The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  “She showed no signs of the many grueling tests to which she had been subjected,” Garland observed. “She was not only smilingly at ease but humorous in her replies, and yet, beneath her gay mood, I caught now and then a hint of serious purpose.” During their séance, the investigator was as charmed by the ghost who called him “Garland, my boy,” and regarded him as a “reg’lar fellow.” * Awed by the ensuing effects, Garland would become another champion of Margery’s work, though he found it savored of “commercial magic.”

  * * *

  * Garland’s sitting would not take place until May 1927.

  A Man As Light As a Feather

  All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.

  —Malleus Maleficarum

  Witches, supernatural beings, have always been imbued with supernormal desires. In their flight, their nightly passage, they ride on brooms or pitchforks, cooking sticks and other phallic objects. In myth, they attempt to defeat men through seduction. And there was something almost superstitious in the voluptuous power Houdini ascribed to Margery. The nebbish scientists could not resist her.

  ♦

  “Why, he’s a pink one,” the Crandons’ maid said of Hereward Carrington, branding him effeminate. “He has rouge, cold cream, lipstick in his room and uses it all the time!” So maybe that was why he came to the summer sittings “looking like a million dollars,” Margery surmised, while the other researchers entered perspiring and left humiliated by Walter for their lapses in hygiene. Carrie had his own room at Lime Street and often went there to refresh himself during intermissions. But there was something odd and unseasonable in the way he dressed. In the summer, while the other men wore short sleeves to the séances, he piqued Margery’s curiosity by wearing layers of heavier clothing.

  He was prepared for the cold breezes, he told her.

  Carrington was as exotic as the places he had visited. One morning he discussed a trip to Egypt and the mystical traditions there. He explained to Margery that according to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the heart was the only organ to survive physical death; it was weighed against a feather in the afterlife and must be light—unburdened by the weight of guilt or sin—for the soul to survive. That day, while Roy was at the office, he taught her basic card tricks and how to make coins disappear. She was impressed with his deft sleight of hand, and, as Carrington saw, a quick study.

  They talked about the medium Palladino, and Carrington’s examination of her in Naples. He described his work without the scientific pretense she was used to from the others. But he had his own affectations—like the way he pronounced séance and clairvoyance like a Frenchman, and Palladino like an Italian. He had lived in places she had always wanted to visit, if only Roy could get away from his medical practice for more than two weeks a year. Carrington was single, unencumbered, his marriage over. She felt no guilt at what developed. On the contrary, she thought Roy would approve of their budding friendship. “Wouldn’t you like to kiss me?” she asked Carrie as they embraced in front of her husband and other members of the ABC Club.

  “What was I to do?” he wrote. “She was there in my arms.”

  The next day their affair began, but it was hard to find privacy. They often went for long walks on the promenade, where one afternoon Carrington asked her to elope to Italy with him. She let him down gently, as he seemed rather fragile to her. He had tuberculosis, which she felt explained the woolen underwear and two vests beneath a shirt and sweater in summer. Roy believed that Carrington’s emaciation was the result of his crankish diet rather than any disease. Whatever the cause, the investigator was wasting away and ashamed of it. He was as light, Margery discovered, as a feather in her palm.

  Onward, Psychic Soldiers

  The committee would tie Margery up like Times Square traffic in the rush hour, but that made no difference. They would set traps for Walter but he was never caught once.

  —New York Daily Mirror

  No Houdini, your methods will not prevail. Spiritualism is advancing by leaps and bounds, and not the world the flesh and the devil, not even magicians can prevent it.

  —Light: A Journal of Spiritual Progress & Psychical Research

  While Houdini prepared to end Margery’s run, “the big show,” as Bird called it, attracted a new set of séance-goers: a business titan and a respected local journalist. In August, Joseph DeWyckoff arrived in Beacon Hill to witness Margery’s phenomena. The steel mogul who had sponsored George Valiantine, the committee’s first candidate, marveled at Walter’s “triple stunts”—in which the ghost whistled or sang through the megaphone that appeared to swim through the air like a fish while playing the tambourine that floated near the ceiling, or rang the bell—all with the medium under DeWyckoff’s firm control. “Continuous performance, good as Keith’s,” whispered Walter.

