The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

On to the Continent, where Bird sat in Berlin with the mystifying Frau Vollhard. This dramatic medium, while kept under strict control, instantly materialized branches and large stones that struck the séance table. In their post-séance interview, Frau Vollhard’s vivid blue eyes became even brighter when Bird converted the contest’s prize stakes for her at 20,000 inflated marks per dollar. “But even for the purpose of winning such a colossal sum,” he informed the Scientific American reader, “she would not sit in other than her own clothes and would not submit to more than a perfunctory search.”

  Just as he was ready to leave the Berlin apartment, and then Europe altogether, something else, rather terrifying, occurred when Frau Vollhard abruptly shrieked then revealed on the back of her hand spontaneous stigmata—deep bleeding punctures, as if she had just been bitten by a demonic creature. But the Scientific American committee would never examine such phenomena; the special conditions the medium insisted on—that her baggy clothing be allowed, her person remain uninspected—had marked her, like all other candidates presented to Bird, as unsuitable for further consideration.

  * * *

  *1 The two Spiritualist communities in the USA.

  *2 The spirit misidentified one of Bird’s friends on the Brooklyn Bridge as a woman and was off by one day as far as the precise date of the shadowed excursion.

  The New Sherlock Holmes

  During the 1920s, Sigmund Freud advanced the idea that the death drive, what he called Todestrieb, is intrinsic to our nature. As if to prove it, Houdini leaped, while others peered, into the abyss. While not one to dabble in the new psychology, Sir Arthur wondered whether the escape artist had an unconscious urge to join his mother in the next life. After their Atlantic City séance a trusted medium warned the Doyles that their friend’s life was in danger. And how awful it is when a superhero lies broken on the pavement.

  In New York a daredevil known as the Human Fly lost his grip while scaling the façade of a skyscraper. With the words SAFETY LAST—the title of the Harold Lloyd picture he was promoting—painted on the back of his iridescent white garment, the superhero seemed to hang lighter than air for a moment, then plummeted ten stories to the asphalt. The Human Fly died in front of 20,000 aghast spectators at Greeley Square—among them his twenty-year-old bob-haired wife, who would receive for her loss the $100 he was supposed to have been paid for the caper. “For goodness sake take care of those dangerous stunts of yours,” Sir Arthur wrote Houdini. “You have done enough of them. I speak because I have just read of the death of the Human Fly. Is it worth it?”

  Indeed, it was worth it! All of Houdini’s wealth and notoriety came from performing dangerous feats; it would be far worse to walk the streets unrecognized than to fall ten stories. Yet he appreciated Sir Arthur’s paternal concern for his welfare, especially since the relationship between the two was practically ruptured.

  ♦

  He is “just as nice and sweet as any mortal I have ever been near,” Houdini said of Sir Arthur shortly after their first encounter at Windlesham. Then came the marvelous times in New York and the culminating séance in Atlantic City. Soon, though, there were dark clouds in paradise: a rift had begun over exactly what had happened that afternoon in the Doyles’ hotel room.

  After returning to England, the novelist insisted that Houdini was transformed by the reunion with his mother, and that he had finally recognized his own power as a spirit medium: “Dear Houdini—Is there any truth in the story of Doyle that you got an evidential message from your mother through Lady Doyle?” wrote Eric Dingwall. “Also that you have become an automatic writer?”

  The answer from Houdini was no, and he essentially said so publicly. On the day before the Halloween of 1922, he told the New York Sun that Spiritualism was nothing more than spook tricks, and mediums either crooked or hysterical. What prompted his statement was a challenge issued by psychics to their greatest foes: the magic order. It appeared that mediums foresaw the announcement of the Scientific American contest—for the General Assembly of Spiritualists made the reverse offer and put up $5,000 to any stage wizard who could produce eight psychic manifestations by deception.

  Houdini accepted the challenge; it was becoming apparent that he considered the whole cult of spiritism to be his opponents and that he had never played it straight with the Doyles. His competitive juices flowing, he made headlines that infuriated Sir Arthur: DISAPPOINTED INVESTIGATOR SAYS SPIRITUALISM IS BASED ON TRICKERY AND THAT ALL MEDIUMS CHEAT AT TIMES—BELIEVERS SELF-DELUDED. Houdini was now slandering his religion, Sir Arthur felt, and by imputation his wife.

