Fodor knew that both Captain Lowry and Alma might have been suffering from hysterical blindness, a ‘conversion disorder’ in which suppressed feelings bypassed conscious thought to express themselves directly through the body. Yet Alma was not obviously unstable. She seemed a capable and kind-hearted housewife and mother, on good terms with her friends and neighbours, tender towards her pets.
Fodor invited Alma to take part in further seances at the Institute. Before he left, the two of them carried out another experiment with a small object. She walked around the house holding his magnifying glass, and he followed close behind, his arms around her shoulders and a finger beneath her hands to stop the glass from sliding into the opening of her black chiffon dress. It was not until Alma sat down in an armchair that the magnifying glass vanished as they had hoped. Fodor searched her pockets and the seat, but found nothing there.
At Walton House on Thursday evening, Fodor hosted a seance with the transfiguration medium Elizabeth Bullock, a regular at the Institute. When Lizzie Bullock went into trance, her features would mutate into those of the spirits who possessed her. Her audiences used to recognise Arthur Conan Doyle (who had ‘passed over’ in 1930) by the giant walrus moustache that seemed to appear on her face. At other times she took on the features of ‘the Chinaman’, with wizened skin and a long, straggly moustache; a Zulu warrior with a ring in his nose; and a soldier with a bullet hole in his forehead. Lizzie Bullock confided to Fodor that during her transformation into the Chinaman she felt as if a hand were massaging her womb. Officially, Fodor allowed that her transfigurations might be evidence that the dead survived, but privately he noted, ‘Sexual hysteria probably covers the case.’
Two hundred people had gathered to see Mrs Bullock on Thursday, among them a reporter from the Daily Mail. Fodor switched out the lights and trained a red-filtered lamp on Mrs Bullock as her features twisted. She relayed a series of spirit messages to her audience, finishing with an address by the Reverend Dick Sheppard, a famous pacifist who had died in November. The Daily Mail correspondent noticed that Mrs Bullock tucked her thumbs into her armpits, just as Sheppard used to tuck his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, while his spirit assured the gathering that he was campaigning for peace from the other side. Like most ethereal visitors, he brought a message of comfort to the circle.
Many Britons had turned to spiritualism in the 1920s because of the losses of war, and many were turning to it now for fear of a conflict to come. Spiritualist seances offered a sense of wonder and intimacy rarely found in the Church of England, where attendances were falling so fast that the Archbishop of Canterbury had appointed a committee to investigate the allure of the rival faith. The national anxiety was also fuelling a boom in supernatural swindles, as Reynolds News pointed out in January: ‘Never have fortune-tellers, horoscope-casters, crystal-gazers, teacup-twisters and fakers had so many mugs or made so much money.’ The ‘futurity racket’, Reynolds observed, was typical of societies on the brink of chaos and destruction: the Italian magician Count Cagliostro flourished in Paris before the revolution of 1789, much as the faith healer Grigori Rasputin thrived in St Petersburg before 1917. Even the popular press was at it, the paper complained: since the publication of the first newspaper horoscope in 1930, astrology had become a national craze.
‘Fear!’ observes the narrator of Orwell’s Coming Up For Air. ‘We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something. Jews sweating when they think of Hitler.’ London, he says, feels like ‘one great big bull’s-eye’.
The Thornton Heath haunting tapped into the fear of attack. ‘We are puzzled by mysterious crashes,’ Alma told the Croydon Times. ‘We hear a tremendous crash that shakes the house, and when we rush upstairs we find everything in place.’ Her home shuddered as if in anticipation of a bombing.
Fodor hoped that Alma would produce supernatural phenomena under tighter controls. Before Friday’s sitting, he and Dr Wills checked for hidden objects by patting her body from top to toe, as did two female members of the Institute: Helen Russell Scott, a Scotswoman of fifty-eight, and Florence Hall, a younger, married woman who had agreed to take notes on the seances. During the war, both Dr Wills and Miss Scott had served on the Western Front, he as a physician (he was awarded the Military Cross) and she as a nurse.
Fodor asked Alma to put on the one-piece silver jumpsuit that Lajos Pap had worn on his visit to London three years earlier. She slipped the suit over her short-sleeved dress. The fabric ballooned around her, so her attendants bound it at the ankles and wrists with elastic bands and at the waist with a belt. They used a safety pin, wrapped with adhesive tape, to secure the zip at the back. Dr Wills took off Alma’s shoes and shook them. Fodor photographed her from the front and from behind.
Fodor suggested to Alma that she try table-turning, a method of communicating with the dead established by the founders of spiritualism, Kate and Maggie Fox, when their home in upstate New York was invaded by a poltergeist in 1848. In the small seance room on the ground floor of Walton House, the lights were dimmed as Alma and the investigators placed their hands on an illuminated three-legged table, their fingertips touching. They hoped that the table would respond to their questions with coded raps, indicating ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers or even letters of the alphabet.
The table rotated, tilted, lifted on one leg, clacked and snapped, but these were effects that were often achieved with unconscious movements of the knees, thumbs or toes. To Fodor’s disappointment, it failed to provide coherent responses to the investigators’ questions.
As Alma was leaving Walton House that afternoon, two halves of a ‘trick penny’ fell on the stairs behind her. She said that she recognised it as belonging to George, who confirmed when telephoned by Dr Wills that a trick penny had disappeared from his trouser pocket. In fact, said George, he had been showing his sister-in-law Rose and his fourteen-year-old niece Jean how the trick worked at about 3 p.m. This was after Dr Wills had met Alma’s train at Victoria and driven her the last mile to Walton House.
The next day Dr Wills motored down to Thornton Heath to get signed statements from George, Rose and Jean about the bogus penny, which George said that he had bought from an acquaintance in a snack bar. A trick penny was a filed-down coin slotted into the recess of a matching, hollowed-out coin; the ‘trick’ was that an apparently normal penny had two heads or two tails. Having secured the signatures, Dr Wills went to the Welcome Café in the high street to ask Mabel to verify the story of the smashed cups. Mabel attested to the commotion in her café. It seemed unlikely that Alma had persuaded all these friends to lie for her, but the value of their testimony was limited. Besides, it was possible that she had dropped a double of the trick penny down the Institute’s stairs, and that she had sent Mabel’s cups flying with flicks of the wrist.
Alma told Fodor that she was meeting with resistance at home. She and Les had been sitting by the fire in the dining room, with Don, George and George’s niece Jean, when Les told her that he wanted her to stop going to the Institute. Alma argued at first, but Les when opposed could be stubborn and unyielding.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I won’t go to Walton House any more.’