  The loftier phenomena were still in development. Progress was made toward the full materialization of a discarnate soul when a small orb shaped like a face, perceived to be the spirit of Mrs. DeWyckoff’s dead friend Sadie, hovered near the magnate’s wife. It was then DeWyckoff realized that his international quest to find a powerful medium was over. Deeply affected by Margery’s work, the DeWyckoffs became intimate members of the Crandon circle, although their relationship with Roy would have been implausible were it not for their mutual interest in psychic phenomena.

  Unlike the cerebral physicians in Roy’s circle, DeWyckoff, a Russian Jew, was tough and unyielding as Vanadium Steel—his industrial product. Years earlier, he had been known to settle quarrels with his fists or his walking stick. At present he communed with spirits and gave benevolently to mediums. But the Crandons did not need DeWyckoff’s money. “Don’t tempt mediums by giving them presents,” Walter admonished him.

  ♦

  In August, the conservative Boston Herald began to cover the Margery case more extensively than any other newspaper. And Walter Stewart Griscom, a thirty-six-year-old scribe from an old Philadelphia family, was the Herald’s chief reporter on the beat in Summerland. With no prior knowledge of spiritism, Griscom could not fathom why mediums kept megaphones on the séance table, nor the reason they gave their demonstrations from within a curtained cabinet that looked like a fitting stall at Filene’s. Yet the reporter had certainly heard of Daniel Comstock—with whom he arranged an interview at the physicist’s Cambridge laboratory.

  “Dr. Comstock regards psychic research as the baby science of 1924,” wrote Griscom. “And the attitude of the public regarding it,” he quoted the physicist, “is identical with the attitude of the public toward electricity, toward radio, toward every new science that has ever been perfected.” Why then did some scientists, and one notable showman, believe mediumistic phenomena to be impossible? asked the reporter.

  “I didn’t say it was possible,” Comstock responded. “I only said it was true.”

  Griscom next took a ride to “quaint old Lime Street,” knowing that this was not a section of town where one expected to find a practicing psychic. Margery was indeed in rarefied territory. “Should Mrs. Crandon win the $2500 prize, as it is generally conceded that she may,” he wrote, “she will be the only real 100 per cent medium in this country.”

  Having arranged the meeting through Harvard contacts, Griscom hoped to land the first newspaper interview with Margery. Instead, he was greeted at her door by Hereward Carrington, who was there “for purposes of scientific investigation.” The reporter was led through the parlor by Carrington, then into the cool dining room where Margery waited.

  Unlike other newsmen pursuing her, Griscom did not smell of tobacco or look as if he had slept in his suit. But for all his geniality, he got nothing from Margery. When he asked her directly if she had already won the prize, she smiled elusively and replied, “No, not yet,” then referred further questions to Carrington, who said that as a matter of fact there was “only one more test to apply to Margery to establish her as 100 per cent genuine.” While Carrie praised her mediumship, Griscom j
otted notes with the dexterity, thought Margery, of an automatic writer.

  It rankled Houdini that Comstock and Carrington were speaking publicly about the case while he, for the most part, was abiding by Munn’s order to keep quiet. Even more disturbing to him was a Margery feature in his favorite paper, the New York World, by Fred Keating—a fellow illusionist and alternate member of the jury. Keating said that he was baffled by the misty green lights emanating from nowhere; and the violent demolition of Margery’s chamber, after which Bird had to be pulled from its wreckage like Buster Keaton when houses topple on him. Other laudatory reports, by newsmen who had never been to Lime Street—declaring the PSYCHIC POWER OF MARGERY ESTABLISHED BEYOND QUESTION—did little to deflate the messianic hopes of her more devout followers.

