The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

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  The six friends linked hands and rested them lightly on the Crawford table, just as the late scientist had advised. Crawford had also suggested that the ritual should begin with a prayer. Dr. Crandon left that part out. Mrs. Crandon voiced the flippant hope, however, that Crawford or some other spirit might find their way to the red lantern on Roy’s desk. Clearly she regarded this activity as spooky fun. Her previous séance experience had not swayed her. Even Kitty, who had accompanied her to that post-ride fling with a ghost, doubted that anything extraordinary had happened that afternoon.

  “By this time I was again pretty well unconvinced,” Mrs. Crandon remembered. “But my friends, who had unconvinced me, now became very serious. Perhaps the red light sobered them. But to tell the truth they were all so solemn about it that I couldn’t help laughing. They reproved me severely, and my husband informed me gravely that ‘this is a serious matter.’ ”

  An indefinite period of silence followed, heightened by the ticking of Roy’s Quare clock. It was mysterious enough, linking hands in the dark with friends one rarely touched. The red glow gave Aleck’s sanctuary the aura of an opium den, though nothing illicit was planned. Aleck shifted his bulk and drew a hard stare from Roy. These probes into the netherworld were not for the impatient. No ghosts were heard. None were really expected by the group hunched over the table. Something inexplicable was happening, though. Breathing and linking as one, the intention of the sitters had become an imperceptible force as much as a thought, and as the séance progressed—a quiver. The table gradually became animate. Dr. Crandon felt it was like putting his hand on the back of a dog. Suddenly the table slid slightly, then rose on two legs and crashed to the floor! In order to determine if one of their circle was a medium, each of the sitters took turns leaving the room. With Mrs. Crandon’s departure the vibrations died. Her friends applauded when she reentered the study. The medium had been right about her. It was Mina, of all people, who had the supernormal gift; she who was the powerful instrument of some discarnate mind.

  The Eve of the Hunt

  With the Scientific American contest just a few weeks away, the New York press was blowing the spirit trumpet in anticipation. It was to be “the most thorough, scientific, and far-reaching spook hunt ever undertaken,” announced the Herald. The Times called it “the Acid Test of Spiritualism.” The Tribune christened the tests “The Great Spirit Hunt” and observed that “every open-minded person has been looking forward with interest to the investigations,” for here at last was the “promise of truly expert and unbiased testing of the claims put forward in behalf of spirit photographs, ectoplasm and the rest of the current crop of spiritualistic doings.”

  There was still, however, no mention of a candidate. Even with Sir Arthur’s support, “the well-known mediums—mediums who are reputed to possess the kind of powers which we desire to study—have not as yet come forward to aid us in our quest,” the Scientific American reported in May. Despite receiving hundreds of applicants, Malcolm Bird worried that psychics were intimidated by the event at 233 Broadway, since shrouded back parlors were their accustomed stages.

  While touring Europe Bird had encountered in Berlin a scientist with “the finest psychic laboratory in the world—and he can induce no medium to work in it with him.” Envisioning the sensitive seated in her spirit cabinet while strapped to fifty-seven varieties of technical apparatus, Bird could well understand her absence. By now he wondered if the Scientific American had a similar predicament.

  The committee’s methods were as elaborate as any ever used to verify supernormal power. Aside from the vigilant jury, the candidate would encounter an array of modern monitors, gauntlets, and detectors. To ensure she was not concealing any earthly means for producing ectoplasm, the medium was to be thoroughly searched and then required to wear—rather than the white alb of her Delphic ancestor—a black bathing suit or potato sack (exactly which garment hadn’t been decided yet) before entering her cabinet. Jury members would then tie her with rope to prevent her from using her limbs to aid the disembodied powers, and if the bonds were insufficient, there was a mosquito-net cloth to further restrain her. Light was anathema to the formation of ectoplasm—the Scientific American had conceded that—but the psychic’s arms and legs would be marked with luminous radium spots so that the judges could track any suspicious maneuvers in the darkness.

