The Alma Fielding And Nandor Fodor Poltergeist Chronicles: Uncanny Accounts of Psychic Heists, Terrapins, Tigers, and Vampire Attacks

Speaker A: Hi everyone and welcome back to Haunted History Chronicles. First of all, thank you for taking a listen to this episode. Before we begin, I just want to throw out few ways you can get involved and help support the show. We have a patreon page as well as an Amazon link so hopefully if you're interested in supporting you can find a way that best suits you. All of the links for those can either be found in the show notes or over on the website. Of course, just continuing to help spread the word of the show on social media, leaving reviews and sharing with friends and family is also a huge help. So thank you for all that you do. And now let's get started by introducing today's podcast or guest derived from the German words Polton to make noise and geist, meaning spirit, refers to a type of supernatural entity commonly associated with disruptive and often mischievous behavior. Unlike traditional ghosts or spirits, which are typically connected to a specific location or individual, poltergeists are thought to be manifestations of psychokinetic energy produced by living individuals, particularly the adolescents or individuals undergoing emotional or psychological distress. This distinctive characteristic sets poltergeist phenomena apart from other types of paranormal encounters. Poltergeist hauntings usually have the following characteristic hallmarks one of the most prominent features of poltergeist activity is the movement of objects. Witnesses often report items being thrown, levitated or displaced without any discernible physical cause. These seemingly random and inexplicable movements can range from gentle nudges to more aggressive and forceful actions. Poltergeist hauntings are frequently accompanied by various auditory manifestations. These can include unexplained knocking, banging, footsteps, rapping, tapping or even voices. Witnesses often hear disembodied sounds that defy logical explanations, adding to the eerie atmosphere surrounding these cases. Unlike traditional ghostly encounters, poltergeists have a tendency to interact physically with their environment. This can involve the manipulation of objects such as doors opening and closing, lights turning on and off, or furniture being rearranged. In some instances, witnesses have reported being scratched, pushed or even physically assaulted by unseen forces. Poltergeist hauntings often take a toll on the emotional and psychological well being of those involved. The individuals experiencing the phenomena typically, adolescents or individuals going through a period of stress may exhibit heightened anxiety, fear or even poltergeist like abilities themselves, such as the ability to move objects without physical contact. When we think about spiritualism, the most natural association is one of the Victorian boudoir where seances held behind crushed velvet curtains are a common reaction towards the advancements of modernism, tearing up traditional understanding of spirituality and opening up the door to new ways of perceiving the realms of both the living and the dead. It's less common for people to imagine a much later period in time when enlightened thinking was supposed to have prospered and superstition in the supernatural worlds of the spirit mediums were considered a quaint historical footnote. The onset of war in 1914, however, ushered in a new era of spiritualism seeing the number of spiritualist societies more than double before the end of the war. For many, it began on the battlefields of Europe, where angels appeared in trenches, spirit armies protected platoons of soldiers, wists of the dead walked carelessly across front lines, and fallen comrades gave messages and dreams to the friends they'd left behind. For many more, it was a helping hand. For those left at home, now facing the future alone. War ended, and the European nations fell into a collective national mourning. With over 20 million estimated deaths, a million of which were servicemen and women fighting on fronts far from home. Lost in trenches, buried in battlefields, few families escaped the loss of a relative or a friend, and in some areas, entire generations of their young adult populations were lost. Within this environment of collective loss, and with so many cases lacking any definitive closure for the connected families, spiritualism completed its resurgence. This is, however, only half the story. The years leading up to World War II would see spiritualism continue to rise in popularity. Famous mediums packed halls and gave enthralled audiences demonstrations of table tipping, speaking with the dead, and apparating objects from otherworldly realms. In London, the Royal Albert Hall gave an audience of over 10,000 people the opportunity to hear the recently deceased author and famed spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speak from the grave through Estelle Roberts, aided by her Native American spirit guide known as Red Cloud. The Psychic News, a UK based weekly spiritualist newspaper, estimated that over 100,000 seance circles were in operation and communicating with the other side. Closed curtains and family houses in the most benign suburban