The investigation of ghosts was ‘basically a psychological inquiry’, Fodor declared in his column for the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, ‘concerned with motives and emotions, and not with facts’. He wrote to Alma, offering to complete the inquiry into her poltergeist with a course of psychoanalysis, but she did not reply.
Fodor was still waiting for his libel suit against Psychic News to be heard – it had been postponed to November – and he was worried about the outcome. The collapse of the Fielding investigation seemed to show that the journal had been right to describe him as ruthless towards mediums, scornful of spiritualism, fixated on sex. It would be very difficult for him to prove libel. Nonetheless, he accepted a commission from the weekly news magazine The Leader that was likely to give his enemies further evidence of his scepticism. He needed the money.
The Leader advertised Fodor’s series on the supernormal as ‘the greatest show-up of spirit “miracles” ever printed’, though it disguised the identities of the mediums that he exposed. The first of his seven articles, on 1 October, featured ‘the Tiger Lady’, as he referred to Alma. The second piece – ‘I Unmask the Muslin and Cheese-cloth Ghosts’ – told of how he caught a ‘foreign Wonder’ (Lára Agústsdóttir of Iceland) emitting ‘knickerplasm’, and ‘a little frightened man in the North’ (Mr Stewart of Dundee) cavorting in a white sheet. In ‘I Hunt the Table-Rapping Ghosts’, on 29 October, Fodor recalled a chaotic sitting in Tottenham, north London, during which a wardrobe was rocked and tipped by the spirit of a Roman slave called Hedger. Fodor had to step forward to catch the cupboard as it pitched forward onto the seance circle, and by the end of the session was fending off a drunken medium with an empty beer bottle.
In New York City on Sunday 30 October, the American actor Orson Welles broadcast a dramatisation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds in the guise of a live news bulletin. Some of those who heard the show believed that Martians really had invaded New Jersey. At the end of the broadcast Welles assured his audience that it had been a Halloween prank. It was as harmless, he said, as ‘dressing up in a sheet, jumping out of a bush and saying, “Boo!”’ In an era of such uncertainty, it was almost irresistible to stage fantasy as documentary, to dance on the line between fact and fiction.
Yet the same uncertainty left many people unable to tolerate ambiguity. To an extent, the International Institute had broken with Fodor because its council could not accept that Alma might be both a liar and a victim, and he both sceptical and sincere. The desire to demonise could have vicious consequences. Freud’s protegé Ernest Jones gave a talk in north London that autumn in which he argued that the Germans had made the Jewish people a repository for their self-loathing. In the Nazi attacks of 9 to 10 November later known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, thousands of Jewish homes, schools, businesses, hospitals and synagogues were destroyed; tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned; hundreds were killed.
Sigmund Freud had moved to London in June, three months after the German occupation of Vienna. At eighty-one, he had been suffering from cancer of the mouth and jaw for fifteen years, and he knew that his latest lesions were inoperable. Freud spoke warmly of the country that gave him asylum – ‘lovely, free magnanimous England’ – while observing that most Londoners were neurotics, trapped by their memories. ‘They cannot escape from the past,’ he wrote, ‘and neglect present reality in its favour.’
When Irene Fodor learnt that Freud was in the city, she urged her husband to solicit the great man’s views on the Fielding case. Fodor was reluctant. He was still shaken by his expulsion from the Institute, and he doubted that Freud would have any interest in his ideas. Besides, he knew that Freud was very ill. But Irene was determined. As her daughter Andrea said, she ‘had the nerve for anything’.
Freud was wary of supernatural belief. To imagine that thoughts could control objects or that the dead could return was, he argued, a regression to the animistic fantasies of childhood. ‘The whole thing is so patently infantile,’ he said. Before the war he had fallen out with Sándor Ferenczi and Carl Jung over their supernormal sympathies. But his attitude had softened. In 1921 he admitted to Fodor’s friend Hereward Carrington, ‘If I were at the beginning rather than at the end of a scientific career, as I am today, I might possibly choose just this field of research.’ Psychical scientists believed that there might be secret forces at work in the world around them, Freud observed, while psychoanalysts were convinced that the hidden energies lay within people themselves. There was some overlap between these positions: Freud had come to accept that unconscious thoughts might be telepathically transferred. For the most part, though, he avoided discussing psychical research, fearing that psychoanalysis would be tainted by association with another suspect science.
On a damp, gloomy autumn day, Irene made her way to Freud’s new home in Hampstead, north-west London, a modern red-brick house in the Queen Anne style. Fodor accompanied her, but hung back when she approached the door of 20 Maresfield Gardens and rang the bell. There she stood in the quiet street: a small, pretty, self-assured Jewish-Hungarian emigré with a huge bunch of orange tiger lilies.
Fodor saw the door open and his wife disappear inside. He waited on the wet pavement in an agony of suspense.
Irene introduced herself to the housekeeper by saying that she wished to pay tribute to Professor Freud on behalf of all the women of England. She waited in a spacious hallway from which she could see a recreation of Freud’s Viennese study and consulting room, with his green tub chair, his couch and his collection of antique carvings and figurines – Egyptian, Greek, Roman. He had once compared these statuettes to the treasures of the unconscious: they were objects that had been so deeply buried that they had been preserved intact, as if frozen in time.
Freud was in bed that afternoon, but he agreed to receive Irene. She was led up a wide, turning staircase to his room, where she presented him with the tiger lilies. He invited her to join him for a cup of tea. She sat at Freud’s bedside and told him about her husband’s plight.
After forty-five minutes, Irene emerged from the house triumphant, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining. She told Fodor that Freud had agreed to read his study of Alma Fielding.
Back in their apartment, Fodor packaged up his typescript and – ‘in fear and trepidation’, he said – posted it to Maresfield Gardens. His report described the investigation of Alma’s phenomena over the past few months, the discovery of fraud and the inquiries that followed. It concluded that the cause of the poltergeist outbreak and the subsequent tricks was a sexual assault in Alma’s childhood.
On 22 November, Fodor received a reply, written by hand in German.
Freud said that he had found the early parts hard going. For a sceptic like himself, he admitted, some of the evidential detail was tiresome. But by reading to the end, he said, ‘I have found myself richly rewarded. Your attempt to turn the interest from the question of whether the observed phenomena were genuine or fraudulent, your efforts to study the medium psychologically and to uncover her previous history seem to me to be the right steps… It is very regrettable that the IIPR would not follow you. I also hold it very probable that your conclusions regarding this case are correct. Naturally, it would be desirable to confirm them by a real analysis of the party. This apparently cannot be done.’ He invited Fodor to collect the report from Maresfield Gardens.