by David Jaher
Back in Boston, the Crandons were on the verge of disgrace. In 1927, Dr. Crandon was censured by the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal for his occult activities. This was also the year that Henry McComas released the results of his ASPR-sponsored study of Margery, concluding, to the chagrin of those who had hired him, that her “mediumship is a clever and entertaining performance but is unworthy of serious consideration by your Society.” If that were not enough, a McDougall protégé, Dr. Joseph Rhine—while on his way to becoming America’s preeminent psychic scientist—called the Margery mediumship “base and brazen trickery.” A botanist who had decided that psychical research, rather than the study of plants, brought him closer to the elemental mysteries of life, Rhine had gone to Lime Street with a religious sense of mission, but said he had encountered there only flirtation and mischief. A former Marine sergeant and national champion sharpshooter, Rhine now seemed intent on killing the mediumship—and accused Margery, after the only Crandon séance he attended, “of kissing and embracing” the researchers. “It is evidently of very great advantage to a medium, especially if fraudulent,” said Rhine, “to be personally attractive; it aids the fly catching business.”
Following his report came another journalistic frenzy. I KISSED A WOMAN, NOT MEN, Margery responded in the headline. “That’s all poppycock,” she objected. “My husband attends all my séances and I would have to be very rash to go around kissing.” Swiftly, the usual champions came to her defense—“J. B. RHINE IS A MONUMENTAL ASS!” advertised Sir Arthur in a Boston newspaper—while her most vehement critics, Prince and Rhine, continued, she felt, to persecute her. It was not just their whispering about Roy’s supposed affairs with nurses or Margery’s with researchers. Prince was still spreading that most lurid rumor—that the bones of an English youth “were buried beneath the cellar floor at Lime Street.”
Even with Houdini in the grave, there was no letup in the hostilities. “We are having a great battle here,” declared the doctor who had never seemed more devilish to his enemies. “A nasty bastard, rotten to the core,” Hudson Hoagland would say of Roy. Few, however, had anything as severe to mention about Margery’s nature. One of Walter Prince’s fondest memories was of her stopping by his home to bring him, an abstinent minister, a peace offering of homemade doughnuts and contraband scotch. And George Hyslop, perhaps the only Crandon critic at the ASPR, said that “if I should call on Margery today, she would receive me just as sweetly as ever.”
Until the end her door remained open to ASPR scientists, though hers was now considered a “house of ill fame” by many of the Crandons’ peers. When Robin Tillyard visited New England, he was told by one Harvard professor that 10 Lime Street “was a thoroughly bad place, that his honor would be stained forever” if he set foot inside the door, as would that of any decent man or woman—and that Margery was a kind of mystical prostitute, the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. Despite her stigma, the ghost hunters still came to Beacon Hill—and returning for another go-round with Margery, Eric Dingwall almost died there. A heart condition exacerbated by thyroid trouble reportedly convinced two emergency-room doctors that they had lost him. Dr. Crandon, who took over the case, alleviated his symptoms. Dingwall was then brought back to Lime Street, where Margery nursed him to good health. “Never again, I am sure,” noted one investigator, “would Dingwall countenance evil tales of the Crandons.”
For the rest of the decade, Margery’s star, while it still shone brightly at the ASPR, progressively faded with the jazz era. Befittingly, the Crandons tried to revive her career in the place where the broader scientific interest in her work began. In December 1929, the last month of the last year of the decade, they visited England, where six years earlier Dingwall and Doyle had heralded the nascent mediumship, and where she was now called “the short-skirted medium.” This time the Crandons had a rough passage on the Mauretania, were besieged by reporters upon their arrival, and had no time to recover. Margery had agreed to perform the next day for Sir Oliver Lodge, at his home in Normanton House—just a few minutes by car from Stonehenge. The séance in Lodge’s bedroom included a small circle of Roy, Sir Oliver, his daughter, his secretary, and his chauffeur. For the occasion Margery wore black silk knickers and a sleeveless red velvet kimono. The usual effects followed. The table was flung about. The basket rose, and when Sir Oliver tossed objects into it, Walter spontaneously identified them. Ghostly thumbprints that Walter claimed were those of Sir Oliver’s dead son, Raymond, materialized. When Roy was asked to leave the room, the telekinesis continued. “You are a wonder, Walter!” exclaimed Sir Oliver. “It’s a long time since I saw things move about like this, though I have seen the phenomenon long ago.”
