麻豆社

How a Croydon housewife baffled a 1930s ghost hunter - the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale, talks to Matthew Sweet about her discovery of a dossier of interviews about a poltergeist "terrorising" Alma Fielding which made headlines in the 1938 Sunday Pictorial newspaper.

30 artists interested in seances and spirituality are on show in an exhibition co-curated by Simon Grant and the Drawing Room Gallery in partnership with Hayward Touring.

Plus we return to a radio experiment in telepathy and a 1920s on air seance with psychologist Richard Wiseman, author of Paranormality amongst many other books. Can you sense what card he is holding?

Kate Summerscale's latest book The Haunting of Alma Fielding is out now and is being read as Book of the Week on 麻豆社 Radio 4 from October 24th.

The Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium developed in partnership with Drawing Room, London runs there until Nov 1st, then it is at Millennium Gallery, Museums Sheffield 19th Nov - 7 March 2021, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea 20 March - June 13 2021, Grundy Art Gallery Blackpool.

The 1927 麻豆社 telepathy experiment with Sir Oliver Lodge described by Richard Wiseman was listed in the Radio Times and you can read about it here: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/1a8b7f91de874debaa392671d7542ea3#

This episode is part of 麻豆社 Radio 3's residency at the Southbank Centre and the 麻豆社 Culture in Quarantine initiative /arts

In the Free Thinking archives and available as Arts & Ideas podcasts are episodes in which Matthew Sweet goes ghost hunting in Portsmouth /programmes/b09dynj0
Shahidha Bari discusses ghost stories and Halloween with curator Irving Finkel, writers Jeremy Dyson, Kirsty Logan, Nisha Ramayya and Adam Scovell /programmes/m0009t19
Matthew Sweet looks at the history of magic /programmes/m000kvss
and at Piranesi and disturbing architecture hearing from guests including Susanna Clarke and Lucy Arnold /programmes/m000mlgh
and at mystics and reality hearing about spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home from New Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson /programmes/b07f6r54

Producer: Alex Mansfield