The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  News of the séance was transmitted to New York and Washington. No one could understand how Houdini had done it. The morning after the séance, Teddy put his arm around Houdini and asked, man to man, if the phenomena the previous evening was “genuine Spiritualism.” With a smile and wink, the magician replied: “It was hokus-pokus, Colonel.” There ended Teddy’s brief enchantment with the spirits. He died six months after his son Quentin was lost in an air battle; it was not for him to know the transcendent comforts of the new religion.

  1922: Don’t Let Them Tame You

  In a short red dress that barely covered her thighs, the dancer pranced barefoot across the stage. Her dance, to the strains of a Russian ballet, was all the rage in Europe. This was not Paris. The Old Yankees found her performance more vulgar than a leg show at Scollay Square. When in defiance she bared her breasts to them, many of the offended walked out. The Harvard crowd and students from the art and music schools remained, cheering madly as she cried, “You were once wild here! Don’t let them tame you!”

  It was Boston’s shame and sensation when Isadora Duncan gave her topless sermon at Symphony Hall. Days earlier she had presented the same program, without exposing her breasts, in liberal New York and was praised there as daring—one of the vanguard. This was not Manhattan. In Boston she was smeared in the newspapers, censured in the statehouse, and ridiculed in the drawing rooms of Back Bay. She was old and corpulent. Her breasts sagged. Her thighs were massive. Her speech—“This scarf is red and so am I!”—was Bolshevist incitement. When Mayor Curley banned her from the Boston stage, he was applauded by the Hearst newspapers. Even many of those, like Dr. Crandon, who rarely agreed with their Catholic mayor from the Mud Flats, believed he was right to banish Isadora Duncan. Let her preach mob rule to the Leninists she loved so much in her adopted homeland.

  This was not Moscow.

  ♦

  The Boston Brahmins loathed disorder and the prevailing isms—Socialism, Spiritualism, Modernism—of the times. They wanted the peace and normalcy that President Harding had promised to restore. Yet Dr. Crandon, no true Brahmin by bloodline, was a member of one of the old Plymouth families—a descendant of the spiritual dissidents who came over on the Mayflower. His people were not first-tier gentry and his behavior was not always in accordance with the Brahmin creed: that one’s name should appear in the newspapers just twice in a lifetime—a birth announcement and an obituary. The doctor’s past divorce to his second wife, Lucy Armes, had been a news item. Moreover, in a city vehemently anti-abortion, he was not against feticide. His nascent interest in psychic research might also have been considered peculiar by some. It cannot be imagined that any Lowell, Adams, or Quincy ever dabbled with ghosts. Spiritualism was associated in past decades with free-lovers, suffragettes, and other radical cults. Despite that, Roy’s beloved grandfather Benjamin had been a Spiritualist—a healing medium who sensed auras and prescribed botanical elixirs and invisible balms for the sick.

  Dr. Crandon had not inherited these supposed psychic gifts, he told his wife, Mina. Never had he sensed bands of etheric light surrounding his patients, but then at Harvard Medical School he hadn’t exactly been trained in prayer or second sight. He was dedicated to healing through more conventional means; and he focused so single-mindedly on medicine that after four years of marriage Mina felt that his profession came before her. When they took their evening walk through the Commons, the doctor often seemed absorbed in some medical crisis he did not wish to discuss. He was more apt to include her in the new obsession in his life. He had taken to the psychical research movement like a Jew to Marxism, remarked their friend Kitty Brown. He read journals on occult phenomena until late at night.

  As for Mina, she was not the type to read quietly by her husband’s side. Roy thought his third wife was like a chameleon in the way she had adjusted to his circle of Harvard and Gold Coast friends. Not that she blended in with them completely; some thought her pretty gay for a society wife. Accompanied by Kitty Brown she might cross Pinckney and explore the colony of artists and bohemians on the North Slope. There, in the speakeasies on Joy Street, Don’t let them tame you became part of the vernacular. Even though it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and not the red hussy, who caused the greater stir that year.

