The Magician and the Spirits

by Deborah Noyes

  After a bit of private sparring, their argument migrated into the New York Times when Houdini bragged in an interview that he could re-create any medium’s feats using just the tools of the magician’s trade. The paper credited him as having attended, by way of research, ten thousand séances. Doyle wrote in to scoff. To attend that many sittings, Houdini would need to visit a medium every day for thirty years! Doyle was personally aware of Houdini visiting only two mediums: Eva C. and Mrs. Wriedt. And how could he presume to reunite Sir Arthur with his mother and son—as Doyle believed, knew a medium had done—using magic tricks?

  A few weeks later, Houdini was back for another round in the Times; he pointed out that many of the mediums who had restored Doyle to his family beyond the veil had since been called out or even arrested for fraud.

  Again, Doyle refrained from public debate, but acknowledged, “Our relations are certainly curious and likely to become more so, for as long as you attack what I know from experience to be true I have no alternative but to attack you in turn.”

  Doyle would soon be back in New York on his second North American tour to promote Spiritualism. The papers were eager to nudge the two celebrities back into the ring, in order to increase their own circulation numbers. The New York Mail thundered, “Sir Arthur Coming to Answer Houdini,” but as it turned out, when the Doyles arrived, Houdini was out west touring.

  Perhaps to draw a clean line between his Spiritualism—a religious worldview with its own theology and philosophy—and the parlor tricks of false spirit mediums who often learned their methods from magicians, Doyle ridiculed the latter in print: magicians were “harmless and ingenious amusers of society” who took on “airs of superior intelligence.”

  He received, in turn, a winking invitation to attend the Society of American Magicians (SAM) Carnival of Magic benefit in New York. The magicians promised to whip up spirit photographs and wax spirit hands for the occasion.

  This kind of distinction between true and false Spiritualism would certainly have stirred up Houdini’s insecurities about his intellectual status in relation to Doyle—and put added stress on a friendship already hanging by a thread.

  Houdini’s handwritten list of original slides used for his lectures on Spiritualism, circa 1922.

  It seems no coincidence that while Doyle’s tour bristled with controversy, Houdini was engineering a new job description. By February 1924, he had signed on for a lecture tour of his own, twenty-four stops, mainly in the South and Midwest. He would turn fifty years old in April, and though this wasn’t exactly retirement, Billboard announced, “Houdini, the magician, has become Houdini, the educator!” Here was his chance to rival the likes of Sir Arthur and other “intelligentsa [sic].”

  “Wait till Sir A. C. Doyle hears of my lectures!” he wrote in his diary. Like any Houdini performance, his down-to-earth, hands-on presentations—with fifty colored slides illustrating a lively history of Spiritualism—gripped audiences. Houdini not only told his crowds how fakes made spirit hands or conjured messages on slates, he showed them, often step-by-step.

  His tour was extended for two months by popular demand, and more and more often, journalists, religious groups, and radio stations called on Houdini as an expert. Soon, many viewed him as the expert on matters mysterious and “psychical.”

  Children attend Houdini’s exposé of fraudulent mediums, circa 1925.

  He pooled the rich material he had compiled for the lectures into A Magician Among the Spirits, what would be his best-known book, published in the late spring of 1924.

  Houdini Lends a Hand

  When Sir Arthur visited his home early in their friendship, Houdini explained how easy it was to make “spirit hands.” The props turned up often at séances, eerie and luminous, floating in the dark (strung from fishing line manipulated by a medium or confederate). The disembodied hands might even reach out and touch, with clammy tenderness, the face or hair of a séance sitter. To make them, Houdini later demonstrated, all you had to do was blow up a rubber glove and dip the glove in paraffin wax. When the wax cooled, you deflated and removed the glove, leaving a shapely hand behind.

  Houdini making spirit hands, circa 1923.

  He devoted a chapter and several detours to his friend (though little now remained of that friendship) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He wanted “no warfare” with Sir Arthur and had no wish to discredit him, but more and more Houdini believed it was his duty to seek and tell the truth, and that truth wasn’t pretty.

  An alarming side effect of Doyle’s US talks the year before had been a rash of suicides and murders by deranged people who had taken his descriptions of a beautiful afterlife literally. News sources may have exaggerated the numbers (or skewed the context), but a few cases seemed sensational proof of Houdini’s claims that the “craze” or “cult” of Spiritualism had become “a menace to health and sanity.”

  A testimonial from warden James Harris describing Houdini’s dramatic escape from “Murderers’ Row.”

  Houdini Escapes from Assassin’s Cell!

  Early in his escape career, on January 6, 1906, Houdini had pulled off a much-publicized escape from the Washington, DC, jail cell that had once held Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield. It’s interesting that Guiteau was, according to Houdini, an early “victim” of the madness he claimed was spawned by the “cult” of Spiritualism. Guiteau, a Spiritualist, claimed spirits told him to kill the president.

  Houdini tells of a young Barnard College student, Miss Marie Bloomfield, “who declared herself in love with a Spirit and finally was driven to suicide in order to join him.”

