The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

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  Houdini’s joint investigation with the Herald had begun in January, when two of its reporters, Griscom and A. J. Gordon, approached him for information on Eric Dingwall, whose Margery inquiry was being financed by Augustus Hemenway—the venerable Boston philanthropist and friend of the Crandons. Eager to help the Boston newsmen, Houdini sent them copies of all his correspondences with Dingwall. The British investigator was “a low salaried man,” he told them, who came ambitiously to the land of jazz. “Never having been in fast company, never having tasted the luxuries of life before, he now being used imagines himself important—and you know no one is important until they are dead.”

  A night owl as well as an early riser, Houdini gave Griscom his home phone number—Monument 8260—and told him to call anytime after midnight. The magician also had a request to make, as he was no longer on civil terms with Margery: “By the way, I have been told that she has changed all of her tricks. Can you find out what she is now doing?”

  As the only reporter with an open pass to Lime Street, Griscom was an effective spy. And Walter, who knew all, somehow never caught on to him. Considering himself “blooded” after his first sitting with the medium, Griscom gave Houdini an account, including diagrams, of all he experienced the June night he was initiated. “The customary bag of tricks” included the rising basket and streaking disks; the bell that rang at Walter’s command—whether positioned on the table or when Griscom carried it about the den; the ectoplasmic hands that stroked his head and leg, untied his shoes, and pulled the hairpin from his wife’s bob; the spirit trumpet that floated erratically about the room—and through which Walter at one point issued threats: “It’s all over with Houdini,” the phantom hissed. “He’s done for,” echoed Dr. Crandon. All this while Margery sat groaning in her kimono, holding Griscom’s hand.

  Lovers were less intimate, Griscom felt, while caressing each other in a parked roadster after a dance. Many a sitter before him had grasped Margery’s hand and attained such close proximity to her—leg-to-leg, foot-on-foot, at times her head falling reflexively to their shoulders—that the arrangement would have afforded them opportunities for a sepulchral petting party. Yet when Griscom asked the Crandons their opinion of some of the investigators, he found them to be correct and candid. Margery described Prince as the most honest man she had ever known—“He’s an ass,” she added, “but he’s absolutely reliable.” At this, the reporter had to suppress a laugh, given how Prince privately maligned them. She said Bird was honorable too, which somewhat weakened her assessment of Prince, Griscom decided. Carrington she called “a real man,” which again had a double meaning for the reporter who knew of their romance.

  As if gauging his loyalty to Margery, the Crandons then wished to know what Griscom thought of Houdini. To their surprise, he admitted to liking him very much both as a person and an investigator. As unexpectedly, Margery cried: “I like and respect Houdini’s attitude much more than most of the others. At least he’s not afraid to say where he stands.” She all but admitted an attraction to her rival, but more amusing to Griscom was that the Crandons had become fond of two reporters who had nothing but disdain for their cause. “Talking about laughs,” Griscom chortled to Houdini, “Crandon handed me one yesterday when he told a man on the Herald—who’s wife, God help her, is a patient—that he liked Gordon and me, and that we had treated him more fairly than any other newspapermen. Walter evidently has failed to tip him off about our exposé of Margery’s past.” Griscom did find the couple brilliant, though. “You’ll have to admit that they are damn clever magicians. You should get them in your show.”

  Testifying to Margery’s cleverness, Griscom had no explanation, even after conferring with Houdini, for how she pulled off the manifestations at his recent sitting. They had coated the medium’s hair with luminous paint so that she could not surreptitiously use her head, as Houdini promised she would, to raise tables and hurl trumpets through the air. But it was Margery’s mouth that was of more interest to Griscom. Walter used many of the same expressions, and seemed cognizant of the same information as the medium. When the spirit’s voice manifested from the far side of her cabinet, the reporter thought he detected a faint hiss from where the glowing locks indicated her mouth was located—as if, he suggested to Houdini, she spoke through the mouthpiece of a tube that projected her brother’s whisper. One of the charter members of the ABC Club, Frederick Adler, was supposed to be a mechanical expert—so maybe he had rigged a contraption, offered Griscom, that created some of her telephonic effects. As for the slimy spirit hand that had teased him and his wife, it was a gloved human hand or foot, the reporters agreed—but Griscom doubted it was Margery’s. Her hands were too well controlled, he insisted, to reach Mrs. Griscom, and the removal of pins from his wife’s hair was too delicate an operation for even a conjurer’s toes.