After a long dinner, Sir Oliver, still sprightly at seventy-eight, insisted on dancing for several hours. His preferred tune was the popular “Button Up Your Overcoat.” Ten years earlier, the only time Lodge visited the States, he had inspired a séance craze, as well as Roy’s own interest in Spiritualism. Sir Oliver was still the most respected psychic scientist in the world. And Margery had saved him the last dance of the era.
1930: A Troubled Spirit
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
—EMILY DICKINSON
Spiritualism, as it turned out, had more appeal for the bereaved than the bankrupt. By 1930, in the wake of Wall Street’s crash, public interest in the Quest Eternal was waning. In that year William McDougall and Joseph Rhine founded the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, effectively taking psychic research out of the séance room. Rhine’s experience with Margery had contributed to his mistrust of any case that savored of ghosts and spirits. The reign of the physical medium was over as far as he was concerned. His interest was in parapsychology—a term he and McDougall coined—quantifiable mental phenomena. And where Rhine led, much of the rest of the psychic research community followed.
The year 1930 was also the year that the apostle of the Spiritualist revival left his body. Having collapsed clutching his heart after a walk in his rose garden, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, already infirm, was confined to his bed that summer. He told his family that he did not want to die there. In his last days, Jean and the children helped him into a basket chair, where he could look out on his beloved Sussex woodland. On July 7, he died with his family beside him. His last words, to Jean, were “You are wonderful.”
Because he had believed that the death day is the true birthday, his funeral, as he had intended, wasn’t mournful. The burial took place in the rose garden at Windlesham in an atmosphere that suggested bon voyage rather than ashes to ashes. Almost no one wore black. Light colors and summer dress were the decorum. Only a few in attendance cried. A Spiritualist minister presided. Jean brought a red rose to her lips and dropped it into the coffin. Days later, thousands gathered at the Royal Albert Hall for a memorial. While friends and dignitaries paid tribute to Sir Arthur, Jean sat onstage beside an empty chair. “He is there!” cried an excited medium.
Many of the influences that had led to the Great Spirit Hunt—the contest that Sir Arthur had inspired—were distinctive to the twenties. By 1930 the contest vogue was over. The Miss America pageant had been suspended after the crash of ’29. The dance marathons had lost popularity. The Ouija and séance were no longer a rage: attention had turned from eternal to more immediate survival.
Even the luminaries of the jazz era seemed diminished. Jack Dempsey had lost not only the millions he had made as a prizefighter but the strength to recoup them. In August, beleaguered by scandal, Sister Aimee suffered a physical and mental breakdown. For almost a year the gaudy evangelist was silent. While still prodigious, Babe Ruth was embarrassed to be pulled late in baseball games. He was no longer fleet enough to cover the outfield.
♦
The year 1930 was also the year Malcolm Bird vanished. When one night he brought an “immoral woman” back to Lime Street, the Cra
ndons turned him away. He became angry and made insulting remarks about their own sexual habits, yet there was a deeper friction between them. Bird was preparing a new volume on the Margery case for the ASPR journal—and this time it would not be entirely positive. For years Bird had prepared for a possible fallout with the Crandons. He had kept a blank check Margery had written him, to use as ammunition against them. He had made note of his discovery of a piece of yarn attached to the scales that were supposed to have been activated by Walter’s invisible agency. The observations of Keating and Carrington, who thought they had seen luminous paint daubed on the soles of Margery’s stockings, were also in his possession. While Bird still believed Mrs. Crandon to be an authentic medium, he alleged that she sometimes resorted to trickery when under pressure to manifest. He had recently gone before the trustees of the ASPR to inform them that before Margery’s final showdown with Houdini, “she sought a private interview with me and tried to get me to agree, in the event that phenomena did not occur, that I would ring the bell-box myself, or produce something else that might pass as activity by Walter.”
