The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

It had been agreed that the two Boston experts, McDougall and Comstock, would lead the committee’s initial testing of Margery. Yet since she was a physical medium, the physicist Comstock had the equipment and expertise to take the investigation more in the direction the Scientific American wanted: toward the examination of her effects rather than their psychological cause. Given the magazine’s preference for hard science, McDougall was not going to win the topical debate over whether the study of psychic phenomena fell under the auspices of psychology (Harvard) or physics (MIT). Comstock therefore got his way, his overbearing streak mitigated by enthusiasm: it was easy to argue with him but hard to stay sore for long. Even Walter liked him, though he said the physicist’s fussiness depleted the séance charge.

  Voluble and spruce, Daniel Frost Comstock had the air of a genius, the imprimatur of MIT—until recently his employer—and the aura of Hollywood, an industry experimenting with his Technicolor invention. Having just applied his colorization process to several scenes in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, he now turned his attention to capturing proof, supported by photography, of mediumistic marvels. As the Margery trials progressed, Comstock began to overshadow McDougall, as well as every other committeeman presently involved in the case. From April through August he attended fifty-six séances with Margery—more than anyone else. “He made more real contributions to the scientific consideration of the mediumship than all other observers combined,” wrote Bird.

  Comstock presented greater challenges to Margery, if she were a fraud, than the Harvard alienists who poked around in the dark, controlled her arms and legs, and sought—unsuccessfully, she said—to get inside her mind. Whereas they carried little more than flashlights into the séance room, Comstock brought cameras to capture what was invisible to the human eye. At MIT he had conducted ocular tests that indicated another Boston psychic perceived an unnaturally wide spectrum of color. His idea was to develop an ultraviolet camera lens to reveal the world that clairvoyants see. Unfortunately, Comstock’s first subject died before he could experiment with her, but the special quartz lenses and mercury-vapor lights—like the kind used in moving pictures—were among the equipment he used at Lime Street. If anything shady was happening there, he was sure his cameras would detect it.

  Along with the new apparatus, Comstock brought changes to Margery’s program. Séances were sometimes held in his apartment in case Dr. Crandon had concealed any insidious devices within the walls of 10 Lime Street; and a new spirit cabinet being developed by the committee was supposed to be “inaccessible to fraud.” But the real shift came with the new tests Comstock had designed. His idea was to invent tasks for the medium that could not be caused, or matched, by flimflam, and to focus control on the object of Walter’s power rather than its mediumistic source. If phenomena were produced in a “closed and sealed space,” it was far less important, Comstock believed, to restrain the psychic and monitor her friends.

  Walter said that he would try to generate the proofs Comstock wanted, though when it came to what he could manifest on any given night, he warned that he was as ignorant as the scientist. “That’s some ignorant, Walter,” Comstock chuckled, just as he unveiled something more rudimentary than anyone had expected.

  A simple chemical balance was what he placed on the séance table. He promised it could be used, in a fraud-proof way, to validate the same invisible force with which Walter shattered cabinets. “Those damned scales,” as Walter would call them, were sealed in a glass or celluloid cover to prevent any human hands from reaching them. Future models would have moving parts made of brass or wood—negating the possibility that their motion might be caused by a trickster’s magnetic tool.

  This was the trial Comstock introduced. Instead of raising the table, he asked Walter to levitate a pan or manipulate the scales in some other way. At first the ghost wanted the cover removed for a practice test, a condition that raised a flag of suspicion. Yet even without the cage, no one could explain how Walter, in visible light, made an empty pan lower while the weighted pan rose. At that point Aleck Cross, of all people, interrupted the discussion by clearing his throat.

  “May I have the floor?” Cross asked.

  “You may have the entire house,” the ghost said with a laugh.

  All heads turned to Cross, who suggested that one of the researchers try to push down the weighted pan. Carrington and Bird both tried successfully, though the researchers had the sensation of pushing against an opposing force. They asked Cross if he wanted to try, but he only smiled queerly, as if awed by the state of unbalance his friend Walter had caused.