  “The earth is in a very strained, tormented condition at present,” the spirit Pheneas warned the Doyles in August. “It is like a pot boiling over with the lid on it. It may thrust the lid up.” Lady Doyle, who channeled Pheneas, wrote that when the catastrophe struck, the multitudes would flock to Margery for “knowledge & hope & comfort.”

  Houdini, on the other hand, was seen by many occultists as the Antichrist to Spiritualism. Some in the movement saw the spirit medium as a Virgin Mary surrogate, forming spirits out of an ethereal substance thought to emanate from her vagina. They considered it sacrilege when Houdini began unmasking and defiling psychics.

  Houdini “is racially a Jew,” the National Spiritualist pointed out. To emphasize that message he was referred to as Weiss—a name he had not gone by since he was a teenager. “Mr. Weiss may pass as an expert conjurer of ephemeral importance to humanity,” the occult journal opined, “but he can not qualify as an expert on matters belonging to the realm of Spiritual powers. His Special Sphere is trickery for his own financial gain.”

  From his higher pulpit, Walter said that defeating Houdini mattered more than the outcome of the psychic contest: “More important than to get a favorable award is forever to wipe Houdini off the map as a ghost hunter.” The voice warned that the magician was plotting a dastardly trick: he was going to conceal an obstructive object in the bell box, so that even Walter’s pseudopod would not be able to ring it. He told DeWyckoff to be on guard; and to mobilize his circle Walter led them in his variation of the Christian hymn.

  Onward, psychic soldiers,

  Marching as to war,

  With the cross of Science

  Going on before!

  Enemies on two planes were allegedly after Houdini. Upon his arrival in the Hub, “he was shadowed by hostile interests,” a Boston tabloid reported. “He refused to be seen at his hotel. Meeting a friend at the Back Bay railroad station, he held his conversation in a telephone booth, declaring that he was being watched and that they might be overheard.” And that night, in the séance room, Walter whispered, “I will take care of Houdini.”

  Houdini’s Box

  Four out of the five men selected as a jury are thoroughly convinced that the Boston woman is 100 percent genuine, and it is believed that announcement of the award will come within a very few days.

  —Boston Herald

  Houdini announces that he will not commit himself until the tests are over. For the general run no verdict is awaited with greater interest than his.

  —Buffalo Enquirer

  “I held both her hands and feet and still she manifested,” Houdini wrote Prince of the July séances with Margery. One month later it was time for her to either conclusively demonstrate her psychic powers or for Houdini to prove she faked them: “We can’t both be right,” he stated. If he had his way in the August sittings, there would be no spirit raps, table levitations, or spectral lights. But he did not appear eager to lay a trap for the medium, as the committee once did with Valiantine, by allowing her enough freedom to attempt flimflam, and then expose her in flagrante. His intention was to prevent the phenomena from happening altogether. Houdini wanted a blank séance, Bird warned the Crandons. He was hatching “a very deadly plot” against Margery, Sir Arthur later affirmed. There was no other way, the Crandon circle felt, for him to stop her from winning the psychic contest.

  Walter, who knew all, advised a way to deal with their nemesis. In the dark, “Houdini could only win by a blank and hence he would by trickery insure a blank,” Roy explained to Sir Arthur. “Walter solved it by announcing he would give them nothing hereafter except red light phenomena.” As both the secretion of ectoplasm and production of spook tricks are believed to require darkness, Walter’s strategy defied the spiritist ritual, whether practiced by earnest mediums or swindlers. According to Bird, it was Houdini who inexplicably insisted that the lights be kept off at the August séances. “He gave no reason,” recalled the editor, “for this extraordinary stand.”

  Whatever his motives, Houdini promised that he would not hinder the psychic program. “I want to give Mrs. Crandon every possible chance to make good, and if she possesses any psychic power, I will be the first to assist her in proving her genuineness,” he wrote Comstock. He and his assistant, Collins, had developed an apparatus for control that would be “comfortable for Mrs. Crandon.” He hadn’t “the slightest wish to interfere with anything,” he informed Dr. Crandon.