  Having suggested that she had a confederate, Griscom as quickly talked himself out of it. The séance he witnessed had been a dress rehearsal, he told Houdini, for Margery’s performance for the new Harvard group. “It would have been possible,” Griscom speculated, “for Margery to have brought in a boy under her long kimono at the home séance.” Later, however, she reproduced the same effects for the investigators at the Harvard laboratory, where the smuggling of any accomplice, no matter how small, would have been impossible. Admittedly, Griscom had not solved the mystery. But new developments made all talk of séance hijinks inconsequential. The spirit world had always abounded with rascals guilty of common swindles and misdemeanors. Few, though, were ever accused of the supposed sins for which Dr. Crandon was now being investigated.

  Lost Boys

  And oh! of all tortures that torture the worst

  Has abated—the terrible Torture of thirst

  For the naphthaline river of Passions accurst:

  I have drunk of a water that quenches all thirst.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Ever since Medea slew her babes, witches have been portrayed as menacing to children. When Sir Arthur was a schoolboy at Stonyhurst, in the heart of England’s witch country, he and his peers pretended to flee the hags said to haunt Pendle Hill—and it was feared that if a witch should ever snatch a boy, he might wind up roasted on a spit or boiled in a cauldron. His bones the grist for spells, his blood the sustenance for demons. But Sir Arthur had long ago renounced his Catholic education and the Church’s bias against occultism. More than witches, he feared the traditional enemies of spiritism; so he smelled a papist plot when Dr. Crandon confessed to being the target of an investigation into missing children.

  “A highly incredible story which persists is that a boy who was in his family some weeks mysteriously disappeared,” Walter Prince disclosed. “He claims that the boy is now in his home in England, but still official letters of inquiry and demand are received from that country. This is no mere rumor, for I was shown some of the original letters.” Unwisely, Margery had confided to Prince that the Secret Service—the real agency, as opposed to Houdini’s people—was investigating her husband. “Doctor Crandon, she tells me, was threatened with arrest at one time. It is very mysterious.”

  The charges were appalling. Someone had informed the authorities that Roy was bringing over British orphans—potential Crandons who were not making it back to England after he found them unsuitable for adoption. Seeking recourse, Dr. Crandon presented Sir Arthur with “a little problem for Sherlock Holmes.” The Secret Service Department in Washington was told, he wrote, “that I had first and last sixteen boys in my house for ostensible adoption, and that they had all disappeared.” Of most concern was the case of Horace Newton, the orphan whom Joseph DeWyckoff had delivered to Margery the previous December. A Member of Parliament in London had contacted the White Star Line to determine whether the boy had returned, as the Crandons attested, on the Doric. Meanwhile, agents from Washington were conducting an investigation in Boston.

  “The U.S. inspectors have been up to see me regarding the boys,”
the Herald’s A. J. Gordon alerted Houdini. “Have you heard anything more from England on the matter?” In response, Houdini sent the Herald the initial findings of the British inquiry; no one was going to be arresting the doctor just yet—the most recent of the lost boys, Horace Newton, whom Roy had gone to such lengths to bring over, had indeed been returned to England. As Roy explained to the inspectors, Mrs. Crandon had put young Newton on the Doric on December 20 for his return passage. Undeniably she had: Horace Newton was on the ship’s manifest. Moreover, he was the sort of spunky child—a quality that hadn’t endeared him to Dr. Crandon—whom people distinctly remembered. The ship’s doctor, a friend of Roy’s, recalled him as being “very popular with everyone, on his return voyage.” But there appeared to be other boys who might have made a one-way trip from England to Beacon Hill. “I am not clear how many boys have gone across. You will let me have the facts,” Doyle advised.

