by David Jaher
The only worthy respondent was Dr. Le Roi Crandon, whose wife, still unknown to the public, had not been mentioned in the challenge. But though she was ready to be tested, Dr. Crandon feared that the Woolworth setting would be a circus; nothing of merit could be determined there. Instead he offered to bring the commission to Boston, so that the séances could take place in a calmer environment. He even invited the New York judges to stay at Lime Street while they sat with Mina.
The news that Mrs. Crandon was ready to throw her cloche into the ring pleased Bird. The Boston lady was likely their last hope, he told Munn, for investigating a worthwhile psychic. Unlike the other candidates, Mina never took a dime for her work, and the Crandons had generously offered to fund the tests in Boston. In return, Bird was willing to make special arrangements for them. Bringing mediums to the Scientific American offices, where they were expected to stand and deliver, was not working, the editor admitted. It was in keeping with the scientific method to work in stages with a psychic, Bird also conceded, before she was asked to give a definitive demonstration. Moreover, the Crandons did not want their name in the papers. To address that concern, Bird offered to give the candidate an alias. Her middle name was Marguerite—why not call her Margery?
Margery they called her; and Margery she became. Soon after the agreement was made, Walter composed an ode to Bird through his sister’s automatic writing.
There was a young man from New York.
As a scientist he was a whale.
The mediums came from near and far,
For him to put salt on their tail.
And he did it without any doubt.
And he did it with very great glee.
And would you believe it: the son of a gun
Is chasing with salt after me.
Dangerous Games
Sweet lad, O come and join me, do!
Such pretty games I will play with you:
On the shore gay flowers their color unfold,
My mother has many garments of gold.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Crandon test séances were not hindered by the presence of children in the house. The couple’s foster son, for reasons unknown, was no longer living with them. Other prospective adoptees would be brought to Beacon Hill, but as none remained there for long, it was speculated—out of the Crandons’ earshot—that the spooks drove them out. Only John Crandon, eleven years old when his mother became a test medium, grew up at 10 Lime Street. Though John’s biological father lived just a few miles away, the boy was raised by Roy and had been given his name. During séances he was tucked away for the night, protected from what he later called “dangerous games.”
Ghosts are said to be drawn to sensitive beings: they possess fragile young women and make mischief with children—like the Fox sisters from Hydesville. Yet there is no record of Walter preying on John or any of the orphans who stayed with the Crandons. The children were believed to be safe. In profiles of Margery so little is mentioned of her son, it is easy to forget that he was in the residence at all. Until his adolescence, however, John was usually there—and while his mother led séances, he was sleeping, or trying to, next door.
The doctor wanted to quell any suspicions that, as in the case of Maggie and Kate Fox, the Lime Street phenomena were caused by puerile pranks. As a precaution, the servants were sent to the movies or confined to their quarters on séance nights. John was locked in his room, though no one thought to shield him from the ghoulish sounds. If Walter was active, the raps and whispers and the crash of furniture, followed by Aleck’s screams, frightened the child on the other side of the wall. Once John heard wood being torn violently apart. The next morning, he discovered the debris of the spirit cabinet, which he vaguely understood to be his mother’s work.
John’s anxiety worsened as the mediumship progressed. Eventually, the Crandons’ friends suggested to them that Lime Street, the new mecca of psychical research, was not the best environment for a child. The doctor, who anyway admired the old boarding schools, decided that Andover was the place for John, and there he would be sent. But John and Mina remained close, and the boy worried about her well-being. Dr. Crandon, an obstetrician, had not been Mina’s physician when her son was born; he had never cut the umbilical between her and John.
