The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Dr. Crandon described the dead Englishman to the police and newsmen as a world adventurer who had served the Crown for three decades as a customs official. Yet he was so squeamish at séances that it was difficult for anyone to envision his swashbuckling past.* It was clear that he had an intense, boyish devotion to Margery, and that her phenomena changed his life. Recently, his wife had left him. She was in Canada when he died.

  The details of Cross’s itinerant life were related by Roy, who also told the police that Aleck had suffered several heart attacks while in his employ. The doctor believed he’d had an attack that afternoon, fell and gashed his head, then stumbled toward the doorway on Brimmer Street.

  There was just one odd detail for the police to address. An unidentified neighbor had called to report an automobile crash near the spot where Aleck was found. The police investigators wondered if Cross, contrary to the doctor’s statement, had been struck by the car. But no witnesses came forward and the inquiry was dropped.

  When the Crandons held a séance on the evening of Aleck’s death, Walter arrived and immediately said, “You are very serious tonight.”

  “Walter, I have just lost a dear friend,” Roy responded. “I am asked to say something tomorrow at his grave. What shall I say?”

  A short time later, Walter whispered one of his poems. In the amber light Roy recorded the ghost’s elegy.

  You call it death—this seeming endless sleep;

  We call it birth—the soul at last set free.

  ’Tis hampered not by time or space—you weep.

  Why weep at death. ’Tis immortality.

  The next day Roy read Walter’s poem at the funeral service for their cremated friend that was attended by members of the ABC Club and assorted lodgers from Aleck’s rooming house.

  Farewell, dear voyageur—’twill not be long.

  Your work is done—now may peace rest with thee.

  Your kindly thoughts and deeds—they will live on.

  This is not death—’tis immortality…

  That night the ABC Club gathered to make contact with Aleck. When Walter came through, he was displeased to find his circle still dejected by their loss. He told them that any death should be celebrated; it was like a birthday, a “promotion,” not a tragedy. But the ghost could bring no uplifting message from Aleck, who would be “delirious for some time.”

  * * *

  * Cross attended 198 séances at Lime Street.

  Two Gospels

  Parson, there’s not a harp among us, nor a white robe.

  —WALTER

  HOUDINI COMES TO DENVER TO KEEP GULLIBLES FROM GOING CRAZY ON “SPOOKS”

  —Denver Post

  A medium is only as credible as her circle, and how curious it was, Houdini commented, that the “most marvelous manifestations occurred” when Bird and Carrington controlled the séances—yet when he took charge the dead stopped talking. As a voting member of the psychic board and a staunch believer in her phenomena, Carrington would make it impossible for Houdini to push through a blanket denunciation of Margery.

  Consequently, the magician was determined to have him kicked off the jury. Born Hubert Lavington, Dr. Hereward Carrington was all pretense, Houdini claimed, when it came to his title, name, and scientific résumé. Margery’s champion was a “shut-eye,” he said, a third-rate illusionist who turned at least one blind eye to spookery. A prolific writer on occult phenomena, Carrington heralded certain psychics because the books that endorsed their work sold better than the ones—like Houdini’s own Magician Among the Spirits—that exposed it, the master magician asserted.

  Houdini charged that Carrington had purchased his doctorate for $75 from a bogus university in Iowa, and that his opportunistic relations with the Crandons had compromised the SciAm investigation. Dr. Crandon was offering Carrington money to fulfill his longtime ambition, Houdini added, which involved starting his own psychical research institute, while Margery tempted him with other favors. But Walter Prince did trust Carrington—who once held his present position at the ASPR; and anyway, he didn’t have the power to grant Houdini’s motion to remove him from the investigation committee. Only the Scientific American could do that, and Orson Munn was not going to expel another Margery supporter from the jury. Thus, the anticipated Margery decision stood in what Prince called a “comatose state,” with the other committeemen sitting on the fence that separated Houdini and Carrington.

  ♦

  CAN THE DEAD SPEAK TO THE LIVING? That fall Houdini was booked for another tour out west, in which he promised to answer the burning question. He wanted the committee to deliver its verdict on the Margery case before he left, so that he could include an exposé on her in his program. To his consternation that did not happen; Prince had promised the public further investigation and he was “opening the matter de novo.”

