by David Jaher
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If Houdini planned to expose Margery on July 24, then Lime Street, where she worked her best magic, would not be the setting for her fall. The next séance took place at the Charlesgate Hotel at 535 Beacon Street, in Daniel Comstock’s apartment. That evening Margery stood in the physicist’s bedroom while removing—as part of a regimen of more stringent control—her green dress and undergarments. Gladys Wood, Comstock’s secretary, thoroughly examined her person and clothes, then searched the medium’s genital region and between her toes; she shone a pocket torch inside her mouth and when Margery let down her blond hair, Gladys searched there. Turning off the light, she inspected the medium’s body, particularly her chest, for the luminous spots that had once puzzled the committeemen. She found nothing within Margery’s vagina, concealed in her mouth, or sparkling on her skin that would explain how spirit cabinets were torn apart, megaphones floated, and tables levitated. Assured that the medium was clean, Houdini and Roy, waiting in the makeshift séance room, proceeded to clasp her hands when she was seated in her cabinet.
Also present in the locked room within the suite were Munn, Bird, Comstock, and Conant; and Walter, if one believed in his existence. “Ha, ha, Houdini!” the spirit cackled, just as Houdini reported that something was touching his right knee. After the spectral contacts came a series of Margery’s finest effects: the cabinet quaked and moved across the floor, the table rose, the megaphone moved, the Victrola behaved weirdly, and raps were heard. At a moment in the proceedings when Houdini, Conant, and Bird declared the control to be perfect, the table became animated and turned over, knocking the bell box to the floor. Minutes later, Walter instructed Orson Munn to sit up. Admitting that he had been slouching, Munn was impressed by Walter’s perception of his posture in the pitch dark. With control of the medium once again established, the publisher was startled when the bell box rang and stopped. Walter asked him how many more times he wanted it to ring. “Five times,” requested Munn. Five rings were immediately heard. After which the ghost, signaling that the demonstration was over, whispered “Good night” to the Charlesgate circle.
♦
A dramatic effort to prevent or expose the phenomena had been expected from Houdini; yet he hadn’t interfered with the test. Deferring to Comstock, he hadn’t snapped this time at Bird. After the Crandons left the hotel, the magician explained that during the séance he informed Mr. Munn that he “had” the medium, but was advised not to expose her, as the time was not right. Regardless, Houdini claimed that the psychic had performed every trick in her repertoire. Margery had leaned forward to raise the table with her head; she had once again worn the megaphone like a hat before hurling it into the air; she rang the bell box with her feet.
Later he reported that the medium “is unusually strong and has an athletic body.” She had the powerful constitution of an escape artist, he implied, not the ethereal aura of a psychic. Earlier, he had been surprised when it took so long for the bell box to ring. According to Houdini, Margery had revealed her predicament to him when she said, “You have garters on, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Houdini had replied.
“Well, the buckle hurts me.”
It was then Houdini realized that the buckle had caught the medium’s stocking, so that her ankle was pinned to his. When he unloosed the buckle, he claimed her foot shifted and the bell soon rang. By this point he wanted to go directly to New York and tell the newspapers about Margery’s slippery feet, as well as how he had caught her with her head under the table (she said she was looking for a hairpin, he claimed)—and the myriad other ways he saw her cheating. Munn, Bird, and Comstock insisted, however, that no statement would be allowed. Displeased, Houdini wanted to know why it was OK to immediately expose the other candidates but not the Beacon Hill psychic.
“It’s different this time,” Bird replied.
Later, Houdini handed Munn a letter he drew up, stating that Margery was “one hundred per cent trickster or fraud.” Outraged by the statement, Bird said that Houdini had not fulfilled his guarantee to catch the medium, because he could not. The Crandons also felt vindicated by the two demonstrations Margery had given for the entourage from New York. In their view, Houdini had come to Boston determined to discredit her. He had “said many nasty things behind the psychic’s back,” Dr. Crandon wrote to Doyle. Yet he had left without curtailing her work. To counter Houdini’s accusations, Roy had his signatures on séance reports that said the magician controlled Margery while the manifestations occurred. “The clouds break a little since yesterday,” Dr. Crandon told Sir Arthur. “Houdini and Munn…have signed the complete notes of both their sittings without reservation. These sittings are so full of clean-cut psychic phenomena that any subsequent denial would indict these men before all the world.”
