by David Jaher
From April until late August, Bird would make eight separate visits to Boston. He came with his wife—“Lady Bird,” as Walter called her—who helped Margery prepare her gatherings; or with Austin Lescarboura, Bird’s fellow editor and quack exposer; at other times Hereward Carrington accompanied him. “There is a deep groove on the map between Westfield N.J. and Boston,” Bird jested, “worn there by my numerous passages of 1924 over this route.” During the spring and summer, Bird—to the neglect, he admitted, of his other journalistic responsibilities—spent a total of fifty-seven days and nights at 10 Lime Street.
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At this time Dr. Crandon was in close contact with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had “plowed these deep furrows in our country and sown the seed that was expected to reap a harvest of mediumistic activity.” Margery, whom Doyle called “the centre of American hopes,” was thought to be the prize of the harvest. But that depended, Dr. Crandon believed, on the sanction of the Scientific American, a “materialistic and coldly scientific paper.” For as soon as the Committee admitted the validity of psychic phenomena, “the whole matter at once assumes a kind of respectability,” Roy said, “for many of the morons who inhabit the Main Street of America.”
The two men had differing views on the producer of the psychic contest. Malcolm Bird had disappointed his former guide to the spirit world by harshly exposing every psychic who had performed at the Woolworth. Regardless, “My present impression of Bird is a little more favorable than yours,” Dr. Crandon told Sir Arthur. Though Bird enjoyed causing a stir, Roy found him to be “at least half scientist and half newsman.”
When Sir Arthur was Bird’s age, he created a consummately dispassionate figure in Sherlock Holmes. Yet the moody Baker Street detective, to whom Bird was likened, could not abide banal life and sought escape through the opium needle. There was something of that same duality to Bird, whose occult adventures had been fostered by Doyle. If Bird considered himself unmoved by psychic manifestations, he was still drawn like an addict to the Crandons’ red-lit séances. While not a supporter of the spirit hypothesis, it took the editor only five sittings with Margery before he concluded that she had genuine telepathic powers.
During one SciAm gathering, while he and Carrington held their hands over the closed mouths of the Crandons, Bird admitted to feeling the first gooseflesh of his life when Walter verbally beckoned and whistled to him from across a room that held no possible confederates—only a couple of respectable Beacon Hill matrons. Bird found it wicked when Suzy fluttered in Roback’s face—rattling the usually stoic German psychologist by crawling in his hair or poking him with the flowers she carried in her talons. He was moved by some of Walter’s more subtle effects, as when the spirit caused a single rose petal to slowly fall from the ceiling, brushing his cheek before landing by his hand on the séance table. He had to suppress a laugh, though, when Walter cussed a blue streak before a circle of visiting clergymen. “Is that the language of the fourth dimension, Walter?” a preacher asked. “Some of the things you believe to be solemn are really to be laughed at,” Walter answered. At a later sitting, the voice indicated that scientists were just as misguided. “You might be better up an apple tree counting the leaves,” he advised them.
At a demonstration that spring, Dr. Crandon produced a megaphone from his yachting days for use as a spirit trumpet, and Bird was among those humiliated when the spirit caused it to rise from the table and perch, in turn, on the head of each scientist in the circle—a dunce cap for the “damn fools” sent to study him. The luminous megaphone then floated “with marvelous speed” toward the ceiling and into the spirit cabinet, where it flew back and forth, knocking against the walls—like a bird trying to escape its cage.
