Alma was wrong to predict that Fodor’s study of her would not be published. On the Trail of the Poltergeist was printed in New York in 1958 by the Citadel Press. Fodor omitted any mention of Elizabeth Severn or Eileen Garrett, and he disguised the identities of the Fielding and Saunders families, but the book otherwise gave a scrupulous and vivid rendition of the four months in 1938 in which he investigated Alma’s poltergeist. Fodor argued both that emotions could cause weird phenomena and that hoaxes could be as interesting as real supernormal events. Lies and tricks and jokes, like ghosts, could be expressions of suffering.
A review in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research speculated on how ‘Mrs Forbes’, as Fodor referred to Alma, might have achieved some of her effects. She could have hidden a flat steel spring in her corset, suggested the reviewer, secretly pulling it up to fire an apport across the room, and pushing it down again when her audience was distracted by the crash of the object’s landing. To capsize the armchair in the Institute library, she might have looped a black thread over a knob on the chairback, yanked the thread as she sat down in another seat, and quickly ravelled it up as she walked over to inspect the fallen chair. Perhaps she used similar techniques to generate poltergeist activity in Beverstone Road.
Some of Fodor’s psychoanalytic colleagues commented on his study. Gustav Bychowski agreed that Alma was severely dissociated but thought that her narcissism and exhibitionism had been dangerously encouraged by the researchers. Paul Federn thought it likely that Alma had indeed suffered trauma of some sort as a child, but wondered if the rape was a fantasy. Joseph Wilder observed that the prostitutes of ancient Rome had produced the smell of violets by drinking a tablespoon of turpentine oil and urinating afterwards.
In the years after the publication of Fodor’s book, psychologists identified other natural explanations for apparently supernatural experiences. Alma’s visits from the incubus and the vampire might have been episodes of sleep paralysis, which render people unable to move or speak when they wake. These neurological events are characterised by an intense pressure on the chest and sometimes a tingling of the nerves, like the feeling of pins and needles that Alma described. Some of those who undergo a sleep paralysis become sexually aroused. Some have visions of intruders: witches, vampires, incubi, succubi, alien abductors. A few feel the press or penetration of a cold penis. To experience such sensations while perpetrating a supernatural fraud – or reliving a traumatic event – might feel terrifying: like a satanic punishment.
Since the 1980s, researchers in the psychology of supernatural belief have found a correlation between childhood trauma and adult experiences of paranormality. People who have been sexually abused as children are unusually likely to report supernatural events. Psychologists speculate that damaged children learn to use fantasy as a form of escape, while their desperate wish for control generates delusions of psychic power. Fodor believed that the desperation sometimes produced real supernatural force.
By the time that Fodor’s book about the Thornton Heath poltergeist was published, psychical research had become an esoteric subject, no longer taken seriously by most scientific thinkers. Yet his ideas about poltergeist psychosis found expression in fiction. In The Haunting of Hill House, a novel of 1959, Shirley Jackson explores the possibility that a disturbed individual can trigger supernormal events. She describes a ghost hunt conducted under the aegis of the psychical researcher Dr John Montague, in which weird incidents seem to emanate from a young woman called Eleanor Vance. When Fodor was invited to serve as a consultant on the film adaptation of the novel, in 1963, he asked Shirley Jackson if she had read his work, and she confirmed that she had.
The filmmakers proposed to Jackson that they present the events in her novel as the hallucinations of a woman in a mental asylum, but she discouraged this approach: the story was about real supernatural happenings, she said. Like Fodor, she chose not to explain away psychic experiences as madness or lies. Fodor wrote an article about The Haunting of Hill House shortly before his death in 1964, in which he observed that Jackson had adopted ‘the modern approach’ to the supernormal: ‘The creaks and groans of furniture, the imbalance of a spiral staircase and the abnormally cold spots are objectifications of the mental anguish and chill of Eleanor’s soul, the violent slamming of doors are explosive manifestations of inner conflicts.’
This strand of psychological gothic emerges again in Stephen King’s novels Carrie, in which a humiliated teenager’s suppressed feelings erupt in supernatural violence, and The Shining, in which ghosts are awakened by the obsessions of the living. It runs through books and films such as Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter, Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. To the question of whether a haunting was real or fantasised, psychological or supernatural, the answer given by such stories was: both. A ghost could be imagined into being, from a feeling repressed so forcefully that it acquired uncanny power. ‘Our irrational, darker selves,’ wrote Elizabeth Bowen, ‘demand familiars.’
Fodor’s ideas about trauma took years to be accepted. Only towards the end of the century did it become commonplace to think that a profoundly shocking event might be erased from consciousness, as Sándor Ferenczi and Elizabeth Severn had described, creating a fragmented, dissociated identity, flashbacks, recurring dreams. The key to cure was the recovery of the memory. But when a traumatic memory seemed to surface, as in Alma’s story, there could be doubt about whether it had been salvaged or invented. This uncertainty continues to haunt the subject. Some events are so dark that to find them is an act of imagination as much as memory. They lie between history and fiction. Perhaps there are still feelings for which only a ghost will do.
Epilogue
In December 2017 I returned to the SPR archive in Cambridge. I again queued briefly at the taxi rank, climbed into a cab and asked for the university library. As the taxi pulled away from the station, the driver asked me what I was researching. He turned slightly in his seat, and I saw that he was the same dark-haired man who had picked me up at the railway station in January. I was unnerved by the coincidence, and reminded for a moment of the malevolent cab driver in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’.
I told the driver that I thought we had met when I was last in Cambridge, eleven months ago. He remembered. I asked him to tell me more about his psychic experiences.
The cab driver told me that he had vampires attached to his spirit. He had summoned them, he said, on the recommendation of his spirit guide. ‘Go for vampires,’ the guide advised. ‘Stay away from fluffy bunnies and fairies. You’re more suited to the darker side.’ Two psychics had told him that he had vampires in his bloodline.
‘Not that I do anything dark and horrible,’ he assured me. The vampires, like the two-headed snake that had dangled from his neck in January, came to relieve him of suffering. ‘Most of my spirits specialise in healing,’ said the cab driver. ‘In fact, the vampires are fantastic healers.’
He said that he summoned the spirits with his mind and that they sustained themselves by sucking energy from other people, on his instructions.