Nandor Fodor: 1930s Spiritualist Buster

This is a wonderful excerpt from a new book titled: The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story -by Kate Summerscale.

Nandor Fodor was an investigator with the Society for Psychical Research in the 1930s in England.

Quote:

He was learning that the golden age of psychical study was also the heyday of supernatural hustle, and that to verify his subjects’ claims he would have to turn sleuth himself. When Lajos Pap materialized a snake and other apports at the International Institute in 1935, Fodor tried to work out whether he could have produced them by normal means. The staff of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington identified the snake as a Central European dice snake, about two years old and not long dead. Fodor rang reptile shops listed in the London telephone directory and found that though the species was available in stores in Merton and Islington, neither outlet remembered serving a man of Lajos or Chengery’s descriptions. He arranged for Irene to be given access to Lajos’s hotel room, where she found a suitcase with a double lining, and he tried to establish whether Lajos really had a medical reason for wearing a whalebone belt beneath his clothing. Fodor hid a pebble on his body, and challenged his colleagues to find it. He put folded sheets of paper in his shoes. On completing his experiments, he concluded that Lajos Pap could have smuggled a live snake over from Hungary in the lining of his suitcase, drowned it in the hotel washbasin and zipped it into his belt. Before the seance he might also have pressed the orphanage documents into the soles of his shoes; lodged a stone in his navel; tucked trinkets behind his false teeth; stored rosebuds in his cheeks; and stuffed a gold coin up his nose. ‘Our verdict is “Not Proven”,’ Fodor told the Institute’s members when the Paps returned to Budapest.

There is a lot of good stuff in this short piece and I'm buying the book.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3sJnmeR