The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  The Unkindest Cut of All

  The story in the Boston Herald shocked Mrs. Crandon. “The famous Margery case is over so far as the Scientific American Psychic Investigation is concerned.” No one on the committee had bothered to call her with the decision, yet on February 12, 1925, a negative verdict was delivered. She had failed to convince four of the five judges that her mediumship was authentic. There would be no award for the Boston medium, nor further investigation of the case by the Scientific American. In the end she had been rejected almost as brusquely as the other candidates. Because three of the judges had had no sittings with Margery since their previous determinations, only two were heard from—jointly, Prince and McDougall announced that they had “observed no phenomena of which we can assert that they could not have been produced by normal means.”

  Prince said in his individual statement that the séance conditions the Crandons insisted on were “embarrassing and suspicious.” While at first less severe, McDougall charged that her mediumship might have been a hoax Roy concocted to show the gullibility of scientists. Shortly after the announcement Margery underwent a sinus operation where she endured the jabs of “wires and long pointed knives.” But since she liked McDougall, his “was the unkindest cut of all. I wonder if he really means what he says?” she wrote Dingwall.

  The postmortem was repugnant to the Crandons. In his brief statement Prince spoke of the unusual private séance he’d had with Margery and how he suspected she hadn’t actually rung the bell box he controlled in his lap. Rather, he believed she rang one she concealed, then and at other times, between her knees and in her undergarments. McDougall went even farther up the medium’s dress in revealing her supposed methods. In his report that ran in the Boston Transcript and later in the Scientific American, he suggested that she concealed fake ectoplasmic hands within “one particular opening in her anatomy.” Privately, he said that Dr. Crandon had surgically expanded Margery’s “most convenient storehouse.”*1 So whether she was in bed with her researchers, as Houdini attested, or packing objects in her vagina, the suspicions of some of the jury members were clear: Mina Crandon was a loose woman.

  Often the mass she produced had an inert and grisly quality that smelled to McDougall like something from a butcher’s shop. Suspecting that the teleplasm was composed of animal organs, he had taken photographs of it to a Harvard physiologist and a zoologist, both of whom confirmed that the masses contained what appeared to be the cartilaginous rings of an animal’s trachea. McDougall concluded that Walter’s hands were molded “of the lung of some animal.” He alleged that Dr. Crandon surgically manipulated the meaty tissue into the forms that Margery hid in her anatomy. The ectoplasmic effects that had amazed Dingwall, and the photographs that had awed the professors at Jordan Hall, were conversely what “clinched the decision” for William McDougall.

  Admittedly, some of her work still puzzled him, but in general the more stringent the control, the fewer the manifestations. “The ectoplasm exhibited abundant and most intriguing movements,” but only when her husband controlled her right hand and only with the lights dimmed. McDougall dismissed the evidentiary value of Walter’s disembodied voice—one that reportedly emanated from all kinds of places and directions—when he said he never sensed it coming from any source other than the psychic. His judgments were a far cry from weeks earlier, when he’d praised the Margery mediumship. In a mea culpa, McDougall conceded that in his recent letter to Roy, “I stated my openness of mind towards the phenomena too strongly.” He publicly apologized as well for presiding over the Jordan Hall demonstration. In hindsight he realized that it looked odd to host a defense of the medium just before condemning her, but he did it, he claimed, out of obligation to Dingwall. He concluded that the mediumship, however remarkable, was “an extreme case of double personality” that ought to fall within the field of abnormal psychology.

  Publicly, Margery appeared unruffled in defeat. “The decision does not bother me at all,” she told a Boston newspaper. “And I can certainly say I am neither discouraged or disappointed…Any further statement must come from my husband. It is up to him to do all the talking.” Privately, though, she was crestfallen. “Needless to say I am quite discouraged,” she admitted to Dingwall. “McDougall’s blast quite froze the kindness within me.”

  All of Margery’s vital force, be it psychic or physical, had been engaged for endless months in the pursuit of this one goal—to win the endorsement of the committee of experts. Even if she were only a tireless producer of phony effects, as Houdini insisted, she was no less distressed at having been rejected by the judges of the contest that made her a celebrity. She was the queen of psychical research, and Malcolm Bird the queen maker. His reports still lauded her psychic gifts, while McDougall’s indicted her as just another delusive miracle worker—the latest ingenious quack or false Spiritualist messiah. Though Hereward Carrington’s support hadn’t wavered, the two scientists Roy thought were on the verge of crossing the Rubicon, Comstock and McDougall, had turned away.

  But like Pandora’s box, it was easier to open the Margery case than to close it. Voices on two planes immediately challenged the verdict: “McDougall couldn’t do any better without changing the philosophy of a life-time,” Walter whispered to his circle. “Tell him the kid carries equipment in her insides of a little ice-box, a pair of bellows, and six lungs with bones in them. She chews liver for a cud. She has insides as big as a cow.”

