In his book A Magician among the Spirits, Houdini demurred. The Zancigs, he wrote:
… have a very clever act. I had ample opportunity to watch [their] system and codes. They are swift, sure, and silent, and I give [them] credit for being exceptionally adept in their chosen line of mystery. Telepathy does not enter into it.
After the first Mrs Zancig had died, Houdini noted, Julius ‘took a street-car conductor from Philadelphia and broke him into the team’. Some acrimony had arisen when the young man later defected from Zancig and began offering his own mindreading routine, using a trained monkey as a foil. He was replaced by a magician known professionally as ‘Syko the Psychic’, who in turn left the act. ‘At that stage, Prof. Zancig came to me for an assistant and I introduced him to an actress,’ Houdini wrote. ‘He said he would guarantee to teach her the code inside of a month, but they never came to an agreement on financial matters.’ Where Doyle found Zancig to be a ‘remarkable man [who] undoubtedly enjoyed supernatural or telepathic powers,’ Houdini saw only an old circus sideshow performer whose new act ‘reflects the modern rage for the occult’.
On the morning of 10 May 1922, Conan Doyle and his wife took a taxi from their New York hotel to Houdini’s house on West 113th Street in Harlem. After some talk at the lunch table about the phenomena of ‘spirit hands’ – to Doyle, an irrefutably ‘miraculous’ feat of spiritualistic intrusion on the material world, and to Houdini a cheap ruse involving some paraffin and a rubber glove – the two men and Houdini’s lawyer, Bernard Ernst, retired upstairs to the library. As Ernst recalled:
Houdini produced what appeared to be an ordinary slate, some 18 inches long and 15 inches high. In two corners of this slate, holes had been bored, and through these holes wires had been passed. These wires were several feet in length, and hooks had been fastened to the other ends of the wires. The only other accessories were four small cork balls, a large ink-well filled with white ink, and a table spoon.
Houdini passed the slate to Sir Arthur for examination. He was then requested to suspend the slate in the middle of the room, by means of the wires and hooks, leaving it free to swing in space, several feet distant from anything … Houdini next invited his distinguished visitor to select one of the cork balls and, by means of the spoon, to place it in the white ink. It was left there to soak up as much of it as possible.
Houdini then asked Conan Doyle to walk out of the house, in any direction he chose, to pause when he was sure he was unobserved, write a phrase on a scrap of paper, put this in his pocket, and return to the house. Doyle did so. Back in the library, Houdini told his guest to fish out the ink-soaked ball and hold it up to the slate hanging in the middle of the room. As Doyle did so, the ball suddenly began to move across the slate, seemingly of its own free will, forming a series of words as it went. When the ball had finished, it just as suddenly dropped to the floor. With his innate sense of showmanship, Houdini then asked Doyle to read out the message on the slate, even though he and Ernst could both plainly see it for themselves. It was the biblical portent of doom, ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ – the same line Conan Doyle had written down and put in his pocket.
While Doyle pronounced himself ‘stunned’ by this mystery, which he was certain had been ‘contrived by psychic means [and] no other’, it seems fair to ask if Sherlock Holmes would have seen matters in a more objective light, without preconception or preformed theories. In particular, might he have perhaps extended a bony hand towards the well-stocked bookcase in his Baker Street consulting room and taken down ‘Volume M’ (for ‘Magicians’) from his encyclopaedia of reference? Had he done so, he might have come across an entry for a turn-of-the-century, German-born vaudeville artist named Max Berol. Berol (sometimes working under the name Konorah) had long entertained audiences on both sides of the Atlantic by a remarkably similar trick to Houdini’s, which had involved, among other things, the surreptitious exchange of a solid cork ball for one with an iron core, some swift pickpocketing, and a strategically placed assistant holding a magnet at the end of a rod. Holmes might have further read that on his retirement this same performer had gone on to ‘sell his entire magical apparatus and all rights thereof’ to an anonymous purchaser ‘anxious to expand his own not insignificant repertoire’.