  The Salt Highway

  SPIRITUALISM TO WIN WORLD ASSERTS DOYLE

  —New York Herald

  From the hurricane deck of the RMS Baltic, Sir Arthur watched the skyline of his favorite American city emerge from the mist. Silhouetted against a gray-violet sky, New York looked to him like some future metropolis, so different was it from anything in Europe. He pointed out the three great towers—the Singer, Woolworth, and Whitehall—to his three gaping children. As the ship rounded Battery Park, he felt both excited and uneasy, knowing that a boarding party of reporters was awaiting his arrival at the docks. Americans were led in their opinions by the newspapers, he realized. Newspaper men here were keen for humor, and no subject was more easily made fun of than spiritism. But it gave him some comfort to know that on his previous visit to New York, two months before the War, he and the press had gotten on famously. On an excursion to Dreamland on Coney Island they wrote of his “Shooting the Chutes” and roaring with delight on the splash-down. Of his gamely mixing it up with the flimflammers and frankfurter men on the promenade. And of hundreds of men removing their hats, the band playing “God Save the King” while he and Jean walked arm-in-arm through Steeplechase Pavilion. For her warm grace the press dubbed Jean “Lady Sunshine.” They had taken as well to Sir Arthur’s boyish enthusiasm, his unabashed awe of their city. But it was now April 9, 1922. This time Sir Arthur was coming on a religious mission. They were already calling him the Saint Paul of Spiritualism. If that were so, he reflected, then the Hudson was his salt highway. He was sure that the Apostle Paul, on the salt road he followed to Rome, hadn’t encountered a more materialistic city. Would New Yorkers have a tin ear for the New Revelation?

  He was buoyed by the prior success of Sir Oliver, whose own US tour had launched a national fascination with spirit communication—a practice that seemed to run contrary to the current trend toward trivial amusement. A spirit message received at a séance weeks earlier back home in Crowborough further encouraged Sir Arthur: “You have no idea what great and glorious work you are going to do. You will leave your mark forever upon America. We will all be with you, giving you inspiration and power and health.” The spirits had never led Sir Arthur astray. They were with him now, he believed, as the Baltic steamed slowly toward its moorings.

  The first wave of newspapermen hit him before the liner had berthed. Boarding at the Narrows after the quarantine, an advance party sought out and cornered him. They were scruffy, importunate men in raincoats and fedoras. Flashes went off in his face. He could taste the powder. Pens came out—ready, he imagined, to be thrust at any chink in his aura. The keen senses of these men were alert, he felt, for any signs that their English visitor belonged in the nuthouse; that the War had cost him both his son and his sanity. Bellevue was just up the river. Would he drop anchor there? It wasn’t just Sir Arthur’s communications with ghosts that struck some of them as fanciful. He was now affirming the existence of faeries. He had put his reputation behind photographs a teenage girl had taken in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, of winged sprites dancing in front of her. Has Sherlock Holmes gone mad? many wondered. In fact, his direct, earnest responses had often disarmed the scoffers. Few doubted that he was still formidable. “Arthur is a massive man,” said the Herald, “broad of shoulder and six feet in height. His hair is thin and brown, but shows no trace of grey. He is erect and the muscles that cover his enormous frame give one the impression that they are hard and powerful.” He did not look like a man in his dotage, susceptible to charlatans.

  Doyle found a windy doorway near the promenade deck where the flash smoke was not as intolerable. There he told the newsmen to fire away. What did he seek to accomplish on these shores? they asked. “To make a raid on
American skepticism. To raid church and laity alike,” he responded. As his children screamed at the sight of the Statue of Liberty, he said that Spiritualism was the “death blow to materialism.” But were there really scotch and cigars in Summerland? Was there miniature golf there? What about relations between the sexes? they asked. Sir Arthur laughed heartily. It may have saved him. He did not know why, within Sir Oliver’s four-hundred-page book on his communications with Raymond, some in America had seized on the brief message regarding otherworldly vices. Raymond was only saying that there was an etheric replica of everything in our world. Sir Arthur wanted them to know that while some mocked Spiritualism, it was the only faith to furnish proof of what lay beyond the veil. “It is not mere hearsay. I have talked with and seen twenty of my dead, including my son, when my wife and other witnesses were present,” he told them. Had he brought any proofs? they pressed him. Come to my presentation, he answered. When they then asked what he would do first in New York he said, without hesitation, that he looked forward to seeing Broadway again. He understood that the lights there were brighter than ever.

