The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Sir Arthur pursued a Grail, not a prize. Undistracted by frivolous challenges, he had just sold out seven New York halls—breaking Sir Oliver’s record of six. His tour had then proceeded with an evangelical flair across the nation. “I take not one shilling of the proceeds of my lectures, so that I have no material interest,” Doyle had told a crowd of 3,000 in Dayton, Ohio. “Approach this from a religious angle or leave it alone.”

  Although church attendance was down, a wave of fundamentalism ran at crosscurrents with Sir Arthur’s spiritist revival: a choice between the Sweet Bye and Bye or Summerland. The leading Christian evangelist at the time was Aimee Semple McPherson, a brash, bob-haired sister who motored across the Bible Belt in her Packard touring car—her “gospel car”—inveighing against dance halls and occultism. From airplanes she dropped leaflets with the Words of Christ upon communities she visited.

  There was a prize for religion. The moviemaker Cecil B. DeMille put a question to the masses flocking to the cinema houses. What picture did they most want to see? Through the Los Angeles Times, DeMille offered a large cash prize to the “Best Idea” for him to adapt to the screen. The country seemed mad for movies, prize contests, and motorcars. Yet by the end of DeMille’s nationwide idea contest, he realized that many still wanted some Scripture. He immediately commenced work on the winning idea—a picture based on the Ten Commandments. It was to feature what he considered the most phenomenal event in history: Moses parting the Red Sea.

  In New York, Orson Munn could still recall the days when church spires rather than office towers commanded the skyline. With its steeples and Gothic patterns, the Woolworth Building looked like a massive cathedral to him. It was a temple, though, of industry and commerce, and Munn’s fifth-floor Scientific American offices were occupied by journalists with no previous interest in religious marvels. In mid-November of 1922 Munn met with his chief editors, including Malcolm Bird and Austin C. Lescarboura, in a charged editorial room. They assembled to discuss a recent challenge that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had issued their magazine. He wanted the Scientific American to conduct an investigation of psychic phenomena. Being such a controversial subject, it required coverage by a reliable journal.

  It was not that Munn and company refused to report on the supernormal. As Doyle was aware, they did so frequently. By now the Scientific American was featuring reports on mediums in practically every monthly issue. But their approach was to present a contentious subject such as spirit photography and in that same issue have two experts offer divergent conclusions. The men of Scientific American presented no editorial opinion. They were, Sir Arthur implied, sitting on their hands—mutely observing. Come, gentlemen, he seemed to implore, you won’t determine a blessed thing in your offices in that skyscraper that Woolworth commissioned off the fortune he made on the five-and-dime store. He encouraged them to become directly involved in séance research: to judge for themselves the demonstrations of those mystifying forces that Lodge, a frequent contributor to Munn’s journal, had been unable to explain by natural laws. Doyle would not have to wait long to hear back from them. “The Scientific American,” Lescarboura wrote him, “accepts the challenge.”

  ♦

  Sir Arthur didn’t know what a chord he had struck. To Munn and his colleagues it appeared he was questioning their reputation for zealous investigation. They were about to unmask Dr. Albert Abrams, who had swindled so many during the electronic-medicine craze. Bird and Lescarboura would determine that Abrams’s famous apparatus, “the Dynamizer,” was about as accurate in its medical diagnoses as a Ouija board. Resourceful journalists, they had a penchant for revealing to the public whether or not there was any substance behind a maverick scientist’s claims. More than a magazine, the Scientific American was an agency committed to distinguishing genius from quackery, and to determining what lay even a half century ahead of the curve. Practically from its first issue in 1845, the magazine foresaw the motorcar. When it was only the stuff of fantasy novels they predicted the aeroplane. The work of Munn’s predecessors was the stuff of legend. When Tammany Hall had ridiculed their calls for an underground rail system in New York, the Scientific American had dug a tunnel beneath Broadway and built one themselves. Through a pneumatic tube they sent a car surging back and forth via compressed air. It became a popular attraction. They had shown it was possible! They charged 25 cents a passenger for a ride on their thrilling transport.