Doyle, however, saw none of this, remarking only that it was a ‘miraculous effect’ that had left him ‘breathless with wonder’. Nor was his day’s entertainment quite over yet. Houdini was later to remark that his guest had been ‘flabbergasted’ by a ‘lark’ he showed him in the taxi as he accompanied the Doyles back to their hotel. To pass the time at a red light, the magician held up his hands, apparently removed the end of his own thumb, and then reattached it. Lady Doyle ‘nearly fainted,’ Houdini remarked with some satisfaction. ‘Never having been taught the artifices of conjuring,’ he noted of his day with Conan Doyle, ‘it was the simplest thing in the world for anyone to gain his confidence to hoodwink him.’
The competitiveness underscored Houdini’s belief that ‘the creator of Sherlock Holmes [is] now in a new line of business, and eaten up with but one subject’. Where Doyle left an impression of ‘self-conceit and self-delusion’ when in the presence of a medium, he, Houdini, was ‘the more methodically-minded detective in [his] spirit investigations’. Later that spring, the magician cut out and scrawled the word ‘Ha!’ on a newspaper account of a New York trial in which four defendants – including an Alice Moriarty – were accused of disorderly conduct after holding a series of ‘mystic events’ at a small apartment on the city’s Upper West Side. The four were said to have invited sitters into a darkened room where they would ‘twang a clandestine harp’ and ‘hymn a lusty version of “Some One is Waiting for Me”’ while a ‘ghostly figure’ floated around in a ‘robe or drape of the most meager sort’.
It did not go unnoticed in the press that Doyle himself had attended a séance with the defendants, and apparently seen his late mother materialise in front of him. Three days later, undercover officers from New York’s 20th Precinct had gone to the room to request a sitting ‘like that given to Sir Arthur’. One of the detectives had subsequently leapt up from his seat and rugby-tackled a ‘luminous presence’ as it passed by him. This was later established in court as being a 29-year-old aspiring actress named Eva Thompson, ‘clad in a white sheet, and little else, [her] maternal orbs imperfectly covered by the fabric’, a role she was said to have adopted for ‘many noted clients’.
After these various curtain raisers, the Doyle-Houdini rivalry finally came to a climax on a hot Sunday afternoon in June 1922, when they met at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. ‘It was a sudden inspiration of mine to invite the little man up to our room and see if we could [summon] his mother for him,’ Doyle recalled. ‘It was all done at my suggestion,’ he added, in The Edge of the Unknown (1930), before noting two pages further on in the same book:
The method in which Houdini tried to explain away, minimise or contort our attempt at consolation, which was given entirely at his own urgent request and against my wife’s desire, has left a deplorable shadow in my mind and made some alteration in my feelings for him [emphasis added].
But if Doyle was confused about the timing of events that weekend, so was Houdini. Describing the Atlantic City ‘miracle’ in A Magician among the Spirits, he made some play of the fact that ‘I especially wanted to speak to my late Mother, because that day, June 17, was her birthday [Houdini’s emphasis]’. In fact, the séance took place on the eighteenth of the month. Houdini’s professional faculties were still sharp enough, however, because:
… before leaving with [Doyle], Mrs Houdini cued me. We did a second sight or mental performance years ago and still use[d] a system or code whereby we could speak silently to each other … In that manner Mrs Houdini told me all about the night previous [when] she had gone into detail with Lady Doyle about the great love I bear for my Mother. She related to her a number of instances, such as my returning home from long trips [and] spending mont
hs with my Mother and wearing only the clothes that she had given me, because I thought it would please her and give her some happiness. My wife also remarked about my habit of laying my head on my Mother’s breast, in order to hear her heart beat – just little peculiarities that mean so much to a mother and son when they love one another as we did.
This seems to have been a lot of information for Bess Houdini to have conveyed merely by blinking her eyes and wiggling her fingers, but we have her husband’s word for it that he was forewarned ‘some business was about to occur’ upstairs in the Doyles’ darkened hotel suite.