  At another séance, with the scales illumined by red light, Walter asked Comstock if there were any way the scientist could make one pan rise and the other stay grounded while both were empty. “No,” Comstock replied without hesitation. After doing just that, Walter boasted: “Comstock, I’ve got you; I can get out just as easily as I can get in.” With the glass cover in place, and weights having been placed on the west pan, Walter balanced the scale by applying his force to the east pan. At other test séances he produced the same effect with weights of a three-to-one ratio, four-to-one, then topped off at five! “Have we got them running!” Walter crowed while making the pans oscillate to jazz rhythm. His powers had never been so directed toward one particular effect. When Carrington observed that the ghost had a scales complex, Walter responded that the MIT professor had one first.

  “You asked for balances, and you’re not going to get another damned thing until the balances are finished,” Walter said. After those and other proofs were furnished, they would not hear from him again, the voice warned. A man could die twice, he quipped, and when he left their plane, this time for good, he hoped they would put a new inscription on his grave: “Here lies a scientist, faithful unto cabinet and scales.”

  Their laughter was interrupted by Walter’s next communication: “Gee, little Mark is in the scales.” The pans began bouncing as the Richardsons’ dead son had his fun with them, and photographs were automatically snapped. Comstock’s cameras captured a halo over one pan, just as little Mark caused it to oscillate. At other times they caught mysterious flashes and patches of light around the scales or hovering near Margery. One picture that Bird hoped to be “recognized as a landmark of psychic science” showed a numinous cylinder on one of the pans that evidently caused it to rise—the prism, said Dr. Crandon, through which Walter directed his force. Margery thought it looked more like a gin glass.

  At a séance shortly thereafter, on June 21, the medium produced her best work with a chemical balance that was sealed in its cage and loaded to a six-to-one arrangement. While the Victrola played the lively “Linger Awhile,” the scales bounced up and down with “the utmost vigor,” or froze in perfect balance despite their weight disparity. After the demonstration, there was an argument between Dr. Crandon and Comstock over whether the scale mechanism had been thoroughly examined prior to the test. “Oh, what’s the use,” Walter was heard to whisper. And never again did he play with the scales that had been tilting in his sister’s favor.

  ♦

  Dr. Crandon said that Margery could produce exactly what the committee called for—a simple yet fraud-proof exhibition of her psychic power. “When Walter swings those balances under the cover…this will end the investigation,” he had promised Sir Arthur. The balance tests were now being contested, to Roy’s dismay, by the inventor who had once boasted of their infallibility. The caution of scientists did not, however, douse Roy’s optimism. For all their strict conditions, he believed his wife’s demonstrations were generally impressing the commission. Margery had produced both “simple as well as complex physical phenomena which cannot be gainsaid,” he informed Doyle, who eagerly awaited news of the journal’s latest, and most important, psychic trial.

  “I’ve made another plaything for Walter,” Daniel Comstock announced. The latest invention the physicist placed on the séance table was simple like the others: a bell and battery wired to a telegraph
key (later a lever board) that when depressed caused the apparatus to ring; it was the device that would develop, upon further modification, into his famous bell box. The challenge presented to Margery was to make the bell ring without touching it physically. In defense against the possibility of preparation for the trial, she was apparently not made aware that Comstock was going to present her with a new test object.

  The very night he produced it, she mastered it convincingly. While Bird controlled the psychic, the bell rang suddenly—as if to signal a new round in the contest between her and the scientists. Bird believed the effect was Margery’s pièce de résistance: “the climax of the mediumship, so far as sheer inescapable validity.” With her hands and feet controlled, she caused the bell to ring in long and short peals, singly and repeatedly. Walter, her invisible operator, seemed to have complete control over its functions. “You ask it to ring,” Bird reported, “and it rings. You ask it to stop and it stops.”