Older and less frightened by the spirits than John, the Richardson children occasionally attended the Crandons’ gatherings, and they were enchanted for a lifetime by what they saw. It began with Noguchi flashing a broad smile when greeting the Richardsons at the front door, then escorting the family through the dark passage and up the creaky stairs. As they passed the first landing, the children noticed the Victrola that Walter was known to bewitch. They were next led into the book room, to greet the guests with whom they were about to link hands. The pre-séance receptions were held in a warm and rustic space—decorated with nautical art and attended by individuals with titles like judge, doctor, and captain. Dr. Crandon might be poised in a corner, speaking to one of the distinguished Europeans who came to visit. And by the fireside, entertaining guests, was the pretty psychic herself; in her one hand a cigarette, in the other a pen with which she dashed automatic writing.
When the doctor gave the word, the sitters were directed upstairs. There, in the fourth-floor séance room, researchers checked their equipment and cameras in the red light while the others took seats around the famous table. The scratchy Victrola played “Souvenir” or, later in the decade, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Before long the medium was snoring loudly in her trance. The light was turned off and they waited for Walter to arrive.
“I can still almost hear his voice in my mind’s ear,” Marian Richardson would later say, “a hoarse masculine whisper.” To the young girl and her parents, “Walter came through as a real person.” The Richardsons dismissed any notion that the ghost might be an invention of the psychic; on the contrary, he was a tangible being, their intimate friend and advisor. “Hello, Walter,” the circle chimed; and with contact established, the ghostly hijinks began.
“He flitted from sitter to sitter, touching each one lightly,” Marian recalled. “He would extract objects from their pockets, or put things in, so delicately that the victim never noticed it. He seemed especially to tease Dr. Crandon and would sometimes tweak his hair quite sharply. The long-suffering brother-in-law would violently start, swear—and then say meekly, ‘Thank you, Walter.’ ” It was strange, not only to the children, to see the doctor made that docile.
♦
When Malcolm Bird returned to Lime Street, in April of ’24, the Victrola played “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a silly and infectious tune that was heard everywhere at the time. For a people discovering Freud, the Bananas song carried subliminal meaning, for it was often joked that virile men had become a vanishing breed. In lieu of popular warriors or explorers, New York had given a scientist, Albert Einstein, a ticker-tape parade. Bird had watched from his office window as the little Jewish professor waved reticently to the masses on Broadway.
“I’ve never seen such a bunch of stiffs in my life,” Walter ragged his circle. “Talk about dead people, my God.” He liked to tell “us humiliating things about ourselves,” Bird said of the dialogue between researchers and the ghost. At times Walter made cracks about the scientists’ poor grooming habits, hearing deficiencies, sluggishness—the generally feeble qualities of his elders. In contrast, Big Brother “almost bristled with forceful personality,” and joked about being more romantically active than any of them. On one occasion when Margery gave a blank séance, Walter had a reason for his absence: “I had to take my girl to a strawberry festival.” Both his youth and libido had evidently survived. “Walter, when you are relaxed do you surround yourself with youth and beauty?” a Christian pastor had asked. The other guests could almost picture the wink Walter gave them when he replied: “No, I am not relaxed when youth and beauty are around. I am under fifty.”
Cruder things were communicated and, in the name of good
taste, stricken from the record: “Walter is familiar with all the ordinary cuss words,” Bird reported, “and some extraordinary ones.” While in trance, the medium could be as vulgar. Possessed by Walter she did and said things that would otherwise have been off-limits in this man’s city, where a woman could neither enter most speakeasies nor sit on juries. A society wife was not supposed to swear or smoke—yet Margery, while believed to be unconscious, channeled a coarse and irrepressible spirit control.
One of the more amusing features of the sittings was the exchanges between Walter and Dr. Crandon, who tried to control the proceedings as he might a surgical operation at Boston City Hospital. But Margery could turn the tables on him through her brother’s presence. It was part of the repertoire for the ghost to release the curtain rod from the spirit cabinet, then poke Roy with the pole. During one sitting the doctor was stroked, pushed, caressed—even, at his own suggestion, given a “kick in the face.” Thank you, Walter. Another time the Richardsons recorded that “a large and muscular hand” appeared to descend upon the doctor’s head, ruffling his hair. Whereupon, according to the report, he “came as near to hysterics as a professional man should.”