  Like his father, the previous publisher, Munn was a patent lawyer. For almost seventy-five years, three generations of the family ran a flourishing patent advisement firm that had helped license almost 200,000 new ideas and devices. Many of the great inventors had marched through the law offices that were next door to the magazine: Morse with his telegraph; Howe with his sewing machine; Gatling with his gun; and Edison, over the years, with a multitude of brilliant wares. Munn & Co. saw those things first. They considered it their mission to help Americans make sense of the latest technology. And now they had been urged to put aside the machinery and link hands in the séance room.

  Malcolm Bird recalled that Austin Lescarboura was the first at the meeting to propose a contest. The idea was to crown a genuine medium, if one could be found, whose supernatural gifts would be confirmed by a committee of prominent judges—the top scientists, the savviest ghost hunters. An electrical engineer by training, Lescarboura had no taste for theater; he wanted the magazine to conduct a thorough scientific trial. Though his colleagues were in agreement, they sensed the investigation’s commercial appeal. Thirty-five thousand contestants were answering DeMille’s challenge. In the past, the Scientific American’s own contests had usually boosted circulation. And at that moment Munn was particularly interested in increasing sales. Even for the times he was remarkably profligate. He owned two opulent homes—an apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria and a Southampton estate. While attempting to travel by rail between Manhattan and Long Island, the Munns had once missed their train’s departure. Orson Munn had thus proceeded to a nearby automobile dealership and purchased a luxury car—a silver Pierce-Arrow. The couple motored across the Queensboro Bridge in style that day. But he was about to leave his actress wife for a young dancer from Buffalo. He would soon be paying hefty alimony, so finances were a serious concern. Hope for increased revenue was not, however, the primary motivation for the psychic contest. The reputation of Munn & Co. had risen in the past, under the stewardship of Orson Munn’s father and grandfather. Munn and his staff intended to make their own mark through the proposed investigation. “The idea of the Scientific American,” one columnist wrote, was “to prove or disprove all the beliefs of spiritualists with one swishing swipe of its sword.”

  “On the basis of existing data,” Lescarboura told the press, “we are unable to reach a definite conclusion as to the validity of psychic claims. In the effort to clear up this confusion and to present our readers with first hand and authenticated information regarding this most baffling of all studies we are making this offer.” It was a purse of $5,000.* But those who sought to claim it, the Scientific American made it clear, should not be mental mediums. “We are not interested at present in the psychological manifestations,” Lescarboura wrote Doyle, “because they do not lend themselves as readily to strict scientific methods of investigation. Furthermore there is greater interest, so far as the public is concerned, in physical phenomena.” In other words, they were not looking for the sort of psychic who could come through with the name of a sitter’s dead aunt’s favorite cat. They wanted to test the physical medium—the kind of clairvoyant, once called a necromancer, who could make objects fly about the room and produce ectoplasmic forms. It was ghosts they were after. There were now “Rewards For Spooks,” the Los Angeles Times reported. A prize! A prize!

  * * *

  * The magazine would offer two $2,500 prizes, one for physical phenomena and the other for spirit photography. Each would be worth approximately $35,000 in 2014 dollars.

  The Ghost Hunters

  There
was a ghost in Nova Scotia, a haunting in the county of Antigonish that sent shivers down from Canada. It began when the MacDonald farm was disturbed by a specter drawn to their adopted daughter. At first the visitations were not destructive. Raps and inexplicable bells were heard. Clothes and furnishings went missing. When the MacDonalds awoke to check their stock, they found distressed animals rearranged in stables. Their cows’ tails were braided. What began as a nuisance soon became a recurrent nightmare. Fires with an eerie blue hue began erupting. Animals were murdered. Amateur spook hunters arrived but were no help; they too seemed scared and left bewildered. Then one evening thirty-eight conflagrations chased the family from their house. When a reporter and local detective arrived, they claimed to be slapped across their faces by the phantom. From the MacDonalds’ farm, twenty-two miles by sleigh from anything resembling a town, the latest occult furor had erupted. Here might finally be the spook to defy science, many newspapers speculated.

