The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Aside from the reporter and medium, there was an imposing array of witnesses present for the tests. Chanting with the magicians and ghost hunters was Granville Lehmann of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, who wondered, like many in the communications bellwether, whether the human brain could really receive messages from the astral plane. Also seated in the circle were Mr. Munn and his Scientific American staff, including Malcolm Bird and Austin Lescarboura—“the electrical detective” of the contest. At least two judges were there for each of the tests—either Hereward Carrington or his alternate, the local conjurer Frederic Keating; and Walter Prince, who attended two of the séances. But could Prince’s failing ears make out what others heard? Tap, tap, tap, the staccato on the spirit trumpet, was often the first of Valiantine’s otherworldly sounds. And when the phenomena started, the draining heat in the cloistered room only got worse. All the men wore short sleeves, including Houdini, who showed up baring his sculpted forearms for the final test séance, as if his muscles had any use in this contest with a spook.

  “If all we hear about this man is true, he is one of the best mediums in the country,” Bird told the press. Even so, the Scientific American wanted a convincing demonstration before summoning the entire commission—the Boston-based judges, Comstock and McDougall, were therefore not in the circle when the contest began on May 21. Also absent, due to his lecture tour, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Which is not to say that Valiantine had no ally in the séance room; in attendance was Richard Worrell—the psychic’s friend and protector from Wilkes-Barre. The Spiritualist was present to balance the energy of the doubters, and it was he who directed the proceedings, leading the Lord’s Prayer and belting, above the others, the various songs the medium needed to bolster his force.

  John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave

  John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave

  John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave

  His soul goes marching on

  Worrell was the first to sense the presence of a ghost. He said he felt the cold breeze associated with its arrival and smelled the fresh earth of the cemetery. After the singing faded, the Times reporter noted that the sudden cackling of the dead “made the hair rise on one’s head.” When they came, the spirit voices appeared to originate from above the sitters or beneath the séance table—it was no display of ventriloquism, Bird later said, since that ruse, based on misdirection of sight, not sound, is ineffective in the dark. Lehmann felt that if the medium’s own vocal cords were the source of the sounds, then he made voices rebound from the floor and ceiling just as Marconi bounced sound waves off the sky.

  On display was Valiantine’s full aural repertoire: the high falsetto of the phantom Bert; the booming commands of the Indian chiefs Kokum and Hawk Chief; the trill of an opera singer named Christo di Angelo; and the whispers of Bobbie—Worrell’s dead son. Returning from the higher plane where he was growing up, the invisible boy frightened a few at these tests. “Go about and touch them, Bobbie,” directed his father. “Touch them all on the head with the trumpet, or touch them with your hands.” The reporter observed that “it was startling after an hour of darkness to have something tap one’s knee or hand.” Not all the ghosts had so light a stroke as little Bobbie, though, and when Hawk Chief propelled the trumpet toward Bernard Walker, editor in chief of Scientific American, it nearly broke his glasses and his nose.

  Two evenings later, Mr. Munn brought to the séance, rather than his wife, a dancer with whom he was smitten. When the girl felt a tap, she “gave forth a shriek,” Bird recalled, “that might have been heard blocks away.” Not only were the displays alarming the fainthearted, there were also a couple of tussles between sitters and the invisible beings. After sticking his foot out, Bird was reproached for “trying to trip a spirit”; and when Houdini was batted in the head the next night by one of the conical horns, he seized the assaulting object—later to be found broken in three pieces on the floor.

  Valiantine was no trance medium; one could converse with him while he channeled the dead. A short and rotund man, he had a habit of saying “pretty good” whenever something pleased him—and that seemed to be most of the time. His effects included orange wisps of light that glowed like fire but oddly did not brighten the room by so much as the gleam of a cigarette. “Will they burn?!” cried Walker, jerking back his leg as one orb dove toward him but did not strike. There was also a guitar placed far out of the psychic’s reach that twanged and traveled about the room. At that point, he felt satisfied with his performance. But then things went pretty bad for the jolly medium.

