The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Dr. Crandon asked his guests to quiet their minds. Mina, wearing a pleated light-blue frock, tried to do the same as the white lights were turned off. During a prolonged silence, the red-lit room began to feel colder and the atmosphere thicker. A series of sudden tilts and jerks of the table began. At first the spirits spoke only through table movements—one turn meaning yes and two no—when questions were put to them by the circle. But when Dr. Crandon proposed that raps to which he assigned a code might be a more effective means of communication, the invisibles agreed. The noises were neither the kind of cracking retorts that the Fox sisters had once manifested nor the tinnier Bessinet variety; these were a series of more muted taps that amplified into a percussion when the physicians applied a stethoscope to the table. And there sat Mina—shivering as the disturbances intensified.

  Evidently the spirit of a Mrs. Caldwell, mother to two in the group—Kitty Brown and her brother Frederick Caldwell—had taken possession of the table. What happened next, however unbelievable, was attested to by everyone in the circle. As if dragged by spectral force, the table suddenly lurched toward Caldwell. Whether invisibly propelled or not, the effect was terrifying. According to the séance record, the table pushed Caldwell out of the den, through the dark corridor, and into the Crandons’ bedroom, where it forced him onto the bed—after having smashed walls and rumpled all the rugs in transit. While Aleck went into hysterics, and Josephine screamed, the other sitters followed the table that was chasing Caldwell. “On request for more the table started downstairs after him,” wrote Dr. Richardson, “when we stopped it to save the wall plaster.” Dr. Crandon didn’t want to see his home wrecked by the poltergeist—which was what seemed to have been unleashed.

  To what else could stunned witnesses attribute such phenomena? Roguish spooks were known to sneak a foot under the séance table to make it rise. But even had Mrs. Crandon—presumably no Mrs. Houdini in disguise—been playing a trick, there was no way she could have engineered the movement of that heavy piece of furniture with her satin pump. Or were four respected physicians and their wives collectively hallucinating? All members of the ABC Club dismissed the idea they were seeing things that night.

  Six days later, something less sensational yet more important in the development of the Crandon mediumship occurred. Roy had proposed a new way of communicating between the spheres. Raps would no longer suffice; instead, he wanted Mrs. Crandon to go into trance and vocally produce the messages, many of which seemed to come from her dead brother, Walter. She resisted this new experiment, which her husband said was inspired by the contact between Sir Oliver Lodge and Raymond. As awed by the effects as the rest of the sitters were, she did not want to miss anything by being induced into sleep. What’s more, she was afraid of being possessed by the dead visitors.

  “I will do nothing of the sort,” she told Dr. Crandon.

  For the first time Mina’s wishes clashed with her husband’s zeal for psychical research. To settle the matter, Roy put the question to the spirit that seemed to be the dominant presence at the séances. “Little sister will do exactly as big brother says,” the doctor entreated. Minutes later, Walter indicated through table raps that he wanted to try the experiment.

  For a while all hands remained on the table, the only noise a faint series of knocks. Then, as one, all heads turned to Mina, who was making odd noises in the scarlet light. She sat, as if in an opium haze, touching the sides of her face. She sighed and began to sway. Suddenly and loudly a guttural voice unrecognizable as her own cried out: “I said I could put this through!” It was her big brother, Walter, and though other invisible souls came through that night—the dervish spirit of Mrs. Caldwell, the lulling voice of Roy’s grandmother—Walter controlled this sitting as he would most others at Lime Street. According to the record, when Mina came out of her trance, her face was moist; but not, it was thought, with tears or perspiration. She had been secreting ectoplasm—the substance of discarnate life.

  While nothing miraculous occurred during that séance of June 9, an important contact had been made. Skeptics of Spiritualism have always maintained that something is suspiciously absent when loved ones return. Disembodied personalities may lack identifiable qualities—the mannerisms, intelligence, pep, and humor of corporeal life. Often the dead are obsessed with mundane objects they may have owned while alive—a brooch, an article of clothing, a childhood penknife—and their communications, such as they are, sound so mawkish and interchangeable that, if the words of those passed on are any indication, we are all torpid zombies after death.

