Thornton Heath Poltergeist

The Thornton Heath poltergeist case began in February 1938 at the Fielding family home in Thornton Heath, Croydon, south London. Alma Fielding, 34, a housewife, lived there with her husband Leslie, an interior decorator, their seventeen-year-old son Donald, and a lodger, George Saunders. After weeks of minor disturbances (knocks with no source, doors closing by themselves), objects began to move on their own and smash against the walls. Alma went to the press, and that is how the case reached Nandor Fodor, the Hungarian psychical researcher who was then research officer at the International Institute for Psychical Research in London. Fodor arrived at the house on 27 February 1938 and documented dozens of incidents over the following weeks, with surveillance and controls designed specifically to rule out conscious fraud.

The noisiest phenomena were the kitchen ones: plates, glasses, eggs and crockery hurtling out, and a heavy bronze fender thrown down the stairs. Invisible slaps to the faces of those present were recorded, and furniture that shook violently. But what made the case famous were the apports, objects that vanished and reappeared where they should not: old coins, brooches and lumps of gold quartz appearing from nowhere, and a brass-bound brush and a pill-box that materialised inside the Institute itself. There were living apports too, and they were what most unsettled the investigators: a white mouse out of her handbag, a goldfish, beetles emerging from under her gloves, and a terrapin that appeared on her lap in the middle of a car journey. Almost everything happened in Alma's presence, and it intensified when she was tense or under pressure.

Fodor watched the house for weeks with cameras, records and witnesses, and subjected Alma to increasingly strict controls, including searches of her clothing before sittings. His conclusion was not the one the spiritualists following the case expected: he held that the origin was psychological rather than spiritual, and put it down to a repressed trauma of Alma's own which, in his view, produced the phenomena without her being aware of it. He also recorded episodes in which the suspicion of fraud was plain. That reading cost him dearly: the Institute removed him from his post and the spiritualist press attacked him harshly. The activity faded away in April 1938. The phrase poltergeist psychosis, which is often used to sum up his theory, Fodor would coin years later, in 1951, and as part of a general explanation of the phenomenon rather than as a diagnosis of this particular case.

The case is one of the hinges of British psychical research: with it, the psychological explanation of the poltergeist gained ground on the spiritualist one. Fodor published his reports in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1938 and returned to the matter in his book On the Trail of the Poltergeist (1958); he also corresponded with Sigmund Freud about the material. His idea that the phenomena revolve around a focus person anticipated William Roll's later work on recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK). In 2020 the case came back to public attention with Kate Summerscale's The Haunting of Alma Fielding, which reconstructs both the events and the life of the woman at the centre of them. What was never settled is how much was fraud and how much was something else, and that question is as much a part of the case as the broken plates.