The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Dr. Crandon offered another defense against the Harvard charges. The séance minutes indicated that Margery had been menstruating on the night she was supposed to have removed objects from her vagina and placed them on the table. Yet no blood was on the hands of investigators who had touched the ectoplasm, nor on the table. Dr. Crandon was using that as evidence, wrote Griscom, “that Margery could not have been faking.” The absence of blood proved her innocence.

  * * *

  *1 The Harvard group consisted of Hudson Hoagland, Grant Code, Foster Damon, Robert Hillyer, and John Marshall.

  *2 Among the notable witnesses present at various séance tests, though never as an entire body, were the Harvard psychologist Edwin Boring, Dr. S. B. Wolbach of the medical school, and the astronomer Harlow Shapley. The physicist E. B. Wilson was MIT’s observer; Professor W. J. V. Osterhout represented the Rockefeller Institute; and the ASPR’s Malcolm Bird attended one of the Harvard test séances.

  *3 According to the official minutes of the sitting, Margery had complained just before the demonstration began that the control bands were too loose; she had attempted to tighten them with pins.

  *4 Hoagland’s observation was not recorded in the signed minutes but inserted as an addendum after the sitting was over—a practice that Dr. Crandon, who believed no witness statements should be allowed after the fact, had prohibited.

  *5 “Mrs. Crandon flatters herself as she did when she tried to vamp Houdini!” Code said in his defense.

  Such Damn Fools

  MARGERY RIDICULES HARVARD GROUP FOR “TRICKERY” CHARGES SAVED THEIR FACES BY SHIFT, SHE HINTS

  —Boston Herald, OCTOBER 24, 1925

  In the end Fair Harvard had not lived up to its name, rued Margery. The university investigators hid behind the Harvard gates when they denounced her: her detractors would not put their names behind their statements to the press; and Grant Code was somewhere in Delaware where reporters couldn’t find him. The whole affair, she said, was wasteful and dishonorable.

  The medium was puzzled and amused, she told Stewart Griscom, by the scientists who had appeared to be impressed by her effects yet concluded on the basis of what she felt was shoddy evidence—a fallen bracelet and slipper!—that over the course of eight test séances she had successfully bamboozled them with nothing but her right foot. In none of the séance minutes the scientists had signed, which she now turned over to Griscom, did they mention any suspicion of sleight of hand. They had decided to reconsider their own observations because “Fair Harvard” would have been put in a queer position, she maintained, had the committee of ambitious students and their mentors admitted they were at a loss to explain what they had witnessed. Concerning Code’s claim that in a private séance she had plotted more deception, she stated—and both she and her maid would give affidavits refuting him—that no such session occurred. In her view she had been convicted on the word of an unstable admirer whom she confessed off the record to throwing over. This was what came of entrusting her case to prejudiced amateurs. “Seriously, all I ask on behalf of myself and this subject is fair play,” she declared.

  In the two days that Griscom had just spent with Mrs. Crandon, she also expressed something not evident in the bluster of her official statement. During his “many interesting talks with Margery,” she seemed most distraught at how Houdini would react to what appeared to be the end of her mediumship. “Just think how Houdini will shout,” she predicted. “He will say that he discovered in one sitting what it took the Harvard crowd eight sittings to find out.”

  As it turned out, she knew only too well the ways of Houdini, who boasted to Walter Lippmann that the Harvard group had “accomplished in half a year what I did in one night.” Undeniably, the young investigators had upheld his claims. But the one thing puzzling Houdini was how Griscom had won Margery’s confidence, given that he was doing his utmost to discredit her. To that Griscom answered: “Although she has never actually confessed, when we are alone it is tacitly admitted between us that the mediumship is all trickery. I think she respects me on exactly the same grounds that she does you, because we weren’t taken in by her.”

