The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  1923: Speed

  By now it was not enough to seize the day; many were seizing the moment. “Jazz it up” was the expression. It meant to pick it up. No music was faster. Even the foxtrot was considered too slow now. The Charleston would soon be arriving. Flappers were called “quick women.” The battle cry seemed to be: Get what you can, for we all die tomorrow.

  One giant figure embodied the notion that the country was on a spree. Babe Ruth gorged himself on eighteen hot dogs, blacked out, and woke up in St. Vincent’s Hospital. THE BELLYACHE HEARD ROUND THE WORLD, ran the headline. Everywhere people lived large. Sports were jazzed. The Yankees did not have to grind out wins. The Babe decided games with one mighty drive to the bleachers. Boxing had also changed. Fights used to go twenty rounds, even thirty. Now before the end of the first round Jack Dempsey had pounded his man to the canvas. Neither was football immune to brisk sensation. Red Grange revolutionized what had been a plodding game. There was no longer a need to advance downfield play by play. In a stadium built in Champaign, Illinois, to honor the War dead, Grange dashed to the end zone each time he touched the ball. “The galloping ghost,” the press called him.

  A Jaunt with Kitty

  Mrs. Crandon excelled at no sport, though she loved a bracing horse ride along the Back Bay Fens. How wonderful it was to own and take out a horse again. On her mount she kept a pace that her husband found dangerous. For that matter, he always felt she drove her car too fast. During the War she had been a volunteer ambulance driver. In that capacity she was sent to the New London naval base that he commanded. After their marriage, Mina usually drove him around and too often he had to remind her there was no one dying in their automobile.

  One day early in March, Mina went for a horse ride with her good friend Kitty Brown. They discussed Dr. Crandon’s improbable interest in spirit mediumship, which was hard for either of them to take seriously yet. Her husband was a gynecologist, Mina joked; naturally he was interested in exploring the netherworld. But she told Kitty that a séance sounded like great fun. And she decided on a lark that she wanted one that day.

  The minister of the First Spiritualist Church had been highly recommended by her friend Mrs. Richardson. “So entirely in search of amusement, I went with [Kitty] in order to gather some good laughing material with which to tweet the doctor.” They showed up at their clairvoyant’s door, still wearing their boots and riding breeches, and expecting that he would “try to put them off to a later date, or that they would meet some other easily recognized variety of mediumistic chicanery.” Instead the minister seemed forthright and kept his ritual short and sweet.

  Welcoming them into his study, he promptly went into a trance. Within minutes he was sensing spirits, among them a strapping, good-humored blond boy claiming to be Mina’s brother. Her first thought was to wonder, What was this medium’s method? How could he know of her dead brother in heaven? “If this is so,” she said to the ghost, “give me some evidence that will identify you.” She noticed that Kitty was staring over her shoulder, as if trying to picture the spirit that the medium saw behind her. Resisting the urge to look back, Mina glanced at her boots. Perhaps the medium caught that gesture. He said that her brother was reminding her of some trouble she had with her boots when they once went riding. Mina recalled her pony mired in a swamp as a child. When she dismounted she too became stuck, and her brother, always resourceful, had used a knife to cut open her boot and free her. She suspected that this is what happens with mediums. They make a hit and you fill in the rest of it. But what the minister told her next was even more surprising: Mina was being called to “The Work.”

  He said that she had rare powers and soon all would know it.

  Thinking about the séance on her way home, it made perfect sense to Mina that her brother should be the one to come through to her, since they’d had a special bond—growing up together “in relative isolation from the other children.” When he was a child, Walter was believed to have psychic gifts. He played at “table turning and spirit rapping”—the occult arts he had witnessed on his first trip to Boston. That is, until their father, pious Isaac Stinson, “set his foot down and firmly forbade it.” The séance had been sacrilege in their home.

  Since marrying Roy Crandon she had adopted the agnosticism of his enlightened circle. But while he considered mediumistic research a science, it was to her a curious trifle. “Many things were far from my mind, but few farther than spiritism,” she later said. “I was interested in my home, my boy, in music and dancing, very much like any normal woman. And when the doctor my husband—began to read about psychical phenomena and tell me of it I rather disliked the subject.”

  Still bewildered, Mina told the doctor what had happened at the séance. His dismissive reaction surprised her. Dr. Crandon had been corresponding with respected professors and scientists. He declared himself “intellectually convinced” now of an afterlife. Yet he trusted no professional medium. No Spiritualist church. And no message dispensed by oracular ministers. “It’s all a fake,” he told her. She too decided that she had been hoodwinked. It was preposterous to think that the dead could come back, and that she might produce them. For a time she forgot what the medium told her.

  A Square Deal for the Psychics

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE SEES EVIL IN REWARD OF $5,000 FOR SPIRIT

  —New York Times

  Malcolm Bird believed in no God, spirit, or discarnate voice. He saw his contest as purely a scientific enterprise, an investigation into a mysterious mental—yet natural—force. With all the talk of miracles, he believed that he and his colleagues at the Scientific American were the ones to use modern equipment and methods to answer the age-old question concerning the supposed powers that mediums possess. Let DeMille have the prophet Moses for his movie. What Bird invoked, when presenting Munn’s contest to the Scientific American reader, was the most exalted psychic in the ancient world, the Priestess of Apollo.

