Jewish refugee who lived in London and worked for the International Society for Psychical Research.
“He believed in ghosts, but he hadn’t yet been able to categorically pin down the truth of them. He thought this sounded like a really plausible case. So, he hurried down to see if he could get any evidence for himself of these supernatural happenings.”
Kate says that Alma was there with her and a few colleagues. The three of them saw many strange and unexpected things together while they were there.
“So, they’d see wine glasses spring out of Alma’s hands and shatter in mid-air, or even hit the light fixture in the ceiling,”She said.
“They saw a saucer that had been used to feed the cat fly across the room when Alma’s back was turned, and there was absolutely no way she could have thrown it and shatter against the back door. A vase apparently transported independently from one room to another. So yes, they were very excited, as well as slightly chilled by what was happening there.”
Kate notes that they wanted to discover proof of the supernatural but didn’t want to be taken for fools.
“They were wise to a lot of the tricks that mediums and others deployed in impersonating supernatural events.”
“They were looking out for things like strings and wires, and misdirection, and sleight of hand, the tricks that the conjurers on the London stage were also using at the time.”
The researchers later invited Alma to come into the International Institute for Psychical Research in South Kensington to see if the poltergeist-like energy would follow her. Kate confirmed that it happened.
“To their great delight and amazement, they did, but they took new forms.”
“When Alma paraded around the séance room in the presence and under observation from all the researchers, she apparently materialized from thin air small objects: pieces of jewelry, odd little items from her home seemed to have followed her and materialized, and increasingly sort of more ancient objects like little terracotta pots.”
In the end, even living creatures such as a mouse, bird, or terrapin appeared. But Kate explains that Fodor became increasingly suspicious because it all seemed too good, or too eerie, to be true.
“This went on for some time, many weeks,”She said. “Things got weirder and weirder in terms of the experiences she was reporting. Fodor saw a couple of moments at which he thought he saw her cheating. He saw what could have been trickery/slights of hand.”
Fodor finally decided to find out if she was real. Fodor tricked her half-way into giving her an X-ray using a portable machine at their office.
On X-ray, he discovered evidence that she had objects hidden in her body. He concluded that at most some of the phenomena were fraudulent.
But Fodor thought there might be a psychological explanation for Alma’s experience, Kate noted.
“Fodor deciding under the influence of ideas he’d read from Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts, that what was really going on with Alma both in terms of her fraudulence and her genuine terror was that she was expressing repressed trauma and that a traumatic event had occurred in her childhood which she had forgotten and that was emerging in the form of these phenomena and this sort of acting out and storytelling,”She said.
“When the other members of the International Institute for Psychical Research got wind of his theories and where he was going with it, he started in effect conducting a kind of psychoanalysis on Alma,” she added. “They were very freaked out by this and thought it was very disrespectful of the spiritualist beliefs of many people in the institute, and also just dangerously sort of sexual and weird, and generally would discredit the institution.”
Nandor Foodor was finally expelled from the institute and replaced as chief researcher/ghost hunters. Alma’s investigation was ended abruptly.
And that’s how Alma’s haunting story ended. But Kate adds that Fodor’s career didn’t end.
“After this, Fodor, to his delight, managed to get some endorsement for his theories from Freud himself who had turned up in London that year,”She said.
“Then Fodor left London, left England, and went and established himself in New York and forged a new career as a psychoanalyst.”
Fodor passed away in 1964.
Alma Fielding eventually moved to rural America, where she held seances. She died in 1976.
Kate isn’t able to answer the question of whether a poltergeist haunted her.
“A lot of supernatural experience was a way for these women in any case of expressing traumatic experience, expressing things for which there was no language at the time,” she stated.
“Alma, in particular, was almost like a performance artist. Her supernatural experience was telling something about her inner life that was not accommodated by the society in which she found herself, or the life she found herself living as an ordinary housewife in a working-class home in South London.”
“So, haunting is a form of self-expression, and of expression of stories through which a culture or society doesn’t yet have a language.”