Supernatural (43 page)

Following this hint, Fodor talked to Mrs Keel.
She then admitted that Uvani was right about the unhappiness in the household.
Her husband was homosexual, so their sex lives left much to be desired.
And the daughter was jealous of her mother—Fodor hints that it was a classic Oedipus complex.
Mrs Keel was keeping up her spirits with drugs.

Soon after this, the case began to reach a kind of climax.
Mr Keel himself was becoming ‘possessed’ by the spirit, talking in his sleep and saying things about ‘Henley’ and his life.
Fodor sent him a transcription of the things Uvani had said about the desire of the Keels’ to ‘hold on’ to the ghost; as a result, Keel rang him to admit he felt it was true.

This confession had the effect that Fodor’s ‘ghost-laying ceremony’ had failed to achieve: the ghost of Ash Manor disappeared and did not return.

This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting cases of haunting on record, for a number of reasons.
First, the corroboration is impressive: the story was also written up by Maude ffoulkes and published in 1936.
¹
And the participation of Eileen Garrett rules out any suggestion that Fodor might simply have invented the whole story—a suggestion that
has
been made about one of Harry Price’s most impressive cases, ‘Rosalie’.
²
Second, the behaviour of the ghost seems to show that the ‘tape recording’ theory of Lethbridge and Sir Oliver Lodge does
not
cover all hauntings: ‘Henley’ was clearly more than a ‘recording’.
And third, it demonstrates very clearly that there is no clear dividing line between a ghost and a poltergeist.
This case started with bangings and rappings, and then developed into a haunting.
And, if we can accept Uvani’s statements as any kind of evidence, it also suggests that there are such things as ‘earthbound’ spirits, probably in dismaying abundance.
The other implications—about the nature of such spirits—must be left until later.

If Fodor had possessed Price’s flair for publicity, the ‘Henley’ case might have made him as famous as Borley made Price.
But he made no attempt to publicise it.
Neither did he attempt to make capital out of a visit to study the talking mongoose of Cashen’s Gap (except for a single chapter in a book), although his investigation was rather more painstaking—if hardly more successful—than Price’s.
(Fodor concluded that the mongoose was probably genuine, but denied that it was a poltergeist on the dubious grounds that poltergeists are always invisible; we have seen that ‘elementals’ are rather less easy to classify than this implies.) In fact, Fodor’s only flash of notoriety occurred almost accidentally as a result of a libel action he brought against
Psychic News.
He was asked whether it was true that he wanted to take a medium, Mrs Fielding, to the Tower of London to steal the Crown Jewels by psychic means, and he admitted that this was true, and that he had been willing to go to prison if the experiment had been successful.
However, it had been forbidden by the other members of the International Institute.
From then on, Fodor was known as the man who wanted to ‘spirit away’ the Crown Jewels.

Mrs Fielding was, in fact, the ‘focus’ of the most interesting and complex poltergeist case he ever investigated.
Mrs Fielding (Fodor calls her Mrs Forbes in his book
On the Trail of the Poltergeist
) was a 35 year-old London housewife, living* at Thornton Heath, an attractive woman with a 17-year-old son.
The disturbances began on Friday February 19, 1938, as the Fieldings were in bed, and on the point of sleep.
A glass shattered on the floor, and when they put on the light, another glass flew past their heads.
They put off the light, and the eiderdown flew up in their faces.
They tried to switch on the light again, but the bulb had been removed.
A pot of face cream was thrown at their son when he came in to see what was happening.
The next day, cups, saucers and ornaments flew through the air.
They notified the
Sunday Pictorial,
and two reporters came.
The poltergeist obliged with an impressive display.
A cup and saucer in Mrs Fielding’s hand shattered and cut her badly, a huge piece of coal struck the wall with such force that it left a big hole, an egg cup shattered in the hand of one reporter, and Mrs Fielding was thrown out of her chair by some force.
As Mr Fielding went upstairs, a vase flew through the air and struck him with a crash—yet although he looked dazed, his head was not bruised.
Within three days of the coming of the poltergeist, it had broken thirty-six tumblers, twenty-four wine glasses, fifteen egg-cups and a long list of other articles.

