On The Trail of the Poltergeist

A "phantom hammer" shattered cups and wineglasses with a sharp "ping”, ancient Roman lamps appeared from nowhere; mysterious scents—sometimes the sweet fragrance of violets, sometimes the pungent smell of wild animals—hung in the air; an elaborate Oriental necklace dropped as if by magic around the neck of Mrs. Pat Forbes, searing her with its heat; the claw marks of a tiger appeared on her body…This was a Poltergeist haunting, perhaps the most famous of modern times. GHOST WRECKS HOME, FAMILY TERRORIZED, newspaper headlines proclaimed. Reporters sent to cover the case had to dodge flying crockery and eggs; two of them narrowly escaped being crushed under a toppling wardrobe. The scene was Thornton Heath, a middle-class suburb of London. The leading characters were vivacious Mrs. Forbes (around whom the furor seemed to center), her husband, her son, and, their crippled lodger. Psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, then Director of Research for the International Institute for Psychical Research, welcomed this opportunity to make an investigation in depth of a Poltergeist haunting. His first task was to record the disturbances and make sure they actually occurred—that is, that they were neither practical jokes nor the fantasies of hysterical observers. His second task was to analyze the phenomena on a psychological basis. This book tells the suspenseful story of that investigation—the careful exposing of deliberate fraud by Mrs. Forbes and the isolating of instances that could not possibly be faked (both of equal interest from a psychiatric point of view), the probing deep into Mrs. Forbes's past in search of the sexual trauma that produced the Poltergeist psychosis. No less an authority than Sigmund Freud read an early draft of this book and found himself "richly rewarded."

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