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Oct. 19, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:09
Edition 488 - Nick Pope, Gary Campbell & Kate Summerscale

Three guests - Nick Pope on the Calvine UFO "coverup," Gary Campbell on exciting Loch Ness Monster sonar findings and researcher/author Kate Summerscale on the deeply strange Alma Fielding "poltergeist" case...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for being part of my show.
You know, I am 12 shows away now from Edition 500 and I think we need to be doing something special for that.
I don't know quite what.
Who knows what the world will be like when we get to Edition 500, which should be sometime around Christmas or New Year.
But I think we need to be marking it in some way.
I mean, if I said we're going somewhere to do a remote broadcast, the probability would be that for reasons of coronavirus restrictions or something else, we wouldn't be able to do it.
So I'll make a plan.
If you've got any suggestions, please go to the website designed by Adam, my webmaster, who does a great job, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me a message from there.
Put in the subject bar edition 500.
And any thoughts and suggestions about what and who we might do on edition 500, gratefully received.
I can't believe that we're nearly getting there.
And autumn continues here.
I'm not even going to talk about that.
restrictions for coronavirus continue here as they do in many countries, and the world seems to be upside down and inside out, in the words of Diana Ross and her great hit of that title from many years ago, which makes me sound It makes me sound like a child of the 80s.
I definitely was starting my career then, so I probably was.
Now, what we're going to do on this show, a few things from my radio show that I wanted to translate here, I wanted to put on here for you.
The Calvine UFO case in Scotland we're going to talk about.
Nick Pope will be on about that.
Because there is some seemingly imposed secrecy about this case from 1990.
Photographs of an object spotted being shadowed or followed or even chased by a couple of military jets seem to have been spirited away and we are not going to get to see them.
They're not going to be released for about 50 years, they say.
Nick Pope was working at the Ministry of Defense in those days, now of course an independent investigator.
We'll get his thoughts on that.
Then we'll talk about a great story to do with the Loch Ness monster.
Got a lot of time for stories about the Loch Ness Monster.
I love them.
Personally, I believe that Nessie exists.
And something that's happened recently suggests even more that she might.
There has been a sonar reading of something large and strange 500 feet down in the Loch.
So we'll be talking with Gary Campbell, the keeper of the Register of Official Loch Ness Monster sightings about that.
A Loch Ness Monster enthusiast through and through is Gary, so we'll talk to him about that.
Also, we'll hear my longer interview, conversation with Kate Somerscale about the haunting of Alma Fielding.
Now, this book that Kate has written, after a lot of research into a very famous poltergeist case, is amazing.
I am not aware, you might be, of any other case, anything like this.
So Kate Summerscale is going to be the third guest on this edition, and I wanted to put this on a podcast so we have it here in perpetuity, as they say, forever.
Well, as long as I keep the website going, let's put it that way.
So, Kate Summerscale, third guest from my radio show on this edition, and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, a real life, very strange, maybe possession, maybe poltergeist, or as you will hear, maybe something else, case, on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Just a couple of shout-outs to do a quick one.
Paul, thank you for your email, Paul.
Good to hear from you.
Barry in Livam.
Nice to hear from you, Barry.
All thoughts noted.
Charles asks me this, just finally.
He wants to know if I can do transcripts of the sound of these shows.
In other words, put them down in print.
I can't actually, for budget reasons, do that at the moment, Charles.
It is something that I'm looking at for the future, though.
If I do it, and I think I have said this before, I would want to do it properly.
And I did try out one transcription service.
And what came back was almost like a comedy script.
It bore very little relation to what I'd actually put on the podcast.
So I don't want to use an automatic transcription service that is like that.
I want one that is accurate.
So let's see how it goes.
And maybe in the future, when funding allows, I know I've said this a lot over the years, we'll be able to do that, Charles.
I hope you understand.
Okay, first item on this show is the Calvine UFO case from Scotland and the thoughts of the man who used to be the go-to guy at the Ministry of Defence about UFOs, Nick Pope, now an independent investigator in the United States.
Here's what he told me.
There's some dispute, for example, about whether the Ministry of Defence did or did not return the photographs and the negatives to the newspaper.
But one thing is for sure, the trail went cold.
The pictures were never publicly published.
So either the MOD kept them or somehow, perhaps using one of the old D notices, they scuppered publication of any article about this or certainly the publication of the photos.
30 years ago it is.
It is surprising if these photographs were anywhere in the public domain, if anybody had them in other words, that nobody would have leaked them in the last three decades.
Yes, it is.
My understanding is that I don't want to use the word threatened, but certainly I think the witnesses were, for whatever reason, made to feel a little bit uncomfortable about the situation.
And I hasten to add, look, I'm not guilty before you and your listeners accuse me of dirty tricks here.
I joined the MOD's UFO program in 1991.
This case was 1990, so I was not the person who conducted the investigation into this.
But I do understand that the witnesses, I don't know whether a conversation was had or quite how it played out, but my understanding is, yeah, they were scared off, shall we say.
And why would Such a conversation be held?
In other words, what are we to assume is on these pictures?
Well, I think the simple answer to your question is something that the government didn't want people to see.
Now, the $64,000 question, of course, is: does that mean it was some secret prototype aircraft, as some believe, or that it was something else?
I mean, as the UFO community would say, a literal UFO, perhaps an extraterrestrial craft?
I mean, you could say that in either event, the government probably wouldn't want a picture of it on the front page of the national newspapers.
