Fodor had noticed that supernatural events were unusually able to communicate the splintering and contradiction of a traumatic experience. Ghosts conjured the uneasy sense that something both was and was not real, that an event recurred as if it were outside time, undead. The mediums and poltergeist girls and shell-shocked soldiers of the 1920s and 1930s expressed in life what modernist authors and surrealist painters expressed in art: jarring dislocations, the return of buried experiences, a fragmented consciousness interrupted by dream and nightmare. During a seance the past was allowed to occupy the present, alternate selves found voices, the impossible was made real. Ferenczi’s theory of trauma was formulated in the field hospitals of Europe and performed in its seance rooms.
But Fodor’s interpretation of Alma’s experience remained a conjecture, no more provable or disprovable than a haunting by disembodied beings. He knew that he might be wrong. As Elizabeth Severn said after unearthing the lurid story of her own shattered childhood: ‘And still I don’t know if the whole thing is true.’
NINETEEN
Boo!
Poltergeists continued to trouble Britain that summer. In August the residents of a boarding house in Golders Green, north London, reported raps, scratches, knocks, bangs, footsteps, cracks, creaks and sighs. One lodger left without giving a reason. ‘I knew what it was,’ said his landlady. ‘He had seen the ghost.’ A worker at Blackpool Pleasure Beach said that he, his wife and their lodger had noticed objects moving around the house. ‘When we told a policeman of our experiences, he laughed,’ said the husband, ‘but while he was actually taking notes, a clothes brush suddenly flew off the piano and a brass fire-iron stand in the fireplace turned upside down.’ Poltergeists, said the Manchester Guardian, were symptoms of a disordered age, in which ‘once-established things break loose from their moorings and bang around our bewildered heads’. The Observer ran a piece on the ‘poltergeist weather’ besieging the country: ‘The severity of the thundery downpours is remarkable enough,’ the paper noted, ‘but more extraordinary is their caprice.’ During the storms, said Two Worlds, a ghost horse was seen galloping along the seafront at Deal in Kent. The more powerless people felt, the more liable they were to find significance in ordinary events, to attribute magical meaning to a mislaid utensil, a startled animal or a burst of rain.
The psychical researcher Harry Price was chasing down a poltergeist in the Midlands, another in the Lake District and two in Scotland. ‘I have never had such a time,’ he told the Yorkshire Evening Post. Price was also writing a book about the spectres at Borley Rectory in Essex, which he had rented for an extended ghost hunt from May 1937 to May 1938. The Borley haunting had been at its most intense in the early 1930s, when the Reverend Lionel Foyster and his much younger wife Marianne lived in the rectory with their adopted daughter Adelaide and a lodger called Frank Pearless, also known as François d’Arles. The poltergeist threw stones and bottles, rang bells and broke windows. A ghostly nun, said to have been walled up alive, wrote messages on the walls: ‘Marianne please help get.’ The five-year-old Adelaide reported seeing ‘something horrible’ by the curtain in her bedroom.
Daphne du Maurier published her gothic psychological thriller Rebecca in August. The novel’s nameless narrator, riven by envy and self-doubt, fears that her husband is still obsessed with his first wife. The memory of the dead woman is laid only when her house is razed by fire. ‘I looked upon a desolate shell,’ says the narrator as she surveys the ruin of Manderley, ‘soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.’ The exposed interior of the house looks back blankly, scoured of history. The Daily Herald praised du Maurier’s ‘wonderful ability of catching a moment of time like a pinned butterfly, and extorting from it all its beauty or its dread’.
In New York City, DC Comics retired its trench-coated ‘ghost detective’ Dr Occult, and replaced him with Superman.
Fodor returned to London from northern France at the end of the month to learn that he had been fired from the International Institute for Psychical Research. Though he had almost single-handedly run the organisation for the past four years, its council had cast him out. When he went to Walton House to collect his belongings, he discovered that his report on the Fielding case, which he had left in a locked drawer in his office, had been confiscated. Nor did he have access to the transcripts, notes and images that he had gathered since February.
On 2 September Fodor wrote to the leading psychical journals to express his fury at his dismissal, at the seizure of his manuscript, and at the Institute’s suggestion that it had sacked him to save money. ‘The finances of the Institute have always been bad,’ he said, in a letter published by Light and Occult Review. ‘Yet I always succeeded in securing the necessary support. I informed a member of the Council some time before they decided to dispense with my services that I would not draw my salary from September on until funds would become available.’
‘I have been one of the founders of the IIPR,’ he declared. ‘I have directed its research for 4 years with considerable sacrifice. I have built the Institute with my sweat and blood. It belonged to me more than to any member of the Council.’ He called on the Institute’s members to defend him. ‘I am positive they will not approve of the manner with which the Council have treated me. I am entitled to satisfaction. I mean to get it.’
Even Eileen Garrett was trying to distance herself from Fodor and the poltergeist case. ‘I find myself being unfairly quoted as upholding the “Fielding Mediumship”,’ she wrote to him. ‘Let me hasten to explain that I have no interest in this mediumship, and had not been favourably impressed by the phenomena I witnessed, or by Mrs Fielding herself. I tried as tactfully as possible to allow you to be aware of this fact.’ Uvani, she said, had been particularly diplomatic during the sitting at the Fieldings’ house. ‘You will be good enough, therefore, to refrain from quoting Uvani or myself on the subject of Mrs F if you should make a report of your findings.’
With Hitler openly threatening to invade Czechoslovakia, it seemed certain that there would be a war with Germany. Air-raid shelters were dug in Hyde Park, minutes from the Fodors’ apartment in the Edgware Road, and the first evacuees left London. Fodor, feeling more unwelcome than ever in England, applied for visas for his family to emigrate to the United States.
On 30 September – two days after the Fodors’ visas were issued – Chamberlain signed an agreement in Munich that allowed Germany to annexe the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia in return for a promise to make no further territorial claims. The prime minister declared that he had secured ‘peace for our time’. Psychic News triumphantly reprinted an article in which Estelle Roberts’s Red Cloud, among other spirit guides, had promised that there would be no war. Under the Munich agreement, Czechoslovakia returned most of Transcarpathia, including Fodor’s home town, to Hungary, whose government immediately launched a campaign against the Jews of the region.
In an International Institute newsletter in October, Fodor received an apology of sorts from the council, or at least an acknowledgement of his efforts: ‘The Council and the members of the Institute are sincerely grateful for the energy and initiative which Dr Fodor put into the work during his term of office, and desire to take this opportunity of expressing their appreciation of his services, which have made the Institute widely known.’ The council returned Fodor’s manuscript to him, along with a copy of the ‘poltergeist diary’ that he had compiled, while retaining the rest of the evidence in the Fielding case. Laurie had become the new research officer, a role in which he was to be helped by his girlfriend, Barbara, and by the Countess. Laurie let it be known that the Institute would adopt a more sympathetic attitude to spiritualism and to mediums.