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THE HAUNTING OF ALMA FIELDING by Kate Summerscale

THE HAUNTING OF ALMA FIELDING

A True Ghost Story

by Kate Summerscale

Pub Date: April 27th, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-55792-0
Publisher: Penguin Press

An intriguing story of a man who vowed to find the truth within the murky world of psychical and paranormal research.

In her 2008 book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, Summerscale chronicled the true story of a 19th-century detective who was devoted to solving a child's murder in an English country house and earned nothing but trouble for his efforts. In her latest, Summerscale, who has also won an Edgar and a Somerset Maugham Award, introduces us to a similar protagonist: Nandor Fodor (1895-1964), a Hungarian ghost hunter who worked for the International Institute for Psychical Research. In the 1930s, as England was mourning its dead from World War I and flinching at the possibility of a second, the practice of spiritualism, which was rapidly gaining in popularity, needed an honest man to investigate its claims. When Fodor heard about Alma Fielding, an English housewife who reportedly teleported objects and channeled spirits, he embarked on the difficult mission to prove Alma’s claims while preserving his own integrity and reputation. Their relationship forms the heart of the book. Fodor, writes the author, “accepted that Alma might be both truthful and dishonest, gifted and fraudulent. As the pressure mounted for him to prove his case, he demanded ever more of Alma—e.g., stripping naked before a séance to prove she wasn’t hiding anything. She resented his demands but kept accomplishing confounding feats. Fodor began to suspect that Alma’s past was the key to the present. The narrative is an intimate portrayal of two people locked in a complicated relationship, and while some readers may tire of Summerscale’s painstaking documentation of Alma’s paranormal activities, her sense of humor and clear style keep the pages moving. Despite a lack of definitive answers, plenty of interesting questions linger at the end of this fascinating book.

An astute psychological study enlivened by dry wit, eccentric characters, and informed analyses of 1930s England.