Once Lady Jean had finished (according to Doyle’s account), Houdini picked up one of the pencils on the table and mused aloud, “I wonder if I could do anything at this.” Then he wrote one word on the page. Afterward, Doyle recalled, “he looked up at me and I was amazed, for I saw in his eyes that look, impossible to imitate, which comes to the medium who is under influence.”
Houdini had written the name “Powell” on the page.
And when he saw this, Sir Arthur instantly jumped up excitedly. An old spiritualist friend of his, an editor at the Financial News of London, had died a week earlier in England. “The Spirits have directed you in writing the name of my dear fighting partner in spiritualism, Dr. Ellis Powell,” Doyle crowed. “I am the person he is most likely to signal to, and here is his name coming through your hands. Truly Saul is among the Prophets. You are a medium!”
According to Doyle’s account, Houdini “seemed to be disconcerted by my remark. He muttered something about a man called ‘Powell’ down in Texas, but he failed to invent any reason why that particular man should come back at that particular moment. Then, gathering up his papers, he hurried from the room.”
When the two men met again two days later, Houdini told him that he had been “walking on air ever since” the séance.
But Houdini’s take on all of this, which later appeared in print, was entirely different from Doyle’s account. First of all, he later wrote, though he had hoped and wished for a feeling of his mother’s presence, “there wasn’t even a semblance of it.” Anyone who had ever deeply loved his mother would know the feeling of her presence, he said. But he felt nothing at all.
There were also a couple of other problems with this “séance,” he pointed out. For one thing, the day of the séance, June 17, was his mother’s birthday—“my most holy holiday”—and though Lady Jean did not know this, if it really had been his mother “coming through,” she would have mentioned this. But she didn’t. (Weirdly enough, Houdini got the date wrong—the reading actually took place on Sunday the eighteenth, not Saturday the seventeenth. For all his meticulous attention to detail in his stage acts, he was surprisingly careless about details in his writing.) Also, Lady Jean—or whomever she was allegedly channeling—made the sign of the cross at the top of the page. But Houdini’s mother was Jewish, not Christian. Doyle later brushed this off; his wife always made the sign of the cross when she did automatic writing, he said, to ward off malicious spirits.
The other problem was a bigger one. The entire message was written in English, but Houdini’s mother, though she had lived in the United States for more than fifty years, did not speak English. She only spoke Hungarian.
The other problem was that name, “Powell.”
Houdini claimed that he’d written the name, entirely of his own volition, because he’d thought of a magician friend named Frederick Eugene Powell, with whom he’d recently had a good bit of business correspondence. It was simply a coincidence that the name matched that of a recently deceased friend of Doyle’s. But Doyle would have none of it. A few days later, he sent Houdini a letter in which he protested that “no, the Powell explanation won’t do.” The “coincidence” was too improbable. Besides, the evening after the séance, Doyle had gone to a medium, who told him, “There is a man here. He wants to say he is sorry he had to speak so abruptly this afternoon.”
Also, he added, the fact that Houdini’s mother spoke in English was immaterial, because in the spirit world language does not matter. Houdini, in a letter of reply, reiterated his skepticism but closed in his usual gentlemanly way by saying, “Trusting you will accept my letter in the same honest, good faith feeling as it has been written.”
Nevertheless, a couple of months later Houdini felt it necessary to file an official disclaimer, witnessed by a notary, maintaining that he had not made contact with his mother during the séance and that “in case of my death, no one will claim that the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s friend Ellis Powell guided my hand.”
This “strangest friendship,” while still starchily polite, had turned increasingly icy. And it was about to get worse.
Cunning fraud or the genuine article? “Margery” became one of the most celebrated, and controversial, mediums of the spiritualist era. Oddly, this picture was taken by Houdini himself.
