Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  In later séances, there seemed to be all manner of psychic high jinks. There was ghostly “psychic music,” of bells and harmonicas, from no discernible source. Then there were the rapping sounds, allegedly from a total of forty-four different discarnate entities in the first year. The messages Margery seemed to be transmitting didn’t come through only in English; she also communicated, according to one observer, in “good French, bad German, ideographic Chinese, in Swedish, Dutch, and Greek.” Then, finally, came the actual voice of “Walter,” merry and impudent, which frequently accompanied the phenomena. Walter’s widely reported antics would eventually become known to much of the English-speaking world.

  One famous psychic investigator from Europe came to a séance and, when he heard the voice of Walter, held his hands over Mina’s mouth and nose.

  “Now, Doctor, isn’t that convincing?” the voice said.

  “How do I know you don’t talk through your ears?” the skeptical investigator asked.

  Mina later gleefully retold this story, to show “what amazing things people are willing to believe in order to avoid believing the things they don’t want to believe.”

  * * *

  THE SUSPICION and mistrust that had begun to poison the otherwise cordial private relations between Sir Arthur and Houdini had also begun to poison the national debate on the subject of spiritualism. While the “new revelation” could now claim millions of adherents across the Western world, its detractors—whether drawn from the worlds of religion, science, or elsewhere—seemed to grow ever more bitterly vocal. The huge popular success of Sir Arthur’s second American lecture tour, in the late winter and early spring of 1923, only seemed to ratchet up the volume of the quarrel.

  Partially in response to all this, the sober and serious-minded Scientific American magazine chose to enter the fray, in an effort to introduce objective evidence that might conclusively prove or disprove the truth or falsity of spirit voices, spirit photographs, communications from the dead, and all other strange manifestations that had so divided the nation. In the December 1922 issue, Orson Munn instructed his editors to run the following notice:

  * * *

  ANNOUNCING

  $5000 FOR PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

  As a contribution toward psychic research, the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN pledges the sum of $5000 to be awarded for conclusive psychic manifestations.

  On the basis of existing data we are unable to reach a definite conclusion as to the validity of psychic claims. In the effort to clear the confusion, and to present our readers with firsthand and authenticated information regarding this most baffling of all studies, we are making this offer.

  The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will pay $2500 to the first person who produces a psychic photograph under its test conditions and to the full satisfaction of the eminent men who will act as judges.

  The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will pay $2500 to the first person who produces a visible psychic manifestation of other character, under these conditions and to the full satisfaction of these judges. Purely mental phenomena like telepathy, or purely audible ones like rappings, will not be eligible for this award. The contest does not revolve about the psychological or religious aspects of the phenomena, but has to do only with genuineness and objective reality.

  * * *

  The magazine then named an esteemed five-person committee, which included eminent people from both sides of the debate, to officiate. There was Dr. William McDougall, a psychologist at Harvard; Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock; Dr. Walter Franklin Prince (SPR); Dr. Hereward Carrington, another psychic investigator and spiritualist; and Houdini.

  J. Malcolm Bird, a member of the Scientific American staff, served as secretary; though he was not on the committee itself, his role would become increasingly influential, and controversial, with the passage of time. Among other things, it was widely rumored that he was having an affair with Margery. Also, though Dr. L. R. G. Crandon was not seated on the official Scientific American committee, as time went on, he became a regular participant, with many of the sittings being held in his house on Lime Street in Boston.

  Though this collection of résumés appeared impressive on paper, the rules of engagement would later be bitterly challenged. By mutual agreement, anyone could be voted off the committee, for any reason, and as time went on, the composition of the committee changed. Also, it was agreed that the committee would assent to the genuineness of any phenomena only if the vote was unanimous, or if four of the five board members were in agreement. (Thus, it was later argued, a stalemate was virtually certain.) The business of the committee was to carry on through 1923 and 1924, with periodic public updates on the august committee’s findings.

  No one could have been more keenly interested in the committee’s creation, makeup, and progress than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As the world’s foremost spokesman for the spiritualist cause, his great walrus-whiskered Scottish visage hung over the proceedings like an enormous spirit photograph. However, he was not physically present in Boston for any of the sittings during 1923 and 1924 (being either off on another world-girdling lecture tour or fast at work on a new book, at Windlesham, in East Sussex). Nevertheless, Doyle was kept in close touch on the goings-on through an unrelenting barrage of letters from his dear spiritualist colleague Le Roi Crandon, his man on the ground in Boston.

  Like Doyle, Dr. Crandon was not someone who shrank from a fight. In fact, both men clearly relished the intellectual battle between the spiritualist camp and those they disdainfully referred to as “materialists”—those who believed in a dead, soulless, strictly rational world, stripped of radiance and mystery. The Scientific American séances were not so much principled inquiry into the two camps’ differences as a bitter dogfight. As Crandon’s and Doyle’s letters flew back and forth across the Atlantic, it was clear that the animosity between the spiritualists and their detractors was ratcheting up almost daily.

