by David Jaher
They were not laughing the next evening, when—as if from thin air—a live dove arrived in the séance room. The creature—“a companion for Birdie,” Walter murmured—perched on the edge of the table, unnaturally motionless and calm. The next day inquiries were made at various pet stores to see if a particular blonde had been recently shopping for birds. Evidently she hadn’t been seeking one.
Kitty adopted the animal. When eventually shown the dove, Malcolm Bird found it the most serene creature he had ever encountered. For about six months it lived with the Browns until, to Kitty’s distress, it mysteriously died one morning. Mina consoled her that it must have been a carrier pigeon and ready to return to its dispatcher. After burying it in the Browns’ backyard, they wished it a happy journey back to Walter.
Sensationnel
A most remarkable instrument: London envies Boston her possession.
—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Sir Arthur recalled the scene vividly. As if apported from some more joyful place, the woman in the black velvet wrap emerged through the turning doors and twirling her pennant flags waltzed about the hotel lobby. Kingsley was dead. She waltzed slowly. When the maroons roared she left. The War was over. Five years after her victory dance, Sir Arthur stood in the same hall. He had not yet met the Crandons but immediately recognized them when they entered the Grosvenor Hotel. They spotted him too and Mina waved gaily. No introductions were necessary when Sir Arthur greeted the medium he had been waiting for.
♦
The Crandons’ first stop, after debarking the Olympic one week earlier, was Paris, a city of psychic light, where mediums were tested by pioneering researchers like the Nobel-winning Charles Richet, the astronomer Camille Flammarion, and Dr. Gustav Geley—who displayed at the Institute Metaphysique his prized molds, casts, and photographs of ectoplasm. Many who had visited Geley’s society, including Bird, were awed by his proofs of the fleeting substance that all psychical researchers were trying to capture and examine. Roy considered it more of a priority to see Geley’s collection than anything in France. It was a delight to drink wine again in public, lunch in the Bois, and walk the grand boulevard. For the most part, though, the Crandons spent their trip in dim rooms.
Mrs. Crandon had never endured such strict control as Messieurs Richet and Geley imposed at her demonstration of December 8, 1923. Throughout the séance her hands and feet were held by the two French scientists, who both sat with her inside the spirit cabinet, resting their heads on each of her shoulders to make sure Walter’s voice was not her own. Independently, it seemed, the ghost whispered one of his humorous poems. Minutes later he made the table dance and then levitate while a music box played. The parlor was lit with the brightest red to which Mina had ever been exposed, yet the researchers saw nothing to suggest deception. Dr. Geley’s associates applauded the phenomena. They yelled bien and encore, as if Mrs. Crandon were the Josephine Baker of the spiritist circuit. When the table manifestations were over, loud raps were heard on the cabinet. The entire structure then imploded on the scientists and the psychic inside it. Mina would always remember Geley—who died in a plane crash a few months later—crying Sensationnel! while examining the debris of her cabinet.
♦
When Mina was still a child, Dr. Le Roi Crandon came to England to take on his first surgical post, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital of London. Twenty-five years later, on this strange new venture, the doctor had returned with his third wife to meet scientists he hoped might explain what the Harvard group had not. All the world’s psychical institutes were in elegant white townhouses, it seemed to the Crandons, with pictures of the first ghost hunters on the parlor walls. Their initial stop in London was the British College of Psychic Science, the brainchild of Hewat McKenzie, who believed that Houdini really passed through water cells and brick walls. McKenzie and his wife were Spiritualists, and not known to be as rigid in their controls as the English SPR. If Mrs. Crandon were a clever fake, then she might have latitude to pull some sleight of hand at the college. Yet aside from a few faint raps and whistles, her first sitting for the McKenzies was a complete blank.