Walter Stinson was called a “he-man,” the “big boss”; and when raps were heard in the séance room, these were caused not by the agency of little girls, as with the Fox sisters, but by “the teleplasmic materialization of his brawny arm and fist.” He not only dominated the séances; in time he made his presence felt in the Crandons’ bedroom.
One night, while Dr. Crandon and his wife lay in bed, the couple “were bombarded with innumerable raps” that came through louder than those produced in the séance room. The sounds manifested from the floor, walls, ceiling, and telephone, Roy later wrote his father. Curtains on the canopy bed were torn apart, a chair five feet away was pushed toward the couple. The room began to creak and shake. The plush mahogany chair tipped over, “scattering Margery’s clothes everywhere.” When the light was turned on, only a few raps were heard. After the doctor turned it off again, the effects returned. There were raps on the mattress springs, and the sensation that a formless body had gotten under the bed; “then the whole foot of the bed was lifted from the floor.”
“It was not,” the doctor noted, “a pleasant experience.” In general, though, the mediumship provided less harrowing thrills. The spirits had brought untold mirth and wonder to Lime Street.
Thank you, Walter.
Kisses from the Void
Four members were present last night; the control was perfect; the phenomena went on serenely.
—DR. LE ROI CRANDON WRITING DOYLE ON THE SCIAM TRIAL
As Malcolm Bird stood on the outside of the circle, watching the medium seated within her black, open-faced cabinet, he sensed wariness from a group that still blamed him for the setback the previous November—when a hostile force was drawn to the séance room. Was that to be the case once again? Bird wondered. Clearly Margery could dazzle her friends, even those who were scientists, and confound a few university psychologists; she could impress a few, mostly geriatric, European experts; but when it came to sittings with a representative of the Scientific American, would she once again conduct blank séances and blame it on some superstitious devilry?
Soon after the room went pitch-dark on April 11, he had his answer. The demonstration began with the ghost’s clarion-like whistle, the likes of which Bird had never heard before. Later he learned that Walter conveyed myriad moods—pleasure, remorse, amusement, boredom, and anger—with different tones of his signature whistle. He had a variable pitch with which he might greet each particular sitter, and a fading note to signal he was leaving. In lieu of the whistle Walter had recently announced his appearance with a far-off yodel, but tonight the ghost arrived boisterously—whistling as the saxophone played madly on the Victrola.
Already Bird sensed a different energy since his visit to Boston in the fall, so he hoped to finally witness the effects that he had heard about in reports from Harvard, France, and England. Capturing proof of a full apparition was a kind of grail that the British SPR researchers were seeking; and since returning from Europe, Dr. Crandon was determined to see Margery generate an ectoplasmic form—a spirit as vivid to the eye as Walter sounded to the ear. Bird had been told that Walter was developing his sister’s powers expressly for that phenomenon. The first step, the ghost said, were the spirit lights he’d started producing. Walter had warned sitters not to start or panic when the bright flashes began to dance around them; instead he encouraged them to laugh. “We can walk on the vibrations made by your laughing.”
Though the demonstrations were “both comedy and serious physics,” there was a general sense of awe when the lights appeared—some in a cloudlike mist, others in the shape of globes, diamonds, tubes, or clovers. Several sitters described a bright wave as like the voracious flames in a Cubist painting; and with their appearance was “undoubted progress toward materialization.” While these phenomena are easily faked—and as readily exposed by psychic investigators—no sleuth ever caught Margery, or any in her circle, flashing an electric torch; no magician at her table would ever rip a glowing form from the air and then reveal a buoyant object daubed in Ghost-Glo paint.
In fact, what Bird saw that night and for years to come truly amazed him. For an hour the lights came—“variable in brightness, in size, in shape”—accompanied by cool breezes with sufficient force to billow the curtains; at other times the flashes were accompanied by raps or whistles. Oddly, the lights were not seen by every person in the room—at least, not at the same time—so Bird was left to wonder if some individuals had sight more finely tuned to Margery’s apparitions.
