Before Alma left Walton House, Fodor took a flash-lit photograph of her in the armchair, with five of the sitters, including the Countess, assembled around her. The suspense of the seance had dissolved. Alma, already in her hat and coat, looked straight at the camera with a trusting smile.
The events of the afternoon had been even better than Fodor had hoped. Alma’s poltergeist had managed not only to move things but to produce them from thin air. For the Countess, who had been raised as a Roman Catholic, Alma’s apports were spiritualist miracles, reminiscent of the wonders produced by ‘the highest type of medium’, the Catholic saints. For Fodor, as a secular Jew, they were precious scientific evidence, proofs of the poltergeist force that could make objects travel through space, vanish and reappear. He measured, weighed and catalogued each of the items that had arrived in the studio that day.
Fodor had promised to return Alma to Beverstone Road by seven, so they set out at six o’clock in Dr Wills’s car. Alma seemed excited by the events of the day. She sat on the back seat, next to the remains of the crockery that Fodor had taken to Thornton Heath on Thursday; by her feet was an old amplifier that he planned to give to Don as a gift, having learnt that he and the boy shared an enthusiasm for electrical apparatus. Fodor sat in the front next to Dr Wills.
Ten minutes into the journey, a saucer flew up from the back seat and snapped loudly into four pieces, and the amplifier lid twice banged open. Fodor asked Dr Wills to stop the car so that he could move to the back. He sat next to the amplifier, placing one of his feet between it and Alma’s leg. The phenomena continued: Alma’s bag smacked into his face; her shoe disappeared, then her hat and her diamanté clip.
Fodor shifted towards Alma and held her from behind, his left hand clutching her left hand, his right arm resting on her right wrist. Alma was wearing a fur glove on her right hand, which reached almost to the elbow, but she had misplaced the other glove, leaving her left hand bare. Somehow, the glove on her right hand removed itself while Fodor was holding her. He didn’t notice it slide off but felt it emerge beneath her left wrist: ‘It was the soft, empty tip that was touching my fingers.’ When he next looked down he saw that the glove had crept back on to her right hand, and a few minutes later was encasing her lower arm. It seemed impossible that Alma could have pulled it on without his noticing. The incident, Fodor said, filled him with ‘a sense of the marvellous’: it was like being in Alice in Wonderland. He took both her hands and held them tight.
Fodor and Dr Wills followed Alma into her house in Beverstone Road at 7 p.m. Alma’s friend Rose Saunders had called round, so Fodor asked her about the incident in Mabel’s café that morning. Rose confirmed Alma’s account, adding that a few of their fellow customers had dismissed the tale of the poltergeist as ‘a put-up job’, but when they saw Alma’s mug of Bovril fly off and soak Rose’s coat they had hurried out of the shop in fright.
Dr Frayworth, who lived nearby, came over to help Fodor and Dr Wills conduct further experiments. The sitting room was cold and Alma was wearing a thin frock, so Fodor encouraged her to put on Dr Wills’s big overcoat. The investigators emptied the coat’s deep, flap-covered pockets in readiness for apports. Alma sat with her arms folded.
‘Something is moving by this side of my arm,’ said Alma at 9.15 p.m., gesturing to her right.
‘It is still moving on my hip,’ she said two minutes later.
‘I feel shivery,’ she added, and after a few minutes: ‘It is still moving, almost like a hand in my pocket.’
Fodor lifted the right-hand pocket flap, reached in, and found the diamanté clip.
Fodor planted his wristwatch in the left-hand pocket to see if it would disappear. Dr Wills followed Alma, watching closely, as she walked upstairs and back down, her hands clasped in front of her. Fodor felt inside the pocket: the watch was gone. She went to the kitchen, walked upstairs, went to the kitchen again. She came back to the sitting room and sat in the armchair.
‘Something is moving near the side of my leg,’ said Alma. ‘Still moving. Still moving. Now it’s stopped.’ Fodor reached into the pocket and pulled out the watch.
Fodor returned the watch to the left-hand pocket. Dr Wills put a penknife in the right-hand pocket. Dr Frayworth gave Alma a golden pencil, which she clasped under the lapel of the coat. She wandered around the house again. The knife vanished; reappeared. Dr Wills felt the outside of the pocket move.
By the end of the night, said Fodor, ‘We were quite inured to these crazy happenings. We laughed heartily and our laughter did Mrs Fielding good.’ Alma was becoming playful, even flirtatious. Her guests were watching her, touching her, teasing her. The poltergeist, instead of terrorising her, was serving her. Les and George kept out of the way.
The intimate manoeuvrings of the ‘magic taxi ride’, as Fodor described their drive to Thornton Heath, had evolved into this skittish ‘vanishing game’. In the car, Alma’s foot had slipped out of her shoe, her hand into her glove, and Fodor had checked her movements by wrapping himself around her. In the house, Alma had slipped into Dr Wills’s big coat, and then let the men’s hands and their belongings – the watch, the knife, the golden pencil – slip in and out of her pockets, moving against her hip and leg as they came, making her shiver.
Fodor tended to talk up his psychic subjects. By nature and by necessity, he was an enthusiast, more likely to advance possibilities than to voice doubts. But his excitement about Alma was real. Through her, he hoped to show – before his libel suit came to court – that Psychic News had been wrong to mock and malign him. Her case, he believed, might not only restore his good name as a ghost hunter but revolutionise the study of psychic science.
‘There has not been a greater or truer ghost story than this one for many years,’ Fodor announced in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. ‘I always wanted to meet a Poltergeist. Now I have met one, a Poltergeist which is certainly destructive, yet not malevolent, in fact, to a certain degree, amenable to experimental suggestions.’ He informed the Sunday Pictorial that the Thornton Heath haunting was ‘a genuine and amazing case of the supernormal’. The paper remarked: ‘There are, it is plain, strange forces about us of which we know practically nothing, just as once we knew nothing of electricity.’
So far, Alma had proved an excellent subject. She operated in the light, without a companion or chaperone. She had volunteered to be searched, and she let the investigators touch and hold her as she worked her wonders. Fodor wrote to congratulate her on the ‘splendid spirit’ in which she had submitted to observation. He was determined to keep her away from other ghost hunters. Harold Chibbett, who ran a medium-busting operation called The Probe, was pestering him for access; Harry Price had driven over to Beverstone Road when the first article about the poltergeist appeared; and C. V. C. Herbert, the austere and punctilious research officer of the SPR, had tried to sign Alma up for tests before conceding that Fodor and the IIPR had ‘got in first’.
The team investigating Alma comprised Fodor, Dr Wills, Laurie Evans and the Countess. Fodor wrote to his friend Wilfred Becker, who had proved so sensitive to the levitation medium Harry Brown, asking him to join them. He knew that Becker might be reluctant, having recently taken part in the farcical six-week investigation of Lára Agústsdóttir, but he urged him to suspend his cynicism. ‘I feel I can rely on you to join us in a spirit of keen anticipation instead of dark and gloomy suspicions,’ Fodor wrote, enclosing the notes that he had made at Thornton Heath. ‘Will you do it? Remember what it may commit you to but think also that this is the thing we have been praying for.’