Fodor tried to soothe Alma by telling her that she was so sensitive to the presence of others, living and dead, that she could feel them without seeing them. This was why she sensed the tortoise on her back. When she felt ‘nasty’ or empty, he told her, she might be tapping in to the experiences of spirits who had been cruel in life or who had died of starvation. She should not be alarmed by these feelings, he advised, but instead evaluate and reject them. They were not her own.
In a psychological analysis of the supernormal, external events were explained by internal turbulence; in a spiritualist analysis, the internal feelings were caused by an external agent. Fodor was trying to calm Alma with the idea that she was persecuted, not paranoid; haunted, not deranged. But privately he was convinced that her phenomena sprang from a damaged inner life, and he knew that the investigation might be making things worse.
At the International Institute that week, the horror writer Marjorie Bowen gave an evening lecture on ghosts in literature and in reality. The best spooky stories – or ‘twilight tales’, as she called them – existed on the cusp of fact and fiction.
On Sunday night Laurie drove Fodor down to Hampton Court, a south-western suburb of London, to meet a medium who used a ‘psychic telegraph’ to communicate with the dead. Louisa Bolt and her manager, Mr Ashdown, said that they had created this machine with the help of her spirit guide, who in life had been an inventor. Mr Ashdown explained to Fodor and Laurie that the device was more efficient than the old-fashioned spirit trumpet: it collected the messages of the dead in spherical receptors, and then rapped them out in Morse code. He was marketing the machine, along with the Reflectograph and the Communigraph, in spiritualist magazines.
Fodor and Laurie paid a guinea a head for a sitting with Mrs Bolt and her device. As the instrument clicked out its messages in the blue-lit room, they could sense Mr Ashdown blowing at them, and they could dimly see Mrs Bolt squirting them with puffs of cheap scent. Laurie afterwards showed Fodor how easy it was to use a magnet to make metal keys rap. The invention, they realised, was a crude and greedy imposture.
Fodor had invited his friend Mercy Phillimore, the general secretary of the London Spiritualist Alliance, to supervise Alma’s strip search before the session of 10 May. Alma stood naked before the searchers in the library, her arms extended so that they could look at her body from all sides. Miss Phillimore inspected each piece of clothing before Alma put it on. She noticed that some of the stitches joining the stockings to the left leg of the knickers had come away; Mrs Taylor, the librarian, fetched a needle and thread and sewed them back together. Alma was menstruating, so the Countess brought her a fresh sanitary towel, which she first presented to Miss Phillimore for inspection.
The twenty sitters that afternoon included the celebrated medium Eileen Garrett, who had helped Fodor at Ash Manor and to whom he had appealed for help with Alma’s case. Also present were C. V. C. Herbert, Fodor’s counterpart at the Society for Psychical Research, and Sir Ernest Bennett, Labour MP for Cardiff Central and a well-known commentator on the supernormal. In 1934 Sir Ernest had made a BBC broadcast about haunted houses that elicited 1,300 letters from the public. He observed that in fiction a phantom usually had a definite purpose – it ‘is bent on communicating some information, or calling attention to some tragic event, such as murder or suicide; it is quite determined to make its presence known and its demeanour is at times sinister and even menacing’. But in actual supernormal experiences, such as those relayed to him by BBC listeners, the ghost was ‘a fleeing, fugitive thing’, its message and meaning obscure. Sir Ernest speculated that hauntings were the dreams of the dead, communicated telepathically to the living. By this hypothesis, the poltergeist attacks in Alma’s home were vivid shards of a ghost’s fantasy. Fodor, by contrast, believed that Alma’s phenomena were generated by her own nightmares and memories, acquiring physical energy as they spilt from her.
Miss Phillimore told the gathering that she had searched Alma thoroughly: ‘I am absolutely and positively sure that she has nothing concealed about her.’ When Alma began to shudder at 4.30 p.m., Sir Ernest clasped her hands in his, and felt them throb; Miss Phillimore did the same and felt a heavy pulsing. An amethyst appeared in Alma’s palm. The Countess caught Alma as she fell at 4.50 p.m., and found a copper coat button in her hand, with the profile of a woman’s head picked out in enamel, turquoise and pearl. Alma became woozy at 5.50, just before a shiny insect arrived on her palm under the sheer glove. ‘It’s a beetle!’ she cried, pulling away in horror. She was repulsed by the beetle, as she had been by the terrapin, as if she was becoming estranged from her own manifestations. Fodor fetched scissors to cut open the stocking and release a dry, dead scarab.
As usual, Alma had moved about a lot during the seance, walking with different people, climbing the stairs to the gallery, sitting and rising and turning. Fodor noticed that she had been mechanically moving her hands from her throat to her diaphragm, pressing her breast, rubbing her ribs, restlessly caressing herself, but Mercy Phillimore insisted that she could not have had anything hidden on her.
Fodor asked Eileen Garrett what she had made of Alma. Eileen said that she had detected only a weak psychic aura. She sensed that whatever supernatural force Alma possessed sprang from anger or fear. Eileen had perceived a square ceramic slab near her. ‘I got it as though it were breathing,’ she said, ‘and she were sucking and drawing it towards her.’ Alma struck her as being ‘almost like a vampire’.
‘She obviously receives all her power at this point,’ she added, touching her diaphragm. ‘I could feel the pull all the time.’ She had seen the image of a baby around Alma, she said, and a zigzag of strong emotion. There was a blockage over the umbilicus that suggested a deep-seated shock. This, Eileen said, was linked to suffering over a pregnancy, and to the death of a child.
Eileen Garrett, like Fodor, believed that psychic gifts were rooted in psychological disturbance. She had her first supernormal experiences as a girl in Ireland, where she lived on a farm with her aunt and uncle. One day in about 1900, when she was seven, her Aunt Martha beat her in punishment for ‘lying’ about the invisible friends with whom she played. Eileen was angry. Afterwards she sat watching her aunt’s ducklings paddling on the farm lake. She leant forward from the lake’s edge and seized a baby duck, pushed it under the water, held it there until its wings stopped heaving against her hands. She lifted out the duckling’s body, its feathers sodden with water, and laid it on the grass next to her. Then she grabbed at another duckling, pressed it down, held it below the surface of the lake. Soon all of the ducklings were dead, laid out around her, the mother duck alone on the water. As Eileen surveyed the collection of dark, soft clumps on the grass, she saw a grey tendril of smoke swirl up from each corpse.
Aunt Martha was distraught at the drowning of her ducks. She told Eileen that she was a wicked child and punished her again. When Eileen was next allowed out she found more creatures to kill: a crow, a rabbit. Suddenly she stopped, sickened by what she was doing. But she thought about what she had seen filtering into the sky after the ducklings’ deaths. Had their souls lifted from their dense bodies to dissolve on the air? She had felt something like joy, she recalled, when she saw the mist rising. She wondered if grey plumes like these had issued from the bodies of her parents when they died. Her mother had drowned herself in a well in 1893, when Eileen was two weeks old, and her father had shot himself six weeks later.