Alma was downstairs with the Countess’s development circle while Fodor was interviewing the chauffeur in the library. She came up at 6 p.m., and stopped when she saw the visitor. Fodor whispered to him to put on his cap. He did so, and Alma identified him as the man outside Walton House on Tuesday. The chauffeur recognised her as the woman he had seen. Alma’s account had been verified.
Many members of the Institute, the Countess among them, thought that Alma might have undergone an astral projection from the cinema, her spirit flying to Kensington while her body remained in Croydon. Spiritualists believed that each person had an etheric self that survived death and could, in rare cases, detach itself from the body even in life. This capacity explained the ‘out of body’ experience of looking down on one’s own physical being. New theories of quantum mechanics made astral projection seem all the more plausible: some physicists proposed that a subatomic particle could be in more than one place at a time and could know about another particle’s state even when separated by a great distance. ‘Matter has been wiped out of existence,’ declared the ghost-story writer Algernon Blackwood in 1938, welcoming the ‘rapprochement between Modern Physics and so-called psychical and mystical phenomena’. The physical world had been revealed as ghostly, spectral, no longer solid, and the invisible world full of secret force.
Fodor, though he was open to the possibility that Alma had projected herself, considered other explanations. Alma probably knew that the Institute was shortly to host a talk on astral projection by the Honourable Ralph Shirley, editor of Occult Review and author of The Mystery of the Human Double. Perhaps she had deliberately staged the projection episode in a bid to keep Fodor’s attention. Or perhaps she was so suggestible that she had unconsciously mimicked a projection. She might have fallen into a trance at the Picture Palace, walked out of the building and taken a train to London, regained her normal awareness for a few minutes when she reached Walton House, then zoned out again and returned to the cinema, becoming conscious only when she was back in her seat. The event might even have been triggered by her setting: a cinema, after all, was a place in which speaking, moving phantoms were magically projected onto a screen. For now, Fodor thought that ambulatory amnesia was the likeliest explanation for Alma’s journey.
That Wednesday, Psychic News submitted its libel defence to the King’s Bench of the High Court of Justice. Fodor had attacked spiritualism and mediums, its lawyers argued, and by implication the journal itself. Psychic News had been entitled to criticise him, and its articles had been factual and fair.
At the end of March, Fodor was invited to the home of a young couple in Putney who said that their dining table was making unexplained movements. Clive Richardson, twenty-eight years old and six feet nine inches tall, was a composer for Gaumont Films. His wife Eileen was an Irish-born opera singer of twenty-two. She believed that their furniture was being manipulated by the spirit of her former fiancé Douglas, who had been killed in a car accident after she broke off with him to marry Clive. When Fodor visited the Richardsons, he saw the oak table jerk across their dining room in the dark, lit dimly by the embers of the fire and the rays of a street lamp. The table seemed to move even when he climbed on top of it, and again when he crouched on a stretcher beam between its legs. Fodor invited his hosts for experiments at Walton House. He told them about the poltergeist activity at Beverstone Road, and promised Eileen Richardson that he would introduce her to Alma.
All over Britain domestic furniture seemed to be bristling into life. The previous June, Fodor and Eileen Garrett had investigated a haunted bed in Essex, in which two sisters had felt themselves being strangled, while a third sister reported feeling something furry when she slept there. Fodor spent a night in the bed. He woke abruptly, but with a feeling of ‘glowing happiness’ rather than disquiet. The same month, an Oxfordshire woman advertised her haunted wardrobe for sale in the Morning Post, claiming that an elderly man in a deerstalker hat emerged from it each evening, marched downstairs and out of the front door. A more sinister wardrobe featured in the February 1938 issue of Two Worlds. One night in September 1937, according to the medium Horace Leaf, an oak cupboard launched itself at a friend of his while she lay in bed, its locked double doors flying open and its screws tearing free as it crashed down beside her. The wardrobe had done the same in 1908, on the last occasion that this woman slept in the room in which it stood, and had seriously injured her. ‘Now what kind of grudge had the wardrobe cherished for twenty-nine years?’ asked Two Worlds. ‘Why did the wardrobe show such passionate resentment of one person, and one person alone?’
Perhaps a poltergeist or a discarnate spirit could invade a piece of furniture, speculated the journal, imbuing it with malevolence in the same way that the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun imbued the objects looted from his tomb in the 1920s. As recently as January 1938 a jinx had befallen Sir Alexander and Lady Seton when they removed a bone from its burial ground on the banks of the Nile. Back home in Scotland, the couple were plagued by illness and supernormal visions until – on the advice of a medium – they returned their souvenir to its original resting place. Again, the curse seemed rooted in the anger of the dead.
But Fodor thought that haunted objects, like the golems of Jewish folklore, might be animated by the emotions of the living. He guessed that Eileen Richardson’s table was not being moved by the spirit of her former boyfriend, but by the strength of her feeling for him. He wondered if Alma’s objects, too, had been forced into life by her guilt or desire. On the drive to Bognor, she had told Fodor about the faceless ghost that stepped from the wardrobe in her childhood home. In Beverstone Road, Don’s wardrobe had thrown itself on the empty bed. A cupboard that came to life, pitching forward or swinging open, might mark a resurgence of feelings that had been shut away.
Fodor observed that Alma was acquiring a kind of radiance. Her eyes shone and her skin glowed. She relished the attention of the educated ladies and gentlemen at the Institute. In the Countess she had found a passionate, sympathetic ally, and in Fodor a stimulating, attentive admirer. Where once she had been alone with her strange experiences, now they brought her friends. After the Picture Palace incident she reported further projections – to Mabel’s café, to her mother’s house, to Rose’s kitchen. She said that two mice materialised at Beverstone Road, one in the fur collar of her coat, and that she found a goldfish in her vest; while she was sitting in the dining room, a stick of rhubarb landed in her lap, on top of her dog Judy, and in Croydon high street a butterfly brooch attached itself to her scarf, as if it had sailed out of the jeweller’s window. Sometimes it seemed that reality slipped and shifted even as Alma described it. She kept hearing cheeps and chirps, she said. At the Countess’s twice-weekly seances, the table rocked violently and everyone felt sick. Alma remarked that the table’s aggression was typical of her grandfather Jimmy. ‘He played tricks’, she said, ‘and when not sober could be very nasty indeed’. Once the table was calm, Alfons fell asleep on it, as if the whole thing was a dream; or unconscionable.
Fodor devised further tests outside the seance room. Before Alma sat with the Countess on 1 April, he and Dr Wills took her to the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington to see whether she could remove an artefact from a locked cabinet. An official checked her bag before their tour of the collection.