The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Not long after this exchange, at a few minutes to eleven, Houdini finally suggested they turn the lights on and open Margery’s box. After she stepped out of it, he found, sure enough, a ruler on the bottom that folded up into a six-inch length. Munn noticed that Margery looked depleted, while Houdini was energized: as if he, rather than the psychic, had absorbed the séance charge. And yet, Dr. Crandon recalled that after discovering the ruler, the magician cried, “I am willing to forget this, if you are!”

  The doctor’s account of Houdini expressing tacit admissions of guilt had a false ring to those who knew him. In fact, neither the Handcuff King nor the Spiritualists were going to let the incident lie. “I do not think,” Sir Arthur later said, “that it should be forgotten or that it will be forgotten.” But the Margery mystery was not Sherlock Holmes’s case. The next morning, Houdini wrote Walter Lippmann at the New York World to say that he had unmasked the medium whom Bird had “failed to detect” in forty sittings. He had “stopped her manifestations. One more séance this eve. & will be back if nothing happens.”

  ♦

  The next day Margery granted the Herald Tribune her first press interview, though she avoided discussing her contest with Houdini. She was even less forthcoming about her past. “Mrs. Crandon refused emphatically to tell anything of her childhood, although it was suggested that this might throw some light on her claimed powers.” Yet the medium seemed “eager for conversation not related to things psychic.” The box that curbed her phenomena had not dampened her zeal. “An attractive figure sitting at the wheel of her large automobile or receiving in the handsome home that is tucked away in the eminently respectable Back Bay,” she was the girl next door, provided the girl was “vivacious and comely” and her home a vortex for the ghosts of the departed. What had happened, though, at the Charlesgate séances? Where she had recently produced psychic terminals that battered cabinets and elevated tables, now her force seemed weaker than a dead galvanic battery. Her powers being a mystery even to her, she could not say why they were failing, but the test séances, she reminded her interviewer, were not over yet.

  ♦

  The group that sat together in the Margery séances, no matter how inharmoniously, also ate together. Despite the strife at the Charlesgate, the medium dined with Houdini after her newspaper interview, along with Munn and Prince, at a suburban restaurant that was safe from prying eyes and newspapermen. This time, however, the tension between Margery and Houdini had not diminished overnight. Dr. Crandon sat next to his wife at séances because she said he calmed her, and that afternoon, while he attended to his medical practice, Margery seemed agitated at a dinner that included none of her admirers. By Houdini’s account, she was sure that he was going to denounce her to his Boston audiences. She warned him that her supporters—led by Joseph DeWyckoff—would turn violent if he attacked her from his vaudeville pulpit.*2

  “If you misrepresent me from the stage at Keith’s some of my friends will come up and give you a good beating.”

  “I am not going to misrepresent you,” he replied; “they are not coming on the stage and I am not going to get a beating.”

  The medium was not consoled, as Houdini recalled. She repeatedly told him about her twelve-year-old and how she did not want him to grow up and read that his mother was a fraud.

  “Then don’t be a fraud,” he advised.

  When the Crandons appeared that evening for the final sitting at the Charlesgate, Margery, looking refreshed and never more feminine in her green kimono, expressed the hope that they might have “a good-natured séance.” Houdini, meanwhile, who had brought an athletic suit, seemed ready for a physical contest: the dark sport of trapping crooked psychics. He wanted to prove he carried nothing—flashlights, rulers, and so on—to concern the Crandons, hence a getup that was like a bathing costume. Alas, Margery told him that his street clothes were sufficient for the gathering—a plea that denied the circle the fitting image of Houdini clad for manly competition seated next to the medium in her boudoir attire.

  But when the lights went out, his might was diminished. All his career Houdini had been developing his prowess, as if for some consummate test of his strength and wiles. Yet while idolized for his strenuous feats, he had an infertile union with his wife. His most ardent relationship had been with Cecilia Weiss. Bess, for whom he prided himself on being “a good boy,” became more mother than mate. Though Houdini had a secret affair with Jack London’s widow, he exhibited a curious prudishness with women: it was rumored that he was uncomfortable kissing his movie heroines, and was incensed when years earlier two of his brothers formed a love triangle with the same lady.*3 At present Houdini felt threatened by a medium who was openly seductive, as if he and Margery were replicating a mythic contest—male strength and rectitude versus female sorcery.