neighborhoods hid seance circles as mediums addressed the realm of the spirits and pulled objects from flowers to living animals out of thin air and delivered messages from those long deceased. If spiritualism wasn't already cemented into society by the late 1930s, then the run up to World War II ensured that the job was complete. As anxieties rose throughout the population of European nations who had entire generations still suffering from the aftermath of World War I, spiritualism and stories of the seance circle provided a natural distraction, an escape and an added comfort those once again being reminded of the horrors of war. As newspapers reported on the movement of Hitler's forces into Austria in 1938, on another page they wrote of ghosts, poltergeists, seances and mediums. One such story was that of a small suburban dwelling in Croydon owned by the Fieldings, whose home declared the Sunday Pictorial on 28 February 1938, had been wrecked by ghosts. The headline in the very next column took almost as much space as the cowering Fielding family. Next to it, it simply read Hitler in large, bold capital letters. In 1938, the Fieldings from South London became the latest in a long line of victims of ghostly disturbances that developed into a full blown investigation. As Alma, the young brunette matriarch found herself quickly sucked into a world of mediumship, complete with spirit guides, apparating terrapins and phantom tigers. As the supernatural world around her got more extreme, nandor Fodor, acclaimed psychical investigator, dug for more earthly explanations into the phenomena that he would later describe as sending shivers down his spine. So get comfortable as we examine this strange case of a 1930s poltergeist, the people at the heart of the investigation and the subsequent investigation into Alma herself. From live terrapins appearing out of thin air, doors slamming, psychic jewelry thefts, and objects routinely flying about, this is a comprehensive look at a case that is still mystifying and intriguing. Alma Smith was born in Pimlico, London, in 1903. She was the second daughter of Charles and Alice Smith. Doris, her older sister, had been born three years earlier, and Charles, her younger brother, was born much later, in 1915. By the time of Charles's birth, alma had moved with her family to Thornton Heath, a small town south of the Thames. As a child, Alma had dreams of working as an entertainer and took training from one of her uncles in the circus skills of tightrope walking, acrobatics and the trapeze. Her ambitions for stardom, however, ended in her mid teens, after a fall from her bicycle left her with permanent physical difficulties. In truth, she'd been a relatively sickly child with prolonged issues with her kidneys that wound up in several surgeries to drain an abscess. March of 1921 would see Alma marry Les Fielding in a shotgun wedding. Her parents were not initially supportive of the marriage, but with Alma secretly three months pregnant, their protestations fell on deaf ears. Les had left school at the age of 14 to become his father's apprentice as a painter and decorator, and had signed up at the outbreak of World War I to fight. After his return from the trenches and an injury that would leave shrapnel from a hand grenade embedded in his right thigh, he started up his own painting and decorating business. Their son Donald was born in 1922, after the couple had settled into their new home in Beverston Road, where they lived with their dog Judy and their lodger named George Saunders, who moved into the Fielding home in 1928. After the breakdown of his marriage, alma and Les's life was a reasonably comfortable one, but not without periods of difficulty. Alma herself suffered the loss of at least two children early in her marriage to Les tragedies that she received little emotional support for. Alma herself continued to be plagued with health issues. With her kidneys, she also endured a mastectomy and the loss of all of her teeth. From the outside, it may have appeared the family were living a good life. There is, of course, the ageold adage that life was not always what it seemed. Under the surface, there was a darkness that bubbled away behind the Fielding door in Beverston Road in the spring of 1938. It threatened to bubble over. The first sign that things were altogether not usual in the family home came to Alma and Liz Fielding in the early days of February 1938. Alma had been out visiting friends, whilst Liz remained at home in bed recovering from dental surgery. Whilst Alma played cards and chatted amongst friends, she suddenly experienced a sharp pain in her pelvis and was forced to excuse herself early from the gathering to go home. Once there, she took some pain relief and slipped into bed with her husband. As she lay drifting off to sleep, she noticed a handprint with six digits appear in the mirror above the mantelpiece. The imprint would be something she would later describe to Les, who also confirmed he had seen such an imprint whilst he had been painting in an empty property for work. The mysterious imprint appeared to follow him about, leaving its mark in green paint. It was certainly odd, but nothing more was said of the matter until the night of the 19 March. At around midnight, alma