Dan Snow's History Hit - Ghost Hunter!

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

Kate Summerscale has written one of the Sunday Time books of the year exploring the world of poltergeists and ghosts in the build up to the Second World War. She came on the podcast to tell us all about Nandor Fodor – a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical research in London. From New York to Croydon he used all the gadgets of modern technology to record, X-ray, tape and photograph ghosts.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Everything's got a history, even ghosts, poltergeists, ghost hunting, it's all got a history. Kate Summerscale is a journalist and best-selling writer. She's won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. She's always been intrigued by poltergeists, I mean I guess it's hard not to be really. She came across the very remarkable Nandor Fodor, a Jewish Hungarian refugee in Britain a hundred years ago, who became the chief ghost hunter for the International Institute of Psychical Research in London. This is the story of a man who used all the modern contraptions, x-rays, lab reports, photographs to try and track down ghosts. And you'll be surprised to learn he was entirely unsuccessful. If you want to listen to all the back episodes of this podcast, yes, you can do so

only on History Hit TV. It's our special new history channel. We've got some big projects planned for Christmas, so you can test it out for free. You just enter the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get a month for free, and your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. So you can test it out for free. You just enter the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get a month for free and your second month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So head over to HistoryHit and do that as soon as you can. In the meantime, enjoy Kate Somerskull. Kate, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's a pleasure. I'm happy to be here. What is going on in the early 20th century with poltergeists and ghosts and talking to people who are dead? What's happening here? Well, I was very surprised myself. I sort of went looking for a true ghost story to tell.

And I was expecting to find one in the late 19th century, which is a period I associate with seances and spiritualism and haunted houses but I was surprised to find that there was a huge craze for seances and ghosts between the wars that sort of took root I think in the grief that followed the first world war and the flu pandemic of 1918, when lots of people began to gather in houses mostly for seances as a way of communicating with the dead, and I suppose communicating with their fellow bereaved. And so it became sort of big business in Britain in the 1920s, the seance and the spiritualist meeting. And gradually newspapers started to publish more and more stories about sightings of ghosts and telepathic incidents. It sort of chimed with some of the technological advances and scientific theories that were being experimented

with at the time. Was there something going on within science and psychology that made people think there was this new dimension at the time as well? Yes, since the 1880s, the early psychical researchers were interested in the subliminal mind as a possible source of supernatural activity or insight. So clairvoyance might be rooted in the subconscious in effect. And in the 20s and 30s, these ideas were developed by certain ghost hunters and researchers who were interested in Freudian ideas. Among them, this Hungarian called Nandor Fodor, who is one of the main characters in my story. He was a Jewish Hungarian emigre who came to London via New York, worked for Lord Rothermere in the first instance. But his real passion, that he trained as a lawyer and a journalist, was for the supernatural. And he was absolutely thrilled in the 1930s to get a job

as chief research officer or ghost hunter with the new International Institute for Psychical Research. And he spent the next four years checking out reports of supernatural sightings, trying to find himself a ghost and also developing his theories about what ghosts might be. And in particular, poltergeists, which he thought could be not the returning spirits of the dead, as the spiritualists believed, but possibly projections of energy from the subconscious mind. So the products of pain and trauma. And was he a scientist or a crank? He was a sort of sincere man, I think, and a clever man, and with a great sense of fun. He aspired to scientific methods and gathering objective

evidence and proving things in the way that a lawyer might in a court. And so I think his instincts were closer to those of a lawyer or a journalist than a proper scientist. He was more a sort of storyteller with a boundless curiosity. In the context of those times, he would have been seen as sort of eccentric in his passion for ghosts. But there were many people who took these ideas seriously. Among them, Sir Oliver Lodge, who was one of the pioneers of radio. Arthur Conan Doyle had been a great champion of spiritualism in the 1920s. And in a way, it was an aspect of being intellectually broad-minded rather than cranky or loony to be curious about these things. But he certainly had to defend himself against more sceptical types,

as well as to defend himself against the more credulous types who thought that he was a cynic in his quest for evidence of the supernatural found himself constantly uncovering frauds so he was a sort of ghost buster in effect like Harry Houdini he'd sort of investigate mediums and find that they were tricking him and would feel honour bound to expose them, at least to his institute. He went up to Dundee to look at a haunted house that was owned by a railway engineer there. And he took his infrared camera. And when he got back to London and exposed the film, he could see that the ghost was the railway engineer himself running around in a white sheet.

was the railway engineer himself running around in a white sheet. So he was a great gadget man, Fodor. So he loved using cameras and thermographs and voice recorders and gramophone records and film to investigate and hopefully prove, but unfortunately more often disprove the existence of the paranormal. You went and discovered all these amazing archives where you can see all this data from his phonographs and recording equipment and everything. That must be amazing. Yeah, I was really startled to find it because it's an archive in Cambridge of psychical research material from the early part of the century. But it wasn't an archive of the institute that he had worked for. So I thought I might just get a few snippets about him. I saw that his name appeared in their files a few times. And when I got there, I realised that

although it didn't say so in the catalogue, this large archive of the SPR also included all the International Institute of Psychical Research papers, which were compiled pretty much single-handedly by Fodor between 1934 and 1938 so it was almost sort of week by week chronicle of all his work and research where he went what he thought the photographs he took the claims that some of these people made and also the fear that was abroad in England at the time but also the fun of it. It was a great adventure for him and he used to take his daughter who was 13 on ghost hunts with him and his wife. He enjoyed the quest enormously. In that period in the UK there were people not only kind of going oh I reckon there's a ghost upstairs but actually genuinely perpetrating