CHAPTER TEN
Sex, Lies, and Séances
On the steamy summer night of August 25, 1924, shortly before 10:00 p.m., in a small upstairs room in an imposing brick house in Boston’s tony Beacon Hill, five distinguished middle-aged gentlemen, in starched shirts and ties, sat down at a low table in semidarkness and formed a circle, holding hands. Included in the circle was a sixth person, a fetching thirty-six-year-old woman with keen, saucy eyes and a blond flapper’s bob, who was seated inside a large wooden cabinet with only her head and arms exposed. She was so comely that some said she was “too attractive for her own good.” Other séance goers were warned, only half jokingly, “not to fall in love with the medium.”
Each of her small hands firmly grasped one of the men’s hands to her left and right, which carried an erotic charge, because inside the box, the men all knew, the young woman was wearing nothing more than a flimsy dress, silk stockings, and bedroom slippers. (It was widely rumored that she sometimes gave séances in the nude, ostensibly to demonstrate that she wasn’t hiding anything under her clothes; tonight she was only barely clothed for the same reason.)
The young woman’s name was Mina Crandon, a former Canadian farm girl who was quickly becoming one of the most celebrated, and most unlikely, trance mediums of the spiritualist era. She was, after all, only modestly interested in the claims of spiritualism and had only become involved in all this a few years earlier when she quite unexpectedly discovered she seemed to be a “channel” for transmissions from the spirit world. That is, supposedly. To the vast throngs of disbelievers, she became known as “the blond witch of Lime Street.”
To the throngs of enthralled believers, she became known as “Margery the Medium” (a pseudonym bestowed by her friend J. Malcolm Bird, in a failed attempt to protect her privacy).
Tonight’s séance circle was an august group. Holding Margery’s right hand in the semidarkness was Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock, a theoretical physicist and engineer at MIT (who had helped develop an early color film process for movies). Next to him sat Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, a stern, intellectually rigorous psychic investigator who held a Ph.D. from Yale and was the chief research officer of the American Society for Psychical Research. To his right sat Dr. L. R. G. Crandon, Margery’s husband, a prominent Beacon Hill physician and devoted spiritualist. Next to him sat Orson Munn, owner of Scientific American magazine, whose offer of a cash prize to anyone who could produce psychic phenomena to the satisfaction of a committee of judges was the reason for tonight’s séance.
Holding Margery’s left hand, and thus completing the circle, was none other than Harry Houdini. Houdini had been invited to join this séance partly because of his unsurpassed knowledge of the ways in which the human mind can be tricked into believing that something is true when it is not. In fact, the cabinet in which Margery now sat had been designed and built by Houdini himself in order to circumvent the sort of trickery and sleight of hand that had made him famous. Once the cabinet was completed, Houdini—in his usual vain and imperious way—had announced that the cabinet was “fraud-proof.”
But the distinguished gentlemen in the room were not holding hands out of camaraderie. In fact, mistrust hung in the air like a suffocating mist. They were holding hands to provide a “control,” that is, to prevent anyone else from either faking psychic phenomena or, conversely, attempting to prevent genuine psychic phenomena from occurring. This was an attempt to create scientifically rigorous conditions under which it would be possible to judge whether “supernormal” phenomena—something outside the known laws of science—had actually taken place, even in the presence of bitter unbelievers.
In the center of the circle
, on the table, sat a contraption called a bell box. It was a small wooden box with a bell inside, attached to a dry cell battery. It measured fourteen inches long by six inches wide and five deep. The top of the box was a hinged lid held open by a spring. If the lid were depressed far enough, two small metal contacts would connect and complete a circuit, and the bell would ring. Because Margery was apparently prevented from physically touching the bell box, tonight’s test was to see if she could ring the bell by means of some unfathomable, “supernormal” power.
This was an improvement over the setup used in earlier séances, in which the bell box was simply set on the floor not too far from Margery’s feet. In one of those séances, when Houdini was seated next to her, the magician claimed he’d felt her moving her foot in order to ring the bell—which prompted him to insist that he build her a “fraud-proof” cabinet, which later became known as a “Houdini box” or a “Margery box.” The cabinet was about the size of a rolltop writing desk, with hand holes on the sides and a hole for her head on top. Its dimensions were four feet deep, five feet wide, and six feet high. It weighed about 140 pounds.
