The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Released while he was lecturing on spirit fraud, Houdini’s exposé cost him as much to publicize as the Scientific American was offering in prize money to the psychics. Soon he was giving popular exhibitions on how he unmasked Margery, while his tour wound slowly to Boston.

  Spiritists at every stop turned out in defense of their medium. CAN THE DEAD SPEAK TO LIVING? After Houdini answered the question negatively while exposing Margery’s methods at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, legions of her supporters staged a protest in the same auditorium: HOUDINI DRAWS WRATH OF 1,500 SPIRITUALISTS, the Chicago Tribune reported. “No man has the right to get on a platform and ridicule a religion,” declared the president of the Illinois State Spiritualists’ Association. The speaker went on to praise Bird and Carrington and then—after more haranguing of Houdini—attempted to give an exhibition of the kind of supernal force the magician was discrediting. Working with the psychic auras of volunteers from the audience, he healed one man’s rheumatic pains while failing to cure two others of the nervous spasms that were their chief complaint that evening.

  Houdini was galvanizing, as only he could, a psychic army of enemies—not to mention the disfavor of researchers who felt he was the rogue in his own narrative. “I have just got the loan of one of Houdini’s pink pamphlets,” wrote Robin J. Tillyard, an Australian biologist sympathetic to the Crandons. “It shows Houdini up pretty badly. One can only conclude that he saw in Margery a performer far superior to himself and, taking the bull by the horns, resolved to ruin her.”

  In defense of the medium, Dr. Crandon gave the Boston Herald his ninety or so transcripts of the séances for the SciAm judges—a veritable Book of Margery. These records, kept by Drs. Crandon and Richardson, had been signed at the conclusion of every séance by each judge—including Houdini after each of the five demonstrations that he witnessed. “A fact is a holy thing,” Dr. Crandon told Stewart Griscom; and his reports indicated that under “perfect control” phenomena occurred. “The wonder is that there has been any semblance of success,” Roy stated, “considering the atmosphere of distrust, criticism, and hatred that has been exhibited by the committee.”

  Though Dr. Crandon wanted to avoid “mud-slinging,” one of the judges, whom he didn’t name, had tried to plant a carpenter’s ruler at the Charlesgate sitting, for the purpose of discrediting the medium. The doctor felt it was the duty, “as gentlemen,” of all members of the committee to publicly denounce this investigator. For this reason, and because the judges had apparently forgotten the records they signed, Dr. Crandon suggested that Orson Munn rename his jury “The Scientific American committee for the prevention of psychic phenomena.”

  ♦

  While not the journal of the upper crust, the Boston Herald won its first Pulitzer in 1924. An old daily known for solid reporting, it was becoming the paper of record on the Margery mediumship—and by December most revelations in the case were first published in the Herald.

  Having taken Dr. Crandon’s statement, Griscom sought out Comstock and McDougall the next day, to determine where they stood on the controversy. The headline of the story of December 19, LOCAL MEN HOLD HOUDINI UNJUST TO MRS. CRANDON, made it clear that they sympathized with the psychic. The commission may not have been in unison when judging Margery’s phenomena, but with the exception of Prince, it was of one voice in condemning Houdini as “prejudiced” and “unfair” to Margery.

  At Harvard, Dr. McDougall described the experiments with the bell box that he and Elwood Worcester were conducting with Margery. “I am not prepared to revise all my ideas of the laws of nature because a bell rings a few times on a table in semi-darkness,” McDougall clarified. But he was inclined to attribute Margery’s work to psychic force, if the bell box continued to ring under experimental conditions and if other tests proved positive.

  While sitting in his Harvard office, the professor slammed Houdini for asserting that he had saved a misguided committee from awarding the psychic prize to Margery. “I do not require Houdini to teach me something about which I probably know more than he does,” McDougall snorted. Indeed, he announced that the Margery case would be decided by Prince, Comstock, and himself—“a definite statement of belief from any one of us would award the prize to the Crandons.”

  At the Charlesgate Hotel, where the Margery mediumship was supposed to have received its deathblow, Griscom interviewed Daniel Comstock, whom he found more supportive of Mrs. Crandon than in his statement for the Scientific American. The substantiation of a mental force was Comstock’s mission, and he wanted to complete his experiments with the medium that was his conduit. He said that just as radio activity and our new knowledge of the atom had revolutionized physics, so would certain physical laws have to be refashioned—because psychic energy had been “proved beyond question.”

  Margery was just one of such cases, Comstock said, though she was by far “the most interesting and promising” medium that he knew of. He doubted that the spirits were behind her mysterious phenomena, but neither did he share Houdini’s belief that she was a world-class conjurer. He recalled how when he placed one hand tightly over her mouth and nose, and the other over Dr. Crandon’s, Walter’s voice still spoke to him. “How or from where it came I don’t know. But it came.”

  In addressing her recent failure to perform in his apartment, Comstock speculated that the séances were blanks because the atmosphere was explosive and hostile. He said that Houdini “appeared to be convinced in advance that the phenomena were fraudulent and always reasoned from that basis. For instance, in discussing a certain test he said to me, ‘She did that with her hair’ ”—an accusation that Comstock found unlikely. While it was still not certain that Margery’s manifestations were caused by psychic power, he said that he was willing to bet they were, and bet heavily.