hoaxes all over the place. Yeah, there's this sort of mixture. I mean, it did become potentially very lucrative. There was a lot of superstitious belief around and people who were setting themselves up as clairvoyants and fortune tellers could make money. And it was a route, especially for working class women, to exert a kind of power, make money and it was a route especially for working class women to exert a kind of power,

make money, command audiences. You had huge gatherings where a medium would sit on a platform at say the Royal Albert Hall and give messages from the spirits and forecast the future and at a time of great anxiety about the international situation that was very welcome and very lucrative. So there was a mixture, I think, of there being a sort of jumpiness that caused people to perceive things that were fairly benign as being more sinister and creepy, but also in some cases, active fraud. I think there was probably a lot in between as well, people who opened themselves to the spirits and were able to express themselves and say things that they didn't know themselves capable of, or to do automatic writing or drawing, a lot of the sort

of grey area between conscious and unconscious impersonations. What are some of the favourites that you came across? Because you mentioned there were sort of some quite celebrated examples of poltergeists. Any particular ones that stick in your mind? One that's very enchanting is the case of Jeff the Talking Mongoose on the Isle of Man, who was a big story in the newspapers in the early 30s. And this was a spirit, a sort of poltergeist spirit, supposedly attached to a teenage girl called Voirie and her family. She lived in a remote farmhouse with her mother and father. And over the years, many islanders claim to have seen or heard this talking mongoose, who is an extremely rude character and very boastful. He claimed to be able to speak many languages.

He swore at the family, stole things from their larder, gossiped about the other islanders. And various ghost hunters went out to the Isle of Man to try to catch sight of him. And there was a famous libel trial to do with the editor of The Listener, who was one of these fans of Jeff. And Fodor went, taking with him editor of The Listener, who was one of these fans of Jeff. And Fodor went, taking with him biscuits and chocolate for Jeff, and was very cross, having spent a week there,

that Jeff had not deigned to appear for him. Jeff. Amazing. So Jeff did not show up amazingly when the investigators appeared. How convenient. I know, yes. It was seen as a mark of his sort of general rudeness and lack of compliance. It fitted with his character for being very disobedient and mischievous mongoose. Tell me about Alma Fielding. Alma was a 34-year-old housewife from Croydon in 1938 when she got in touch with the Sunday Pictorial, when she got in touch with the Sunday Pictorial, who was running a series on the supernatural,

to report a poltergeist in her house. They had apparently been throwing things at the walls, sending cold breezes through the house, smashing eggs. And when the reporters turned up within hours of the phone call, they witnessed this poltergeist activity themselves. They saw saucers and cups and glasses smash themselves. And they saw that Alma was terrified and that the others in the house were also shaken. They were her husband, Les, a builder, their lodger, George, and their teenage son called Don. lodger, George, and their teenage son called Don. So they wrote up the story and it appeared the next day on the front page of the Sunday Pictorial, dubbed the most unusual story we have ever printed.

I'll bet it was, but there was no evidence found, I'm guessing. They claimed to have witnessed supernatural activity or activity that they couldn't explain in a product of deceit or human intervention. And once the piece was published, it was brought to the attention of Fodor, who'd been investigating a poltergeist in Bethnal Green a couple of weeks earlier. And he went down to Croydon to look for himself. And he'd taken several colleagues with him, including a doctor, a retired anaesthetist, another colleague who was a sound recordist and they too witnessed things that they simply couldn't explain that they you know swore that nobody in the house could have thrown this particular saucer or made a particular noise so they were alarmed but more excited.

They thought they might have stumbled on the case that would prove the existence of the supernatural and that could be studied as a way of locating the source of supernatural activity as well. What happened to this fashion? Why do you think the Brits fell out of love with ghosts and poltergeists and seances? Was it sort of modernity, science? What do you think it was?

I don't think it was science, because some of the curiosity about the supernatural was actually fuelled by scientific developments, both theoretical and all the... You know, the fact that there were telephones and even televisions. There were all these means of transmitting voices over time and space, and people in the 20s and 30s thought plausibly that why not also between worlds, the worlds of the living and the dead, for instance, or that the mind might be able to radiate thoughts. One of the things was that the mediums in the late 1930s, famously, and it was sort of often reported in the press,

were assuring everyone that there wouldn't be a war. And I think the fact that the war did break out slightly damaged their credibility. They'd been great, the most famous mediums who appeared on the big stages, their spirit guides told them that everything was going to be all right and there would be no world war. So these messages of consolation and reassurance that were typically coming from the spirit world proved to be unfounded. So I think they did get discredited, the big name mediums, and one very famous medium called Helen Duncan was investigated during the war for psychically intercepting state secrets and on investigation they found there was no evidence for that but there was

evidence for her having perpetrated various frauds so there was a general sort of unmasking that went on and the reality of war this sort of you, the real kind of violence that took place in the early 1940s outdid anything that the poltergeist could do. It was as if an end had been put to all the suspense and the kind of anticipatory thrills and fear and anxiety. And I think it just sort of cleared it out, really. and anxiety. And I think it just sort of cleared it out, really. And so, of course, you know, the interest in the supernatural and seances and fortune telling has not disappeared, but it certainly became a much less mainstream pursuit in the post-war years. It was much more esoteric and niche. What is your book called? It's called The Haunting of Alma Fielding. Very good luck with that.

I hope it enjoys as much success and prizes as your previous book. Thank you for coming on the pod. Thank you so much. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the history of our country. for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.