Margery might have felt just as confined there. Having her home besieged by psychic investigators, for whom she had to perform, was starting to tell on the medium. In late April she suffered bilious headaches, nausea, and vomiting before a scheduled séance. “We all tried to dissuade her from keeping her engagement for this evening with the Scientific American sitters,” Bird wrote, “but she regarded the occasion as a highly scientific and highly important one, and she insisted that if she permitted illness to interfere with it, she would be seriously discredited in the eyes of the committeemen.” Her determination that night was not reinforced by her disembodied brother. When Walter came, he remarked that “the kid” had no force and the circle was futile. The séance proceeded weakly, alternating between red and dark light, until Margery abruptly excused herself to vomit. Shortly after she returned, Dr. Crandon was called away—as was not unusual—to remove an appendix. Bird suggested they break up the gathering, but Walter said to remain a little longer. Dr. McDougall kept Margery’s legs in his “usual vise-like control,” her hands held by the scientists on either side of her, while she moaned frailly. Before long Bird sensed, and then tried to resist, a growing pressure on the table that seemed to emanate from its very structure. When he weakened, the table suddenly toppled over, spilling onto the floor the megaphone and all the detritus of the scientists—their instruments, scales and Dictaphone, and the ukulele Walter liked to play. It was a convincing exhibition, thought Bird, by a medium in poor condition.
Catch Her If You Can
A decade before Houdini was making it a part of his repertoire, Hereward Carrington gave a Broadway exposé on the methods of mediums before an audience at the Lyceum Theater that included twenty-three newsmen. “Mr. Carrington, with the sweetest smile shown by any male performer this season,” gushed the Tribune, “and with hair of the lightness of spun moonbeams; dainty of figure, finished and burbling of voice, stood in the midst of skulls and crossbones.” Before the ghoulish scrim, the fair sleuth rhapsodized on death while delivering an effect-a-minute spook show featuring floating tambourines, spirit hands, slate messages, and phosphorescent forms. After the one-night engagement his wife, Helen, who had played Grieg on the piano as the curtain raiser, revealed to a reporter that “Mr. Carrington is a very strange mixture. He is the most healthy minded thing, but loves skulls. I sometimes think he must be very deceitful—he does these things so sweetly and easily.”
Her husband’s surface charm, as Helen had hinted, could be as misleading as a spirit faker draped in muslin. Aligned with no one, Carrington was an opinionated judge of psychic talent whom Houdini saw as his rival on the Scientific American jury. One of the younger experts, Carrington was a lithe forty-two due to his practice of yoga, but since he began his career in psychical research as a nineteen-year-old, he may have had more years actual experience as a ghost hunter than any of the other committeemen. The newspapermen assumed that he was one of the ASPR representatives, since at one time he had been an important officer there. His mentor with the ASPR had been the trailblazing James Hervey Hyslop—president of the society for two decades until, after suffering a crippling stroke, Dr. McDougall succeeded him. But the autocratic Hyslop had fired Carrington, then his research officer, for using company time to write his sundry books on Eastern mysteries, vegetarianism, and juice fasting. Carrington’s relationship with the ASPR was further soured when he brought Eusapia Palladino to New York.
Dr. Hyslop disapproved of both the publicity surrounding those demonstrations and the test medium, whom he thought a fraud and hysteric. After Palladino was indeed caught faking her séance effects by a team of Columbia professors instructed on how to entrap her by Houdini’s medium-busting friends Joseph Rinn and W. J. Davis, the vindicated Hyslop wrote his former protégé a letter of admonishment that essentially said: I told you so, Hereward. Carrington felt the incident at Columbia University was overblown by the press. But whether Eusapia was a bona fide channeler or shameless cheat—or both, as Carrington believed—she was the last medium he publicly endorsed.
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Another frequent houseguest at 10 Lime Street, Carrington stayed with the Crandons on six occasions, for a total of forty-four days and nights, during the spring and summer of ’24. On one visit he
accompanied Fred Keating, the magician who was an alternate judge in the contest.