  Margery had tried to vamp him in her own son’s bedroom, he told Prince, and when seduction failed, her husband purportedly tried to bribe him at the final Charlesgate séance. “While we were waiting there for something to happen and her reputation depending on my report,” Houdini recalled, “Mrs. Crandon said she hoped that I would be seized in a trance, which would be a wonderful thing.” The doctor then added that if Houdini were entranced that evening, if the magician could only see the spiritist light, he would give $10,000 to charity.

  “It may happen, but I doubt it,” Houdini said.

  When friends of the Crandons heard of the accusation, they found it absurd: the righteous Dr. Crandon would not have attempted to bribe Houdini, let alone at a test séance in front of the jury. The charge was another of the magician’s attempts, they believed, to defame the couple. No one contested the lack of mediumistic phenomena, though, on the evening of August 27. The group sat for some time while Margery moaned and perspired in her box, but there were no manifestations. Not a single desultory rap. No whistles. No ringing of the bell. No shaking of the cabinet.

  Houdini had apparently prevailed. He had proved that when he applied his control the revelations stopped. It was disappointing for Roy to see his wife so inhibited by Houdini’s box that nothing happened. Where was Walter? The jury waited for an hour, but there was not a word from Margery’s spirit guide. Her final séance at the Charlesgate was all darkness and silence, and the discomforting suggestion that death is an eternal blank.

  * * *

  *1 The Houdini biographer William Gresham quotes Collins, years after Houdini’s death, providing a different account of how the ruler came to lie in Margery’s box: “I chucked it in the box meself,” said Collins, “the Boss told me to do it, ’e wanted to fix her good.” Smiling slyly, the old magic assistant said, “There’s one thing you got to remember about Mister ’Oudini in his last years. For ’im the truth was bloody well what ’e wanted it to be.” However, Collins’s supposed admission should be taken with at least one grain of witch’s salt. Gresham’s source for the story was Fred Keating, who endorsed Margery and had a grudge against Houdini.

  *2 In the confidential report that Houdini submitted to the commission he makes no mention of Margery’s threats. His account of this conversation appears in a pamphlet he published two months later, that revealed how he exposed the tricks of the Boston medium.

  *3 Houdini’s brother Nathan lost his wife, Sadie, when she fell in love with their older brother, Leopold.

  The Postmortem

  GHOSTS SHY WITH HOUDINI ON HAND

  —New York Tribune

  MEDIUM FAILS IN BLACK BOX TEST: HUB WOMAN UNABLE TO PERFORM HER PSYCHIC FEATS WHEN ENCLOSED IN DEVICE—LOSES BIG PRIZE

  —Boston Post

  HOUDINI ROUTS PET SPOOK OF SCIENCE

  —New York Daily Mirror

  It must have been a spirit’s invisible hand, as much as Malcolm Bird, that guided Mina Crandon from privileged obscurity to the front pages. While she had never aspired to be the avatar of the Spiritualist revival, she took on the role when the committee of judges had seemed ready to endorse her powers. The contest in which she par
ticipated was the platform, distinctive to a wishful age, for an inquiry into spiritistic phenomena. However much Bird denied that the ultimate goal was to determine whether the dead survived—declaring instead that the magazine only wanted to find a genuine clairvoyant—to the press the venture was the Quest Eternal. All of the candidates claimed to draw their occult forces from the spirits, and all had swiftly been declared delusional or fraudulent. Then came Margery, the medium who had led ninety-three séances, many of them said to be convincing, that were observed by various members of a jury of experts. Had communications with departed souls finally been proven? “While thousands of persons interested in spiritualism throughout the country are besieging the office of the Scientific American for an answer to their question, excited by the publicity given the investigation of Mrs. Crandon,” a Hearst reporter wrote, the “answer remains the same.”

  “No,” said her champion at the magazine. Although Malcolm Bird had attested to her psychic powers, he could not attribute them to any discarnate agency. “I do not mean that the theory of spirit forces as a possible explanation would not be considered, but this theory would be only one of countless possibilities.”

