Doyle tried to hold his tongue, as Dr. Crandon had advised, but it was difficult. Eventually, his rage boiled over.
On the morning of January 26, 1926, the front page of the Boston Herald carried a long letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—a double-barreled blast from the man Crandon called “the great leader of this present movement.” Doyle criticized the committee’s findings, its flawed methods, its members, the general reluctance of people to admit it when the mystery has plainly shown its face, but most particularly the methods and motives of the Hungarian magician Erich Weisz, known to the world as Harry “Handcuff” Houdini.
“It is Christmas morning and I sit at a table which is heaped with documents and photographs. They are the dossier of the Crandon case,” Sir Arthur began, that gray winter day, sitting at a writing desk in a hotel in Switzerland, where he and his family were vacationing for the holidays. “Perhaps one should not work on Christmas day, yet surely there is no day so holy that one may not use it for the fight for truth, the exposure of evil and the defense of the honor of a most estimable lady.”
He was, he said, deeply offended as a gentleman that Mina Crandon, this “charming lady,” and her eminent husband, the physician, had been so gracious as to host many of these out-of-town American guests over a period of many months; had declined any payments at all, if Margery won the prize; and had even continued the sittings after Houdini had publicly accused her of fraud. Yet after she was publicly accused, the American gentlemen of the committee had not stood up for her, thus permitting “this attack upon the reputation of a lady who had entrusted herself to their hands.”
The committee itself, he complained, might have sounded imposing on paper, but it had significant practical limitations, including “an entire lack of harmony and confidence.” Nobody seemed to trust or even respect anybody else. And “as every Spiritualist knows, harmony is the first essential for psychic success.” It was a testament to Mrs. Crandon’s psychic powers that she got the results she did “with such a hopeless crowd,” he said. Psychic phenomena were fickle and ephemeral, like dappled moonlight; they couldn’t be forced, especially in an atmosphere of deep suspicion. In short, the whole committee was “a farce.”
It was Doyle’s considered opinion that the committee’s efforts were also poisoned by the fact that Houdini and Dr. Prince seemed to have formed a cabal against Dr. Carrington and Mr. Bird, the secretary. They had invented “the monstrous theory that their own secretary was helping to produce the results which they could not explain away.” It did not matter that the phenomena occurred even when Bird was not there or that there was not a “tittle of proof” of these charges.
Walter, Doyle said, “was a vigorous and virile personality, whose whispered voice could be heard throughout the room, often at some distance from the medium, and continued equally loud when the medium’s mouth was filled with water.” This alone should have qualified as a “fairly well-marked psychic phenomenon,” but because the committee could not award the prize without a unanimous or four-out-of-five vote, even after more than sixty separate psychic manifestations, in more than ninety sittings, witnessed by 140 respected people—ministers, doctors, lawyers, “men and women of education and of all creeds”—they could not reach a positive conclusion.
In essence, Sir Arthur said, the committee was set up to fail.
There was also Walter, and of course the ringing of the bell box, when Margery and her husband were both under strict controls. “When I say that this was done not once, nor a hundred times, but more likely a thousand times, that it was done when out of all possible reach of the medium, that it was done in the darkness, in the red light, and in subdued daylight, and finally that it was done in Dr. Prince’s lap, while … he waved his arms all round it, one realizes how invincible was the prejudice which the Crandons had to overcome.”
One observer, Joseph De Wyckoff, whom Doyle said was “a rather strict critic,” made the following sworn statement after observing one of the sittings: “In good effective light playing directly upon the contact box I have known the electric bell to ring to my order long and short rings when the medium was at a clear distance of several feet and I controlled her hands and feet, all the other sitters at the time plainly visible.” This statement, Sir Arthur maintained, “utterly demolishes all the theories afterwards put forward by Houdini.”