  These tests would not be compromised, as Bird felt some European studies were, by the faulty senses of bereaved sitters and aging researchers. If the Scientific American were to affirm the presence of disincarnate beings, it would be on a body of incontrovertible evidence. Walter Prince thought it unwise for Bird to reveal all their methods—what Austin Lescarboura and other technicians had devised would only cool the feet of the sought-after mediums. But if she were a true clairvoyant, why be afraid of benign scientific instruments? The induction coils, galvanometers, and electroscopes were for testing her electric field when the forces were active and also to determine if these so-called spirits were actually composed of physical matter. Munn & Co. revered new technology, and Bird seemed to take pride in describing the gadgetry their investigators employed.

  All furnishings, he reported, had electric contacts to monitor any floating vase or levitating table. A phonograph with a directional microphone would be automatically activated should the phantoms cause a rap or whisper. And if any apparition formed, a camera with a powerful electric flash—in lieu of noxious powder—would not fail to capture it. Nothing was left out as the Scientific American converted its law library into a psychic laboratory. A chronograph was installed to register the readings of the instruments that were in turn monitoring the medium. Ready for use were kymographs, a sphygmomanometer, and other tools for measuring the respiration, temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure of the psychic—for the spirits were said to drain the vital forces from her abandoned body.

  Such were the instruments when scientists had free rein in the séance. And with the apparent success of psychic experiments in Europe, it seemed just a matter of time before an American clairvoyant produced effects that registered on every dial while spectral orbs were photographed and a table floated over the upturned heads of five bewildered experts.

  The Wizards of Sound

  To placate the psychics, Harry Houdini said that he would embrace Spiritualism if any medium should prove its claims. Having not yet given up on converting him, Sir Arthur suggested they visit the birthplace of his religion, the tiny town of Hydesville, New York—the sight of the phenomena that launched the first American séance craze: the famous spirit raps of 1848. The two men never made the pilgrimage, though Houdini was familiar with what had happened in Hydesville and said it was easily explained.

  In the beginning was the rap. Rap—rap—rap! The late-night knockings woke the Foxes, ordinary farmers who had never before sensed ghosts in their house. The concerned mother, candle in hand, found her young daughters—Maggie and Kate Fox—in bed, conversing with the phantom that had caused the eerie sounds. Frightened and perplexed, she summoned other Hydesville residents, who were just as astounded by knocks that seemed prompted by the girls’ questions to their invisible friend. An alphabet code was deciphered by a neighbor and from there on communications are said to have been established between the living and the dead.

  With ghost seekers trespassing on the Fox farm, the mother sent her daughters to a Quaker home in Rochester. The spirit followed them there. Leah Fox, who lived nearby, became a leader of the budding spiritist cult by managing her little sisters’ occult gifts. And when they visited New York City in 1850, the influential publisher Horace Greeley put the sisters up at his estate and gave them entrée to people of means; for them Maggie and Kate began to channel disembodied voices as well as knocks on furniture and walls.

  As adults the sisters traveled many years later to England, where a venerable scientist, Sir William Crookes, was eager to study the case. According to Crookes, Katie produced raps on a plan
e of glass, a tambourine, and on his hands and shoulders. The noises were heard while she was suspended in a swing, enclosed in a wire cage, and after she fell fainting on his sofa. The raps were made on the roof of Crookes’s carriage, inside a tree, and on the floor of the Lyceum Theater. “I have tested [the raps] every way that I could devise,” Sir William stated, “until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means.”

  But even then the Fox sisters were seen as relics of a superstitious craze. It was no longer the Civil War era, when séances were held in the White House and the dead haunted the nation. Unfortunately for Maggie and Kate, who seemed lost in a void, this was also well before the twentieth-century Spiritualist revival. Star-crossed in love, exploited by their older sister, abandoned by patrons, they both took to the bottle. A shunned vagrant, Maggie was eventually paid to reveal the mystery behind the Hydesville sensation. The raps were heard at the New York Academy of Music, where her confession—that she caused the effects by the cracking of her toes—appeared to be the death blow to a movement already on the wane. And that was all Houdini needed to know about the Fox sisters, who launched a religion with their pranks and were buried in paupers’ graves.

