The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Even though their relationship was deteriorating, Houdini still tried to engage Doyle in reasonable discussion about spiritualistic phenomena. While lec turing on Spiritualism in Los Angeles in April, he investigated a spirit photograph that had been taken at the funeral of a medium named Mary Fairfield McVickers. Convinced that the ghostly apparitions were a product of the irregular surface of the wall, Houdini hired a photographer, went back to the church, and attempted to replicate the original photo, taking ten exposures. When his own photos were developed, Houdini was shocked to find a weirdly shaped luminous streak in the second negative. Convinced that there was no normal explanation for the strange streak of light, Houdini sent a copy of the photo to Doyle in New York. Blinded by his anger, Sir Arthur missed his opportunity to restart the conversion of Houdini and deemed Houdini’s photo absurd. Undeterred by Doyle’s negative response, Houdini still urged his audiences to attend Sir Arthur’s upcoming lectures.

  In May, Houdini and Doyle found themselves in Denver at the same time. Even though the Doyles attended Houdini’s show and Bess sat through Doyle’s lecture, relations were strained, especially after The Denver Express ran a huge headline: “DOYLE IN DENVER DEFIES HOUDINI AND OFFERS TO BRING DEAD BACK AGAIN.” The article quoted Doyle as challenging Houdini to a $5,000 bet to attend a sitting where he would bring his own mother back in physical form. Doyle rushed up to Houdini in the lobby of the hotel where they both were staying to apologize profusely for the story, claiming he had been misquoted. Houdini told Doyle that the papers misquote people all the time and he wouldn’t hold it against him, but then he went to the paper’s offices, where the editors told him that Doyle positively was not misquoted.

  Later that month, the tables were turned. Doyle was enraged when Houdini was quoted in The Oakland Tribune to the effect that Doyle had been fooled by two mediums who had been discredited. Doyle counterattacked in the pages of the paper and then wrote Houdini and asked him to send him a written denial of making his original charges. “Our relations are certainly curious and are likely to become more so, for so long as you attack what I know from experience to be true, I have no alternative but to attack you in return. How long a private friendship can survive such an ordeal I do not know—but at least I did not create the situation.”

  The final straw occurred a few days later, when Houdini participated in a séance that exposed a leading American medium. Houdini’s explanatory letter went unanswered and, as far as we know, there was no further correspondence between the two for the next seven months.

  After not corresponding with Doyle for months, Houdini wrote him in December, presumably asking Doyle for some favor. The Spiritualist’s response was curt. “I was surprised and sorry to get your letter…. You can’t bitterly and offensively—often also untruly—attack a subject and yet expect courtesies from those who honour that subject. It is not reasonable. I very much resent some of your Press comments and statements.”

  The spirit photograph that Houdini couldn’t explain.FATE magazine

  A spirit photograph Houdini could explain. From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

  Two months later, the charade was repeated. Houdini wrote Doyle asking for permission to use some of his writings in his book on Spiritualism. Doyle shot back a letter on February 26, 1924. “You probably want these extracts in order to twist them in some way against me or my cause, but what I say I say and I do not alter. All the world can quote.

  “What you quote, however, about your own frame of mind is obviously a back-number…. I read an interview you gave some American paper the other day, in which you said my wife gave you nothing striking when she wrote for you. When you met us, three days after the writing, in New York, you said ‘I have been walking on air ever since.’ I wonder how you reconcile your various utterances!

  Another spirit photo, Houdini style. From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

  “I observe that, in your letter, you put down my starting my world-mission ‘in a crisis of emotion.’ I started in 1916. My son died in 1918. My only emotion was impersonal and the reflection of a world in agony. Our regards to Mrs. Houdini.”

  Those were Doyle’s last words directed at Houdini, at least in private. When Houdini sent him a note on May 5 offering to send him a copy of his book A Magician Among the Spirits, Doyle didn’t even deign to reply.

  From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

  21

  Little Sister Will Do Exactly As Big Brother Says

  THE SIX FRIENDS WERE SEATED AROUND the table, bathed in the faint red glow from the specially prepared lightbulb, red light being the color of choice for those in the other world. Everyone was so solemn that Mina, the lady of the house, who was younger than the others present, began to laugh out loud.

  “This is a serious matter,” Dr. Crandon, her husband, rebuked her. He had recently attended a lecture on Spiritualism by the famed English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who recommended some books for him to read. Deciding to model his own experimentation after the standard family circles in the Spiritualist literature, he had a séance table built to the same specifications of psychic researchers. Then, on May 27, 1923, he invited his friends Dr. Edison Brown and his wife, Frederick Adler, and Alex Cross to a room on the fourth floor of his Boston town house at 10 Lime Street for an exploratory séance.

  They completed the psychic circle by linking hands over the table. At first, there was a slight motion under them, but then the whole table began to slide to one side, rise up on two legs, and crash back down to the floor. Something or someone was trying to get their attention.

  Crandon, determined to identify the medium, sent each person out of the room, one at a time. The only time that the table remained stable was when Mina was gone. She returned to a sitting ovation. The circle now had its medium. The world would soon know her as Margery.