  DO SPIRITS RETURN? HOUDINI SAYS NO AND PROVES IT. One week before Halloween, Houdini was back in Denver—this time to warn about the bane of superstition. “I’m trying to regulate this spiritism flood,” he told the press, “to keep half the people from going crazy on the subject of spooks, ghosts, goblins and eerie voices.” The Great Houdini fervently believed in the hereafter—he was not, to be clear, speaking against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s religion. But the spirits did not come back to rap tables, scratch messages on slates, and float lampshades across a dark parlor. “Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge, and other big men, are leading a lot of folks to the bughouse,” he alleged, “because they have befuddled themselves into believing that the dead communicate with the living.”

  Yet if the dead, in his experience, did not call from across the Styx, there was still a lot of noise in the spirit world. The following night, during his demonstration on the methods of false mediums, he caused “a bedlam,” the Denver Post reported, when a former candidate for the Scientific American prize stood up and confronted him. The protester was the Rev. Josie Stewart, who claimed to have followed him all over the country. When she and her gaunt husband yelled objections to Houdini’s anti-Spiritualist gospel, he offered the entire house receipts if the two would come onstage “and give me one message from the beyond.” Undaunted, the reverend offered to “fight it out” with him the next day, before a fair-play audience. “Do it now!” voices in all parts of the house answered for him.

  “She cannot come to the platform now!” shouted her husband—“her health is impaired!” Showing no sympathy, Houdini said he would only battle a woman when absolutely necessary, but the Rev. Josie Stewart was a criminal. “You stand convicted and I know it,” he charged, his voice trembling, his hand pointed righteously at what he claimed were incriminating documents. “Furthermore, you are a follower of non-Godism. You cannot deny that you do not believe in God.”

  Drawing forth his trunks and spiritist equipment—slates, a cabinet, a séance table—and glaring from the stage lights, he offered to place them at the reverend’s disposal if she would step up and summon her spirits. The medium repeated that she would only accept his challenge the following evening. Again the crowd demanded that she “do it now!” This time, though, the defiant couple sat down. “I think that disposes of the Stewart case,” said Houdini. “They are unbelievers.”

  ♦

  While Houdini spoke in the West against the charlatans, Margery continued to conduct test séances in Boston. That fall Prince sat with the candidate on four occasions; McDougall was back in her circle; and Bird, though no longer representing the jury, returned several times to Beacon Hill. Due to their conflicting schedules and personalities, the investigators did not sit together. Having failed to reach a consensus on Margery, they attended her demonstrations individually, with the intention of arriving at their own independent conclusions—a state of affairs Bird lamented. “The committee is dead and doesn’t know it,” he said while blaming his replacement, Prince, for the disintegration of the jury.

  As it happened, Prince was no closer to explaining Margery’s ability to activate a bell placed beyond
her reach. He wanted to see a repeat of the time she made it ring for him in clear light without her husband next to her. But the demand that she manifest in this way, without darkness, frustrated Dr. Crandon: “You write as if I were a stage manager who can turn on a show at any time and under whatever conditions you desire. Such is not the case,” he admonished. When confronted with an intransigent investigator, Roy was apt to question his motives or competence. In his medical opinion, Prince was showing signs of “a mild senile dementia.” He had a systolic blood pressure over 200, and was given less than a year to live by Walter—about the same life span the spirit gave Houdini.

  If the Crandons had trouble with Prince, they were buoyed by an apparent breakthrough with McDougall. The night before Halloween, Margery gave a sitting that included the English psychologist, Roy, and an inquisitive Episcopal minister, Elwood Worcester, who believed in New Thought, faith healing, auto-suggestion, and psychoanalysis—all of which he blended with Christian sacrament. Dr. Worcester tied Margery’s ankles together, then roped her to McDougall for good measure. To his astonishment, the Victrola began to sputter as soon as the lights went out, and minutes later the bell box pealed. Roy turned up the red light. The bell rang while the puzzled cleric carried it around the room. It stopped on command then rang again. This time Worcester could see the spark on the contact plate: the connection had to be caused, he surmised, by an invisible force rather than hocus-pocus.