To the trustees’ ears this was blasphemy. Most physical mediums were thought to cheat when under duress, but Bird had always portrayed Margery as the exception. Even now his descriptions of her proofs dwarfed his negative observations—only some of the phenomena may have been “normally produced,” he asserted.
“Well, if he admits half a ghost, that’s as good as a whole ghost,” Walter answered. But the ASPR was not so cavalier. They refused to let Bird publish his report. They made it appear that his “frequent trips to Boston were the cloak for a series of illicit amours.”
And then, in December, they fired him.
There would literally have been no Margery were it not for Malcolm Bird, who publicized her work and named her. As an ASPR officer he had presented the case for her mediumship before more than two hundred audiences—from Chicago to the Sorbonne. However, the powers at the society were themselves Spiritualists—Mark Richardson, Joseph DeWyckoff, William H. Button—who tolerated no reproof of Margery. The society’s mission was to further develop her phenomena. And though Bird had been her stalwart advocate, he had never embraced Spiritualism. Sensing that Margery was, over time, resorting more to trickery, he had wanted to protect himself when the crash came. Now an aggrieved Bird crossed enemy lines and attempted to publish his report with Walter Prince’s Boston Society. To his surprise, Prince demurred. The new policy of the BSPR was simply to ignore Margery.
Bird exited the stage quietly, his subsequent activities a mystery. Two years later Prince visited him without coming away with any notion as to how he occupied himself. “Really, and peculiarly, I have not the least idea what Bird has been doing,” he remarked. Prince’s secretary, Eleanor Hoffman, suggested that he became involved in bootlegging. An important player in the spirit hunt, he seemed to disappear with the fading force of Spiritualism.
♦
“Backward—turn backward, O Time, in your flight. Give us a séance, just for one night. I am so weary of teaching such rot: The stuff I am teaching convinces me not.” In a poem that Margery had penned through automatic writing, supposedly conceived by Walter’s mind, the professors and scientists who had been drawn to mediumistic research, only to turn away from it when his sister was discredited, would find their other endeavors mundane, the spirit promised, their futures unsatisfying.
Perhaps no one had been as prominently employed on the front lines of psychic science, only to abruptly abandon the field, as J. Malcolm Bird. But with his reputation besmirched, he never returned to the former professions, academia and journalism, that had brought him success. In many respects Bird withdrew from both the material and the psychic world. He had a small life income from the estate of his half-sister. Whatever else he did for the rest of his life, he did it inconspicuously. His wife, Katherine, would leave him and they never had children. He would die, in 1964, in Kings County Hospital on the day before Halloween—ten days after being hit by an automobile while crossing a Brooklyn boulevard.
“Weary of looking for heaven and hell; Weary of reading the lies that I tell. Give us a sitting; ’twill change things aright; Walter—Come back to us; just for one night.” Without Walter, there was considerably less scientific interest in psychic phenomena. The answer to the age-old mystery would have to be deferred, Bird had presumed, to future generations. Séance research was now as antiquated as the notion of the ether. Yet there was something abiding, they had all felt, in the interplay of mind and spirit. What Plato once believed—that forms and thoughts were of a higher, eternal reality—had been eschewed long ago by his student Aristotle, who held to only what was concrete and perceptible to the physical senses. Who was to say that the student was right; it was much like trying to settle, forever, the case for Spiritualism. Bird recalled Sir Arthur telling him, when they had sailed back to America together on the Olympic, that whenever physical science advanced too far and fast, there would be a revival of supernaturalism.