  In the case of the return of Walter Isaac Stinson, lost to Mrs. Crandon since a railroad accident in 1911, none of these criticisms held. Those who had known Mina’s older brother swore that the ghost retained all the vitality and charm that he had in physical life; and in the course of providing proofs of his existence, he seemed to be having a pretty good time. Scientists would find it refreshing that in the solemn séance room, fun was had whenever dead Walter arrived. Usually the spirit was affable, as had been the man, except when encountering a sitter he did not like; then he became truculent, a force to be feared. There was no angelic presence; it was not his style to communicate platitudes, or the terse precepts from dead Indian chiefs that so many spirit guides produced. Walter spoke as he did while on this Earth; he could be coarse and profane. Yet he had more liveliness and personality than many of his sitters, the Crandons felt, and when he was present one might forget they were communicating with a disembodied mind.

  For Mina, Walter had once been a guiding figure, who taught her to ride horses on the Stinson farm in Picton, Ontario, and to later negotiate Boston—the “hub of the universe” to them—after the family emigrated there when she was a teenager. Though he was five years older, Mina considered him her best friend until his horrible death at the age of twenty-eight. A railroad fireman on the New Haven Line, Walter had been riding a locomotive that jumped a switch—toppling off the tracks and into the sand. Pinned between the cab and tender, he was slowly crushed to death in the Harwich yard.

  Twelve years later Walter was a powerful presence at 10 Lime Street, which is not to say that his phenomena lacked grace: the stronger the channel, the more elevating the séance program became. On the Sunday of June 17, one week after Mina’s first attempt at trance-mediumship, the ABC Club again joined hands. Walter had promised at the previous sitting that tonight he and Roy’s uncle Elliot (an admiral whose Arlington funeral the Crandons had attended on New Year’s Day) would demonstrate something that would exhaust the medium and amaze the guests. At this séance, after Mina had reluctantly slipped into her trance, Walter asked Roy what had most affected him when he watched his favorite uncle put into the earth. The doctor answered that it was the playing of “Taps.” “Your Uncle Elliot stood beside you there as you listened,” whispered Walter. Then the voice directed the circle to “have patience” as a long wait was in store. The red light remained on and all could see Mina, her blond head bowed forward as though praying. It was with an air of triumph that she finally lifted her face and smiled ecstatically into the gloom. She squeezed the hands of the sitters next to her; then came an ethereal rendition of “Taps” “as on a bell so pure as to bear no vibration—almost as though breathed out without the use of an instrument.” It was a moving yet chilling manifestation of the hymn to dead fighting men. Two weeks later Walter repeated the tune for an honored guest: William McDougall was present, the world’s greatest English-speaking psychologist, said Roy, and a judge for the Scientific American prize.

  ♦

  If ever a medium were baptized by fire, thrown into the spiritist controversy so soon after the discovery of her clairvoyant gifts, it was Mina Crandon. Roy’s otherwise well-adjusted wife seemed to be possessed by a supernatural force—her effects more dazzling than the traditional whisper through the spirit trumpet or the floating orb of translucent light. Still, it is remarkable how quickly she became the star of psychical research. Less than a month after
the ABC Club’s first séance, the experts at Harvard appeared to sense the ozone-like waft of ectoplasm from across the Charles River. Dr. A. A. Roback, who knew Roy professionally, was the first outside investigator to participate in the experiments when invited for the séance of June 24. The fastidious Roback, a Harvard psychologist with a thick German accent, was told how the table had manifested incredible power, how it forced itself into the laps of sitters and chased one out the door of the study and down the hall. This all sounded to Roback like so much spirit humbug. Sometime later, when Mina brought the table to life, he slunk to the floor—from where he shone a flashlight at the medium and her sitters, in this way verifying that no human hand or foot was causing the piece of furniture to gyrate and circle madly; as if confused, a sitter later observed, by the strange Jewish professor crouched beneath it.

