Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  2. It is never that of a sitter.

  3. One of the thirteen is a mirror-print of the other twelve.

  4. These prints are made in dental wax and have, therefore, three dimensions. The mirror-print (as distinct from positive and negative) cannot be made in a three-dimensional world. The best way to understand it is to say that the man behind the mirror has pushed his thumb through into our world.…

  5. Now comes the unexpected observation: The Navy finger-print expert whom we have, went over the prints last night of Psyche, Walter and Walter’s mother. He found approximately a 45% resemblance in characteristics in all three thumbs which is precisely what ought to be the case in relationships of this degree.

  Do you realize what this means? It means that we have proved that there is in the séance room a person who is not one of us. That it is always the same person and that that person’s thumbprints have an average percentage of resemblance which a brother should have to a mother and a sister. This entity or person declares himself in a voice proven to be mechanically independent of the normal anatomy and physiology of the medium, to be Walter, her brother discarnate.

  Nevertheless, a couple of years later the skeptics got some ammunition to shoot down this latest evidence. In 1932, a report appeared in the bulletin of the Boston Society for Psychic Research claiming that Margery had gotten the fingerprints not from Walter but from her dentist, Dr. Frederick Caldwell (who had originally suggested the idea of using dental wax for digital impressions). According to the report, by one E. E. Dudley, Dr. Caldwell’s right and left thumbprints were virtually identical to those Walter had been claiming were his own since 1926. Dudley claimed there were no fewer than twenty-four correspondences between the prints.

  But this startling claim—clear evidence of fraud—resulted in a furious exchange of counterclaims. William Button, president of the American Society for Psychical Research, now claimed that it was Dudley who was the fraudster, having substituted Dr. Caldwell’s prints for Walter’s, either inadvertently or because of deep-seated resentments toward the Crandons. And a new analysis found that the match between the two sets of prints was actually questionable anyway.

  Still later, the medium’s son, John Rand, gave a different version of events. He floated the story that Conan Doyle and Crandon had visited a Boston funeral home late at night to steal fingerprints from a dead body in the morgue. One problem with this story (in addition to the oddball image of two distinguished doctors creeping around a midnight morgue): Doyle was never in Boston during the period the prints appeared in the wax.

  But despite all the evidence that had been presented, the Scientific American committee refused to budge from its position that at least so far nothing that had occurred constituted incontrovertible proof of the reality of psychic phenomena. Though they could not catch Margery or the Crandons in some ruse to concoct the voice of Walter, or figure out how the bell box was rung with no one physically touching it, they remained firmly in Houdini’s corner: “None of the evidence offered has been able to stand up under the fierce rays of investigation.”

  And Orson Munn—the owner of the Scientific American—never had to write a check for five thousand dollars.

  * * *

  OVER THE months that followed the disputed séances, Sir Arthur exchanged a series of letters with Dr. Crandon, brimming with anger and frustration over the continued intransigence of several members of the committee. In one letter, dated November 22, 1924, Dr. Crandon noted that in the sittings of both July 23 and July 24, Houdini had gotten “positive results [of psychic phenomena] and signed his name to them.” Then, later, he claimed to have witnessed no such thing and accused Margery of fraud.

  “After [the committee member] McDougall, last week, had seen everything done by the bell-box which he had asked for and all in good red light, he was asked by Dr. Elwood Worcester to sign that he had seen psychic phenomena. He replied: ‘If I were to do that, I should have to recast and deny the philosophy of a lifetime!’ Can you imagine a more hopeless statement?

  “Dr. Worcester threw up his hands. McDougall’s philosophy is something inviolable and immutable like Gibraltar, forsooth! I give up. Prince is worse, and Comstock is sick in a nervous way, so I think the Siam [Scientific American] Committee is over.”

  Doyle wrote back in agreement. “It [is] difficult to say which is the more annoying. Houdini the conjurer, with his preposterous and ignorant theories of fraud, or such ‘scientific’ sitters as Professor McDougall of Harvard, who, after 50 sittings and signing as many papers at the end of each sitting to endorse the wonders recorded, was still unable to give any definite judgment, and contented himself with vague innuendoes.”

