When Fodor sued Psychic News in January for publishing malicious falsehoods about him, Arthur Findlay, as the journal’s owner, immediately resigned his chairmanship of the International Institute and his membership of its council. Fodor now needed urgently to prove himself to the rest of the board.
FIVE
Something is moving
Fodor spent much of the morning of Friday 25 February 1938 on the telephone, excitedly inviting friends and colleagues to meet Alma Fielding at the International Institute for Psychical Research. Dr Wills picked Alma up from home at two o’clock, and an hour later showed her in to the Institute’s premises at Walton House, a detached, five-storey Arts and Crafts building on a cobbled mews behind Harrods department store. The property belonged to a rich young widow called Mary Dundas, who lived in the upper storeys and accommodated the International Institute on the first two floors. It was the most imposing and capacious of the several psychic-research establishments in South Kensington. Other supernormal institutions lay in neighbouring districts: the Psychic Bookshop, founded by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1925, was next to Westminster Abbey, two miles to the east, while the seance halls and occultist societies of Marylebone were two miles to the north.
Fodor welcomed Alma to Walton House. She looked well. Her hair was waved and lustrous, her eyebrows neatly plucked. She was wearing a cloche hat, a dark wool coat with a fur collar, a sheer, calf-length dress, glossy stockings and dark shoes with a modest heel. Once she had hung her hat and coat in the ladies’ cloakroom on the ground floor, Fodor took her up to his office and introduced her to his secretary, Elyne Tufnell, the Institute’s only other salaried member of staff.
Fodor asked Alma whether there had been any trouble since he left her the previous evening. There had, she said. That morning, she and Rose had been at the Welcome Café in Thornton Heath high street when her teacup and saucer were smashed out of her hand and a glass of milk crashed to the floor. Their friend Mabel, who ran the café, brought Alma a cup of Bovril. ‘I dared not drink it,’ Alma told Fodor. ‘I sat for some time spooning it. But while talking, I forgot about my fears and lifted it to my lip. It immediately flew off.’
Dr Wills, who was sitting in on the interview, added that when he called to collect Alma from Beverstone Road, she was followed out of the bathroom by a scrubbing brush and a soap tray. She was in full view, he said, as they came rattling down the stairs behind her.
Fodor often found it hard to persuade mediums to take part in scientific seances – ‘They are all scared stiff of psychical research,’ he told a friend, ‘so we have to go very gently’ – but Alma seemed remarkably unfazed by the idea of being monitored. She suggested that Fodor search her before she went into the seance room. He, Dr Wills and Miss Tufnell rifled through her pockets and handbag, making a note of the odds and ends that they found. The group was joined by Dr Frayworth, the Croydon physician who had called at the Fieldings’ house the previous day.
Fodor showed everyone in to an airy, light-flooded room on the first floor, originally designed as an artist’s studio. The studio was twice the height of a normal room, sparsely furnished, with a bare wooden floor and tall mullioned windows – Fodor described it as having the proportions of a cathedral. On one side, a small staircase led to a gallery. On another, a door opened on to a chamber in which Fodor kept his recording devices. Next to a giant carved fireplace in the main room was the curtained cabinet in which visiting mediums often sat. Fodor had placed five cut-glass tumblers on a folding table in the cabinet, in the hope that they would be smashed by Alma’s ghost; a flashbulb was nestled in one of them and a rattle in another. He had put saucers and cups on chairs around the room for the same purpose, and had trained cameras on the chair inside the cabinet and on the armchair in front of it.
Most experimental subjects liked to sit in the dark, but Alma chose to walk around in the light. Fodor, Dr Wills and Dr Frayworth accompanied her as she paced the room clasping a tall, dimpled glass. At 3.30 p.m. they heard a bang and saw that a brass-bound brush, three inches long, had fallen about twelve feet away. Fodor was sure that Alma had still been holding the glass with both hands when the brush landed. He picked it up and found that it was warm. Alma recognised it as her own: she had last seen it in her bedroom, she said.
The group broke for tea at 3.50 p.m. to allow nine new arrivals to join the party. These included Fodor’s brother Henry, who was visiting from Budapest, and Countess Nora Wydenbruck, an Austrian author of forty-four who had been a member of the Institute’s council since its inception. The Countess was a serious, sensitive woman, tall and very thin, who smoked heavily and dressed soberly, in tweeds and pearls. She and Fodor – Nora and Nandi, as they called one another – both spoke German, and had been fellow citizens of Austria-Hungary until the state was dissolved in 1918. The Countess had published an English translation of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, whom she had known in Austria, and had written several novels. She claimed to have composed Woman Astride while in trance, taking automatic dictation from a seventeenth-century ancestor who had disguised herself as a boy to fight in the Thirty Years War. The Countess, unlike Fodor, was still convinced of the survival of the personality and the reality of spirit return. She was excited to meet Alma. ‘Whenever I sit with a new medium,’ she said, ‘I do so with a feeling of happy, childlike anticipation.’
After tea, Alma again paced the room. She was walking with Fodor and Dr Frayworth at 4.15 p.m., clutching a glass with both hands, when a small circular tin of Carter’s Little Liver Pills – a popular over-the-counter laxative – fell with a clatter behind her. Alma identified it as a tin from her dressing table. Fodor picked up the container and found that, like the brush, it was warm to the touch. Apports were usually warm on arrival: the heat, it was supposed, was generated by the energy expended when an item undid and reconstituted itself as it passed from one plane to another.
At 4.45 p.m. Alma was invited to sit inside the cabinet on a wooden chair, with the curtains draped over her back so that she could still be seen by those ranged in the seats before her. She was given a cup of tea on a saucer, which she held with both hands. She sat quietly, the black fabric rising and falling with her breathing, until after almost half an hour she said ‘Something is moving behind me underneath the chair.’ A few moments later: ‘Something is still there. I feel as if I were sitting on it. I think it is something solid.’ The Countess felt sick.
Fodor came forward and reached behind Alma to pull a glass dome, about two inches in diameter, from the back of her seat. Alma recognised it as an ornamental dust cover from Don’s bedroom.
As Miss Tufnell came into the seance room at 5.30 p.m., Alma’s teacup and saucer flew out of her hands with a ‘ping!’, drenching the Countess and splashing Fodor. He, Miss Tufnell and two other witnesses testified that they had seen the saucer in mid-air, already split; a fifth observer was sure that it had been whole as it left Alma’s hands. It was as if it had been hit in flight, said Fodor, by an invisible hammer.
At 5.40 p.m. Alma was still visible in the cabinet, her hands in her lap, when the sitters heard a bump in the box. Fodor looked in and found on the floor the flashbulb that he had stowed in one of the tumblers. The bulb was intact: a thin shell of blown glass encasing a thread of filament and a shiny crush of foil. The tumbler had seemingly tipped it out, then returned to a standing position. This, said Fodor, was the best phenomenon of the day.