  While there was no place in Dr. Roback’s worldview for the occult, he found no evidence of flimflam or pathology. Accordingly, he asked the chief of Harvard Psychology, Dr. McDougall, to help solve the Lime Street mystery.

  During the first few months of Mina’s mediumship, the psychologists participated in a number of her séances. Walter gladly welcomed Dr. McDougall as someone respected on the higher plane for his work with mediums. Even so, in their attempts to establish a natural explanation for Mina’s manifestations, the investigators found themselves in a kind of contest with her spirit operator, since they wanted to prove that with vigilant control they could stop the phenomena.

  For all their efforts, the ghosts still haunted the place.

  Mrs. Crandon could not whistle to save her life, so it was perplexing that Walter usually announced his arrival with a nebulous whistle. The sitters also heard at various séances a noise that sounded like chains being dragged across the room; raps resounding on furniture, the walls, the door; and piano notes struck by Walter that seemed both too immediate and too ethereal to be accounted for by the Steinway on the first floor. As Roy’s experiments continued, Mina mastered the direct voice—which meant that by midsummer Walter conversed without the use of the medium’s vocal cords. Dr. Ralph Harlow, a Harvard-educated ghost hunter unassociated with McDougall’s team, said that he “was present many times when Walter’s voice was as clear as that of any person in the circle. And it was absolutely fascinating and startling to hear him wander about the room. At times his voice would be close to my ear, whispering some very personal comment about me or my family; at other times it would come from a far corner of the room, or from outside the room, beyond the door piled waist-high with books, or from the center of the table.”

  Unsettling as the vocal phenomena were, the table was where the action occurred. Could Walter perform true levitation? he was asked during the séance of June 23. The spirit responded that he didn’t know but he would try! A tense wait ensued as Walter gathered energy from the circle. Brown, Adler, and the medium would be put on the scales after the séance and found to have lost weight, but the spirit had apparently made good use of their physical essence. Just moments after Dr. Brown “sensed that the table was about to rise,” so it did—by supernormal means it was thought, as none could discern in the red room any limb or article holding it aloft. At first the table had risen only by a few inches and very briefly—a display that paled to what Eusapia Palladino, the former queen of table manifestations, was said to have achieved when she was in good form. But it was Walter’s modus operandi on the higher plane, as on Earth, to build in methodical stages, as he might a railroad line. Two months later, after steady progress with this demonstration, he was raising the Crawford table for as long as a minute, and shoulder-high.

  Thus far Mina seemed able to cause both furniture and inert sitters to take on animate life and there was often a raucous energy when she was in trance. On two occasions a neighbor climbed onto the table in an attempt to stop its quaking, but it bucked him as a bronco would a cowboy. The ghost of Walter Stinson liked to dance with the table—meaning that he made it tip and move to the foxtrot music he requested on the Victrola. If not in trance, Mina was apt to break into laughter, a habit that vexed Dr. Crandon. But Walter did not want his sitters to behave like mourners. “Don’t sit like ramrods,” he instructed them. “Let the kid giggle if she likes,” he chided Roy.

  They did whatever Big Brother said.

  During the sitting of June 30, Walter directed his circle to carry the table downstairs and into the parlor, where it was reported to have tilted on two legs and played on the piano a simple tune that a deceased friend of Dr. Crandon’s had composed while alive. Walter also had stunning tricks he did with his four-legged wooden toy—especially when in the company of Mark and John, the Richardsons’ dead little boys. Once, the two phantasm children and their older guide caused the table to pulsate so violently it shattered—“Richardson and Stinson, wreckers!” cried Walter. The roughest phenomena, though, were reserved for those who got on the spook’s bad side.