  * * *

  BUT BY now, the science-minded readership of Scientific American had begun expressing general discontent at the early reports from the psychic investigation committee that had appeared in the magazine’s pages. Most of them had been penned by J. Malcolm Bird, and they made it sound as though the committee seemed willing to at least entertain the possibility that Margery’s mediumship might in fact be genuine. Uneasy with this development, the magazine’s editors urged the committee to wrap things up.

  In November 1924, the magazine published the considered judgments of the five committeemen.

  The statement of Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, the committee’s chairman, ran first. After first apologizing for only having attended six of the more than ninety sittings, he concluded, “I am compelled to render an opinion that thus far the experiments have not scientifically and conclusively proved the existence of supernormal powers.”

  Hereward Carrington’s statement was next: “I am convinced that no snap judgment is of any value in a case such as this; nor will preventing the phenomena demonstrate their non-existence. The present case is peculiarly difficult, for many reasons; but I am convinced that genuine phenomena have occurred here, and that a prolonged series of sittings, undertaken in an impartial spirit, would demonstrate this.” This statement was remarkable in that it was a nod of assent—and one of the first—from someone with truly sterling credentials.

  Dr. McDougall remained, on the whole, unconvinced, even though on one occasion (the séance of May 12) he had said, in the face of some eerie phenomenon, “If that happens again, I shall leave this house an altered man!” but when it promptly happened again, he did not seem changed in any way.

  After attending forty sittings, Dr. Comstock was still on the fence: “My conclusion … is that rigid proof has not yet been furnished but that the case at present is interesting and should be investigated further.”

  Houdini’s conclusion, not surprisingly, contained no such waffling: “My decision is, that everything which took place at the séances which I attended was a deliberate and conscious fraud, and that if the lady possesses any psychic power, at no time was the same proven in any of the … séances.”

  Mr. Munn tried to close the book on the whole matter, telling his readers, “The famous Margery case is over so far as the Scientific American Psychic Investigation is concerned.” In summing it all up, the magazine’s editors concluded that the psychic investigations committee was “unable to reach a final and unanimous decision with regard to the mediumship of ‘Margery.’”

  Isn’t it rather odd? All these famous men had gathered around the séance table—Houdini, Dr. Comstock, Dr. McDougall—to denounce spiritualism or cast a cold eye on it at the very least. They were there, basically, to disprove the very idea that the living can communicate with the dead. And yet, night after night, there they were, talking to a ghost: Walter. They talked about him; they talked to him. Recall what happened after Walter discovered the ruler in Houdini’s box and flew into a rage: Dr. Comstock addressed Walter and got him to calm down. Would Comstock have bothered, if he really thought “Walter” was some trick?

  Detailed notes of these séances were made every night—Dr. Crandon made sure of that. He also made sure that the sitters signed the notes to verify their accuracy. At
the end of every evening, they all agreed that Walter had said this and done that. Even Houdini agreed. Here’s just one example. On possibly the first time he sat for a séance with Margery, on July 23, 1924, the notes begin, “During first part of sitting nothing observed except Walter’s whistle and whisperings. Next, Houdini was touched several times on inside of right leg. He did not announce it, but Walter did so for him, specifying the place touched. Houdini … confirmed what Walter said.”

  But how did Walter whistle? And how did he speak? Was it Margery talking? Was he using Margery’s voice?

  After the failure of the Scientific American committee to agree on genuine phenomena, Dr. Crandon attempted to answer these questions. He asked his colleagues at Harvard Medical School to test his wife. One of them, Dr. Mark Wiley Richardson, devised an apparatus he called a “voice-cut-out machine,” a three-foot-high glass U-tube with a luminous cork floating in each arm and two flexible metal hoses with mouthpieces. Each mouthpiece had to be held between the teeth and the tongue positioned over three holes to keep the corks in disequilibrium. It was an ingenious way to keep Margery from talking or whistling, and yet Walter could be heard doing both. Walter’s was an independent voice.