and Les found themselves suddenly awoken by a shattering thud in the room when Alma turned the light on her bedside table. On there on the bedroom floor were the broken shards of a smashed glass tumbler, which usually sat on Les's side of the bed. Each night, with Alma and Les having both been asleep and no one else in the room, it was a mystery as to how it had gotten there. As they were staring at the broken shards, a second glass hit the bedroom wall with a sharp crack and two splintered across the bedroom floor. Alarmed, Les suggested to Alma that she turn the light off, but as soon as darkness spread across the room, the couple felt a cold snap hit and the duvet flew up into their faces. Alma frantically tried to turn the light back on once again, but found that it simply would not turn on. Panicked, the couple began to call out for help. George and Donald, who had been asleep in their own beds, were instantly stirred by the sudden commotion and as they entered the bedroom to see what was wrong, found themselves being hit by objects, george being struck by two pennies and Donald by a jar of face cream. With everyone still struggling to turn the light on, donald went downstairs to collect a box of matches and when he returned, he struck one. As that small light illuminated the room, it became clear as to why they had failed to get the lights to turn back on. Unbroken and resting in the nursing chair by the bed sat the bulb from the lamp. After making this unsettling discovery and once the bulb was returned to the lamp, the family settled for the night in an uneasy sleep, hoping to put the drama behind them. But when Alma woke early the following morning and went downstairs to the kitchen to make breakfast, she was sharply reminded of the events from the previous night as an egg smashed into the kitchen wall. Quickly deciding that vanishing light bulbs and levitating eggs were not the usual thing to happen, alma called up the Sunday pictorial, which had over the past several months featured pieces on spiritualism ghosts and otherworldly phenomena. Instantly interested in the story, the paper agreed to send two reporters around that evening, and by early afternoon Lionel Crane and Victor Thompson were walking up the short path to the small terraced house on Beveston Road. As Alma opened the door to greet them, they saw an egg fly down the corridor and land at their feet. As they were taken into the kitchen, a pink china dog rattled and fell to the floor, and a sharp bladed tin opener sliced through the air at head height. In the front parlour, a teacup and saucer lifted out of Alma's hands before beginning to spin and then splinter in midair, cutting Alma quite badly. Large chunks of coal rose from the grate and sailed across the room. Wine glasses escaped locked cabinets and crashed to the floor. The Fielding's home seemed to be under siege. What they witnessed that day was printed in the paper the very next day under the headline terror in Home Wrecked by Ghost, and with the slogan this is the most curious front page we have ever printed. With the terrors continuing into the night, Alma was quoted as saying, I feel some terrible climax is approaching. We shall stay up all night to see it through. I hope it comes soon. Our nurse cannot stand much more. With the story hitting the papers, the events at Beveston Road drew the attention of the psychical investigators of the day, one of which was Nandor Fodor, a Jewish Hungarian journalist and researcher for the International Institute for Psychical Research, based in London. He quickly approached the editor to inquire after the address of the Fielding family, and within hours Fodor's assistant was knocking on the door of Berston Road to make a preliminary sweep of the scene. His report was later included in a book published by Fodor in 1958 titled on the Trail of the Poltergeist. Though the names of the buildings were changed to Forbes, it stated this was my first experience in the house and I think it is in the highest standard of the phenomena. Incidentally, I found during that day and subsequently that a phenomena of the more startling variety would almost invariably occur within about ten minutes of the arrival of the house of any new visitor. Whilst I was upstairs, two loud crashes were heard from the front room, which we had just left. The only inhabitants who were downstairs at the time were the two friends of the Forbes who were in the back room. They were in the act of coming out into the hall as I ran downstairs. In the front room, a large salad bowl was in pieces in the fireplace and a wine glass lay broken by the sideboard. Mrs. Forbes gave me an estimate of the damages and breakages in the house in the 72 hours since the disturbances started. This included the following 36 tumblers, 24 wine glasses, 15 egg cups, five teacups, four sauces, one salad bowl, three electric bulbs, nine eggs, two plates, one pudding basin, two vases, one water jug, one jar of face cream and one milk jug. In addition, an aluminum saucepan had on three occasions been pressed in towards the center, which took considerable force but was not beyond a normal man's strength. Also in the front room was a brass ornamental kettle, which was deeply indented in several places. This, Mrs Forbes