Fodor had to prove himself as a scientist as well as a showman. In his first laboratory experiment at the Institute, he tried to recreate a recent study in which Dr R. A. Watters of Reno, Nevada, claimed to have photographed astral bodies escaping from dying animals. Fodor commissioned B. J. Hopper, a young physics teacher from west London, to build a ‘cloud chamber’ that could detect ionising particles. Hopper assembled an elaborate contraption of rubber tubes, metal cylinders, glass jars, lamps, pumps, wires and switches. Fodor applied to the Home Office for a licence to experiment on living creatures, and purchased nineteen white mice, three linnets and a collection of frogs and American cockroaches.
Fodor and Hopper anaesthetised the animals with ether-soaked cotton wool, then transferred each one to a tube in the chamber, where its throat was encircled with a blade. The cinematograph was rolling as the guillotine came down on the slender, sweet-voiced linnets, the long, stinking roaches, the frogs, the mice.
Though the cockroaches continued to twitch for half an hour after being decapitated, the researchers saw no vapours rise from any of the bodies, no souls slipping away. Fodor took a photograph of Hopper peering into the misted box: ‘Mr B. J. Hopper, MSc.,’ ran Fodor’s caption, ‘watching for the ghost of an American cockroach.’
When Fodor published his results, he pointed out flaws in Dr Watters’ original experiment and concluded that the phantoms in his pictures must have been particles of dust. Watters retaliated, writing to the British spiritualist press from Nevada to denounce Fodor and his associates and threatening to sue the International Institute for libel. A bitter correspondence ensued.
Some of the researchers who studied the cloud chamber footage thought that they detected faint forms rising from the tiny corpses, but Fodor was cautious. ‘This phenomenon,’ he wrote, ‘is akin to watching for the appearance of fantastic figures in the burning coals in a fire or sky-gazing to find shapes in the clouds.’ If you looked for long enough, your eyes would find things to see.
With the cloud chamber experiment, Fodor established the Institute’s scientific credibility, and he embarked on his war with the more fervent devotees of spiritualism. He yearned as much as they did for proof that the dead lived, but he had to be true to the evidence.
FOUR
Where the facts are fantastic
In the summer of 1935 Fodor learnt that a private detective had exposed Hylda Lewis, the flower medium, as a fraud. On the instructions of the Society for Psychical Research, Edgar Wright of Wright’s Detective Agency had followed Hylda to the seance that Fodor and Irene attended in January. Wright shadowed her by bus to Oxford Circus from her office in the City, watched her buy flowers from a series of shops and stalls and then slip into a side street to bite the stalks off a bunch of roses. Hylda stashed the roses in an attaché case, bought more flowers, and stopped again, outside a Lyons restaurant, to slide several stems of lily of the valley into her coat. Finally she proceeded by bus to the British College of Psychic Science in South Kensington.
In the darkened room, Fodor realised, Hylda had made it appear that the flowers were pressing out of her body by secretly prising them out of her clothes. He also discovered how she had acquired her eerily accurate information about his daughter’s life: as a switchboard operator for a City firm, Hylda was able to eavesdrop on the telephone calls of people due to attend her seances.
Fodor felt betrayed by Hylda Lewis, whose phenomena had so impressed him and the other investigators at the Institute. He was learning that the golden age of psychical study was also the heyday of supernatural hustle, and that to verify his subjects’ claims he would have to turn sleuth himself.
When Lajos Pap materialised a snake and other apports at the International Institute in 1935, Fodor tried to work out whether he could have produced them by normal means. The staff of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington identified the snake as a Central European dice snake, about two years old and not long dead. Fodor rang reptile shops listed in the London telephone directory and found that though the species was available in stores in Merton and Islington, neither outlet remembered serving a man of Lajos or Chengery’s descriptions. He arranged for Irene to be given access to Lajos’s hotel room, where she found a suitcase with a double lining, and he tried to establish whether Lajos really had a medical reason for wearing a whalebone belt beneath his clothing. Fodor hid a pebble on his body, and challenged his colleagues to find it. He put folded sheets of paper in his shoes. On completing his experiments, he concluded that Lajos Pap could have smuggled a live snake over from Hungary in the lining of his suitcase, drowned it in the hotel washbasin and zipped it into his belt. Before the seance he might also have pressed the orphanage documents into the soles of his shoes; lodged a stone in his navel; tucked trinkets behind his false teeth; stored rosebuds in his cheeks; and stuffed a gold coin up his nose. ‘Our verdict is “Not Proven”,’ Fodor told the Institute’s members when the Paps returned to Budapest.
Fodor unmasked other hoaxers with infrared photography, a new technology that made it possible to record images in the dark. His pictures of a ghostly form in the home of the Dundee railway engineer Charles Stewart revealed the railwayman himself, dressed in a white sheet. Fodor sent Mr Stewart copies of the photographs without comment. Infrared photos of the well-known trance medium Agnes Abbott showed that she was impersonating an ethereal visitor by waggling a luminous spirit trumpet on her thumb. ‘Mrs Abbott, the game is up,’ said Fodor, dramatic as a movie detective. But he was careful not publicly to shame her. He reminded his team that they should be kind to mediums even when they caught them cheating. Fake psychics were only trying to earn a living, after all. ‘Never at any time must a bullying attitude be adopted,’ Fodor wrote, ‘and the whole business must be carried through with dignity… and with gentleness and consideration.’ It would, in any case, be bad business to be rude. If word got around that the Institute treated its subjects roughly, it would have no one with whom to experiment.
In 1935 Fodor and Irene befriended an American couple called the Woodwards who lived in a neighbouring apartment block in Chiswick. Dick Woodward was a tall, good-looking man in the film business, with whom Fodor would sit up until one in the morning, playing canasta and drinking whisky.
One evening in June, the Fodors and the Woodwards were playing bridge at the flat of another couple when Dick Woodward announced that he was able to levitate flowers. Fodor ran up to his own flat, on the fifth floor, to fetch a potted geranium about two feet tall. He returned to his friends’ fourth-floor apartment, and switched off the electric lights. The sky was clear, and by the light of the moon Fodor could see his companions’ faces, the furniture, the pattern of the carpet, the luminous dial of the wireless set. He put the geranium in the middle of the room and sat against a wall.
Woodward stood about three yards from the pot, his arms outstretched. ‘His breathing became heavy,’ recalled Fodor, ‘he snapped with his fingers, as one snaps to a dog; his breath came faster and faster, and suddenly the branches of the geranium swayed and twisted.’ Woodward fell back on the sofa, his arms out wide, his head thrown back. Then he stood up and began again. This time ‘a storm broke loose among the branches and leaves of the geranium. First there was a faint rustle; then, in silence but with the force of an explosion, a shower of leaves and flowers shot up in the air.’ Fodor counted seven leaves and eight flowering twigs strewn around the room, along with a bud and a scatter of petals. He was staggered. ‘You are one in a million!’ he told his friend.