The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  A Lime Street séance on the evening of January 6 began with the slight lift of a glowing ring that Dingwall provided Walter to play with. When the ghost told him to place his hand palm upward on the table, he felt something cold and clammy brush the nail of his middle finger. As the sensations spread to his other fingers and the rest of his hand, he started at the realization that an invisible being was touching him. “The substance resembled a cold, damp tongue,” Dingwall recorded, “which sometimes appeared to thicken at the end and exert pressure.” When McDougall put his hand across the table, something slimy flopped on it three or four times. Then Reverend Worcester, the most prosaic in his observations, was touched by what felt like a piece of cold raw beef, and with each contact he heard a beastly sound. Later Walter asked for a luminous plaque so that the men could observe the materialization of a black mass that formed shapes variously described as fins, claws, or prehensile terminals that slithered across the table. This “teleplasm,” as they called it, moved toward a basket and slapped it away—then levitated the plaque with the basket precariously balanced on it. The shadowy claws glided toward Margery’s lap—or more precisely to “an opening in the anatomy”—from which they were believed to emanate. When the force was low, they appeared to recede back inside her.

  Walter explained that she had given birth to the teleplasm. In subsequent experiments the matter that emerged from Margery’s vagina formed into a spectral hand—sometimes two, with one molding the other—connected by a placenta cord to her navel. With each flash of red light, Will Conant photographed the phenomena. Dingwall was so impressed that he urged, as a rejoinder to Houdini, the public demonstration that the Crandons scheduled for Jordan Hall. “Nothing can exceed Dingwall’s enthusiasm for the case,” Dr. Crandon informed Sir Arthur. “He is belligerent about it. He wants to proclaim it to the world.” Soon there were other “great developments” to convey to Windlesham. Roy believed 1925 was to be the year when the real experts prevailed over the rabble-rousing Jew on the committee. Orson Munn was disgusted with his jury of experts, wrote Roy. “He hopes that now, since he cannot dissolve the Committee legally, that the white men in it, namely McDougall, Comstock and Carrington will resign. Munn will then appoint a new Committee of McDougall, Worcester and Dingwall, and ask them to decide the case, with award if deserved…You can readily see that at this moment, it looks as if the sun were coming out.”

  While Roy saw bright days ahead for Margery, Dingwall said the darkness necessary for her manifestations was the greatest obstacle to studying them. Unable to exist in light, the psychic structures were verified by touch and brief observation during the red flashes that Walter never seemed to allow when Dingwall most wanted them. The photographs usually captured the solid product when the proofs lay more, he still stressed, in the means of their development. Fully formed hands were not thought to pop out of the medium’s womb as though from a spawning assembly line; rather, they materialized from her ectoplasm. The pictures showed thick globs oozing from Margery’s ear, her mouth, nose, and genitals, or captured the shadowy terminals that supposedly formed from the discharge. But Dingwall was not able to witness or capture what he considered the real magic: the actual transformation of that substance into the psychic rods that moved objects.

  On the other hand, it frustrated Dr. Crandon when researchers expected an immaterial process to be more discernible than physical forces that, though invisible, were accepted as real because of observed chemical effects and reactions. He realized that what Einstein had done with Brownian motion—used it to prove that atoms and molecules exist—was considerably more than could be expected in the psychic field from Dingwall, an anthropologist by training, and a couple of Boston psychologists. So when challenged on the elusiveness, or just plain absurdity, of certain teleplasmic effects, Roy was known to respond, “You didn’t make the Universe; you must accept it.” European researchers like Charles Richet had shown, to Dr. Crandon’s satisfaction, that ectoplasm was real stuff. And he consoled himself that at least Dingwall’s knowledge of magic, physics, and the female anatomy was superior to that of Professor McDougall, who was telling colleagues that Margery’s vagina might be a storage place for spirit hands and fake teleplasm.

