{"id":1156,"date":"2020-11-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-29T21:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2025-01-02T11:43:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T22:43:23","slug":"the-haunting-of-alma-fielding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/11\/11\/the-haunting-of-alma-fielding\/","title":{"rendered":"The Haunting of Alma Fielding"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kate Summerscale<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bloomsbury<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, November 11th 2020<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On  February 20th 1938, London\u2019s Sunday Pictorial<\/em> featured the report of a poltergeist terrorising an ordinary, working-class Croydon family. Part of a series on the supernatural, the story included testimony from the householders, Alma and Les Fielding, their lodger George and Pictorial<\/em> reporters, all of whom witnessed various household items \u2013 coal, eggs, glasses and teacups \u2013 flying through the air as if propelled by an invisible force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article piqued the interest of journalist Nandor Fodor, chief ghost hunter at the International Institute for Psychical Research (IIPR). Established in 1934, the Institute took a scientific approach to the paranormal, and Fodor had spent four years travelling the country investigating paranormal activities ranging from haunting to spirit photography. Although these investigations exposed numerous frauds and established the Institute\u2019s scientific credentials, they left him profoundly disillusioned and off-side with the wider spiritualist community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite this, Fodor remained convinced that some people were capable of performing supernatural acts, possibly as the result of the energy generated by suppressed emotions and (sexual) desires. Seeing the Fielding\u2019s poltergeist \u2013 whose activity seemed to be centred around Alma \u2013 as the perfect test case, Fodor and the IIPR studied Alma\u2019s abilities for four months. During that time, she exhibited a broad range of psychic powers, from apportation (making objects materialise from thin air) to spirit-channeling and astral projection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More concerningly, her weight plummeted, mysterious wounds began appearing on her body, and she reported being attacked by vampires and raped by an invisible incubus. Fodor eventually discovered that many of her manifestations were hoaxes but refrained from publically exposing her lest it compromise her already fragile mental health:\u00a0 While some of her pretences were no doubt deliberate, he believed most were involuntary, carried out in a dissociative state that, alongside her manipulative behaviour, had its origins in childhood sexual abuse (a view that was endorsed by\u00a0 Freud, to whom he presented the case shortly before the great man\u2019s death).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Fodor\u2019s conclusions were so heretical they saw him fired from the IIRP, his book on Alma\u2019s \u2018poltergeist psychosis\u2019 inspired Shirley Jackson\u2019s novel \u201cThe Haunting of Hill House\u201d, <\/em>and he went on to a successful career as a psychoanalyst whose theories on traumatic memory are now widely accepted. But Alma\u2019s story also raises troubling questions about the interaction between the way individual and societal trauma manifest and are interpreted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on both Fodor\u2019s published works and mis-archived notes, which she describes as \u201ca historical record of the imagination\u201d, Summerscale situates the widespread belief in spiritualism during the 1920s and 30s in the context of the losses of WWI and the influenza pandemic on the one hand and the prospect of a second world war on the other. Given this background, it makes sense that Alma\u2019s psychological distress would manifest itself in psychical terms, just as in the moral panic of the 1980s, America gave rise to a surge of reports of satanic ritual abuse (similarly characterised by dissociative identity disorder and the \u2018recovery\u2019 of suppressed memories). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also describes Fodor\u2019s own background, his misgivings about the case and the various ways way he justified and\/or minimised how his own actions endangered his patient, ending her account with a reminder that, in cases of remembered trauma, it may be impossible to determine whether what is recovered is an act of imagination, memory or both. No doubt these troubled times will generate realities of their own. It remains to be seen what ghosts will arise from their ashes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/haunting-alma-fielding<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kate Summerscale Bloomsbury Otago Daily Times, November 11th 2020 On  February 20th 1938, London\u2019s Sunday Pictorial featured the report of a poltergeist terrorising an ordinary, working-class Croydon family. Part of a series on the supernatural, the story included testimony from the householders, Alma and Les Fielding, their lodger George and Pictorial reporters, all of whom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[326,421,340,368,18],"class_list":["post-1156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-326","tag-historical","tag-kate-summerscale","tag-non-fiction","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1156"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1972,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions\/1972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}