But you say in the newspapers over this weekend that you have seen these photographs at the time or around the time, and they shock you?
Oh, absolutely.
They shocked all of us.
Our standard line, as you know, was this little sound bite we had, that UFOs were of no defense significance.
And then, of course, we got this set of photos, and there were six of them.
And one of them, we had an enlarged poster-sized copy on our office wall for years.
And colleagues in the defense intelligence staff had one.
I mean, the intelligence community imagery analysts had them.
I mean, they were all over the place.
And all of us were staggered by it.
And there was not much middle ground with it.
I think in the article, in the feature that I wrote for The Sun over this past weekend, I said I once went to a briefing about this.
And the intelligence, the military intelligence briefer pointed to one side.
And he said, you know, this picture, he said, it's not the Americans.
He pointed his finger the other way.
He said, it's not the Russians.
And then he pointed straight up and he said, and that only leaves one other option.
And we all right.
So, you know, there is a strong possibility that whatever is on these pictures that you've seen and I haven't is something that is inexplicable.
Yes.
And by the way, some Ministry of Defense files about this have already been declassified and released.
I know the news story is about the delay in getting files, maybe unredacted files, hard copy files, not digitized that would have all the original details.
But some papers on this have already been declassified and released.
And there is in the public domain a poor quality black and white photocopy of a line drawing of one of the images.
And the funny thing is, it looks almost cartoonish, but line drawings, it's a standard part of an imagery analyst's work in the intelligence community.
You do these line drawings.
It helps with all sorts of things.
I don't think I can discuss the details because they're, I think, classified still.
But essentially, the MOD put this out.
And of course, everyone laughed.
And they said, what, that's the best photo you've got of a UFO.
And of course, it was a photocopy of this line drawing.
And it was almost like deliberate tactic to make the whole thing look faintly ridiculous.
But yeah, I've seen the original.
And the funny thing was, even on Facebook, when I put this article up this weekend, an old friend, an MOD colleague who worked in the same section, kind of popped up and said, oh, I remember that.
And I asked, you know, is the colorized graphic artist recreation that we did, does that capture what was on the office wall?
And she said, oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, this gets even more mysterious because apparently efforts were made to trace the planes that were adjacent to or shadowing this so-called craft.
And those efforts apparently drew a blank.
This all gets stranger and stranger.
It does.
And of course, it's ridiculous to assume that the Ministry of Defence couldn't trace two military aircraft.
We knew what they were from looking at the pictures.
They seem to be Harriers.
There are only a limited number of squadrons in the UK and with other nations that have that.
Through just logical deduction and the fact that we maintain 24-7, 360-degree radar coverage of everything in the UK, of course we could have found out and probably did what it was.
As I say, my predecessors undertook this investigation, not them.
And if they say that the aircraft couldn't be traced, well, I have to accept that that was the line that they put out.
I mean, obviously, you and listeners can decide for yourselves how likely that actually is.
So as ordinary human beings who read the news, we can only assume that this was perhaps an extraterrestrial craft of some kind being monitored or pursued by two military planes, or it was some kind of military technology of a secret nature, although how that would need to be kept secret for so long, I don't know, but who knows, of a secret nature that was being shadowed or followed or escorted by military planes.
Those seem to be the only two possibilities, and the second one seems less likely than the first.
I think I'd agree your assessment there.
I think that's fine.
And you could say, well, maybe the UFO program wasn't briefed in on this project.
But of course, a lot of people within the Ministry of Defense were trying to get to the bottom of this.
And of course, one has to say that if this really was some secret prototype aircraft, surely some quiet word would have been had somewhere along the line and the whole thing would have been dropped.
The documents would never have been generated.
The picture would never have been allowed to be hung up on our office wall for two or three years.
Okay, so when Do you think?
When is it likely that we will now get to see these pictures that somebody somewhere is so keen we shouldn't see?
Well, according to the media story, it's the year 2072.
But my best assessment is the answer to your question is never.
I don't think these, even if the file in its full unredacted, undigitized, hard copy glory, even if the file is opened, I don't think you'll find the colour photos in there.
I suspect that, and clearly, look, somebody's done a cleanup job, I think is the polite way of putting this sort of thing.
And you're not going to, whether it's 1st of January next year, as the UFO community had hoped, or 2072, as seems to be the latest theory, I don't think whenever that file's opened, those color photos are going to pop out and everyone's going to go, oh, there they are.
No, I think they've gone.
Or I say gone.
They've either gone or they're so well hidden that the media and the public aren't going to get them.
Would your best assumption about those photos which you have seen be that this was probably something extraterrestrial?
I don't know.
I mean, I honestly, I couldn't call it, but I think your two theories are realistically the only viable ones.
There's no middle ground with this one.
It's not a hoax.
Sure, people hoax photos, but the full resources of the intelligence community, imagery analysis community were brought to bear on this.
So it's not a hoax.
It's not, you know, something like this isn't a weather balloon or Chinese lanterns or anything.
It is either extraterrestrial, as the UFO community, I think, believe and hope, or some deep black program that for some reason was not immediately notified, as in, you know, stop digging into this to the UFO program and others, but allowed to run for a bit and then got out there and then was kind of put back in the box a little bit.
Strange story, Nick.
Indeed.
Nick Pope, and we will talk about the Calvine case, I am sure, more in the future.