  It Was Some Party, Wasn’t It?

  When the light was extinguished,

  She covered me warm,

  And prayed to the angels

  To keep me from harm—

  To the queen of the angels

  To shield me from harm.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Any vindication for Margery when the Hub experts rebuked Houdini was as short-lived as a winning streak by the hapless Boston Braves. Before the ABC Club could revel with Walter over the good press the previous day, the Herald published another scoop—this time an interview with a man who knew Mina as intimately as Dr. Crandon, yet supported Houdini’s contention that she was neither the Beacon Hill matron nor the bona fide medium she seemed to be.

  Stewart Griscom was beginning to suspect that Margery’s pleasing scent inevitably threw investigators off the right trail. The public deserved to know more about Mrs. Crandon, he said, because her background and experience should have a strong bearing on whether her psychic work was accepted as genuine. On December 19, Margery’s past life was unveiled on the front page of the Herald—right next to a photograph of President and Mrs. Coolidge posing awkwardly in skis on a snowless White House lawn. Griscom had found and interviewed Mina’s first husband, a Faneuil Hall grocer named Earl Rand. And the exposure of her common background—she had been married to a lowly shop owner on Tremont Street!—diminished the aura that had made her seem more trustworthy than less cultured psychics.

  Earl Rand had been introduced to Mina Stinson in early 1909 at the Union Congregational Church, where she was employed as a secretary. She lived then with her mother, Jemima, and her older siblings, Clara and Walter—who worked for the New Haven & Hartford Railroad. It did not take a long courtship to get her away from Clara’s South End boardinghouse, and by the following year she and Rand were husband and wife. The couple had a son, Alan Rand. They toiled together at the provision store not far from their home, but Earl recalled that they “enjoyed the hard climb.”

  The Rands lived together uneventfully until 1917—when, complaining of stomach pain and fearing appendicitis, Mina was admitted to the private Dorchester Hospital where Dr. Crandon was on staff. Not long after Mina
’s acquaintance with Roy, she and her husband began to fight. Following a violent disagreement she abruptly left him on Christmas Day. A few weeks later, in January 1918, she sued the “cruel and abusive” Rand for divorce and custody of their son. By the fall, she and her son had made the short but uncommon move from South Boston to Beacon Hill. She had wed Dr. Crandon—her surgeon, savior, and proud skipper of a yacht that carried her to waters that Rand considered out of her depth.

  While many details, including her childhood in rural Ontario, were not included in the Herald article, enough was said to indicate that Margery’s pedigree was acquired when she moved to Lime Street. More damaging was the statement her former husband made about her psychic work. Rand said that she had never displayed any clairvoyance when she was his wife. Margery the medium was a stranger to him; they hadn’t spoken since their divorce. Yet he claimed there were no hard feelings between them—even though Roy had adopted his son and renamed him John Crandon. Earl had also remarried and the Crandons bought their produce from him; the grocer insisted he had no ax to grind. But from what he had heard from Mina’s mother, with whom he still talked, it was Walter, rather than Houdini, who was the séance autocrat. The ghost had banished those from the circle, including Mina’s sister, who doubted he was real. Jemima, however, was always welcome—and at one recent gathering she heard Walter promise that Houdini would be dead within a year.

  “What do you think of spirit manifestations?” the reporter inquired.

  “Bunk,” Earl Rand replied.

  The next day reporters from other newspapers descended on the shop on Tremont Street. Once again Rand was asked what he thought about Mina’s psychic gifts. “Ridiculous, absolutely foolish,” he declared. “While Margery was my wife she never had any spiritualistic powers. She took lessons on the cornet before we were married. She tried the cello and she could play a few pieces on the piano, but I never knew her to be able to talk with ghosts.”

  ♦

  The Herald conducted a parallel investigation into Dr. Crandon’s past and uncovered material that also suggested deep wrinkles beneath the polished veneer. Like Mina, the doctor did not like to discuss his matrimonial history, and for good reason, Stewart Griscom believed. In the summer of 1904, six years after finishing medical school, Roy married Annie Lawton, a petite and diffident girl. Their union produced a daughter, if not a happy home. The doctor routinely came home late, and Annie suspected he was unfaithful rather than detained by hospital work. On their fourth anniversary, Roy said their marriage was all a mistake. He needed his freedom, he explained. The doctor urged her to take their daughter to Europe for an extended trip, and then to return and divorce him.

  After many months, Annie did reluctantly sue him for divorce. On the witness stand in Reno, she said that while Dr. Crandon was wealthy from the sales of his medical books and other enterprises, his fortune was never what she sought. “I wanted the love and protection of a husband and not money,” she quietly sobbed. Later she would marry one of Dr. Crandon’s best friends and move to Palm Beach. With his marriage dissolved and his daughter far away, the doctor had his freedom. Three years later, he was ready nonetheless for another attempt at matrimony.

