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March 28 - June 17, 2025
The word ‘poltergeist’, from the German for ‘noisy spirit’, had been popularised in Britain in the 1920s, but no one knew what poltergeists really were: hoaxes by the living; hauntings by the dead; spontaneous discharges of electrical energy. Fodor, having read the work of Sigmund Freud, wondered if they might be kinetic forces unleashed by the unconscious mind.
The nation’s phantoms were distractions from anxiety, expressions of anxiety, symptoms of a nervous age. Fodor
In the first methodical study of poltergeist attacks, in 1896, Frank Podmore of the Society for Psychical Research concluded that all of them were hoaxes, often perpetrated by mischievous, unstable working-class girls. But in 1911 the physicist William Barrett, also of the SPR, proposed that poltergeists were otherworldly forces working through a ‘radiant human centre’. Some researchers argued that they were the spirits of the dead, and others that they were ‘elementals’, primitive beings from a lower astral plane.
The psychical researcher Hereward Carrington had another theory, as he explained in a historical survey of poltergeist cases in 1935. Carrington argued that poltergeists were neither ghosts nor hoaxes. Rather, they were kinetic energies spontaneously projected by psychic individuals, typically adolescent girls.
he suspected that suppressed emotion always underlay the violence of a ghost.
Spiritualism was big business in Britain. Three-quarters of a million Britons had been killed in the Great War, and another quarter of a million in the influenza pandemic that followed. Thousands of spiritualist seance circles were established by the wives and husbands and sweethearts of the dead, their mothers and fathers and children. The faith offered ‘something tremendous’, said Conan Doyle, ‘a breaking down of the walls between two worlds . . . a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.’
In effect, a seance was a voluntary haunting, a summoning of ghosts,
‘Where the facts are fantastic,’ advised Dr Telling, ‘you should never be afraid of fantastic theories.’
Many Britons had turned to spiritualism in the 1920s because of the losses of war, and many were turning to it now for fear of a conflict to come.
table-turning, a method of communicating with the dead established by the founders of spiritualism, Kate and Maggie Fox, when their home in upstate New York was invaded by a poltergeist in 1848.
Traditional ghosts were relics of a romantic, aristocratic past. Poltergeists, by contrast, were a Woolie’s brand of phantom, vulgar copies of the ethereal apparitions of old. The Daily Mail described them as ‘altogether different from the honest, upright ghosts of decaying castles and ancient halls’. They were characterised by ‘low cunning and nasty intention’ and ‘mean, underhand ways’. The Hull Daily Mail lamented that the ‘old-fashioned family ghost’ was giving way to spirits ‘right at the other end of the social scale’.
But for a woman with psychic powers, different rules applied. A medium could undertake extravagant feats of mobility – astral projection, transfiguration, time travel, levitation – and in doing so escape the constraints of her gender and her class.
And when Les tried to stop Alma from going to Walton House, her poltergeist leapt back into action, enabling her to defy her husband, to follow her own path, to break free of her home.
‘If one brings children into the world,’ she said, ‘it is one’s duty to look after them.’
Eleonore Zugun, a thirteen-year-old Romanian girl whose visit to London in 1926 had popularised the term ‘poltergeist’.
The best spooky stories – or ‘twilight tales’, as she called them – existed on the cusp of fact and fiction.
Fodor knew that smells, touches and temperature changes could all be induced by expectation and suggestion, and the effects were contagious: when one person felt sick or dizzy or cold, others were more likely to feel the same.
Fake mediums, said the Countess, made capital ‘out of the profoundest emotions of their fellow-humans – out of their love and their fear’.
The incident spoke eloquently of Mrs Fielding’s instinct for retaliation which was, perhaps, the basic motive of all Poltergeist phenomena.’
‘It seemed to me possible,’ wrote Fodor, ‘that he attracted something to him, having opened the psychic door, and the thing would not leave him.’
Early impressions could ‘fester or poison the mind like some hidden abscess’,
Fodor was drawing on Freud’s argument that a disowned memory could return as a physical symptom: if the memory was put into words, the symptom might disappear.
trauma as a specific and almost universal cause of Neurosis,’
Freud held that the psyche was shaped by childhood sexual fantasies, which should not be mistaken for facts.
‘In cases of violent dissociation,’ she said, ‘there is almost always a sexual trauma in the background.’
A ghost was the sign of an unacknowledged horror. It indicated a gap opened by trauma, an event that because it had not been assimilated must be perpetually relived. There were no words, so there was a haunting.
Word-association tests were designed to tap in to a subject’s unconscious by revealing unusual connections or blocks.
that the poltergeist activity stemmed from Alma’s psychic disintegration, which in turn was rooted in a trauma that she had suffered in childhood.
The more powerless people felt, the more liable they were to find significance in ordinary events, to attribute
Freud’s protegé Ernest Jones gave a talk in north London that autumn in which he argued that the Germans had made the Jewish people a repository for their self-loathing.
Psychical scientists believed that there might be secret forces at work in the world around them, Freud observed, while psychoanalysts were convinced that the hidden energies lay within people themselves.
In 1941, the navy launched an inquiry into the Scottish medium Helen Duncan – who had once refused Fodor’s request to film her by infrared light – after reports that she had psychically intercepted a state secret about the sinking of a warship. The investigation uncovered deceit rather than ethereal espionage, and in 1944 Duncan became one of the last people to be convicted of fraud under the Witchcraft Act.
‘The Poltergeist is not a spirit,’ he said, ‘it has no identity, it brings no messages from the dead; it is a bundle of projected repressions bent on destruction and mischief because it is born out of rage and frustration.’
researchers in the psychology of supernatural belief have found a correlation between childhood trauma and adult experiences of paranormality. People who have been sexually abused as children are unusually likely to report supernatural events.
This strand of psychological gothic emerges again in Stephen King’s novels Carrie, in which a humiliated teenager’s suppressed feelings erupt in supernatural violence, and The Shining, in which ghosts are awakened by the obsessions of the living. It runs through books and films such as Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter, Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook
Perhaps there are still feelings for which only a ghost will do.
