Cooking up spooks

One evening in 1938, Alma Fielding and her husband Les were lying in bed in the London suburb of Thornton Heath. Alma was suffering from kidney pain and Les from toothache. Suddenly, a handprint appeared on the mirror - with six fingers. The next thing they knew, an eiderdownA type of quilt or duvet. It takes its name from the eider duck, whose under feathers - known as down - are extraordinarily light and warm and used to insulate everything from jackets to sleeping bags. was flying through the air, a dank wind was blowing through the house and a glass shattered for no apparent reason.

Over the next four months, the couple - along with their teenage son and their lodger - were terrorised by what seemed to be a poltergeist. They saw hairbrushes flying through the air and furniture toppling over. In a single morning the breakages amounted to 36 tumblers, 24 wine glasses and 15 egg cups - not to mention a dented kettle. When a newspaper, The Sunday Pictorial, sent reporters to investigate, they experienced flying eggs, china breaking in mid-air and a brass fenderA guard made of metal. In the Fieldings' house, it would have stopped burning coals falling out of an open fire. falling down the stairs.

These bizarre events are the subject of Kate Summerscale's book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding. It draws on the diary and notebooks of the man sent to investigate them by the International Institute for Psychical Research (IIPR), a Hungarian journalist called Nandor Fodor.

At first Fodor was convinced that Alma was both haunted and the possessor of strange powers. When he visited her, he saw a teacup sail through the air and the cat's bowl smash against a door. "My flesh creeped," he wrote after a ring Alma had admired in Woolworth's turned up a few hours later in one of his camera-film containers.

Alma even seemed able to be in two places at once, writing a recipe for potato wine in her house while being examined at the psychical research institute.

It finally became clear that she was playing tricks when Fodor placed her in front of an X-ray machineBecause of the dangers from radiation, X-ray machines are used sparingly today. But before the risks were discovered, they were routinely used for, among other things, checking children's feet when they were measured for shoes.. It showed that she had hidden objects in her underwear and even inside her body. She turned out to be an expert at distracting people's attention in the same way that a magician does, so that the objects appeared or moved as if by an unseen force.

And yet there were some things that not even this factor could explain - such as a doormat that wrapped itself around a policeman's head, and a wardrobe that kept falling over.

Fodor became convinced that Alma was a deeply disturbed person whose inner turmoil was somehow expressed as energy, causing these strange events. He decided that she was haunted by a childhood experience of abuse, as well as by the death of her second child from meningitisA dangerous disease that causes inflammation of the membranes protecting the brain and spinal cord..

This was not what the IIPR wanted to hear, and Fodor was fired. But when his wife took his file on the case to show Sigmund FreudAn Austrian psychoanalyst who was one of the world's foremost authorities on psychology in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Although his ideas have been discredited in the scientific community, he remains influential for literary scholars., the great neurologist agreed with Fodor's conclusion.

Modern scientists suggest several reasons why people believe they have encountered ghosts. One is that they are disturbed by low-frequency sounds from machinery or the atmosphere; another is that they are exposed to toxic mould or carbon dioxide that causes hallucinations or irrational fear.

Could ghosts really exist?

Some say, yes. The case of Alma Fielding may not have been a genuine haunting, but there are so many stories of strange events told by perfectly sensible people that we must accept a supernatural explanation. We are constantly discovering strange new things about the way the universe works, so it would be wrong to dismiss the idea of ghosts entirely.

Others argue that Kate Summerscale's book shows not only how ingenious fraudsters are in pretending that ghosts exist but how willing people are to believe them. The fact is that humans have a weakness for bizarre tales. With all the highly sophisticated devices we have for detecting and recording things, by now someone would surely have produced convincing evidence of ghosts - if there were any.