told me, was due to a heavy glass decanter having been repeatedly thrown at it. On looking through my notes on the Thornton Heath case made on my first visit to the house on February 23, I experienced afresh the feeling I had at the time. That is to say, an utter belief in the genuineness of the phenomena and also in the good faith of Mrs Forbes. As Fodor read the report from his assistant and the COVID letter, which concluded I unhesitatingly label it as supernormal, he could not contain his excitement. As a fan of Freud, who he interviewed in 1926, Fodor's approach was always one of careful analysis and a strong psychoanalytical tone. It was a perspective and approach that meant even if something were a hoax, and by that point he had seen a few, they were still worthy of serious study. In 1936, he'd investigated a case known as the Ash Manor Ghost, where he concluded that suppressed sexual energies had spurred the haunting on. His approach and findings, though, were not always appreciated, and many in the psychical community felt he worked too much on the side of the skeptic. Psychical research into poltergeist activity was still in its relative infancy at the time. In spiritualism, it was thought to be the work of malicious or maladjusted spirits, psychokinetic energy or elementals. From earlier investigations, Fodor and a few others had their own theories. The case of Eleanor Zugan in the 1920s had seen a young Romanian girl become possessed by a purported poltergeist. That led to a barrage of paranormal activity, from apparitions to stigmatic, wounds and possession. In the years following the case's explosion, rumors of exploitation and sexual abuse led some who were more psychoanalytical in approach to theorise that it was the trauma that fed into the phenomena. Clearly, the case in Beverston Road, in Fodor's mind, needed further investigation, whether otherworldly or not, fodor arranged to visit the Fielding home on Thursday 24 February, and when he arrived that morning at 11:30 a.m., he found a tired looking household. After greeting Fodor, almond showed him the collection of broken cutlery, glass and china, all victims to the poltergeist activity. Having read the kind of activity that had been going on from the preliminary report, fodor had come to the house forearmed. He pulled out a collection of his own tumblers and began placing them on the mantelpiece in the living room with a light bulb in one and an egg in another. As he arranged the glasses, a thumping crack hit the door behind him and when he stepped out into the hallway, he found a broken clock lying on the floor and the door to the lounge scarred from the clock's collision. Fodor began to carefully question Alma. He noted how she visibly cringed with every crash, knock and thud that bounced throughout the house. He asked her about the incident with the handprint and whether she believed herself to have any psychic ability. Whilst Alma didn't have an answer, she was able to recount numerous stories of uncanny coincidence. In one paraprophetic dream, she had dreamt her son had been in an accident. It had left a strong enough impression on her to warn him to watch out before he left the house in the morning. Later that day, he was hit by a passing bicycle. Alma recalled her the stories of feeling a cold hand touch her shoulder as she walked down the stairs whilst home alone one day, and another of how she had once heard a whisper in the kitchen. What was interesting to Fodor was that neither Alma or Les seemed particularly interested in spiritualism and their son was an outright skeptic. But yet even he had found the events of the previous week so most impressive for Fodor were two occasions where a glass fell onto the kitchen floor whilst all members of the household were in the lounge and in full view of the investigator. Many of the reports from those involved included detailed descriptions of Alma's hands and how, in many cases they were full and occupied, so therefore couldn't have played a role in the destruction being observed. It was clear from Fodor's own report, however, that he believed Alma was the centre of the activity. When Alma's mother and sister visited the house that evening, fodor took the opportunity to dig a little deeper and quiz them about Alma's past. It turned out that she had a history of telling strange stories that her family had playfully written off as fairy tales. Now, however, they had changed their mind, as Alma's mother explained that she too had witnessed China break in her own hands and recounted a chilling tale of feeling hands tightening around her throat whilst visiting her daughter at the house. By 10:00 p.m. On that first day, and having arrived at the conclusion that there were strong reasons to consider Alma as the poltergeist medium, he invited her to attend the Institute in South Kensington, where they could investigate any such links between Alma and the supernatural under more scientific scrutiny. It was the start of an investigation that would eventually lead to Fodor's own undoing, but not before he and the Institute's Seance Circle would bear witness to some of the most bizarre phenomena. Before we head back to the podcast, if you haven't already visited The Haunted History Chronicles Patreon Page, now is