When Fodor arrived a few days later, the poltergeist did not disappoint.
Fodor records twenty-nine poltergeist incidents during that first visit.
Again and again, he had his eyes on Mrs Fielding when things happened—glasses flew off tables, a saucer smashed against the wall, glasses were snatched from her hands and broke on the floor.
It was soon clear that Mrs Fielding, and not her 17-year-old son, was the focus and ‘cause’ of the disturbances.
One glass flew out of her hand and split in mid-air with a loud ping, as if it had been hit by a hammer.

Fodor asked Mrs Fielding to come to the headquarters of the Institute, Walton House, for tests.
She was dressed in a one-piece garment after being searched (a precaution he may have learned from the Lajos Pap case) and they went into the seance room.
While Mrs Fielding was standing in full view, with three witnesses around her, there was a clatter, and a brass-bound hair brush appeared on the floor.
It was warm, as ‘apports’ usually are (the theory being that they are ‘dematerialised’ and then rematerialised).
Mrs Fielding identified it as her own, and said she had left it in her bedroom at home.
The poltergeist then obliged with several more apports, and also made saucers fly out of Mrs Fielding’s hands and split with a ping in mid-air.
Strong men found that they could not break them in their hands.

The idea of stealing the Crown Jewels probably came to Fodor when he and Mrs Fielding went into a gift shop and she decided against buying a small elephant; as they were getting into the car, a box in Mrs Fielding’s hand rattled, and they found the elephant in it; they had committed ‘psychic shop-lifting’.

At a later ‘sitting’, Mrs Fielding produced some impressive results.
On one occasion she sat with her hands tightly clenched while someone held them.
The person holding them felt one hand convulse ‘as if something was being born’, and when Mrs Fielding opened her hand, there was a tortoiseshell cross in it.

She also began to experience ‘psychic projections’, finding herself in other places in her trance states.
In the seance room, in a semi-trance, she projected herself back to her home.
They telephoned her husband, who said she was there, and even handed her the telephone; at that moment, they were cut off.
Mrs Fielding’s ‘double’ handed her husband a recipe that she had written in the seance room; he read it back to them over the telephone, and it was identical with the one they had in front of them.
He also handed the ‘double’ a compass, which then reappeared in the seance room, ten miles away.
The ‘double’ had walked out of the front door with the compass.

A full account of Mrs Fielding’s phenomena would occupy a whole chapter.
She produced some ancient artifacts like Roman lamps and pottery labelled ‘Carthage’, white mice and a bird, and a spray of violet perfume around her body (as well as violets which fell from the air).
Under increasing strain, she started to show signs of breakdown.
She began going hysterically blind, burn marks appeared on her neck, and she claimed she was being clawed by an invisible tiger (producing an unpleasant ‘zoo’ odour).
When her husband said jokingly that he would like an elephant, there was a crash and an elephant’s tooth appeared in the hall.
She also had a phantom pregnancy.

At a seance, a spirit that claimed to be her grandfather declared that he was responsible for the apports.
Asked to prove its identity by bringing something of its own, it materialised a silver matchbox—which Mrs Fielding said had belonged to her grandfather—in her clasped hands.

And at this point, the story took a bewildering turn.
Mrs Fielding apparently began cheating.
Fodor saw her producing a ‘breeze’ during a seance by blowing on the back of someone’s neck.
Fodor became convinced that she was producing small ‘apports’ from under her clothes, and an X-ray photograph showed a brooch hidden beneath her left breast.
Later, she produced this brooch as an apport.
When being undressed, a small square of linen fell from between her legs, stained with vaginal secretion; it looked as if she was also using her vagina to hide apports.

Two days after this, she claimed to have been attacked by a vampire.
There were two small puncture marks on her neck, and she looked listless and pale.

One of the oddest incidents occurred when Fodor was walking with her into the Institute.
With no attempt at concealment, she opened her handbag, took something out, and threw a stone over her shoulder.
When Fodor asked her about this, she indignantly denied it.

In his account of the case in
The Haunted Mind,
Fodor makes the statement: ‘This discovery .
.
.
eliminated any remaining suspicion that a spirit or psychic force was still at work.’
But the ‘still’ implies that he felt there had been genuine psychic forces at work at an earlier stage.
Reading his full account of the case, this seems self-evident.
It would have been impossible for Mrs Fielding to have faked the poltergeist occurrences in her home, and later in the Institute.

