The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

Margery’s demonstrations, at their most raucous, were a “regular six-ring psychic circus,” waxed Malcolm Bird. At one séance the editor heard a bell ringing; a tambourine illuminated by spirit light shaking; Walter whispering and whistling through the spirit trumpet; a psychic dog barking; and Margery laughing; “all at the same time!” There was some concern, though, as to whether Prince would hear any of this.

  After endeavoring to make dinner conversation with the new investigator, Roy discovered that he, like Thomas Edison, had a hearing impairment that effectively detached him from the rest of the world. Prince was never satisfied with the way his hearing aid functioned and said that he had written to the various manufacturers complaining of it. Ultimately, though, he did hear Walter’s clamorous effects. He also witnessed many of the most dramatic phenomena: the spinning curtain rod; the movement of heavy furniture; the destruction of the spirit cabinet; and the playing and flotation of a ukulele that landed in his lap, causing him to exclaim: “I have a psychic baby.”

  But as the tests progressed, Dr. Crandon sensed that Prince was not as awed by his wife’s phenomena as Bird, Carrington, Comstock, and Keating. At times the ASPR officer exasperated Roy even more than the suspicious Harvard psychologists. When Prince witnessed an astonishing effect, he blamed it on the faulty control of Carrington or Bird, yet when he took Margery’s hands, the curtain pole continued to gyrate, the table to dance, the scales to swing,

  Prince was not especially liked by his colleagues, and Bird complained that he offered no suggestions for advances in the psychic program, as had Carrington and Comstock. Moreover, Prince did not seem to consider the Margery case as important as the rest of the commission. He refused to stay with the Beacon Hill couple, maintaining that the ASPR could afford him sufficient, if not fancy, room and board. He seemed as disinclined to fully acquaint himself with the case, Bird observed, as to get to know the Crandons. His first visit to Lime Street ended, Bird felt peremptorily, after only a few test séances. Through Margery’s automatic writing, Walter expressed his own frustrations with the ASPR expert: “What use can lights and ghosties be, when Princes come and will not see.”

  For all these reasons, there was a noticeable lack of rapport between Prince and the Crandons. The psychic bell ringing did not appear to move him. He never saw or heard enough to satisfy him. Walter said that, like some old horse, the ASPR should retire him. Margery faced a formidable challenge in winning over the crusty New England minister, as her spirit control did not cotton to “this man Prince and his vibrations.” Adding to the tension, the Crandons were hurt when someone mentioned that Prince did not entirely trust them. Before one séance that took place late in the SciAm investigation, Prince told one of his colleagues of a vision he’d had the previous evening: Dr. Crandon, he joked, would sit on the medium’s right (his customary position) and phenomena would ensue. The crack somehow got back to the doctor, who did not appreciate Prince’s insinuation that he was an accomplice in fraud. “A mean and uncalled for implication,” he wrote Sir Arthur, “showing a mind too sclerotic for research work.”

  Prince’s vote was crucial—Bird did not think Margery could win the prize without it; but no medium, except for the one the impaired ghost hunter adopted, had ever really convinced him. Prince also seemed to have little confidence in his fellow researchers. He trusted no phenomena that occurred without his direct control of the medium and her environment. The old Puritan would not be satisfied, Dr. Crandon told his friends, until he was a committee of one, and the tests were under the auspices of the ASPR rather than the Scientific American.

  During the séance that occurred after Prince’s sarcastic premonition, Walter was in unusually bad form: he made the Victrola behave weirdly but could not activate the bell box as he had previously. “Walter, last week you rang the bell most every night in red light,” Dr. Crandon said with a tinge of disappointment. “Yes, with an entirely different circle,” the spirit answered. “All friendly.” So that he might adjust to Prince’s energy, Walter asked the ASPR officer to prolong his trip to Boston. When Prince refused, the mood was grim in the Crandon circle. Prince had just witnessed a series of essentially blank séances that made prospects for a favorable vote from him unlikely. Hence, Walter made what seemed like a rash offer. The medium was never known to perform in the day, yet her brother invited Prince to a séance at Lime Street the next afternoon, to be held in the daylight considered anathema to the production of ectoplasm. Furthermore, per Walter’s instructions, the bell box was to be under Prince’s control and this time he would be alone with Margery.

