Fodor was overjoyed: ‘The sun shone out and life became wonderful again.’ He rushed to Freud’s house to retrieve the manuscript.
Freud welcomed Fodor and returned his report to him. Fodor asked for permission to quote his letter if the manuscript were published. Freud agreed. ‘He was kind and gracious, encouraging me to stick to my guns and fight for the truth as I saw it.’
In Fodor’s account, both Alma’s eerie experiences and her fraud were explained by the damage done to her in childhood. His theory made haunting consistent with psychoanalysis: not a counter-argument that suggested that some gifted individuals could make contact with another world or with their subliminal selves, but a proof of the uncanny power of repression.
Fodor made a copy of Freud’s letter and sent it to the Institute without comment.
‘This letter,’ he said, ‘was my vindication.’
As 1938 drew to a close, the spiritualist journal Two Worlds reflected on twelve months of alarm and unrest, of economic hardship at home, bloodshed and persecution abroad. But it had been a wonderful year for spiritualism: ‘Never have meetings been so large,’ the journal reported, ‘never has there been so great a call for good mediumship, never has the public Press nor public opinion manifested so keen an interest.’
Since Fodor’s court case was again delayed, this time to the new year, he accepted a freelance ghost-hunting assignment in December. His client was a film editor, a single woman of about forty whose cottage in Chelsea was haunted. Fodor learnt that eighteen years ago she had suffered a stillbirth. More recently, in the summer of 1938, she had been jilted by a man she loved. This rejection, he guessed, had revived the shock of her child’s death. She had ‘made herself into a living dead person’, he said, ‘a kind of Zombie, a ghost’. Buoyed by his encounter with Freud, Fodor told the film editor that the poltergeist’s knocks and raps were attempts by her unconscious self to call attention to her buried trauma. His interpretation seemed to do the trick: the ghost left the cottage.
In February, Fodor sent the Fieldings a copy of his report on the Thornton Heath poltergeist, explaining that he hoped to publish it as a book. Alma and Les went to the Institute to protest. The organisation was still based at Walton House, although, to cut costs, it had amalgamated in December with the British College of Psychic Science to become the International Institute for Psychic Investigation. The Fieldings spoke to Wilfred Becker, who wrote to Fodor to warn him that they might make trouble. The couple, said Becker, were horrified by the report. Fodor’s references to Alma ‘were painful to them both’ and ‘would seriously damage her reputation in the eyes of her friends and neighbours’. He appealed to Fodor’s good sense and his compassion.
If Eileen Garrett’s supernormal marriage counselling had helped to bring Les and Alma together, their opposition to Fodor’s book united them further. By reading about Alma’s deception and her disturbance, Les gained a new perspective on his wife, as well as a fear of what the book might do to their family.
Fodor’s suit against Psychic News was heard before a special jury in the King’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice in the Strand on 1 March 1939. He was represented by Kew Edwin Shelley, KC, a copyright lawyer of Indian descent who sat on the International Institute’s council, while Wilfred Becker, also a council member, had agreed to appear as a witness for him. Les and Alma were in the courtroom, she having received a summons to give evidence against Fodor for the defence.
Shelley told the court that Psychic News had libelled his client by suggesting that he was unfit to be a psychical researcher. The defence replied that the journal had been justified in its reports: Fodor had insulted the great spirit guides, persecuted mediums, and published revolting theories about the sexual aspects of mediumship.
‘I am not persecuting mediums,’ began Fodor, ‘and I have never done so.’
‘Who are the great spirit guides?’ asked Justice Singleton.
‘They are a sort of managers from the great beyond,’ said Fodor, ‘who take charge of mediums.’
‘Are they capable of being insulted?’ asked the judge, to laughter in the court.
In response to questions from the defence barrister, Fodor said that he had uncovered about twenty mediums practising fraud, and on occasion had passed the details to Psychic News. The journal had declined to publicise them.
When the defence mentioned the Thornton Heath case, Fodor interrupted with a request to the judge. ‘May I ask your lordship to instruct the press not to reveal the lady’s name,’ he said, ‘as that would endanger her family’s happiness and her own health? The revelations that are to follow would have disastrous consequences on the lady, whom I regard as being a psychopathic subject rather than a fraudulent medium.’ The judge said that he was sure that the press would accede to this request. Alma was referred to in the papers as ‘Mrs F’.
Was it true, the defence lawyer asked, that Fodor had suggested that Mrs Fielding and her investigators visit the Tower of London to see if she could ‘apport’ the Crown Jewels?
Fodor confirmed that he had proposed such an excursion. ‘It would unquestionably establish whether the so-called poltergeist is able to get something through a glass case, which is secured with burglar alarms. My suggestion, however, was not kindly received by Countess Wydenbruck, a member of the council of the IIPR. She said, “Suppose the medium does apport the Crown Jewels. We shall all land in gaol.” I was willing to risk gaol, but they would not allow me.’
He also agreed that he had wanted to administer a truth serum. ‘Scopolamine might have brought out deeply buried psychic injuries from her mind.’
‘Was Mrs Fielding a sick woman?’ asked the defence lawyer.
‘She was a sick woman before we started the investigation,’ said Fodor, ‘but throughout the period of the investigation she began to improve, until some very strange and disturbing psychic phenomena occurred, which made me fear that she might lose her mental balance unless treatment could be given so successfully that she would calm down.’
The case continued over three days. Maurice Barbanell, the editor of Psychic News since its foundation in 1932, gave evidence in defence of his journal. On being questioned by the judge, Barbanell agreed that he was himself a medium ‘to a little extent’, with a spirit guide who went by the name Big Jump.
Also speaking on behalf of Psychic News were its owner and co-founder, Arthur Findlay, who had resigned as chairman of the International Institute when Fodor brought his libel suit, and the journalists who had written the articles to which Fodor objected. Two mediums, both friends of Barbanell, testified that their calling had nothing to do with sex. One was the clairvoyant Estelle Roberts, who with her spirit guide Red Cloud could command audiences of 6,000 at the Albert Hall, and the other was Louisa Bolt, at whose home Fodor and Laurie had tested the ‘psychic telegraph’.
Shaw Desmond, of the Institute’s council, took the stand to say that he had never known a prominent medium caught in fraud, and was aware of no relationship between psychic power and sex, except perhaps in poltergeist cases. Under cross-examination, he agreed that Fodor always treated mediums with scrupulous fairness.
Wilfred Becker attested to Fodor’s integrity, as did C. V. C. Herbert of the Society for Psychical Research. Fodor chose not to submit the approving letter from Freud to the court because he did not want to drag him into the controversy. The endorsement might not have helped Fodor anyway: to win this case, he needed to prove his respect for spiritualists and mediums rather than the validity of his psychosexual theories.