Alma said that she did not believe in ghosts and was not a churchgoer or a spiritualist, but she thought ‘there are things which we are not meant to know’.
Fodor asked Alma about her sexual relations with Les: ‘Do you mind telling me something about your marital life?’ Alma replied that it was ‘perfectly normal’, though both she and Les were ‘rather cold, untemperamental’. Fodor asked if Don was fond of the company of girls. Alma said not: ‘He is very shy, reserved, and has almost no friends. He has reverent views about sex. He is innocent.’
Alma had undergone other odd experiences over the past few months, she told Fodor. Towards the end of 1937 she heard a voice in the dining room, whispering, ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’ Soon afterwards a powder puff and a tube of lipstick sprang out of her hand and disappeared.
Last Christmas Day, she said, while the men of the house were out at the pub, she was walking down the stairs with a tray when she felt a cold hand clutch her shoulder. She froze at the touch, faltered, fell. She came round to find herself lying in the hallway, her crockery broken about her.
With the arrival of the poltergeist, Alma’s private experiences had become public, the whispers in her ear turning into bangs and crashes in her home. The chilly hand that she had felt on her shoulder on Christmas Day, the voice in the dining room, the disappearing powder puff had all been omens: flickers of this future.
Alma seemed frightened, but Fodor had so far not seen the poltergeist in action. This changed at lunchtime.
Don turned up at one o’clock, as he and Les had a decorating job booked that afternoon. At sixteen, Don had already been working as his father’s apprentice for two years. He was a quiet, dutiful boy, as his mother had said, and at school had excelled at mathematics and practical work. He looked like Les: slim, tidily dressed, his light brown hair cut short at the back and sides.
Fodor was about to go out to buy something to eat, but Les and Alma encouraged him to stay. Something might happen while he was away, they said. He instead sent out for sandwiches, and sat on the dining-room sofa, reading the Fieldings’ insurance policy, while Alma put lunch on the table for Les, Don and George. The sofa faced the back window. Along the wall to Fodor’s left was a heavy oak sideboard, laden with ornaments; and to his right were a fireplace and mirror. The room was papered with a geometric print. Through the doorway on the left, Fodor could see the hall and part of the kitchen entrance.
At 1.50 p.m., as Alma was bringing in a plate, a tumbler flew off the kitchen table. Fodor went to the kitchen to see the glass, which was undamaged, and then returned to the sofa. Next Alma brought the pudding plates to the dining room. ‘From sheer nervousness she is holding everything with both hands,’ wrote Fodor in his log. ‘She is in full view. Ping. Behind her in the kitchen the same glass flies off the table again, falling away from her and remaining unbroken.’ The tumbler was put back on the table. Five minutes later she fetched a saucer and three cups for tea. ‘She is hugging them close to her breast with both hands. She is in full view. Ping. The same tumbler flies off the kitchen table, again unbroken.’
Alma became more agitated and fearful with each crash. She let Fodor put his fingers to her pulse, which was racing. ‘Feel my heart,’ she said, and he placed his palm against her pounding chest.
At 2.15 p.m. Alma was sitting on the fender by the dining-room fireplace when her teacup sailed through the air at Les, missing his head by a fraction of an inch; her saucer simultaneously smashed on the hearthstone. When Les left for work with Don, Alma’s cup jumped across the table at George, blasting his face with hot tea. Fodor was caught in the spray. Then two tumblers in succession leapt from Alma’s hand at speed, one hitting the wall with a rap as sharp as a rifle shot.
There were comings and goings throughout the afternoon, a bustle of people to match the flurry of objects. Several of Fodor’s psychical research colleagues turned up. The first was Dr Gerald Wills, a spare, rangy man of forty-seven who had taken early retirement from his job as an anaesthetist at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. He was joined by Fodor’s assistant Laurie Evans and by the Reverend Nicolle, who had alerted Fodor to the Thornton Heath poltergeist. A Croydon physician, Dr Frayworth, came to offer his help. It emerged that he was of Hungarian descent, and distantly related to Fodor.
Laurie, who had brought six tumblers with him for the poltergeist, went out at four to buy cakes for the Fieldings and their visitors. A reporter from the Croydon Advertiser arrived at teatime, and Alma’s unmarried older sister, Doris Smith, called round with their mother, Alice, who lived nearby. Dorrie admitted that she had been impatient with Alma’s supernatural stories in the past. ‘We always used to think they were fairy tales Alma told us,’ she said. ‘We used to say, “Oh, Alma, you and your china again!” Now I’ve had the china break in my hands.’ Alma’s mother claimed to have had the sensation of being ‘nearly strangled’ on a previous visit to the house.
Rose Saunders, Alma’s best friend and George’s sister-in-law, was in and out all day. Don was staying with her family, who were neighbours of Alma’s mother in Haslemere Road. Rose told Fodor that she had seen the spout fly off a teapot in the kitchen on Tuesday.
Fodor was alone in the living room, speaking on the telephone to the Sunday Pictorial, when a saucepan thudded against the door. He noticed that one of the eggs that he had placed on the mantelpiece had disappeared, and minutes later saw an egg zip down the hallway to smash on the carpet.
At 5.30 Dr Wills informed Fodor that he had just witnessed an unmistakably supernatural event in the kitchen. He had been facing Les, who had come in through the garden door and was taking off his shirt collar. Alma was standing with her back to them, using both hands to fill the kettle at the sink. Suddenly Dr Wills saw a saucer appear at eye level, about four feet away from him, and crack itself on the corner of the back door.
Gerald Wills had joined the International Institute three years earlier, but this was the first time that he had witnessed an event of this nature. He drew up a plan of the ground floor of the house, marking the kitchen’s measurements and the positions of Les, Alma and himself at the time of the smash. The kitchen was a bare and narrow room with a linoleum floor, eight feet nine inches long and eight feet eight inches high. Along its left-hand side were a fitted corner cupboard, a gas cooker, a draining board and a sink. A small table was pushed against the right-hand wall. Gauze curtains covered the window above the sink and the glass panels in the back door. On his diagram, Dr Wills placed a small cross in the far right corner, where he had seen the saucer burst. Les and Alma identified the plate as the cat’s saucer, which was usually on the concrete path outside. The investigators found scraps of fish on the door frame where it had hit the wood.
In his log of the day’s action, Fodor listed the strange incidents witnessed by himself or another member of the Institute. He entered most as ‘not evidential’: that is, they could conceivably have been engineered by someone in the house. But a few, including the episode of the flying cat saucer, seemed impossible to explain.
Fodor interviewed Don, who said that he had not witnessed anything supernatural. According to his mother, he was ‘picture-mad’ – obsessed with the movies, like many of his generation – and thought spiritualism was ‘just bunk’. Nonetheless, he had been unnerved by the chaos and by Professor Morisone’s warnings about his safety. He was the only member of the household frightened enough to move out.