Lore 239: Head to Head

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It's the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.

Humanity versus aliens.

The lone cop versus a building full of German terrorists.

John Wick versus everyone the high table can throw at him.

Everyone loves a good rivalry.

But those epic matchups aren't limited to the present.

Everyone's heard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and everyone has heard of legendary escape artist Harry Houdini.

But what most people don't know is that they were bitter rivals for years.

Houdini had made it his mission in life to debunk and expose all the frauds in the spiritualist movement.

And Doyle, well, he was obsessed with proving just how real spiritualism was.

skepticism and belief represented by key figures of the 19th century.

How did it play out?

Well, not so good, actually.

Arthur Conan Doyle's wife was apparently a medium, the kind who can talk to the dead, mind you, not her shirt size, and she claimed to have received a message from Houdini's dead mother.

As proof, Doyle handed over a 15-page transcript of her message to the world of the living.

There was just one problem.

It was written in perfect English, and Houdini's mother, a Hungarian, barely spoke any English at all.

Rivalries are everywhere, apparently, from sports teams and celebrities to ancient rulers and modern superpowers.

But while so much of it feels formulaic and predictable, there are always exceptions.

Rivalries, for as common as they are, can appear in some of the most bizarre and unexpected of places, even it seems in the world of ghostbusting.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

I can't stress enough just how popular ghost hunting was in the second half of the 19th century.

A great example took place in the English city of Hull back in 1852, when rumors of poltergeist activity inside a local home spread among the community.

One local paper reported how somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people gathered outside this house one night for a chance to see or hear some of the otherworldly activity for themselves.

And this was in the freezing rain, not perfect summer weather.

Clearly, people wanted answers.

It took a few years, but organizations began to form around that curiosity.

Groups like the Society for Psychical Research, or SPR for short, which was formed in 1882 in London.

It was conceived of as a gathering of intellectuals who wanted to use modern science to study the paranormal.

Sure, it was comprised entirely of upper-class men, but it was a start.

Four years later, they published their first book, a 1,300-page two-volume survey of the British public's experience with all things paranormal.

The success of that study, as well as another in 1894, helped cement the SPR as a clinical, scientific think tank dedicated to giving the public hard data.

It wasn't sexy, but it was certainly British.

If ghosts were popular before World War I, things only ramped up once it was over.

Historians call it the interwar period, that space between the First and Second World Wars.

And one of the things that people were grappling with was all of that death and loss.

And on top of that, the world was modernizing at breakneck speed.

You have to remember, people on a whole don't really care for change.

And all of this, as you can imagine, was just overwhelming for them.

So the topic of ghosts and hauntings became a safe space, a way to hold on to what once was, rather than the anxiety of its absence.

And I need you to hold that image in your mind as I introduce a new character to you, a man named Harry Price.

Born in 1881, he grew up in the heyday of the spiritualist movement, even seeing a performance of a medium for himself during his childhood, throw in a passion for stage magic and learning how tricks really worked, and he was primed for a career in the study of supernatural events.

So in 1920, when Price joined the SPR, he became a bit of a controversial figure.

Remember, everyone else in the organization were highly educated scientific men who spoke the language of academia because that was their world.

Harry Price, however, wasn't.

But what he lacked in academic training, he more than made up for with flair.

You see, Price had a way of using the language of the organization, its terminology, the scientific process, all of that, while still making it accessible and understandable to the general public.

Plus, he did more than just talk about hauntings.

He loved to engage in ghost hunts, something that the SPR had left to the lower-class folks.

Basically, Harry Price was a philosopher in the streets, but a ghostbuster in the sheets.

Oh, and he was a bit of a publicity hound, too.

He loved the limelight and often preempted his events with a healthy dose of PR and interviews with the press.

One of his first first high-profile cases involved a spirit photographer named William Hope, and the mix of drama and content was instantly attractive to the general public.

Folks loved a good spirit photograph, and Price's takedown of William Hope was well received by most.

But through it all, Price's love of the press started to rub the rest of the SPR the wrong way.

They wanted to share data, numbers, figures, survey results, that sort of thing.

And Price wanted to enthrall the public with thrilling accounts of his adventures inside reportedly haunted houses.

So Price left and founded a new organization of his own in January of 1926.

He called it the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, and it wasn't a quiet gentleman's club like the SPR.

In fact, he announced its launch through a huge publicity campaign that courted the press instead of the scientific community.

His first big case under the new organizational banner was actually an old one.

I won't go too deep into it here, but it involved the legacy of a dead spiritualist medium named Joanna Southcott, who was known for her predictions.