Arranging themselves around a small baize-topped table, lit by a single candle, the three sitters bowed their heads and said a prayer. For some minutes, Jean Conan Doyle continued to remain quite still, gazing down at a pad of paper in front of her, before suddenly turning her head upwards and asking sharply, ‘Do you believe in God?’ At that, she briskly struck the table three times with her left fist. Then, snatching up a pencil, her right hand began to move rapidly across the paper. ‘Oh my darling, thank God, at last I’m through – I’ve tried so often – now I am happy – Why, of course, I want to talk to my boy – my own beloved boy – Friends, thank you, with all my heart for this,’ she wrote, with Conan Doyle swiftly tearing off the finished pages and passing them to Houdini:
You have answered the cry of my heart – and of his – God bless him – a thousand fold, for all his life for me – never had a mother such a son – tell him not to grieve, soon he’ll get all the evidence he is so anxious for – I will work with him – he is so, so dear to me – I am preparing so sweet a home for him which one day in God’s good time he will come to – it is one of my great joys preparing it for our future – It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful – so lofty – all sweetness around one – nothing that hurts and we see our beloved ones on earth – that is such a joy and a comfort to us – Tell him I love him more than ever – the years only increase it – and his goodness fills my soul with gladness and thankfulness. Oh, just this, it is me. I want him only to know that – that – I have bridged the gulf – That is what I wanted, oh so much. Now I can rest in peace.
‘Houdini had a poker-face and gave nothing away as a rule,’ Conan Doyle later remarked. But on this occasion he appeared to be ‘profoundly moved’, looking ‘grimmer and paler’ as he read ‘each successive page of the message my wife produced, with her hand flying wildly, beating the table while she scribbled at a furious rate’. At the end of the séance, Doyle himself exclaimed, ‘Truly, Saul is among the prophets!’ and at that, ‘gathering up his papers, Houdini hurried from the room’.
On 3 September 1922, Lloyd’s Sunday News of London published the first of twelve instalments of Conan Doyle’s book Our American Adventure. Among other revelations, the serial went into some detail about the events of the previous June in Atlantic City. Before long, a friendly English SPR officer named Eric Dingwall wrote to ask Houdini, ‘Is there any truth in the story of Doyle that you got an evidential message from your mother through Lady Doyle? Also that people say you have become an automatic writer?’
This was too much. Telling Dingwall that he had no intention of becoming known as a ‘confirmed spookist’, Houdini swore out a statement and had it published in several New York papers. It began:
THE TRUTH REGARDING SPIRITUALISTIC SÉANCE GIVEN TO HOUDINI BY LADY DOYLE
Fully realizing the danger of claims made by investigators of psychic phenomena, and knowing full well my reputation earned, after more than thirty years’ experience in the realm of mystery, I can truthfully say that I have never seen a mystery, and I have never visited a séance, which I could not fully explain … Lady Doyle told me that she was automatically writing a letter which came through her, and was guided by the spirit of my beloved, sainted mother … There was not the slightest idea of my having felt my mother’s presence, and the letter which followed I cannot possibly accept as having been written or inspired by her.
It seems not to have occurred to Houdini that this public rebuff might in any way harm what he called his ‘warm and kindly’ relations with Conan Doyle. Six months later, he was to note serenely that the Doyles had ‘attended and certainly enjoyed’ a magic performance he gave in Denver. ‘We sent them a bunch of violets and five pounds of candy for little Billy, the[ir] tom-boy daughter’, he added. Being a pragmatist, Houdini easily overcame his ideological prejudices and continued to speak as if Doyle and he were the ‘most cordial of pals’ and ‘intellectual piers [sic] at that’. He was considerably more outspoken in private, confiding to one friend that he could only wonder why his mother, a Jew, would have communicated with her son under the sign of a cross and in fluent English, a language she had never spoken.
For his part, Doyle was outraged that the ‘little man’ had seen fit to publicly question his wife’s integrity. His deep hatred of any form of injustice, particularly when inflicted on a woman, showed in his rebuke:
I have had to handle you a little roughly in [the press], because they sent me a long screed under quotation marks, so it is surely accurate … I hate sparring with a friend in public, but what can I do when you say things which are not correct, and which I have to contradict or they go by default?