  Walter had proposed a séance for one, even though Prince was said to block his phenomena. “We all do not see how this can be done,” the doctor wrote in his séance report, “but it will be tried nevertheless.” While it worried the Crandon circle, Walter was keen for the challenge: “I’ll give the old buck the surprise of his life,” the voice assured them.

  At 2:30 the next day the trial started. Dr. Prince drew the curtains, although sunlight still shone into the room. He arranged the degree of light himself, then examined the bell box and explored the medium’s lap. Satisfied that all was as it should be, he sat directly across from Margery, with no table between them; their feet in contact; their hands clasped in each other’s; the bell box held vigilantly in the investigator’s lap—as if he were the guardian of the Hope Diamond and she the world’s most cunning jewel thief. But if Margery were indeed an impostor, it would be difficult for her to reach for the prize without Prince observing her. Though subdued, the room was bright enough, he later said, to see “anything the size of a pea” in the space between him and the medium.

  After sitting for a while in silence, whispers were heard as the psychic began to receive messages—one of which was from Prince’s now deceased wife, whose ailments in her last days included, as Margery accurately related, a persistent chill which now afflicted the medium. Prince watched her shivering, and expressed, with emotion that surprised her, the fear that she “might die.” Promptly he covered her hands to warm them and pulled her robes around her. Then came a shattering crack near the west wall as Walter’s voice warned, “The kid is too cold.” A fifteen-minute break was taken, and a coat and tea fetched for Margery. After another search, they took their previous positions for the séance. And there they waited. For an hour nothing happened. Prince wondered if this was Margery’s gambit, to simply outlast him. The minute he nodded and relaxed his grip, the bell box was hers for the taking. If so, she underestimated the Maine farmer. He was ready to sit with her all night, or until she cried uncle. That scenario was obviated by the sudden noise of the bell ringing, ringing, ringing—a noise that carried downstairs to the parlor, where Dr. Crandon sat with company that saw him smiling intensely.

  According to Margery, Dr. Prince then declared, “My God it was the bell box.” After the investigator checked the device, and found nothing wrong with it, they resumed their vigil. “The control is perfect. Walter, ring it now,” Prince challenged. Five minutes later the investigator looked into Margery’s eyes, as if to make a remark, but was interrupted when once again the bell box rang. With the second demonstration, Prince had heard enough. “I examined the space between the medium and myself,” he later stated, “without discovery.” He then escorted Margery across the hall to her bedroom, where he experimented with the bell box, and asked the medium to disrobe. He explored her dress and petticoats but found nothing incriminating. By Margery’s account, he said that he could think of no other way that the bell box could have rung other than by supernormal agency. In Prince’s own report, he maintained that it would still take a few more experiments, with similar results, “to satisfy me of that.”

  As he left her house, Prince was unusually affectionate with the medium. After he hugged her, she watched from her front door as he got into the taxi that drove him toward South Station. Just because there had been a matinee performance, though, did not mean the evening event was canceled. At a séance after dinne
r, the appearance of Walter was greeted by “cheers and rejoicing.” When asked what had caused the loud crash during the afternoon sitting, the spirit replied that he “was breaking the ice for Prince.” He said that the stunts in daylight were difficult for him to produce but he had not wanted Prince to return to New York without something to shake his skepticism. After the successful demonstration for the ASPR investigator, Margery’s brief slump was over. That evening the psychic and her brother were marvelous. The ukulele and megaphone floated near her head, then rattled against the cabinet. The instrument was later transported over the circle, at which point one of Comstock’s lights flashed; a sign that a photograph had been taken of the ukulele that was floating in a firmament of eerie crimson.

