The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  It was not just the sittings that spooked Aleck; he was carrying his new belief in Spiritualism to “ridiculous extremes.” Every mundane piece of good fortune that befell any of the group was the gift of Mina’s spirit guide; every subtle noise in the house was to him the work of Walter or the Richardson boys. One time Mina’s young son John Crandon had struck the piano in the parlor, and it gave Aleck a start—as if he could no longer distinguish between the notes of living and dead boys.

  The Dark Side of Summerland

  There was magic in West Harlem, where in his fine brownstone the Great Houdini showed off a talking teakettle that answered in a ghostly whisper any question put to it. There were treasures in the wizard’s lair, where on display in his long front parlor were the once-potent wands of famous dead conjurers; the bronze that would one day ordain his grave; and a statuette of Sarah Bernhardt, who he said had once asked him to restore her amputated leg, so sure was she that he was supernormal. Visitors to 278 West 113th Street felt transported from the commonplace. The Houdinis cultivate a house of mystery!

  Of all rooms in his townhouse, Houdini himself found most enchantment in the space where he claimed to spend five months a year researching his publications and inventions—the cramped top-floor sanctuary that he called his favorite place on Earth: his library. A source of pride for Houdini, the apartment was no decorous nouveau-riche book room like the kind Gatsby’s guests ogle. Aside from the voluminous Spiritualist works, he had amassed one of the finest, though disordered, private theater collections in the world, including prized items of John Wilkes Booth, the mad assassin, and Edwin Booth, who was haunted by the dead that came to him in dreams and during séances. One day Houdini hoped to match the trove of the Brahmin Robert Gould Shaw, the renowned Harvard collector. He took pleasure in receiving men like Mr. Shaw in his library. His collection meant that he was not some crass virtuoso from the ghetto: he was as erudite as any high-and-mighty Brahmin.

  But Houdini never showed Shaw or any other visitor the only article that he stipulated should not, upon his death, be sold at any price: a lost artistic diary that contained the comparatively worthless macabre sketches of that failed Victorian artist Charles Doyle. According to Sir Arthur, his father channeled the supernatural beings he drew and painted. If so, Houdini felt that Charles’s tragic fate, kept secret by the Doyles, was in keeping with those who communed too often with the happy phantoms.

  The Handcuff King had his own inner demons; it took as dark an imagination as Edgar Allan Poe’s to conceive of the predicaments from which he fought to extricate himself. There were gruesome items in Houdini’s library. In an envelope in a desk once owned by Poe, he kept graphic photographs of Chinese captives, men and women, butchered at the stake. Houdini could only wonder if their astral doubles had mercifully slipped away from their torture. He had always been privately fascinated with the malignant forces in society—pogroms, crime, and insanity…His great ambition was to defeat, as he did in his photoplays, a great menace to humanity. Toward that end, he had of late been poring over material for Magician Among the Spirits, his exploration of the darker side of Summerland.

  Seated among his valued books, stacked in towering piles above him in his study, Houdini looked more like a well-built scholar than the heroic escape artist on the billboards of cinema houses. He eyed with disdain an article on how the great Howard Thurston, whom some considered a more outstanding magician than he himself, had just converted to the Spiritualist cult. “During a recent series of tests,” Thurston reported, “I was astounded on several occasions by the unmistakable presence of a very definite supernatural influence which seemed to be attempting to transmit some sort of a message to me, or through me.”

  Unlike his rival, Houdini flouted the spirits, whether good or evil, but he was inclined to demonize crooked mediums. Accordingly, he collected—as ammunition to be used in a campaign against the occultists—newspaper accounts of spirit crime and tragedy. Arrayed on Poe’s desk were some of the most disturbing articles in his arsenal.

  In a case of “radio telephone spiritualism,” a Mr. Robert Hose of Chicago slit his wrists while under the influence of a discarnate voice coming through the ether. While in San Francisco, a Mr. John Cronyn used his revolver to dispatch his two sons to the astral after the spirit of his dead wife told him to send them to her. In Brooklyn, one Thure Vigelius, a studious young chemist, was working on a book called The Hereafter, and by inhaling doses of chloroform he believed he traveled there. Tragically, on one of his research trips Vigelius had crossed too far: “Visits Hereafter for Book Material and Never Returns,” the World disclosed.