  ♦

  Even before the psychic contest started, Walter Prince was dubious of Valiantine’s direct line to Summerland. While Prince’s own officer, Gardner Murphy, had recommended Valiantine, the ASPR had another report that cast doubt on the wonder-creator from Wilkes-Barre. “It all sounded suspiciously like trickery,” noted Prince, “with which I had become familiarly acquainted.” Malcolm Bird was at first more hopeful, but when Valiantine insisted on a dark séance he also smelled fakery. The candidate was a direct-voice medium—not a producer of apparitions—so why the need for a veiled demonstration? Valiantine also requested that the sitters not cross their legs during the séance, another condition that sent up red flags—for Bird knew that fraud mediums wanted to negotiate no roaming feet while they snuck under the table and tiptoed around in the dark.

  Rather than express their reservations, the experts appeared to be in awe of the jolly medium. When the contestant spoke of the marvels he had produced for DeWyckoff and others, their reactions were: “Is that so?” “How remarkable!” “Can you just imagine a thing like that?” By golly, was George comfortable with these boys! Where was the scrutiny that the Scientific American had advertised? Their idea of control, the judges told him, was to saturate the carpet with talcum power so that any humans walking about during the séance would leave a pulverulent footmark. Though the medium assented, he warned that spirits leave trails too. He was concerned that “we would have an awful time getting the rug clean again,” recounted Bird, “and perhaps we would better realize this and put the talcum in pans, here and there across the floor. We were deeply touched by this solicitude.”

  In truth, the Scientific American commission would have found it as absurd to layer the room with powder as they would to sprinkle it with faerie dust from the Cottingley Beck.* Their token attempts at controlling the medium were merely to distract him; in dispensing with traditional restraint and visible control they wound up giving him all the rope he needed to hang himself. Valiantine evidently believed that he was free to cheat, as he hadn’t read about—could he read at all?—the Scientific American’s methods for these tests.

  Among the array of traps the investigators put out were ten hidden contacts that Lescarboura attached to Valiantine’s chair. As long as the test-medium remained seated, a red bulb glowed in an adjacent room, where an office girl observed it. When on fifteen occasions it faded, she marked with her stopwatch the time and duration of the psychic’s absence from his chair. Next to her was a Dictograph operator who kept a record, via Bird’s loud commentary, of when manifestations occurred. The time intervals of the physical effects precisely matched the moments when the oracle left his throne. Thus the judges realized that Valiantine was faking the phenomena ascribed to Hawk Chief and little Bobbie. Rudimentary though also damning were the small luminous wall buttons that were visible only to Lescarboura and Bird. When an opaque body, presumably the stealthy medium, passed between them and the disks on the wall, the two editors observed an eclipse effect—and after each eclipse came one of Valiantine’s miracles.

  At the third séance, on May 24, Malcolm Bird engineered the coup de grâce. The invisibles were drawn to Bird—the fair-minded appraiser of mediums on both sides of the pond—tapping the secretary ten times with the spirit trumpet for each metallic touch received by others. “Hello, Malcolm,” a spectral voice had whispered plai
nly. “Yes, this is Malcolm. Who are you?” he answered.

  What followed were inarticulate sounds: if Valiantine’s ghosts spoke many tongues, they could now be distilled into an unintelligible “wa-wa”—at least, that was how Bird described what he heard. When asked, however, if the spirit present was that of the deceased Harry Meyer, the voice clearly acknowledged that Bird was correct. Then Bird tried to elicit the details of how Harry had died. He envisioned his careless friend driving an automobile into a telephone pole. Or had he fallen off a ferryboat? “Come, Harry, can’t you give me something about the manner in which you passed? Perhaps you can indicate whether you died a violent death? Was it an accident?”

  It was most definitely an accident, affirmed the spirit that was again coherent when fed a few details of Harry’s demise. Bird’s inquiry was suddenly interrupted, though, by a snicker from Munn that provoked a louder outburst from Walker and Lescarboura. These men realized that Bird had never known any individual named Harry Meyer, and they could no longer suppress amusement at their colleague’s attempts to draw audible words from a mumbling wraith, which then fell into the trap of proving its own nonexistence—except in Bird’s imagination.