  The press wanted a rejoinder from Doyle. “They sent me the New York Sun, with your article,” he wrote Houdini, “and no doubt wanted me to answer it, but I have no fancy for sparring with a friend in public.” Sir Arthur thought it undignified to reveal what had happened in Atlantic City, but he could not shake the vision of an awestruck Houdini receiving Jean’s gift to him. He recalled his friend blissfully leaving the hotel room, clutching in his hand, after a decade of blank séances and disappointing results, the scrolls of automatic writing. “When you say that you have had no evidence of survival, you say what I cannot reconcile with my own eyes,” Sir Arthur wrote him. “I know by many examples the purity of my wife’s mediumship, and I saw what you got and what the effect was upon you at the time.”

  The spirits that had brought them together were precipitating their clash, and Houdini implied that his friend was not handling their disagreement sportingly. “You write that you are very sore,” he answered Doyle. “I trust it is not with me, because you, having been truthful and manly all your life, naturally must admire the same traits in other human beings.”

  He then expressed the doubts—“The letter was written entirely in English, and my sainted mother could not read, write, or speak the English language”—that led him to reject Lady Doyle’s communication. Houdini expected a genuine message from his mother to be in her native tongue—which Sir Arthur, who knew few Jews, assumed was Hebrew. Doyle explained to him that there was no language in the next life: psychics like his wife received transmissions in “a rush of thought.” Trance mediums “might get the Hebrew through,” he told him. “I don’t think a normal automatic writer ever would.”

  Truly, their religious views were incompatible. “By the way,” Doyle continued, “Mr. Bird told me that, in the very complete test given you by your mother, you found it incredible that she, a Jewish lady, should put a Cross at the top. The Cross is put by my wife above the first page of all she writes, as we guard against lower influences, and find it protective.” Sadly, the escape artist was proving himself reluctant to make his greatest leap of all, thought Doyle.

  After being asked to participate in Munn’s spirit hunt, Houdini backed down from the challenge to produce by trickery the Eight Feats of Mediumistic Power. As one of the five chosen judges for the contest, he could not do open battle with the Spiritualists and claim to be impartial. Nevertheless, Sir Arthur complained that with Houdini’s inclusion the Scientific American committee “becomes biased at once. What I wanted was five good, clear-headed men who would stick to it without any prejudice at all.” But if Doyle had lost Houdini, he seemed to bond with Bird—the man upon whom everything depended.

  They arrived from England together on April 4: the crusading Spiritualist and the Scientific American agent. The newsmen called Doyle’s latest mission to America—his tour of ’23—“The Second Coming of Sir Arthur.” However, judging from the reception that Malcolm Bird received, they were as interested in this “new psychic sleuth” and his international spirit hunt. “At a time when half of Europe seems to be dabbling in spiritualism and when there are thousands of converts to the idea in the United States,” Bird’s reports struck a chord.

  He had seen a thing or two in the dark room. “Tables did jump off the floor, lights did appear, voices did issue from trumpets and mediums, vases did move through the air, all apparently because of some mysterious force the source of wh
ich has not been discovered. Mr. Bird said he saw everything which Sir Arthur said he would see, except ectoplasm, the strange substance which issues from the body of a medium.”

  Even so, Bird was surprised by the attention he received at New York Harbor. Just a few years earlier he had been a capable but obscure professor at Columbia University. Presently the reporters, of their own accord, had promoted him from secretary to “Chairman” of the Scientific American contest; they failed to realize that, rather than an expert and judge, he was only the coordinator of the psychic challenge. But having returned on the Olympic with Doyle, he was perceived as an important new player in the Quest Eternal. “I suggested to Mr. Bird that he come to me and place himself in my hands,” Sir Arthur told the press. Having created one ingenious detective, he was seemingly molding another.