After her death in 1814, she had left behind a sealed box full of a whole bunch more.

Think of it like a 1920s version of Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault.

In 1936, he even went live on BBC radio in what's widely thought to be the first live broadcast from inside a supposedly haunted house.

Everything he did only helped convince the general public of one thing.

Harry Price was the face of paranormal research, and he loved it.

But as we've already discussed, there will always be rivals.

In 1929, a new psychical investigator arrived in England, and this one brought a new flavor to the usual mix of scientific study, the growing field of of psychology.

Nandor Fodor was, in almost every way, the opposite of Harry Price.

Where Price was interested in paranormal research mostly as a vehicle to fame, Fodor was only there for knowledge.

Price loved the press.

Fodor, on the other hand, avoided it.

His birth name was Nandor Friedlander, born into a Jewish family from Hungary.

And like Price, he had experienced the paranormal at a young age.

For him, it happened at the funeral of his grandfather, when he heard heard the dead man's voice speaking to him through the coffin.

Fodor had only been seven years old at the time.

Early adulthood had found him settled in America, where he worked as a journalist, although he managed to find time to hang out with another Hungarian immigrant while he was there, a friend named Bela Lugosi.

It was a newspaper job in London, however, that lured Fodor away from America, and he settled down there with his wife and daughter for what must have seemed like a reputable, normal job in journalism.

But his old interests weren't fading away, and pretty soon he dove headfirst into the psychical research scene in the city.

And that was life for a while.

By day, a respectable newspaper man writing about whatever came across his desk.

By night, though, he was researching paranormal cases and writing about them.

It was the sort of side hustle that must have made him feel like Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde in a way.

Then, in 1934, Nandor Fodor did something that upset his boss at the newspaper.

He published a 500,000-word book called the Encyclopedia of Psychic Science.

His employer wasn't a fan of all that paranormal talk and expected his journalist to be fully devoted to the paper, putting Fodor in a tricky spot.

Thankfully, the book was well received, so well in fact that he landed a job at a place called the International Institute for Psychical Research, and he jumped shipped to join them.

It didn't help that his boss at the paper was quickly falling in love with Nazism, and with Fodor's Jewish background, it felt like the wise thing to get out of there fast.

The role at the new organization did something else though.

It put him in the same world as Harry Price.

And Price wasn't used to sharing the stage with anyone else.

But he didn't really have a need to worry, to be honest.

Fodor wasn't interested in fame or attention.

He just wanted to study unique cases and uncover the truth wherever it led him.

Price wanted the fame more than anything else.

It was a rivalry that often led the men to the same cases.

For example, in the summer of 1935, Harry Price headed out to the Isle of Man and spent three days at a local farmhouse there.

He had made the trip because of the unusual stories that were spreading about the events inside that house.

The stereotypical poltergeist situation.

People inside the house claimed to hear screams as well as loud knocking and pounding from all sorts of places.

But try as they might, they were unable to find the source.

Price arrived hoping to help, but the spirit or entity or whatever it was refused to make itself known during his stay.

In fact, the poltergeist even explained why.

Price, it told the family later, was the man who put the kibosh on the spirits, which honestly is so easy to love, right?

Price though, didn't care for the snub, and he was probably even less happy when Nandor Fodor made the same journey two years later to try his own luck there.

Despite writing to the family ahead of time, promising to pay for his room and board, as well as offering to sleep on the bare floor so as not to be in imposition, the experience for Fodor was pretty much the same, silence from the spirit during his stay there.

Thankfully, others had a chance to document the events in more detail, which is why we have the story of Jeff the Mongoose, one that we have shared here on lore before.

But while Ghostbusters aren't supposed to cross streams, Price and Fodor would lock horns at least one more time.

and the winner would earn a chance to investigate one of the most bizarre paranormal cases in the history of England.

Whether Whether that was a fulfilling prize, however, is up to you to decide.

Both men found out about the case because it ended up in the newspapers.

It was February of 1938, just a year after Nandor Fodor's failed attempt on the Isle of Man, and a woman in the London suburbs needed help.

Alma was a middle-class mom with a pretty normal family life.

She lived there in Thornton Heath with her husband Les and 16-year-old son Don, along with a lodger named George.

And we can tell that they were pretty well off as a family because they had two big luxuries for their era, running water and a telephone.

What was Alma's problem?

Well, there seemed to be some sort of entity in her home, and it was violent too.

Teacups were known to fly across the room, light bulbs would vanish from lamps without any explanation, and eggs would materialize from thin air and smash into the rug.

It was overwhelming and frustrating, so Alma did the only thing she could think of.

