Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  At other times, Walter’s mood grew more somber. When his and Mina’s mother died, he sent out a remarkably deft poem:

  IN MAJESTY DEATH COMES

  In majesty death comes:

  He walks alone.

  Comes here as your friend.

  Why weep? You’d have it so.

  He knows you know ’tis not the end.

  As with a perfect day:

  The sun has set.

  With gracious hand he gives you perfect peace.

  They answer his great call:

  They find release.

  Ah! Majesty, we worship at thy throne.

  Thy will be done: the power,

  We do believe.

  God, give us strength

  To know and feel and not to grieve.

  At the same time, Walter seemed to engineer the production of eerie phenomena that were increasingly difficult to dismiss. Yet the Scientific American committee always found some way to equivocate or deny them. Like Dr. Crandon, Walter grew increasingly short-tempered at the intransigence of Drs. Prince, Comstock, and McDougall, who seemed unwilling to accept even the most flagrant demonstrations of unexplainable phenomena. Walter also objected to the fact that old Dr. Prince was almost completely deaf, so how could he possibly pass judgment on voice phenomena or the ringing of a bell? In one séance, Walter remarked that there was no need to consider the Scientific American committee “intellectually dishonest,” but simply “tell them to go to hell.”

  Then he proceeded to give a demonstration of what he could do with the bell box. He instructed a Mr. Patten, who was visiting from Chicago, to pick up the box while it was ringing and allow all the other sitters to feel around it, especially the area between the box and Margery, to make sure she had no contact with it at all. Then another visitor was instructed to put the bell box on top of his head, and it rang off and on, according to commands. Then he instructed another sitter to pick up the box while it was ringing, carry it over to one window and then to another, then turn his body in a complete circle while it was still ringing. Then the visitor returned to the table, whereupon—when someone asked Walter to stop the box from ringing—it stopped. When Mr. Patten asked Walter to ring the bell two longs and three shorts, he did that too, after which the bell box was examined and no tricks or anomalies were found.

  In another session with Margery, attended by Dr. Crandon and two others, Walter seemed acutely aware of the larger controversy surrounding the Scientific American committee’s work. He said he thought bad publicity from Orson Munn’s efforts to block phenomena might actually do “the cause” more good than a mere five-thousand-dollar award. Then he seemed to counsel the sitters on strategy. “They are trying a smart game on you,” he said. “Every move must be made after deliberation. Consult only a baloney—I mean, ‘attorney’—if necessary. Not that lawsuit is the only way to get them, but reproduce all the correspondence and crucify them before honest opinion of the world for their unfair dealing.”

  He closed his comments by jeering at the naysayers: “Now I am going to put a nail in your coffin!”

  Then he instructed a séance sitter named Mr. Adler to “control” Margery by holding her two hands with his two hands and her two feet with his two feet. He instructed Mr. Cross to control Dr. Crandon in the same way. Then the bell box rang out loudly, twenty times in a row.

  “What do you want me to do now?” Walter asked.

  “Seven short rings and one long one,” someone said.

  The bell rang seven short rings, one long.

  “This is what I can do for Dr. Prince or anybody you want it done for,” Walter said. “Let the doubter examine the chair and the cabinet and the Psyche and the contact apparatus and then let him be alone in the room with the foot and hand control of Psyche and let the door be guarded by a friend of his, the room having been searched, and I will ring the bell. That way we can make converts as far as they will line up!”

  To Dr. McDougall, in particular, the phenomena that the committee had witnessed were enough to push a rational man to the brink of belief but not quite over the edge. In a letter to Dr. Crandon, McDougall clarified his intellectual conundrum, distinguishing between three stages of conviction:

  1. One observes a physical phenomenon which one cannot explain, but believes one can suggest possible explanations.

  2. One observes a physical phenomenon which one cannot explain and for the explanation of which one cannot conceive a physical or normal explanation, but one is not in a position to assert that such an explanation is impossible.