And by the way, if you're in Scotland, I've been trying to get a definitive pronunciation of this place.
And I know, you know, most places in Scotland and I can pronounce them, Kirkardy.
And there is a place called Greenock, which a lot of people in the south call Greenock.
It is Greenock.
But I'm not sure whether this is Calvine, Calvine.
I don't think it's Calvine or Calvin.
So please let me know.
But I think it's Calvine.
So we'll talk about that when we get more information about it.
But that's a fascinating one.
I wonder who it is and where they are that they don't want these photographs to get into my hands and your hands.
What's on them?
It makes me want to see them all the more, you know?
Gary Campbell is the official keeper of Loch Ness Monster sightings, the register of them.
A great Loch Ness Monster enthusiast and advocate is Gary Campbell.
This story I spoke to him about, it was in the Scottish Daily Record and other newspapers.
And the headline was, is Nessie about to be discovered?
Loch Ness Breakthrough.
Paddy Power, the bookmakers, they cut their odds on the discovery of the Loch Ness Monster because of a sonar sighting way down in the lock, a 30-foot shape detected on sonar about 500 feet down.
I spoke with Gary Campbell about that.
Gary, the Loch Ness monster or something weird being caught on sonar.
Sonar, that's a big story, isn't it?
It is, yes.
And this was taken by a man who really knows the water, Ronald Mackenzie.
He's been plowing Loch Ness in his boat for a good number of years.
And these contacts aren't unusual.
They're not very common, but they're not unusual.
But this particular one, the depth at which it was taken would rule out most of the obvious explanations.
And I think that's what makes this one really exciting.
But they've used sonar on the loch before, haven't they?
And what's different with this one?
I mean, there has been a lot of sonars ever since sonar was really invented.
People have used it at Loch Ness.
And the most famous example of it was in 1987.
There was a large operation called Operation Deep Scan, where essentially a curtain of sonar from a series of boats strung across the loch went down the loch.
And they found something similar to this, but it wasn't as deep.
This one is deep down.
It's 500 feet down.
And bearing in mind, Loch Nest is twice the depth of the North Sea in places.
So it's a really deep loch.
And fish don't, there are some fish that live right at the bottom, Arctic char, but most of the fish and other creatures live near the surface.
So this one being so far down but not actually at the bottom makes it very unusual.
And also the size of it, because you can tell the size of the creature from the sonar contact.
And 30 feet long, that's big.
So if you get something that's 30 feet long, it's 500 feet down in Loch Ness.
And then when they looked again, it had gone.
Well, we've got a really good sort of chance that this might have been Nessie or one of her family at that particular point in the log.
And clearly, pretty nifty going away so soon the second time they looked it wasn't there.
Is there any chance this could be some kind of false reading?
It does happen from time to time.
The sceptics and I suppose people who are sonar experts say that sometimes you get sonar echoes coming off each of the walls because it's essentially a long, narrow, deep lake.
So it's like a valley that's been filled with water.
And if the sonar goes in a certain way, it can bounce off the side and give a false reading.
Although modern sonar and the type that's used in the boats like Ronald's cruise log nest, these are fish finding sonar.
What they use in log nest, the two cruise companies, is the same technology that fishing boats use to find shoals of fish around the world.
So it's well-proven, good technology that doesn't normally give false readings because of what it's used for in a commercial sense.
So a 30-foot something down there.
What else Can be done then?
Are there going to be more sonar scans to look out for this thing again?
The problem with it, Howard, is that you can do a sonar scan, and as I said, Operation Deep Scan, which was the main one that was done all these years ago, and did pick up contacts like this, but it's just a contact 500 feet down in Loch Ness.
Nobody knows what it is.
And of course, the situation is with sonar, if you think about it, that if something does live deep down in Loch Ness, which myself and others are definitely convinced it does, then because the loch is so dark, I mean you go 20 feet down in Loch Ness, you can't see your hand in front of your face because of all the peat in the water, then that creature is going to move around using sound.
It's not going to use sight, it's going to use sound to move around.
Of course, if it gets pinged by a sonar, a sonar beam, it's going to move and it's going to move very, very quickly because it's not going to know what this noise is.
So therefore, even if you actually used sonar to then, and then you had a guy behind it with a big net, for example, it's almost certainly going to be gone because it's going to move very rapidly.
Chances are you would always be one step behind it unless you caught it by chance.
And you know, as far as we know, it will use sonar to navigate in that dark place.
Well, that would be the common sense view on it, that it must do because it can't use sight.
I think you've actually come up with a really good statement there that we would be one step behind it.
I think the problem is we've been one step behind it for almost 1,500 years.
And that's really why the Loft Ness Monster is such an enduring, I suppose, an enduring mystery and an enduring enigma that people like myself and others and lots of people around the world really want to get an answer to.
But this just adds another, as I think we've said before in your programme, this is just another piece of unexplained evidence.
It's another layer of mystery.
That's what it is.
But I'll tell you, Gary, just quickly, what fits in with this is that DNA survey that was done in the last year or so by that guy from New Zealand who came up with a lot of logical findings, but also in the soup of DNA was a lot of EO DNA.
And, you know, that was a suggestion that there might be something lurking down there.
And I wonder if that is one of the reasons why the bookies are so excited and they've cut the odds.
The bookies do this every single time, if you look at it.
I'd fair play to Paddy Power and anybody else that does this.
It's a good, I mean, here's some free advertising for them.