She called a local newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, who had previously put out a call to its readers looking for paranormal experiences.

And that's where Harry Price and Nandor Fodor both spotted her story.

Clearly, it would be amazing to research her troubles, and both men really did have an interest in getting to the bottom of it all.

Was it all a hoax for attention, or was it a real, provable paranormal experience that could offer new information or knowledge?

Not long after Alma's article was published, on the front page no less, Harry Price showed up to ask a few more questions.

Then, he seems to have left and stalled a bit too long.

By the time he returned in late February, Fodor had already settled in.

His rival, he would later say, had got in first.

And that was it.

Alma Fielding's case now belonged to Nandor Fodor.

The better man had won.

On this first day at the Fielding house, Fodor witnessed all sorts of unexplainable phenomenon.

Glasses that flew off the kitchen shelves, flying eggs.

Alma's husband even narrowly escaped getting clocked in the head with a teacup.

So, having seen enough, Fodor invited Alma to his institute's office the following day.

It was time for the real testing to begin.

And she did not disappoint.

According to Fodor, as Alma sat in a controlled environment, random objects would appear.

Some were items from home, like a decorative glass dome and, of all things, a package of laxatives.

On March 1st, he recorded that the investigation was far from complete, but he was pretty sure it was one of the greatest cases to come his way in many years.

But as Fodor dug deeper, he started to apply his usual approach to any psychical experience, psychology, because in his opinion, there was more going on behind the scenes.

In fact, he believed trauma from earlier in her life had empowered her to cross some sort of boundary and manifest this paranormal situation through the sheer will of her mind.

Alma sat for several more tests over the coming weeks.

She managed to produce coins, jewelry, and even pieces of broken pottery.

Once, she produced a live bird, a breed of which Fodor claimed was not indigenous to the UK.

He even documented incidences of astral projection, where Alma demonstrated the ability to leave her body and listen in on conversations elsewhere before returning to report on them.

And later interviews with her did seem to confirm that she had endured a number of traumatic experiences over the course of her life.

Fodor even suspected that she had been assaulted as a child, but he remained a firm believer in the paranormal things he was witnessing.

That is, until the day she produced that bird that I mentioned a moment ago.

You see, Fodor wasn't the only Institute representative in the room, and one of the women who was helping him that day noticed that Alma had a handkerchief tied around one of her legs, under her skirt, and when Alma removed it, a feather fell out of it.

All of a sudden, everything Fodor had come to believe was falling apart.

His next test involved asking her to materialize more objects, but he first had her x-rayed.

He told her it was to look for spirits that might be hovering around her body, and she went along with it.

Sure enough, two objects were spotted on the film.

objects that she went on to miraculously materialize in the session that followed.

Scientifically, he later wrote, the case was dead, but psychologically, it was just beginning.

After consulting with a number of psychologists, he decided the real-life trauma of her past was at the root of her behavior in the present.

But more importantly, he still believed her early paranormal behavior had been real.

She had simply invented more of it to maintain the attention she was receiving for it.

Fernandor Fodor, the case would prove to be the end of his career with the International Institute for Psychical Research.

The old women who supported their studies there there did not care for his attempt to bring a sexual element to the investigation, whether or not it was real.

They simply refused to believe that it could be relevant at all.

Fodor believed in the importance of context, whatever it might be.

The others, though, chose to ignore it.

The defeat was crushing for him.

The institute fired him, confiscated his research, and cleaned out his office.

But in November of that year, his wife spotted a chance to help him regain some of his reputation.

You see, she believed in in his work and she believed that his approach to the paranormal through the lens of psychology could offer a lot of answers, both for the investigators and the people they were trying to help, because you can't heal a trauma by ignoring it.

So when she learned that a prominent psychologist had recently moved to London, she paid the man a visit.

He was admittedly a dying man.

In fact, in less than a year, he would be gone for good.

But Fodor's wife paid him a visit anyway and told this man all about the Alma Fielding case.

The man read Fodor's report and, surprisingly, thought that it was handled incredibly well.

His handwritten assessment of the case wouldn't be enough to get Nandor Fodor his job back, but it certainly boosted his reputation and it offered him the encouragement necessary to change careers and train as a psychologist himself.

All because a dying man saw potential in his paranormal research.

A dying man named Sigmund Freud.

Most rivalries have a winner.

Sometimes the more equal the battle seems, the more popular the rivalry will be.

But in the end, someone has to come out on top.

Thankfully, it doesn't seem that Nandor Fodor was interested in victory over Harry Price.

While Price did a lot of posturing that suggested that he deserved the crown over anyone else, Fodor never stooped to pettiness.

pettiness.