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  Sir Arthur describes the Rochester Rappers as operating a “spiritual telegraph.” Their powers were discovered just as commercial lines for Samuel Morse’s receivers were being laid in all directions; and Rochester, home to Western Union, was then the hub of electric wire communications. In 1848 there was a mysterious link between the new technology and spiritistic phenomena—as if for every tap of the telegraph there was a corresponding rap from the shadowland.

  Seventy-five years later there was renewed interest in establishing communications between two worlds. A telegraph operator in his youth, Thomas Edison was still touched daily by the pulse of Morse code. Since he was practically deaf, his young wife tapped it on his hand so that he could keep up with parlor conversation; if they attended a play she tapped the dialogue on his leg; and when they walked the Great White Way the din was barely audible to him. And yet, Edison was a wizard of sound. When Alexander Bell first presented the telephone, no one could hear through it—until Edison improvised the carbon transmitter that made voices louder. Now he hoped to construct an apparatus—a valve, he called it—that would amplify transmissions through the ether.

  The inventor said that “the time will come when science will be able to prove all the essentials of what faith has asserted.” Nevertheless, he abhorred occultism. Contrary to Lodge, he experienced no psychic breakthrough or transformation. “From my experiments with Sir Oliver Lodge and other scientists who believe that it is possible to demonstrate the existence of life beyond the grave, I cannot say that men live after death,” he emphasized. “Our experiments brought no results that convinced me of the presence of the departed.”

  For this reason, Sir Oliver advocated contacting the dead through the spirit medium, the mental radio, rather than by any mechanical invention. Although no Morse code operator, Lodge heard his own odd tempo. As a youngster he had learned a five-finger piano exercise that became an obsessive tic in later years. While with company or alone he tapped lightly on the table—a habit he would take to his grave and hopefully beyond it. He sealed the melodic code in an envelope and deposited it with the SPR, with the idea that after his death a spirit medium would rap it on the séance table. In this way proving, after the envelope was opened and the notes revealed, that the human mind was the most powerful receiver.

  By 1923, radio was the latest communications wonder. Marconi’s wireless receivers would carry discarnate signals to the living, Doyle predicted. There was a curious parallel, he said, between spirit manifestations and the wireless: for were not both Hertzian waves and psychic transmissions carried through the all-pervading ether?

  Unlike religions inspired by a prophet’s holy vision, Spiritualism owes its genesis—and revival—to spectral sounds. A signal was received in the last year of the World War by George Valiantine—a down-and-out forty-three-year-old razor manufacturer who was startled by three peculiar raps at the door of his New York hotel room. No one was there when he answered the knock. Moments later, the disturbances were heard again, this time resounding through the empty corridor. A Spiritualist friend later told Valiantine that the knocks were the sign of a disembodied presence. She held a séance and the intrusions returned. The befuddled Valiantine, a man with no mystical tendencies, had “the gift” and was meant to develop it, according to a message from a dead relative. The small-time businessman suspected that the spirits had always been trying to reach him, for he had been hearing raps intermittently throughout his life, or so he later told the committee that invited him to seek the Scientific American prize.

  The Jolly Medium

  Malcolm Bird often found that the mediums he investigated, no matter how gifted, were simpletons and rubes. In that class was George Valiantine of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who was semi-illiterate, provincial, and inexpressive, yet channeled voluble spirit voices in eleven different languages. Like a human radio, Valiantine became known for his direct-voice mediumship—that is, he transmitted messages that seemed to manifest from space rather than by means of his own voice organ. To amplify the communications, two spirit trumpets were always placed on the table and in the course of the séance both megaphones might float above the heads of the sitters while emitting a spectral pulse.