  ♦

  Clearly under strain, Margery was ill again and worried about her forthcoming debut at Jordan Hall. She needed a rest, Dingwall suggested to Walter. But the answer from the spirit was a firm “No.” They had to sit every night, he said, so that he could “practice.” Nothing he did would harm the kid, he assured the scientist. “Pay no attention to her,” he announced one evening, “let her groan. She really hasn’t any pain. Blow your nose, Kid…Don’t ask her how she feels.”

  Both Roy and Walter denied that the medium was overworked. On the contrary, Roy remarked, she often emerged from her trances rejuvenated while her sitters were the ones exhausted. Reassured by the doctor, Dingwall let the matter go, though he had doubts that she would go through with the public exhibition.

  At the test séance of January 9, speaking of the “great night” approaching, Walter instructed the circle as to how he wanted his sister to be controlled at Jordan Hall. Dingwall was to have one leg, he said; Roy the other; “Dr. McDougall may have a wing,” the ghost cracked, and “Dr. Worcester may hold her nose if he feels neglected.” The joke produced barely a chuckle. Walter was working with a circle of four serious men—the doctor, the alienist, the anthropologist, the minister—and his phenomena were never more lurid. His materializations were like the severed appendages that live on in ghost stories while the rest of the body decays in a catacomb.

  As soon as Margery passed into trance, a rustling was heard from her lap. Walter instructed Dingwall to run his hand up her stocking until he reached her thigh. But the spirit found Dingwall clumsy: “Your hand is caught in the lining of the bathrobe, follow the stocking.” After trying this, Dingwall found an ice-cold, knobby mass on Margery’s skin. Then another globule was found on the table, connected by a rough placental cord with shiny rings that Dingwall followed to her abdomen. Against the light of the plaque, little fingers, as if amputated, suddenly grew out of the form on the table—some slowly, some quickly. The fingerlike projections lifted a luminous ring “and waved it about with great freedom.” The fingers on the mass vanished as it became more amorphous—its movements “sometimes violent, sometimes stealthy.” Yet the teleplasm shook hands with Dingwall and McDougall. They were later told to wake Psyche by gradual exposures to red light. By midnight the séance was over.

  The spirit hands were the first step to the full materializations Walter promised but had still not delivered. As the experiments continued, though, it became harder to ignore his sister’s physical reactions. After one sitting she suffered nausea and vomiting. Following another she was weighed and found to have somehow lost four pounds during the experiment. Once she complained of “pain, headache, soreness all over.” A séance was canceled when Mrs. Hemenway, while conducting an anatomical search of the medium, discovered that her right ear was bleeding. More often Margery was upbeat—inane when others were serious—and apparently as perplexed as the scientists by what her body was producing. Her ectoplasm continued to take on different appearances and was at various times said to look like the back of an armadillo, a pancake, a starfish, a huge knobby potato—pinkish-gray in color, elongated tuberosities, a membrane filled with a semifluid substance, and the different organs of an animal. The developed forms were described as a pinkish-white appendage and shriveled forearm, detached fingers, a small human skull, and the hand of a child.

  All Eyes Were on Boston

  Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,

  And tempted her out of her gloom—

  And conquered her scruples and gloom;

  And we passed to the end of the vista,

  But were stopped by the door of a tomb—

  By the door a legended tomb.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  “The baby is born. And it’s a hand
,” Walter announced. After the séance, Dr. Crandon spoke of the materializations with awe, as though he had both planted the seed for these effects and delivered the teleplasm. He had planted something within Margery, Houdini conjectured, but as the only committeeman who was persona non grata at Lime Street, he could not touch Walter’s clammy hands or witness the production of ectoplasm. And since his colleagues had also ostracized him—even denying him séance reports—he turned to a network of sleuths, journalists, and society friends for information on the Crandons.

  One important source was Quincy Kilby, treasurer and historian of the Boston Theater, and an acquaintance of the Crandons. When Margery first attracted notice as a pseudonymous medium, it was Kilby who had informed Houdini of her true identity. Months before the Herald revealed Margery’s obscure roots, Kilby suspected she was not really of society. Her vaguely rural accent had never been heard, he was certain, in a Seven Sisters dormitory. Particularly after a couple of highballs there was sometimes a coarseness to Margery—her hands were not soft like a Gold Coast lady’s, and Kilby sensed she was not afraid to get them dirty. Even her ectoplasm was not the fine, diaphanous stuff that one expected, though Dingwall was still keen for a public display of that sought-after substance.