  There were times when one of Margery’s sitters, usually the farthest one from her, grabbed the bell box and left the circle. It rang as he walked away from her. Carrington clasped her hands and covered her feet with his own—“to prove that they were in her shoes where they belonged.” The bell rang while she laughed. He put her feet in his lap. The bell rang. A luminous plaque was placed over the contraption for the purpose of revealing any shadowy hand or device that might cause the phenomena. None were evident when Walter rang it with his invisible terminal. The bell was secured inside a box. It still rang. The medium and her bell box were moved to Comstock’s apartment. It rang there too. In darkness, as well as in visible light, the bell box blared. Margery made it ring in Morse code but did not transmit anything like the famous message that had once heralded telegraph technology: “What hath God wrought?” Instead, the message delivered was more distinctive to Walter: “Are all the scientists here damned old fools?” Once, though not in the presence of the commission, a sitter asked Walter if he could reveal his etheric hand depressing the button. Mark Richardson reported that a shaft of light, in the shape of a finger, suddenly extruded from Margery’s lap; and when it reached the bell, it sounded.

  ♦

  Even before the scales and bell experiments, Dr. Crandon knew that Bird believed in Margery’s work. In truth, the editor was no closer to accepting the spirit hypothesis. He could more readily attribute Margery’s revelations to an unknown subconscious force than to her dead brother. Regardless, the mandate of his investigation was not to determine the cause of psychic phenomena; it was to prove or dismiss their objective occurrence. It made no difference to Bird whether the spirits returned. What mattered was that Margery’s work appeared to transcend known physical laws. And when the commission could not explain a medium’s effects, she was supposed to be awarded the prize.

  Margery was brave, trustworthy, and overwhelmingly convincing, in Bird’s estimation. On a drive back to New York, Carrington said he felt similarly, and if the vote were that day his would be cast affirmatively. Keating, while not a voting member of the commission, was also a believer; the magician saw no hocus-pocus in the Crandon mediumship. Comstock was on the verge, Bird felt, of endorsing her. McDougall was softening. Prince was a mystery. But while the secretary needed four votes to declare Margery a winner, the idea was not for each of the five committeemen to decide individually; they were supposed to render their decision as one unified body.

  So that left Houdini.

  It had been a bad idea, Bird had once warned Munn, to put a man on the committee whom the spirits considered a mortal enemy. A match between Houdini and Walter would dignify science about as much as Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo slugging it out at the Polo Grounds.

  As the weather warmed, Bird was hopeful that by the summer he would be announcing a breakthrough in psychic research. Yet he and others still felt an unaccountable chill at the Crandons’ gatherings. Many times he heard sitters say they experienced a loss in body heat during the production of phenomena—as if the medium were somehow siphoning the energy of her circle. “When I use your brains,” Walter explained, “there are cold breezes and a drop in temperature.” Those “arctic breezes from nowhere,” as Bird described them, were an important feature in the Margery séances. The cold gusts reminded Carrington of the kind Palladino used to produce, even though she supposedly emitted the current from a cleft in her forehead, while no one could determine the precise origin of Margery’s more blustery effect. Generally, the winds came from the direction of the cabinet, blasting the curtains apart and bracing the circle. When Bird first experienced the breezes, they came with psychic lights that wafted across the séance room. “These were of considerable force,” he reported; “distinctly cool,” and as real as anything nature produced.

  To measure the phenomena, Dr. Crandon installed a mercury thermometer that confirmed it was advisable to dress warmly for the séances. When Walter was active, the temperature in the room might drop as much as twenty degrees. The scientists objected that the thermometer placed in the spirit cabinet was far from fraud-proof: Margery could have secreted a magnet on her person, they theorized, and used it to send “the float kiting up the minimum side.”

  For all their monitors, the temperature of the medium herself was not determined, but Walter was believed to take most of his energy and heat from Margery. If she practiced deceit, Comstock remarked, it was with a cool constitution. When Austin Lescarboura controlled her hand during the séances, his own hand, normally hot and damp, “was chilled to an icy temperature positively uncomfortable for us to touch.” Bird often controlled her other hand as the cold winds streamed from the cabinet; and to prove that the current was not issuing from her body, she blew warm puffs of air down his neck.