Before his first visit to Lime Street, Carrington had read what sounded like far-fetched reports on the mediumship: Had the spirit cabinet, with Margery seated in it, really been dragged all over the séance room by an invisible carrier? Carrington suspected that Drs. Crandon and Richardson, despite their professed adherence to the scientific method, were exaggerating. Yet during his first sittings, which were composed only of committeemen, he witnessed the same type of phenomena. While Carrington held one of Margery’s hands and controlled both of her feet, the medium’s booth was “shaken as a rat by a cat,” as Bird put it. At another séance, with Carrington and Bird firmly in control of the psychic, “the cabinet was battered about all over the apartment, pushed, hauled, shoved and ultimately by great good fortune, it got pushed over so that it completely blocked the door of the séance room.” Hurled to the floor, Bird somehow managed to maintain his grip on both the medium and her husband. Sitting vigil by the door, McDougall’s secretary warned that the cabinet was being forced into the hallway. Its left wing was then wrenched off “with the utmost violence.” When the raucous effect was over, the lights turned up and Bird extricated, there sat Margery, fresh as a daisy.
“I have never heard her draw a hurried breath in the séance room,” Bird reported. Examination of the battered cabinet showed that the screws had been torn out rather than unscrewed. In disbelief, Dr. McDougall speculated that a man with an ax snuck into the room and had a whack at it. Offended by the accusation, Roy countered that the culprit was likely “a negro dwarf concealed in the fireplace.” McDougall’s assertion became comic grist for Margery, who often reminded the assistant guarding the doorway to remain alert for her ax-wielding, black-robed confederate. The man with the ax became the euphemism, even to members of the committee, for the accomplice who had to be involved if Margery were a charlatan.
Mrs. Crandon’s forte was the motion of objects without apparent cause. Anything not tied down was liable to move or take flight during the séances, while, adding to the Wonderland effect, the band played on. Whether Walter was in a violent mood or delivering one of his soothing poems, the Victrola piped his favorite songs. The ambience was something else the Crandons had brought home from Europe, though Walter’s preference for popular songs was a departure from the traditional séance hymns. And the continuous play, or rather intermittent activity, of the Victrola produced another of the mysteries that baffled the committeemen.
When Walter cried something like “John, get off of that!” it was a sign that his phantom tagalongs, the dead Richardson boys, were playing with the Victrola; the mischievous brothers seemed to delight in making the machine slow and flat, then pick up speed again or stop. Carrington could not explain how it happened. There were times when he or Fred Keating, flashlights in hand, stood by the Victrola and made sure no one approached. Still the music fluctuated weirdly—apparently at Walter’s command. Austin Lescarboura, the magazine’s electrical expert, took the machine apart and claimed that he had fixed the problem. At a séance sometime later, the jazz played normally until Walter remarked that half his energy came from music. The song sped up as he spoke. Then the song stopped. Agents for the manufacturer came by and declared the motor and phonograph in proper working order; but what warranty protects a sound box from the interference of an ectoplasmic hand? Mina wondered. That very night, the saxophone slowed until it sounded like the wailing of a succubus. It was magic to the ears of Dr. Crandon.
The committeeman Daniel Comstock—the former MIT physicist who had only recently become involved in the case—had the Victrola looked at by electricians in his shop. After some tinkering, they gave it “a blanket guarantee.” Despite their assurances, at a séance that night the machine stalled, slowed, and began to overheat. Afterward Comstock and his assistant, Will Conant, secretly replaced the motor. But when the séances reconvened it flatted during “Souvenir”—Walter’s favorite song. Comstock and Lescarboura checked the source of the electricity, because the music often began to die just as a spirit light faded, or speeded up as it flared. As Carrington reported: “Investigation of the wiring in the house failed to disclose anything which could account for these results.”
Neither could a trickster solve the mystery. Fred Keating, a popular stage conjurer, admitted he had no explanation for a spirit cabinet thundering across a room, then bursting apart. Where were the wires to convey it? The confederates to drag it? He found most impressive the spirit lights that swooped across the séance room like a comet while Walter called for control. The magician “came to scoff,” said Dr. Crandon, “and remained to pray.”
