by David Jaher
I Am a Winner
Had Houdini’s rash exposé of George Valiantine killed the Scientific American contest? It seemed unlikely that other mediums would “risk their reputations—and their livelihoods—by submitting themselves to the investigation of observers who command the resources of modern science and are willing as well as able to use them,” said the New York Times. “This is a regrettable consequence of Mr. Houdini’s hurry to convince his jeering friends that he was not such a ‘simpleton’ as to be taken in by tricks that any professional ‘magician’ could duplicate and improve upon. Except for that, probably half a dozen Valentines could have been exposed, and the impressiveness of the disclosures would have been far greater.”
Stung by the censure of both the Scientific American and the newspaper of record, the magician quickly made amends with Malcolm Bird: HOUDINI PRESTOS HIMSELF BACK IN SPIRIT HUNT, flashed the headline. “I’m positive that mediums won’t hesitate to come forward,” he assured the press. “They’re sure to get a square deal. Valentine got the squarest deal he ever got in his life.”
For a while it appeared that Houdini was wrong. Months went by without any further séances in the Scientific American library. Until finally Bird invited the reverend of a Spiritualist church in Ohio to pursue the psychic award. He called her the flower medium, but she was something of a mystery: no one he knew had ever witnessed her exotic work.
The Rev. Josie K. Stewart had collected eight hundred testaments to her psychic powers over the years. She presented her bona fides to the touring Doyle, who had recommended her, without a sitting, to Malcolm Bird. Mrs. Stewart would later tell reporters that the spirits warned her to expect a hornet’s nest if she accepted Bird’s offer to be tested in October in New York. She saw it as her mission, though, to face the scientists and experts there. And so, with a valise containing the glowing appraisals of her work, the flower medium came to perform in the library where George Valiantine had been summarily exposed.
Mrs. Stewart, in a brown satin frock with squirrel trim, caused heads to turn when she entered the offices of Munn & Co. A plump, high-strung woman, she had thick red-brownish hair and piercing dark eyes. On her fingers were gold bands from the various men to whom she had given her hand over the years. The medium was married, having been divorced twice, but her husband had not accompanied her to New York. She was adorned with other rings and shiny bangles on her arms. It was no small task for her to remove them all. At which point Mrs. Bird, Mrs. Lescarboura, and three female stenographers conducted, as best they could, the inspection not only of her anatomy but all of her ornaments and clothes.
Nervously, the Rev. Josie Stewart then faced the circle that included the ubiquitous Times newsman; a female friend of the psychic; Messrs. Prince, Carrington, Bird, and Lescarboura; and other representatives of Munn’s journal. Like Valiantine, Mrs. Stewart was voluble while linking hands. She had a specialty that she described: in clear light she would channel written spirit messages that manifested on plain cards. Her modus operandi was to place on each card the petals of a flower, their coloring matter to be used by the psychic operators as ink. Immediately she sought the gentleman in the circle with the proper magnetism for the effect to work. She placed cards on the heads of her various sitters. Unfortunately, no one had the right vibration. The séance was a blank. The medium spoke instead of the marvelous things she had done at other times and places and what she would do at her next demonstration.
Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, Bird reflected, but never jam today.
The flower medium had more confidence at the second test séance two days later. Rubbing her hands together like a pianist before a recital, she said there was strong electricity in the room. As was her ritual, Mrs. Stewart chose a flower, this time a moss rose, from a bouquet on the séance table. She plucked its petals and inserted them in between each card that the spirits were to use in their communications. Rolling up her sleeves, she told the circle, “Folks, I am going to get it. I feel what seems like a wave.” The medium then proceeded to Hereward Carrington and placed the cards with the rose petals on his auburn head. Dr. Carrington was used to receiving cards and flowers from women, Bird supposed, and she had clearly singled him out as the “battery” for her psychic force.
The reverend of the First Spiritualist Church breathed deeply while histrionically bringing her hand to her brow. She asked for water and then guzzled two glasses full while keeping the cards and petals on Carrington’s head. All waited for her to lay down her deck and show the authentic spirit messages that would be her winning hand—the royal flush of messages from Spirit Land. Finally she handed the cards to Bird. “There may be some writing on them,” she said.
