(eerie music begins)
This is a really crazy story.
Every thing that happens you think,
(women screams)
"What's going on?"
It's completely bewildering.
(eerie music)
My name is Kate Summerscale,
and I wrote "The Haunting of Alma Fielding."
Kate Summerscale tells the true story
of a woman who may have been haunted by a poltergeist.
Well, it was one Friday night in February, 1938,
that Alma Fielding was in bed with her husband,
Les, in a working-class suburb of South London.
She and Les apparently witnessed
this bizarre poltergeist activity,
objects flying across the room like glass tumblers,
light bulbs, and when her 16-year-old son, Don,
came to the door to see what was going on
because of all the clatter and shrieking,
things were thrown at them as well,
assorted pots of face creams and coins.
The whole family was very scared.
And when the events continued the next morning,
in the kitchen, eggs flew around and so on.
Alma telephoned a Sunday newspaper
that was running a series on the supernormal,
as it was then called,
and invited the journalists to come,
and see for themselves what was going on in the house.
She was terrified.
Word of the haunting made its way to a man
named Nandor Fodor.
He was a Hungarian Jewish refugee in London
who worked with
the International Society for Psychical Research.
He believed in ghosts,
but he hadn't yet been able to categorically pin down the
truth of them,
and he thought this sounded like a really plausible case.
And so he hurried down to see if he could get any evidence
for himself of the supernatural happenings.
When he went down with a couple of colleagues,
and all of them independently saw different things happen,
which when collated seemed good evidence that something
genuinely weird was going on.
Wine glasses spring out of Alma's hands,
and shatter in mid air,
even hit the light fixture in the ceiling,
the saucer that'd been used to feed the cat
fly across the room when Alma's back was turned,
and there was absolutely no way she could have thrown it,
and shatter against the backdoor.
A vase apparently transported independently
from one room to another.
They were very excited, as well as slightly chilled,
by what was happening there.
They wanted to discover proof of the supernatural,
but equally they didn't want to be taken for fools.
And they were wise to a lot of the tricks that mediums
and others deployed in impersonating supernatural events.
So they were looking out for things like strings,
and wires, and misdirection, and slight of hand,
the tricks that the conjurers on the London stage
were also using at the time.
They invited Alma to come in to the
International Institute for Psychical Research
in South Kensington,
to see if the Poltergeist energies would follow her there.
To their great delight and amazement they did,
but they took new forms.
So when Alma paraded around the seance room in the presence,
and under observation from all the researchers,
she apparently materialized from thin air,
small objects, pieces of jewelry.
Odd little items from her home seemed to follow her,
materialized and increasingly sort of more ancient objects,
like little terracotta pots,
and eventually even live creatures,
a mouse, a bird, a terrapin.
It all seem too good or too eerie to be true.
Fodor became increasingly suspicious.
This went on for some time, many weeks,
things got weirder and weirder in terms of the experiences
she was reporting.
But Fodor saw a couple of moments at which
he thought he saw her cheating.
He saw what could have been trickery, slights of hand.
And, eventually he decided that,
to establish once and for all,
whether she was for real or not, as a psychic.
He kind of half tricked her into submitting to an x-ray,
on a portable machine in their offices. And on the x-ray,
he found evidence that she did have objects
concealed in her body.
Therefore, at least some of the phenomena were fraudulent.
Fodor thought there might be
a psychological explanation for Alma's experience.
Fodor deciding under the influence of ideas
he'd read from Sigmund Freud,
and other psychoanalysts, that what was really
going on with Alma,
both in terms of her fraudulence and her genuine terror,
was that she was expressing repressed trauma,
and that she, a traumatic event had occurred
in her childhood where she had forgotten,
and that was emerging in the form of these phenomena and
this sort of acting out and storytelling.
But when the other members of
the International Institute for Psychical Research
got wind of his theories, and where he was going with it,
he started in effect,
conducting a kind of psychoanalysis on Alma,
they were very freaked out by this and thought it was very
disrespectful of the spiritualist beliefs of many people
in the Institute,
and also just dangerously sort of sexual and weird,
and generally would discredit the institution.
So he was expelled from the Institute.
He were, having been their chief research officer,
the chief ghost ghost hunter, he was turfed out,
and the investigation into Alma was abruptly ended.
And that was the end of Alma's haunting story.
After this, Fodor, to his delight,
managed to get some endorsement for his theories
from Freud himself, who had turned up in London that year,
and then Fodor left London, left England,
and went and established himself in New York,
and forged a new career as a psychoanalyst.
(eerie piano music plays)
Fodor died in 1964.
Alma Fielding eventually moved to the countryside,
where she occasionally held seances. She died in 1976.
So, was she actually haunted by a Poltergeist?
Summerscale says, it's not necessarily
an easy question to answer.
A lot of supernatural experience
was a way for these women, in any case,
of expressing traumatic experience,
expressing things for which there was no language
at the time, almost like a performance artist.
Her supernatural experience was telling something about her
in a life that was not accommodated by the society
in which she found herself,
or the life she found herself living
as an ordinary housewife in a working class home
in South London.
So haunting is a form of self-expression,
and of expression of stories,
for which a cultural society doesn't yet have a language.
(eerie music fades out)