  Griscom sensed that Margery would finally come clean if only “Crandon did not firmly believe. She knows that it would end all their relations and she doesn’t dare to do it. She and I had a private conference the other afternoon and I advised her to admit it was all a hoax. She smiled broadly and asked how she could when it wasn’t true. Then she said, with a grin, ‘Aren’t people such damn fools. Such damn fools. The investigators most of all.’ ”

  ♦

  The front-page muse was not expected to be featured there much longer. “This verdict, I think, will kill the Margery phenomena with the great majority of intelligent people,” Griscom wrote Houdini. “This has been a triumph for you, for the Herald and for me,” the reporter gloated after his final Margery story. “I am rather pleased with myself for being the first to print the finding that she was fraudulent. At the same time I am sorry for Dr. Crandon and rather admire her for her sheer nerve, for her wit and for the good sportsmanship she has shown when shown up. Remember she has the doctor still to fool.”

  Not everyone agreed that the Harvard finding spelled the end of the Margery mediumship. Life magazine called Hoagland’s investigation “an inquiry into anatomy by butchers seeking not so much knowledge as meat.” In the eyes of some of the intelligent people to whom Griscom referred, Dr. Crandon was entirely more rational and trustworthy than the graduate student whom the Hon. Everard Feilding, one of the SPR’s most influential officials, found “pathologically peculiar.” It was really too late, though, to impeach Code and other witnesses. The precocious Harvard investigators—the psychology students, the Harvard aesthete, the literary toe dancer—had already made their case. And unlike the Scientific American committee, they were interested in exploring the motivations behind what they saw as a grotesque hoax from the beginning. In a private response to Feilding, Hoagland presented what many regarded as the definitive portrait of the Crandons.

  “Dr. Crandon, is a man who has never learned to play,” Hoagland wrote. “He takes everything very seriously. Mrs. Crandon on the other hand is extremely fun loving.” Her penchant for mischief and Roy’s maniacal drive merged dangerously when “Dr. Crandon took up spiritualism as a violent hobby and Mrs. Crandon played it for all it was worth…As long as Mrs. Crandon could fool her husband at all, and I think that in his present state of mind she may still, he is willing to do anything to convince others of his claims. He is able to pose as a martyr to science likening himself to Galileo. A half million uncritical spiritualists in the country regard Margery as a sort of Messiah.

  “It would be quite impossible to imagine one’s having faith in a fraud in which one is an active confederate, however in certain pathological cases such inconsistencies are not uncommon,” Hoagland concluded. In his view, Dr. Crandon had become aware that only Margery’s spook tricks, not genuine clairvoyance, would advance the mediumship. But by this time Roy, his friends, and some of the scientists were possessed by what H. L. Mencken saw as often among atheists as spiritist drones: “the irresistible and perhaps pathological impulse to believe and cherish the incredible.”

  As Grant Code put it, “The doctor was crazy enough to believe his own tricks, and honest enough to devote himself and his wife as living sacrifices to their own dishonesty.” While Roy had morbid fears that drew him to Spiritualism, he had buried doubts about Margery that only scientific validation could assuage. As far as Harvard was concerned, the ghost was only a clever invention.

  “Walter’s a genius and I guess I told you I boohooed like a baby, when I just couldn’t believe in him anymore,” Code wrote Margery. “I wish Dr. C. could believe me and trust me, but I’m afraid he doesn’t and I don’t blame him much. He’s had some pretty raw deals from investigators so it’s natural that he should mistrust the breed.”

  Code’s final letter to the medium expressed how devastating it was to b
e cast out by the Crandons. He lamented that he would never again hear Walter whisper, “Here comes the works” or “Hello, Code.” But perhaps Walter might not be long for this world anyway. Goodbye, Walter, he closed. Goodbye, Kid. Goodbye, Dr. C. Goodbye, 10 Lime Street.

  1926: The End of Magic

  The heyday of magic appeared to be over. “Visits of magicians to this city have become not unlike the reputed calls of angels,” observed the New York Sun. “They are rarer even in vaudeville than they formerly were. Some of the practitioners of what used to be called the black art are quite as expert as their predecessors, but there is not the same degree of interest that once existed.” Only Houdini and Thurston, King of Cards, were known to still draw turnouts. But Houdini was now performimg the kind of old-time conjury that was supposed to be Thurston’s forte. And his show was a triumph on Broadway.