  “We continue to sit for the Scientific American Committee every night,” Dr. Crandon wrote in one letter. “Every night I insist on their living up to their agreement and giving me signed copies of their notes. This was an agreement made in advance between them and me and if they ever make any announcements not consistent with these notes you can readily see I have the material to crucify them. We are not wasting any time in compliments or politeness. It is war to the finish and they know I shall not hesitate to treat them surgically if necessary.”

  When Houdini published his book A Magician Among the Spirits while the Scientific American sittings were still in progress, Crandon and Doyle nearly exploded. The book laid out Houdini’s experiences with all manner of phony trance mediums and so-called psychics and explained that any of their tricks could be reproduced by ordinary magic. He described how he would sometimes attend séances wearing a fake beard or mustache, and after he’d gathered enough evidence to incriminate the phony medium, he would throw off his disguise and shout, “I am Houdini! And you are a fraud!”

  What was especially galling to spiritualists about Houdini’s book was that the frontispiece bore a photograph of the conjurer posing with Sir Arthur, in apparent good-natured companionship, but the text made Doyle out to be a kindly but gullible true believer. On the first page of his copy of Houdini’s book, Doyle later scrawled, “A malicious book, full of every sort of misrepresentation.”

  In one letter, Crandon complained that Houdini “has collected every lie and innuendo that has ever been raised against psychic science. He has an advantage over the rest of us in writing this book because he is not in any way held back by the ability or intent to tell the truth.” In other letters to Doyle, Crandon jacked up the ill will: “My only regret is that this low-minded Jew has any claims on the word ‘American.’” Elsewhere he referred to the magician’s “general nastiness” (without mentioning his own).

  Both men were disappointed by Houdini’s selection to serve on the committee in the first place, because it was by now widely known that Houdini had an ax to grind. Doyle wrote to him directly to c
omplain: “I see that you are on the Scientific American Committee, but how can it be called an Impartial Committee when you have committed yourself to such statements as that some Spiritualists pass away before they realize how they have been deluded, etc.?… What I wanted was five good clear-headed men who can push it without any prejudice at all.”

  Nevertheless, the Scientific American committee saved a seat for Houdini in the séance circle (though it was many months before the magician actually participated, due to his hectic performance schedule). As the committee got fully under way during the winter of 1923, it began to appear that Houdini’s doubts might actually be well-founded. A series of mediums gave sittings for the committee, but all failed, were judged “inconclusive,” or were shown to be out-and-out frauds.

  One early “medium” was a man from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, named George Valentine, who tried to rig the test by arranging to have an electric light go off when he stood up from his chair, which in turn switched on a phosphorous button in an adjoining room to create “spirit photographs.” Another woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Tomson, of Chicago, refused to participate at all unless she strictly controlled the situation (she was not allowed to). Then a young Italian lad named Nino Pecoraro, who could not read or write, impressed the committee with two séances in which he made a bell ring and a bugle toot, among other “rattlings, shrieks and high-pitched sound effects.” Houdini was not present for these sittings, but when he showed up for a third sitting—and personally tied up Pecoraro with rope, chains, and padlocks—the boy was unable to produce anything but a few muffled thumps and complaints (in the voice of the medium he was supposedly channeling) that he felt uncomfortable.

  It was Sir Arthur, someone who by now claimed to have attended more séances than perhaps anyone else in the world, who first suggested Mina Crandon, his fellow physician’s comely young wife, as a study subject. After discussing the matter with her husband, “Margery” agreed to sit for the committee, on one stipulation. If she won the five-thousand-dollar prize, she told them, she would not accept the money personally but donate it to psychic research.

  In all, the Scientific American committee had more than ninety sittings with Margery. The phenomena witnessed in the first several dozen sittings were so remarkable that Bird and Carrington seemed almost ready to hand over the prize money. The New York Times reported the development under an eye-catching headline:

  “Margery” Passes All Psychic Tests

  Scientists Find No Trickery

  Scores of Séances with Boston Medium

  But Houdini was aghast when he heard about all this. The reports in the magazine written by Bird, he wrote in his book, “were such as to lead an ordinary layman to believe that the magazine had found a medium who had successfully passed all its crucial tests and to all intents and purposes was ‘genuine.’” But in fact, these reports were “the worse piffle I ever read,” he wrote. It was all nonsense, a trick that he vowed to expose.

  Alarmed that the Scientific American committee might actually award the prize before he had a chance to debunk Margery—and even though he had so far not attended a single one of her séances with the committee—Houdini now cut short his harried performance schedule to come to Boston to participate in the séances and presumably put a stop to this nonsense.

  Malcolm Bird, in a 1925 book he published about the Margery mediumship, claimed that Houdini had been difficult from the very start. Unlike the others selected to sit on the committee, Houdini “regarded himself as the hub about which the committee would revolve, the one member whose abilities were of moment.” (Odd for a man who showed up for only five of the more than ninety sittings.) He had no respect for the credentials or honesty of his peers, asking at one point, “Who is this man, McDougall, anyway? I’ve never heard of him.”

