THORNTON HEATH

Opening

Late on Friday 18 February 1938, glasses began to smash in the bedroom of Alma and Les Fielding at 93 Beverstone Road, Thornton Heath, then in Surrey. Over the next days eggs, coal, crockery and a tin opener flew through the house in front of the family, their lodger and two reporters from the Sunday Pictorial, which ran the story on 20 February. Nandor Fodor of the International Institute for Psychical Research took up the case the next day.

Fodor published it under the pseudonym "Mrs Forbes", and for decades that was the only name it had. He tested her for months at the Institute in Kensington, where objects kept appearing until an X-ray showed some of them hidden against her body. Fodor then argued the cause was psychological. His colleagues objected, and he was pushed out of the Institute that autumn.

Timeline

13 February 1938Alma Fielding, 34, falls ill with kidney trouble and takes to bed.

18 February 1938Around midnight, tumblers smash, an eiderdown lifts, and the lodger, George Saunders, is hit by coins.

19 February 1938Two Sunday Pictorial reporters visit and see objects fly and break.

20 February 1938The Pictorial's story runs under the headline "'GHOST' WRECKS HOME".

21 February 1938A clergyman, the Reverend Francis Nicolle, writes to alert Fodor. Fodor soon visits the house himself.

Spring 1938Fodor tests Fielding at the Institute, where she is searched and dressed in special clothing. Apports keep appearing. On a day trip to Bognor Regis in March, a ring she had handled in Woolworths turns up in a box she is carrying.

1938An X-ray before a sitting shows objects concealed next to her skin.

Autumn 1938Fodor is dismissed from the Institute, which confiscates his papers.

July 1945Fodor publishes the case, as "Mrs Forbes", in the Journal of Clinical Psychopathology.

1958His book On the Trail of the Poltergeist tells it in full.

2020Kate Summerscale's The Haunting of Alma Fielding identifies Mrs Forbes and draws on Fodor's original dossier.

Key figures

Alma Fielding, the "Mrs Forbes" of Fodor's accounts, a Croydon housewife at the centre of the disturbances.

Les Fielding, her husband, a builder and decorator injured in the First World War.

Donald Fielding, their 16-year-old son, and George Saunders, the lodger, both present on the first night.

Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian-born journalist and psychical researcher, research officer at the International Institute for Psychical Research since 1934.

Physical and documentary trail

The main sources are the Sunday Pictorial report, Fodor's 1945 paper and 1958 book, and his original case file. The Institute's archive was thought lost in the Blitz. In January 2017 Summerscale found Fodor's dossier in the Society for Psychical Research archive at Cambridge University Library, catalogued under "Mr" Fielding, with interview and séance transcripts, lab reports, X-rays and photographs of damage to the house and of marks on Fielding's body.

in 72 hours, 60 tumblers and wine glasses, 20 cups, 4 saucers, 1 salad bowl, 3 electric bulbs, 9 eggs, 2 plates, 1 basin, 2 vases, 2 jugs, 1 pot of face cream were smashed by the poltergeist.

Accounts of the X-ray differ in detail. One summary of Fodor's paper says it showed three objects on a belt next to her skin; another says two objects under her left breast. Either way, objects later produced as apports were shown to be hidden on her before the sitting.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. Mrs Forbes was a pseudonym for Alma Fielding. The Institute did not simply split: it dismissed Fodor and took his papers. The house address is documented, and so is a test that found concealed objects.

Things you might not know

• The apports included live animals. At the Institute a brooch, an ancient oil lamp, a white mouse, a scarab beetle and a Javanese sparrow appeared, and a live terrapin turned up in her lap on a car journey.
• Fodor called Bognor "psychic shoplifting". He and four colleagues all said they had seen the Woolworths ring still on the counter as they left.
• The newspaper put a ghost beside Hitler. The Pictorial's front page carried a large photograph of Hitler, and the "'GHOST' WRECKS HOME" headline appeared to come out of his mouth.
• Freud read the case. In his last months, living in Hampstead, Freud read Fodor's psychoanalytic account of the case and said he broadly agreed with it.
• Fodor was already in court. In January 1938, before he heard of Thornton Heath, he had sued the spiritualist weekly Psychic News for libel over attacks on his work.
• He later advised Hollywood. Fodor was consulted on the 1963 film of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson said she had read his work.

Competing explanations

A genuine poltergeist with some fraud later. Two reporters saw objects fly in the first days, Fodor's assistant counted the breakage, and Fodor had no proof of trickery at the house. On this reading, cheating later under test conditions does not explain the first outbreak.

Trickery throughout. The X-ray showed that objects presented as apports had been hidden on her body. In Summerscale's account the evidence mounted that she hid small objects about her person and threw things with a flick of the wrist.

Unconscious fraud with a cause. Fodor's own reading was that Fielding faked phenomena in a dissociated state driven by repressed trauma. He described "poltergeist psychosis" and later traced it to childhood sexual trauma. This explains her behaviour, not physical events, and it was this reading that cost him his job.

Later life of the case

Fodor moved to New York, practised as a psychoanalyst and wrote on poltergeists as "projected repressions". Summerscale's book in 2020 restored Alma Fielding's name and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

Finding

The investigator caught the trickery himself. An X-ray showed objects concealed on Alma Fielding before they appeared as apports, and Fodor concluded that at least part of the phenomena was fraudulent. That part of the case was fraud. Whether she knew what she was doing was the question Fodor spent the rest of the case on.

What still will not resolve: the first days at Beverstone Road. Two reporters described objects flying in front of them before any researcher arrived, and no one has shown how each was done.