  While Houdini’s life had many pinnacles, his present engagement at the Forty-fourth Street Shubert Theatre was the high point, he said, of his life as an entertainer. His show HOUDINI played near productions of Eugene O’Neill, Noel Coward, and Shakespeare. His profitable run countered the views that stage magic was antiquated. The Great Houdini blended the old sleight of hand and spookery with showgirls and electric phosphorescence. The “Radio of 1950” was a huge cabinet with glowing meters and spinning dials that Houdini revealed to be empty inside but for some tubes and wiring. When he turned a knob and blasted jazz, a beauty in silver lace emerged dancing while the crowd roared to the Charleston.

  The Sun reported, perhaps unfairly, that HOUDINI’s popularity was due to the part of the show where he unveiled Margery’s charlatanism. Whatever the reason, the magician had never seemed more fluid and commanding. Praising his vitality onstage, even after suffering a broken ankle late in the run, Billboard belittled what Margery had prophesied: that he would die in December of 1925. When the appointed time came all he suffered was a minor fracture. “Margery’s crystal,” it was noted, “seems to be a bit misty.”

  Philadelphia

  After Margery was given the gate by the Harvard boys, her elder and more steadfast admirers attempted to restore her honor. In February they—Mark Richardson; Dr. Crandon; three other illustrious Harvard alums;* and Joseph DeWyckoff, the one author who did not attend the university—put out a booklet, Margery Harvard Veritas, which rebutted the Harvard group’s charges. Their record of events was distributed to virtually every university-employed psychologist and physicist in the world; to all the major libraries; to everyone employed at the ASPR; and to each professor and administrator at Harvard.

  At the same time, Malcolm Bird swooped across the continent—deriding Houdini and the Margery bashers while promoting his own new book on her mediumship. From platforms lacking Broadway panache, Bird spoke in Boston, Memphis, Salt Lake City, Richmond, and Winnipeg. He appeared at Rotary Club luncheons, Women’s Club events, Kiwanis Club forums, university auditoriums, and YMCAs and YMHAs. He made his case at engineers’ clubs, physicians’ clubs, and before the social elite as well as the local Spiritualist chapters. No one was more active, and few more passionate, in defending Margery. After his New York run, Houdini made the counterargument at some of the same types of associations, as well as in churches and on vaudeville. And ultimately, as if the spirits ordained it, they engaged each other in February at the Broad Street Theater in Philadelphia.

  While Bird disparaged his competence and character, Houdini sat quietly in his box. Watching stoically, he seemed to take the attack in the same way he was said to let any challenger take their best shot at his midsection. Arguing that Houdini was a liar and an ignoramus, Bird recounted the most violent of Margery’s phenomena—the spirit cabinet she shattered in the magician’s presence. He described how the screws were forced out of the structure rather than unscrewed—and there was sawdust on the floor and sheer puzzlement in Houdini’s eyes. Margery could not have accomplished this, Bird insisted, with her legs and her shoulders. “Mr. Houdini agrees with me because he says it couldn’t have happened unless I did it, and I didn’t do it, so there you are.”

  When it was his turn to address the audience, Houdini leaped fiercely onto the stage. Speaking from the gut, his rejoinder came out in a torrent of emotion. In only a few minutes he called Bird “a liar,” “a contemptible liar,” “a dirty liar,” and “the man who lies.” He condemned him as a betrayer of Orson Munn and an embarrassment to the Scientific American—a journalist whose reports on Margery were silly rot, and an author whose book on the medium was filled with more bunk than Baron Munchausen. By this time the mood in the house resembled a prizefight, yet the divide did not completely fall along expected lines. One Spiritualist who had met Dr. Crandon and felt misgivings on first sight had the same impression that evening about the ASPR officer. “The minute I saw and heard Bird, I felt distrust,” she said. “He had eloquence, but not the truth that would have made him convincing. Houdini, without eloquence or command of speech, seemed to me to be trying, incoherently and hopelessly, to express truth.”