  3. One observes physical phenomenon and is convinced that any normal or physical explanation is impossible and therefore believes that it is supernormally produced.

  McDougall went on, “In regard to the bell-box, I am in the second stage as above defined.… I agree that the bell-box phenomena are very impressive but I cannot say outright that they have yet convinced me of their supernormal nature.”

  Hence, the committee as a whole still officially remained unconvinced.

  * * *

  ON AUGUST 26, 1924 (the night after the séance in which Houdini appeared to jam a pencil eraser under the hinged lid of the bell box to stop it from ringing), the séance sitters reconvened in the same upstairs room in Dr. Comstock’s Beacon Hill home. In the smallish room, the atmosphere among the sitters was stiff and uncomfortable, leavened only a little by a few forced pleasantries. As the men took their places around the table with the bell box sitting in the center, Houdini’s Cockney helper, Jim Collins, assisted the magician as he moved the Houdini box into position beside the séance table.

  Before the sitting, the lighthearted Margery was thoroughly searched by a young female stenographer, though the medium (as usual) was wearing only a thin dress, a slip, and stockings. Then Houdini and Orson Munn helped Margery up over the high edge of the box and into a seated position inside. Once she was seated, Collins closed the top over her head and locked her in with eight padlocks, in melodramatic Houdini fashion.

  Afterward, Collins left the room, and the door was locked behind him. The other doors leading to the corridor outside the séance room were also locked. Once again, the men linked hands in a circle around the table, with Houdini taking hold of Margery’s left hand, followed by Dr. Comstock, Mr. Munn, Dr. Crandon, with Dr. Prince completing the circle by holding the medium’s right hand.

  This time, by prior agreement, the séance would consist of two parts. In the first, Margery would sit in the box as she had the night before, with her head and arms protruding. In the second, the arm holes would be covered with wooden plates, screwed into place, so that only her head protruded from the box. (Though Houdini professed to disbelieve the existence of “Walter,” he had taken up Walter’s challenge anyway.) According to tonight’s agreement, Mr. Munn was also to loudly dictate the events of the séance so that the stenographer, seated in a small adjoining alcove, could take notes under a very dim red light. Other sitters also later made notes of the séance and entered them into the official record. (These form the basis of this account. Unfortunately, many of the notes are unsigned, making it difficult to determine who is speaking.) These carefully negotiated protocols were important, because an enormous audience of interested parties, from both sides of the debate and on both sides of the Atlantic, was watching with rapt interest. (Houdini referred to the Crandons as “messiahs to a half million or more Americans.”)

  “Prince, hold her right hand firmly all the time,” Houdini said to Dr. Prince as they prepared for the sitting. “I want to put my hand inside the left arm-hole of the box for a minute.”

  Then, according to the notes jotted by an unidentified sitter, “Houdini at about this time felt up along her left forearm and followed up her arm to see what position her elbow was in, and while doing so, his right hand and part of his forearm were partly in the box.”

  Given that Houdini was the world’s greatest master of sleight of hand, with an enormous chip on his shoulder, this seemingly
casual incident was significant indeed.

  “Why don’t you search me again?” Margery asked at this point.

  “Oh, no, that won’t be necessary,” Houdini said, offhandedly. “I’m not a physician.”

  “Why don’t you search the box?” she repeated.

  Once again, Houdini demurred.

  Then everyone sat in the darkness, in uneasy silence, waiting for something to happen. After two minutes, a low whistle rang out into the room. It was Walter, the smart-aleck spook. When he spoke, one observer noted that it was “as loudly and clearly as [he] ever has during the past fourteen months.”

  But tonight his voice was brimming with rage and sarcasm.

  “What did you do that for, Houdini?” Walter howled. “You god damn son of a bitch! You cad, you! There’s a ruler in this cabinet, you unspeakable cad! You won’t live forever, Houdini—you’ve got to die. I put a curse on you now that will follow you every day until you die!”