Every time that there's a decent sighting in Loch Ness, it's like it's either Paddy Power or Bette 365 or William Hill for years was like, oh, odd slash to Nessie being found.
What you'll find is they'll quietly go up in December and then they'll be able to be slashed again next year.
So what's happening here is we're one step behind the Loch Ness monster.
They're generally one step ahead of the rest of us.
Yes, but you see, the Loch Ness monster, I don't think, can always be one step ahead of you.
You know, as may have been proved by this sonar, the Loch Ness monster can occasionally miss a step, Gary.
I think that's what we've got to count on.
Yes, and that's what I'm certainly hoping for, and lots of others are.
And, you know, with technology improving, I mean, the sonar is improving all the time.
Who knows, we might be able to get proper images of something 500 feet down in the loch.
I'm sure that technology exists somewhere around the world at the moment to do that.
And if somebody would like to bring that to Loch Ness, it would be fantastic.
And if you tie it in with, say, hydrophones as well, listening in Loch Ness, which can be problematic because of the boat traffic, because it is, of course, part of the Caledonian Canal connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the North Sea.
But improvements in technology should actually mean that at some point, hopefully in the not too distant future, we actually start to get some answers.
Gary Campbell, and now settle down for this.
The fascinating, chilling, and disturbing story of Alma Fielding.
This is a story from a London suburb in South London, in fact, not far from Croydon, Fontenheath.
And the era is the 1930s, so just before the Second World War, and indeed through that period and afterwards.
A woman called Alma Fielding apparently had a poltergeist that acted around her.
All the phenomena, disturbing as they were, were exhibiting themselves somehow because of her.
It was one of the most bizarre cases that I think any investigator of these things has ever had to look into.
So we'll hear this amazing story that has been intensively and extensively researched by Kate Somerscale.
I think you're going to like it.
So settle down for the haunting of Alma Fielding.
There is a question I want to pose, and maybe we will get the answer to it during this hour.
See what you think.
The question is this.
Can people influence events?
Is the paranormal sometimes heavily influenced by individuals, rather than paranormality influencing the individuals, if you see what I mean?
Which way round is it?
Can people sometimes make things happen by means that we don't fully understand?
Now that question, and that statement that's a little rough, but I knocked it together before I came on air, ties very much into the story we're about to tell you, based on the book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
Kate Somerscale, author, has spent the last few years investigating the case of Alma Fielding, which on the face of it is a 1930s UK poltergeist case, in an era when we were just starting to get excited by reports of such things.
But it turned out that this case was much, much more, disturbing in many ways, but much more than your average run-of-the-mill round-the-corner poltergeist.
Kate Somerscale has written the book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
She's online to us now.
Kate, thank you for doing this so late at night.
Good of you.
Oh, hi, Howard.
It's a pleasure.
Now, this case, I get the sense from the moment I read the introduction and the foreword to your book, fascinates you clearly.
Yes, I came across it in a book now out of print written in the 1950s by the man who investigated the case, the ghost hunter in question.
And what really gripped me about it was not just the characters involved and the weirdness of the phenomenon, but the way That he, Nandor Fodor, the ghost hunter, was so interested in the connection between the paranormal and psychology, human psychology, and the ways in which they might intersect?
Because even today we tend to think, you know, if people say, oh, something threw a vase across the room, we tend to think it's a hidden hand.
But if you look at cases like the famous Enfield poltergeist case, which was much later than the one we'll be talking about, that was in the 1970s, it appeared that the activity centered around a teenage girl, around a girl going through that stage where, you know, your hormones are all over the place and sometimes phenomena are tied into young adolescent children.
But there have been very few cases where that link has been so clearly made.
And this is an astonishing connection.
I think we need to handle it in this way so that we can map our way through it, if this is okay with you.
We'll talk about the principal characters in this and the events that happened around Alma Fielding.
Then we'll talk about the investigation.
Then we'll do a bit about your conclusions and what happened next.
Does that work for you?
Yeah, sure.
That sounds good.
Okay, well, let's start with this then.
Most obvious question, but then that's me all over.
Obvious questions.
Who was Alma Fielding?
Alma was an ordinary, apparently ordinary, working-class housewife who lived in Thornton Heath in Croydon, South London, with her husband, Les, who's a builder, their son, Don, who's 16 years old and worked with his father, and a lodger called George.
And Alma was, she was prey to illness.
She had been throughout her life, and she suffered from very severe kidney infections, among other things.
And in February 1938, she fell ill with a kidney infection.
And as she was recovering, her husband, Les, was also in the sick bed with her, having had all his teeth extracted to be fitted with false teeth and with hemorrhaging from his mouth.
So they were both in a very fragile state.
And one night, just before midnight, weird things started happening in their bedroom.
Right.
And in fact, I can read, if you don't mind, just a few lines from the book about that.
If this is the genesis of it, as I read in the book.
Okay.
Towards midnight on Friday, Alma and Les were trying to sleep when they heard something shatter nearby.
Alma turned on the bedside lamp.
She and Les saw shards of a broken tumbler on the floor.
And then suddenly, another glass flew past and splintered against the wall.
They waited, terrified.
The room fell quiet.
Put the light out, said Les.
Let's see what happens.
When Alma turned off her lamp, a dank wind moved through the room, lifting the Ida down.
And that's just the start of it, isn't it?
Yeah.
