The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • The Sunday Times • The New Statesman • The Times • The Spectator • The Telegraph
Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection
“Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this.... The atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.”—The Times (London)
London, 1938. In the suburbs of the city, a young housewife has become the eye in a storm of chaos. In Alma Fielding’s modest home, china flies off the shelves and eggs fly through the air; stolen jewelry appears on her fingers, white mice crawl out of her handbag, beetles appear from under her gloves; in the middle of a car journey, a turtle materializes on her lap. The culprit is incorporeal. As Alma cannot call the police, she calls the papers instead.
After the sensational story headlines the news, Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research, arrives to investigate the poltergeist. But when he embarks on his scrupulous investigation, he discovers that the case is even stranger than it seems.
By unravelling Alma’s peculiar history, Fodor finds a different and darker type of haunting, a tale of trauma, alienation, loss and revenge. He comes to believe that Alma’s past has bled into her present, her mind into her body. There are no words for processing her experience, so it comes to possess her. As the threat of a world war looms, and as Fodor’s obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed.
With characteristic rigor and insight, Kate Summerscale brilliantly captures the rich atmosphere of a haunting that transforms into a very modern battle between the supernatural and the subconscious.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection
“Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this.... The atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.”—The Times (London)
London, 1938. In the suburbs of the city, a young housewife has become the eye in a storm of chaos. In Alma Fielding’s modest home, china flies off the shelves and eggs fly through the air; stolen jewelry appears on her fingers, white mice crawl out of her handbag, beetles appear from under her gloves; in the middle of a car journey, a turtle materializes on her lap. The culprit is incorporeal. As Alma cannot call the police, she calls the papers instead.
After the sensational story headlines the news, Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research, arrives to investigate the poltergeist. But when he embarks on his scrupulous investigation, he discovers that the case is even stranger than it seems.
By unravelling Alma’s peculiar history, Fodor finds a different and darker type of haunting, a tale of trauma, alienation, loss and revenge. He comes to believe that Alma’s past has bled into her present, her mind into her body. There are no words for processing her experience, so it comes to possess her. As the threat of a world war looms, and as Fodor’s obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed.
With characteristic rigor and insight, Kate Summerscale brilliantly captures the rich atmosphere of a haunting that transforms into a very modern battle between the supernatural and the subconscious.
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Community Reviews
The Writer Kate Summerscale’s nonfiction book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story, is the story of Nandor Fodor, the “chief ghost hunter at the International Institute for Psychical Research (IIPR) (Summerscale 3), and Alma Fielding, a housewife in a district in the South of London, England. Alma Fielding claimed a poltergeist haunted her. Summerscale writes, “the word ‘poltergeist’, from the German for ‘noisy spirit', had been popularized in Britain in the 1920s” (Summerscale 8). Summerscale also writes, “Fodor, having read the work of Sigmund Freud, wondered if they might be kinetic forces unleashed by the unconscious mind” (Summerscale 8). Freud, himself, briefly appears in the book (Summerscale 277-282). Summerscale writes that for Fodor, “a ghost was a sign of an unacknowledged horror. It indicated a gap opened by trauma, an event that, because it had been assimilated, must be perpetually relieved. There were no words, so there was a haunting” (Summerscale 257). As explained in the book, Fodor became a psychoanalyst in New York City (Summerscale 304). According to Summerscale, Fodor was a key figure in the use of psychology to find “natural explanations for apparently supernatural experiences” (Summerscale 309). I read the book on the Kindle. The Haunting of Alma Fielding has illustrations. The book has a “note on sources” (Summerscale 319). The book has a bibliography and an index. Summerscale’s book is a readable history of a particular moment in the history of ghost hunting and psychology.
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