  There were items in the wizard’s lair that would appall Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—reports that suggested his latest American tour was not all plaudits from newsmen and teary applause from Gold Star Mothers. Had Sir Arthur painted the life beyond too vividly? Some were in a great hurry to enter Summerland, and Houdini thought Doyle was encouraging them to get there. The press had begun to connect Spiritualism to lurid crimes—suicides and child murder.

  In Newark lived a woman named Maud Fancher, who believed that from the spirit world she could help her husband find a brighter future. Mrs. Fancher did not want to deprive her two-year-old son of his mother—and so, three days after Doyle spoke at Carnegie Hall, she poisoned him with Lysol. The spiritist convert then took a dose herself and died two days later in a hospital. SHE COULD QUOTE SIR ARTHUR, read the headline. “Damn Spiritualism!” her husband cried to reporters.

  Doyle explained that Mrs. Fancher had misunderstood the Spiritualist message. He began to speak against suicide at every lecture. There was no shortcut, he insisted, to the hereafter. Houdini, meanwhile, began to compile other reports as tragic.

  A Mrs. Edith Miller Busby gassed herself at her home in Atlantic City; shockingly she took her three young daughters—dressed for their passage in party frocks—with her when she slipped across the Borderland. She left a note saying that she was “not a material person” and a quote as well: “What if the soul could cast the earth aside, And naked on the air of Heaven Ride?”

  There was also included in the magician’s collection the case of a Mr. Herman Light of Omaha, Nebraska, “who filled his library with the writings of Sir Conan Doyle and other spiritualistic authorities.” According to the article that Houdini filed, Light, who missed his recently deceased wife, craved the spiritist paradise so desperately that one night he forced his son to drink a poisonous elixir, then took a fatal draught himself. As the double cortege passed by the next day, Light’s neighbor, another recent novitiate to the séance religion, put a shotgun to his mouth so that he too could enter the plane where lost lovers reunite and all orphans find their mothers.

  Faces in the Sky

  The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will.

  —Hamlet

  The missionary who had returned on the Olympic could not, as they say, cross the same river twice. He felt that Manhattan had somehow changed since his last visit: its avenues were blighted with potholes; Central Park was dirtier; New Yorkers more wound up by the saxophone and stock tip. He too looked different. The press noted “a subtle change in Sir Arthur’s appearance since his last lecture tour here, a year ago. A dreamy expression blurs the keen eyes that are searching every day into mysterious realms. As he paced up and down in his suite at the Biltmore last night—a huge, shaggy figure, with ruddy cheeks and hair barely frosted with gray—he seemed remote and visionary, in spite of his great stature and his hearty manner.”

  During his previous tour Sir Arthur had given a cogent, Holmes-like presentation on the case for spirit contact. This time his urgings at Carnegie Hall were more evangelical. “I have a vision,” he said while closing his eyes and holding his brow intensely. What he saw was Spiritualism emerging from the mist of doubt and criticism. This would coincide with the decline of a church not designed for modern people. “How else could ten million young men have marched out to slau
ghter? Did any moral force stop that war? No, Christianity is dead,” he declared. The movement to unite faith and science would take hold most strongly in the country that—thanks to the Fox sisters—had started it. He called this new sect the Church of America.

  To publicize his mission, he presented what he called “the greatest spirit photograph ever taken.” At Carnegie Hall he projected a lantern slide of a crowd of men with bare heads bowed, gathered around London’s Cenotaph—all paying homage to the war dead. He indicated with his pointer a small party separated from the rest of the mourners in the picture by a shaft of light he claimed was ectoplasm. The select group were mediums planted among the Armistice Day throng. The spirit photographer, Ada Deane, had captured a manifestation that required the combined forces of those psychics.