  Mina Crandon, the artist soon to be known as Margery. From the collection of Libbet Crandon de Malamud

  By the second séance, Crandon was intent on communicating with the spirits who made their presence known by tilting the table and rapping upon it. He devised a simple code—one rap for “no,” two for “don’t know,” three for “yes,” etc.—and the spirits began to answer questions.

  Crandon still wasn’t satisfied. The third sitting was on June 9, this one held at the home of Dr. Brown. Even on Brown’s regular table, in red light, the phenomena became more refined. Now a tin plate, which rested on a shelf above the table, slowly moved off the shelf and spilled onto the floor while the table remained motionless. After the plate was then placed on the table, at the request of the sitters, it moved without being touched. Crandon needed more.

  “Our means of communication with your world is clumsy,” Crandon addressed the unseen spirits. “It would be much more efficient if you were to utilize the medium’s own vocal cords to convey your messages.”

  The import of this was apparent to Margery. For the spirits to talk through her she would likely have to go into a trance and if that were the case, she would miss out on all the fun of the séances.

  “I will do nothing of the sort,” Margery declared.

  Crandon shot her a stare that could kill.

  “Little sister will do exactly as big brother says,” the good doctor said, with surgical precision.

  Dr. Crandon poses stoically as a spirit obscures his wife in the photo. From the collection of Libbet Crandon de Malamud

  The table rapped three times, indicating the spirits agreed with Crandon.

  The group rejoined hands over the table and concentrated. Several minutes later, the attention of the others was drawn to Margery. She began touching the sides of her face in a most peculiar way, as if she were trying on new skin. Then she sighed deeply, closed her eyes, and began swaying back and forth in her chair.

  Suddenly, a loud, brash, masculine voice was heard to emanate from her lips.

  “I said I could put this through!”

  It was Walter, her belo
ved big brother, who had been dead for twelve years.

  The Crandons were a decidedly odd couple. She was young, just thirty-three, vivacious, charming, and quite attractive. A blue-eyed, blond Canadian farm girl, Margery had migrated to the Boston area to live with a sister and to escape the fundamentalist bleakness of her father. Her joy was compounded when her favorite sibling, her brother Walter, divorced his wife and moved in with his two sisters. Shortly after, Margery married Earl Rand, a grocer. Less than a year later, Walter, who worked as a locomotive fireman, was crushed to death when his train derailed on the Provincetown line. Two years later, Margery gave birth to a son.

  Sometime in 1917, Margery had been hospitalized, most likely for appendicitis, and she was operated on by Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon. Crandon was a Boston Brahmin who could trace his lineage to one of the original twenty-three Mayflower passengers. His father was the president of the Boston Ethical Society. Le Roi graduated from Harvard Medical School and then eleven years later received a master’s in philosophy from Harvard. He was one of the most prominent surgeons in the Boston area, earning the nickname “Bellybutton Crandon” for his innovative technique of doing appendectomies through the belly button to avoid unseemly scars. It was this procedure that resulted in a scandal that nearly cost him his job when he operated on a woman who was reporting appendicitis-like symptoms but in actuality was suffering from another undiagnosed ailment. The blow to his reputation led him to other outlets to feed his bloated ego. He immediately joined the Boston Yacht Club and bought a yacht. Within a year, he had a new trophy wife too, marrying Margery shortly after she divorced her grocer husband. The new couple continued to purchase their groceries from Margery’s ex.

  Crandon was a peculiar man. Arrogant, dour, antisocial, he seemed to live in his own world. Margery, almost twenty years his junior, was his third wife. He had honeymooned each bride at the exact same resort in the Bahamas. An atheist, he was morbidly preoccupied with his own death; perhaps this was his intellectual attraction to the Spiritualist notion that death was not the end. Now with a medium in his own household, they held nightly séances that eventually expanded beyond the intimate circle of friends and became a sought-after destination in Boston society. In this way, Crandon could enjoy the company of a prestigious expanded social circle with Margery acting as both hostess and mystic.

  Margery collapses under the weight of her ectoplasm. From the collection of Libbet Crandon de Malamud

  Less than a month into Margery’s mediumship, Crandon fired off a letter to “Dr.” Arthur Conan Doyle, who was in the United States for his second Spiritualist lecture tour. He reported Walter’s communications through his sister and asked for advice. He also invited Doyle to sit with them in Boston. Doyle responded from a train in Canada, warning that a medium might be placed at risk going into a trance in a large circle where “undesirable elements” might be attracted. “It is different where all are religious Spiritualists. There you have a guardian control.”

  Crandon immediately responded. “My little circle have now become all religious spiritualists and I feel that we have a guardian control in the brother of the Psychic…. Repeatedly putting the question of danger to the Psychic up to Walter he replies, ‘Do you think I would let anything happen to her?’”