  After a moment, Houdini responded, seemingly flustered and surprised.

  “Oh, this is terrible!” he said. “I don’t know anything about any ruler! Why should I do a thing like that?”

  According to the real-time notes of someone else who was present, he then cried, somewhat inexplicably, “My dear sainted mother was married to my father!” And, moments later, “I am not well.… I’m not myself.”

  But Walter’s voice was still shaking with rage.

  “You get the hell out of here or I will, and don’t you ever come back!”

  Despite the atmosphere of generalized suspicion in the room, this enraged outburst came as a shock. Dr. Comstock tried to restore order.

  “Walter,” he said calmly, “if you will reflect for a minute you will see that this box has been in this room where there are tools and workmen, and it is indeed possible that someone may have left or locked a ruler in it.”

  It was true that there had been some minor repairs going on in the house, and Walter conceded the point.

  “That is possible,” he said, a little more quietly. “I apologize to Houdini. You may cut all the nasty words out of the records, but leave all the rest.”

  At that point, with general consent, the lights were turned back on. Houdini, according to Dr. Crandon, was in a position of prostration, with his face in his hands. Collins was called in, the box was opened, Margery stood up, and Houdini climbed into the box. On the floor, he found a carpenter’s ruler, folded up into four six-inch lengths, so that the extended length would have been two feet long. Because the bell box was only about eighteen inches from Margery’s face, it was conceivable that she could have unfolded the ruler and with her hands or mouth extended it to ring the bell. No one seemed to recognize the ruler, and no one took the blame for putting it there.

  Finally, Houdini said to Margery, “I’m willing to forget this, if you are.”

  But what had just happened was very difficult for anyone to forget. And what was it that had just happened? One of the note takers observed that “if Walter had not discovered the ruler and [Margery] had gone into the second part of the sitting with her hands in, although the box was boarded up, and the bell had rung, of course, an examination of the box would have been demanded at the end of the ringing. If then, that ruler had been found, it would be quite apparent that bending one quarter of it at right angles, and holding that short end in her hands, and protruding that long end out through the neck hole, she would have had a firm instrument over eighteen inches long with which to reach the contact bell.” On the other hand, “Houdini’s defense is probably … that the ruler was a plant by Psyche to prove him to be crooked.”

  The finger of suspicion seemed to point both ways.

  The unnamed note taker went on to say that “it seems to the writer, however, that the fact that Houdini’s right hand was in the box for a few seconds just before the light went out, combined with the ingenuity of the ruler device, suggests the trickery of an expert, such as Houdini is.”

  In his signed notes, Dr. Crandon expressed no doubt at all about what had just happened. “The presumption, which amounts to a practical certainty, is that the ruler was placed there by Houdini.… Since the first apparent ‘plant’ [the eraser forced into the bell box the previous night] was such to make manifestations more difficult, and the second ‘plant’ could only have been placed to discredit the medium, it seems to be reasonable to conclude that the committee-man who placed the ‘plants’ is not interested in Psychic Research, but only in either preventing phenomena, or in discrediting the medium.”

  Eventually, after the hubbub died down, the sitters decided to carry on with the second stage of the séance, in which Margery’s hand holes would be boarded up. Once this was done, and the lights lowered, the participants sat for more than an hour, waiting for something to occur.

  The only one who spoke was Walter.

  “A great chance I have to do anything with all you and myself in this state of mind,” he remarked, finally. “I admit I lost my temper.”

  It was 11:52 when Walter said “goodnight” and the lights came on again.

  Afterward, someone suggested that Margery be photographed sitting in the box, for the historical record. Since Margery had already gotten out of the cabinet and left the room, apparently exhausted, someone else suggested it was just as well to let somebody else sit in the box. At this point, Houdini spoke up.

  “Oh, no—that box is sacred,” he said. “No one else should ever sit in it. I would rather sink it to the bottom of the sea.” On the other hand, archival photographs show Houdini himself sitting in the box.

