On 6 September the coffin was taken for burial at the Mitcham Road cemetery, and lowered into a hole in front of Alma’s father’s grave. Charles Smith’s body had been taken to the burial ground that June in a hearse pulled by two horses, at a cost of £21. Laurie’s interment was a simpler affair, costing just under £9. Both graves were at the back of the cemetery, almost against the wall. Afterwards, Laurie was rarely mentioned by the family. In October, Alma’s aunt Nell – her father’s sister – referred in a letter to Les and Alma’s ‘little trouble’.
The autumn of Laurie’s death was the same autumn that Alma was poisoned by anthrax, tried to stab her husband, and broke out of the house in her nightclothes, screaming ‘Fire!’ and ‘Murder!’ She tore along the street, her mouth black with disease, like the bolting, frothing dog that she said had once attacked her. She seemed crazed beyond ordinary grief or sickness. Alma told Fodor that she had been beside herself with anger at Les for failing to comfort her. Perhaps she was also terrified that she had exposed her son to the illness that killed him. Her father had returned from the Croydon tuberculosis sanatorium to die at home in Maplethorpe Road at the end of May 1926, and Laurie succumbed to tubercular disease in the same house three months later. Alma may have blamed herself for her boy’s suffering and his death.
Sándor Ferenczi believed that a traumatising event was always a repetition of a previous crisis. The shell-shocked soldiers he encountered, he said, were men in whom the horrors of war had cracked open already fractured psyches. If Alma had been assaulted as a child, as Fodor and Mrs Severn believed, the loss of her baby may have awakened intolerable feelings from her early life. ‘Traumatic aloneness,’ said Ferenczi, ‘is what really renders the attack traumatic, that is, causing the psyche to crack.’ The lasting effects of trauma, he argued, resulted from the absence of a kind, understanding environment. Laurie’s death, terrible in itself, was made catastrophic for Alma by Les’s seeming indifference. In failing to comfort her, Les may have unwittingly repeated the silence with which her mother betrayed her when she was a child. Twice, those who should have protected and consoled Alma – her mother, her husband – refused even to acknowledge her suffering. When Laurie died, Alma’s pain was all the sharper because she had failed to protect her own child too.
‘My mummy, my mummy!’ cried the spirit child who spoke through Alma on 17 May 1938. A month later the voice emerged again, still pleading: ‘Mummy. My mummy. She is not come? She said she will come.’
In New York City in the 1940s, Fodor trained as a psychoanalyst. He lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with Irene and Andrea, and rented a consulting room nearby. When the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944, Irene’s parents and Fodor’s brother Lajos, a leader of the resistance, were among the 400,000 Hungarian Jews killed by the Nazis.
After the war Andrea Fodor became a prima ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. She married Ervin Litkei, a Jewish-Hungarian musician who had survived the German invasion of his country, and they had a daughter.
With the help of Freud’s letter, which he framed and hung on his wall, Fodor built up a successful psychoanalytic practice. In 1945 he gave a paper to the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy in which he outlined what he had learnt from Alma’s story. ‘The Poltergeist is not a spirit,’ he said, ‘it has no identity, it brings no messages from the dead; it is a bundle of projected repressions bent on destruction and mischief because it is born out of rage and frustration.’ In his book Haunted People, published in 1951, he elaborated the theory of ‘poltergeist psychosis’: a person could suffer a kind of ‘psychic lobotomy’, he said, in which a devastating mental shock loosened an infantile, repressed part of the psyche, a vengeful poltergeist personality. He cited a sequence in the 1945 British horror film Dead of Night in which a ventriloquist’s dummy comes to life and murders its master.
Fodor believed that Alma’s fraud, like her supernatural experience, was rooted in pain. He thought that the objects that leapt into life around her in February 1938 were animated by feelings that she could not own: her sexual desire; her obscure sense of fear, violation and abandonment; her wish for power; her rage. The poltergeist was her surrogate. It was a force of insurrection, a protest, a scream.
As a psychoanalyst, Fodor sometimes treated haunted patients: a married woman whose incubus brought her a ‘mad, happy darkness’; a teenage boy who eventually vanquished his poltergeist by becoming a science-fiction writer. ‘Find the frustrated creative gift,’ advised Fodor, ‘lift up a crushed ego, give love and confidence and the Poltergeist will cease to be.’ He regretted the probing techniques that he had adopted as a psychical researcher in England. His attitude had undergone ‘a tremendous change’, he told Psychic Observer in 1943. He took ‘no more joy in tying up mediums and exalting instrumental findings’, he said. ‘I see now psychical research has tried to be too scientific for years and has gone bankrupt as a result. Mediums do not function well if they are used as guinea-pigs. They are human beings with the same virtues and vices as the researchers themselves.’ He was sorry for the harshness with which he had treated Alma, and saw that his methods had expressed his own frustration and fear. But he had also helped to lift her up, as he had the science-fiction boy, by treating her as precious and astonishing.
Fodor learnt in 1943 that the medium through whom his father had seemed to speak in 1927 had concealed the fact that he was himself fluent in Hungarian. As for the Hebrew words that the seven-year-old Nandor had heard at his grandfather’s burial, perhaps those had been spoken by the rabbi giving a blessing over the grave. But Fodor already knew that the voices of his forebears had not issued from their spirit selves.
In several books about his psychic adventures of the 1930s, Fodor returned to the case of Alma and her poltergeist. He also tackled new psychological territory. In The Search for the Beloved (1949), he examined birth from the point of view of the baby. The baby’s expulsion from its mother’s body, he argued, was the original traumatic experience, and the womb was the model for every paradise, from the Garden of Eden to Aladdin’s Cave to the Never-Never Land to Shangri-La. He cited Alma’s cave dream as an instance of the longing for this place, speculating that his own search for the supernatural, too, had been a search for the floating bliss of pre-natal existence. ‘We all have lived in another world,’ he said, ‘before we were born.’ The woozy, enveloping atmosphere of the seance room was one such haven. Fodor signed a copy of his book for his old friend Laurie Evans.
Harry Price died in 1948. Eight years later an SPR investigation concluded that the Borley Rectory haunting of the 1930s had been a hoax, perpetrated by Price at some points and by the rector’s wife Marianne Foyster at others. Marianne seemed to have faked some of the phenomena in order to conceal a liaison with her lodger. Price joined in because he hoped that the story of ‘the most haunted house in Britain’, as he proclaimed it, would bring him fame and riches. Fodor defended Price. ‘He was intensely selfish, jealous and intent on his own glory at all cost,’ he said, ‘but these weaknesses of his character do not detract from his reputation as an honest investigator and ruthless exposer of frauds.’ Fodor’s faith said more about his own integrity than that of his adversary.