  Yes, there were controls: This was done in a locked room at a house other than 10 Lime Street, and Dr. Richardson held Margery’s hands the whole while. Under these conditions, wrote Dr. Crandon, “the Walter voice talks and whistles freely, will whistle any tune requested, if he knows it, and takes apparent delight in pronouncing words which contain many labial, dental and lingual sounds.”

  So how did Walter talk? Usually through the ectoplasm, he explained. Out of Margery’s right ear would emerge a blob, the size of a large potato; it was cold, gray, and clammy and settled on her shoulder. That, Walter said, was the machine by which his independent voice talked. The ectoplasm vanished in the light, hence the need for darkness in séances. The many photographs of ectoplasm were taken with flash photography and fast shutter speeds, a technology just emerging in the 1920s.

  With this and other experiments, the Crandons kept trying to prove the genuineness of psychic phenomena. But their enemies would keep going to extreme lengths to prove fakery.

  Conan Doyle with Lady Jean and their children arriving in New York to begin a lecture tour.

  COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “We Have Just Begun to Fight!”

  Not long after the inconclusive results of the Scientific American séances were announced, a bound pamphlet with a bright pink cover began circulating among the many people who had followed the case, believers and disbelievers alike. The pamphlet was emblazoned with the headline, “HOUDINI Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium ‘Margery,’” with Houdini’s name in the biggest, boldest type.

  Written by the magician himself, the pamphlet purported to show exactly how Margery had accomplished her frauds, which Houdini referred to as “the ‘slickest’ ruse I have ever encountered.”

  When Sir Arthur, Dr. Crandon, and their colleagues got wind of Houdini’s “exposé,” they were furious. According to the agreed-upon terms of the Scientific American sittings, Houdini had signed statements agreeing that the “controls” were adequate during all the séances he participated in. Yet his very public pamphlet claimed that Bird’s early reports on the Margery mediumship were “tommy-rot” and “fulsome, gushing reports of nothing.” It was all fraud, he claimed, probably engineered by the Crandons working together, possibly with the collusion of Malcolm Bird, though only a clever magician like himself could detect it.

  Without mentioning his own apparent dishonesty, Houdini claimed in the pamphlet that he’d caught Margery cheating. In the first of the five séances Houdini attended, he said, the bell box had been placed on the floor between his feet, with Margery’s left foot making contact with his right foot as a form of control. (The pamphlet included a diagram of the placement of their feet.) In order to prepare himself for that night’s task, Houdini explained that he had worn a silk rubber bandage around his leg, just below the knee, all that day. By the time of the séance, that leg had grown “swollen and painfully tender,” enabling him to detect the slightest movement of Margery’s foot.

  Houdini claimed that during the séance he detected the medium surreptitiously sliding her foot past his in order to ring the bell. Later, when the table tipped, he said he could feel her ducking her head to do it and that when a megaphone flew through the air, supposedly tossed by Walter, it would have been quite simple for her to toss it with her head. It was as a result of these tricks, he said, that he later designed the so-called Houdini box to circumvent them.

  But other people who attended the séances had an entirely different story to tell. Malcolm Bird, in a 1925 book, called Houdini’s pamphlet “scurrilous,” calling his motives and methods into question. As someone who helped to set up and coordinate the séances from the beginning, Bird recalled that all the other committeemen were cooperative and respectful of each other. But Houdini was different. From the very start, he was arrogant, rude, and temperamental, Bird said.

