To dispel the ghost, Eileen first let it occupy her. She convulsed, stiffened, grabbed Fodor’s hand so tightly that it went numb, and allowed herself to be possessed by ‘Henley’, a sixteenth-century nobleman determined to revenge himself on a rival. Fodor urged Henley to leave the earthly sphere and let God bring his enemy to justice. ‘You prate to me of God!’ shouted Henley, through Eileen. ‘I want my vengeance.’
Back in London, Fodor held a private sitting with Eileen, at which Uvani disclosed further facts that he had picked up at Ash Manor: Maurice Kelly was a homosexual ‘debauchee’ and an alcoholic, and his wife Katherine – a beautiful half-Russian woman who had trained as a lawyer – was sexually frustrated and addicted to morphine. Fodor sent a transcript of Uvani’s revelations to Mr Kelly, who admitted that the information was accurate. Fodor felt sorry for the couple: ‘I realized how the ghost had been used as a distracting element, a sort of tranquillizer, which helped hold the family together without bringing their true frustrations into the open.’
A few weeks later Maurice Kelly wrote to tell Fodor that the haunting had worsened: ‘It is no longer in the house alone but is in me too.’ Fodor assured him that this would pass – ‘the fear of one’s own desire often leads to persecutory delusions’, he said, encouraging Maurice to be more forgiving of his sexual impulses. The case confirmed Fodor’s hunch that supernormal phenomena could be caused by forbidden feelings.
At the end of 1936 Fodor had to lobby for donations to make up a £400 shortfall at the Institute. He worried for his future. Rothermere had axed his retainer, and even with the proceeds of freelance journalism (£250 in 1936 for a nine-part supernatural series for Empire News), he was struggling to make ends meet. He feared that he would be forced to leave England if he lost his job as a psychical researcher. To raise the Institute’s profile, and his own, he decided to tackle one of the most famous stories of the day, the mystery of Gef the talking mongoose.
Gef (pronounced ‘Jeff’) was said to live in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man with James Irving, a piano-salesman-turned-farmer, his wife Margaret and their adolescent daughter Voirrey. Several islanders claimed to have seen or heard Gef over the years, but he was especially attached to Voirrey, while the fullest account of his antics was a log kept by James since 1932. Though Gef took animal form, he was a classic poltergeist: unruly, elusive and rude. On one occasion he described himself as ‘an earthbound spirit’, though on another he told the Irvings: ‘I am not a spirit. I am just a little extra-clever mongoose.’ Gef threw objects at the family, spat at them, jeered at them, killed rabbits for them, roamed the island gathering gossip by day and returned to raid the larder by night. He was partial to butter and chocolate. The mongoose could speak several languages, according to James Irving’s log, and was proud of his intellectual prowess.
‘I’ll split the atom!’ declared Gef. ‘I am the Fifth Dimension! I am the Eighth Wonder of the World!’
Fodor’s fellow ghost hunter Harry Price failed to flush Gef out when he spent three days with the Irvings in 1936. Fodor, hoping to get the better of Price, arranged with James Irving to stay for a week. He promised that he would be no trouble: ‘I would willingly pay you £5 for the week’s board,’ he wrote to him. ‘Considering that I am a vegetarian and eat only vegetables cooked in water for 10 minutes, I do not think that Mrs Irving would have too much trouble looking after me.’ At night, he said, he would be happy to ‘rough it’ anywhere in the house.
‘I hope that Gef will bear with me and will not throw things at me or spit at me in the night!’ added Fodor. ‘He has my admiration. He is certainly the cleverest thing far and wide… Tell him also that I shall bring him chocolates and biscuits.’
James Irving later told Fodor that while he was reading this letter to himself in the cottage, Gef screamed down from the attic: ‘Read it out, you fat-headed gnome!’
The Irvings put Fodor up for a week in February 1937. Though he did not manage to communicate with Gef, he was able to verify statements that the mongoose had made about the interior of Ballamooar, a grand Manx house which the Irvings claimed never to have visited. When Fodor left the Irvings’ cottage, he installed a contraption to take automatic photographs of Gef, and he left a note for him:
Dear Gef,
I am very disappointed that you did not speak to me during the whole week which I spent here. I came from a long way and took a lot of trouble in collecting all your clever sayings, and I shall lecture about you in my institute where people are extremely interested in your doings. I hoped that you would be kind and generous. I believe you to be a very good and generous mongoose, I brought you chocolates and biscuits and I would have been happy if you had done something for me… Will you send me a message? Or will you write a letter to me? I should be very pleased if you gave a definite promise that you would speak to me. I would come again in the Summer. Congratulations on Ballamooare [sic]. You scored there, Gef.
With best wishes,
Your friend,
Nandor Fodor
On his way back to London from the Isle of Man, Fodor called on a physician in Leeds who was interested in psychoanalysis and the supernatural. They discussed Gef. Fodor told Dr Maxwell Telling that he thought that James Irving’s unhappiness somehow lay behind the Gef phenomena. Irving had failed in life, he observed, and the mongoose may have been a means to express his unconscious desires. The Leeds doctor was sympathetic to Fodor’s views. ‘Where the facts are fantastic,’ advised Dr Telling, ‘you should never be afraid of fantastic theories.’ He suggested that Gef could be a detached part of Mr Irving’s personality that had taken up residence in an actual mongoose.
In the year after the Gef adventure, Fodor had more bad luck with mediums. Rudi Schneider of Austria, Lára Agústsdóttir of Iceland and Anna Rasmussen of Denmark all turned out to be clumsy frauds. Arthur Findlay, the Institute’s chairman, admitted to the members, ‘So far our efforts to establish supernormal physical phenomena have been unsuccessful. It gives us no satisfaction to expose fraudulent so-called mediums but in work such as is ours we must be prepared for all kinds of experiences.’
Fodor passed some of the Institute’s evidence of fraud to the spiritualist weekly Psychic News, which happened to be owned by Findlay, but the journal chose not to publish any of it. Instead, it ran scornful articles about Fodor himself. ‘Fodor still attacks mediums,’ ran one headline: ‘Sneers at England’s materialisation evidence.’ The journal claimed that Fodor was harsh towards his experimental subjects, excessively sceptical, and obsessed with sexual theories and technological gadgets. Fodor suspected that the magazine’s editor, Maurice Barbanell, bore him a grudge because he had not given him an entry in his Encyclopaedia.
‘Fodor Finds Sex in Mediumship’, Psychic News announced in December 1937, reporting the ‘unblushing audacity’ of Fodor’s ‘repugnant’ claim, in an American publication, that supernatural events were exciting to mediums. According to Fodor, the famous Italian psychic Eusapia Paladino used to tremble, convulse and moan during seances, entering ‘a state of voluptuous-erotic ecstasy which was followed by true orgasm’. The journal declared that Dr Fodor was disgusting, insensitive and incompetent.