the perfect time to join, to listen and enjoy a multitude of additional podcasts, merchandise, mail and other written materials. It's a great way to support the podcast to continue to grow and put out additional content to share guests and their stories, as well as helping the podcast to continue to be enjoyed. You can find the link in the episode Description Notes as well as on the Haunted History Chronicles website. And remember, you can always help support guests in the podcast by coming and liking the social media pages and chatting over there. It's truly all very much appreciated. And now let's head back to the podcast. Alma first visited the Institute at 03:00 p.m. On Friday, the 25 February 1938. A seance room had been prepared in advance with cups, tumblers, saucers, light bulbs and even a rattle placed on tables and chairs. That afternoon, in front of a small circle of investigators and other interested friends, alma appeared to import a small hairbrush and a tin of liverpills into the centre of the room. Both items had been last seen in the main bedroom of Beverston Road. Witnesses present at the time claimed to have full view of Alma's hands that were occupied with a cup and saucer when the items appeared from thin air onto the floor. At 05:30 p.m. That same day. As the group were finishing, the cup and saucer in Alma's hands appeared to fly across the room and smash in midair by an invisible hammer, Fodor later wrote. That night, Fodor had Alma driven home along with several members of the investigation circle, to witness the range of activity at Beverston Road for themselves. As it had every night that week. Things continued to crash and break around the house. As soon as Alma arrived home, a pocket knife and watch were both placed on the inside of Alma's large coat, only for them to reappear shortly afterwards in different places. Fodor wasted no time in writing an article for the Journal of American Psychical Research and quickly asked Alma to continue to come to the Institute for further investigation. He followed this up with extensive interviews into her past, where he uncovered a time in her life where she had lost her sight temporarily for three weeks in 1929. Alma claimed that despite this, she could at the time still see the world around her through a sensory practice that she could not explain. Les had convinced her to visit an optician who referred her to an eye hospital who confirmed her blindness and prescribed a course of drops to cure the ailment, which led to the return eventually of her sight. It was a peculiar story. Alma's next story, however, was even less easy to understand. A year after her temporary incident of blindness, she recounted visiting friends to play cards one evening when she felt a sudden bout of exhaustion. She lay on the sofa for a while to get some sleep and seemed to fall into unconsciousness, during which she had a dream that her dead father walked silently across the floor and placed a finger on her chest and traced across. When Alma awoke, she had a mark on her chest in the same area from her dream. Shortly afterwards, it was discovered that Alma had a cancerous tumour in her breast, which required a mastectomy to remove the growth. Perhaps the most troubling story she told Fodor was of a strange, long faced man she used to see crawl out of her wardrobe and approach her while she lay in her bed as a small child. Fodor noted that these accounts could have been the result of hysterical blindness and sleep paralysis. But the dream of her father he found more difficult to explain. The combining aspects of his investigations and interviews with Alma seemed to him to point to a woman who had been living a life that needed mental escape from the mundane reality of the life she lived as a housewife. It certainly pointed to the need to investigate and consider further. At the start of each seance Circle, alma was searched, stripped and scrutinised carefully in a private room by two female members of the Circle. After the search, she was given a jumpsuit to wear to ensure that she could not slip anything into the seance room. Tabletipping was soon introduced to the investigations, and whilst they produced a series of knocks and wobbles, fodor concluded that there had been no intelligent phenomena. In March, in an effort to spur on the poltergeist activity, fodor suggested the group take an outing to the seaside. And so, on March 11, Fodor Alma and the rest of the circle arrived in Bogna Regis. Fodor and the Circle, however, were more interested in the high street. On the way down, Alma had been telling Fodor how she'd been shopping with a friend where she had tried on a ring. Handing the ring back to the shop assistant, the pair had then left the shop empty handed, only to find, to both parties great surprise that the ring had somehow made its way back onto Alma's finger shortly afterwards. Her friend immediately suggested they try again in another shop, but this time with a necklace. Alma initially protested, but they found their way soon enough at another jewelry counter, perusing strings of pearl necklaces. Alma had been careful not to touch anything while in the shop, and as before, the pair left empty handed just as before, as soon as Alma stepped onto the tram to head