When Margery was at her best, or worst for that matter, there was no telling what weirdness might unfold. At the sitting of June 11, the light effects became as much burlesque as spook show. After she had smashed yet another cabinet, “Psyche,” as Dr. Crandon called his wife, “retired to rearrange her clothing and her hair.” In the dressing room, Dr. McDougall’s secretary witnessed her alarm at discovering a glow that extended from her bra strap toward her left breast. At Margery’s request the secretary fetched Carrington, who spotted something else—a luminous spot on her right shoulder that faded as he observed it. They returned at once to the séance room and presented this latest oddity to the experts. Walking to the moonlight by the bay window, Margery unloosed her robe, while the investigators—Bird, Carrington, Keating, Comstock, and McDougall—took turns examining the light patches by rubbing their fingers against the sparkle on her skin and undergarment. No residue came off on their hands; it was not, they decided, zinc-sulfide paint. And if she were cheating, they did not think she would have alerted Carrington to the incriminating spots. Looking dazed, Dr. Crandon sat down by the séance table as the room lights were turned up and dimmed again. Then something happened that unnerved the men even more than the violence to the cabinet. There was a whisper, “Good night,” and a ghostly cackle—“practically in our faces,” Bird recalled. “My God! That’s Walter,” McDougall exclaimed. At that moment—practically two a.m.—the phosphorescence on Margery vanished, except for a minute sparkle that dwindled from a stain to a freckle.
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Experiments at Lime Street were almost never daytime affairs. “We went to bed in the small hours and got up not too long before noon,” Bird reported to his publisher. Since Dr. Crandon was at his medical office during the weekday, Margery was often alone with investigators whose company she began to enjoy. After her experience with the stuffy Harvard professors, the arrival of the New York committeemen—Bird, Keating, and Carrington—was like a fresh breeze on Lime Street. Keating had magic; Bird a fiendish wit; and Carrington—or “Carrie,” as Walter called him—unusual charm.
Carrington’s gaunt, ethereal appearance and faint English accent made him seem, to Kitty Brown, like the tragic hero in a Victorian novel. It was Carrington whom the ABC Club wives wanted to sit next to at dinner. And with each conversation, Margery and her circle discovered another odd wrinkle to him. He did not drink liquor. He subsisted for the most part on raw fruits and nuts—and for weeks at a time on nothing but juice cocktails. It was important, he said, for mediums to maintain a steady nervous system and he encouraged Margery to drink less alcohol, a suggestion she humored then soon forgot about.
Like Bird, Carrington became fast friends with the Crandons. They both thought this a great advantage in determining whether the mediumship was authentic. The committeemen who stayed at Lime Street had carte blanche to search any room and an intimate knowledge of their subject’s routine. Bird had never heard of a psychic making her home—indeed her entire life—as open to an investigation. Apparently, she had nothing to hide.
“Catch her if you can,” said Dr. Crandon.
Despite months of trying, William McDougall never caught the medium in fraud. Yet the psychologist had theorized, to her face, that objects in her sittings were transported by strings, and that the destruction of her spiri
t cabinet was caused by a stealthy intruder with an ax swung expertly in the dark. One of the cardinal rules of the Scientific American tests was not to condemn the psychic without ironclad evidence. Despite that, Dr. McDougall was not shy about voicing whatever suspicions came into his head. It was difficult, though, to provoke real ire in Margery. She had forgiven her foe for the accusations in his office, and during séances a kind of banter had developed between them where she responded to his incredulity with wit.
One evening the researchers were surprised by what sounded like chains being dragged across a floor—as Dr. Crandon imagined Scrooge must have heard when the ghost Marley came to him in shackles. When Margery started, McDougall interpreted her flinching as an attempt to loosen his grip. The psychic responded that she was supposed to be controlled, not dead, and she would not be held accountable for having human nerves. But aside from the odd exchange or two, the Crandons noticed that McDougall was protesting less. After one extraordinary effect, the researcher said to Margery that “if it happens again I shall leave this house an altered man.” It happened again. And so Dr. Crandon wondered if McDougall would cease being to the investigation what Scrooge was to Christmas just before he was transformed by a ghost.
The Tipping of the Scales