  Bedfellows are rarely stranger than those made in the séance. Part of Bird’s appeal to Sir Arthur had to do with something the European mediums had sensed: his presence was a boon to the harmonics of the gathering. One of Mrs. Leonard’s spirits had prophesied that Bird was “eventually to do much work in the spiritist movement”; other spooks averred that he himself was a medium.

  Malcolm Bird was making a name for himself and acquiring so much supernatural experience “that if he should criticize our movement, he is a critic whom we will be obliged to listen to with respect,” said Sir Arthur. Conversely, Doyle warned that Houdini would “keep away every decent medium—for they are human beings, not machines, and resent insult…they do not go into an atmosphere which is antagonistic.”

  To reassure the psychics, Sir Arthur intended to sit in on the séances Bird was organizing for May. He also told reporters that he would assist in the Scientific American search for that still-elusive prize-worthy medium.

  Accordingly, Sir Arthur and Bird sat in a dark room in a rustic home near Lake Erie. The sleeping Ada Bessinet was slumped in the chair next to them, her breathing heavy and portentous. The room, however, was alive with her Odic energy. Spirit lights of yellow with a reddish tint darted over and around the heads of sitters. Then came a steam of grayish and transparent faces—thirty? forty?—that Sir Arthur strained to recognize before they faded. “I think that is Oscar [his dead nephew],” he exclaimed; another face with closed eyes he identified as his mother. Bird himself saw no familiar form—but then, he had lost no one close to him. This made him, he felt, a model observer: “I am unemotional in the presence of these phenomena,” he wrote, “to what I conceive to be an extraordinarily cold-blooded degree.”

  But Secretary Bird did have an impulse for hyperbole. Convinced of the sincerity of a grandmotherly slate-writing medium Doyle had recommended in Indiana, Bird reported, “If she is a fraud, then there is absolutely no sense in believing anything creditable about any member of the human race…my whole sense of fitness rebels at the idea of this lady being a swindler.” The committee judges were increasingly put off by such statements. Sometime earlier Walter Prince had sat with that same Indiana spook and found her work suspect. By commending psychics before any were tested, Bird sparked the fear in Prince that the Scientific American endeavor was becoming more journalism than science. The official experts in the contest—Prince, Carrington, Comstock, McDougall, and Houdini—worried that Bird’s findings might be confused with their own. The editor was a greenhorn, muttered Houdini, an easy mark for spook fraud.

  With each of Bird’s reports, the Scientific American reminded its readers that his informal sittings were not to be confused with the committee’s scientific examination of mediums. The New York press did not always grasp the distinction, though, between his preliminary survey and the rigorous tests to follow. Bird had sat in England for a spirit photograph with William Hope, who Prince and Houdini suspected was a faker. To their chagrin, Bird commented favorably on Hope’s spectral pictures.

  “It seems most extraordinary and it casts doubt upon all the forthcoming proceedings that Mr. Bird should announce himself as already convinced of the genuineness of spirit photography,” editorialized the Tribune. They called for the truly scientific inquiry the contest had promised. Walter Prince, who did credit some of Bird’s observations, issued his own shrewd reproof: “Mr. Bird, if he wishes to achieve the authority in psychical research which I invoke for him, must hereafter avoid falling in love with the medium.”

  The Crawford Experiment

  The Crandons gave a party with an unusual purpose that May. The dinner guests took their cue from Roy, who behaved more as a sober physician that night than convivial host. The butler, Noguchi, served but one glass of wine to each of the Crandons’ friends, yet there was a feeling of anticipation, of electricity, in the air. For it was a pretty ghoulish activity that the doctor had planned. The weather, Mrs. Crandon commented, could not have been more cooperative. It was raining lightly outside.

  Mina recognized that this evening would see the culmination of months of preparation by Roy. Before Sir Oliver Lodge had entered his life, her husband was as staunch an atheist, she felt, as her father had been a man of faith. He had once relieved her of her own religious baggage and pointed out to her the folly in worshipping a God conceived by primitive minds. Lately he’d begun saying there was more superstition in the Bible than in séance research. And he no longer dismissed what the medium had told her—that she possessed second sight. The doctor had visited that same Spiritualist minister, apparently giving no intimation of who he was, or that his wife had been by for a sitting. Again a spirit claiming to be Mrs. Crandon’s dead brother had come through. Here, though, was the problem with mental phenomena—it was not suited to empirical proof. Chance, intuition, or deceit could explain the hits. Physical displays of mediumship were easier to test; they were either demonstrably real, Dr. Crandon reasoned, or brazenly false.