  “Nothing surprises me about Margery,” Houdini wrote Kilby. “A woman who will drag her dead brother from the grave and exploit him before the public as a means of gaining social prominence would do anything.” However gregarious she seemed, and no matter how erudite her circle, Houdini believed something wicked was fomenting at 10 Lime Street—a plot more insidious, given the influence of her patrons and zeal of her followers. “I have just received warning letters,” he informed Kilby, “of what Margery and the Spiritualists are going to do to me.”

  Houdini feared that his legacy would be tarnished if he should die tomorrow and Margery continue to flaunt her powers. Even his provocative pamphlet had not revealed the darker details, he hinted, behind their encounter, and he did not want his version of events to be lost, or distorted after his death by mediums who claimed to channel his own disembodied spirit. “I am going to write the real inside of my experiences in Boston so that some day the truth will eventually be known,” Houdini informed his friend Shaw, the Harvard collector.

  In the field of mediumistic research, where matters may play out beyond the grave, Houdini knew his case could be won or lost posthumously. So he made photostatic copies of important documents concerning the Margery case, including a copy of Bird’s aborted article on the medium—the one that allegedly proved the journal was about to endorse her—and sent them to his brother Hardeen, “in case anything should happen to me.”

  Of more immediate concern was what the Crandons planned to unveil at Jordan Hall. On January 19, twelve days before Margery’s public séance, Houdini wrote Kilby three times, pressing him for information on her “new routine of manifestations.” The uncertainty was tormenting him. A rival mystifier had rented a hall for the express purpose, he believed, of embarrassing him. Not even his stage rival, Thurston the Great, would have attempted it. When Houdini had mysteriously produced the photograph of Walter crushed to death by the railroad car, the witnesses onstage were astonished. It would be considered a far superior feat, though, for Margery to summon her dead brother—his voice and some aspect of his form—back from the void, so that he might perform a few uncanny effects for a hushed audience.

  As a matter of fact, it was a restrained and select crowd that gathered in Jordan Hall on the last evening of January. While less than the 3,000 that had seen Houdini in a larger auditorium, Margery’s was a fine turnout, Stewart Griscom noted. Thirty minutes before showtime he could spot only a few vacant seats in the rear balcony. Yet the event wasn’t open to the general public; sensation seekers and even some with press credentials were turned away. Most in attendance were sympathetic to the Crandons. In a minor flap, Dr. McDougall, the host of the affair, was denied admission until he could prove his identity. By Roy’s design, no intruders—the Houdinis and Joseph Rinns of this world—were going to be allowed to disturb the proceedings. Instead, the Crandons had invited the Boston members of the ASPR, the medical faculties of Tufts and Harvard, and a good portion of the teaching staff at MIT. An inspection of the audience made it clear that most of those invitees had accepted. But where were the Crandons?

  The evening began with McDougall announcing his gratitude to Eric Dingwall for coming to America to test Margery. McDougall affirmed that Boston had always been “the home of new things, the very fountainhead of new religions, of new cults, new methods of healing, new wonders of all sorts.” Ultimately it had produced Margery, he said, and with her rise “the very eyes of the world have been centered on Boston.” Griscom’s own eyes shifted to Dingwall as the speaker turned the stage over to the SPR investigator. Dingwall was the most qualified man in the world to determine the cause of Margery’s phenomena, Dr. McDougall declared.

  And tonight it would be his show, in lieu of the star medium. Days earlier, Griscom had surprised Houdini with gratifying news: the Crandons were not going to be in attendance at their own demonstration. Margery had gotten cold feet. Or rather, the Crandons decided they were playing into Houdini’s hands by trying to answer his exposé with a public séance. “They said they were going to show me up and denounce me by having the medium present her manifestations in front of an audience and all it turned out to be was a lecture by Dingwall,” Houdini gloated.