Following the contentious tests, it was evident that Margery had survived Houdini’s first challenge: she had stood up to the notorious bugbear to spiritism. “Houdini is apparently all that you and other gentlemen have ever said of him,” Roy told his English ally, “to which I should be pleased to add a choice collection of adjectives which you may assemble from the White Chapel and the East End. Nevertheless, I think we have him.”
If Houdini could not stop the phenomena—and he had abstained from trying this time—Margery would receive the prize. As final proof, Dr. Crandon suggested to Bird and Doyle the possibility of “the one-man circle.” He wanted Margery alone in the dark with the trickster, and let him stop her if he could. “Who knows, perhaps we shall add Houdini to this list of magicians who have become spiritualists,” he said. In the end, however, Roy decided that Houdini, who he thought was crooked as a dog’s hind leg, would probably insert his own toe in the bell box to prevent it from ringing. It was better, the doctor felt, to have other judges present so that both the medium and Houdini could be supervised. Another round of sittings, this time for the entire jury, was thus arranged for later in the summer. Bird expressed confidence to Roy that Margery would do just fine: “The Committee will sit in Boston in September. Everything lovely.”
A Shake-Up in the Contest
If these people were on the level they wouldn’t have to perform in the dark…More power to Houdini to run the fakirs out of business.
—Providence News
When the midnight train carried Harry Houdini and Orson Munn from their first sittings with Margery to the teeming Grand Central Station, the publisher felt his mood shift accordingly: it could not have been a grayer, steamier, more prosaic July morning. Houdini, though sleep-deprived, had been reliving his encounter with Margery. She was a savvy operator, he said, and it had taken all of his considerable experience in flimflam to unveil her methods. As the two men parted outside the terminal, Munn recognized that they were at a crossroads in the investigation: the credibility that was the lifeblood of his family’s publication was at stake. He would be forty-one years old the next day, far younger than the magazine that had recently been entrusted to him. He was sweating and uncomfortable. Reading the Times on the drive to the Waldorf, he saw that the sweltering heat was causing abnormal behavior. By police estimates, hundreds of thousands fled the hot spell on a working day, descending on Coney Island—and 50,000 remained there to sleep, like an exhausted army, on the beach. Munn could not help but wonder if the much-anticipated approach of Mars—riding closer to Earth than it had in a century—had something to do with the infernal weather and general upheaval.
Publisher Munn was in a quandary: though he respected his editor, Houdini’s suspicion that Bird was the Crandons’ carrier pigeon disturbed him. The September issue of the Scientific American was supposed to contain another report on Margery—Bird’s most positive yet on her mediumship. It would be a great embarrassment if Bird commended Margery just as Munn’s chief expert exposed her as a charlatan. At no small cost, Munn therefore decided to pull the story from the presses. Houdini had successfully clipped Bird’s wings; Munn would now have to decide between Margery’s advocate and her
debunker.
Matters came to a head at the Scientific American office days later—when Houdini showed up with a report on Margery that he withheld from Bird. “I told Mr. Munn that Mr. Bird tells the medium everything,” Houdini recollected. During this exchange he got Bird to admit to Munn “that she wormed things out of him by cross-examining.” Afterward, on the phone to Walter Prince, Houdini boasted that Munn refused to show his own editor the document. In his efforts to usurp Bird, Houdini found an unlikely ally in Prince, who had hitherto seemed less opposed to Bird than to Houdini’s grandstanding attacks on spiritism. That August Prince and the magician would square off at the Saint Mark’s Church in a raucous public debate over the validity of psychic phenomena. But Prince found Houdini no more excitable and boastful that night than during committee proceedings; he later said that “in the genial sunshine of his presence, one hardly minded these peculiarities.”