  A relationship was quickly formed, then cemented in December of that year, when Crandon and his wife sailed to London, where she gave a number of séances before various psychic groups and then sat at Conan Doyle’s London apartment. Sitting in a makeshift cabinet consisting of a three-way screen covered by a rug, in the dark, Walter manifested at once, tilted, and then levitated the table. Crandon then turned on a regular white lightbulb and the table continued to levitate. All hands were visible on the tabletop, and Margery’s feet were controlled in a unique way—they were nestled in Sir Arthur’s lap. Back in the dark, Walter whistled, shook the cabinet so violently that the rug flopped down over Margery’s head, and made a dried flower from the shelf materialize on the floor. Perhaps it was the flower production, perhaps it was the unique foot control, but Doyle remembered Crandon’s “charming” wife fondly, and spread the word of her mediumship. It was through Doyle’s recommendation that Margery became a candidate for the prize that had been offered by Scientific American magazine, which sought out a medium who could “produce a visible psychic manifestation” to the full satisfaction of their panel of judges, one of whom happened to be Harry Houdini.

  “You will be doing the human race a favor when you get your Spiritistic book on the market,” W. S. Davis wrote Houdini. “And the sooner the better. A man like yourself is needed at this time, to correct general misconception and to expose ignorance and superstition.” By May of 1924, the zealous Davis got his wish. Houdini’s A Magician Among the Spirits was an eminently readable social history of Spiritualism and the mediums and entertainers associated with that movement. There were chapters on key personalities ranging from the Fox sisters to D. D. Home to Palladino and Dr. Slade, the celebrated slate writer. Houdini exposed the secrets of slate writing and spirit photography. In a chilling section, he chronicled the many deaths associated with the movement, including a family who according to a witness was “cranky on spiritualism” and “no fewer than four of them agreed to take poison!” They were not alone. In Providence, Rhode Island, a fourteen-year-old rapping medium named Almira Bezely tapped out a message that her infant brother would die. Almira helped the prediction along by purchasing arsenic and administering it to her sibling. Years later, in the same town, a Ruth McCaw was sentenced to twelve years in prison for poisoning her stepson, Leon, who somehow managed to survive. Oddly, she wasn’t tried for the death of her stepdaughter, Elsie, who was handicapped and eventually succumbed to the poison. McCaw confessed to trying to kill Leon and noted that the spirits had prompted her actions.

  Despite Houdini’s assertions that he approached the subject with an open mind, his book was immediately attacked by the Spiritualists as a one-sided diatribe. Critics correctly pointed out that there were many factual errors in the book, but Houdini chalked those up to his editors at Harper and Brothers who cut 100,000 words from the manuscript. In a letter to the author Upton Sinclair, who was sympathetic to Spiritualism and other psychic phenomena, Houdini explained his urgency to get the book to market. “The publishing of my book had been so long drawn out that I had a slight premonition that perhaps I would not live to see the book in print if I waited much longer, so I allowed them to rush it, against my judgment, and made some of the very important mistakes, they did not think worthy of correction.”

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been spending most every night in his home circle, where Pheneas had now begun to speak directly through Lady Doyle. According to the ancient spirit guide, 1925 was the year of doom. “In September the earth will be shaken from the sky. There will be great loss of life. It will be terrific. All humanity will be shaken to the core. Shams will then fall away. God will come into his own. After that comes the deluge. England will not suffer as badly as the rest of the world…. It is not like Atlantis. It is not indiscriminate. Our plans are made…. no one will suffer that should be spared. God is love. Remember that. It will be like a great sieve passing through all that is worthless, retaining only the fruit.”

  Around this time, Pheneas directed Doyle to keep a record of these messages, and to eventually publish them in book form. “Every sect is done for. The people know too much,” Pheneas said. “They have failed in the past and people will turn to those who have been in direct spirit communication. The medium knows this. She senses it. Her powers will develop greatly. She will be, as it were, a small bridge between two enormous countries…. Take all this down. We are most anxious to have a record as it will be invaluable. It is this script that the whole world, not England alone, will cling to in its great extremity.”

  “Is it the Second Coming?” Doyle wondered.

  “Yes,” said Pheneas. “It is the Second Coming, even as prophesied.”

  At t
he beginning of July, one of Walter’s most impressive manifestations was the ringing of a bell box in the séance room, while the medium was under strict control. A box had been devised, and modified over the months, that contained a bell assembly and a battery. Two eight-inch-square boards had been hinged together along one edge of each. Small metal plates had been attached to various points of their inside surfaces and a spiral spring was permanently affixed, keeping them apart. The boards were wired to the battery so that when enough pressure was put on them for the plates to make contact with each other, the bell rang. To mitigate any chance of a stray human hand producing the contact in the dark, the upper contact board was covered with a plaque that had been coated with luminous paint.

  On July 13, the bell box was on the floor to Margery’s left. Her hands and feet were controlled by those sitting on either side of her. In spite of this, Walter rang the bell at will and on request, even giving combinations of long and short rings. One of the sitters then asked to see Walter’s finger when it pressed down on the box. In response, there emerged from under Margery’s chair a dollop of strange-looking light that was in the shape and size of a forefinger. It slowly moved across to the box. When it arrived there, the bell rang. Now everyone wanted to see this new phenomenon.

  “Never mind the circle,” Walter said. “Everybody get up and stand around and look at it.”

  They all complied, breaking control, of course, but what they saw astounded them. Again the strange finger-shaped light seemed to float across and depress the box, causing the bell to ring.