  House of Crimson

  In Walter Prince’s dream, the doomed young woman begged him to hold her hand while she was beheaded—as if by a guillotine. One of his hands was in her hair and he could feel the bloody dampness. His other hand was caught in teeth that clenched his fingers—fastening then refastening; her disembodied head would not release him. The next day, he discovered while reading the Evening Telegram that a woman named Sarah Hand, a mental patient on leave from an asylum, had—at the same time as his dream and not far from his home in Flushing, Queens—laid her head on the rails in front of a train, which decapitated her. She had wanted to prove, she said in a letter the authorities discovered, that her severed head might exist consciously, apart from her body. Following his own investigation of the case, Prince determined that his premonition was hard to attribute to chance. Her photograph resembled the woman in his nightmare.

  This was not the only time that Prince had a personal psychic experience. Proofs of mind acting on mind came to him in the manifestation of his own harrowing dreams, though he had not had any like them recently. He had no intimation that anything was amiss during the period of the Scientific American contest. He was a troubled man, but they were natural worries that plagued him in May, when he first visited 10 Lime Street.

  If Margery had any tricks up her kimono sleeves, then Dr. Prince, known for solving the Antigonish hoax, was considered the most qualified of the ASPR investigators to expose them. According to Doyle, Prince was an arch-skeptic. At least one medium had won Prince’s deepest affection, yet he had the reputation for being detached and uncompromising. He disapproved of the casual contact between the researchers and Margery—the lively sublunary activities that were taking place on Lime Street: Carrington dancing with the medium; Bird playing charades with her friends. Neither did he trust experiments devised by a Tech physicist who knew nothing of magic, hobnobbed with Hollywood moguls, and tried to habituate a spirit to his fancy cameras.

  The one psychic whom Dr. Prince believed in was named Theodosia. Years earlier he had discovered that the disturbed young girl, a victim of brutal abuse, had extraordinary mediumistic powers. He wrote a 1,300-page report on her various personalities. Then he adopted her, and tried for the rest of his life to heal her. Recently, i
n a public debate with Houdini, Prince challenged the magician to match the raps that Theodosia had produced at his Flushing home. Uncharacteristically, Houdini demurred. He was sure that the phenomena in the Prince house were easily explained but did not wish to call the researcher’s daughter a fake.

  Prince appeared to be drawn to distraught females, or they to him, but he was wary of the dangerous side to a medium’s hysteria. He had seen such mayhem in Antigonish, when an unstable young woman almost brought her family’s home down like the House of Usher.

  ♦

  There was a reason why Prince, the most respected of American psychic researchers, had never, like the Englishman McDougall, been made president of the ASPR; for he was, as Bird described him, “one of those in whom rugged intellectual honesty sticks out like a cactus.” Prince was scrupulous, critical, and deliberate in thought and action. A former minister, a psychologist, a stickler for accuracy in a nebulous field, he was remarkably disciplined. The Antigonish sleuth said that he hadn’t played a game in twenty years; he hadn’t fished in thirty. What he didn’t mention was that the previous year had been the most difficult of his life. His wife had suffered through nine operations for cancer.

  For all his present misfortune, Mrs. Crandon did not find Prince to be dour or morbid. He liked to crack jokes that were old hat, and reminded her of the pious, earthy men she knew as a child. Probably since the moment he was born into a fast-changing world there was an anachronistic quality to Dr. Prince. He arrived on Beacon Hill like a Maine farmer to a dance at the Chilton Club. More accurately, he was a Bulldog in a house of Crimson. With two degrees from Yale, he was every bit as sophisticated as the Crandons’ Harvard friends. And he was more scholarly than any of the new generation of psychic researchers. Yet he was the investigator Walter often referred to as “a damn old fool.”