  With the next photograph the mood in the auditorium instantly changed. Sir Arthur tapped his pointer against the sky above the Cenotaph monument. Visible now were scores of disembodied faces: some vaporous, others so clear as to be recognizable by loved ones, and all wearing “the fixed, stern look of men who might have been killed in battle,” reported the Tribune. “There was something about this photograph, and the conditions under which it was shown that was so eerie, so weird, so supernatural that it impressed even the scoffers.”

  The image of resurrected soldiers caught on Mrs. Ada Deane’s plate was too much for some in the audience. Even Sir Arthur seemed taken aback by the volume of gasps and frightened cries. A hysterical woman in the back wailed, “Don’t you see them? Don’t you see the spirits?” Sir Arthur halted his presentation while Lady Doyle went to calm her. Her reaction was not to the spirit picture, she told Jean, but rather to the presence of something unearthly in the immediate atmosphere. There were ghosts, she said, hovering over Sir Arthur. The glorious dead all around him.

  After viewing Doyle’s proofs, Hereward Carrington was approached by the Herald for his opinion on the Cenotaph faces. The Scientific American had a prize for spirit photography—that Ada Deane had been invited to seek—as well as psychic phenomena; and as it happened, few investigators were as familiar with the English mediums whose cameras registered what the eye could not. The previous summer Carrington had sat with Mrs. Deane for a spirit picture in her London studio. The unmasker of the rogues at Lily Dale had taken “every precaution and examined everything” while testing the spectral portrait maker. “I took my own marked plates, removed them from the camera and developed them myself.” No ghost showed up in his exposures. Yet while posing for Mrs. Deane, Carrington, whom some considered psychic himself, had envisioned a nimbus of light projecting from his right shoulder. To his astonishment a semblance of what he imagined, like an etheric flare, showed up in the developed picture. On the same trip he sat for the other popular spirit photographer, William Hope, and in the developed photographs a woman’s glowing face was visible next to him—his unknown astral companion.

  Despite these effects, Carrington was dubious of Sir Arthur’s Armistice Day phenomena. While granting that a few authentic psychic photographs existed, he believed that most were fraudulent. And like his fellow committeemen, Carrington was wary of newsmen associating his views with Doyle’s. Above all things, he wished to be regarded as a serious researcher. A few days after Sir Arthur’s appearance at Carnegie Hall, he gave his own lecture, far more thinly attended, at a small theater near there. “The next world is a mental world where we create our own environment,” Carrington avowed. His subject was “Dreams.” The fantastic images that every mind created nightly.

  In New York, Jean gave a radio sermon on Spiritualism that was heard by 500,000 Americans. The Doyles then took to the road, with the intention of visiting the places—Cleveland, St, Louis, Chicago, and the western cities—they hadn’t made it to in 1922. Bird joined them in Ohio for the examination of Ada Bessinet, yet she still refused to come to Manhattan for the contest. Regardless, every time the Scientific American agent wrote favorably on a psychic it was “one more point gained in this uphill game,” tallied Sir Arthur. “They cannot continue to think that I am a credulous fool so long as my observations are corroborated by such a man as Bird.” To that end, a spirit picture was worth a thousand words. In addition to the Armistice Day phenomena, he displayed at every talk on his tour a photograph of Bird staring dispassionately into the camera, unaware of the wispy forms beside him.

  ♦

  In a Cleveland hotel banquet hall a gimcrack band played ragtime. Couples shuffled zombielike in the center of an enveloping crowd. The girls’ dresses were rumpled and soiled. Their ankles were swollen. They stopped only briefly to syringe their bloodshot eyes. Sir Arthur was told that the dancers had been at it for over twenty-four hours. While impressive as a display of spunk he sensed an aimless desperation to it all. Returning to his room, he told his wife what he had seen. It was somewhat seedy, they both agreed, but morbid curiosity drew him back to the hall the next evening. The same couples were still on the floor, performing their mechanical one-step before what appeared to be the same leering crowd. The women rested their heads on their partners’ chests. They seemed to be sleeping while their feet moved resolutely on. Sir Arthur left before the dance derby was over. Later he heard that it went on for more than seventy hours; that one contestant had fainted; that two others in a similar competition in a nearby town had gone mad and died. All for some paltry award.