  * * *

  * Alfred W. Martin, Charles S. Hill, and S. Ralph Harlow.

  Chicago/Washington

  The next city the Great Houdini played was Chicago, which was bad news for the many fraud mediums prospering there. For the eight weeks that his shows ran, he fought it out with the Midwest spooks; even though a supposed matriarch of the Spiritualist movement, Annie Benninghofen, came over to his side. At the Sherman Hotel he presented Mrs. Benninghofen to the newspapermen who had gathered to watch her reveal her secrets. Following a slick séance display, some were touched when the medium admitted her deceptions while denying her sins.

  “I really believed in spiritualism all the time I was practicing it,” the psychic quietly explained, “but I thought I was justified in helping the spirits out. They couldn’t float a trumpet around the room. I did it for them. They couldn’t speak, so I spoke for them. I thought I was justified in trickery because through trickery I could get more converts to what I thought was a good and beautiful religion.”

  Armed with Mrs. Benninghofen’s affidavits, Houdini moved on to Washington, DC, for the defining moment in his crusade. With the Capitol as his stage, he would throw his support behind a fortune-telling bill sponsored by Congressman Sol Bloom that would effectively outlaw mediumship for profit as well as all forms of divination for hire.* In reaction to the impending vote, the ghost talkers came to Washington—MEDIUMS JAM CAPITOL, the headline flashed—to protest this threat to their religion and livelihood. Bloom had produced the anti-clairvoyant legislation, but the press considered Houdini the “motive energy behind the bill”—and the psychics were there, as he hoped, to defy him.

  It looked like an out-of-season Halloween celebration, with so many spooks walking the marble halls. During the sessions spirit mediums and fortune-tellers sat on the floor, hung from the windows, and huddled outside the door to the committee room. What transpired were the most bizarre and volatile hearings anyone could recall in the capital; the effort to keep Houdini and the spiritists apart so overwhelmed Bloom that at one point he fainted. Invigorated by the melee, the magician unrolled long scrolls compiled by Rose Mackenberg that he said contained evidence against the mediums debating him. When they called him a liar, he slammed $10,000 on the committee table and challenged any of them to perform a single feat that he could not unmask as flimflam. There were no takers. “Tell me the name my mother called me when I was born?” he cried. There was no answer. No spirit raps were manifested in the Capitol Building, only the raps of a gavel on sounding block. No disembodied voices came through, only the cries of “Infidel!” “Traducer!” as the chairman called for order.

  In their defense, the mediums claimed that Spiritualism was backed by the Bible—and that when Houdini attacked prophets and seeresses he was condemning a religion. “How can you call it religion,” Houdini mocked, “when you get men and women in a room together and feel each other’s hands and bodies.”

  The exchanges becam
e so heated that the police were later called to separate Houdini from his psychic opponents. Even some on the subcommittee were not clear as to why a conjurer, of all people, should object so harshly to the work of fellow occultists. “Would you be so cruel as to deprive a young country fellow of the pleasure of getting a picture of his sweetheart, or being told he is ‘going on a long journey,’ and all that frivolous stuff?” Congressman Gilbert asked Houdini. Also wary of the bill was Congressman McLeod, who wished to know how Spiritualism could be “such an outrageous fake and fraud,” if it was advocated by “such men as Conan Doyle, who is an outstanding authority?”

  “He is one of the greatest dupes, outside of Sir Oliver Lodge,” answered the magician whom the psychics called “a Judas.”

  “In the beginning, 3,000 years ago, or 2,000, Judas betrayed Christ,” an aggrieved medium testified, “he was a Jew and I want to say that this bill is being put through by two—well you can use your opinion.” The witness warned that if lawmakers passed the legislation they would be reenacting the religious persecution of the Romans—a statement applauded by many in the chamber. Reporters noted something atavistic to these hearings—as if Roman senators were deciding whether street oracles should be allowed to prophesy in the shadow of the Forum. It was only when Houdini demonstrated spook tricks that the assembly was brought “back into twentieth century sunshine.”