Following the light show were table manifestations of the kind the psychic had exhibited in Europe. Three times, with Margery controlled, the table flipped over and rotated back to its upright position. Then it tilted on two legs, like a dog expecting a biscuit after a trick. Having had enough of that, Walter began to build force within the spirit cabinet. Spectral touches were felt; a tapping on McDougall’s head, a contact on his knee. Minutes later, Margery’s booth began to quake. With the wing to the cabinet now flapping and the structure shifting and tilting, Bird got on the floor to help McDougall and Roy maintain control of the medium. With dignity barely intact, he was able to keep her hands firmly gripped—yet to his shock his hair was grasped and pulled. Dr. Roback, whose commission was to catch anyone sneaking about the room, confirmed that no person was behind Bird. Either the medium used her teeth, or Walter was responsible for the assault.
Bird had little time to fully consider the matter, as something more remarkable then happened. Walter had evidently gotten hold of the luminous curtain pole—which came unloosed from the sockets at the top of the spirit cabinet—and slammed it with a hair-raising thud on the table. While it alarmed Bird to see it pointing inches from the psychic’s chest, what followed was spectral entertainment. Suzy the bat appeared—a sphere of wing-shaped light that began to flutter, click, and dance on the séance table. When Walter maneuvered the curtain rod to rest at a steep angle—one end on the cabinet, the other braced on the table—the winged light tobogganed up and down the pole. When the bat disappeared, Margery’s invisible brother spun the pole in slow, mesmerizing rotations, like a drum major.
The next sitting was as perplexing. The pole was transported through a maze of arms and legs in such a complex way that Bird felt it was either carried by a number of accomplices or had to truly penetrate matter. One thing he knew for sure: Margery, with all four of her extremities controlled, was not the pole carrier. Bird could not identify a culprit. During both the Harvard and Scientific American investigations, a sentry, usually McDougall’s assistant, was stationed by the door to prevent any intruder from sneaking into the séance room. And to ensure that none of the sitters were up to mischief, Roback continued to quietly patrol. “The presence of such an observer, likely to bob up any moment at just the wrong place,” said Bird, “would wreck the morale
of any fraudulent operator.”
As in Europe, the Scientific American official was not only considered a positive influence on the séance battery, he was one of the few investigators for whom a spirit showed any affection. When a couple of sitters began to whisper during Margery’s performance, Bird hushed them with a “tsk-tsk” that Walter apparently mistook for a kiss. For the rest of the evening, and well into the year, Walter made a smacking noise or tsk-tsk at the mention of Bird’s name. When he was present, the ghost blew him kisses from the void.
♦
The committee intended to treat Margery like a promising candidate whose supernormal gifts, if she really had any, were to be developed and tested in stages. Because William McDougall was a member of both the SciAm commission and the leader of his own active investigation, his Harvard group fell under the auspices of the magazine—with Dr. Roback made a non-voting member of the jury. It was agreed that Margery would sit for various combinations of the committee before Bird assembled the full imposing quorum, if need be, to judge her phenomena. Members of the ABC group were allowed to be present, though they would not be for much longer. Margery would soon have to draw her force from a circle composed of professional investigators.
Secretary Bird took full advantage of the Crandons’ offer to accommodate any representatives of the Scientific American, or judges of the contest, who wished to stay with them. He saw Margery’s hospitality and the doctor’s generosity as a testament to the Crandons’ dedication to the inquiry. After the séances, large parties often went out to dinner, and Bird noticed that Dr. Crandon always picked up the bill. By the same token, Mark Richardson, one of Roy’s closest friends, said that for all the meals he had at the Crandons’ house, he could almost never get the medium to dine with his family in Newton. Ever the hostess, Mina was rarely anyone’s dinner guest—she was the madam of this occult salon, the elusive siren of her society.