In fact, when the chance arrived after Price's death to trash the man's work and legacy, Fodor did the opposite, defending him to critics.

At the end of the day, both men were focused on finding proof that paranormal events were real, or an explanation for how they had been faked.

It was a tricky thing to balance, too.

Price took the routes that pleased the crowd, while Fodor opted for the gathering of facts.

Yes, they were rivals in many ways, but at their core, they were really chasing different targets.

It's often been said that seeing is believing, that the real proof for something paranormal is an eyewitness account, and the more qualified and scientifically trained that witness, the better.

But one of the things that Nandor Fodor helped the paranormal world understand is that sometimes there are factors at work that you can't measure or look at with your own eyes.

Personal trauma might not be the most comfortable thing to talk about, but Fodor proved that it has to be acknowledged, even in the paranormal space.

Like I mentioned a moment ago, Fodor went on to study psychology.

In 1951, he published a book called Haunted People, The Story of the Poltergeist Down the Centuries.

And a few years later, it inspired a writer to incorporate elements into an upcoming novel.

When that book went on to become a major Hollywood film, Fodor noticed the similarities and wrote to the author to thank them for using his work as inspiration.

It was a connection that led him to become part of the publicity campaign for the film, telling audiences everywhere that haunted houses do exist, and the unknown forces and powers contained within these so-called evil places are often activated by the human passions of the people who come in contact with them.

And the name of that book and film?

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

If the battle between Harry Price and Nandor Fodor teaches us anything neat and tidy, it's that there will always be haunted house stories and groups of people who want to study them.

And while Alma Fielding's story is over, we're not quite done.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about one last case and the investigators behind it.

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In August of 1977, a poltergeist began to haunt a familiar scene, a family home in a suburb of London.

It was almost four decades after the Fielding investigation, almost two whole generations, and it's easy to think that the world had moved on, but so much about it felt as if it were just another chapter in an age-old story.

Peggy was a single mom with four kids under her roof.

Margaret was 13, Janet was 11, Johnny was 10, and Billy was 7.

And it was the middle two, Janet and Johnny, that first brought the problem to Peggy's attention.

They came into her bedroom on the night of August 30th to tell her that their beds had been shaking uncontrollably.

Peggy didn't believe them though and told them to go back to bed.

But the following night, their cries brought her into their room to discover something unexplainable.

At first, it was just the sounds of knocking from somewhere else in the room, but that was quickly interrupted by a chest of drawers sliding across the room without anyone touching it.

Peggy didn't know what to do, and honestly, who could blame her?

So she called her neighbors, a couple named Vic and Gary Nottingham, who came over and walked through the house with her.

They heard all the same knocking sounds and were so frightened that they called the police.

And the police, they had the same strange encounters there.

The officers claimed to see a chair move across the living room floor a distance of roughly four feet without anyone coming near it.

Drawers in the furniture opened and closed, objects like silverware and boxes jumped on their own, and that constant knocking was ever present.

So as the 80s song asks, who you gonna call?

The Society for Psychical Research, of course.

Because despite fading in popularity over the years, they were still around and well-known enough to be seen as a resource.

So investigators Maurice Gross and Guy Playfair showed up to look into the matter.

For the next year, the pair would visit the household roughly every other day, even spending the night every couple of weeks to hold vigil with the family.

And over that dedicated period, both men became convinced that while many of the kids were having some paranormal experiences, the main focus was clearly on 11-year-old Janet.

What's more, Janet began speaking in another person's voice.

It was gruff and deep, almost like that of an elderly man.

The voice swore at the investigators and told them all about who he was and why he was there.

Apparently, he used to live in the house, but had died there in a chair.

Later, in conversation with the neighbors, it was revealed that someone had indeed died in a chair in the house years before.

The haunting continued for many more months.

Fires spontaneously started in the house, and cameras would malfunction when trying to capture evidence.

In January of 1978, older sister Margaret started vocalizing as well, but it was infrequent and not as convincing.

And then, all of the activity began to wind down.

Playfair and Gross went on to write up their observations and experiences in a book they published in 1980 called This House is Haunted, an investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist.

And while their story has drawn a lot of critics who think the events were all faked, many disagree.

To some, it's just a matter of science whether it's true or not.

To most, though, it's a matter of faith.

But whether or not it was all real, the story has gone on to influence countless others who are fascinated by poltergeist activity, most notably Hollywood.

And you can see that influence in a horror film that came out just a few years ago.

The 2016 film, The Conjuring 2.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra Day Alba and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online at two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.

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