And when they started sort of screaming when these activities continued, and the lodger, George, and their son Don both came to the door, and then they were hit by, or they had to dodge flying objects themselves.
So everyone in the house was witness to this activity.
Right, and did this stuff start out of a...
It just started suddenly.
Yes, I think that's the case.
I think Alma had had some sort of eerie feelings and sort of events when she'd been on her own over the previous few weeks and months.
But there'd been no other witnesses and she ascribed them to just sort of delusions or funny terms or whatever.
And she didn't make much of them, but this was suddenly a sort of explosive event in-house.
And it carried on the next morning when she went down to the kitchen.
And so she was very frightened.
And she telephoned the Sunday Pictorial, which seems an attention-seeking thing to do.
But on the other hand, what do you do when there's a ghost?
And the Pictorial had been running a series on the supernatural and had asked readers to get in touch with their own experiences.
So obviously, this was manna from heaven for the Sunday Pictorial.
They were round there like a shot.
They were there by early afternoon, yes.
A photographer and a reporter.
And sure enough, as soon as the door was opened to them, it all kicked off again.
An egg flew down the corridor.
As they were having a cup of tea with the family, a piece of coal ricocheted across the room and smashed into the wall.
And they were convinced that nobody in the house could have been secretly throwing things around.
They were keeping an eye on them all.
And they were apparently genuinely alarmed and rushed back to the paper and got a story in by the next morning.
Well, I have to say they had reason to be genuinely alarmed because, you know, quite often I've had experts on the paranormal tell me that ghostly phenomena, things that throw themselves around the place, those who seem to be possessed, usually nobody is hurt.
But in this instance, there was another saucer that appeared to just shatter and explode in her fingers while these journalists were there, sliced into her thumb.
She was pouring with blood, and this gash in her thumb had to be bandaged while the reporters were looking on.
Then during all of that, they heard smashing in the kitchen a wine glass that escaped from a locked cabinet and shattered on the floor.
So whatever was around her, it would have been clear to the reporters that it was putting on a performance for them.
Yes, that's true that somehow the presence of others almost sort of activated this particular poltergeist.
And it seemed sort of genuinely violent, that although the objects that were Being moved and were breaking were fairly sort of banal, humdrum, domestic objects, chunk of coal, bake-like clock from upstairs, a blue vase.
The things that were happening to them were very destructive.
And so there was this weird kind of combination of this sort of suburban ornaments and crockery and this very aggressive vandalism that was being done to them.
1938, this was a time when a lot of people's first port of call would have been the local priest or vicar.
Did they try that route?
Or, as you said, they went straight to the Sunday Pictorial?
Yeah, there was also a great popularity of spiritualism at the time.
And so they went first to the Sunday Pictorial, but in the course even of that first day, they got visits from local mediums and clairvoyants offering to exercise the house.
So it seems as if this spiritualist movement was much more sort of energetic and engaged with these happenings than the traditional Church of England and the Anglican Church.
So yes, they held a seance with a couple of local women who claimed to be mediums who said that the house was haunted by an old man and that babies were buried in the garden.
And they also found a clairvoyant palm reader outside who called himself Professor Morissone, who said that Alma Fielding was a very strong carrier of ectoplasm, which was a popular idea at the time that mediums had this kind of spiritual material inside themselves with which they could give form to spirits.
And of course there are many celebrated photographs of mediums spewing out this stuff that looks like cotton wool that is claimed to be ectoplasm.
Yes, yes.
So it was a big, I mean it was a huge craze in the 20s and 30s, really, the seances, the mediums, the idea that mediums could physically materialize objects and figures, not just give voice to them, but actually embody things.
And so the poltergeist was a kind of extension of that in a way.
The idea that maybe Alma was radiating invisible matter from her body and causing objects to fly around was one of the theories that was put forward by the psychical researchers.
And how did she and Les and George manage to live a normal life in Thornton Heath in the midst of all of this hullabaloo?
Well, it's mysterious.
I mean, the only person who got really, who was scared enough to move out was their son, Don, who quite reasonably, on the Saturday after the initial poltergeist attack, decided to go and stay with some friends of the family's who lived a few blocks away.
And he stayed away for a while.
He claimed that he didn't believe in spiritualism and thought it was all bunk, as he put it, but he was very scared.
Whereas George and Les stayed put, and as did Alma.
And I think that Alma quite quickly accepted that the poltergeist had something to do with her, and indeed that it would sort of accompany her.
It wasn't attached so much to the house as to her being.
Nothing happened unless she was around.
And so maybe the men stayed by her out of a sense of chivalry, of loyalty, really.
They didn't want to leave her on her own with this thing.
And as it emerged, as I discovered sort of reading, there was a fairly complicated relationship between the three of them.
Well, indeed, I mean, I had to do a speed read on the book, but there were indications later in the book that she was more than fond of George, the lodger.
Yes, and it seems, and she talked about Les being impotent, and she seems to have been very angry with him in various ways, and he curtailed her freedom and others.
So George was sort of her confidant, and there was certainly a very intense attachment between the two of them.
And she said George, she later divulged that George was, she put it in love with her, but always a gentleman.
So there was definitely some sexual tension there.
So a lot of angst in that house, in the suburbs.
Yes, certainly.
And, you know, because it is the suburbs, because it's Thornton Heath near Croydon, what did the neighbours think as far as you know?
Well, I know that there was straight away a lot of interest in the case and that even within 24 hours, a huge crowd had gathered outside the house and children were throwing stones at the windows.
