At weekends Fodor sometimes took Irene and Andrea on ghost hunts. They stayed overnight in haunted houses, surrounded by cameras, flashbulbs, switches and timers. Andrea looked forward to these trips, partly because she hoped to see a spook, but chiefly because she adored her clever, good-looking, sociable father. Fodor delighted in his work. He modelled himself, he said, on the boy in a Hungarian folk tale who plays games in a haunted house, throwing skulls to the resident ghost, whooping with joy as his bed flies up and down the stairs. He enjoyed ghost stories as well as psychical studies, and secretly gave Andrea collections by the British horror writer Algernon Blackwood (‘Don’t tell your mother!’ he warned). He only regretted that he was not more psychically sensitive himself. In an attempt to enhance his receptivity, he arranged for a doctor at the Maudsley Hospital in London to inject him with mescaline, and experienced sensations of colour, light and movement so stupendous that he felt bereft when the drug wore off.
Fodor advertised for subjects to submit to similar experiments. Ronald Cockersell, aged twenty, the son of a convict from west London, took nitrous oxide at one International Institute seance to see if it improved his extrasensory powers. In a trim three-piece suit and a pair of round spectacles, his hair oiled smooth to his scalp, Ronnie went into trance and allowed his spirit guide ‘Cosma’ to speak through him. ‘You married because you wanted to,’ Cosma informed Irene Fodor, ‘and did not have parental consent.’ Irene replied, ‘Yes, that is true.’ On the transcript of this exchange, Fodor drew an arrow to his wife’s ‘Yes’ and wrote ‘No!’ At another seance Ronnie took Benzedrine, with similarly negative effects. Cosma told the widowed Dorothy de Gernon that her husband had been very humble. ‘No,’ said Mrs de Gernon. ‘He was very conceited.’
In 1935 Fodor and Irene attended an evening seance with the twenty-four-year-old ‘flower medium’ Hylda Lewis at the British College of Psychic Science in South Kensington. Hylda, a plumber’s daughter from north London, was slightly built and wore her dark hair in a crimped bob. During the sitting, her spirit guide ‘Robin’ spoke through her, in a high, lisping voice, to tell the Fodors that their daughter had just moved to a new school, and remained very friendly with a girl called Pamela. ‘All these statements were hits in the bull’s-eye,’ said Fodor. ‘My daughter changed her school the day before.’ A profusion of flowers then began to swell from beneath the left lapel of Hylda’s jacket, damp and gleaming: pink and red roses, grape hyacinths, lily of the valley, snowdrops, violets.
At Fodor’s invitation, Hylda and her friend Miss Evans visited the International Institute for an experimental seance. To show that she had nothing concealed on her body, Hylda undressed in front of two female members of the Institute. She warned them not to touch her, showing them burns on her abdomen that she claimed had been caused by human contact. The lights were turned off during the sitting. Hylda bent double in her chair, her chin to her knees, her body heaving as seventeen roses and cornflowers splayed slowly from her hair and shoulders. Robin, her spirit guide, asked the sitters to notice that the flowers were breathing as they came. Hylda handed the wet plants to Fodor. She always felt labour pains as she gave birth to the flowers, she told him.
A few days later Hylda produced ten roses, all hanging head down, with warm buds and flattened, dewy leaves. ‘I asked the Medium if her blouse was not wet underneath,’ wrote Fodor in his report. ‘She promptly took my hand to feel. I went around her back, up to her elbow and in front all around under her breasts. There was not the slightest trace of moisture. She took her coatee off, then the blouse. I suggested that we film this.’ A seance room was a permissive place – mystical, tactile, erotically charged – in which convention often fell away.
Fodor was also introduced that year to Harry Brown, an eighteen-stone house painter from east London who claimed that he could levitate. Harry was tall, moustachioed, barrel-chested. Under his suit jacket he wore a soft striped shirt and tie, and a knitted tank top that rode up his belly. At Harry’s first sitting, Fodor sat directly to his left and held his hand – Harry said that he liked to hold hands with those to either side of him, for fear that he would otherwise float clean through the ceiling. Once the lights were turned off, Fodor felt his hand gently lift with the bigger man’s. Soon he could sense Harry bobbing above him, as a cork might bob in water. He felt one of Harry’s dangling legs bump against him. In the blindness of the seance room, the other senses came to the fore: sometimes sharper, sometimes more malleable. Harry seemed to be twirling, tethered only by his neighbours. The Institute’s photographer was in position in the corner, waiting for Harry to give the signal for him to take an infrared picture. ‘Go!’ Harry shouted. As the camera shutter came down, Fodor felt his arm jerk upwards, as if Harry was jumping.
When the photograph was printed, it seemed to show that Harry had staged a levitation by leaping from the chair as the shutter fell: his feet pointed down as they would if he had just pushed off. And yet, oddly, the hem of his coat was hanging perfectly straight, unruffled. Fodor tried to imitate a faked levitation by standing on a chair and jumping; though he weighed just twelve stone – six fewer than Harry – he could not control his descent, and the chair toppled onto him as he fell to the ground.
Harry became a regular at the Institute. One night a child spoke through him. On another night he produced a symphony of raps in the darkness: loud, small, clear, liquid, crisp, metallic; raps that cracked, scraped, rang. Some were swallowed by the muffled rush of the underground trains passing every few minutes beneath the seance-room floor.
Fodor’s friend Wilfred Becker, the director of a photography company, would reel and faint during Harry’s seances, lurch forward and fall off his seat. It was as if Harry were sucking the energy from him, so that one man fell as the other rose. Becker’s skin turned clammy in Harry’s presence; he felt sick when touched by him. During the session of 5 November, Becker slumped in his chair and slid onto the floor, deaf to the crackle and burst of Guy Fawkes’ Night fireworks in the street outside, and the clanging of fire-engine bells.
Fodor enjoyed Harry’s visits regardless of whether they provided proof of the supernormal. They were occasions for wonder and levity, a kind of vaudeville, in which the atmosphere rolled from eeriness to hilarity, suspense to relief. The sitters sometimes broke into song (‘Good King Wenceslas’ just before Christmas) or fell about with laughter. ‘Next Weds we have the levitation man,’ Fodor wrote to a physicist friend, ‘and hope to get him in the air. It starts at 8.30.’ He relished the improbability, the bravura of this hulking labourer who claimed to float like a feather.
Now that he had his own research budget, Fodor was able to bring the Hungarian medium Lajos Pap and his minder to England for experimental seances. He put Lajos and Chengery up in a hotel in South Kensington, provided them with expenses and a daily Hungarian newspaper, and alerted the press to their visit. ‘Watch your goldfish tonight!’ the Evening Standard cautioned its readers on the day of Lajos’s first London seance: ‘If your canary disappears tonight, or your goldfish bowl is emptied, Lajos Pap will probably be responsible.’ That evening Lajos produced nothing. If anyone’s goldfish had gone missing, Fodor noted ruefully, they should probably blame the cat. But at the second seance Fodor’s faith and perseverance were rewarded. Lajos showered the sitters with trinkets, gravel and rosebuds, and materialised two legal documents issued by the Orphan Board of Budapest along with a pebble and a snake (‘twenty-eight inches long’ noted Fodor; ‘quite soft, and dead’) before kicking over the table and falling like a log to the floor.