  Professionals were sent for. Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, of the American Society for Psychical Research, had never encountered a haunting he hadn’t been able to explain by natural means. It was Prince’s assignment to proceed with a team to Canada to see if he could solve the mystery. “A Party of inquisitive scientists now threatens to break in upon the quiet of the Antigonish ghost, whose fame grows with each new thrill he, or it, causes,” the Times reported. Quoting Sherlock Holmes, cackling at his own jokes, and recounting tales of other rural hauntings, Prince—the fifty-nine-year-old psychic detective—was avuncular and patient. He rigged the MacDonald home with secret traps, in case humans and not poltergeists were the guilty parties. He sat in the parlor all night with a revolver, a camera, and a magnesium flash beside him. Neighbors expected at any moment to spy him fleeing from the place in horror. But nothing really happened. It was windy, a door blew open; that was all the phantom had to offer. On Prince’s final day the MacDonalds’ teenage daughter, Mary Ellen, sat blithely on the porch petting her kitten—the intruder was gone, she told her father. Prince had examined the burn marks on the walls, however, and determined how the outbursts started. According to him, Mary Ellen was the culprit, not the channel. In a possessed state, she had caused all of the phenomena. For the spectral slaps he had no explanation; the men may have worked themselves into such a frenzy that they either hallucinated or struck each other, he reported. Many were disappointed by the demystification of the Antigonish case. Mary Ellen, princess of flames, was committed to an asylum. And nothing more was heard of ghosts from that wild outpost above the border.

  ♦

  Few had better credentials than Dr. Prince to judge a psychic contest. The Antigonish sleuth possessed two degrees from Yale and a keen knowledge of both magic and psychology. He was a former pastor who appeared to be less mystic than scientist. During a crankish, whimsical era, he remained a Maine farmer at heart—resolute and unimpressionable. After receiving Malcolm Bird’s invitation to judge the Scientific American competition, he expressed both interest and reservations. Somehow, the idea of a prize challenge did not sit entirely well with him. Was this to be some highfalutin dance contest?

  “I knew that investigations conducted by the Scientific American would attract much attention and excite criminations and recriminations,” he wrote. “I deferred acceptance until I could consult my official superiors.” As Prince soon discovered, though, the man whose consent he needed—William McDougall, president of the American Society for Psychical Research—had already been approached to join the Scientific American investigation. McDougall was boarding Munn’s train. Prince was cleared to follow.

  The ASPR was the sister chapter of England’s pioneering Society for Psychical Research. In addition to presiding over both offices, Dr. William McDougall was one of the most esteemed psychologists working in America. His forerunner as both the president of the ASPR and chairman of the Harvard Psychology Department had been William James, who famously bemoaned that souls were out of fashion. As acclaimed for his intellect as his brother Henry was for his novels, James had been devoted to séance research, which he saw as the best hope for establishing an interrelationship of mind and spirit.

  “Are the much-despised spiritualists and the Society for Psychical Research to be the chosen instrument of a new era of faith? It would surely be strange if they were; but if they are not, I see no other agency that can do the work,” James wrote many years earlier. The father of American psychology, he was the inspiration, even after his death, for a new generation of ghost-chasing alienists that included McDougall.

  Contrary to James’s work, the general tilt in psychology was now toward the mechanistic approach. So McDougall had caused a stir when he wrote a treatise, Body and Mind, that stressed how humans are driven by a higher intention. A man of Scottish descent, McDougall never felt accepted in England—neither at Cambridge, where he learned, nor at Oxford, where he lectured. Sensing a “land of romantic opportunities,” he came to the States in 1920, to take James’s old position at Harvard. Due to James’s influence, Harvard had always been the university in England and America most hospitable to psychic research. Nevertheless, Dr. McDougall tolerated no nonsense in the séance, and he did not hesitate to reach for an apparition, if by so doing he might expose a fraud in white muslin. Like Prince he rarely found mediums he could believe in. The Spiritualists were therefore hostile toward both of them.