  On April 15, three days after Doyle’s first Carnegie Hall lecture, a New York Times headline read: “Wife Seeks Death to Be a Spirit Guide: Newark Woman Kills Baby, Then Drinks Poison So She May Help Husband from Beyond.” The woman’s husband blamed the deaths on his wife’s ill health and interest in Spiritualism; he published her suicide note in accordance with her wishes. The paper followed up with Doyle, who said, “The incident shows the great danger of the present want of knowledge concerning spiritual matters.” Two days later, the Times ran a story about a man in San Francisco who had, according to police, shot and killed two of his boys, ages seven and eight. The man, John Cornyn, claimed to be in “communication” with his dead wife, who had “asked him to send all of their five children to her.”

  “It is with the deepest interest and concern,” Houdini wrote, “that I have watched this great wave of Spiritualism sweep the world in recent months and realized that it has taken such a hold on persons of a neurotic temperament, especially those suffering from bereavement.”

  To Doyle, these tragedies were a grave misunderstanding of the message of Spiritualism. “Truth wins and there is lots of time.”

  “The first thing the knowledge of Spiritualism does for you is to remove all fear of death. A Spiritualist fears death no more than walking into the next room—it is a promotion to a life far more lovely and happy than the earth-life.”

  —LADY DOYLE,

  FROM A RADIO SPEECH IN NEW YORK, 1923

  Houdini argues in A Magician Among the Spirits that even medical professionals expressed concern about the effects of Spiritualism on fragile minds. In an annual report in 1920, an eminent physician and asylum superintendent acknowledged that many people had “broken down since the war” and had taken up Spiritualism as “a solace to their feelings.” Another doctor predicted that “asylums would be flooded if popular taste did not swing to more wholesome diversions.” A third estimated some million cases of insanity under the influence of Spiritualism.

  When Houdini called attention to these numbers, Doyle argued in his jovial way, “People have been going mad for years, and you will find on investigation that many go mad on other subjects besides Spiritualism.”

  Fingerprinting a Spirit

&nbs
p; One of the most “startling swindles” Houdini recalls in A Magician Among the Spirits originated with a sculptor “who dabbled some in Spiritualism.” The man managed to make a plaster of paris mold of a dead man’s fingertips and filled it with a rubbery substance that, when hardened, matched the corpse’s fingers exactly. The cunning medium planted a few prints on a trumpet for that night’s séance. Discussion led to an investigation, and sure enough, the dead fellow in the morgue looked to have left his prints on the horn.

  Another medium got hold of this trick and secured a job in a funeral home, where he eventually collected the prints of a number of well-heeled dead. “There are two cases on record,” Houdini writes, “where fortunes were at stake because of this sort of fraud.”

  The average person didn’t “realize the suffering, losses, misfortunes, crimes and atrocities” that were a direct result of the “curse” of Spiritualism, Houdini believed, and his intention was to right that.

  For long stretches, A Magician Among the Spirits reads like a rap sheet of the movement’s seedy underside, with Houdini listing key players and colorfully narrating the grifts and grafts committed in its name, everything from jewelry theft and bum real-estate deals (on the advice of “spirits”) to corpses used for purposes of fraud. Widows were cheated out of hefty fortunes and husbands out of peace of mind:

  The Washington Times (D.C.) of January 14, 1923, tells of an Earl L. Clark who secured a divorce on the grounds that his wife claimed that she had a “Spirit Affinity” named Alfred and that this Alfred through Clark’s wife made his life unbearable, even predicting his death so that she might marry some man who would “accept Alfred’s Spiritual guidance.”

  In most of these cases, Houdini observed, people didn’t suspect the medium in the least: “The majority of people who are fleeced . . . really believe that the Spirit of their departed one prescribed the loss.” It was only when mediums fell out with each other, when “honor among thieves” broke down, that fraud came to the attention of the police.

  Two mediums he notes as especially skilled at fraud and deception were his contemporary Ann O’Delia Diss Debar (a master criminal who practiced hypnosis and mediumship as handy sidelines) and the legendary physical medium Daniel Dunglas (D. D.) Home.

  The medium Ann O’Delia Diss Debar, 1909.

  Houdini calls both “adventurers” with a knack for infiltrating high society, “bringing within their reach people of wealth as well as scholars and scientists.” He claimed that all other mediums combined “could not have aggregated the amount of money obtained by these two.”

  Debar was an outright fraud (he includes her arrest record as an appendix in his book), “one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known. Some even classed her among the ten most prominent and dangerous female criminals of the world.” Debar changed locales as often as she did her name, claiming at one point to be “the daughter of King Louis I of Bavaria and Lola Montez, a Spanish-Irish dancer.” Her schemes were elaborate and ambitious, targeting aristocratic “marks” and magnates of Wall Street. “It was not unusual,” he wrote, “for her to make deals that ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  Of the multitude of mediums who rose up in the shadow of the Fox sisters, Hou-dini counted fewer than a dozen “whose work, in spite of repeated exposure, is still pointed to as proof of Spiritualism.” Chief among them was the Scottish medium D. D. Home, who peaked between 1859 and 1872.