  Dingwall actually gave what the Herald described as a vivid account of the phenomena he witnessed at Lime Street and a stinging assessment of how Houdini and his colleagues had mishandled Margery. To McDougall’s embarrassment, Dingwall accused the Scientific American of giving psychic research an “evil odor”—and of treating the Margery candidacy like “a burlesque puzzle or vaudeville show.” He blamed the row chiefly on the entertainer “whose knowledge of the art of self-liberation is as profound as his ignorance of the method of scientific investigation.” But Dingwall questioned the competence of all the judges at the Charlesgate séances. He could not understand why the ruler controversy wasn’t settled by simply dusting the suspicious instrument for fingerprints. He encouraged Margery to come to London so that her effects could be examined in a less antagonistic environment and with more advanced equipment. The English SPR was less fractious and publicity-minded, he suggested, than Orson Munn’s hung jury.

  Later he called for the lights to be dimmed, as if the spirits were to be summoned after all. Just like Sir Arthur’s lectures, the highlight of the evening was the proofs he projected. Unlike Doyle’s slides, however, these “pictures were not of shadowy vapors or mist-like forms, but were of solid masses, strange things which revealed themselves to the eye of the camera.” Clearly they issued from Margery’s body, and her flood of ectoplasm looked almost too weird, Griscom thought, to be invented. But without a live séance the event lacked the intended impact. The circumspect Dingwall was not a powerful orator like Sir Arthur. When he responded to questions, his voice failed to carry. “Louder!” a woman next to Griscom shouted. The researcher walked forward, more into the stage light, and with a strained effort raised his voice. Griscom felt that he was still not loud enough; he was supposed to be presenting the case to a larger audience than this hall of Margery partisans.

  From what Walter Prince gathered from the newspapers, Dingwall’s presentation, despite its coldly scientific tone, was a thinly disguised tribute to Margery—another glowing feather for her to wear in her silk headband. With Houdini trying her daily before thousands at the Hippodrome, Dingwall had defended her in a dignified and widely covered forum. This time, Prince mused, her savior was the SPR representative, yet ever since discovering her spiritist powers, the right advocate—Doyle, Bird, Carrington—entered Margery’s life, as if each materialized at the opportune time in her development. In response to Houdini’s charges, Bird, who wrote “rhapsodically of her personality and charm,” was praising Margery’s work in auditoriums thro
ughout the country. Unlike any other medium, she inspired chivalrous gestures among otherwise hard-boiled journalists, conjurers, and researchers. It was a kind of magic, Prince joked—though not the kind available to male mediums or shrews like Palladino.

  By this time Dr. Crandon anticipated that Margery’s gifts would be endorsed by Dingwall and the English SPR—an investigative body that he deemed superior to Prince’s haphazardly constituted SciAm committee. The jury had tested Margery for more than a year and the Crandons were tired, Roy told Prince, of its endless infighting and deliberations. In favoring Dingwall’s investigation, the doctor treated Prince and the New York experts like jilted lovers. Of Prince’s group only the Englishman McDougall was now allowed to test Margery. When Prince wrote Roy to try to arrange another official jury sitting, he answered that she was tied up with Dingwall’s investigation until February 14, when the SPR officer would return to London. More pointedly, he told Prince that if the committee did not disavow Houdini’s verdict and ban him from further investigation, there would be no more séances for the judges.

  Whatever wonders Margery was showing McDougall and Dingwall in private, there seemed little likelihood for further SciAm tests that winter. There was no point, Munn decided, in deferring a Margery decision if the Crandons were not going to cooperate—especially as there was only one judge, McDougall, who had not already submitted an opinion on the medium. Even now the psychologist wanted more time to test her. But at Prince’s behest, McDougall finally agreed to vote on whether her powers were genuine. Her hopes for the psychic prize lay in the hands of the judge who had so warmed to her that he presided over the Jordan Hall exhibition. Three weeks earlier, McDougall had praised her work in a letter to Roy, calling it a “remarkable and outstanding case of mediumship.” He had been the first committeeman to investigate Margery, and his would be the last word in the contest.