  Since the days of the Fox sisters, gifted mediums had attracted patrons to help them materially while they performed the Good Work. Valiantine’s benefactor was Joseph DeWyckoff, a magnate more mysterious than the psychic himself—and a figure, despite his Spiritualist beliefs, as worldly and shrewd as Valiantine was folksy and jocund. Though he lived in New Jersey and was born a Russian Jew, DeWyckoff did not appear to belong to any particular place. He dropped hints of an adventurous past and was rumored to have done clandestine work in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. At present a lawyer, and a director of Vanadium Steel, he was one of the world’s wealthiest believers in Summerland. He resided on an estate of over two hundred acres known as Arlena Towers—a pleasure ground with a nine-hole golf course and a private lake, where his discovery, Valiantine, liked to catch the pickerel and bass served up for breakfast. A lifetime associate member of both the SPR and ASPR, DeWyckoff, while neither bereaved nor a researcher, was on his own spirit hunt. The steel tycoon sat with many of the great mediums of the day both in Europe and the United States.

  After hearing about the Wilkes-Barre seer, DeWyckoff invited him to Arlena Towers for an exhibition of his work. Between séances Valiantine appeared to enjoy his taste of the high life and the felicity of his fascinating host. He stayed at the estate for seven weeks and like few clairvoyants who have sung for their supper, he produced a Babel of tunes. During his visit the medium amazed DeWyckoff, as well as his European servants and guests, with multilingual communications from their dead. “Xenoglossy” is a word Charles Richet invented to describe the phenomenon of spirits speaking in languages unknown to the medium who channels them, and not since the first Pentecost had a mystic manifested such a confusion of tongues.

  George Valiantine was discovered by DeWyckoff around the time that the Scientific American was searching the world for psychic talent. Before long the medium was visited in Wilkes-Barre by two men seeking a demonstration of his effects: Dr. Gardner Murphy, head of the Psychology Department at Columbia University, and his companion, a reporter for the New York World. During their test séance, spirit trumpets rose and sailed about the room, disembodied voices were heard while blue and red lights bobbed about in space, and a ghostly hand touched the reporter’s head then vanished as suddenly as it came. The two visitors were impressed, and both gave positive reports: the newsman to readers of the World; and Dr. Murphy, who was an alternate judge in the Scientific American contest, to Walter Prince.

  Soon thereafter George Valiantine b
ecame the first official candidate to extend a spirit hand toward Munn’s purse. The contestant was well liked; Valiantine, whom Houdini called “the jolly medium,” appeared to be as sweet and guileless as a child. He often looked baffled by what he produced.

  You Must Not Laugh

  The cleaning ladies who took over the fifth floor of the Gothic Woolworth Building each evening were too frightened to do their work. Strange rites were being conducted there. The women heard violent noises, a lady’s scream, and the continuous murmur of men chanting hymns. The door and windows to the sealed Scientific American library, the source of the disturbances, were cloaked with black muslin to ensure the desired pitch-darkness for the activities inside. Malcolm Bird reported that the devilish sounds and black trappings “struck panic into the souls of those stationed on our floor; they were with the utmost difficulty prevented from fleeing the place.” All this was embarrassing to serious researchers like Walter Prince. But the atmosphere was unsettling when George Valiantine was tested by the Scientific American committee of experts.

  The psychic would have to channel his spirits through the steel marrow of the Cathedral of Commerce. To the sitters, though, it could have been a musty Victorian parlor where they waited for him to perform. In the dark all rooms are the same; and sitting in such a cryptlike state “for two or three hours had a curious effect,” wrote a Times reporter. “There was a hypnotic suggestion in it, the eyes saw things that were not there, the nerves became tense and jumpy, and it was possible to understand why persons were convinced by the first touch of a ‘spirit’ hand or the sound of a ‘spirit’ voice out of the dark.”