In the front room, Fodor took a call from a reporter at the Croydon Times, a rival of the Advertiser, who asked for news of Alma. ‘She is fine,’ said Fodor, ‘but she does not want to see anyone. There are a lot of relatives here, and the occurrences are still going on. In the first place, when they started happening, she got in touch with the press because she thought they could help her. Now she is tired of all the publicity this is getting.’
Fodor wanted to limit access to Alma for his own reasons too. Some of his rivals had already shown an interest in his new find. This might prove a sensational case, and he hoped to keep it between the Institute and the three newspapers that had been first on the scene.
The reporter for the Croydon Advertiser, Jack, told Fodor that he had been calling at the house all week. Les had said to him: ‘I would have laughed at the wife and said she had been “on the razzle” if it had been just her telling me of these things. But I know she doesn’t drink, and I have seen the things for myself.’ Jack had slept over on the Tuesday night that the wardrobe fell on Don’s bed. He and the newspaper’s photographer had still been playing darts with Les and George when Alma finally put out the cats and headed to bed at 2.30 a.m., telling the visitors that they could stay in Don’s room. A few minutes later they heard a heavy thud overhead. Jack, Les and the photographer rushed upstairs. Alma was emerging from her bedroom, pulling on a dressing gown as she crossed the landing and opened the door to her son’s room. Jack saw the wardrobe lying across the empty bed, its mirror cracked where it had hit the bedpost. Just then a cry came from the hallway: George had followed the others upstairs, and as he climbed the steps with the help of a crutch he had fallen backwards and tumbled to the ground. An invisible hand had pushed him in the chest, he said.
Jack told Fodor that he, the photographer, Alma, Les and George all slept downstairs that night. They went up in pairs to use the bathroom.
Alma mentioned to Fodor that she recognised his name from reports of the Bethnal Green poltergeist, which he had investigated with Laurie Evans and the Reverend Nicolle earlier in the month. The story had run in the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Daily Sketch and the Evening Standard. The BBC – which had just finished airing Things I Cannot Explain, a radio series about listeners’ eerie experiences – had considered broadcasting from the haunted house. Alma was curious about what Fodor had discovered in east London. What lay behind the phenomena? she asked. Had the ghost been laid to rest?
Fodor and Laurie first visited the house in Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green, on 5 February, having obtained the address from the editor of the Standard. Almost 2,000 people were gathered outside the building. A Mrs Davis had died in the house in September, and her spectre had apparently returned to haunt her family and a young couple with a baby who lodged in the upstairs rooms. Pictures fell off walls, doors unbolted themselves, chairs flipped onto their backs. The house would shudder as Mrs Davis had shuddered when she suffered an epileptic fit, and wails echoed down the stairways, like the shrieks that she had once made as she convulsed. Mrs Davis’s twenty-year-old daughter, Grace, said that on Armistice Day she had seen the earth move at her mother’s grave, as if her fits were persisting in the spirit world.
The widowed George Davis, a print compositor of sixty-one, lived on the first two floors of the house with Grace and two of his sons. On the top floor were the lodgers: Mr Harrison, a lorry driver, his wife, Minnie, and their eighteen-month-old baby, Maureen. The ghost was making mischief in their rooms, too: when Minnie Harrison found that a jar of Bovril beef extract in the kitchen cupboard had been emptied, she remembered that Bovril had been Mrs Davis’s favourite drink. The tiny Maureen, she said, could do an uncanny impression of the bloodcurdling cries that their landlady had made during an epileptic episode.
Fodor and Laurie tried to trace the ghost – or hoaxer – with detective techniques. They sprinkled powdered starch on the floor of Mr Davis’s bedroom, where many of the phenomena had taken place, before locking the door and sealing it with tape, copper wires and staples. When they opened the door the next day, they found the starch untouched.
Fodor interviewed Grace and Minnie. Both women’s nerves seemed shattered. Grace suggested that the spirit of her dead mother might have returned to take revenge on Mr Davis and Minnie Harrison, whom she had suspected were lovers. Minnie agreed that there had been tension between her landlady and herself. ‘She has been very jealous of me,’ she said.
Fodor noticed that either Grace or Minnie was always present when something strange took place. One or both of them seemed to be causing the phenomena. But why? Perhaps the grief-stricken Grace was avenging her mother, or Minnie Harrison was engineering an escape from the house.
The Harrisons moved out of Teesdale Street on Saturday 19 February, just as the Thornton Heath poltergeist first struck. The International Institute’s investigators had been unable to determine the cause of the disturbance, nor even whether it was a hoax or a haunting, but Fodor was confident that it was over. The Reverend Nicolle confirmed that all was now quiet in Bethnal Green.
In the first methodical study of poltergeist attacks, in 1896, Frank Podmore of the Society for Psychical Research concluded that all of them were hoaxes, often perpetrated by mischievous, unstable working-class girls. But in 1911 the physicist William Barrett, also of the SPR, proposed that poltergeists were otherworldly forces working through a ‘radiant human centre’. Some researchers argued that they were the spirits of the dead, and others that they were ‘elementals’, primitive beings from a lower astral plane.
The psychical researcher Hereward Carrington had another theory, as he explained in a historical survey of poltergeist cases in 1935. Carrington argued that poltergeists were neither ghosts nor hoaxes. Rather, they were kinetic energies spontaneously projected by psychic individuals, typically adolescent girls. Fodor had investigated cases that seemed to bear this out, such as the mysterious bell-ringing at Aldborough Manor in Yorkshire in 1936, which he traced to a sixteen-year-old housemaid, and the dull raps in a doctor’s house in Chelsea in 1937, which seemed to emanate from a seventeen-year-old servant girl. But he speculated that the maids’ kinetic force was psychological rather than biological, the product of feelings more than hormones. Unlike Carrington, he suspected that suppressed emotion always underlay the violence of a ghost.
By evening the Fieldings were less anxious. Fodor had created a carnival atmosphere, as if the family, the investigators and the poltergeist were larking about together. He had come to Thornton Heath that Thursday for proof of the otherworldly, but also for action, laughter, adventure. His copious notes on the happenings were punctuated, like a comic strip, with dramatic noises. Ping! Smash! Crash! Bang!
In a photograph taken for the Institute’s records, Les held a broken vase up to the electric light, a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and gave the cracked china a wide, confiding smile. Alma had relaxed, too. She suggested to Fodor that George’s tumble down the stairs on Tuesday might have been caused by the whisky that he had consumed while playing darts in the dining room with the Advertiser men.
Fodor left Beverstone Road just before ten that night, making Alma promise to visit his office in South Kensington the next afternoon. He hoped against hope that her poltergeist powers would manifest again in the controlled conditions of the International Institute’s seance room, and that objects there might be floated, toppled, cracked.