  As for the two committeemen with whom Houdini was likely to clash, they still thought he had no business in a scientific trial. Having already made up his mind about Margery, Carrington saw no point in upsetting the séance atmosphere by knocking heads with his antagonist. Shortly before Houdini arrived in Boston, he left Lime Street. Once again McDougall was also out of town. Despite Munn’s hopes for unity, Margery would not perform before the full jury.

  While lecturing in Canada, McDougall made his own case for what Dr. Crandon wanted—a true metaphysical science. In his view, physical science could not address the greater mysteries—“For the atoms are gone,” he said; “matter has resolved itself into energy; and what energy is no man can tell.” Inspired by McDougall’s argument, the New York Herald said that “religion is once more becoming respectable for an intellectual.” Then why, Bird wondered, was the psychologist absent when a spirit medium was so close to receiving scientific sanction?

  Munn and Comstock had asked Houdini to develop a method of restraint for Margery that was both foolproof and humane: an apparatus that would not inhibit the delicate formation of ectoplasm. To that end Houdini—master of escape from milk cans and torture cells—may have drawn too much from his own line of work when designing Margery’s cage. Charged with the commission of controlling without disturbing the medium, he had constructed what was henceforth known as Houdini’s box.

  One reporter later called it “not unlike the stocks used for punishment purposes by the ancient puritans”; another saw it as “a cross between a pillory and folding bed on Tuesday night”; a third likened it to an “electric bath cabinet.” But there was a logic behind the odd invention. Houdini and Collins had constructed a new kind of cabinet—one that allowed the darkness and privacy deemed necessary for the psychic while curtailing any impulse to cheat. They presented an oak box that sloped upward at the top, like the roof of a house, and contained apertures though which the medium’s head and arms stuck out.

  Bird, among others, feared the design was too restrictive: “the use of this cage involves the assumption that the psychic force either issues from the medium’s head, or else is capable of penetrating an inch of wood,” he pointed out. Prince too thought it might be impossible for the medium to perform in Houdini’s box. But game as always, Margery was willing to try—even if Dr. Crandon considered Houdini’s new restraint a brutish and unprecedented attempt to prevent manifestations of the spirit life. The irony of it was not lost on Walter, who composed a piece to make light of the predicament escape artists, corpses, and now his sister shared.

  I’ll sing ye a little song tonight,

  A song from a box that’s closed:

  For the scientists have locked it tight,

  They are out to do and know.

&n
bsp; But ye can’t shut a Ghost in a box for long:

  I’m sure to be raisin’ me voice in song.

  When Munn suggested that Bird transport the box to Boston by automobile, Houdini objected that he would undoubtedly allow the Crandons to examine and find a way to undermine it. He didn’t want to give them access to the box until the medium was locked inside it. So he brought his box by train to Boston himself, assembling it on August 25 in Comstock’s apartment—where Walter would attempt to do what he had to every other cabinet in which his sister sat: demolish it.

  Upon seeing the cabinet for the first time that evening, Margery’s first request was that the six-inch-wide screen be replaced by a solid block of wood. Houdini reacted with dismay. The screen, to be placed over the region of her lap, was designed to allow her ectoplasm a point of release into the room, he explained. Margery countered that Comstock had said that if she were a fraud, she could extend wires through the screen to ring the bell box. Each time Houdini made the case for the screen, the medium repeated: “Comstock said, perhaps I could stick out wires.” When the phenomena came she wanted no talk of threads, concealed wires, or anything else her critics had grasped at to discredit her.

  Houdini suspected that she knew the real reason for the screen: to grant him a window into the bodily region where the tools of a false medium’s trade might be hidden. Part of the answer to the Margery mystery, he believed, lay in the inventive use she made of her anatomy. He doubted if the secretaries and wives—least of all Bird’s wife—who searched her prior to séances looked very carefully between her legs. The medium’s argument was a sound one, though, and Houdini relented. There would be no screen in the cage.