  All the Muse That’s Fit to Print

  WOMAN ASTOUNDS PSYCHIC EXPERTS

  —New York Times

  SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATORS WON BY DEMONSTRATIONS OF RICH WOMAN MEDIUM

  —Brooklyn Eagle

  FOUR OF FIVE MEN CHOSEN TO BESTOW AWARD SURE SHE IS 100 P.C. GENUINE

  —Boston Herald

  Until recently the casual reader of the Scientific American did not expect, for his thirty-five cents, to find stories on parlor séances and hauntings. It was a journal of science and technology, not occultism. But there was a world of difference, Bird often pointed out, between the supernatural and supernormal. Margery could very well be a genuine medium without actually being in touch with discarnate spirits.

  In the present environment, that was like endorsing Biblical miracles while denying a belief in the Divine. Whenever mysterious forces were discovered, it activated the urge for supernatural communion in some vestigial region of the human mind—or so it seemed to Bird, who sat at his typewriter while looking at photographs of spectral lights and heavy objects that hung in the air, defying gravity. It occurred to him that Scientific American journalists had always sought to debunk just this type of curiosity. Under the leadership of the two prior generations of Munns, they had likened spiritism to carnival flimflam and medieval sorcery. Yet there had also been occasions, Bird knew, when the magazine substantiated discoveries that seemed too fantastic to be true. A part of its mission, and now his, was to demystify the new frontiers of science.

  When Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the X-ray, and presented proof in the form of spooky photographs of his wife’s skeleton, it had the appearance of a dime-museum stunt that elicited much ridicule on both sides of the Atlantic. Shortly after his announcement, though, the Scientific American claimed that Röntgen’s work would not only revolutionize the diagnosing of disease, it might eventually be applied to “cosmic questions of the utmost magnitude.” While this was well before Malcolm Bird’s tenure at the magazine, he believed experts were now close to validating a psychic force that, at the very least, would legitimize a new branch of psychology or physics. Bird therefore wanted to relay more than a good ghost story when, in the summer of 1924, he told the world about Margery.

  “The Lady about whom this story revolves is the wife of a professional man of prominence in the city of their residence,” he began his Scientific American article. “Her brother was regarded as psychic while in this life. After his death, curious things began to happen.” Supernormal effects were channeled through the sister and controlled by the brother, he explained; and with the “systemization” of her clairvoyant gifts, Margery had produced “objective phenomena of great distinction.”

  Bird forcefully addressed the possibility of chicanery—and why the unsavory assumptions about spirit mediums did not apply to Margery. “The favorable moral factors of the case it is impossible to exaggerate. I consider them stronger than in any contemporary instance of physical mediumship.” At last the commission was working with a respectable lady—rather than the trumpet babbler from Wilkes-Barre, the cagey seeress from Ohio, or the ward of the doctor from Harlem. Unlike the other candidates, Margery had no cloudy past or material motives. “The psychic is so much a lady of refinement and culture that to speak of this feature gives one who knows her a lively sense of bad taste,” he averred. “It follows that the mediumship is wholly private, nonprofessional and free from the odor of money.”

  Not only did Margery “pay the freight” for the committee’s relocation from New York to Boston, she was going to donate the prize money, should she win it, to further psychic research. She had already paid a higher price in other ways. Though averse to publicity she had sacrificed her former serenity and privacy. “Dislocation of the family life by all this is acute,” Bird reported, “and the psychic’s role as mother of her twelve-year-old son is seriously hampered, to her keen realization and concern.”

  What sustained her was the encouragement of her inner circle. While Bird created pseudonyms for all the characters, he made it clear that Margery’s supporters were “substantial people of affairs, both materially and intellectually.” Four were physicians, and one (Mark Richardson) an innovative scientist whose research on influenza had earned him a place in Who’s Who in America. They were convinced Spiritualists, Bird said, but wary of the religious side of the movement.