  But had Margery at least demonstrated bona fide supernormal powers before the committee?

  “No,” said Harry Houdini.

  While the Handcuff King respected Orson Munn’s order to keep quiet until the proceedings were over, in his confidential report to the commission, his triumphal postmortem of Margery, he determined that all of her effects had natural causes.

  “I charge Mrs. Crandon with practicing daily her feats like a professional conjurer,” he said, adding that her training as a secretary and cello player made her “resourceful to the extreme…She is not simple and guileless, but a shrewd, cunning woman.” Without making clear how her music practice and secretarial experience abetted her mediumship, Houdini claimed to know a fellow trickster when he saw one. Margery had mastered “some of the slickest methods, I have ever known,” he wrote Harry Price, an interested investigator with the English SPR, “and honestly it has taken my thirty years of experience to detect her in her various moves.”

  The experts and other informants who had been at the Charlesgate tests disclosed enough for newsmen to presume that Houdini had dealt a mortal blow to the hopes of the Scientific American’s only legitimate candidate. “The sad report comes from Back Bay that a formal test of Margery’s power before the scientific jury turned out to be a blank séance,” said the New York Tribune. By all indications she had lost the big prize that had seemed to be hers for the taking. “We are still far away from the spirits,” announced the Boston papers.

  Appearing at Keith’s, Handcuff Harry was once again the Hub’s unparalleled occult performer. The Boston Transcript, the favored newspaper of Beacon Hill society, called him “Unconquerable Houdini,” the “marvel of the century” to his audiences. Contrary to Margery’s fear, he did not denounce her from the stage. Without mentioning the spirits, he presented the vaudeville feats that had made him famous. His hair had “grown a bit thin at the temples,” his athletic frame “inclined to stoutness,” but he had lost none of his verve. The escape artist performed the old East India Needle Mystery as cleverly as ever. He slithered through Metamorphosis with Bess, still limber at forty-four, even though she rarely shared the stage with him anymore. And for the main feature he demonstrated his excruciating straitjacket caper. “He bows and is gone,” said the reporter. “He has lived up to his reputation.”

  A Drawn Battle

  PSYCHIC EXPERTS FALL OUT OVER SÉANCES OF “MARGERY”

  —New York Evening Post

  MARGERY WILL CONTINUE TESTS

  Medium Not Affected by Row Between Houdini and Bird, Which Caused Latter’s Resignation

  —Boston Post

  Unsurprisingly, there were two perspectives on the Charlesgate séances: Houdini’s and Dr. Crandon’s. Some tabloids reported that the Crandons were depressed after the sittings there, yet, by Roy’s account, it was a triumphant ABC Club that gathered at Lime Street on the night after Margery’s last encounter with Houdini. When Walter came through with his most cheerful whistle, he was “greeted with a recital of his wonderful achievements of the last three nights—namely, the discrediting of Houdini in the sight of the Committee.” During the exchange, Walter revealed that although Houdini’s box was fixed, the magician’s ally, Prince—whose honesty few ever challenged—was guilty more of dimwittedness than malice. So spot-on was the ghost’s imitation of Dr. Prince’s querulous voice that even Aleck Cross, usually not responsive to séance hijinks, laughed heartily.

  The tone in the room changed when Walter promised that if the magician lied on the stage, he would “finish him.” The voice made clear why Houdini had responded so emotionally when sworn at for laying a plant on Margery. According to Walter, Houdini’s parents had not been married when he was born; he had entered this world a bastard and would leave it, the ghost whispered, with a legacy as wretched as his birthright.

  For the remainder of the séance, Walter and his friends rehashed how he had exposed Houdini’s subterfuge. But where, a sitter asked, was the spirit last night, when the Charlesgate was dead quiet? Walter had been watching over his sister, he answered, but was unable to manifest given her depletion of ectoplasm.

  The next day Dr. Crandon began disseminating his record of the events to interested parties in Boston, New York, and London. Aghast at Roy’s report on Houdini’s misconduct, many of them rallied around the psychic. “Surely the Committee will not stand for this,” Sir Arthur complained to Bird, “and will protect a very self-sacrificing lady against such attempts upon her honor. I trust the matter will be most fully ventilated in the Press. It is a complete exposure—but not of the medium.” Carrington was as outraged: “I never heard such terrible stuff in my life!” he wrote Dr. Crandon; “I would have given a lot to have been present at that sitting when H. wept!”