  At the Boston City Club, Malcolm Bird held up copies of séance reports, bearing McDougall’s signature, which contradicted the psychologist’s statements that Margery never manifested under perfect control and in red light. “I’m afraid,” said Bird, “he has a bad memory.” By this time, though, Roy’s hopes, and emphatic missives, were directed toward England. He had turned the case over to Dingwall, “the research officer of the parent of all psychical societies—the supreme court of appeal.” Roy promised that Dingwall would “find the gateway to a high place in psychic research” through his work with Margery. In her own inimitable way, she too cajoled him. “We have never had anyone here we missed more,” she wrote Dingwall; for he was “the one and only investigator in the world,” and she needed his “cheery smile.” None of the others could compare, Margery hinted, to the scientist who directed the study of her ectoplasm, and replaced constrictive methods of control with the glowing bands she wore like haloes in the séance.

  ♦

  Astonishingly, after what had appeared to be the decisive case in his contest, Orson Munn said the hunt was on for another psychic candidate. An editorial in the Times called the endeavor futile. The Scientific American was not going to find another contestant with credentials like Margery’s. “She was educated; she had never sought to exhibit her powers for hire and she had no history of association with mediums or magicians who might teach her the tricks of mystification.” Mrs. Crandon was the one true candidate—and yet after many months and scores of trials, the committee determined that not a single of her observed effects was genuinely psychic. “Margery,” the Times opined, “might have won a peace prize with much less effort.” The verdict was considered “rather unsatisfactory,” after so much of the experts’ time and Munn’s money.

  Whatever the cost, Margery’s critics felt that science had won an important victory. For them an occult revival spelled the end of the period of rationalism that had begun not so long ago, when scientists like Newton and Descartes demystified the laws of nature. Not everyone saw the debunking of mediums as a sign of progress, however. The Baltimore Sun observed that if Mrs. Crandon had been found genuine, the award would have signaled a discovery “far transcending any miracle of science, far more revolutionary in its effect upon thought and life than any material wonders.” Yet the “long cherished human hope” remained “deferred, and Margery of Boston joins the far-flung line of unconvincing charlatans.”

  Soon it was clear that the obituary for Margery’s psychic career, and the eulogy for the spiritist movemen
t, had been written prematurely. Among the ASPR directorate were steadfast believers in her mediumship, and the Scientific American verdict caused a dispute that divided the entire sphere of psychical research according to one’s attitude toward Margery. The schism began when Walter Prince was demoted by Frederick Edwards, president of the ASPR, for what he thought was prejudiced and poor handling of the Margery case.

  A Spiritualist, a Detroit clergyman, Edwards was not comfortable overseeing researchers like Prince and McDougall, who were openly skeptical toward his movement.*2 So when Edwards, allied with Mark Richardson and other Margery supporters, won a power struggle within the organization, the ASPR hired a new investigator of physical mediums. To Prince’s consternation, Malcolm Bird—“a man whose journalistic methods were distasteful to every member of the Scientific American Committee”—was given his former position: research officer of the ASPR, the traditional function of the most respected ghost hunter in America.

  The organization that was supposed to solve the enduring mystery of psychic phenomena was now, warned Prince, in Dr. Crandon’s deep pockets. In consequence, Prince, along with Houdini and McDougall, quit the ASPR. The aging investigator promptly formed a Boston Society for Psychical Research, and brought in Hub investigators who repudiated the Margery mediumship. Meanwhile, Bird, the young turk, was returning to Lime Street—despite a letter he’d received from Roy’s sister, Laura, warning that Margery was on the verge of a breakdown: “Mrs. C is reaching her limit nervously—& the goose who lays the golden eggs is going to be killed unless there is some let up somewhere. She is threatening not to sit at all for any of you anymore. Rather than this happen, I would suggest that when you go up you stay at a hotel.”

  Brushing off Laura’s concern, Bird did stay and sit with Margery, and he found the medium in good form—only one night was there any sign of turmoil. A sitting was winding down that April when suddenly Walter’s whisper came through forebodingly. “Good night, I’ve got to go now, quick.” Moments later Bird and the other sitters felt the entire house shake as Boston was hit by another earthquake.

  * * *

  *1 He once also wondered if Dr. Crandon had inserted some sort of refrigeration device within her vagina, to give the ectoplasm its cold texture.

  *2 When McDougall was president of the ASPR he tried to bring more conventional scientists into the organization. The psychic board had resisted and eventually replaced him in 1923 with Edwards.

  The Craziest Road of All

  Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road

  And the craziest road of all!

  Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode,

  As it did in the days of Saul,

  And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store

  For such as go down on the road to En-dor!

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  Passing shadowy gaslit lanes and brick homes of Federal and Georgian style, it struck the reporter that the Crandons’ neighborhood looked unchanged since the days of witch trials. “The house,” he wrote of 10 Lime Street, “stands hardly a stone’s throw from that spot on Boston Common where the colonial rulers built their gallows and executed their witches. Indeed, I do not see how a phantom can possibly make its way to Margery’s house without rousing the ghosts of those old witch hunters, who, with faggot and Scripture, pursued through this very neighborhood many an ancient medium.”