Another practical problem was spotty attendance. Both Carrington and Bird attended nearly all the séances, but Houdini and Prince missed most of the sittings, so that convincing phenomena were produced when only a partial committee was present, and therefore they didn’t count. One other practical problem: Dr. Prince’s deafness. He could barely hear Walter, the star of the show, so how could he possibly render judgment?
Then Doyle laid out his most damning charge—that Houdini had actually tried to jinx the results on two separate occasions, explaining the evidence for these two “plants,” once the eraser and once the ruler, in detail. Doyle added that based on a letter Houdini had written to the editor of the spiritualist journal Light even before the sittings began, it was apparent to him that Houdini meant to block the phenomena however possible, no matter what happened. Houdini was concerned about protecting his own reputation and could not possibly be party to an investigation that suggested psychic phenomena might be genuine. Hence, Houdini’s willingness to make sure that nothing happened in the Margery séances, even if it involved fraud.
Unfortunately for Houdini, Doyle added, there was one “dramatic factor” Houdini hadn’t counted on—the wiseass discarnate Walter, haughty and self-assured, who called out the famous magician in front of the committee. Houdini claimed to have “exposed” Margery, but it was Walter who exposed Houdini.
“Far from exposing anyone,” Doyle concluded, Houdini left Boston “a very discredited man so far as psychic research is concerned.”
* * *
THE SCIENTIFIC American séances, intended to conclusively prove or disprove the reality of psychic phenomena and thus put the metaphysical quarrel to rest, seemed to have done no such thing. Angry squabbles continued to rattle through the spiritualist and scientific press for months and even years afterward (these events occurred, after all, almost a century ago). People looked at the evidence, aired their opinions, and then reached for their foregone conclusions.
Some leading investigators came down foursquare on the side of the genuineness of Margery’s mediumship. Eric Dingwall, the research officer of the SPR, produced a report based on séances with Margery during January and February 1925. “I have never on any occasion detected anything that could be called fraud or deceit,” he wrote. “It is the most beautiful case of teleplasmic telekinesis with which I am acquainted. We can freely touch the teleplasm. The materialized hands are joined by cords to the medium’s body; they seize objects and move them.… I held the medium’s hands; I saw [teleplasmic] figures and felt them in good light. The ‘control’ is irreproachable.”
Meanwhile, as the Margery séances continued, weird phenomena were witnessed by many—whether they were “real,” faked, or something in between. A tambourine and a ukulele appeared to dance in the air. A Victrola started and stopped on command without being touched. A rose was picked up from the table and dropped in a séance sitter’s lap. Cold, clammy, puttylike “ectoplasm” appeared to emerge from Margery’s nose, mouth, and ears, one of the most alarming and repulsive phenomena of the spiritualist era. People felt someone or something touch them on their legs, hands, and faces. On two occasions, Walter’s voice and Margery’s voice actually overlapped.
Strange lights danced around the room. In one case, a “nebulous luminosity about two feet high and eight inches wide appeared above the table.… This was visible to all.” It appeared to take on the shape of a human face, then dissolved. There was table tipping, mysterious voices, and strange perfumes wafting through the air. On one occasion, a photographer came to take a picture of the bell box for publication. He exposed a single photographic plate, in
a sunlit room. Twice while he was doing this, Margery passed through the room, doing her household duties. On exposure, the box was almost completely obscured by two blobs of diffuse white light, on one edge of which some people said they saw a vague human face. When Walter was asked about this in séance, he said, “I was waiting for you to ask that. This house is haunted. There are lots of us around.”
But for every believer there was a disbeliever.
One summer day in 1926, a thirty-year-old Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife arrived for a sitting with Margery. J. B. Rhine, then a young professor at Duke, would later become the father of modern “parapsychology” (he coined the word), subjecting “psi” (psychic) phenomena to the rigors of scientific inquiry. Rhine was unimpressed with Margery. Among other things, he believed he saw her kick a megaphone during the séance, to give the impression it was levitating. In fact, Rhine concluded that the whole show was “premeditated and brazen trickery” and that other, unpublished reports he knew about were sufficient “to place the question of any particle of genuineness in the realm of utter absurdity.”