  For fourteen centuries a woman was chosen to be the Sun God’s oracle, and pilgrims flocked to Delphi from as far as Asia to receive her counsel. The Oracle at Delphi inhaled magical vapors thought to emanate from the Earth’s navel and then delivered her intoxicated forecasts from atop a cauldron in Apollo’s Temple. Her words were incomprehensible and required a Delphic priest to interpret: men were rational; women psychic and ecstatic. There came a time, however, when one of her monastic men, the historian Plutarch, noticed the gases from the chasm were losing their aroma. Christianity had begun to flourish in Rome, and with the waft of the new religion the seeress’s day was over.

  ♦

  Even during the Oracle’s reign there was debate, Bird claimed, as to whether she was “inspired or drunk or merely canny.” So in 1923, with psychics once again conducting the rites of a religion, the argument resumed: one man’s quack was another’s Cassandra. “The controversy of today,” he observed, “is essentially the controversy of 1000 B.C. translated into modern terms and given a modern setting.” The difference, as the Scientific American saw it, was that the modern clairvoyant worked in a rational rather than superstitious world. If she wanted Munn’s purse, she would have to face twentieth-century music, a score to be composed by some of the top psychic researchers and experts of the time—Prince, McDougall, Comstock, Carrington, and Houdini.

  Bird admitted that it might be too ambitious to hope to solve the psychic riddle once and for all, but he explained that the contest’s mandate was to answer the question for the present generation—many of whom were seeking mediumistic guidance as none had since the heyday of the oracle. Accordingly, the New York–based judges—Carrington, Houdini, and Prince—and the Scientific American representatives—Bird, Munn, and Lescarboura—gathered in the magazine’s editorial room. While Houdini paced the floor or fingered a deck of cards, and Bird smoked Old Golds, the men exchanged views on psychics and framed the rules for the contest. Houdini wanted to employ thorough restraint to ensure no possibility of fraud. To his annoyance, Carrington insisted hi
s control methods were too extreme, and the other judges agreed. Clairvoyants would be searched and rope could be used to bind them, it was decided, but not in the draconian fashion Houdini had in mind. “We do not wish to draw any picture of a medium trussed up like a roast fowl,” said Bird.

  But who and where were the great modern psychics? The first medium Bird wanted to bring to New York was Ada Bessinet, an Ohio seeress whom Doyle called the most outstanding physical medium in the States. In a sitting for him, she had produced the spectral face of his mother, wrinkles and all. Mrs. Bessinet summarily refused to sit with Houdini, however, and there was no immediate alternative. The contest needed Doyle’s sanction, all felt, for the worthy psychics in Europe and America to step forward. “I place the announcement in your hands,” Lescarboura wrote Doyle. “First, because your challenge has been instrumental in our making it; and second in the hope that you may influence some of the more prominent British mediums to come to this country for the good of the psychic cause.”

  It was “a square deal” they were offering the psychics. The mediums could work in complete darkness, Bird announced, and in a sympathetic circle. “We do not accuse the photographer of chicanery because he shuns the light, and insists that what light be present be red. We know also, if we will but admit it, that a hostile atmosphere does make more difficult the exercise of the mental faculties.” As Bird had hoped, many psychics were assured by his statements. They were eager to win the endorsement of the prestigious Scientific American; the problem was that no credible mediums were in the ranks of those showing up at the Woolworth.

  Among the first aspirants was a male medium who asked the magazine officials to lock the door to the room in which he was to be interviewed. Only then, in a low voice, did he confide to Bird that a spirit had channeled him the secrets to a marvelous machine for which he wanted Munn & Co. to pay him $25,000 to develop. He was dismissed without further questions.

  The next candidate, an Italian barber from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said that when it came to producing ghosts, turning tables, and talking with famous dead men—Shakespeare, Caesar, and Ben Franklin—he was better at the dark sport than any queen of ectoplasm. His offer was also rejected.

  It was a parade, Bird felt, of crackpots, queens of mystery, and charlatans. An older female psychic who visited the Scientific American office told her interviewers that after many years studying the news sheets she had observed that citizens who got their faces in the papers resembled certain animals, a phenomenon that she believed Mr. Aristotle of ancient Greece had discovered about famous persons in general. To exhibit her case, the medium brought with her a bulging valise containing thousands of cut-out faces from the newspapers, each with an animal counterpart attached to it. Unfortunately, as she sat down her suitcase opened, strewing pictures over the floor and under desks. It took the office staff practically an hour, Bird reported, to retrieve them all for the distressed psychic. Her bid to compete for Munn’s prize was, to her great disappointment, declined. One did not summon men like Comstock and McDougall from Boston or pull Houdini from whatever skyscraper he was hanging from or movie he was making to test some quack just off the train from Lily Dale or Cassadega.*1

  Doyle had warned them this would happen. Responding to the announcement of the Scientific American contest, Sir Arthur—in a letter dispatched to Munn & Co. and published in the New York dailies—maligned the psychic tournament as “a very dangerous thing. A large money reward will stir up every rascal in the country.” The more gifted psychic would be wary of a prize contest, he promised. “For the sake of the cause and their own reputations they would help you,” he conceded, but only “if you got the personal support and endorsement of leaders of the movement.”