To her consternation, the cards were blank. Just then Mrs. Stewart’s friend, who had come all the way from California for the event, felt compelled to defend her. Facing the committee when the lights were raised, she said that while the medium’s power was weak today, she had seen something phenomenal in their hotel the night before. They had heard voices and saw a blazing green cross on the ceiling. “Didn’t we, Josie?” she beseeched the medium.
Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, Bird mused, but never jam today.
Carrington suggested they wait a few days so that the psychic could find peace of mind before trying again. But when they gathered on October 15, the committeemen again saw the medium wilt like flowers in fall. Her performance was becoming increasingly melodramatic and peculiar. While she used a “battery more often than not,” Bird reported, “she often omits this feature; and she does many unorthodox things with the cards. She puts them to her own head.” There was no charge. “She parades about the room with cards in her right hand and her left extended ostentatiously.” There was no charge. “She sits at her table and fingers the cards and turns them over and fairly plays solitaire with them.” When turned over, they were blank. Finally Mrs. Stewart concluded that the Woolworth Building was not fertile ground for her botanical effects. She instead suggested an afternoon demonstration outdoors. “She yearns for nature,” observed the Times.
A séance in some flowery meadow in the light of day? Why not, said Bird, who wished to do anything within reason to accommodate the sensitive’s needs. Hence, the commission gathered next in a residential garden overlooking Long Island Sound. It was a crisp day. After being searched, the flower medium requested an overcoat, which the Times reporter graciously produced for her. The investigators scrutinized her every move as she bent to the earth and picked phlox, asters, and ferns to lay on each card handed to her by Bird. “This is my last chance,” she declared. “I must make a success.”
The reverend placed one of her gold bangles on a card. Moments later she snapped her fingers like a vaudeville conjurer. Nothing happened. The committee sat attentively in the sun for ten minutes. Nothing happened. She tried scattering a few of the cards in the nasturtium bed. There they lay, still blank. She placed a card on Lescarboura’s head and then removed it with a “he won’t do” expression. She felt the aura of the newsman but said that he was “not electrical.” Once again her hopes lay with Carrington. A card was placed on his head. Still no writing materialized.
Then came Mrs. Stewart’s last attempt to win the psychic prize. “Folks, I must ask you to gather round me,” she announced. “Come draw your chairs right up to the table where I am sitting. Others of you stand behind me.” She asked Carrington to place his hand on the back of her neck while she clasped the hand of the elderly lady whose daughter was hosting the séance. Breathing deeply, the reverend pleaded for the spirits to arrive. “They must come now; they must. You women will pray that they will come, won’t you?” Moments later she cried ecstatically: “See! Do see! There they are now, Mr. Bird, look at the cards and see what you can read. The waves passed through and through me.”
There was writing at last. Truth crushed to earth shall rise again, read the first card in a script of heliotrope and pink—the colors of the flowers the medium had placed in the deck. Oth
er messages were signed by dead mystics like William James, and W. T. Stead. The communications essentially said that finally verifiable spiritistic proofs had been brought through. Astounded by what they saw, the sitters surged around the medium. She had attempted a feat usually done on spirit slates, but the mechanism of slates allowed for hidden pencils and other opportunities to cheat. This was an entirely different effect. In plain light and in front of the sharp eyes of Prince and Carrington, Reverend Stewart had just produced spirit messages on a number of the Scientific American’s own cards! There was no writing instrument or any other means to explain the simultaneous appearance of the messages. They were ascribed by trusted newspapers, if sometimes glibly, to the finger of ghosts.
SPIRIT MESSAGES IMPRESS SCIENTISTS, the Times headline read. WOMAN’S TEST DECLARED PRIMA FACIE EVIDENCE OF COMMUNICATION WITH THE DEAD. Malcolm Bird announced that “we are sufficiently well impressed to proceed further.” First, though, the supernatural proofs were eagerly examined. As soon as Munn’s staff returned to the Woolworth, they put the spirit writing through a series of laboratory tests: chemically, to determine the material in the flower ink; microscopically, to ascertain if a writing instrument had been used; and spectroscopically, to find out if there was ectoplasm. “It is possible that our tests may show ectoplasm in the writing,” Bird told the press. The commission also studied motion pictures that had been filmed of the medium’s every move—the hand may be faster than the eye, Lescarboura believed, but the camera was faster than both.