home, she had found a string of pearls hanging around her neck. Fodor was keen to repeat this experiment in Bognoregis, and so he arranged for the group to visit Woolworths and convinced Alma to try on a ring. Before they entered the shop, fodor handed Alma a small film canister and suggested it might be interesting if a small piece of jewellery could end up inside of it. All the members watched on, witnessing Alma clearly try on and then take off and hand back to the shop assistant a ring and then leave. As they walked around the corner, they then all heard a rattle from Alma's inside pocket and when they pulled it out, inside sat the ring from the shop. Fodor wondered about these psychic thefts and what the motive behind them could have been. He contemplated whether thefts were an attempt to simply seek a thrill. If that was the case, the question remained how she was doing it. As March continued, so did the investigation and seance circles at the Institute. Matters at Beverston Road also continued to grow. One night the household was awoken by the lodger screaming at the top of his lungs, having been convinced that Alma had been standing in his room, staring at him and grinning. Alma at the time had been sleeping beside Les. Their son too was experiencing disturbed sleep, complaining that his light was regularly turned on and off throughout the night. The house itself was intermittently giving off a sweet rotten smell detected by householders and visitors. Fodor at this point had decided to take a backseat at the seance circles to create a more casual approach to the investigations. This also included a smaller development circle in order to make Alma less conscious of being scrutinized. If she was hoaxing, he thought, she was more likely to slip up. Fodor's suspicions were mounting against Alma, who he noticed often seemed detached from herself when a weird event took place. He wondered if at such moments, her buried life surged to the surface and broke out. He was intrigued by the phenomena of mental dissociation which had been observed in mediums and shellshock. Victims phenomena witnessed at the institute grew harder and harder to explain, with Alma graduating from reporting small objects to live mice, goldfish, terrapins, antique pottery, necklaces and other unusual objects. Fodor spent much of his time following this up with visits to pet shops, museums and antique stores to see if anyone recognized any of the items or remembered selling any to Alma. His searches would prove futile. Experiences reported were equally baffling in nature. One such experience included Alma telling Fodor of how she had fallen asleep at home one evening. She explained how in the dream she found herself outside of the institute, where she saw many of the members of the circle arrive. All except one, as it turned out. On the night in question, the group had met, with the exception of one member who had been unable to attend due to car trouble. Alma had mentioned seeing a chauffeur during the dream who had appeared to notice her in the street and stare at her suspiciously. When Fodor tracked down the chauffeur, he easily remembered seeing a woman matching Alma's description, and when the two were later introduced in person, both. Gave positive identification of the other. Whilst many at the Institute saw this as evidence of astral projection, fodor remained skeptical, believing it could be a case of ambulatory amnesia. It was also during this period that Alma began to channel the dead spirit of a Persian artist called Bremba, who was the owner of a pet tiger. Alma routinely found herself covered in scratches and marks during these seances. At times, the welts were so deep and would stretch from her neck right down the length of her back. Before long, Fodor rejoined the seance circle. Les by this point was becoming rather vocal. Concerned by the fact that Alma was not doing well and was losing weight, he was convinced that something was feeding on her alarmingly. Alma herself began reporting feelings of wanting to cause people harm. Instead of backing off, Fodor doubled his efforts and suggested that Alma be subjected to an X ray before now entering the seance room. This was important to Fodor, who had begun to believe that Alma may be sneaking in items to the Institute internally. He believed she may have been waiting for when she had been searched and stripped and changed into other clothes to excuse herself before retrieving these items and hiding them. About her new set of clothing. The X ray of her pelvis and torso was, he hoped, his way of catching the fraud. On the same day that Horace Leaf, British lecturer and author in The Cause of Spiritualism and Psychic Research, published a journal about Alma's amazing mediumship, the X ray of Alma's torso showed two items pressed internally against her body. One item was in the shape of a pin and the other the shape of a heart. Foda was alerted to this finding, but withheld it from the rest of the circle, who watched on as Alma seemed to abort a heart shaped locket. The group were informed of this discovery sometime later and instructed to remain quiet so as to observe Alma further and examine whether these events were subconscious or not. Fodor did not want Alma to be made aware of their new focus