The Crandons’ next appearance was at the SPR, the institution that had once discredited Eusapia Palladino, among other touted spooks, after she had dazzled the scientists in Italy and France. More recently, Eric Dingwall and a new generation of SPR officers had disenchanted Eva C, the Queen of Ectoplasm—when, with Houdini present, she did little more than disgorge gauzy bile from her mouth. It was Dingwall, amateur magician and curator of medieval erotica, who now controlled Mrs. Crandon during her first séance for the SPR. Among those attending was also the Hon. Everard Feilding, another seasoned researcher and dabbler in magic. The investigators used a trick séance table, Malcolm Bird was later told, with a shelf that would immediately collapse if physical pressure were applied to it. Even so, Mrs. Crandon made the table rise and float six separate times. At Dingwall’s request, she even levitated it twice in clear white light. None in the circle had ever before seen that particular effect—contrary to the ritual, when the lights were turned up, she continued to perform. That evening Mina went back to the McKenzies’ for another séance at the college, where this time Walter made a twelve-pound table dance and rise in full light while a Victrola piped jazz. The McKenzies called her levitations unprecedented. They and Dingwall welcomed the arrival of the Boston psychic.
News of her triumphs also impressed the scientist who had originally inspired Dr. Crandon’s experiments. Sir Oliver Lodge would soon tell colleagues visiting the States that the two things they must see were Niagara Falls and Mrs. Crandon. She was said to have rare magnetism. When on December 12, at the Stead Psychic Center, the medium sat for Ada Deane, photographer of the Armistice Day miracle, every plate showed ectoplasmic forms around her—one of which Mina said was her brother, Walter, recognizable by his blond wavy hair, slightly twisted mouth, and scar above the left eyebrow where a horse had kicked him. It was indeed Walter, his mother in Boston later affirmed. All of this was gratifying news to the detective writer who had arranged most of Mrs. Crandon’s European demonstrations, the supportive guide who had followed her progress from afar.
All roads to the spirit world—Houdini’s, Bird’s, and now the Crandons’—led to Sir Arthur’s door. At his suite in the Grosvenor, Mina gave her last séance of the trip. She sat in a rug-covered cabinet, veiled behind a three-way screen that made her feel as if she ought to receive confessions from the three other people in the room. With her limbs extended from the enclosure, her clasped hands resting on the square séance table, and her feet restrained in Sir Arthur’s lap, she went immediately into trance. There was no music, though the persistent rumble from nearby Victoria Station was as evocative of Walter, the former railroad worker. Tonight he arrived quickly and with force. He levitated the table to a record height thus far, and when Dr. Crandon turned the lights up, none could discern what kept it in the air. With blinding darkness restored, the darting presence whistled in Sir Arthur’s ear, behind Lady Doyle’s back, and then more distantly, as if he were leaving the room. But he was not. With no warning Mina’s cabinet began to pulsate, the rug falling on her head. Dried roses that had been on a shelf were transported through the air. Though Walter had spared the Victorian couple none of his coarsest jokes, he left a flower at Jean Doyle’s feet as a token of his affection for the old girl.
In the séance room, as well as over dinner, Mrs. Crandon made a fine first impression during her visit at the Grosvenor. Both in terms of talent and refinement (few had any inkling she was country-bred), Doyle considered her to be of a different class from most psychics. Her husband was an esteemed surgeon and she a dashing girl; although, as Brahmins went, both seemed rather modest. Mrs. Crandon said that she could not credit many of the effects ascribed to her, particularly that during her séance a bird had been apported from another sphere. Her spirit control, on the contrary, was brash and lacking any sublime quality. “Walter has a wealth of strong lang
uage and makes no pretence at all to be a very elevated being,” Doyle wrote. Even a racy spirit had use over there, however, and he perceived what that calling might be: Mrs. Crandon and Walter would be excellent subjects for the Scientific American challenge. As Sir Arthur had feared, the confrontational style of some of the judges was anathema to the fragile psychic constitution. Yet he had heard, via Bird, how Mrs. Crandon stood her ground in the confrontation with McDougall—how she had deflected his accusations with grace and humor. She was a rare breed, in Doyle’s estimation, a sensitive with mettle. And in her dead brother she had a powerful guardian. She would not be intimidated, Sir Arthur felt, by enemies of spiritism—the traducers of mediums.
The Boy Medium
BOY MEDIUM PUZZLES EXPERTS
Committee Says Phenomena Produced by Italian May Be Genuine.