The crowd was big enough.
I mean, it was reported in the local press as well as the national press.
The crowd was big enough that it was thought necessary to dispatch police officers to protect the house.
And again, this was part of the great fascination with ghosts and poltergeists of that period, that something similar had happened in Bethnal Green in East London just a couple of weeks earlier.
And a crowd of, I think, 2,000 people had gathered outside the house that was supposed to be haunted in Bethnal Green.
So it was almost a kind of street entertainment to go to these haunted houses and see if you could see anything.
And in the meantime, this case created a media frenzy.
We know that.
With people seemingly queuing up to tell their stories.
Yeah, well, various people, friends and family, trooped in over the days that followed and had stories of their own to tell about what they'd seen or what their theories were about the poltergeist.
So, yeah, friends, neighbours, and the policeman who was guarding the house claimed that the family's doormat had risen off the ground and wrapped itself around his head.
So it was as if everyone was, you know, everyone wanted a piece of this story.
And there's a slightly sort of hysterical atmosphere about the whole thing.
And when the psychical researchers got involved, the ghost hunters from London, they too all sort of poured into the house and watched and listened and made their own observations and saw their own supernatural events.
Right.
And this is the point at which a man called Mandor Fodor comes into this because he was an accomplished psychical researcher from London, but was well known as a journalist in America, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was originally a Jewish-Hungarian lawyer who then emigrated to New York and became a journalist.
And he was brought to London on the staff of Viscount Rodomir, who was great owner of media mogul, Press Baron.
But Fodel's real passion was the supernatural.
He absolutely loved looking for ghosts, reading about psychical research, studying stories and trying to work out the truth or the veracity of various supernatural claims.
Really interesting character.
You say in the book, and I quote, Fodor traveled the country to investigate hauntings, levitations, automatic writing, drawing, spirit possession, glossolalia, if I'm pronouncing that properly, that's speaking in tongues, telepathy, psychometry, materializations, and spirit photography.
He was well into all of this.
He was, yes.
And it was, and in the 1930s, he got his dream job when he was appointed chief research officer or ghost hunter for a newly founded organization in London called the International Institute for Psychical Research, which essentially funded all these trips, these investigative trips around the country.
But when Nandor Fodor heard about this, sorry to talk over here, but when Nandor Fodor heard about all of this and was fascinated by this like he's fascinated with all the other things, he didn't go down there himself, did he?
No, I was mystified by that.
But he chased the story as soon as he read about it.
He wrote to the editor of the Sunday Pictorial asking for the address because the address wasn't given in the paper.
But I think he must have been tied up on the afternoon, the first afternoon that he got the address.
But he sent his research assistant in the first instance just to see whether it was a sort of bona fide haunting, whether it was worth investigating, because he'd come across a lot of frauds.
So this young man, Laurie Evans, who was new to the International Institute but worked in the film industry, he went down and he was absolutely amazed by what he saw.
He saw a glass spring out of Alma Fielding's hands and hit the ceiling and shatter.
And he also saw that he noticed a blue vase in Alma's son's bedroom upstairs, which a few minutes later he saw smashed on the floor of the hall, even though there was no one upstairs and Alma was in the kitchen at the time.
So he went back to the Institute saying he was convinced that this was a genuine case and that they ought to investigate.
And you say in the book, when Fodor asked if any of the incidents of the past few days had been comical, she recalled, and that's Alma, that on Tuesday, a Tuesday, the lid to the whistling kettle had gone missing, only to be found in Don's room perched like a beret on the head of a white china cat.
But most of the phenomena frightened her.
Alma described what it was like to have a glass snatched from her hand.
She felt a chill and a sudden pressure before the glass flew up and shattered in the air or fell unbroken to the ground.
So, you know, serious, serious manifestations here.
Yes.
But the fact that I like the fact that Fodor asked that question, had any of the manifestations been comical?
It sort of gives you a sense of his character because he was a very earnest and ghost hunter who longed to find evidence of the supernormal.
He was almost a childlike sense of wonder, wanting to discover magic.
But he was also a sceptic and he also had a great sense of fun and mischief.
And he enjoyed jokes and he enjoyed pranks and so on.
He was not a sort of disapproving kind of person and he would like to find a bit of fun on a ghost hunt as well as a real ghost.
Yep, there was a bit of the Barnum in him, a bit of the showman.
Yes, yes.
He absolutely relished sort of showy phenomena and he had to be a fundraiser for his institute and for his researches.
So he needed to get mediums who were good and impressive on board so that he could raise money by holding seances and making films of them, which he would then show at international conferences or charge members to watch.
So he walked a fine line between being a kind of impresario entertainer and being a serious scientific researcher, which is what he understood and felt his role to be.
Right.
Before we take some commercials here, which we have to do in a couple of minutes, just to say that Fodor was partly scientist or thought of himself that way.
So the events that he saw at the beginning, he thought that most of them could have been, if you were so willed, have been engineered in some way.
But there were some of them that couldn't have been engineered by anybody in his view, including literally a flying saucer.
To him, that seemed impossible to explain.
And all of that added to the fascination for him.
Yes, he was very, kept a very meticulous log, a really giant document of even the events on his first day in the house where he was there with his colleagues.
And he was very scrupulous in sort of saying, well, nobody saw any evidence of fraud or fakery or sleight of hand, but he acknowledged that some of the incidents that he hadn't w he hadn't been in the room or hadn't seen been that feasibly could have been engineered.