  He seemed to have nothing but scorn for the other members. He was not willing to assume the personal honesty and competence of his colleagues or impartially consider evidence, which was the whole point of the investigation, Bird said. Instead, Houdini “regarded a major part of his duties to be the protection of himself and the Scientific American against possible collusion between committee members and fraudulent mediums.” Primarily, though, he needed to protect his own reputation as the world’s most famous fraud buster and flatly said so. He had agreed to serve on the committee under certain stringent conditions, he said, including having the right to reject any other proposed member, because “while an ordinary investigator … could make a mistake and later correct himself without damage to his standing, I was in a different position, for due to the peculiar nature of my work my reputation was at stake and I could not run the risk of having it injured.”

  In other words, Bird observed, Houdini was under professional and financial pressure to make sure no phenomena witnessed during the séances were judged genuine, no matter how convincing. He “stacked” the committee and its rules to make sure of this. In Bird’s view, in other words, Houdini had “abandoned all pretense at judicial consideration. All that had been reported from prior sittings was, in his eye, necessarily the result of mediumistic fraud. The phenomena must be invalid because they couldn’t possibly be valid.”

  And that was that.

  In his pamphlet, as mentioned above, Houdini included a diagram showing the position of Margery’s and Houdini’s feet, with the bell box on the floor nearby, to show how she had secretly rung the bell. But in his book, Bird ran Houdini’s diagram side by side with an actual photograph of their two feet, taken immediately after the séance ended. The photograph showed that Margery’s foot was clearly blocked by Houdini’s foot and too far away from the bell box to ring it. Bird claimed that Houdini hadn’t run the photograph in his pamphlet, but instead substituted a diagram, because the photograph clearly contradicted his claim.

  Bird also recalled that after the very first séance Houdini had announced to the others, “Well, gentlemen, I’ve got her. All fraud—every bit of it. One more sitting and I will be ready to expose everything. But one thing puzzles me—I don’t see how she did that megaphone trick.” (At one point in the séance, Walter had asked, “Which direction should I throw the megaphone?” and when someone suggested toward Houdini, it flew in his direction and landed on the floor nearby.)

  Bird and the others told Houdini that they, too, had considered how this phenomenon might have been faked. The megaphone couldn’t have been in her lap (too easy to be found with an exploring hand) and couldn’t have been on her shoulder (Houdini had explored that, he said). “Then an expression of relieved triumph spread over his face,” Bird wrote. “Though admitting that he had made no search there, he stated as fact that the megaphone had been on her head
during the critical moments. The reasoning here is simple. The megaphone can’t be in the air; it must be somewhere; it is nowhere else; it must be on her head. Ergo, it is on her head.”

  By means of this kind of circular, self-serving logic, according to Bird, Houdini was able to dismiss anything that happened in the sittings and preserve his reputation not only as the world’s greatest escape artist but also as the preeminent debunker of spiritualistic nonsense.

  * * *

  IN THEIR private correspondence during this period, Sir Arthur and Dr. Crandon seethed with indignation. Both men were fighters, by nature and inclination. “We are too supine and must fight back!” Doyle wrote to Crandon. “We have just begun to fight!” Crandon fired back. For Sir Arthur, the matter was even more personal than it was for Crandon, because the accusations in Houdini’s inflammatory pamphlet came from a man he still considered a friend. (Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this highly public squabble was that in their private letters to each other Doyle and Houdini continued to treat each other with what appeared to be genuine courtesy and respect.)

  It wasn’t as if Doyle and his colleagues had any shortage of material against Houdini, if they chose to fight back. After all, what had happened in the Scientific American séances appeared to be very suspicious, if not incriminating. But Crandon, a bit more circumspect, counseled caution in the way they chose to proceed.

  “The case against Houdini is, of course, circumstantial and deductive, the sort of thing which convicts most murderers, the sort of thing of which Sherlock Holmes is the master!” Dr. Crandon counseled Sir Arthur, implying that he might consider enlisting the help of the world’s canniest sleuth against the world’s noisiest enemy of spiritualism. However, Houdini “would be only too glad to tempt us into a mud-slinging contest, but at that he might easily beat us, because of his experience. We remain, however, steadfast in psychic research and there will be no mud-slinging except a publication of the official notes [of the Scientific American séances] with all the details.”