  There was some debate at this time whether psychic phenomena was the domain of psychology or physics. Because the Scientific American would be testing physical mediumship, they wanted a physical scientist. Austin Lescarboura had a good candidate. A former professor at MIT, Daniel Frost Comstock was a respected physicist and engineer. While less well known in the field of psychical research, he too was a member of the ASPR, and a zealous ghost chaser. Not yet forty, Comstock was suave and good-looking. Some found him as convivial as Munn, only smarter and younger. In his own way he too bridged science and entertainment; he was the inventor of Technicolor and founded that company. DeMille was to use Comstock’s groundbreaking process for certain scenes in The Ten Commandments. Comstock, for his part, found Bird and Munn’s contest to be an extraordinary production. He welcomed the challenge of substantiating a medium’s power.

  The author Hereward Carrington was also enlisted. Dr. Carrington had joined the ASPR in 1900 as a precocious nineteen-year-old embarking on what would be a lifelong psychic journey. He had cut his teeth investigating Lily Dale, an occult community and popular summer camp for those desiring a palm reading, a zodiac consultation, or a few sentimental words from the departed. At Lily Dale, disguising himself as a dupe with bad eyesight, Carrington sampled slate-writing mediums, materializing mediums, spirit photographers…a veritable smorgasbord of the supernatural arts. He tried them all, and all attempted to fleece him. So controversial was his exposé of the flimflammers’ methods that the Times had featured his report. High-profile investigations were his bread and butter.

  Carrington was an Anglo-American who lived in New York but spent considerable time in Europe, as well as the Orient. He was fastidiously well mannered, charming but elusive. He had a wife whom no one saw anymore and a PhD from a university in Oskaloosa, Iowa, that no one had heard of. At dinner parties—while the men discussed Ty Cobb’s hitting streak or whether the Naval Treaty would hold—Carrington might sit with one of their wives, discussing that premonitory dream she’d had when she was twelve. Some thought him a crank. Carrington was one of the first to introduce Americans to a mystical form of contortion called yoga. He wrote scores of books, not just on clairvoyance but also on health and diet. He called for a return to the “natural food of man”—subsistence by means of raw fruits and vegetables. He had the wan, ethereal look of a psychic himself, but he was a former vaudeville magician who knew all the tricks and gaffes that spook mediums used in the séance.

  By 1922 there was likely no researcher in the world who had investigated a wider range of supernatural claims than Carrington. He had tested the
notorious Eusapia Palladino—a coarse, rotund, wily medium who levitated tables and shot cool breezes from an invisible third eye on her forehead. He had sat many years earlier with the uncanny mental medium Leonora Piper—the first to convince Sir Oliver Lodge and William James, among others, that it was possible to converse with the discarnate. And he had participated in the debauched magic rituals of the “world’s most wicked man”—the poet and sorcerer Aleister Crowley.

  Soon the Scientific American had assembled a jury of five: two distinguished men of science, two professional ghost chasers, and, most notably, Harry Houdini—who was finishing a book, Magician Among the Spirits, that chronicled medium fraud. Houdini was a special case. He claimed that Munn had agreed to clear all candidates for the judging committee with him first. “I am to know each and every man so selected,” he informed Bird. Having never heard of Comstock or McDougall, he feared his reputation as a master of illusion would be ruined if the judges were to crown a sly impostor. He had far more at stake than the $5,000 prize the magazine was offering, he told his colleagues. Then he ruffled Bird’s feathers by chastising the editor for not consulting him. He was further aggrieved by something Prince had observed: “The Scientific American was to have all the responsibility and take all the credit.”

  Houdini was telling reporters that the Scientific American challenge was his notion. In fact, it had been Austin Lescarboura’s idea, it was Orson Munn’s prize money, and it was Malcolm Bird’s contest. Bird was the editor at the journal with the most knowledge of the psychic world. It was he whom the publisher had selected as director of this enterprise, and to him befell the task of choosing judges. Uncharacteristically, Houdini swallowed his indignation and fell in line. The press touted this to be “the greatest spook hunt of modern times.” And he, claiming to be in pursuit of what William James had called a white crow—that rare, undeniably genuine, medium—was eager to be a part of it.