He suspected that Dr. Crandon was Margery’s confederate and that Malcolm Bird might also be in on the con (because, after three years of working with her, Bird had not seemed to detect the fraud Rhine had noticed in one sitting). Rhine was especially suspicious of the Crandons’ hospitality. “Many find the Crandons such charming hosts that they find it difficult to think of them as fraudulent. This field is a dangerous place in which to be appreciative. Flies are caught with molasses. It is evidently of very great advantage to a medium, especially if fraudulent, to be personally attractive; it aids in the ‘fly-catching business.’” Rhine was aghast when Margery actually kissed one of the male séance sitters. “Could this man be expected to detect trickery in her?” the Rhines asked.
The Rhines also offered something else: a theory of motivation, because many had wondered, if the Crandons really were faking the whole thing, what they had to gain from such a dangerous, years-long fraud. Mrs. Crandon knew of her husband’s “morbid fear of death and intense interest in psychic affairs,” the Rhines suggested, and started the table-tipping stunt to please him and save their relationship. He responded to this apparently genuine phenomenon with such enthusiasm that she soon found herself “in deep water” and unable to stop. Later, “he gradually found out she was deceiving him, but had already begun to enjoy the notoriety it gave him, the groups of admiring society it brought to his home to hear him lecture and to be entertained, the interest and fame aroused in this country and Europe, etc.” Due to his “loss of position and prestige suffered in recent years,” he “continued to play the game—and was pleased to be hailed in many quarters as a ‘martyr to the cause of science.’” (The Rhines tacked on a scurrilous, unexplained charge to this explanation, pointing out that both Mina and her husband had previously been married, adding, “We refrain from publication of other pertinent and explanatory material for reasons which must be evident to the reader … [but] the raw facts must be dragged out into naked publicity for such as they.”)
It was an unsupported accusation more fitting for the National Enquirer than a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
When Sir Arthur read the Rhines’ report of the Margery séance, published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, he took out ads in the Boston newspapers. Surrounded by a black border, the notices read simply, “J. B. Rhine Is an Ass.”
Yet another somber academic study of the Margery mediumship began in March 1926, led by a Princeton psychology professor named Henry Clay McComas, along with a psychiatrist, Dr. Knight Dunlap, and a physicist, Robert W. Wood. For the first sitting, everyone gathered in the Lime Street house with the Crandons for an evening of food, drink, and merriment. Dunlap woke up in his hotel room at 2:00 the next afternoon suffering from what he later called an “ideological hangover,” having been “completely won over by the couple’s extraordinary personal charm.” Ultimately, the McComas investigation concluded that “Mrs. Crandon’s mediumship is a clever and entertaining performance, but unworthy of any serious consideration.”
Later, more serious charges were leveled against Margery.
In 1933, Walter Franklin Prince wrote an article for the Scientific American claiming that Malcolm Bird intended to publish a confession in the journal of the American Society for Psychical Research admitting that he had been part of a fraud arranged to humiliate Houdini during the Scientific American séances of 1924. According to Prince, Bird wrote that Margery “sought a private interview with me and tried to get me to agree, in the event the phenomena did not occur, that I would ring the bell-box myself, or produce something else that might pass as activity by Walter.… It seems to me of paramount importance, in that it shows her, fully conscious and fully normal, in a situation where she thought she might have to choose between fraud and a blank séance; and she was willing to choose fraud.”
But none of this deterred Margery’s defenders. In a letter to Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Crandon wrote confidently that Margery “will turn out to be the most extraordinary mediumship in modern history.”
When Dr. Crandon died in 1939, after falling down the stairs, Mina seemed to slip into a disordered haze of alcohol and depression. She seemed lost, at sea. One of her lifelong friends, a psychoanalyst named Nandor Fodor, later observed that “physical mediums, in the course of years, find themselves so much drained of vital energies that they almost invariably become chronic alcoholics or dope addicts,” a melancholy pattern that began with Maggie and Kate Fox.