—New York Times
Eusapia Palladino, the great medium of the prewar period, had something none of the recent pretenders could claim—the backing of respected researchers such as Carrington, Lodge, and Charles Richet. The scientists reported that the coarse and corpulent Palladino, a Neapolitan peasant with fiery, protuberant eyes, could move furniture about the room by some unknown power. With a commanding stare she drew the séance table toward her or raised it in the air. Seated in her chair, she purportedly levitated herself while sitters clung to her; she raised a fist and violent raps were heard as if, said Lodge, someone were striking wood with a heavy mallet. And when the psychic emitted a breeze of cold air from a cleft in her forehead, it was joked that the slight Carrington was carried away by it.
Certain that Signora Palladino was ready for a bigger stage, Carrington had brought her to America in late 1909 for a series of ballyhooed exhibitions that some said fattened his wallet. He had negotiated a magazine deal with McClure’s and was charging for an evening with Eusapia a hefty $250 a séance. Unfortunately, her psychic channel had somehow been lost or corrupted in the passage from the Old to the New World. By the end of a disastrous New York tour, the newspapers were calling her an unmitigated fraud. Her disappointed supporters still maintained that Palladino, though apt to cheat when frustrated, had produced unparalleled effects in Europe. But Eusapia was no longer the hope of the psychical research movement. She died just after the War, though her spirit was said to possess a medium who had inherited her power.
♦
The papers called him the Boy Medium. To the Scientific American judges, he was Nino Pecoraro—a pale, muscular twenty-four-year-old Neapolitan immigrant who, when his physician discovered that the boy possessed the Gift, had been employed as a drugstore clerk. After having spent two years helping Pecoraro develop his clairvoyant powers, Dr. Anselmo Peccio presented him to Munn’s commission.
Dr. Peccio, it occurred to Bird, was as drawn to spirit mediums as magnates were to chorus girls. When Carrington brought Eusapia Palladino to America, Peccio had hosted her séances at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. At present it was the Boy Medium enchanting guests in the Italian doctor’s suite; yet he needed looking after in a way the late Signora Palladino had not. The boy had terrifying nightmares, and ghosts were said to appear by his bedside. He was known, Dr. Peccio attested, to jump out of his window whenever the dead gave him a fright.
Pecoraro first came to the attention of psychic researchers in 1922, when he gave a séance for Sir Arthur in Washington, DC. Among the sitters were Carrington and an Italian debutante named Aida, who looked ready to bolt for the door should a ghost appear. To Aida’s distress, soon after the lights were turned out a chilling breeze wafted from the spirit cabinet that held Pecoraro tied to a chair. Minutes later an impassioned spirit was heard; “Aida! Aida!” it roared—so suddenly, Doyle recalled, “that it made us all jump from our chairs.” Articles of Pecoraro’s clothing flew from the cabinet and landed on the séance table—the medium’s collar, his belt, his crumpled shirt. The spirit then called for Aida to enter the cabinet. “Oh, no, no, no!” cried the petrified girl. Though nothing else remarkable happened that night, the medium had shown enough promise for Doyle to recommend him to Malcolm Bird. By the time of the psychic contest, Pecoraro had also sat with an unimpressed Walter Prince at the offices of the ASPR. Two of the three New York judges were therefore familiar with the third official candidate for the prize.
Dr. Peccio had developed the Boy Medium specifically so that he could channel Eusapia Palladino and continue her work. Nino would attempt to produce for an American research committee what his spirit control failed to in life: unassailable evidence of the power of the psychic mind. Typically his demonstrations resembled an old-time spook show complete with spectral music and floating instruments. Because he was known for such physical effects, the judges did not treat him with the kid gloves used for the other candidates. None of the covert devices that had monitored and trapped George Valiantine were attached to the Boy Medium’s chair. Dispensing with the technology Houdini had compromised, the judges instead trussed Pecoraro like a dangerous criminal or crafty escape artist. After his hands were encased in heavy mittens sewn to his coat sleeves, he was instructed to clasp his elbows with the opposite mitt—straitjacket-style—while Carrington bound his arms with picture wire, and his torso and legs with long lengths of rope knotted to his chair. Despite this predicament, Pecoraro looked so unfazed that Bird began calling him “poker face.”
