Everyone was shaken, but after half an hour things seemed to have calmed down. At about twenty to one Don and George went to their beds. They all eventually fell asleep.
The next morning Alma was feeling well enough to go downstairs, but an egg smashed when she was in the kitchen; a saucer snapped. She didn’t know what to do – a ghost hardly seemed a matter for the police – so she placed a call to the offices of the Sunday Pictorial. The newspaper was running a series on the supernatural and had invited readers to write in with their experiences.
‘Come to my house,’ Alma implored the Pictorial ’s news desk. ‘There are things going on here I cannot explain.’
The Sunday Pic, as it was known to its readers, despatched two reporters to Thornton Heath.
As Alma opened the front door to the Pictorial men that afternoon, they saw an egg fly down the corridor to land a yard from their feet. As she led them to the kitchen, a pink china dog rattled to the floor and a sharp-bladed tin opener cut through the air at head height. In the front parlour, a teacup and saucer lifted out of Alma’s hands as she sat with her guests, the saucer spinning and splintering as if shot in mid-air. She screamed as a second saucer exploded in her fingers and sliced into her thumb. While the gash was being bandaged, the reporters heard smashing in the kitchen: a wine glass had apparently escaped a locked cabinet and shattered on the floor. They saw an egg whirl in through the living-room door to crack against the sideboard. A giant chunk of coal rose from the grate, sailed across the room, inches from the head of one of the reporters, and smacked into the wall. The house seemed to be under siege from itself.
Les, Don and George were at home but, as far as the Pictorial men could tell, none of them was responsible for the phenomena: the objects were propelled by an unseen force.
A crowd had gathered in the street outside. Among the bystanders, the reporters found a palm reader who went by the name of Professor Morisone (otherwise Mr Morrison), and invited him in to the house. The clairvoyant advised Alma that she was a very strong ‘carrier’ of ectoplasm, the floating filmy substance with which some mediums materialised spirits. He said that the tumult in her home was a message of warning, and that her son was in danger.
The Pictorial published its piece the next morning, under the slogan: ‘This is the most curious front page story we have ever printed.’ In an ordinary terrace in Thornton Heath, it declared, ‘some malevolent, ghostly force is working miracles. Poltergeist… That’s what the scientists call it. The Spiritualists? They say it’s all caused by a mischievous earth-bound spirit.’
On an inside page, the paper ran a photograph of Alma, Don and George – ‘the occupants of the house of fear’ – gazing warily at a large lump of coal.
Fodor was gripped by the Pictorial’s story. He hoped that this poltergeist would provide him with the proof of the supernatural that he needed. It might also help him to develop his more daring ideas about the occult. The word ‘poltergeist’, from the German for ‘noisy spirit’, had been popularised in Britain in the 1920s, but no one knew what poltergeists really were: hoaxes by the living; hauntings by the dead; spontaneous discharges of electrical energy. Fodor, having read the work of Sigmund Freud, wondered if they might be kinetic forces unleashed by the unconscious mind. He noticed that the Thornton Heath poltergeist centred on one woman. It had sparked into life in the bedroom, and seemed at first to direct its violence at the men of the house.
Fodor knew that he must act quickly. The International Institute was one of several psychical research bodies in London, and other ghost hunters would be sure to take an interest in this haunting. Poltergeist attacks were in any case usually short-lived, sometimes lasting for only a few days. He composed a letter to the Sunday Pictorial’s new editor, the twenty-four-year-old wunderkind Hugh Cudlipp, asking if he could ‘come in’ on the case. Would Cudlipp be good enough to give him the haunted family’s address in Thornton Heath? Reminding Cudlipp that he had already submitted several articles about uncanny events to the Pictorial, Fodor promised to report back on anything that he found.
Like everyone in Britain, Fodor was also following the political news with disquiet. The Pictorial reported that the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had called an emergency Cabinet meeting to address the threat posed by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini; and that Adolf Hitler had massed 80,000 troops on the Austrian border, ready to invade. That Sunday, Hitler made a defiant three-hour speech in which he demanded the return of German land surrendered in the Treaty of Versailles.
Britain was braced for war. Twenty-five million gas masks had been manufactured by late February, schools were being commandeered for air-raid training, and trial blackouts were being staged throughout the land. The town of Jarrow in north-eastern England was seized with panic when an oxygen works went up in flames that month, reported the Pictorial. As exploding metal canisters shot across the River Tyne, the residents fled their homes in terror, convinced that enemy planes were bombing the munitions factories. ‘It was an amazing scene,’ said the paper. ‘Cripples, frantic women pushing prams, aged people, all scantily dressed, massed in a terrified throng.’ Several war veterans collapsed, apparently with symptoms of shell shock.
‘Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere,’ says the narrator of George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air, ‘chaps that I run across in pubs, bus drivers, and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have a feeling that the world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet.’ They have a ‘kind of prophetic feeling’, he says, ‘that war’s just around the corner and that war’s the end of all things’. For many, the dread was sharpened with flashbacks – ‘mental pictures of the shellbursts and the mud’. If the first world war of the century had been devastating, the next was expected to be apocalyptic.
The ghosts of Britain, meanwhile, were livelier than ever. Almost a thousand people had written to the Pictorial in February to describe their encounters with wraiths and revenants, while other papers reported on a spirit vandalising a house in Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides, and on a white-draped figure seen gliding through the Hawker aircraft factory in Kingston upon Thames. The nation’s phantoms were distractions from anxiety, expressions of anxiety, symptoms of a nervous age. Fodor had been in Britain for less than a decade, but as a ghost hunter he had already become intimate with his new country’s fantasies and fears.
While Fodor waited he gleaned a few further details about the Thornton Heath poltergeist. The Daily Mirror, the Pictorial’s weekday sister paper, disclosed that it had sent three men to the Fieldings’ house on Sunday: they had seen a book slide from the bookcase when Alma was in the dining room, a glass leap from the table and a mirror drop from the wall. She was frail and hollow-eyed, the reporters observed, and no wonder.
The Mirror also reported that Anthony Eden had resigned as foreign secretary of Chamberlain’s coalition government, having failed to persuade the prime minister to stand up to Mussolini. When Eden emerged from 10 Downing Street after their meeting, said the Mirror, he looked like a ghost.
On Wednesday, Hugh Cudlipp replied to Fodor with the Fieldings’ address. Fodor couldn’t make it to Croydon that afternoon, so he despatched his assistant, a young film technician called Laurence Evans, to check out the story. Laurie had been an investigator at the Institute for just three months, but he was keen, enterprising and personable. At only twenty-five, he had already squandered his inheritance in Hollywood and been married twice. He now had a day job as a sound recordist at Twickenham Studios, near London, and lived in Surrey with his girlfriend, a film actress. He was a ‘brilliant young inventor’, according to Fodor, as well as an enthusiastic ghost hunter. Fodor told Laurie to let him know at once if the Thornton Heath case seemed genuine, so that they could stake a claim before any of the other psychical research organisations in London.