“It is, to say the least, an extraordinary partnership,” remarked Bird, who had no idea how revolted Prince was by his public adulation of Margery, as well as the commercial aspirations of the magazine that sponsored the contest. “I have become disgusted beyond the point of endurance,” Prince wrote Eric Dingwall—the SPR investigator who had tested Margery in London.
Seizing the moment, Houdini urged Prince to come over to the Scientific American. Two doors from Bird’s office, they asked that Munn prohibit his editor from giving statements on the committee’s findings without the assent of themselves and the other committeemen, and they insisted that Bird no longer be referred to as “Secretary of Judges.” It was misleading to the public, they explained, to associate him by title with the jury. Faced with the threat that his two expert judges were ready to quit, Munn agreed to their conditions. The producer of the Scientific American contest was now reduced, in the eyes of Houdini, to a clerical position. “Mr. J. Malcolm Bird will never again write for the committee,” he informed Dingwall. “You ought to see the piffle,” he said of the article he had convinced Munn to squelch. “It is terrible.”
While Houdini had no issue with Bird’s presence at the séances, Munn, fearing a dustup, decided to ban him from the next round of tests. Bird might have heard one too many of the siren’s songs, thought Munn, and drunk too much of her potion. Whatever the cause, Bird’s reputation as a neutral observer and thus the magazine’s had been compromised. If the journal were to err, Munn wanted it to be on the side of the doubting Thomases.
It was now Houdini’s contest.
“Houdini and Prince simply constituted themselves the mouthpieces of the committee,” recalled Bird. They were “dictators,” who “got together, agreed on a program, and jammed it through as far as they were able.” Bird lamented that the mediumship he had been instrumental in developing and unveiling in stages—the trust and rapport that he had carefully cultivated between the magazine, the Boston subcommittee, and the Crandons—would be destroyed by the rampaging wizard. Houdini wanted to take the priestess off her throne. He said that manual control of the medium wasn’t working; yet Margery, a Beacon Hill matron, was not some Italian drugstore clerk—you couldn’t handle her like Pecoraro. With that in mind, Houdini and his assistant, Jim Collins, designed a humane mechanism for restraint; it was a great surprise they had in store for Margery. “We are going to have a final séance with her,” Houdini wrote Dingwall. “And in this séance she is to be stopped.”
Who Is Margery?
MEDIUM MEETS TESTS
“Margery,” Wife of Prof. Crandon, of Harvard, First to Demonstrate Spirit Forces Under Scientific Control
—New York Mirror
No evidence of fraud was found, and the moral factors were all in favor of the medium, who has put every convenience at the disposal of the investigators.
—Time
The summer of ’24 was the hottest Margery could recall. Relief was not in sight, she supposed, until the Scientific American contest was over, and she missed getting away from Beacon Hill, even though she purportedly left her body nightly. She wanted to escape the stifling séance room by motoring along the South Shore or sailing on their schooner, Black Hawk. But she rarely complained about the endless gatherings; with the deciding tests scheduled for late summer, this was not the time for leisure and distractions.
The showdown between Houdini and Margery had become an international story. According to many of the reports, the Scientific American judges had decided to award the Boston psychic the prize unless Houdini could change their minds, and their next encounter would apparently not be as cordial as the one in July. MARGERY TO RASSLE WITH THE HANDCUFF KING, declared one headline. SPIRITISMUS IN PRÜFUNG (Spiritualism on Trial), a German newspaper announced. Tabloid reporters had become like a Greek chorus, goading the players toward a fated conflict in the dark.