  The candidate may have sensed then, with his circle in stitches, that the experts had been playing him like the phantom tune on a fiddle. As the exhibition turned to comedy, Worrell reprimanded the sitters. “Friends,” he said, “I must really ask that you treat this seriously. After all, this is a religion to many persons, whether you believe in it or not, and it deserves respect. This is the most sacred of all things…Please do not laugh.”

  “Yes, that is so,” piped Valiantine in his low brogue. “You must not laugh.” But while the committee members—Carrington, Houdini, and Prince—had comported themselves respectfully and not been the ones to react like underclassmen at a Ouija party, the proper atmosphere for spirit converse was lost. Worrell complained that he had not sneered like these men when Valiantine brought his dead mother through. He admonished them for mocking the spirits. Bird, meanwhile, wondered if Worrell would ever finish his sermon—while in the control chamber the girl stared expectantly at the red bulb.

  * * *

  * A rustic area in England where Sir Arthur believed that little girls had photographed real faeries.

  A Waste of Science

  Valiantine’s day was over. It was not long before the Scientific American’s first contestant, whose name reporters usually misspelled to match the holiday, realized that none of the experts present at the Woolworth, least of all Houdini, were enamored of his gifts. For Houdini the evening contained more brazen jugglery than test-worthy mediumship. Whatever unusual feats this psychic might produce in a less stringent environment, his séances for the Scientific American committee confirmed that he was not their shining candidate.

  Although more exhibitions were scheduled, Valiantine abruptly departed on the evening of May 24—never to return. Having solved the case, the Scientific American wanted the story of their first inquiry to be an exclusive. Until the magazine published its finding, the sitters pledged not to say what had transpired: when the séance is over, by Orson Munn’s edict, the trumpets are silent; even the Times agreed not to print anything before the Scientific American announced its verdict. Understandably, then, Bird was disturbed when a member of the committee preempted his own report on the unveiling of Valiantine, and shamelessly stole the magazine’s thunder.

  By the end of Valiantine’s performance, the Great Houdini looked, uncharacteristically, to be nothing more than a supporting player. Except for that wicked clout from the trumpet, the ghosts, for the most part, stayed clear of the judge most hostile to spiritism. But few things rankled Houdini more than to be ignored, and he denied any vow to keep quiet. Two days after Valiantine’s final séance, the magician called the newspapers and revealed the Woolworth mystery—even explaining the covert electrical devices that Lescarboura had used to trap the psychic, which of course reduced their future effectiveness.

  Houdini’s reason for the exposé, he said unconvincingly, was that his friends in the magic order had taunted him for falling under the spell of Valiantine. Hence, he spoke first and pulled no punches with the jolly medium. “I never saw such awkward work in my life,” he asserted. “There wasn’t a chance at any time that this magician fooled us.” By his account, Houdini was instrumental in unmasking a crook. “I think those people ought to be put in jail for preying on the most sacred of human emotions.”

  While Houdini sought to stamp his name on the proceedings, Malcolm Bird was adamant that they were no place for glory-seekers. When called for his response to the story, Bird said that Houdini had violated the trust of the committee with his loose-lipped condemnations. “And please say,” he declared, “that Mr. Houdini is through right now as a member of that Committee.” The star expert had not been fired from anything since the days of his beer-hall act—yet this 125-pound former mathematics professor had apparently booted him from the jury. HOUDINI IS OUSTED AS A SPOOK HUNTER, trumpeted the newspapers.

  The magician’s allegations especially outraged Richard Worrell, who claimed that Valiantine had set off the sensitive contacts on his chair by shifting his weight during the charged demonstrations. Did Houdini expect the subject to stay unnaturally still for three hours in a corpselike state of rigor mortis? When a medium is possessed by spirits, movement is said to be involuntary; and Valiantine’s backers still considered his effects prize-worthy. Worrell wanted the medium X-rayed during the next séance (for what purpose, he did not specify); they would then bathe him in red light inside his cabinet, he proposed, so that the committee could photograph spirit forms in all their radiance.