  Undated portrait of the Scottish medium D. D. Home.

  Magnetic and cultured, musical and artistic, elegant and educated in both medicine and linguistics, Home was a snappy dresser and fond of diamonds, rubies, and other fine jewelry. Tuberculosis gave him a pale, ethereal quality that together with silvery eyes and copper hair made him look otherworldly. He inspired trust, awe, and sympathy, and built his success and reputation by not charging money for his services as a medium (a clever maneuver that protected him from skeptics: as a fellow visitor in the house, an unpaid member of the host’s inner circle, he was unlikely to be challenged or called out during a séance, the rudeness of which would insult the host).

  How Do I Distrust Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

  The famous poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was enchanted by D. D. Home and wholly convinced, but her equally esteemed husband, Robert Browning, was no fan. After his adored wife’s death, he published a scathing poem based on Home.

  “Now, don’t, sir! Don’t expose me! Just this once!

  This was the first and only time, I’ll swear,—

  Look at me,—see, I kneel,—the only time,

  I swear, I ever cheated,—yes, by the soul

  Of Her who hears—(your sainted mother, sir!)

  All except this last accident, was truth—”

  —ROBERT BROWNING,

  FROM “MR. SLUDGE, ‘THE MEDIUM’”

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, 1853.

  The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, after a sitting with Home, “We were touched by the invisible.” And in fact, Home’s séances were a dazzling spectacle: objects bobbed around the room on air, ghostly hands reached out to touch sitters, firefly lights glinted and faded. Knocks raced over walls, barely audible voices whispered in corners, the swish of wings filled the dark.

  Home lived “a life of positive luxury” in America and Europe on the hospitality of Spiritualist friends who competed to host him at their estates for extended periods and wooed him with gifts (gifts often “suggested” by the spirits: “His spirit guide seems to have always kept a sharp eye on his need for earthly sustenance,” said Houdini).

  Born in Scotland in 1833, Home came to New York from Edinburgh as a child and lived with his pious aunt. When he informed her of his plans to be a medium, she called him a devil and threw a chair at him. And so, says Houdini, began Home’s “custom of living on the bounty of friends and dupes.”

  Home’s clients and friends were usually people of culture, rank, and wealth—even royalty, including the emperor and empress of France and the czar of Russia. Like the occult “healer” Rasputin, Home lived at court in the Russian palace for weeks at a time. He twice married Russian noblewomen, and before he left Russia, he made some emeralds conveniently “dematerialize” at court (the police made the jewels “rematerialize” and invited him to leave the country).

  In England in 1859, Home charmed Mrs. Lyons, a seventy-five-year-old widow, and burned her will. She signed over money and real estate before panicking and filing a suit to retrieve the sixty thousand pounds he had relieved her of. In his closing remarks, a court official called the widow’s mind “saturated with delusion.” As for Spiritualism, he said, it was on the evidence a “system of mischievous nonsense well calculated to delude the vain, the weak, the foolish, and the superstitious.”

  An illustration of the medium D. D. Home apparently levitating himself in front of witnesses on August 8, 1852.

  “The average medium works only for the money he or she can extract from the public,” Houdini concluded, reviewing the crimes and consequences of spirit fraud, “money obtained by moving the deepest sentiments in the human soul.” Spiritualism was “nothing more or less than mental intoxication,” as bad as alcohol or drugs. Why, he wondered, were those vices legally prohibited (both were, in the 1920s, in the United States) when fake mediums had license to drain “every bit of reason and common sense from their victims. . . . It ought to be stopped,” he told his readers, “it must be stopped.”

  Out One Window, In the Other

  The physical medium D. D. Home was best known for his dramatic levitation acts and for a feat Houdini called his “masterpiece”: sailing out a window feetfirst, floating another seven or more feet away, and landing catlike in the room across the alley, where he calmly strode to a chair and sat down. Then, to the startled
cries of his group, he did it again, passing back—stiffly horizontal, they reported—through the original window again. Or so the story goes. Houdini offered a do-over of Home’s famous feat “under the same conditions,” but Spiritualists never took up his challenge. “I desire to go on record as being able to perform the same phenomena,” he insists in A Magician Among the Spirits. The “mind of the average person accepts what it sees,” he complains, “and is not willing to apply the laws of physics.”

  PART THREE

  Not a Skeptic

  EIGHT

  Science and Sincerity

  “Psychical science, as we here try to pursue it, is the embryo of something which in time may dominate the whole world of thought.”

  ~Sir William Crookes,

  IN AN 1897 SPR PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

  Gladly would I embrace Spiritualism if it could prove its claims,” Houdini liked to say, and from the first, intelligent people tried. Both sincere believers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and doubters like Houdini used scientific methods to observe, classify, and, as needs be, rule out spiritual phenomena.

  Houdini applauded these efforts and joined in when he could. Like many magicians, he saw himself at the far side of a continuum, with fraud and superstition on the one end and entertainment and delight in the marvelous on the other.