The stoic Pecoraro, having never learned English, was more apt to communicate with the dead than with any of the jury members. When he went into trance, the voice of Palladino did the talking—her Italian translated by Dr. Peccio, the intermediary between the medium and the committee. This personality, the doctor warned, was as mischievous a spirit as she had been a medium, having stolen $35 from his billfold when the lights went out. Since then the ghost had been repaying him, he explained, by apporting dollar bills onto the séance table. Are our wallets safe? asked one journalist. Yes, replied Dr. Peccio, who had pasted in a scrapbook the singles Palladino had produced at various séances, along with a ledger of what the wraith still owed him. Yes, echoed Bird, who was sure it was a larger purse—Mr. Munn’s money—that the candidate hoped to spirit away.
Unlike the previous contestants, the Boy Medium made a strong first impression. The lights were barely extinguished when Pecoraro startled a circle that included the New York judges, the journal staff, the inevitable Times reporter, Dr. Peccio, and three respected Manhattan physicians who were studying the case. Within the cabinet were placed a collection of instruments that the bound medium should not have been able to reach. Yet bells rang at once, a tambourine clanged, a whistle shrilled, and the spirit megaphone blasted through the curtain of the cabinet, tilting the séance table. A crescendo followed, where all instruments seemed to play simultaneously, while a trumpet voice wailed. Fifteen minutes later, Eusapia implored the sitters to talk and sing, as intermittent raps and assorted notes from the instruments were heard. The séance ended with an earthly crash and then a shriek. Inside his cabinet the investigators found the hysterical Pecoraro, still bound but capsized in his chair. His nose was bleeding profusely. Quickly they cut him free, so that Dr. Peccio could attend to his injured psychic.
At the next pitch-black séance, the instruments were placed this time on a table outside the cabinet. Again they were played and manipulated. The bell was thrown at Bird’s feet. The table rocked violently just as some in the circle saw a glowing hand form outside the medium’s cabinet. The hoarse voice of Eusapia vowed that a full materialization was in store, but the spirit often promised more than the medium produced. The séance ended with the common excuse for a failed effect: there was a hostile presence, complained Eusapia, that stanched her energy. While she did not name him, all knew that she blamed Walter Prince—whose open doubts had offended her. Prince appeared to be validated, though, by what happened next. The last thing Eusapia said was that the medium had been agitated and his bonds disturbed—which they were, as the experts soon found out. While still restrained, it was evident that Peco
raro had frantically tried to escape. His gloves were in disrepair and had bite marks, as if a dog had been chewing on them. In Prince’s view, the medium might have been able to slip them; but if that were so, it puzzled Bird why there were no fingerprints on the musical instruments. Another intriguing discovery was that the psychic’s trance appeared to be genuine. While Pecoraro was unconscious, the physicians had stuck pins in his calves without provoking any reaction. When they opened his eyelids and shone a flashlight into his eyeball, he did not recoil.
“We regard this case as unusually interesting,” Bird told the press, “and believe that the medium does not practice conscious fraud.” Nino was like a character in a Poe tale, tormented by some subliminal terror. In staff meetings at the Scientific American, it was suggested that he had either hypnotized himself during the sittings or fallen under the spell of the faintly disreputable Dr. Peccio.
By this time the experts were certain that Pecoraro, whether deliberately or not, was presenting a spook show. When Bird’s assistant had sewn Nino’s gloves to his sleeve, he was almost asphyxiated, the editor reported, by the stench of garlic on the medium’s breath. When a powerful blast was later heard from the trumpet, some in the circle detected the same offensive aroma. It should have been the spirits, not Pecoraro, who were communicating through the megaphone; Bird doubted the sitters had smelled “celestial garlic.” More incriminating was that the psychic’s bonds were always found to be slightly loose after his demonstrations. Bird had never encountered a medium who took so long, after the séance was over, to come out of his trance and allow his cabinet to be searched. This was because Pecoraro needed time to restore the bonds he had escaped, Prince contended. The medium had nevertheless performed his magic while tightly controlled. The experts hadn’t been able to stop him. The Times called him “the most promising contestant to date.” In consequence, Orson Munn decided to summon his expert on escapology.