  From there on, Worcester added psychical research to his metaphysical interests. Roy felt the real triumph, though, was in nudging the skeptical McDougall toward belief in the medium he had once doubted. “I think we have McDougall committed,” he told Sir Arthur. With Carrington convinced and Comstock and McDougall evidently leaning toward a positive verdict, Margery was ringing her way to a clear majority on the jury. Dr. Crandon believed “they were on the verge of a real victory,” so long as McDougall committed to a vote for Margery.

  “I agree that the bell-box phenomena are very impressive but I cannot say outright that they have convinced me of their supernormal nature,” the psychologist wrote Dr. Crandon. “My slow caution must seem excessive,” he admitted. “But you must remember that for me this is my Rubicon.” It was a crossing he was not yet ready to make, though the bell box rang all fall. A signal for Houdini that once again he was needed in Boston.

  ♦

  The medium who was giving her life—literally, Mark Richardson later said—to psychic research, did not reserve her gifts solely for friends and scientists. “Almost overnight 10 Lime Street became the Mecca for pilgrims from all over the world,” Richardson recalled. Two nights a week were reserved for the seekers, their names taken from a long waiting list, who were neither friends of the Crandons nor psychic investigators. They included ministers of all faiths, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, mechanics, and schoolteachers. Unlike the scientists, the lay circle sought to be spiritually enlightened. In addition to wanting to witness her famous physical effects, each new visitor “brought with him his full quota of pet questions as to life here and hereafter.

  “Such extravagant hopes were to be blasted immediately,” Richardson noted. Many sitters became convinced that Walter truly was a discarnate personality, but he was one spirit never eager to describe the life eternal. Language, he explained, was inadequate to convey a picture of his dimension. No disembodied being could describe their existence in a way that was understandable to the living. “As to conditions in the next world, Walter has told us little,” Richardson admitted.

  Walter only said that after dying he had lingered in a sleeplike state while reliving his earthly experience. He awoke after death to find himself with new senses and powers, and a psychic connection to his loved ones still in their bodies. While dismissing visions of angels, harps, and golden cities, he made it clear that disembodied life was unimaginably pleasant. Our physical perception was as crude and narrow as the vision of a frog in a well, he said. Not even mystics could know what it was like when “the silver cord” was broken. Above all, death was not to be feared. No medium who made the crossing in her psychic sleep ever wanted to return to the earth plane, he told the circle. It was even more difficult for Walter to come back, yet he could not leave them until he had developed the kid. He was like the signal and she the receiver. But “conditions must be right in order to tune in successfully. If things go badly you don’t throw away the radio.”

  Sometimes Margery channeled an intruder that blocked Walter’s otherwise strong signal. During a séance in October, Dr. Crandon became alarmed when ghastly snarls were heard from the floor of Psyche’s cabinet. Minutes later Walter whistled a weak greeting. He said his force was low and that he wouldn’t be able to do that much for them. After some perfunctory bell work, and poor prospects for anything else that evening, a conversation began between the ghost and the minister who wanted to know what it was like to cross over.

  Walter told Dr. Worcester that he would find as many descriptions of the afterlife as there were discarnates to convey them. What was his? the minister persisted. Walter answered that after leaving his body, his impressions were very much of the earth plane. It was like waking up in a strange hotel, he whispered, after dreaming of himself in a box and his mother and sisters crying. He knew he was dead, but he wasn’t ready to leave them. Was he happy to realize that he had survived the grave? Worcester asked. “No,” Walter replied. “I was the first in my family over here.”

  Margery stirred, as if to awaken from her trance, while Walter explained that at first he was “homesick and lonesome.” He had wanted to finish out his life on Earth as other people do. It was more difficult, he said, for those who died suddenly. The ones with lingering illnesses drifted unconsciously to the next world and back, but he wasn’t ready to leave the physical plane, and so he hadn’t. Dr. Worcester wanted to know if he could see the sitters, as he had seen his family when they buried him. Walter answered that he perceived rather than saw them, and that, in any case, the physical world was as unreal as a movie; all earthly strivings were absurd—why did they think the kid laughed so much at these gatherings?