But Dr. Fodor, like many others, had come to a mixed conclusion about the remarkable mediumship of “Margery.” So many people had witnessed the phenomena she produced, and she had been studied by so many investigators, her mediumship was very difficult to discount entirely. Fodor felt that many of the phenomena were easier to explain as evidence of supernormal powers than as evidence of fraud. But there were other things, like the controversy over the thumbprints in wax, the ringing of the bell box, even the whole persona of Walter, that he had questions about.
Now Margery seemed to be slipping away fast and was soon confined to bed most of the time. One day Dr. Fodor came to sit with his once-celebrated, once-beautiful friend, now a diminished old gray lady in a big feather bed. Gently but persistently, he began to ask her pointed questions. Everyone was in agreement that many of the phenomena were genuine, he said, but what about the rest of it? Had she succumbed to the temptation to fake phenomena? If so, how did she do it?
Mina Crandon listened quietly to his questions, then muttered something he couldn’t understand. He asked her to repeat herself.
“Sure,” she said, more loudly. “I said you could go to hell. All you ‘psychic researchers’ can go to hell.” Then she chuckled softly, with something like that old twinkle in her eye. “Why don’t you guess? You’ll all be guessing … for the rest of your lives.”
Houdini’s shows debunking the methods of phony mediums became wildly popular. And as he got older, they were also easier than his trademark escapes.
PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC. / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Death Foretold
“The Greatest Necromancer of the Age—if Not of All Time!” the garish posters read, announcing Houdini’s latest multi-city, blockbuster, death-deriding tour. It was September 1926, and Houdini was to begin the tour in Boston, crisscrossing the United States and Canada for the next five months. The tour was billed as “3 Shows in One!” because it was to consist of Houdini’s mind-boggling magic tricks, followed by his even more mind-boggling escape acts, followed by his new favorite crowd-pleaser, the exposure of phony mediums. Some of the posters read, “Do the Spirits Return? Houdini Says No … and He Can Prove It!”
Houdini’s escape acts, ironically, seemed to taunt death, such as his classic “Buried Alive,” in which he was placed in a glass-fronted coffin and then covered in a ton of sand. He also planned to perform the hugely popular Chinese Water T
orture Cell escape, in which he would be suspended by the ankles, upside down, and then lowered into an enormous glass-sided, water-filled fish tank, and then locked in place. A curtain would then be drawn across the tank, and as an orchestra played the popular tune “Asleep in the Deep”—“Crawl into this hole I’ve made! Transform these feelings of fear!”—Houdini would somehow wriggle free, release himself from bondage, break out of the tank, and then burst onstage, soaking wet but triumphant, as the hall roared with awestruck applause, the audience members’ own personal shackles released.
But it was his final act, in which he demonstrated how fake mediums and soothsayers accomplished their nefarious tricks and then exposed some of them in person, that had by now become as popular as his other wonders. The popularity of these exposures was clear evidence that by 1926 small-time swindlers and hustlers had joined the spiritualist bandwagon in droves, and more than a few of the people in Houdini’s audiences had been snookered by their desperation to believe.
In the weeks prior to Houdini’s scheduled arrival, a small cadre of assistants would pay undercover visits to the most well-known mediums and fortune-tellers in towns and cities on his tour and attempt to catch them red-handed in some act of deceit. Then, a day or so before Houdini arrived, he would openly provoke these purveyors of moonshine in the local papers:
* * *
HOUDINI CHALLENGES LOCAL SOOTHSAYERS! WARNING TO ALL ORGANIZATIONS OF SPIRITUALISTS!
“I hereby dare the following individuals to come to the theater tonight to try and take some of my money!”
* * *
If the mediums had the temerity to show up in person, he would lambast them mercilessly from onstage, to the boisterous delight of the audience.
Through a Glass, Darkly Page 21