  Of special interest to him were the séance experiments conducted in Ireland by Dr. William Jackson Crawford—a professor of mechanical engineering with a consuming interest in psychic effects. Dr. Crawford had sat with Kathleen Goligher, a nonprofessional clairvoyant, for a series of 170 séances in the attic of her family’s Belfast house. Ectoplasmic rods that shot forth, he believed, from her genitals suspended a table high off the floor. He observed it rocking in the air as though borne on a choppy sea. He saw it suddenly turn sideways and revolve until upside down. All by the force of spirit operators who had chosen as their instrument this fey Irish girl. There was something called contact phenomena, which the Goligher circle had tried. They placed their hands on a table and collectively channeled a spirit that caused it to vibrate, move, and communicate by means of knocking or rapping. In effect, Dr. Crawford believed, they had brought the table to life.

  With his technical tools—spring scales, pressure sensors, electroscopes—and discussion of reductions and force magnitudes, Crawford was the sort of skilled investigator who interested Roy. As was his penchant, he attempted to contact the scientist directly to elicit further information on his work. Alas, such an exchange was no longer possible. Dr. Crawford had drowned himself in a lake near Belfast. In a letter to his family, he did not blame the spirits for his suicide. “I have been struck down mentally…It is not the psychic work, I enjoyed it too well.”

  ♦

  Dr. Crandon’s objective that May evening was to reproduce the Belfast experiment. “Contact phenomena are quite common,” Crawford had said. “Nearly every family contains one member at least who is capable of producing them.” Dr. Crawford had left behind a guidebook—to tilting and turning tables using psychic force—that Roy adhered to while planning his own venture into the unknown. He constructed a seventeen-pound table of rough wood according to the Crawford design. It was important that no nails were used, as the wrought iron was said to somehow interfere with the psychic magnetism. He had also purchased a red lantern to illuminate his library, as ectoplasm was most effectively formed in red light.

  Dr. Crandon then invited a few close friends for dinner and a séance. By undertaking the experiment with his tru
sted circle, he felt that he eliminated the possibility of psychic fraud. Trooping up to the fourth-floor Book Room—one of two libraries in his spacious home—were guests with varying degrees of skepticism. Among them were Mina’s friend Kitty and her husband, Dr. Edison Brown—two of the Crandon milieu of accomplished physicians and their wives. Curiously, the Browns were the two sitters that evening most disposed to accept the possibility of spirit communication. Less inclined to believe, but as game to try, was an old friend, Frederick Adler, who ran the building on Commonwealth Avenue where Dr. Crandon kept his medical office. Also present was Alexander W. Cross, whose diffidence seemed out of place among this usually lively crowd.

  Cross was a troubled and easily rattled man. An Englishman from Canterbury, he carried with him a past that only the Crandons knew about. Aleck, as they called him, had worked for British customs in Shanghai for so long that he had virtually ceased to identify himself as a Westerner. It was during the Great War that his troubles began. While steaming back to England his liner had been intercepted by a German raider that held him captive for six months. When the vessel was sunk, Aleck escaped to the Danish coast. Somehow he made it to England and was given command of 10,000 Chinese coolies bound for labor at the French front. There he suffered trauma that made him unfit for civilian life. He was obese and in ill health when he made his way to Boston after the War. Dr. Crandon, his acquaintance from a previous visit there, did all he could to help. The doctor attempted to find Aleck work, and when this proved unfeasible he hired the poor fellow himself. Cross had a room in Cambridge but as often spent nights at Lime Street on the Book Room couch. Ostensibly he was Dr. Crandon’s librarian, but Mina said that his true function was to keep their yellow cat out of mischief. Next to her, Aleck was the youngest of this séance circle. Tragically, he was also the closest to the grave.