  Then what should they be attending to on their plane? Worcester inquired. Your thoughts, the ghost responded. Thoughts were “things,” he whispered. “Look out for them; they go on forever.” As Walter spoke, Roy, straining in the red light, recorded his statement. Suddenly the ghost chortled at his brother-in-law’s stenographic frenzy. “We have imported ten thousand dollars’ worth of pens over here for his use when he gets here.” The sitters echoed his laughter. Walter then wished them “Good night.” And when he was gone, his sister returned to them.

  She Did That with Her Hair

  BITTER PSYCHIC CONTROVERSY RAGES AROUND BOSTON MEDIUM

  —Springfield Union

  HOUDINI REPORT CALLS MARGERY’S “SPOOKS” BOGUS

  —New York Herald

  HUSBAND OF MARGERY ASSAILS PSYCHIC TESTS: HOUDINI IN HOT RETORT

  —Boston Herald

  DO SPIRITS RETURN? It appeared that the jury was no closer to answering the question when in October the Scientific American released its preliminary determination on the Boston medium. There was still no consensus as to whether Margery deserved the psychic prize. The only two judges who had made up their minds disagreed on whether her phenomena were supernormal. As a result, the Crandons were disappointed, Houdini frustrated, and most others unsatisfied with the ambiguous outcome of a seven-month investigation. No matter the lofty goals involved, many saw the psychic challenge as a match between Margery and Houdini—and an announced winner, and loser, had seemed imminent. Few were expecting a draw. After a fifteen-round match in Shelby, Montana, no one had raised the arms of both Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons, declaring them co-victors simply because Dempsey had failed to deliver the knockout blow that was expected. The jury that decided the Miss America contest hadn’t announced that, as some of them preferred the Mary Pickford type and others the Gibson Girl, they could not choose a winner from among t
he teenagers who paraded across the Garden Pier in Atlantic City. No dance marathon ever ended indeterminately, with the prize money pocketed by the owner of the dingy hall that sponsored the competition, because after forty-eight hours it was deemed too dangerous for the two couples still on their feet to continue to shuffle.

  Hereward Carrington, at least, was ready to vote. “As the result of more than forty sittings with Margery I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal (physical) phenomena frequently occur at her séances,” he reported. Walter Prince provisionally disagreed; Comstock too said that “rigid proof has not yet been proven.” They both called for further testing in visible light, while the elusive McDougall could not be reached for his decision. Houdini, conversely, saw no reason for additional trials. “Everything which took place at the séances which I attended was a deliberate and conscious fraud,” he asserted.

  Aside from presenting the jury’s preliminary findings, the Scientific American issued no statement of its own on the medium. Unlike the tendentious articles that Bird used to write, the new psychic editor, E. E. Free, flatly affirmed that the journal’s duty was to pay the award if the committee directed it, but to otherwise keep quiet until the jury reached a final decision.

  ♦

  Even confined in a box, Margery had unleashed more mischief than Pandora, Houdini believed. And with the expert opinions on record, his gag was off and he could publicly accuse her of deception. The day after the Times published the committee’s report on the medium, he released an incendiary pamphlet—Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium Margery—a detailed and damning account of the five séances he’d had with her, complete with illustrations of her effects and diagrams of the alleged trickery behind them. The Hearst papers published his accounts in a series that revealed Margery as a deft and acrobatic medium. Under manual control, she frees her feet to ring the bell box, leans forward and uses her head to raise the séance table, then balances the megaphone like a dunce cap before sending it hurtling toward Houdini. Though no medium was more artful, Houdini claimed to have unveiled all her maneuvers. The supposedly solid spirit cabinet that she propelled across the room, tipped over, or demolished, was rigged to collapse, he charged. What’s more, she had accomplices—Bird and Carrington—to help her in the dark, as well as a husband who had attempted to bribe him. When her confederates were absent, she had tried to smuggle an extendable ruler into her box, but he caught her red-handed with the bell-ringing object.