  Their effusive support heartened Dr. Crandon—whose admiration for Doyle “merges into love,” he told Sir Oliver Lodge. And just as Walter had urged, the Crandons prepared for another round of the test séances that were apparently not over.

  Malcolm Bird, who had always sought a physical explanation for supernormal manifestations, claimed that Houdini’s thick oaken box had only succeeded in temporarily cutting off the psychic current. But since she hadn’t lived up to Bird’s panegyrics, the Scientific American and its editor had some explaining to do. Though they had promised more reports on the candidate, the September issue, for the first time in twenty-six months, carried no psychic story of any kind. Instead, Bird explained in his column why they had pulled their latest article on Margery. He said that two of the judges (Houdini and Prince) had threatened to quit if the magazine continued to publicize her work before their verdict was delivered. With a scientist’s disdain, Bird accused the scandal sheets of causing the misunderstandings and discord. At the same time, publisher Munn, as if to refute the rumors that he had banned Bird from the contest, announced his promotion from associate to managing editor of the Scientific American.

  In a sense Bird was right; the newspaper coverage was so mercurial that headlines seemed written in quicksilver. Soon it came out that, aside from Houdini, the committee was not ready to dismiss the psychic whose manifestations had “stirred the scientific world.” Her poor showing at the Charlesgate did not portend a negative verdict: if anything it was a hung jury. “All Boston and New York have been buzzing with the story of a big row in the committee”—which meant, to Houdini’s displeasure, that MARGERY STILL HAS A CHANCE. To bolster her case, the candidate finally emerged from behind the veil to speak to reporters. Two days after Houdini made her dead brother disappear and seemed to dispatch her to the brimming ash can of discredited mediums, Margery presented her side of the story.

  “It was not a fair test,” she told the Boston Traveller. “Why, Harry Houdini himself admitted that a psychic rod couldn’t be expected to pierce a thick woo
d panel.” Like Bird and Doyle, Margery argued that Houdini’s box was an insulator of the psychic current. And with every interview she gave, a new headline issued from the ether. MARGERY SCOFFS AT HOUDINI STATEMENT. The medium dismissed his claim that with proper control her phenomena were nonexistent—“That is untrue, at every one of a hundred sittings there has been perfect control”—and she was through remaining quiet while Bird and others defended her. “I have the greatest respect for Mr. Bird,” she admitted to the Boston Herald. “He’s a gentleman, he’s my friend, but at least one member of the committee has not been acting like a gentleman.”

  The image of the obliging medium locked in Houdini’s box made many feel sympathetic to her. One Boston paper observed that the Handcuff King had always “objected to the publicity accorded Mrs. Crandon.” After her ordeal she was receiving even more attention. “I honestly want to keep my obligation to keep silent,” Houdini wrote Prince, “but you must allow me to defend myself, please.” Prince relayed his complaint to Munn, warning that Bird and Dr. Crandon were provoking him. “It is very unfair that criticism should be launched which affect him, while he is obliged to be silent for perhaps two weeks longer.”

  In an editorial on the Margery controversy called “The Quest Eternal,” the Hartford Courant offered a prescient view: “What is evident is that the question remains unsettled.” There were two views on Margery’s phenomena: believers in the spirit life saw nothing to shake their faith in her, while those who denied it were calling her another pretender. “Again,” predicted the Courant, “we see a drawn battle.”

  ♦

  Two weeks later the Crandons were in the newspapers for something other than séance research. At just before noon on September 8, Aleck Cross, the sweet and troubled British war veteran whom Roy employed as his secretary and librarian, was found unconscious in a doorway on Brimmer Street—just around the corner from the Crandons’ house. It was at first unclear what had caused the deep wound in Aleck’s forehead. By the time an ambulance rushed him to the hospital, he was dead. As it was unusual for a man to be discovered mortally wounded, perhaps bludgeoned, in a doorway in Beacon Hill, reporters had again arrived at Lime Street.