Charles Petzold

The Haunting of Alma Fielding is the fourth book by Kate Summerscale that I’ve read aloud to Deirdre. You could say we’re fans.

Kate Summerscale writes delightfully engrossing histories of forgotten events. Diligently researched and crafted into compelling novelistic narratives, Summerscale’s books blossom in scope to reveal telling details of the era’s culture and mores. Her most famous book remains The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (2008), about the brutal murder of a three-year-old boy at an English country home. The investigation was headed by Scotland Yard’s Jonathan Whicher, who became a prototype for fictional detectives.

I was particularly interested in Summerscale’s Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (2012) because I had recently researched the ramifications of England’s Divorce Act of 1857 for a blog entry about Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. That act allowed for divorces to be tried in a special civil court open to the public. Because divorces often involved adultery, the newspapers were more than willing to report salacious details to their eager readers. Isabella Robinson was one of the first victims of this trend: She was sued for divorce by her husband in 1858 after he found her secret diary that contained extensive details of an affair, and the diary was read aloud in court. (But were these diary entries real or were they fantasies?)

Summerscale’s The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer (2016) shifts the timeframe towards the end of the 19th century for an 1895 East London matricide committed by a thirteen-year-old boy — an enigmatic figure portrayed at the time as having been corrupted by penny dreadfuls and other popular stories about vicious criminals.

For The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Summerscale has moved into the 20th century, but in an era that seems as distant and mysterious as the Victorian years. In February 1938, a “poltergeist attack” was reported in the London suburb home of Les and Alma Fielding. Tea cups and saucers were being yanked out of their hands and thrown across the room. This was a time when such things were covered in the newspapers and investigated by psychic researchers, in this case the “chief ghost hunter” of the International Institute for Psychical Research, Nandor Fodor.

Nandor Fodor turns out to be a fascinating figure. He’s a Jewish-Hungarian journalist who had left his home country in 1921 to move first to America and then England. He became fascinated with the supernatural after reading Hereward Carrington’s Modern Psychical Phenomena and later himself published the Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science and several other books. It is Fodor’s unpublished chronicle of the Alma Fielding case — long believed to have been lost but discovered by Kate Summerscale in a mislabeled file — that has provided much of the information that Summerscale reports.

Communicating with the dead had resurged in interest in England in the 1920s and 1930s as so many yearned to have some kind of contact with husbands and sons who had been killed in the trenches and battlefields of the Great War. The institutes that sprung up to investigate paranormal activity fashioned themselves as legitimate scientific organizations determined to find the hidden connections with the afterlife. Books and publications abounded, and in 1925, the avid spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes) founded the Psychic Bookstore. Newspapers loved the craziness of it all, and even the BBC ran a radio series, Things I Cannot Explain, featuring ordinary people telling of their extraordinary experiences.

The investigation of the Fielding poltergeist begins with a visit to their home:

Alma and Les showed Fodor round, pointing out the astonishing array of items that had been smashed over the previous few days: thirty-six tumblers, twenty-four wine glasses, fifteen china egg cups, five teacups, four saucers, a salad bowl, three light bulbs, nine eggs, two plates, a pudding basin, two vases, a water jug, a milk jug and a jar of face cream.

Psychic researchers walked a delicate line. They had to maintain a certain level of skepticism to avoid being duped by hoaxers, who seemed to be both plentiful and ingenious. But they also had a professional commitment to the reality of psychic phenomena. Even the seemingly ridiculous had to be investigated, such as a talking mongoose named Gef (pronounced “Jeff"), who would sometimes identify himself as “an earthbound spirit” (that is, a poltergeist) and sometimes as “just a little extra-clever mongoose.” Who knows?

It soon becomes obvious to Fodor that Alma is not the innocent victim of the poltergeist disturbance, but someone who has powers as a psychic and medium. When Alma is brought to the Institute for seances and other experiments, she reveals herself to be skilled at producing “apports,” which are physical objects that suddenly and supernaturally appear. Some of these objects seem to have been shoplifted by the poltergeist from the popular Woolworth’s store. Known as “Woolie’s,” the Woolworth’s chain was scorned by some defenders of traditional British values as a cheap American knock-off.

Similarly, poltergeists themselves were loud and vulgar manifestations of more traditional sedate spirits:

In Britain, even supernormal phenomena were social markers. Fodor’s fellow ghost hunter Maude ffoulkes declared in True Ghost Stories (1936) that she longed for spooks in the same way that she yearned for the “unspoilt country of yesteryear,” a land untainted by roadhouse pubs and electricity pylons. Traditional ghosts were relics of a romantic, aristocratic past. Poltergeists, by contrast, were a Woolie’s brand of phantom, vulgar copies of the ethereal apparitions of old. The Daily Mail described them as “altogether different from the honest, upright ghosts of decaying castles and ancient halls.” They were characterized by “low cunning and nasty intention” and “mean, underhand way.” The Hull Daily Mail lamented that the “old-fashioned family ghost” was giving way to spirits “right at the other end of the social scale.” Poltergeists were domestic hoodlums: destructive, subversive, uncouth. “Not that being a ghost can be much fun,” admitted the paper, “in this age of service flats and arterial roads and psycho-analysis.”

As we enter deeper into the colorful world of psychics and mediums — and, yes, even incubi and vampires — Kate Summerscale skillfully walks a line as delicate as the psychic researchers. She never mocks or ridicules her subjects, or spoils the fun by prematurely peeking behind the curtain. She generally tells this story from Fodor’s perspective, and as Fodor incorporates more of Freud into his analysis of the paranormal, he begins to believe that Alma’s poltergeist was not something external that haunts Alma but instead emanates from her mind. He begins to explore the possibilities of childhood sexual trauma on psychic phenomena, sounding a distinctively modern note.

Throughout The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Summerscale frequently reminds us of the wider world in which Alma Fielding and Nandor Fodor exist. For example, the year 1938 is the year of Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light, in which a man attempts to drive his wife crazy with simulations of what seem to be remarkably similar to poltergeist activity. But the big news in 1938 involves Hitler, and Summerscale keeps us abreast as Prime Minister Chamberlain wards off war by signing the Munich Agreement and guaranteeing “peace for our time.” Soon, the destruction of English homes won’t be caused by mischievous poltergeists but very real bombs.