  Soon the ABC Club was utilizing most of the traditional articles employed for séances, and Mina often sat in a curtained, wood-framed spirit cabinet, which is said to provide the needed darkness and privacy for ectoplasm to materialize. Kitty’s husband, Dr. Brown, was cautious in attributing what they had witnessed to spiritistic force, and it was he who often sat next to Mina and kept control of her hands and legs. On one occasion, with Dr. Brown occupying the cabinet with the psychic, it began to shake and move about the floor. Deafening knocks were heard and the curtain pole slashed downward, inches from Brown’s head. Then the whole structure spontaneously burst apart.

  It was rebuilt into a version sturdier than before. During a red-lit sitting one week later, with Dr. McDougall now controlling Mrs. Crandon inside the cabinet (and he a far tougher audience than Brown), again the pole shot out with hostile force. When the sitters tried to replace it, they claimed to be resisted by an invisible presence that shattered the cabinet a second time. The nine screws that held the structure together were soon discovered neatly stacked in the corner—an orderly touch to the poltergeist effect, and the work of little Mark, Walter said. Mrs. Richardson was then heard to comment that while on the earthly plane her son was always good at picking up his toys.

  ♦

  No member of the ABC Club was as disturbed by Mrs. Crandon’s work as Alexander Cross, and he reserved the right to leave the circle when the more violent effects began. Broken years earlier by the War, recently abandoned by his wife, Aleck was the middle-aged neurasthenic case whom the Crandons charitably employed. After witnessing all that the medium wrought, he had become a Spiritualist practically overnight. He seemed to hold Mina—a nurturing presence to him—in affectionate awe, despite her being nineteen years his junior and, he believed, a witch. Aleck did not see her as a spell-maker in the Salem sense, yet he and Roy had noticed at one sitting aurora-like flares shooting from her fingertips; he had heard her issue prophecies in trance that came true in short order; and he was beguiled by her automatic-writing scripts. Mina was now manifesting scrawls from the spirits in English, French, Swedish, Dutch, Greek, and poor German—as well as a note in Latin that was translated by a blushing classics professor who said it was too obscene to record. She had also produced for Aleck, who had spent almost thirty years adventuring in the East, a message in ideographic Chinese; it was from a General Kuen, who addressed him in a childhood nickname that schoolmates who thought he had the eyes of a Chinaman had given him while growing up in England. How could she know what they had called him as a boy?

  Mrs. Crandon, who said she disliked creeds and isms, had no urge yet to convert anyone to Spiritualism, let alone this middle-aged orphan. Her husband viewed the séance from a scientific rather than religious angle, but Aleck often had an emotional reaction to the ghosts. As time went on, Mina’s sittings weren’t enough to sate his growing fascination with the occult; he sought out other mediums as well—one of whom he brought home.

  For the first time a psychic other than Mina was asked to help conduct a sitting at Lime Street.
Mina could barely suppress a laugh as the obese clairvoyant from South Boston lumbered up the stairs to Roy’s den. After hands were linked the charmer began shaking the beads she removed from her neck while transmitting plaintive ghostly whispers and scribbling illegible messages on her pad. The circle considered her performance more entertainment than anything else, but taking Mina’s cue, all were polite to Aleck’s guest.

  Later Mrs. Crandon went into trance and produced something Walter had been promising for weeks—that little John Richardson would make music for the group. What followed sounded like a one-finger piano lick by the spirit of the little boy, so faint it was heard by only half the room, yet they felt no piano could produce such an unearthly sound.

  At the next sitting, one week later, there was speculation that the guest medium had somehow altered the usual atmosphere in the séance room, for another invisible seemed to usurp Walter’s place as the spirit that manifested for the ABC Club. Mina abruptly complained that a cold hand had gripped the back of her neck. Ducking forward, she felt it grasp her chin—and it was apparently a female presence as she sensed scented hair brushing against her face. She began to shiver as cold air, at least to her mind, began buffeting the spirit cabinet. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The medium was not in trance and in the red light all could see she was shaken. Aleck was even more alarmed. The sitters on either side of him noticed that his hands had become cold and clammy, and then he began to cry.