  As it happened, to involve him would not be an impossible task. Despite an aversion to the crasser elements of the contest, Sir Arthur was pleased “to see a journal of the standing of the Scientific American taking an interest in psychic matters.” He had this in mind: that Orson Munn should fund an international search to be conducted by a savvy but fair individual. This man would scour both Europe and the United States for talented mediums. If the Scientific American were to send such a representative to him, Sir Arthur promised to give him entrée to the best clairvoyants in England, to essentially take him under his wing. Above all, though, Munn’s agent had to be someone who was courteous and receptive—not the least antagonistic in the séance.

  “Everything,” he told them, “depends on your man.”

  ♦

  One month later, in early February, Malcolm Bird crossed the Brooklyn Bridge with two reporters who lived in the outer borough. Their conversation concerned in large part the preparations for the psychic contest taking up Bird’s every working hour. Maybe it was the effect of the visit they had just made to a Broadway speakeasy, but there was something otherworldly to the twilight view from the bridge promenade. The clusters of yellow light beneath hazy domes and spires made the city seem a fairyland on opalescent water.

  The evening’s drinks notwithstanding, Bird’s companions were sober materialists who gave little credence to the psychic revival. As for Bird, he liked to claim that he spoke “neither as believer nor as disbeliever” and would not make up his mind until better acquainted with the spirit medium. This was soon to happen; pursuant to Doyle’s plan, Bird had recently booked passage across the Atlantic—where he intended to investigate the best clairvoyants in Europe.

  Actually, Bird had reserved two possible crossings in order to ensure, depending on which mediums were available, the most opportune arrival. He also hoped to see something of London during his visit, but as it would turn out, he’d only get a glimpse of Westminster and Parliament, and not see the Tower at all, so busy was he with Doyle’s psychics.

  The first medium he met was John Sloan, a meek Scotchman whom Bird judged to have an intelligence “comfortably below the mean.” This was the first séance the producer of the Scientific American contest had ever attended, and what struck him straightaway was his utter blindness when hands were clasped and the candles extinguished. A proper séance, as Bird was experiencing, is a sphere into which no light leaks, no human eyes adjust—as they might to a bedroom at night or to starlight. “One can stay there till kingdom come,” he vouched, “and visibility will remain at the zero mark. One who has never attended a dark séance has in all probability never been in this sort of darkness.”

  Soon after the sitting commenced, voices came in a hushed whisper through the spirit trumpet sitting on the table and most assuredly not, Bird was certain, from the mouth of the medium seated next to him. When an invisible entity calling itself Captain Morgan took over the trumpet, things got “pretty thick.” What happened next stunned the visiting American.

  Although Bird had come to the séance incognito, the voice described him strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge with two companions three weeks prior! Captain Morgan claimed to have followed Bird’s movements ever since the editor had made plans to visit Europe for work that the spirits deemed important.*2 Bird had reserved two tickets for his passage, the Captain revealed. The editor could not fathom how this wraith could utter things known only to a few colleagues with the magazine.

  Racking his brain afterward, Bird could not determine any means of trickery; he later wired the friends with whom he had tramped to Brooklyn, but neither could solve the mystery. How many blank séances had Houdini endured in his quest for spiritist proofs? Yet Bird, from the start, had something eerie to report under the credible masthead of the Scientific American.

  Next, Sir Arthur directed Bird’s European talent search to one of the most revered psychics in England. It was Gladys Osborne Leonard who first reunited Sir Oliver Lodge with his dead son Raymond; and Doyle said she was the best trance medium he knew of. The pleasant Mrs. Leonard would not be the star, however, of the Scientific American tests. Mr. Bird expected more for his thirty shillings. When the medium was possessed by the girlish spirit Feda, a number of discarnate v
oices were introduced to him—all murmuring that they had known him in life while cascading him with general information. Almost none of these personalities were the least recognizable to Bird—and a spirit channeled by Mrs. Leonard was way off in describing him. “I pause here,” noted Bird, “to remark that this picture of me as a shrinking violet, highly sensitive to all sorts of delicate conditions is just about as whole-hearted a miss as any spirit ever made.”

  Whether wrong or right, these spectral voices were not what the Scientific American was seeking; theirs wasn’t a contest of mental mediumship or second sight. Evan Powell, the Welsh channel through whom Sir Arthur first received communications from Kingsley, was more the model for their tests, as he produced not only messages from the dead but glowing forms and unambiguous physical effects. During an early-afternoon séance in London, Powell caused flowers to rise from a vase and caress each sitter’s hand and face. While Bird suspected that Powell had slipped a hand free of his bonds, he was nonetheless impressed with the demonstration. “It is not inconsistent to speak of a given psychic performance as partly genuine and partly fraudulent,” he explained. Regardless, Powell, whose gifts were being studied by the sympathetic British College of Psychic Science, would not commit to coming to America for more stringent tests.