But there were a few, a handful, that he and his colleagues just could not see how they could have been faked.
And so they went back to the Institute tremendously excited and impressed.
There were a lot of ghost hunters around at the time, and everyone was keen to find the definitive, the case, the evidence that would make their name, but also make real scientific progress.
Okay, and that is where we get into what I would call the investigation phase proper.
So we'll take some commercials now.
We'll gather our thoughts.
We'll come back and talk about the investigation and then the conclusions to all of this.
It's a fascinating and very British case, a lot like any other that I know.
We're talking with the author, researcher Kate Somerscale here about the haunting of Alma Fielding.
And we don't have a lot of time to do an awful lot of stuff here, Kate.
And if I may say so, and I have to say this in this hour, because it's just a fact, an excellent book.
No wonder the reviews in The Guardian and The Times were so good.
So, you know, well done on that.
Nandor Fodor, how did he go about investigating this then in a systematic way?
Well, the first thing he did was invite Alma to accompany him and the other research to the International Institute in South Kensington, a building quite near Harrods.
And when she went there, things took a pretty extraordinary turn because it seemed that the poltergeist travelled with her, but he became a kind of genie or conjurer in that objects started to materialize around Alma in the seance room in full daylight as she walked around.
And the investigators then instituted sort of more rigorous checks.
They strip searched her, put her into a kind of body stocking, which they sewed up to make sure that she wasn't taking objects in with her.
And still she was managing to produce things, small objects, jewels, and a Roman oil lamp at one point.
And so they became fascinated by the fact that the poltergeist seemed able not just to move objects, but to sort of create them.
And that it wasn't only violent, but in this new setting, could become almost creative.
and they took her on a trip to so her power started to fade after a couple of weeks but when Fodor and his colleague Dr. Wills and Laurie Evans took her on a trip to Bognor Regis she managed to spirit a ring out of Woolworths I read that.
Yes, Fodor described it afterwards with psychic shoplifting.
It seems not to have occurred to him that they should return the ring to Woolworth.
He was very excited by it as a piece of evidence.
And indeed, all her apports, as they were described, the objects she materialised, were put on display in the Institute and kept as kind of sacred objects.
There was even one, wasn't there, from an outpost of the Roman Empire, a piece of pottery, porcelain.
Yes, it was a little, it was a fragment of something from somewhere like Carthage.
You know, they started, to begin with, they were quite sort of local, the objects.
They were things like Woolworths type of trinkets, but then they became more exotic.
So there would be a very heavy silver Turkish necklace and a Roman oil lamp, and then even living creatures.
So they became more and more sort of arcane and elaborate.
So that a finch materialized.
She claimed that a white mouse appeared in her handbag on the train from Thornton Heath, a pteropin in her lap when Dr. Wills was driving her to the Institute.
So it seemed as if by design or just unconscious wishes, she was more and more pleasing the investigators.
She was bringing them greater and greater treasures.
And it seems to me that the investigators fed off, and I'm sorry, once again, I'm talking across here.
Sorry, because it's such a fascinating story.
The investigators were fascinated.
They were like kids with a new toy with her.
And she was keen to deliver what they wanted.
Yes.
Fodor said that, you know, this is the thing we've been praying for, because in fact, the Institute was in quite bad financial straits, and he was in trouble because he'd been accused of being too sceptical about the supernatural, because he had exposed a string of mediums as frauds.
He had become known more as a sort of medium buster than a gullible ghost hunter.
So he really wanted to find a real psychic with real powers.
And they all had a great deal invested, but Fodor especially, in proving her worth and her truth.
They tried everything with her.
There was something years and years ago when The Unexplained was on another radio station, Talk Sport, and this is 15 years ago easily.
We got a medium in, and we had to do this so that it was all compliant with our regulators for radio in the UK.
But we managed to do a table turning experiment, which basically we got a three-legged table, little one.
It almost looked like a little stool in the studio.
And the medium said that by power of spirit, without touching it, she would turn it over.
And indeed, that happened on the radio.
We couldn't go through any of the procedure on air of what she did, because that's not allowed.
But the actual event itself, we were able to broadcast live, and that happened.
It was a weird event.
They tried that with her.
Yes, and the table was able to move and wrap and so on, but they were a bit disappointed to begin with that it didn't seem to give any coherent messages.
Sometimes table wrapping could produce letters of the alphabet and thereby communicate in code.
But that that didn't work.
But eventually b she started to be apparently possessed by spirit guides who would address the seance circle and give information.
One in particular, I think, Jimmy.
Yeah, well they called, Fodor playfully called the poltergeist Jimmy, and she adopted this happily and said actually her grandfather was called Jimmy and he was a real practical joker, a slightly mean-spirited practical joker.
And this sort of led, started Fodor thinking in various ways about whether the poltergeist might actually be connected to her family life and to her past and to things that might have happened to her that she had suppressed in her mind.
But before all of that became the supposition about her, some really weird stuff happened.
There were cases of astral projection where Alma would be at a cinema, I think, but know what was going on somewhere else.
Yes, and she apparently, yeah, she was at the cinema in Croydon and then claimed that she'd been astrally projected to the Institute in Kensington, and she was able to describe the cars that were outside the Institute that evening when there was a meeting on accurately and a chauffeur who she saw standing there.