  As for the ghost, while Walter could be truculent, he “displays keen interest in the scientific side of the case, and in the mechanism of his own manifestations.” Without discussing the quality of entertainment that the séances provided, Bird observed that the spirit had “the same keen humor that is noted in Margery as a person.”

  In the two articles he wrote about the Lime Street investigation, Bird cast himself as an active researcher as much as a journalist. He covered Margery’s work with the restraint expected of a scientific publication, but it was clear what he wanted to convey: the commission’s impression of Margery was “distinctly favorable.” Finally the Scientific American had found a medium whose phenomena were prize-worthy.

  ♦

  Even though Bird knew the report on Margery would be controversial, he and his colleagues had still “underestimated the general interest in our work.” Once the dailies picked up the story, readers wanted to know more about the Boston lady who might be the world’s first scientifically verified medium. If she truly had passed the jury’s tests, it would be an important development in the quest that Lodge, Edison, and others had taken up: to establish communications with dead souls. There was a journalistic hunger for more information on Margery, her brother’s ghost, and the phenomena—an occult mania not seen since the Fox girls, seventy-six years earlier, made the séance a popular domestic pastime.

  Orson Munn was not crowning his winner just yet, though. A few newspaper stories emphasized something else that Bird had said: definite proofs had not yet been given. The commission was preparing an ultimatum for Walter. The plan, according to an incredulous New York World editorial, was “to tell him to quit playing with the furniture and the musical instruments and to give a real demonstration, such as closing an electric-circuit gap in a sealed jar or tipping a scale protected from tricky touch.”

  Anyone following the story would have concluded that the ghost had already done that. In July, the Times heightened expectations when it reported that the committee was “unable to find the slightest evidence of fraud” in the psychic’s manifestations. MARGERY PASSES ALL PSYCHIC TESTS, read the headline of record.

  As Bird had expected, his star judge reacted strongly to “the barrage of publicity.” It appeared, to Houdini’s dismay, as if the Scientific American editor spoke for the committee. Bird did not speak for them. Certainly he did not speak for Houdini. He spoke for the magazine. Bird, however, was the only one associated with the contest making public statements; like some sideshow piker, the Great Houdini had been left off the main stage. An important inquiry was taking place, and he the only committeeman excluded. Yet the newspapers were reporting that Margery had convinced the experts, which suggested that she had also impressed him. When he read about the case, Houdini “immediately exploded.” The Scientific American, the jury, and the magician himself were “being made ridiculous,” he cried.
He wanted to go to Boston and expose the high-class sorceress immediately.

  Bird responded with a letter reminding Houdini that the original idea was not to bother him with the new case “unless, and until, it got to a stage where there seemed serious prospects that it was either genuine, or a type of fraud which our other committeemen could not deal with.” As they had now reached that stage, Bird and Munn did, in fact, want to talk to Houdini. Could he “run in,” at his convenience, to lunch with the publisher? It was hinted that he should not rush over to the Woolworth too quickly, though. Munn was out of the office until the following week. Bird was busy for the next few days. It might be better to call first.

  When Houdini did finally confront Munn, the publisher told him that he had been trying to reach him for a week, “but Bird had been side-stepping the matter.” This came as no surprise to the magician who complained that he had been excluded from the Margery trials so that Bird could push the other judges toward a favorable verdict. Denying this, Munn called his editor into the office to refute the charge directly.

  By Houdini’s account, he asked Bird if Margery was going to be awarded the prize.

  “Most decidedly,” Bird answered.

  “Mr. Bird,” Houdini flared, “you have nothing to lose but your position and very likely you can readily get another if you are wrong, but if I am wrong it will mean the loss of reputation.”

  Houdini turned to Munn, who he felt respected him as an expert on spirit humbug. He had to be permitted to sit with Margery, he told the publisher. If she were a genuine medium then, given the reports he had read—about a live pigeon transported through matter, and so forth—she had to be the “most wonderful in the world.” But if she were given the prize money and later found to be an impostor, then her endorser “would be the laughing stock of the world.”