  In December 1914, a Maryland belle named Lucy Armes—formerly married to a US Navy doctor from Alabama—exchanged vows with a distinguished Old Yankee. Lucy, who deferred to no male authority, could not have been more dissimilar to the first Mrs. Crandon. She had the temperament of her father, Col. George Armes—an impulsive hero of both the Civil and Indian Wars; and in the beginning Roy admired her dash and fiery convictions. She was an active suffragette and aspiring actress, pursuits that he supported. But regrettably, he found that Lucy’s aristocratic charms faded with familiarity. She was relentlessly demanding, had a violent temper, and was even more insane, Roy’s friends came to feel, than her volatile father. Cruelly inattentive to his compliant first wife, Dr. Crandon suffered at Lucy’s hands.

  One morning, a few months after their wedding, Roy was boarding the Black Hawk off the coast of Camden, Maine, when he noticed a small skiff drawing near. In it were Lucy and a strange man, returning from an all-night spree. After being taken on board Roy’s schooner, Lucy flaunted her tryst to Edison Brown and other future members of the ABC Club. She had gone ashore the night before to attend a hotel dance, which, in this boondock, had ended far too early for her. So Lucy had joined a group of men, “live ones,” on a motor trip to the top of a mountain she now pointed out. Shamelessly, she announced that she had returned to the hotel at four a.m.—and presumably spent the rest of the night with the local gentleman who had just rowed her, in his rumpled suit, back to Roy.

  Dr. Crandon was no more constant or faithful. But the detachment he exhibited that could so depress Annie sent Lucy into a violent rage. One night, in their home at 60 Fenway, she punched him in the face and pulled his hair, saying that she was going to ruin him or, failing that, blind and shoot him. On another occasion, she attacked him in front of his friends—breaking his glasses and stomping, when he fell, on his hand. Two years into their marriage, Lucy had declared domestic war on Dr. Crandon, vowing to never provide him with what she said he wanted most: a male child.

  According to court documents and old newspaper reports obtained by Griscom, the doctor, after suing Lucy for divorce, charged that she “abused and shamed him.” One day Lucy showed up at the City Hospital and “uttered serious charges against him to the superintendent.” She returned to their home at Fenway after midnight with three men she had picked up at a dance. As she removed her coat and lit a cigarette, one of her escorts, a Fred or Charlie, declared, “It was some party, wasn’t it?” The party was just beginning. The three men remained at the Crandons’ home until six in the morning, while Roy endured their carousing and liberties with his wife.

  Even before Margery, Dr. Crandon had been featured in the newspapers for what became a scandalous divorce. In addition to his money, stocks, bonds, Maine cabin, and yacht, she wanted him to be her escort at least once a week; and she demanded an apology from him, in her presence, to Fred and Charlie.

  Griscom had wondered why Roy, a highly regarded physician, was banned from City Hospital, where he had been an attending surgeon for more than twenty years. There were rumors, which he thought unfounded, that the doctor had been involved in a financial malfeasance of some kind; and whispers, which sounded more credible, of affairs with nurses. In truth, Roy was quietly dismissed because Lucy revealed that he was performing illegal abortions in a Catholic town.

  That was why, during his divorce proceedings, Dr. Crandon happened to be working in the Dorchester Hospital when Mina Rand was admitted with acute stomach pain. Soon after examining his patient, he relieved her of the inflamed vestigial organ that was in danger of bursting and poisoning her.

  Voodoo Priestess

  Houdini is the opposition’s last hope in condemning Spiritualism and if he fails I don’t know what they will do. I do hope that a National worker gets him in every city he shows.

  —A CORRESPONDENT FOR THE National Spiritualist

  Death within a year will be Harry Houdini’s punishment for impugning the validity and honesty of Mrs. Le Roi G. Crandon.

  —Daily Mirror

  The Great Houdini’s campaign was like a maelstrom in spiritland. In Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, rackets disguised as spiritist churches were broken up. Not long after he lectured in Los Angeles, the local police raided “seven purported psychic headquarters” and hauled to court forty-six ministers and mediums, charging them with larceny by “trick and device.” What he never told audiences was that the legitimate Spiritualist Church in Los Angeles had helped to drive out the rogues.

  Occultists saw the local crackdowns as old-time witch hysteria. And Massachusetts, where the Crandons were already beginning to feel persecuted, was where the magician appeared next. Launched on the Pacific Coast, his anti-Spiritualist tour was going to end in a public exposure of Margery that was booked at
Boston’s Symphony Hall. He had visited many cities in 1924 and at each stop presented his renditions of her séances. “It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer,” he said; upstanding men trained to deal only with facts could not contend with a lady “whose stock in trade is a bag of tricks.”

  But was she a magician or a witch? Just before Christmas, Houdini seemed to want to demonize Margery when he told reporters that she was trying to use the forces of black magic to bring about his death. Her threats had been carried to him, he said, by “semi-public statements” she made “in the name of evil spirits” against his life. Then he described for reporters the satanic rituals he said she led. “A wax-doll image of me will be made,” he claimed. “The doll will stand at the bedside of my enemy, who will prick it with pen-knife blades, while chanting certain curses characteristic of the black days of the Middle Ages.”