For months, said the trusted Hartford Courant, Munn’s prize money “seemed sure of remaining safe with the Scientific American; but now there may be at least a hairline crack between the $2500 and the assets of the journal.” Bird, the Holmes of spiritism, had spent much of the evening with his eye glued to a microscope, trying to ascertain the mystery of how the spectral writing came to be. After the laboratory analysis, the commission was ready the next day for another display of psychic writing. Once again the séance took place in the Scientific American library. Fresh off her triumph on Long Island and confident that she had already won the prize (she didn’t know what “prima facie” meant, Bird commented), the flower medium had never been more merry. “Oh,” she chirped, “I feel good this morning. I ought to get lots of writings. Anybody want to search me to see if I have anything concealed on me?” Bird said that they could dispense with the examination today. “Ah,” exclaimed Mrs. Stewart, “no one looks suspicious this morning. Everybody is smiles.”
They smiled as they had at George Valiantine before he went down in flames.
The candidate rolled up her sleeves, exposing her milky arms. She took several deep breaths, then drank copiously from her water bottle. Abruptly she blurted emotionally: “I’m a winner. I know that I am a winner. My angel friends said to me the night before last, Have no fear—we’ll see you through. Someone said that every century has its psychic. Someone said that Jesus was one and Joan of Arc another and some have been kind enough to call me the psychic of this century.”
With that, the spiritist martyr arranged flowers on the cards with her usual ceremony while continuing to bare her soul to the gentlemen seated around the mahogany table. “If you knew how serious this is to me—I tried to serve the spirit world and now I am trying to serve the scientific world.” Someone mentioned, rather provocatively, that Harry Houdini, presently touring in Kansas, was eager to see her spirit writing. Mrs. Stewart retorted that she hoped no one expected her to go before a mountebank. “This is my religion and my science. I am not catering to that class of people.”
The reverend recalled a harrowing experience before a committee of magicians, which she had already described in some detail before. Even the mention of Houdini seemed to affect her magnetism. Where now was the magic of yesterday afternoon? The contestant placed cards successively on the heads of Lescarboura, Bird, and the rest of the Scientific American staff while begging the researchers to solve the mystery. “I wish some cool scientific person would tell me how I get this writing,” she murmured. “I don’t know. Will you, Mr. Bird, see if there is any writing there? No? Too bad! Too bad! Then I guess that I shan’t take that $2,500 prize home. But I must get my mind off that prize—no money in the world could pay for a living truth, one that will tell whither and why. No sir!”
She must have known then that the cards would always be blank in the Scientific American séance room. The reverend was becoming frustrated with the sitters, who seemed less accommodating than they had been on Long Island. “It is terrible to conform to all the rules,” she complained, “all the rules and regulations and then to be turned down by the unseen. It is more than trying; it is vexing.”
On the verge of tears, she gathered her friend who had witnessed the flaring green cross in their hotel room. They left to pack for her trip back to Cleveland. But though she had failed again at the Woolworth, Mrs. Stewart was sure she had done enough to win the contest. Bird had the sense that the medium was already “mentally spending our $2,500.” Munn, however, wasn’t writing the check.
It had not taken long for Bird to see that their candidate was a cheat. Cards were up her sleeve. When days earlier she returned the deck to him following her first blank séance, he noticed that five in the stack were missing. He anticipated that at a future sitting they would reappear with pre-written messages in flowery ink. Later, during the sitting on Long Island, Reverend Stewart did something that he felt gave her a chance to retrieve what she had pinched. After the psychic writer had been searched, she went to use the bathroom while the commission assembled on the lawn. Upon returning she complained of the cold. The reporter had provided his bulky German overcoat with outside pockets, Bird noted, “big enough to swallow the Woolworth Building.” It was then Prince whispered, “Now, we are going to get some writing.” The medium must have found a blind spot in the vigilant eyes—and camera—of the committeemen. No one saw her make the switch. “You know magicians claim, and rightly, too,” Bird told reporters, “that the hand is quicker than the eye.” Five messages were produced minutes later—on five counterfeit cards. “The texture, weight, color and thickness all were different under the microscope than ours.”