Hereward Carrington had said much the same thing to him. The last of the great ghost hunters, Carrington—who had always looked as though he were in the final stages of a terminal illness—would live forever, Bird felt, on his rabbitlike diet and exotic juices.* He had heard that Carrington went to Los Angeles and found a more receptive audience there for his yoga practice, crankish food, and belief in psychic magic. Bird, on the contrary, had concluded that spirit mediumship, with its legacy of false materializations, could not withstand the scrutiny of a generation whose reference had shifted from the auditory to the visual. Whoever thought séances were quaint and quiet, though, had never sat with Margery, who manifested to the wailing of the saxophone and burst of drums. When one séance was over and she was awakened from her trance, he could remember her smiling at him, as if to say, Was that not magic?
♦
The First World War had been a ghostly war. The next great conflict, which Bird had followed from afar and Margery had not lived to see the end of, featured no similar celestial lore or manifestations. Often it had struck him that while the scientists he knew had made it their mission to substantiate eternal life, the new physicists he read about in the Scientific American were employed in the development of technology that might destroy intelligent life altogether. Sir Oliver had been right when he predicted how awesome and world-altering was the power of the atom, but evidently wrong, Bird suspected, about Summerland.
For Margery there was no walking away from the spirit world as Bird had—or, like Prospero, relinquishing her occult power. Often she had seemed on the verge of a crack-up, only to recover before the next investigation. The dignitaries still visited her in the 1930s—especially those from Europe, where her work and reputation were less maligned. Early in the new decade a friend of Sir Oliver Lodge’s—“a distinguished literary man”—came to stay with the Crandons. Margery acted so strangely around him that he soon decided to cut short his visit—but unfortunately, his psychic influence lingered. At a séance just after his departure, Margery was possessed by a sinister spirit calling itself Lila Lee and claiming to be the deceased lover of the recent visitor. Lila Lee said that after an unhappy love affair with the European writer she killed herself by jumping from an omnibus. A chill descended on the circle when she vowed that Mrs. Crandon would suffer the same fate. Without warning, while Drs. Richardson and Crandon attempted to calm the troubled spirit, Margery arose and rushed from the room. With the sitters in pursuit, she retreated down the hallway and climbed a ladder to the roof of the house. There she stood, close to the parapet, gazing at the street four stories below—while ignoring Mrs. Richardson’s frantic pleas to come down. Then she shut her eyes, as if listening for the voice to tell her when to leap.
* * *
* In fact, Carrington would die in 1958, six years before Bird.
I Ain’t Pretty Anymore
Over time Mark Richardson came to understand Margery’s hysteria, the aborted impulse to jump; for �
�her life became an almost routine existence of trance and uncomfortable control by picture wire, surgeon’s tape, locked cabinets and a manifold variety of apparatus. It was a species of slavery, in fact, and Dr. Crandon was, in a certain sense, a slave-driver. But in this connection I now know well that we were all guilty—even Walter.” During the 1920s, visitors had often commented that Margery looked younger than her years. By the 1930s at least one reporter observed that she seemed older than her age, though men still had eyes for her and she for them. James Wobensmith, the Great Thurston’s lawyer, claimed that at one séance she took his hand and guided it between her legs.
One night, in December of 1932, Margery entertained Prince’s secretary, Eleanor Hoffman, who promised not to tell him that they socialized. After dinner and one too many drinks, Margery began to make admissions—not about her mediumship but concerning other things. She was aware of her reputation for seducing the investigators, she said, but she wanted to be clear that the rumors were wrong about her and Bird. He was “disgusting looking,” she snorted, “the kind you want to sweep the house out after.” Recalling the night he’d picked up a loose girl and took her to a hotel bar, she said—“the girl sat on Bird’s lap and wet all over him, that’s the kind of girl she was.” Margery had only repugnance for the investigator who had tried to bring his floozy back to her house.
Her eyes became softer when she spoke of “Carrie,” remembering how good-looking he was and the fun the two of them had. Her mood darkened, though, when she mentioned the rumors concerning Roy. She knew what was said about him and the orphaned boys.