  The Men from Beyond

  In April a movie by and starring the Great Houdini premiered on Broadway. While The Man from Beyond played at the Times Square Theater, Houdini performed live immediately afterward. He was placing himself center stage amid the supernatural hullabaloo. If it is spirits you seek, he seemed to announce, then come see my picture! His press book promised that “audiences everywhere will welcome it as evidence that loved ones gone to the great beyond are not lost to us forever.”

  At the theater the Doyles saw first a close shot of the Bible with the verse John 5:28 highlighted: Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice. A dead man then came to life: an arctic explorer, played by Houdini, who is resuscitated after one hundred years of frozen entombment on a lost ship. Brought back to New York, he encounters a young bride he believes to be the reincarnation of his former lover. Complications ensue when he attempts to part the veil and reclaim her. He must first escape the mental asylum in which her groom, a sinister doctor, has him locked up and tortured. After this and other predicaments are surmounted, Houdini saves his beloved from a canoe caught at the crest of the Niagara Rapids. This stunt he actually undertook—an unseen steel wire secured him from plunging over. The point of the movie is that an etheric cord still connects him to his heroine. There was also a surprising ode to Sir Arthur. The six reels conclude with Houdini reading verses from The Vital Message—Doyle’s latest book on the “progression and immortality of the soul.” The Man from Beyond was Houdini’s attempt to merge his muscular form of melodrama with Sir Arthur’s Spiritualism. Variety said, “The two things don’t go together.” Doyle found it the “best sensational picture” ever.

  After the photoplay was over, the band struck up “Pomp and Circumstance” and Houdini bounded onto the stage all dash and fire. Cards vanished at his fingertips and reappeared in all parts of the theater. He swallowed a handful of sewing needles then brought them out threaded. He shouted, “Goodbye, autumn!” and made his heroine disappear in midair. From an empty bowl he pulled streams of bright-colored silk and giant flags of all nations. He shot off a pistol and yelled, “Hello summer!” The girl reappeared from the ether. He clawed his way out of a straitjacket as he had in his screen adventure. For the finale he brought out Fannie, a live elephant he had borrowed from the Ringling Circus, and made her vanish. Sir Arthur and others were allowed to come onstage. “Fannie!” the guest of honor called. But no one could find her.

  ♦

  While Doyle had not come to entertain, his appearances in New York were a more popular draw than Houdini. He began with a series of three presentations to some of the largest crowds ever at Carnegie Hall. All the standing room the fire laws would permit, and many women in mourning garb or with gold stars pinned to their clothing. And there was Houdini perched by the stage. He had the nose, Sir Arthur felt, of a hawk, and the luminous blue eyes of a medium.

  In a double-breasted blue serge and wearing gold spectacles, Sir Arthur looked both distinguished and sturdy. His feet seemed firmly planted on the ground, yet in his rolling Scottish brogue he spoke of ghosts and faeries. The miracles revealed in the New Testament had driven him out of the Church as a medical student, he said. Now mysterious wonders would draw all skeptics back to religion. He reminded them with a chuckle that he was supposed to know something about detective work. For him, this case was proven.

  With awe he described the apparition of his mother at a séance in London. “Do you think a man doesn’t know his own mother’s face? I could swear by all I hold holy on earth that I looked right in her eyes.” Jean Doyle, who had witnessed the moment, was seated onstage beside her husband. When he asked her to confirm the phenomena she did so assuredly. Proof? He told the audience about Kingsley. His death. Their reunion. He knew his own son’s voice. He knew fact from illusion. Clear evidence, he insisted, was about to be presented. There were mediums in England with the gift for spirit photography. They were able to capture with cameras the world that psychics see. Here was proof the dead were with us, active and interested!