  ♦

  The Colorado Rockies were a rugged place to plant the Spiritualist standard, but Sir Arthur had always thrived in high altitudes. “There are unsolved mysteries at every turn,” he said, and, as fate would have it, a great mystifier was passing through the territory. While stopping for their respective engagements in the Mile-High City, Doyle and Houdini crossed paths. And for every magic performance at the Orpheum that the Great Houdini gave, Sir Arthur made his case at the Ogden theater for life beyond the grave.

  But there would be no psychic showdown in the old mining town. The two men were as amiable with each other in person as contrary in print. Pleased to reunite, Houdini and the Doyles (again Bess was indisposed) motored together along a mountain road then picnicked under the shade of green ash trees. That evening a rejuvenated Bess went to hear Sir Arthur present his “Proofs of Immortality.” She listened raptly while he lectured. She marveled at his spirit pictures; she gasped at every ghost. Mrs. Houdini later told Sir Arthur that he spoke so fervently, she feared he would burn himself out before he reached the West Coast.

  As for Houdini, who performed himself that night, he was gratified to hear that Sir Arthur’s talk, while well attended, was no sellout. Doyle was a miracle monger, he said, who packaged his wonders with conviction and erudite words. Nevertheless, the magician believed that his own feats paled next to the novelist’s enduring fame. “Doyle is a historical character and his word goes far,” he admitted to Bess, “in fact much further than mine.”

  Sir Arthur would give one hundred talks in forty days during his tour of ’23. In Salt Lake City, while trying to convert the Mormons in the Tabernacle, he staggered and, as Bess had predicted, nearly collapsed. The famous organ played hymns while he paused. The Mormons—whom he had portrayed so lewdly in A Study in Scarlet—cheered happily when he got to his feet and projected the spiritist proofs that, unlike Joseph Smith’s Golden Plates, were available for all to view.

  His next stop was Los Angeles, a city where European writers came to sell their souls. But Sir Arthur had no Sherlock Holmes scenario to shop. He told newsmen that Spiritualism was more important than Bolshevism or the movies. He called it “the greatest thing that ever came out of America.” Then he toured the studios. As the Doyles strode across the replica of a Great War battlefield, complete with scarred trees and fetid craters, he admired how closely the set mimicked what he had seen in France. The filmmakers’ lavish constructions were like parallel worlds that came to life under mercury-vapor lighting.

  Not long after leaving California, while touring lower Canada, Sir Arthur heard from Dr. Le Roi Crandon.
Following the initial séance experiments on Lime Street, Roy wrote for advice in developing his wife’s mediumship. In response, Sir Arthur warned him about attracting dark spirits—“undesirable elements”—that could harm the medium if his circle was not composed of “religious Spiritualists.” What was needed was a “guardian control” to shield Mrs. Crandon from hostile influences.

  “My little circle,” the doctor answered in July, “have now become all religious spiritualists and I feel that we have a guardian control in the brother of the Psychic.” Dr. Crandon assured Doyle that in death, as he had in life, Walter was looking after his kid sister. “Do you think I would let anything happen to her?” Big Brother had promised. The new convert to the faith was eager to have Sir Arthur meet Walter. Would the British expert come to Boston?

  Regrettably, Doyle could not make it to New England, but an important connection had been made. Dr. Crandon was the kind of Old Bostonian Sir Arthur had always respected, and Mrs. Crandon would soon replace Houdini as his great psychic hope. The Doyles had nothing to say to the magician now: not after he told an Oakland reporter that Sir Arthur was under the spell of a notorious rogue.

  To Sir Arthur, this was a particular sore point, as it revived an incident that had almost ruined his previous tour. In the spring of ’22, the Doyles had sat in New York with the sought-after Mrs. Thompson of the First Spiritualist Church and her reverend husband. Three days after performing for the Doyles, the couple was arrested for defrauding their sitters. In reaction, Sir Arthur said that he had quickly recognized the couple he sat with as spook crooks. The ghost identifying herself in an Irish brogue to be his mother was actually Mrs. Thompson disguised in filmy white robes. It had been humiliating, though, when the Graphic published an illustration of him on his knees, kissing his fake mother’s glowing white hand.