Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (46 page)

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 seventeen-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 séance 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 “dematerialized” and then re-materialized).
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 séance 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 séance 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 séance 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 labeled “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” odor).
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 séance, 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 materialized 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.
Forbes [Fielding] apparently began cheating.
Fodor saw her producing a “breeze” during a séance 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 six, 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 sixteen, 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 seventeen she made a runaway marriage, had her first baby at eighteen, her second at twenty-one.
(This died of meningitis.) At twenty 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 twenty-four 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 the hospital they discovered she had a breast cancer, and the breast was amputated.
At twenty-six she had an attack of hysterical blindness which lasted for six weeks and, at twenty-seven, was in an accident on a steamer which was smashed against Margate pier.
At twenty-eight she aborted twins after being terrified when she found a dead rat in among her washing.
At thirty she had a kidney operation, and at thirty-two, 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 five 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, symbolize the hugeness of the man who assaulted her (an elephant), his savagery and beastliness, his scaliness (the nutshell), while the pottery symbolizes 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 inverifiable.

It would be a pity to leave this case without at least an attempt at an alternative explanation.
And the simplest and most obvious is that Mrs.
Fielding was a born medium.
Her many illnesses turned her into what nineteenth-century investigators liked to call a “sick sensitive.” Her vision of the black arm that tried to strangle her in bed may not have been a dream or hallucination, as Fodor thinks.
If she lived in a haunted house, then it seems likely that spirit entities drew energy from her, increasing her tendency to illness.
And later in life, she actually developed into a medium.
During the investigation, she often went into trances, and a “control” called Bremba spoke through her.
Sitting near a pub—and a church—in Coulsdon, she had a vision of an evil, leering face, which she continued to see for ten minutes.
“Bremba” later stated at a séance that the man she saw had belonged to the church, and had been hanged for interfering with small children.
“She was probably sitting on the spot where one of the outrages took place.” When Mrs.
Fielding came out of her trance, she could not speak or even whisper, then, as they all watched, strangulation marks appeared on her throat.
When she could speak she said: “I feel as if I am being pulled up”—as if she was suffering from the man’s hanging.
Later, when she was telling friends about it, the noose marks again appeared on her throat.
Fodor uses this as a support for his theory about the early rape; but it could, in fact be ordinary mediumship.
Bremba could have been telling the truth about the man hanged for sexual offenses against children.

Then why did Mrs.
Fielding begin to cheat?
There are two possible explanations.
One is that she was enjoying her new position as a subject of investigation.
She was a bored housewife, and, as Fodor says, the phenomena meant “a new interest, a new life for her.” This could be true; but
if
Mrs.
Fielding was developing genuine powers as a medium, then she had no need to cheat in order to keep them.
It sounds as if they had been latent since childhood; all she had to do was to allow them to develop.

The other explanation is that she was unconscious that she was cheating—which would explain the stone thrown in front of Fodor, with no attempt at concealment, and her subsequent denial.
I have mentioned the case cited by Roll in which a man being investigated was seen, through a two way mirror, to throw an object—yet a lie detector test supported his denial that he had done it.
We have seen that there is considerable evidence that poltergeists can enter the mind and influence people-mediums more than others.