Despite the provocation, Margery and Houdini were still on good terms. “I have been hearing some very nice things about you lately,” she wrote him, “so I am glad to be able to say I know ‘The Great Houdini.’ ” While many of those contacting the Boston medium had their letters intercepted and answered by Dr. Crandon, Houdini and Margery began a warm correspondence when he sent her the Lime Street snapshots and told her how much he enjoyed his visit there. The photographs that showed them delighting in each other’s company were like doves of peace, considering the brewing animosity between Houdini and Margery’s supporters, but she asked, “in view of the fact that I hate publicity, never to use any of those pictures or show them publicly. Dr. Crandon and I know that you are a gentleman and will respect our wishes in this matter.”
Although her wishes were honored, the yellow press did not abide by the code to which she held Houdini. “One day I was in town shopping when my eye fell on an afternoon paper,” she recalled. “I nearly fainted. There was my name on the first page in those bold, black letters the Boston papers love so much.” Later she discovered that a reporter for the Boston Advertiser had followed one of the researchers to her home and figured out who lived there. From then on all knew the true identity of the mysterious candidate for the Scientific American prize. The Advertiser revealed her address as 10 Lime Street; for Margery there was the embarrassment of everyone knowing that “Margery” and “Mina” were one in the same:
Who is Margery?
For over a year the world has buzzed with speculation concerning the identity of the Boston woman who has startled scientists with the most astounding feats of mediumship ever witnessed.
She stands today revealed as Mrs. Le Roi. G. Crandon, wife of professor of surgery at Harvard for more than fifteen years and the author of a number of scientific volumes.
The Hearst papers posted a photograph of Margery, never more genteel, next to one of Houdini fettered by balls and chains. She had become just the kind of rotogravure item that had no place, Dr. Crandon had warned, in a scientific trial. Refusing demands for interviews, the Crandons instead allowed Hereward Carrington to speak for them. From their parlor, he told the Boston American that voices, cold winds, and astral bells were not the jury’s province. It was the gravity-defying scale test, and others like it, that were the mark of this investigation. Still, the newspapers glorified Margery in ways that embarrassed Bird and Carrington.
A year and three months ago the Scientific American, conducting an investigation into the claims of mediums, offered a series of prizes of $2500 each to any medium who, in the face of the most heart-breaking tests, could establish irrefutable proof of spiritistic communications.
Scores, attracted by the tempting offer, presented themselves, advanced their claims and were laughed to scorn by the scientists.
Then came “Margery.”
She complied cheerfully with every exaction and test…with the one request that at each séance her husband be permitted to hold her hand.
Whether or not the commission was convinced, the Boston and New York newspapers had found their medium. “The woman may be genuine, as they say,” Houdini told The World. “I will not commit myself until the
tests are over. But there will be further tests. A case of this kind excites too many people, disturbing them, and giving them hope for communication with the dead. If Margery can give that communication, all right; but if she can’t, I want to do something more for humanity than entertain it.”
Houdini’s involvement with the case helped put Lime Street on the map, but a higher class of artist, in Dr. Crandon’s estimation, would ultimately find the place. “To experience the events at 10 Lime Street was not only to get glimpses of wonderous, unexplainable things; it was to meet some of the most outstandingly curious minds in the nation,” said S. Ralph Harlow. When in town, William Butler Yeats liked to stop by—and one day he and Roy, who became his doctor, joked about the yellow fever that gripped reporters who wrote about Margery. “I have had my first cold,” Yeats noted. “Dr. Crandon cured me with tabloids and whiskey….Séance very remarkable.”
The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and ASPR researcher Hamlin Garland would also come eagerly to Lime Street. “If one quarter of the marvels reported from here are true,” he wrote, “this is the most important psychical laboratory in America.” What he encountered in no way disappointed him. Garland found Dr. Crandon “scholarly in appearance, slender, low-voiced, and graceful, entirely in keeping with his book-walled study.” His interest in the doctor was outshone a few minutes later, though, when “the widely celebrated Margery came in—a lovely young woman charmingly gowned. She was much younger than I had expected her to be. She was indeed hardly more than a girl.