Sir Arthur wished to know, after studying Bird’s scenario, why the medium used five substitute cards if she had pilfered the originals. The editor could only surmise, but he believed Mrs. Stewart had made copies of the cards she swiped, brushed messages onto them at her hotel, then produced them in the garden with a look of devout wonder on her face. The cards were substitutes. The New York World reported that no spirit operators wrote on them with ferns and violets. “The bubble of mysticism created by Mrs. Josie K. Stewart, the Cleveland medium, in a sunlit garden in Bay Side L. I., was shivered yesterday when it was brushed by the harsh finger of science.”
“Another mediumistic failure,” Bird determined. “Her claims to further attention and to the Scientific American award stand vacated.”
Mrs. Stewart was enraged. The reverend complained to her Spiritualist congregation that she had been forced to conduct séances in New York for fifteen cigar-smoking men in a noxious atmosphere of smoke and intimidation. She said that her inquisitors had made her strip nude in front of strange women who examined her. She threatened through the press to bring a suit against Munn & Co. for saying that her messages from the departed were fake. Malcolm Bird responded that the journal would be “tickled to death” if she wished to take her case before a higher court.
The Spookess from Chicago
MAN BITES A GHOST AND UPSETS SÉANCE
—New York Times
Within two weeks the Cleveland seeress was forgotten. Now Mrs. Elizabeth Tomson of Chicago, the third aspirant for Munn’s prize, was the psychic in the spotlight, and she an old-time mystifier of the Anna Fay vaudeville variety.* The latest candidate produced from her cabinet myriad snowy white forms, all of which Houdini insisted were phony. Yet even he would admit that in her cunning way she was formidable. In London a decade
earlier, the medium had been challenged by a skeptical inventor to manifest from a spirit cabinet in which he would restrain her. Sir Hiram Maxim was famous for inventing the prototype of the machine gun that would send thousands of bullet-riddled young men west. Was that not enough to break hearts, that he also had to deny the spiritist consolation of life after death? His draconian bonds had seemed more appropriate for one of Houdini’s escapes. He put the medium in a black body stocking to inhibit any access to fake ectoplasm. Then his people tied her, sewed her, taped her, chained her, and sat her within the inspected psychic cabinet. It took one hour before Mrs. Tomson cried that she was beaten. She had produced no apparitions and lost the competition. But when Sir Hiram parted the curtains to her booth, he received the fright of his life. Coiled above the medium was a large snake, poised as if to strike him.
Mrs. Tomson produced just the sort of dime-show spookery that attracted medium baiters. When she came to Manhattan in 1920 for a public test séance at the Morasco Theater, it was “all I could do to keep J. F. Rinn from breaking up the performance,” Houdini remembered. Before the days of the Scientific American contest, Joseph Rinn had been more of a nemesis to crooked mediums than the Great Houdini. And that evening the bellicose Rinn had an ugly exchange with the Broadway impresario Raymond Hitchcock, who defended the psychic after she claimed from the stage that Sir Oliver Lodge had endorsed her.
When later queried by Houdini, Sir Oliver said that Mrs. Tomson’s spook act had been rejected by his English SPR investigation. Undaunted, the Chicago psychic still sought the applause of scientists, and the highest stage for a publicity-seeking spook was now the Scientific American library. Mrs. Tomson had been the first medium to petition to be tested by Munn’s commission. She was reluctant, though, to return to the city where debunkers like Joseph Rinn had hounded her from the stage lights and attacked her in the newspapers. Aware of her dilemma, Bird tried to persuade her. Despite her detractors, Mrs. Tomson was the only notable psychic in the world willing to be tested by the jury, and as a materializing medium she would give them an opportunity to judge the most sensational of spiritistic effects—the fully formed apparition. This psychic produced visible forms—not raps, whistles, and vague messages from the departed.