And on another occasion, she claimed to have projected herself back to the Institute and knocked on the door from a cinema near Victoria.
And another time to project herself to Thornton Heath and write a recipe for potato wine.
So the investigators were very, you know, kind of on the case with all of these, trying to work out whether it could possibly be true, whether they had evidence either that she was lying or that it was real.
And so they were sort of avidly sort of getting witness statements and chasing round after the people who she claimed to have seen or been in the company of.
And so it was a very detailed investigation.
They were really trying to build the case, whether it was for her, as they hoped, or against her, as they feared.
But it all started to unravel, didn't it?
I mean, she started at home manifesting marks on her body, scratches almost like stigmata.
Yes, sort of she caught, she described them as tiger scratches.
She talked about a spirit tiger not quite attacking her, but scratching her in play.
And the investigator, well, Fodor started to become a bit worried at the effects that the investigation was having on her, or that the poltergeist was turning nastier, actually sort of attacking her body instead of her house.
So that was, they became worried some members of the institute thought that they were putting too much pressure on her and that the investigation might be very damaging.
Fodor said we've been encouraging the development of abnormal tendencies.
We have been rearing a strange plant.
Yes, he knew that they had to bear some responsibility for the way things were going.
And there was a very intense, almost erotic kind of relationship between Alma and him.
And she so sought to please him.
And he was so excited by the things she could do and what she promised for his career in the Institute that it was all quite intense.
And he knew that somehow he'd become implicated in the development of these phenomena.
They were trying to develop her, as they described it, and they couldn't just abandon her, he thought, when things got sinister.
There was a suggestion at one point, and proof, I think, that she was faking some of the materializations, some of the objects that appeared.
Yeah, I won't reveal her secrets, but Fodor did establish, much to his disappointment, that some of her manifestations were fake.
And they were very ingenious, clever frauds, but frauds nonetheless.
But that didn't explain all of it.
No, exactly.
There were certain events, especially at the very beginning, the poltergeist events in the house, but throughout the investigation, that he found impossible to explain.
And he accepted many people, including some people at the Institute, thought, well, she's a phony, but this is no good.
We should end the investigation.
But he didn't think like that.
He thought that many psychics were people who were in some way psychologically fragile and damaged.
And that it was no surprise if they turned to fraud once their powers started fading, especially if they were getting some real gratification from the attention given to them by the psychical investigators and ghost hunters.
And so he didn't see it as a black and white issue of, you know, true or false.
He wasn't binary about it.
He thought that most medians lived in a kind of grey area and might not even know themselves what was real and what wasn't.
So as we sum this up, through modernize, there are many strange and unexplained aspects of this case, even to this day.
Yes, and certainly the theories that he came up with were very modern and radical theories about the fact that a suppressed trauma in Alma's past might have created her phenomenon, both the real and the fake ones.
And this was a theory so horrifying to his colleagues that he was expelled from the International Institute.
So he was quite a daring thinker, and although he posed a danger to Alma in some ways, he also stood by her.
So frustratingly, because he was expelled from the Institute, he was never able to complete his investigation, but he nonetheless wrote it up.
And I was able to find his notes and to try to piece together for myself both the investigation and what might have lain behind it.
Well, which you do wonderfully in the book, and I hope that we've done it justice.
Just finally, in the last 90 seconds, two minutes or so, what became of Alma?
Well, Alma, I discovered, I had to first find out her real identity because Fodor disguised it in the book, but I've managed to trace her grandsons, one of whom lives in Devon.
And I discovered that she moved to Devon with Les and George, the lodger, during the war when Croydon was very badly bombed.
So they got out of Croydon shortly before the bombing.
And she sort of lived out her days there and in Croydon.
I think she became a nurse in the war, so she was able to sort of go to work again.
And I think that she was given a kind of freedom that she hadn't had in the late 30s, which was a fairly constrained time for women.
And Fodor, meanwhile, he sort of got out of England, maybe partly because of the impending war, he being Jewish, and went back to America, but also because he'd been expelled from the Institute and denigrated by them.
And in America, he became a psychoanalyst, but a psychoanalyst who continued to specialize in having patients and clients who experienced supernormal phenomena.
Well, that could be the subject of some more research, I guess.
This seems to be a unique case, as far as I can tell.
And just very quickly, did you come across any other cases like this?
No, this was the only case that I could find, which is why I wrote about it, about which the story had so many twists in it.
There were so many different layers as to psychological and paranormal, the destructive poltergeist and tiger and vampire.
There is so much in it, Kate, and thank you very much for explaining it.
The book, I think, is excellent.
I mean, it's a packed 370, I think, pages or thereabouts, and I can understand why the reviews have been so good.
The book is called The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
It's a remarkable and unique case, I think.
Kate Summerscale, thank you very much.
Thank you, thanks.
And I know I've said these words before on this show, but what a strange story that is.
Kate Summerscale and The Haunting of Alma Fielding.
Kate, a really diligent researcher who did a fantastic job on the book.
I definitely recommend it to you.
Before that, you heard Gary Campbell, the keeper of the official register of Loch Ness Monster Sightings, on what might be a breakthrough in the hunt for Nessie.
And before that, Nick Pope, independent researcher in America, former Ministry of Defense UFO man, about the very strange Calvine UFO case and the photographs that apparently we can't get to see.
If you know where those copies that we talked about might be, I'd love to hear from you.
Give me an email through the website.
We're totally out of time now.
More great guests here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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