  Contrary to the press report, the medium had not been chased out of town. With Valiantine at his side, DeWyckoff showed up at the offices of the Times—and there explained that all mediums lose material form while producing ectoplasm. It was this loss of weight, he insisted, rather than the subject sneaking away from his seat, that had been registered by the fancy apparatus. But despite such objections, the Scientific American was through with DeWyckoff’s psychic. Bird concluded, in his own report on the candidate, that Valiantine “failed to give any evidence whatever that his mediumship is genuine.” Speaking for the judges, he announced “that his mediumship stands rejected, and that his claim to the prize and to the Committee’s further attention stands vacated.” Sometime later, though, Bird would offer a more nuanced take on Valiantine: “My own personal opinion is that he quite probably has genuine subjective powers, and attempts the fraudulent production of physical manifestations to go with his ‘spirit messages.’ ”

  As expected, the newspapers had the final word on the controversy. The Times called the committee’s exposure of Valiantine “the neatest bit of ultra-scientific, detective work ever brought to bear upon phenomena supposed to have their origin in the intangible, spiritual world.” The Tribune concurred that “it was not a very auspicious beginning for the spirits.” But the paper also stated that it was “A Waste of Science” to test a medium whose “perambulating trumpets and whacks from Indian spirits…were old stuff in the General Grant Era.”

  The editorial particularly chided Bird, the “impresario of the occasion,” for dismissing the most competent judge on the committee. And for the first time a respected daily questioned the motives and expertise of an inquiry that, for all its scientific pretense, seemed “largely concerned in securing effective publicity.” The Tribune observed that—“amid this vast amount of fraud and trickery of the mediumistic world there may well be a remnant of genuine phenomena. Upon that possibility hang theories of great potential significance to mankind. It is a tragedy that every effort to test the existence of spirits should meet such difficulties in living up to a true scientific standard.”

  The psychic tests, however strict in procedure, could never rise above the quality of the candidates, Bird decided. And so the search went on to find a better class of medium. Toward that end, William Mc
Dougall had not been idle in Boston. A short time after George Valiantine was discredited, the Harvard psychologist began to test a young Beacon Hill lady who had only recently discovered she was psychic.

  The ABC Club

  In late May, just as the Scientific American judges were dispensing with their first candidate, Mina Crandon began to exhibit her own, previously latent, psychic power. At the first séance hosted at 10 Lime Street, she had appeared to be more surprised than anyone by the revelation that she alone caused the table effects. Her husband, who had been as incredulous, wanted to see it happen again. So one week later, on June 3, the circle formed for further experiments in his den. By now the party had taken to calling itself the ABC Club, as all at the prior sitting—Drs. Crandon, Caldwell, Brown, and their wives; the devoted Frederick Adler; and Aleck Cross, the troubled Englishman—had surnames that fit. Dr. Mark and Josephine Richardson were the only new additions to the circle. While their name did not conform to the group appellation, the Richardsons had already played an important role in convincing Roy of the scientific merit to this work; and they took on the important responsibility of recording the events.

  The Richardsons were two of Dr. Crandon’s closest friends. Mark and Roy had met fifteen years earlier, when both were examiners for the same medical insurance company. Around that time a heartbreaking tragedy occurred, when the Richardsons’ two young boys died of polio three weeks after contracting the disease. Devastated, the couple saw Boston mediums who attempted to contact their sons. A skeptic at the time, Dr. Crandon had always felt the Richardsons were blinded by grief; one could only walk along the river with those dead boys for so long before it was time to let them cross. But the Richardsons did not let go. For years they were the only Spiritualists among Roy’s friends, and he saw in Mark the same paradox he would one day encounter in Sir Oliver Lodge. A notable scientist as well as a physician, Richardson was a pioneer in the development of a vaccine for typhoid fever; he described séance phenomena in the same clinical tone with which Roy once heard him lecture on the cultivation of the typhoid bacillus from rose spots. At present, of course, Roy thought he had been too closed-minded when Mark spoke of the continued existence of his sons.