In a small adjoining room sat a female stenographer, taking notes under a very dim red light. According to her real-time notes, it was 9:45 p.m. when the lights in the séance room were lowered to near darkness. It was standard procedure to either completely darken the séance room or light it only with dim red light, because spiritualists claimed full light could prevent phenomena from occurring or might actually harm the medium. Skeptics, of course, claimed this whole business about dim light was utter hogwash and merely a convenient cover for all manner of fakery.
Nevertheless, once the lights were lowered, the séance sitters sank into an awkward and uncomfortable silence, clasping each other’s sweaty palms without speaking. Eight minutes of silence went by.
Then, suddenly, a bright, cheery whistle rang out into the room.
“Leave everything to me!” a young man’s voice called out. “Be of good cheer!”
The voice seemed to originate from Margery’s general location. It did not appear to be Margery’s voice, or if it was, it was cleverly disguised as the voice of a robust and mischievous young man. (In earlier séances, the voice still sounded even if Margery was asleep and snoring or her mouth was full of water. The voice also sometimes seemed to come from elsewhere in the room, even the ceiling.)
In fact, the voice itself claimed to be that of one Walter Stinson, Margery’s beloved older brother, who had died in a railroad accident years before, at the age of twenty-eight. Hamlin Garland, the noted novelist and spiritualist who had attended several previous séances with Margery, described Walter’s usual entrance as “a loud merry whistle, like that of a boy signaling his fellows; and a moment later a curious guttural voice was heard that might have come from deep in a man’s throat.” It was the voice of “a vigorous, humorous, rough-and-ready man of twenty-five or thirty, with such intonation as a Canadian youth … would use.” His tone and comments tended to be sarcastic and irreverent; he referred to his sister as “the kid.”
In previous séances, Walter had taken particular aim at Houdini, for whom he seemed to harbor a delicious disdain. He was profoundly suspicious of Houdini’s motives and delighted in mocking him, at one point singing out,
Harry Houdini, he sure is a sheeny,
A man with a crook in his shoe.
Says he “As to Walter,
I’ll lead him to the slaughter.”
“But,” says Walter, “perhaps I’ll get you!”
At another point, Walter snarled, “You Munn and Houdini think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? Straighten up there!” He was, he claimed, no “little sunbeam” or “gladiola” but “a full-grown man who wears an 11½ shoe on a supernormal foot.”
At other times, Walter seemed to have access to private information obtained in unfathomable ways. “Very interesting conversation you men had on the train,” he said to Houdini in one séance. “I was there. I can always be where my interests lie.” Houdini’s own interests, Walter made clear, were to prevent any kind of psychic phenomena from occurring, because according to his own account, in his book A Magician Among the Spirits, he was a wounded seeker who had turned into an angry professional debunker.
“I have said many times that I am willing to believe, want to believe, will believe, if the Spiritualists can show me any substantiated proof,” Houdini had written, but “none of the evidence offered has been able to stand up under the fierce rays of investigation.”
A healthy skepticism was fair, and there was no shortage of fake psychics and table tippers in the public square. But in the face of phenomena that were entirely unexplainable, Walter argued, Houdini was willing to take his skepticism one step further and cheat to keep it from happening. In fact, in a séance two days earlier, Walter had predicted that Houdini would do something to prevent Margery from ringing the bell box, possibly by slipping a die between the box and the hinged lid. “Search his pockets … you’ll find the other die,” he’d said.