  In the ensuing discussion of this rather odd request, someone else pointed out, suspiciously, that the night after the séance in which the eraser “plant” was discovered, Houdini had ordered Collins to move the box into the service elevator of Comstock’s building, take it to the basement, and nail it back into its packing case. “Why should he be fearful of leaving that box in the supposedly friendly apartment of a fellow committee-man, Dr. Comstock?” one note taker asked. Also, earlier that day, before the ruler incident, one of Dr. Comstock’s employees had quietly walked into the room where Houdini and Collins were working on the box. Houdini angrily accused the man of “sneaking around” and later complained to Dr. Comstock about it. “Why was Houdini so suspicious of a committee-man’s helper, if the box were on the level?” the note taker wondered.

  * * *

  TWO NIGHTS after this disputed, interrupted sitting, another séance was held, this time at Dr. Crandon’s residence at 10 Lime Street. There were five sitters this time, including Dr. Crandon, but without Houdini, who had left town. Margery sat at the séance table, no longer confined to the box. Walter came through almost immediately, with his usual jaunty whistle. He was in fine fettle tonight, convinced that he had discredited Houdini in the eyes of the committee.

  “If Houdini says anything false on the stage, I’ll finish him!” Walter exulted. “No telling that he might be a raging Spiritualist in a week. You know his father lived with his mother for a couple of years before they were married, and then Houdini came along and they had to get married. But now Houdini is going—he’s slipping fast!”

  Walter even suggested a couple of sensational headlines, including this:

  GHOST-HUNTER BOXES PSYCHE—GETS BOXED

  Walter told the sitters that the Houdini box was a trick one, just as they suspected, and that it would all come out eventually.

  Houdini, for his part, seemed so rattled by the ruler incident that several days later he added the following oath to the historical record: “I wish it here recorded that I demanded Collins to take a sacred oath on the life of his mother that he did not put the ruler in the cage and knew positively nothing about it. I also pledge my sacred word of honor as a man that the first I knew of the ruler in the cage was when I was so informed by Walter.”

  Houdini’s oath would seem to put an end to the matter. But many years later, in 1959, long after Houdini’s death, the author Will
iam L. Gresham published a book called Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls, in which he claimed to have interviewed the now-elderly Collins about the ruler incident. When asked about it, Gresham writes, “Collins smiled wryly. ‘I chucked it in the box meself. The Boss told me to do it. ’E wanted to fix her good.’”

  Then Gresham interjected, “But he swore on his mother’s grave…”

  “Sure—that was after ’e told me to do it. By that time ’e ’ad it all figgered out in ’is mind that ’e ’adn’t done it. There’s one thing you got to remember about Mister ’Oudini in his last years. For ’im the truth was bloody well what ’e wanted it to be.”

  * * *

  IN LATER séances, Margery announced that Walter was now ready to establish his identity in a new, even more convincing way: by leaving his fingerprint on a block of soft dental wax, called Kerr wax. He instructed that two pans of water, one warm and one cold, be added to the séance room. A ball of Kerr wax would be added to the warm dish, in order to keep it soft; once he announced that his prints had been made in the soft wax, it was to be transferred to the cold dish in order to harden it.

  And when the lights came up after the very next séance, lo and behold, there were “two beautiful indentations” in the wax, according to Dr. Crandon. The doctor hired a Boston detective named John “Sherlock” Fife to authenticate the prints, and he did so. But when Houdini got wind of this, he checked into Fife’s background and concluded the man had seriously exaggerated his credentials. “He just materialized out of nowhere.… Ha! That’s a good trick,” Houdini wrote. Later Dr. Crandon enlisted the help of a better fingerprint expert, from the U.S. Navy, to authenticate the prints.

  Over the course of six months, a series of thumbprints appeared in the wax after Margery séances. Dr. Crandon wrote exultantly to Doyle, summarizing these findings:

  1. The Walter finger-print … is always the same.