Fodor was amazed by what he witnessed in the seance rooms of London. He leapt to his feet, crying out with pleasure, upon first seeing a medium produce ectoplasm. When he discussed psychic affairs, said his friend Mercy Phillimore of the London Spiritualist Alliance, ‘his words gushed forth, indeed, splashed forth – in torrents at terrific speed, and in the whirl of sounds were many amusing mistakes. He was quite willing to learn about his errors of speech, and joined in the fun.’ A Daily Express reporter who interviewed Fodor about his supernatural inquiries in 1930 found him both lively and sensible: ‘vital, vivacious’, and ‘eminently practical and matter-of-fact’.
While in Budapest for a journalism conference in 1933, Fodor attended a seance with Lajos Pap, a slender and lugubrious carpenter whose sittings were organised by a retired chemist called Chengery Pap (no relation). Before the seance, Fodor was invited to search the room (he examined the clock, chairs and table), the medium (he checked his mouth and ears, combed his fingers through his hair and beard) and the other sitters. Lajos then donned a one-piece boiler suit with tight luminous bands at the wrists and ankles so that he could be seen in the dark, and he slipped luminous spats over his shoes. Once the session was in progress, two sitters held his wrists lightly, to prevent trickery. Lajos made peculiar scooping motions with his hands, then climbed on a chair and started to snatch at the air: ‘Take it!’ he cried as he dropped an iridescent green beetle, an inch long, into Fodor’s palm. Fodor enjoyed the jabbing in his flesh as he closed his fist around the creature, a sensation that he remembered from his beetle-hunting days. Over the next hour Lajos sprinkled fifty-nine green-backed beetles on the sitters, as well as a cluster of rosebuds, a squashed butterfly and a flowering acacia twig.
When Fodor returned to London, Chengery wrote to keep him up to date with Lajos’s ‘apports’ (the word was derived from the French apporter, to bring). In July 1933: twelve dragonflies, thirteen caterpillars, a goldfish, fifteen stag beetles. Over the winter: a tortoise, a lizard, a bullet, black crickets, a quantity of acacia honey, dirty snowballs, a sparrowhawk. Fodor was keen to get the Paps over to London for controlled demonstrations, and lobbied the London Spiritualist Alliance to sponsor a trip.
Fodor wrote articles on famous hauntings for Associated Newspapers, and he hoped that Rothermere would let him oversee his newspapers’ coverage of the supernormal – the public seemed fascinated by the haunting of Borley Rectory, as described in the Daily Mirror in 1929, and by sightings of the Loch Ness monster, widely reported in 1933. But the mogul showed little interest in the subject, even when Fodor sent him a sample of messages that the spirit of Rothermere’s late brother Lord Northcliffe had supposedly relayed to him at a seance. ‘If they are nonsense, I crave your pardon,’ wrote Fodor. ‘If not, may I send you the rest?’ Rothermere’s response was furious and derisive. ‘Dear Fodor,’ he wrote, ‘I have a great mind to send your letter to a mental specialist. You are certainly not sane.’ He ridiculed the seance messages, concluding: ‘I should advise you to stop this nonsense forthwith, otherwise there will be very serious trouble for you.’
Fodor was mortified at his own lack of judgement, and alarmed at the possible consequences. He could not afford to lose his job. Rothermere, meanwhile, was consorting with anti-Semitic politicians. In 1934 the mogul travelled to Germany to meet Hitler, who had become Chancellor the previous year, and he declared his support for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Oswald Mosley was a slick, charismatic figure, a former Member of Parliament for both the Conservative and Labour parties, who had been inspired by European fascism to found an authoritarian movement of his own. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ Rothermere wrote in the Daily Mail; and ‘Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand’ he encouraged readers of the Daily Mirror.
Fodor tried to find other employment, working so intensely on compiling a guide to supernatural research that he came close to nervous collapse. When his definitive, 500,000-word Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science was published in 1934, with a foreword by Sir Oliver Lodge, he at once applied for a post at the new International Institute for Psychical Research in South Kensington.
The International Institute aimed to combine the spiritualist and scientific approaches to the supernormal. In theory, the two were compatible, as seances were designed to elicit proof of survival after death, but in practice, the alliance between science and religion proved difficult to sustain. Within weeks of the Institute’s foundation almost all of the scientists on its board had resigned. When Fodor was appointed chief research officer in June, he replaced a professor of physiology who had objected to being provided with a seance room rather than a laboratory.
Fodor tried from the start to find a middle way: he was less reverent towards weird phenomena than the spiritualist church, less severe than the Society for Psychical Research, which he described as ‘rather stuffy’ – it had adopted such a high-minded attitude that its membership halved after the war. Fodor took pride in cultivating a relaxed atmosphere at the Institute. ‘You know, we are quite a nice crowd,’ he assured one prospective subject. In a guide to the experimental seances, he wrote: ‘Light conversation, laughter and mirth is encouraged. In conversation, sitters should stimulate the medium by kindness, sympathy and appreciation.’
Spiritualism was a predominantly working-class faith, but the Institute, as a research establishment with an annual membership fee of a guinea, attracted many educated, affluent types. Its few hundred members included lawyers, doctors, stage magicians, businessmen and businesswomen, writers, artists, clergymen, psychoanalysts, cinematographers, linguists, philanthropists and engineers. Fodor raised a third of the Institute’s yearly costs of £1,000 from subscriptions. He tried to make up the difference by selling tickets to lectures, public seances and screenings, and by soliciting donations from rich patrons. In his first year, as he was still being paid a £300 retainer by Rothermere, he agreed to work for the Institute for free. After that, his annual salary was £300, double the average national income but less than a third of what he had earned on moving to England.
Fodor lived in a modern estate in Chiswick, south-west London, with Irene, Andrea and a dog, Cadet, who chewed up his books (‘He’s searching for knowledge,’ said Fodor indulgently). He was known as Dr Fodor in the press – he had a doctorate in law, and the title lent him an air of authority – and as Nandi to his friends. He was so open and friendly, said Andrea, that it drove his wife crazy. Irene accused him of flirting with the family’s maid, Magda, whose Hungarian cooking he adored. He, in turn, worried about Irene’s volatile temperament. He discouraged her from developing her psychic gifts, warning her that all mediums were unhappy. Just as he had turned to spiritualism after the death of his father, Irene went to seances in the hope of making contact with her beloved younger brother, who had been killed in the war.
Fodor travelled the country to investigate hauntings, levitations, automatic writing and drawing, spirit possession, glossolalia (speaking in tongues), telepathy (the reading of minds), psychometry (the reading of objects), materialisations (the production of objects) and spirit photography (images with ghostly ‘extras’). He was alerted to strange phenomena by newspaper reports and by individuals who approached the Institute for help. His chief rival was the well-known ghost hunter Harry Price, a ruthless self-publicist who had been chasing spooks and cultivating mediums since the 1920s.