Doyle closed another letter to Houdini by telling him, ‘Pray remember us all to your wife. Mine is, I am afraid, rather angry with you.’ This was mild compared to the words of the Doyles’ spirit guide, Pheneas, when his voice came through to them while they were seated around their living room fire one night in the spring of 1923. Speaking directly through Lady Doyle, Pheneas remarked acidly on the man then busy denouncing the claims of mediums on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Houdini is doomed, doomed!’ the spirit shouted. ‘A terrible future awaits him … His fate is at hand!’
Soon Doyle found what he called another ‘cruelly oppressed’ medium to champion. This was a 34-year-old Frenchwoman named Marthe Béraud, who went by the nom-de-séance of Eva C. Blonde and svelte, she often performed in a sheer black body stocking ‘which permitted for no possible concealment of substances’, and despite this restriction appeared to possess the gift of ectoplasm. ‘The Eva controversy is absurd – as if negatives can ever explain anything,’ Doyle wrote to the American author Hamlin Garland. ‘To me, who have had ectoplasm in my own hand it is all meaningless, save that I am annoyed by the persecution of this woman who has done more for Science than all her critics.’
In time, Doyle would speak of Eva C. as a ‘God-given force’ and a martyr to the religious Establishment. ‘She is a prophet,’ he insisted. Houdini was less impressed when he attended one of Eva’s London séances. The medium had ‘“sleight-of-handed” some [foreign] substances into her mouth,’ he wrote in his diary, and simply regurgitated them. Only a ‘prize boob’ would believe in this ‘poor deluded female, [who] is probably mad,’ he added.
Even so, during one of his public lectures at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Conan Doyle, pointer stick in hand, took the opportunity to project a series of graphic illustrations of ectoplasm apparently oozing from Eva’s body. One particular image proved so potent that the wife of the city’s mayor vomited at the sight, and several other women had to be helped from the room. Undaunted by this reaction, Doyle had brought the talk to a close by stepping forward between two large potted palms on either side of the stage, rapping the stick sharply on the floor, and then raising his hand in a quieting gesture. ‘Now I will show you a picture of a ghost,’ he announced simply:
A lady was taking a picture at an old English inn. But when she developed the plate apparently something had passed, and she brought it to us in perplexity. It was the image of one of those earthbound spirits called ghosts, a coincidence that might not occur again in 100 years.
As the picture was shown there was a steady crescendo of ‘mingled cheers and sobs of excitement,’ the New York World reported, though a ‘few scattered remarks of a skeptical nature’ were also heard from the balcony.6
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In December 1923, another attractive medium was let loose on Conan Doyle, who arranged a séance for her at his new London flat at Buckingham Palace Mansions, near the Houses of Parliament. She was a 35-year-old Canadian-born housewife named Mina Crandon, who went under the alias ‘Margery’ and was popularly known as the ‘Blonde Witch of Lime Street’ in honour of her address in the fashionable Beacon Hill neighbourhood of Boston. In 1911, Margery’s elder brother Walter, a Massachusetts motor mechanic, had died at the age of 28 after being crushed by a runaway train. She later recalled that following this tragedy she had found solace in the Congregational Church. Margery would go on to tell a Boston Herald reporter that her loss had ‘cured me of my agnosticism’, and also of materialists ‘who speak hypocritically of knowing the secrets of our universe’.
In early 1917, Margery had undergone an abdominal operation at the hands of a wealthy Boston surgeon named Le Roi Crandon. At the time of this procedure, later to be the subject of some speculation in spiritualist circles, she was still a practising Congregationalist, and claimed to have ‘learned much from the church’s skill in deal[ing] with human nature’. The following year, Margery married Crandon; she was 29 and he was 48. After attending a 1923 lecture by Conan Doyle’s friend Oliver Lodge, she had gone on to discover a talent for levitating tables, producing flashes of light and manifesting ectoplasm (often from her vagina), among other psychic powers.
The Man who Would be Sherlock Page 33