  Suddenly the lights went out and the pictures started. The first showed a ghost gliding across a room at noon, holding in her hand a lighted candle. “The darkness of the theater, the spookiness, the uncanny effects produced by the pictures and the impressive sincerity of Sir Arthur as he told the history of the subject on the screen had a weird effect upon the crowd,” the Herald reported. Houdini felt as if he were experiencing a séance for 3,500 spectators. It was unnaturally silent within the auditorium. He heard the popping of floorboards, the breath of his petite wife, Bess, sitting next to him. He felt her shudder as dead boys flashed on the screen one after another. There was a photograph of Kingsley’s vaporous form smiling tenderly at his father. Loud gasps were heard in reaction to the image that followed. “On a divan sat Lady Lodge. Next to her sat Mrs. Leonard, a medium. Between the heads of the two women—thinly sketched but clear in every physiognomical detail—was the face of the dead Raymond.” Next came another prim lady, who sat with the grim form of her son floating beside her. A bullet hole pierced his skull. Blood was pouring out of it. That was how he’d been killed at Ypres, Sir Arthur solemnly commented.

  Some comfort for that poor lady, Houdini reflected. The picture that most interested him, though, was of the medium Eva C. Luminous rods shooting from her body held a table aloft during a remarkable sitting. This was her ectoplasm, Sir Arthur explained to the audience. It melted like “snow in sunshine,” but when hardened it was powerful. Six men could not push that table down, he claimed. Houdini’s eyes flashed but he kept quiet. No table was levitated during his séances with Eva C. He had never seen any of the effects shown in spirit photography.

  Last in this spectral gallery “was the picture of a woman in a trance with six men looking above her head. They appeared to be startled. They had a right to be. Out of the sleeping body of the medium was coming a radiant creature who seemed to issue from the woman’s shoulder like a wisp of smoke from a cigarette. The wisp curled upward and began taking form. Presently the legs and body of a beautiful woman were seen and then the head and shoulders heavy with unfastened hair. It wasn’t a moving picture but if one followed the wisp of smoke one received the impression of a movie.”

  “You have seen the picture of an angel,” Sir Arthur declared. “That’s what that was, an angel.”

  ♦

  In presenting his images of the phantoms of dead boys swirling around the living, Sir Arthur spurred a new interest in spirit photography. The following day the Herald inquired what Dr. Walter Prince, America’s most respected psychic investigator, thought of the phenomena. They found him at the Hotel Pennsylvania, participating in a psychic tea arranged by the Opera Club of America—a program consisting of music, psychoanalysis, the science of the human aura, Spiritualism, tea, and small rum cakes.

 
While sampling the refreshments Dr. Prince disclosed that the chief photographer of the prints Sir Arthur was exhibiting, William Hope, had refused to submit them for scientific analysis. For this reason, and because Hope was a professional medium, the expert was unconvinced. He conjectured that Hope’s effects were due to either trickery, double exposure, or telepathy. Prince made it clear, though, that he had nothing but the utmost respect for Sir Arthur’s “altruism and honest belief in Spiritualism.”

  Some felt differently about the British missionary. In a bellicose speech, New York’s mayor, John Hylan, asserted that Doyle was out to fleece the country. “From all reports,” he said, “the shekels are rolling in to him as fast as when he told how easy it was for the famous detective of fiction to get out of tight places.” The English had tricked us into bailing them out of a horrendous war; and now Doyle arrived with his New Revelation—a call to arms, critics warned, for every shady medium in America.

  As a former spook himself, Houdini knew how the flimflammers operated. He informed the Times how a false medium might lead a client into self-hypnosis, or by reading their facial cues could sense if they were onto something with their so-called spirit messages. He even said that some clairvoyants, if truly intuitive, might absorb “the telepathic wave from another’s mind,” and thus appear to channel the dead or read the future of the living. But he insisted that even a genuine psychic, if one existed, was tuning into the sitter, not the departed.