  While Holmes sought to clear the Crandons, Houdini’s own investigation hadn’t doused his suspicions of them. “Gordon wants me to ask you…what are you doing to find out about that boy in New Jersey,” Griscom wrote Houdini. The remains of a vagrant teenager had reportedly been found in the general vicinity of DeWyckoff’s two hundred acres; indications were that one of the missing boys had also wound up in New Jersey—and any mention of DeWyckoff only added, by dint of his past, to the pall over the investigation.

  Though DeWyckoff had influential friends in Washington, Griscom discovered that he hadn’t always been the venerable citizen—the Russian Horatio Alger—that his wealth and connections suggested. As a young lawyer, DeWyckoff had fled Chicago after being indicted for pilfering thousands of dollars that had been willed to one of his clients. In another incident he was arrested and charged with grand larceny in Florida. Houdini didn’t believe that villains change their stripes, least of all because of some spiritist epiphany. Yet the magnate whom the Boston Globe once called a “Russian fugitive,” for defrauding four different parties, was the individual whom Dr. Crandon had entrusted with the Newton adoption. It was DeWyckoff who had accompanied the orphan from England—as if he, an aging immigrant, could assure the new one of a bright life with the Crandons.

  For Griscom, the Margery case had become more of an inquiry into the pathology of Dr. Crandon. “I find that many of those who have known Crandon best and longest,” he wrote Houdini, “believe he is insane, at least on this one subject.” He had heard, for instance, that after one scientist tried to reach for Margery’s ectoplasm without permission, the doctor warned: “If he had carried out his test, he would never have left the house alive.” While Dr. Crandon had no reputation for violence, whispers persisted that he was preying on children. The investigations went nowhere, though, and the Herald reported nothing on the missing boys.

  In the course of Sir Arthur’s opposing inquiry, as to who was conspiring against the Crandons, he had managed to determine the identity of the MP causing such a flap in London; it was Harry Day, a relatively new hand at politics. Sir Arthur warned Day not “to act as the unconscious agent of any personal enemy.” He demanded to know who had persuaded him to call for an investigation into the Newton adoption. Dr. Crandon believed that only William McDougall wielded the influence to draw an MP into the affair. Doyle, meanwhile, still felt the Catholic Church was after the Crandons. They were both mistaken. The former impresario of “Harry Day’s Crystal Cabaret,” Day was Houdini’s close friend and theatrical agent in Britain.

  Were this one of Houdini’s action movies, no doubt the Svengali-like Roy, and his strong arm, DeWyckoff, would be child traffickers foiled at the end of the third reel by Haldane of the Secret Service. Houdini had already called Margery a voodoo sorceress, and was now collecting articles attesting to the discovery of human bones in the New Jersey cellar of a “Voodoo Witch Doctor.” Bedeviling children is a charge for which many an eccentric woman, a supposed witch, has stood trial. Margery’s only immediate summons, however, was to Harvard.

  To Hell with Harvard

  The Margery mediumship was still attracting serious scientific interest, with Harvard professors more interested in the case than agents of the Secret Service. The original questions were still unresolved in the eyes of many psychic researchers. Although the Scientific American had rendered a decision of “supernormality not proved,” some of the judges had called for further testing. Because the committee’s verdict had not settled the controversy, a new team assembled to investigate Margery.

  Hudson Hoagland, a graduate psychology student and protégé of McDougall, had a zealous interest in the case: he intended to write his Harvard dissertation on Margery’s phenomena, should he find her work convincing. Like many of his predecessors, Hoagland was impressed with the earnestness of Dr. Crandon. But after he and his colleagues had several sittings with Margery, and were showered with an array of Walter’s effects, they made some rather frank criticisms: primarily that it was futile for the doctor to try to convince the scientific world of anything as long as he insisted on holding the gatherings at Lime Street and on imposing his conditions. They suggested that Margery be brought to the Harvard Psychology Laboratory for further experiments. Finding their argument persuasive, Roy agreed to what became known as the Second Harvard Investigation—the enterprise that Hoagland hoped would offer more conclusiveness than the Scientific American inquiry.

