The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Thornton Heath, 1938

Thornton Heath, Croydon, early 1938. Alma Fielding was 34, a housewife on Beverstone Road. She lived with her husband Les, a builder who suffered flashbacks from the First World War, their teenage son Don, an apprentice, and a lodger named George. Across London, Nandor Fodor was research officer at the International Institute for Psychical Research, described as its chief ghost hunter. He had already investigated Gef the talking mongoose and was also suing Psychic News for libel.

Friday 18 February 1938. Around midnight. A broken tumbler lay on the floor, then another glass flew past and splintered against the wall. The bulb had vanished from its socket, then was found on a chair, unbroken and still hot to the touch. Two coins, a shilling and a penny, struck George, and a six-fingered handprint appeared on a mirror.

By Saturday afternoon, reporters were in the house. An egg flew down the corridor. A pink china dog rattled to the floor. A sharp-bladed tin opener cut through the air at head height. A teacup and saucer lifted out of Alma's hands, the saucer spinning and splintering. A big chunk of coal narrowly missed two reporters before smashing into a wall.

A wardrobe was pushed over in a bedroom while no one was nearby. On Sunday 20 February the Sunday Pictorial put the story on its front page. "Ghost Wrecks Home. Family Terrorised."

Fodor's assistant Laurie Evans confirmed the first reports. From about March to July 1938, Alma sat at the institute's rooms in South Kensington before observers including Dr Gerald Wills, Countess Nora Wydenbruck, Elizabeth Severn and professional magicians. She was strip searched. Her hair, ears, nose, mouth and false teeth were inspected. She was sewn into a one-piece silver garment.

The apports came anyway. More than 50 in all, including a butterfly brooch, a stick of rhubarb, an ammonite, a beetle, white mice crawling out of her handbag and a live exotic bird. On a car journey, a terrapin materialised on her lap. Two blood-clotted punctures appeared on her neck. In trance she spoke in a deep voice as Bremba, a dead Persian.

Then Fodor used an X-ray machine in secret. It showed objects concealed in her underwear and inside her body. She was caught bringing an apport into the room concealed in an intimate place. An ancient terracotta oil lamp was claimed to come from the V&A Museum. The museum later confirmed it was not theirs.

Fodor did not decide she was simply a fraud. "The genuine and the fraudulent march in queer procession," he reported. He diagnosed a "poltergeist psychosis" and traced it to repressed childhood sexual trauma and to the death of her second child from meningitis. Some events, especially the movement of heavy furniture, stayed unexplained in his view. Sigmund Freud read the report and replied: "Your efforts to study the medium psychologically ... seems to me to be the right steps."

Psychic News ran the headline "Fodor Finds Sex in Mediumship". Fodor was dismissed from the institute, and its founder Arthur Findlay resigned in protest. Fodor later wrote the case up as "Mrs. Forbes" in On the Trail of the Poltergeist.

Alma retired to Branscombe in Devon, where she held séances. During one, a grandchild saw a Woolworths-labelled bell hidden in her sleeve. Relatives still say real events happened. Fodor's poltergeist theory, through Haunted People, fed into Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. In 2020, Kate Summerscale returned to his preserved case notes in The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story.