Laurie stayed late at Beverstone Road and reported back to Fodor early the next morning. He had witnessed amazing things, he told him. In the living room, he saw a wine glass jump from Alma Fielding’s hand, shattering in mid-air and falling to the wooden floor. A second glass did the same, this time landing on a rug. A third hit the electric light fixture on the ceiling. Alma was shaking violently and her heart was racing, said Laurie. He put his fingers to her wrist and felt her pulse leap. Upstairs, he was shown a wardrobe that the poltergeist had thrown on the sixteen-year-old Don Fielding’s bed. Luckily, Don had been sleeping at a neighbour’s house at the time, being already so alarmed by the weird events that he had decided to stay away from home. Laurie noticed a broken white china cat lying between two blue vases on the far side of the boy’s room. He was downstairs in the hall a few minutes later when he heard a smash, and turned to see the pieces of a blue vase lying by the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs. He ran up to Don’s room and saw that one of the pair had vanished.
Laurie told Fodor that no one could have smuggled the vase out of the bedroom. Alma had been in the kitchen when it hit the hall floor. He had never known anything like it, he said. ‘I unhesitatingly label it as supernormal.’
Fodor couldn’t wait to meet Alma. He immediately set out for Thornton Heath himself.
TWO
Feel my heart
At 11.30 a.m. on Thursday 24 February Fodor reached the Fieldings’ house in Beverstone Road, a red-brick end-of-terrace Victorian villa with a dark slate roof and bright white gables. He introduced himself to Les Fielding at the door, and handed him three eggs and three tumblers, explaining cheerfully that he had brought them along in case the ghost would like to break them. Les was tall, fair, broad-shouldered. Fodor, at forty-two, was four years older than his host and a little shorter, with a solid build, dark stubble and curly hair.
Les took Fodor into the living room, pushed the door shut, and showed him a tray of glass and china fragments, relics of the poltergeist’s rampage. Les seemed straightforward and down-to-earth, thought Fodor, but badly shaken by the events of the past few days. ‘He had an anxious and worried look in his eyes,’ he noted. ‘The removal of all his teeth and three days in bed with haemorrhage had already affected his nerves.’ Les had been hit by a hand grenade while serving on the Western Front in the Great War, and still scratched the back of his right thigh where the shrapnel had lodged in his flesh.
Les said that he and Alma had barely slept all week. The previous day he had taken part in a seance in the dining room – his first such experience – in which a local medium tried to exorcise the ghost. The psychic warned the Fieldings that there might be murdered babies in a well in their back garden, and advised them to plant marigolds over the site. That night, Les told Fodor, he and Alma had drunk double whisky and sodas to help them get off to sleep.
Les said that he didn’t like all the people peering in through the windows. The crowd had been building since Saturday, when Alma first called the Pictorial, and had grown so large that police had been sent to protect the house. On Tuesday, one of the constables claimed that the Fieldings’ door mat had wrapped itself around his head.
Fodor tried to put Les at ease, telling him how excited he was at the prospect of meeting the poltergeist. He took the eggs that he had brought, placed them inside the tumblers and lined them up on the mantelpiece. Suddenly something whacked the other side of the living-room door. Les opened the door, and found a Bakelite clock on the hall floor, its case cracked. A dent had been made in one of the door’s panels. The clock, Les said, came from his and Alma’s bedroom.
Les introduced Fodor to Alma when she came downstairs. She was tremulous and nervy, Fodor observed, and very attractive: about five feet three inches tall, delicately built, dark-eyed and dark-haired. Fodor also met the Fieldings’ lodger, George Saunders, a short, balding man with thick black eyebrows. George mended boots and shoes for a living, and had been living with the Fieldings since the breakdown of his marriage in 1928; he had chosen to rent a room in a family home rather than a boarding house. George walked with crutches, having been badly injured playing football at the age of seven, but he had no ‘inferiority complex’, Fodor observed. He was affable and self-assured, and of all the household the least rattled by the poltergeist.
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. Fodor saw the dents that had been punched in an aluminium saucepan and an ornamental brass kettle. He saw some of the objects that had been chucked at Alma: chairs, rugs, a fire screen. In Don’s room, at the back of the building, he saw the capsized wardrobe, askew and splintered on the bed.
The Fieldings’ house was more comfortable than most working-class homes that Fodor had visited. Unusually, it had its own telephone as well as being fitted with electricity, gas and water. The entrance hall gave on to the living room and dining room, both amply furnished, and a small kitchen. The sash windows in the front room were topped with squares of stained glass – purple, orange, pale green – and hung with thick lace curtains. Les kept his business ledger and invoices in a desk in this room. The three bedrooms upstairs were served by a bathroom with a flushing lavatory. George’s shoe-mending workshop was in the garden, near the coal shed.
After his tour, Fodor interviewed Alma alone. She confirmed the accuracy of the piece in the Pictorial. He asked about the injuries that she and Les had sustained. As well as cutting her thumb, she said, she had bruised her head when she fell on the stairs and again when a tin of polish whirled out of the kitchen cupboard. A vase had hit Les on the head when he was on the landing outside the bathroom. ‘I don’t think these bruises were intentional,’ Alma said. ‘I think it just happened we were in the way.’ She seemed to want to play down the poltergeist’s aggression.
When Fodor asked if any of the incidents of the past few days had been comical, she recalled that on Tuesday the lid to the whistling kettle had gone missing, only to be found in Don’s room, perched like a beret on the head of the white china cat. But most of the phenomena frightened her. Alma described what it was like to have a glass snatched from her hand: she felt a chill and a sudden pressure before the glass flew up and shattered in the air or fell unbroken to the ground. Objects could be taken in any room, she said, whether or not she was present.
‘Do you think you are psychic?’ asked Fodor.
‘I don’t know. I am told I am because sometimes I tell people things that come to pass. I dreamed once that Don had met with an accident. I warned him to look out. That morning he was knocked down by a bicycle.’ She cited other premonitory dreams. One night she dreamt that the State cinema in Thornton Heath had crumbled and collapsed, so the next evening she insisted that the family go to the Empire instead. She afterwards heard that the film reel at the State had burnt out, though the building itself was not damaged.
Fodor asked whether the Fieldings’ dog Judy – a black-and-tan Manchester terrier – ever showed signs of alarm. ‘Sometimes we see Judy with his hair standing up and shivering,’ Alma said. One of their three cats was behaving queerly, she added.