Fodor hastily assured her that it was impossible that the phantom had impregnated her, and advised her to do everything she could to resist any further encounters. In truth, he did not know what this visit could mean, or how to avoid a recurrence. Alma made Fodor promise to keep the information to himself. He sealed his report of their conversation in an envelope, which he kept separate from the main log of the case.
On Saturday Alma told Fodor over the telephone that she felt tired and lifeless. He asked her whether she had been visited by the ghost again.
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I was awake most of the time. But I could not help myself. I felt paralysed.’
Fodor asked for a description of her attacker. ‘It was a man with a broad head,’ said Alma. ‘I know nothing about him. I have never seen him. He stayed quite a long time. He paid two visits.’
Later that night, Alma added, she felt someone bite her neck and when she woke at 5.45 a.m. she saw her late uncle George approach her. After this she dressed, went downstairs and sketched his image from memory. George Bannister, who had died in 1924 aged forty-six, was the younger of Alma’s mother’s brothers. It was he who had trained Alma when she was a girl. Perhaps there was a connection between her disclosure of her family history and the arrival of the phantom lover.
Alma told Fodor that she had first seen the ghost of her uncle just a few days ago, at a variety show at the London Palladium. At the end of Thursday’s matinée performance of London Rhapsody, which featured the popular comedy act the Crazy Gang and the Welsh conjuror Cardini, she claimed to have seen George appear between the stage curtains. He bowed and smiled and was gone.
Of all her experiences, Fodor could tell that the night visits scared Alma the most. He wondered what they were. Returning memories? Visits from the dead? Fantasies about a man who, like Fodor himself, was both attractive and dangerous to her? Alma’s encounter had been pitched between pleasure and revulsion – she described the icy, insistent press on her body, her answering pulse of excitement.
A predatory erotic demon was known in psychical circles as an incubus or – if female – a succubus. These figures were sometimes the former lovers of those they assaulted. In May Sinclair’s short story ‘The Nature of the Evidence’, a dead woman thrusts herself between her widowed husband and his new wife as they lie naked in bed, ensnaring him in ‘terrible and exquisite contact’ so thrilling that he abandons his flesh-and-blood bride. Alma had recently heard real-life stories of vengeful, envious ghosts: just a week ago, Eileen Richardson was seemingly assaulted in Walton House by her former fiancé Douglas, in the guise of a three-legged table, and a few weeks before that the spectre of Mrs Davis was said to have driven her love rival Minnie Harrison from their home in Bethnal Green. In both cases, the dead were animated by sexual jealousy.
In Alma’s phenomena, said Fodor, ‘the genuine and the fraudulent marched in queer procession. It was too dangerous to conclude from one to the other.’
Now that Fodor had joined the sittings again, he wanted to test Alma in front of a larger audience. He organised a public seance on 22 April, and made sure that she was not left alone for a second that afternoon. Dr Wills met her at Victoria. Miss Scott took over at the door of Walton House. Fodor himself searched the ladies’ room, the upstairs seance room and the armchairs in the library.
Alma stood in the middle of the library and undressed, revealing the scars from her mastectomy and from the operations to drain her kidney abscesses. She passed her clothes to the searchers to place on the Chesterfield sofa by the window and stepped onto the Institute’s scales: she had lost a pound since the last sitting. When Alma was naked, the Countess ran her fingers through her hair, looked into her ears, up her nose, under her arms and in her mouth. Alma removed her false teeth for inspection. She dressed herself in her corset, two baggy woollen vests, a pair of long, loose bloomers and a pair of stockings. Miss Scott sewed the tops of the stockings to the legs of the knickers. Alma pulled on the one-piece silver jumpsuit, which her attendants zipped up the back, cinched at the waist with a narrow suede belt and tied with tape at the neck, ankles and elbows. The women checked Alma’s hands – ‘the two hands should be examined simultaneously by two examiners and the fingers spreadeagled’, specified Dr Wills’s written instructions – before putting her arms into a pair of custom-made gloves: these were silk stockings with the feet cut off and the ends tied in a knot. Miss Scott sewed the open ends of the gloves to the arms of the one-piece suit, and the library door was unlocked to admit Dr Wills, who tied bandages around Alma’s arms. She was led to the adjoining seance room, her hands held all the while.
Among the nineteen sitters in the large studio were Will Goldston, an English stage magician whose publications included Will Goldston’s Card System of Exclusive Magical Secrets (1920), More Exclusive Magical Secrets (1921) and Further Exclusive Magical Secrets (1927), and Horace Goldin, an American magician who claimed to have devised the illusion of sawing a woman in half. Fodor had invited them to assess whether Alma, under cover of feminine passivity, was using tricks like their own. Mediums and conjurors both dealt in magic, but a medium aspired to be a conduit for real supernatural forces, whereas a conjuror was a master of illusion. As Harry Houdini, the most famous exposer of fake mediums, liked to say, ‘It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer.’
While Alma was walking around after the tea break, she complained of sharp pains in her stomach. She jerked, twitched, collapsed into a chair, seemed to lose consciousness as her head fell forward: a small glass vase was found in her hand beneath the stocking-glove. Five minutes later she shook, blanched, faltered; trembled all over and again fell into a chair: a dogtooth quartz crystal appeared, this time outside the stocking. An hour later, she started to give way for a third time. Fodor rushed forward and caught her. He and Will Goldston held her up, clasped her flinching hands and felt the sinews pulse. She subsided into a chair, shaking from head to foot as she opened her palm: there, outside the stocking, was a small piece of pottery with a faded label inscribed with tiny writing. On examining it through a microscope, the investigators made out the word ‘TIMGAD’, the name of an ancient Roman city in Algeria.
The magicians were amazed. ‘It was the most wonderful thing I have ever seen,’ said Horace Goldin afterwards. ‘I am absolutely convinced.’ Will Goldston said that he had heard and read many stories about apports, but had never believed that they were truly supernormal: seeing Alma’s phenomena had changed his mind.
Alma lay on a sofa in the conservatory while Dr Wills brought her brandy. She then went to the library to dress in her own clothes, under the supervision of six women. Just as she was about to pull on her cardigan, ‘Oh, my arm!’ she cried. ‘That tiger again!’ Her right arm was bright red from elbow to shoulder with four livid weals, as if raked by claws.
As she was buttoning the cardigan, ‘Oh, my back!’ she exclaimed. She took off the cardigan and lifted her blouse: red scratches reached from one shoulder blade to the other, and down her spine from neck to waist. All the women in the library felt sick, and some detected a foetid smell. Miss Scott had a violent headache. Everyone sensed something alien in the room with them. Alma cried out again: there were marks on her left arm now, and more on her back, and two minutes later a thick red band appeared on her neck from her left ear to her throat.