  Houdini’s whole attitude, according to Bird, was one that made any kind of objective judgment impossible. Houdini was now fifty years old, and his physically demanding escape tricks were increasingly difficult to perform. More and more, he was leaning on his exposure of mediums as a primary source of income. Therefore, Bird wrote, “in building up a new stage personality as exposer of mediums … he must behave toward all mediums as he has toward Margery. He must assume in advance that the phenomena are fraudulent, must at all cost make them so appear.”

  By now the distrust and suspicion among the committee members had distilled into a dark and lethal venom.

  In a July 30, 1924, letter to Doyle marked “confidential,” Dr. Crandon reported that “at this moment it looks as if Mr. Munn, seeing that there was apparently grave danger of having to grant the award and give the prize, came on with Houdini to block it at any price.”

  * * *

  SUCH WAS the atmosphere that steamy night of August 25, 1924, when Houdini and the four other men joined hands with Margery, lowered the lights, and prepared to see what might happen next. After eight minutes of silence, there was a wrenching, grating sound that came from the vicinity of the cabinet containing Margery.

  “She’s forced open the cabinet with her shoulders!” Houdini cried out. “She’s pushed out the front, and bent some brass staples!”

  This “precipitated a long row” in the darkness, according to the notes by the stenographer (who referred to Margery as “Psyche”). Responding to Houdini’s accusation, the stenographer coolly observed that Houdini “did not state … that there had been the slightest strain of muscles of Psyche’s hands or forearm and he did not state why he had made a fraud-proof cabinet which could be forced open by the Psychic.”

  Once the hubbub died down, the group sat in watchful silence until 10:35, when, according to the real-time notes, Dr. Crandon angrily spoke up.

  “Houdini, do you have a white flashlight hidden on you?” he demanded.

  “No!” Houdini snapped back, in evident surprise.

  A few minutes later, at 10:43, it was Walter’s turn to accost the magician.

  “Houdini, have you got the mark just right?” he jeered. “You think you’re smart, don’t you? How much are they paying you to stop these phenomena?”

  “It’s costing me $2500 a week to be here, from loss of contracts,” Houdini said.

  “Where are these contracts? You didn’t have a job for this week.”

  Suddenly Dr. Comstock broke in. “What do you mean by this, Walter? This is not psychic research!”

  “Comstock, take the box out in the white light, and examine it,” Walter said, “and you will see what I mean!”

  The distinguished Dr. Comstock scooped up the bell box from the table and took it into the fully lit hall outside the séance room. He could clearly see that the eraser from the end of an ordinary pencil had been wedged between the top of the box and the hinged lid, making it very difficult to lower the lid and cause the bell to ring. (Comstock later calculated that with the eraser in place it would not be impossible to ring the bell, but it would have taken about four times the amount of force to ring it than if it had not been there.)

  The female stenographer noted drily that “it is unknown who put [the eraser] there.” Though the bell box had been examined at the beginning of the evening’s sittings, it had not been examined at the beginning of this particular sitting.

  No one directly accused Houdini of putting it there, but he denied having done it anyway. Everyone else denied doing it also (including those seated in the back of the room but outside the séance circle). In the judgment of at least seven people who were present, the stenographer noted, the “evidence pointed wholly toward Houdini, who was the last person to examine and test the bell-box.” At least according to the note taker, “It seems apparent … that the committee, unofficially at least, does not intend to allow any further phenomena to take place.”

  Walter, jolly and jubilant, seemed to be unbowed by all this.

  “Tomorrow have the kid sit in the box, have every opening closed, except for the neck, and let these fellows declare themselves satisfied, and then we’ll see!” he sang out
.

  And with that, Walter jauntily signed off for the night.

  During séances an eerie putty-like substance called “ectoplasm” emerged out of Margery’s ear. The spirit of her brother Walter said he used it to speak—and whistle.

  COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Houdini Cheats … Again

  Walter often seemed to be the smartest, funniest, most vividly alive personality in the séance room. But who or what was he? A bit of mischievous ventriloquism concocted by Margery (even with a mouthful of water)? A two-player con game engineered by Margery and her husband, Dr. Crandon, a frequent participant in the sittings and a bitter partisan warrior in the fight against the “materialists”? Or was he what he claimed to be—an actual discarnate spirit whose high-spirited high jinks demonstrated the survival of human personality after death?

  Those who followed the progress of the Scientific American séances in the spiritualist press, and sometimes even in popular newspapers, were roundly entertained by Walter’s irreverent antics and witticisms. In fact, as time went on, Walter began developing a fan base akin to that of his now-famous sister “Margery.” He bounced around the séance room, laughing and cajoling, mocking, taunting, and rhyming with sardonic glee, like an irreverent flapper-era rapper. After one especially lively session, Mrs. Margaret Cameron Lewis, who had extensive experience in the psychic world, remarked that she had “never heard anything to equal the voice of Walter.”

  During another session, Walter was asked whether he was happy when he first “went over” to the other side. “No, I slept six years and was homesick and lonesome,” he replied. “I admit I would have preferred to finish out my earth life as other people do,” adding, “Within the next five years the reality of psychic phenomena and the truth of spirit return will be established.”