BERNARD WINCHESTER outlines a ghostly tale that includes Conan Doyle and Sigmund Freud, a talking mongoose from the Isle of Man, and the notorious Thornton Heath poltergeist
Coming to a cinema near you: Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, at the David Lean next Saturday
Next Saturday, Croydon’s David Lean Cinema is screening a curious film, a little-known British comedy called Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.
Quite…
Nandor Fodor was a paranormal investigator during that period between the wars when such matters held a grip on the popular imagination. The Roaring Twenties may have been a time of high jinks and economic boom (until the Crash), but in Europe they were very much a time of mourning for all those who had “gone before” in the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic that followed.
Consequently, there was a huge interest in the possibility of communicating with loved ones on “the other side”.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame and a resident of South Norwood, spent the 1920s, his last decade, travelling the world and lecturing to packed houses upon the survival of the soul. Even on the evening of the day that he heard of the death of his beloved only son, Conan Doyle went on stage as planned, telling his audience that he was certain that Kingsley was with him even as he spoke.
Ghost-hunter: Nandor Fodor
Conan Doyle attended innumerable séances and he claimed to have detailed knowledge of the after-life, the existence of which was as proven to him as any scientific fact. The newspapers frequently featured articles by or about him, as his latest activities and pronouncements always made good copy.
Other high-profile investigators, notably Harry Houdini and Harry Price, were equally in the public eye, whether for tirades against the spiritualists or for investigations of celebrated cases like the Borley Rectory, “the most haunted house in Britain”.
Second only to these in the popular mind was Nandor Fodor.
Fodor was a Hungarian Jew who had left his country to avoid persecution. In America he met Lord Rothermere, who was impressed by the young man’s acumen and immediately gave him a highly paid job as a correspondent with a special interest in Hungarian affairs.
As a result, he was able to live in some style with his wife and maid in north London. But Fodor’s his real interest was in the paranormal, and eventually he gave up his job to give his full attention to the cases then coming to light.
Strange presence: mongoose-owning Jessica Balmer
His approach was always extremely serious in assessing the evidence, which gave rise to comic possibilities in 1935 when he came to investigate Gef, the Isle of Man talking mongoose. Was the mongoose (voiced in the film by Neil Gaiman) the mouthpiece of the spirits, or was he part of a hoax dreamed up by his young owner (played in the film by Jessica Balmer)?
Fodor’s biggest case – yes, bigger than the talking Manx mongoose – was the Thornton Heath poltergeist, which has now come to prominence in Kate Summerscale’s 2021 book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding and the subsequent BBC radio serial.
It was 1938, only a year before the outbreak of war, yet news of Hitler was displaced from the headlines by the antics of the Beverstone Road poltergeist.
The Fielding family, neighbours, reporters and investigators were all shocked, entertained and even terrified of the actions of the entity which appeared to take over the otherwise innocuous suburban house.
Cups and saucers sailed through the air, breaking cleanly in two as they flew. 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. Hundreds of incidents were catalogued and assessed by Fodor and his assistant.
An ordinary house on Beverstone Road: or is it?
Alma Fielding was taken by Fodor to South Kensington to be studied in depth under controlled conditions by fellow members of the International Institute for Psychical Research.
After several months, Alma was caught introducing an “apport” into the room, concealed in an intimate place. Fodor brought his investigation to a close.
He wrote up his findings in a psychoanalytical case study published in 1956 as On the Trail of the Poltergeist. The book had been rejected as too sceptical by the Institute and by the Fielding family, who put pressure on Fodor to delay publication. But the book was taken by Fodor’s wife to the ailing Sigmund Freud, then living near the couple in Hampstead.
Freud was very taken by the book and wrote a glowing review, even stating that if he could have his time again, he would become a parapsychologist.
As for the Fielding case, sceptics seize upon Alma’s exposure as proof that the whole episode was an elaborate hoax. To those directly involved, though, there was no doubt that a malign entity was present, as they pointed to large number of unexplained incidents and the evident terror of the family: son Barry left to stay with neighbours while they continued.
Grandson Leslie (coincidentally in my class in Winterbourne School for several years),
now lives in Norway, but told Kate Summerscale in a telephone conversation that he hadn’t believed a word of the poltergeist story until his father casually mentioned that he had seen a back-scrubbing brush float down the stairs of the house, despite having never before expressed a belief in the supernatural, nor reported any paranormal experiences.
Haunted family: the Fieldings, including Alma, in the 1930s
“He said it in such a matter-of-fact way,” said Leslie, “that I believed it happened.”
After the Talking Mongoose film at the David Lean next Saturday, I will be giving a presentation about Fodor, Alma Fielding and the Beverstone Road poltergeist.
There will then be a Q&A session when I will be joined by paranormal expert John Fraser, who lives in a street in Thornton Heath where Alma and relatives of the Fieldings also lived. He discusses both the mongoose and the Fielding case in his recent book, Poltergeist! A New Investigation Into Destructive Haunting.
Read more: Poltergeist investigation discovers Croydon’s haunted bar
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