  A far cry from the established experts Munn and Bird had assembled, these young investigators were a hodgepodge of graduate psychology, English, and poetry students, including the admiring Grant Code—whose goodwill made the Crandons feel more comfortable than they had felt at the Charlesgate tests.*1 Yet once word got out that Margery had consented to a thorough examination on their side of the Charles, some of Harvard’s most respected scientists wanted to join the undertaking. To shield the school from involvement in another Margery controversy, the professors called themselves observers rather than committee members.*2 They felt they had to be more careful than their students; if they were married to their academic specialties—mathematics, astronomy, and biology—then psychic research was where they sought illicit excitement.

  The press was not informed that once again Walter and scientists were tangling. The Harvard investigation of the Crandons was sub rosa—only Griscom and his colleagues were aware of it, and they respected the news blackout. It remained to be seen, however, whether one dark room was like any other. In crossing the Charles, the Crandons had entered an environment less hospitable to a spook show and more conducive to a controlled experiment. The séance laboratory was a small square room on the third floor of Emerson Hall, where fraud was deemed “impossible.” It had no windows and the only door was to be kept locked during sittings—any intrusions would have to come from the spirits, not lightfooted accomplices. The meager room—one that Walter would liken to “the Charlestown jail”—could accommodate only a table and chairs, a cloth spirit cabinet, a Victrola, and the usual playthings for Walter. To protect against deception researchers sent a mild electric current through the circle gathered there—so that if anyone were to release their hands it would instantly break the circuit and sound an alarm. The luminous bands that Dingwall had introduced were also attached to the medium’s head, arms, and legs, as well as her husband’s. Layers of humane control, rather than Houdini’s box, were used for this trial.

  As the tests commenced on the evening of May 19, 1925, the circle was literally charged with energy. On a Windsor chair sat Margery, restrained by the usual hand and foot control, monitored by an electrical apparatus, wrapped in gleaming bracelets, and surrounded by those who, for the most part, doubted her. Within minutes Walter arrived with his typical defiance. After hearing his lively whistle, Roy was confident that the spirit would not forsake his kid sister. “To hell with Harvard,” the voice jeered—and within minutes the researchers noted cool breezes and “inexplicable noises and movements.” One of Walter’s illuminated round toys, which he called “a doughnut,” was propelled around the room the
n flopped on the table next to Hoagland. Did they really think their electric current could impede psychic force? Margery, now in trance, was more powerful in her sleep, Walter’s activity suggested, than their feeble apparatus. Together, brother and sister performed many of their best numbers: the bell box rang; the lambent megaphone floated; the ghost yanked Hoagland by his forelock.

  The atmosphere was so hot and draining that Margery could give only one of her two weekly demonstrations at Emerson Hall, with the other conducted at Hoagland’s apartment in West Cambridge. But after six sittings the team was impressed by her work at both locations. At various times Walter used his phantom limb to raise a white basket loaded with metal weights, while a corresponding increase in Margery’s weight was registered. He liked to rap the sitters with his clammy hands, untie their shoes, and send tremors through the table while crying, “Earthquake!” His most discussed feat, though, was the game of checkers he played with the astronomer Shapley. Both the living and the dead man moved painted electrodes across a glowing coordinate board until Walter outmaneuvered his opponent and whispered, “Checkmate!”

  Walter was never more outrageous. The Harvard students were most entertained when the spirit led them in a song that parodied his old nemesis, who had said Margery’s ectoplasm smelled like liver, and whose office was just down the hallway.

  Shall we gather at Old Harvard,

  Shall we go to all the bother

  For McDougall?

  Shall we gather at the river?

  Shall we eat a pound of liver

  For McDougall?