We all love a poltergeist story

There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists seem to have gone quiet, or at least unreported; but before then they were everywhere. In 1938, poltergeists kicked off in Thornton Heath, Surrey, and a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and psychic investigator, Nandor Fodor, was alerted to strange happenings in the home of a 34-year-old housewife there.

The list of happenings is familiar in all poltergeist stories. Furniture moves, light fittings shatter, crockery, money, knick knacks, even small pictures are thrown through the air, sometimes seemingly aimed directly at individuals.

Alma Fielding and her husband Les were ill at the time the hauntings began, she with a kidney infection, he with haemorrhaging after tooth extraction, both with high temperatures. But when they recovered, the poltergeist did not depart. Neighbours got wind, and hung about outside, so inevitably the press was alerted too, and the Sunday Pictorial, noted for its popular shock-horror stories, sent reporters down. As Mrs Fielding opened the door to them

they saw an egg fly down the corridor, to land a few yards from their feet. As she led them to the kitchen, a pink china dog rattled to the floor and a sharp-bladed tin-opener cut through the air.

The Pictorial’s subsequent headline was: ‘This is the most extraordinary front-page story we have ever printed.’

Fodor was desperate to visit the house, to witness something — anything — as proof of the paranormal. He was a serious psychic researcher, trying to be open-minded; but he was gullible, as they all are. He befriended, and spent a lot of time with, Alma, witnessing numerous inexplicable incidents.