  The visitor, John T. Flynn, was not the usual ghost-chasing scribe; no unshaven hack with a slouch hat, he was a gentlemanly reporter who saw more to worry about in trade unions than supposed witch covens. If anything, he found Margery to be a good witch—a patroness of wisdom—whose library held the enlightened works of Hume, Thoreau, and Emerson. Quickly becoming one of the couple’s favorite newsmen, Flynn would write a long and sympathetic portrait of Margery: “The Witch of Beacon Hill,” for Collier’s. In the most eloquent interview she ever gave, the medium communicated volubly with Flynn. “She seemed to enjoy answering my questions,” he reported, “and telling me of her tormentors.”

  Her greatest antagonist remained the magician who had associated her with darker witchcraft. Her notoriety was partially due to Houdini’s popular exposés, yet he believed she wouldn’t lose her mystique until the word “fraud” was indelibly stamped next to her name. When the committee denied her the psychic prize without exposing her as a cheat, as he had urged, it had not diminished the Margery craze. Months later, at the International Spiritualist Congress in Paris, a near riot occurred when thousands of citizens, a throng too large for the auditorium, clamored to see Doyle’s lantern slides of her ectoplasm. In London, Dingwall continued to trumpet her as “the medium of modern times.” Meanwhile, in Boston, just after Dingwall left, a new group of scholarly investigators sought to test her. “It was strange to find the intellectual university of Harvard in the throes of a mental, if not a moral, revolution because of one woman,” noted Robin Tillyard, the Australian entomologist sympathetic to the Crandons.

  Harry Houdini, among others, petitioned Harvard’s president, Abbott Lowell, to forbid Margery from being tested again at his “wonderful institution.” But in May the medium’s chief nemesis kept her topical by bringing his spook act back to Boston. Oddly, after Houdini’s run at Keith’s was over, a disturbance there made it seem as if Walter still haunted the theater. During performances iron pellets, deliberately launched, fell onto the orchestra, wounding a number of terrified spectators. For a subsequent show “the police distributed forty plain-clothes men throughout the audience with the view of detecting the criminal,” Dr. Crandon wrote Dingwall. Again the missiles struck with no culprit visible. A reporter for the Associated Press phoned Margery to tell her the police had just about “come to the conclusion that it is the spirits who are doing it.” Did they really think, she gasped, that she was responsible for the mischief there?

  Witches were no longer held accountable for the darkening of the sun and shaking of the earth, or mysteries like that at Keith’s. Yet Margery would soon face what she joked was as bad as a witch trial: another Harvard inquiry. Her case hadn’t been solved to everyone’s satisfaction. Even Walter Prince, who doubted her supernormal gifts, recognized that there was something extraordinary about this medium. “Margery,” he told Dingwall, “has developed a technique which is very remarkable, but we have to put up with the fact that there are remarkable people in the world and even geniuses of which she may be one.” Even so, her riding companion, Kitty Brown, failed to see anything devious about her. “If they knew how dumb you really were,” she remarked, “no one would accuse you of such things.”

  ♦

  In her Collier’s interview, Mrs. Crandon recalled the amusement-seeking visit she and Kitty once made to the spirit medium who reunited her with her dead brother. Goodness, was it only three years since they rode toward that first psychic adventure? Since then she had been imbued with a gift, but also a stigma she hoped to erase.

  “You want to know what it feels like to be a witch,” Margery told John Flynn. “You know that’s what they would have called me in Boston 150 years ago. And they would have hauled me before the General Court and executed me for consorting with the devil. But now they send committees of professors from Harvard to study me. That represents some progress, doesn’t it?”

  Rather than spiritualize her powers, she said they sometimes felt “a little creepy.” She recalled, for instance, the time at a neighborhood teahouse when the table she shared with a Beacon Hill matron began to sway, tilt, and reverberate. The distraught lady summoned a waitress and proceeded to rebuke her for the rocking table. Mortified, Mina fled the place rather than admit she was to blame.

  She had no explanation for such phenomena, but neither, in her view, did the so-called experts—the grave and supercilious investigators who seemed to her “so very little and so very futile.” Most of the scientists who came to study her were “terribly at sea about this whole business of psychic research and do not know how to approach it. I do not know myse
lf…” she admitted, “but they seem quite helpless.”

  All of them? asked Flynn.

  Well, not all of them. She recalled how one younger but experienced investigator (Carrington?) told her, “ ‘My dear Psyche, do you know what is going to happen to you? You will lose your mind and that quite soon.’ ”

  “There is a pleasant prospect for you!” Margery exclaimed to Flynn. She denied being afraid, however. Her work, she realized, could not be established “without much misunderstanding and pain.” And she hoped that despite the controversy and religious unrest, the earnest men and women probing about in the darkness might yet find their proofs.

  “How does it all feel?” she summed up. “Well, I am sure I am a good deal sobered by it. I look at my cello, standing in the corner of the music-room. It never comes out of its green hood anymore. Somehow, I do not find myself moving around in the dance as joyously as I once did.”

  Houdini Won’t Talk No More

  Hearken not to your prophets and diviners, and dreamers, and soothsayers and sorcerers.

  —JEREMIAH 27:9

  Walter arrived in the Crandons’ séance room and immediately began to perform. While singing in a whisper he tapped the megaphone on the table to the beat of “It Ain’t Gonna’ Rain No More.”