Fodor’s own analysis is as follows:
As a child, Mrs Fielding was both accident-and illness-prone.
At the age of 6, recovering from tonsillitis, she thought that a muscular black arm tried to strangle her in bed; it vanished when her mother ran in.
She was bitten by a mad dog, and attacked (and scarred) by a parrot.
She lived in a house with a reputation for being haunted, and Fodor states as a fact that neither the windows nor mirrors ever needed cleaning—they were cleaned by invisible hands during the night.

At 16, she had ‘visions’ of a ghost; a cupboard in her room opened and a man stepped out, then vanished.
Subsequently she saw him several times.
On one occasion he left a piece of paper with sooty scrawls on it beside her, but her mother burned it.
A bicycle accident at this time led to a kidney abscess, which later necessitated many operations.
At 17 she made a runaway marriage, had her first baby at 18, her second at 21.
(This died of meningitis.) At 20 she contracted anthrax poisoning, and tried to stab her husband with a carving knife.
She ran into the street in her nightdress screaming ‘Murder, fire’, and recovered after having twenty-eight teeth extracted.

At 24 she had a vision of her father, trying to pull her away from her husband.
He made the sign of the cross over her left breast.
When she woke from her trance, this was bleeding.
At hospital they discovered she had a breast cancer, and the breast was amputated.
At 26, she had an attack of hysterical blindness which lasted for six weeks and, at 27, was in an accident on a steamer which was smashed against Margate pier.
At 28 she aborted twins after being terrified when she found a dead rat in among her washing.
At 30 she had a kidney operation, and, at 32, pleurisy.
Altogether, it can be seen, Mrs Fielding was a thoroughly unlucky woman.

Fodor then proceeds to interpret the evidence from the Freudian point of view.
He is convinced that the basic truth is that Mrs Fielding was attacked and raped, probably in a churchyard, by a man in round glasses, before she was 5 years old.
Everything else, he thinks, springs from this trauma.
On two occasions, when lying awake at night, she felt a shape like a man—but as cold as a corpse—get into bed with her; then it ‘behaved like a man’ (i.e.
had sexual intercourse).
One day, on her way to the Institute, Mrs Fielding was attacked by a man on the train.
Fodor does not doubt that she was attacked—she arrived in an upset condition—but thinks that the man’s round glasses may have aroused in her a mixture of loathing and desire which was wrongly interpreted by the man as an invitation.
Fodor goes on to suggest that her husband became somehow identified in her mind with her attacker, so that the poltergeist attacks were due to her unconscious aggressions against him.

There are times when Fodor’s Freudian interpretations verge on the comic.
For example, he is convinced that her apports are a cipher ‘in which her tragic life story is hidden’.
On one evening, the apports were: elephant’s tooth, tiger claw, Carthage pottery, a tropical nutshell and a piece of coral.
These, says Fodor, symbolise the hugeness of the man who assaulted her (an elephant), his savagery and beastliness, his scaliness (the nutshell), while the pottery symbolises the breaking of her hymen; the coral stands for music from the church nearby.
(Organ music always made Mrs Fielding cry, and Fodor surmises that the coral was organ-pipe coral.)
There is, of course, one basic objection to the whole theory: Mrs Fielding did not tell Fodor she had been raped, and apparently had no such memory.
Fodor naturally thinks it was suppressed.
But do memories of that type become so suppressed that they vanish completely?
It seems highly unlikely.

Fodor was never able to bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion.
When he began explaining his rape theories to the Institute for Psychical Research, they objected so strongly that he felt obliged to drop the case.
At least it enabled him to believe that Mrs Fielding was getting closer and closer to remembering her rape experience, and would one day have confirmed all his theories.
It will be recalled that, in the case of the Bell Witch, Fodor believed that Betsy had been sexually attacked by her father, and that this produced the poltergeist, ‘tearing loose part of the mental system and letting it float free like a disembodied entity’.
As a good Freudian, he felt bound to seek a sexual explanation in the Thornton Heath case.
Yet, like so many of the ‘primal scenes’ that Freud believed caused lifelong illness, the one posited by Fodor is completely unverifiable.