or that they knew of her deceptions. Alma continued on, oblivious to the X ray discovery, reporting objects, suffering her attacks and channeling her spirit guide and reporting to Fodor strange dreams and experiences. In such discussions with Fodor, she reported feeling like she was being visited at night by a presence, forcing himself on her. On one occasion, she telephoned Fodor and gave a detailed account of being visited the night before by a bat entering her bedroom, where it bit her on the neck, leaving puncture wounds below her ear. When Fodor arrived with a doctor to examine the wounds, they observed two deep punctuations consistent with Alma's story and her story of a vampire like visitation. Fodor made sure not to use the word vampire when speaking with Alma, instead waiting for her to use the word vampire and incriminate herself. During the next seance. Alma's spirit guide, Bremer, suggested the investigators stake out Alma's bedroom at night, poised to kill the vampire bat upon its return. This, he assured the group, would free Alma's spirit, which was currently residing in the animal, and allow it to return to Alma. After careful consideration, Fodor suggested they take a softer approach and instead enlisted the help of Eileen Garrett, an Irish spirit medium and parapsychologist who was a friend of Fodor. The aim was that she would be able to perform a therapeutic seance. This meeting took place in Beverston Road, with Eileen calling upon her own spirit guide, Yuvani, to mediate between the investigators and Alma. Yuvani reassured Alma that she was a strong, talented woman, but warned her against the danger of fraud for her own sake and her reputation. Yuvani then addressed Les, telling him not to be jealous of his wife's mediumship or be threatened by her career as a medium. By now, Fodor was convinced what lay at the heart of all the activity was not paranormal or supernatural, but instead lay in Alma's unconscious mind. The original phenomena in the house, he suggested, could well be true, as there was much he could not explain. But he believed, as the investigation wore on, that Alma had begun to invent new activity to appease the investigators and keep the investigation going. He believed Alma had been using the seances as a vehicle to escape. He even considered that the more frightening stories of sleep paralysis, nighttime visitors and long faced men creeping out of her wardrobe were the product of repressed memories of sexual trauma from her youth. By now, the Circle had long had enough. They'd had enough of Alma, who they perceived as deceptive and her lies a personal affront. They'd also had enough of Fodor and his constant psychoanalytical approach. The group voted to terminate the investigation outright. Fodor found himself ousted from his position and all the members of the Circle rapidly beginning to distance themselves from him. Many requested that if Fodor should publish a final article on the case that he leave their names out of it. With little left in London, Fodor applied for a visa to America, where he believed the atmosphere would be more sympathetic to mediums and mediumships. Despite uncovering fraud over and over again, he still claimed that the matter of ghosts, poltergeists and mediumship was basically a psychological inquiry. Before leaving London, Fodor delivered a copy of his investigation to Sigmund Freud, who was living in Hampstead after his escape from Nazism. Freud replied to Fodor a few weeks later, supporting his approach and theories. For Fodor, he saw the letter as vindication for the mistreatment he had received from the Institute. On 17 March 1939, fodor sailed for New York. Six months before war with Germany was declared. Les and their son moved to a rural area of Devon where Les and Donald volunteered for the Home Guard. Alma herself volunteered as a nurse. Shortly after the war, the International Institute for Psychical Research closed its doors for good. Fodor continued to spend his time in America developing his own practices of psychoanalysis. He later wrote of poltergeist psychosis, a symptom of past memories and trapped trauma. In 1958, he published his material on the case of Beveston Road called The Trail of the Poltergeist. Whilst he changed the names of many involved, he laid out the investigation for all to see and further embellished his theories. When all was finished, it would seem, we'd been left with fraud and psychology. It's easy to forget, however, that in the beginning several people signed testimonies to perplexing phenomena that remained unexplainable even to Fodor. Despite his best efforts, Fodor was unable to dismiss everything entirely and was unable to find evidence of fraud for much of those first reports. What are we to make of his belief that took several years for him to shake off that much of the early phenomena was genuine. It is this that is the enduring mystery. Whoever and whatever we believe, the truth of much of the activity is now lost to history, a footnote of an era where war loomed on the horizon and ghosts spoke in darkened rooms. Alma and Fodor's story in many ways came together and echoed each other. Here were two individuals looking for acceptance and acknowledgement. Thanks for listening. See you next time, and bye for now.