If this was indeed the disembodied voice of Margery’s brother, the voice was entirely in character, because in life Walter Stinson had been willful, rebellious, and filled with reckless joy, with tousled blond hair and broad shoulders. He was strong enough to stand up to his father, a grim and disapproving fundamentalist. But he was also kind enough that he once gave away his expensive overcoat to a tramp. Mina and Walter had been very close. They shared a casual interest in the shadow world of the occult, partly because they had a cousin named Henry, crippled by a childhood accident, who was a “dowser”—able to find water by means of a forked stick. All the wells on the Stinson farm had been dug with the help of Henry’s magic stick. Mina and Walter were both amused and puzzled by Henry’s seeming inexplicable abilities. Walter was intrigued enough that he once came back from town with wild tales of a “spook show,” or séance, that he had attended.
When Walter was killed after a railcar fell on him, Mina had been heartbroken. She left home shortly afterward, got married, and had a son, but the marriage was an unhappy one, and she divorced soon afterward. When she went to the hospital for an operation, she charmed the doctor who treated her, a tall Boston surgeon named Le Roi Crandon. After all, those who knew her, especially men, stumbled over superlatives for her. She was “deep and frivolous, superficial and solemn,” one observer wrote, “an elusive beauty, a delicate and mischievous loveliness.”
Several years later (in 1918), with the coming of the world war, Mina volunteered to drive ambulances for a navy hospital. There she crossed paths once again with Dr. Crandon (now a lieutenant commander of a medical unit), who was by then also divorced. Shortly afterward, a somewhat unlikely relationship blossomed between the thirty-year-old Canadian farm girl with sensuous eyes and a throwaway laugh and the forty-four-year-old doctor, who had developed a deep interest in the claims of spiritualism. The newlyweds moved into Dr. Crandon’s four-story brick house at 10 Lime Street in Boston.
Dr. Crandon had first developed an interest in spiritualism after reading Sir Oliver Lodge’s famous 1916 book, Raymond, about the son Lodge had lost in World War I. Eventually, Dr. Crandon declared his conviction that he was at least “intellectually convinced” of the reality of some psychic phenomena. As time went on, Dr. Crandon became ever more deeply involved in the spiritualist movement, becoming a close friend and colleague of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s. Mina, who at first had no particular interest in spiritualism beyond her cousin’s crazy dowsing stick, lightheartedly went along with her husband’s hobby.
One day, on a lark, after a day of horseback riding, Mina and a friend stopped in to see a local Boston psychic. Still dressed in their riding clothes, both women were taken aback when the clairvoyant described an invisible presence in the room—a laughing young man with broad shoulders and blond hair. Mina was immediately convinced it must be Walter. At the conclusion of the sitting, the medium gravely told Mina that she had been chosen for “The Work.”
One evening shortly afterward, in May 1923, Mina, Dr. Crandon, and four friends sat down for a séance in a small fourth-floor room once used as a den, in their home at 10 Lime Street. They made a circle with linked hands around a Crawford table (named after a well-known psychic researcher and built without nails according to the latest occult instructions). But nothing happened. “They were all so solemn about it that I couldn’t help laughing,” Mina recalled later. “They reproved me severely, and my husband informed me gravely that ‘This is a serious matter.’” That’s when the table began, ever so slightly, to move. Then it moved some more. And then it rose up on two legs and fell to the floor with a resounding crash.
Someone suggested that the séance sitters take turns leaving the room to see who in the group was the “medium,” channeling this alarming phenomenon. One by one, the sitters left the room, but the table kept moving. Finally, Mina got up and left, and the table immediately stopped moving. When she reentered the room, the others cheered.
Mina, of all people, a medium? She seemed the most improbable candidate in Boston. She didn’t even really “believe.” But over the next weeks, months, and years, Mina Crandon, as “Margery,” became one of the best-known, and most-studied, psychics in the world.
The phenomena that appeared to manifest during her séances, attested to by others who were present, were startling. As one writer observed, Margery “was able to produce an extraordinary spectrum of spiritistic phenomena that are very difficult to explain.” Once the table tipped up on two legs and played a tune on the piano. Another time, according to the record, the table followed a guest “out through the corridor into the bedroom … then, on request for more, the table started downstairs after him, when we stopped it to save the wall plaster.”
Through a Glass, Darkly Page 17