The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

During another confessional with Eleanor, she spoke further about one of the children who came to Lime Street. “The poor little fellow had adenoids,” she recalled, “and had to be circumcised.” After the operation, which Roy had performed at home, “the little fellow sat up in bed and looked at himself and said, ‘I ain’t pretty anymore,’ and John told him that was all right, he looked that way too.”

  After the boy was sent back to England, “people were asking his whereabouts and the Prime Minister of England cabled to ask where he was and demanded cable reply,” Margery confided. “Why, people even said Dr. Crandon committed illegal operations on little children and murdered them.”

  Later the conversation turned to Walter’s latest manifestations, which included both the fingerprints of beings who had left this world and those about to be born into it. Having shown Eleanor casts of the evidence, Margery put them in a closet and returned with photographs of a “whole rack of pictures of little children—most of them really lovely.”

  “Those are Dr. Crandon’s caesareans,” Margery explained, “aren’t they sweet? All caesareans.”

  There were dozens of photographs of young girls and boys.

  Another of Margery’s confidantes was Eileen Garrett, the most gifted medium with whom the Crandons were associated. A visiting Irish psychic, Eileen didn’t produce physical phenomena like Margery. Instead she channeled messages and information. She was to the study of ESP what the Boston medium was to ectoplasmic phenomena—and the two had sat for many of the same scientists and investigators.

  In November of 1931, upon hearing that Eileen was coming to New York, Margery had rushed there to meet her for the first time. Arriving at Hyslop House, the ASPR offices, she arranged a sitting while keeping her identity from the Irish clairvoyant. During the séance, Eileen nevertheless identified her as a “powerful medium.” She then brought through “a very vital young man,” who Margery knew was Walter—for he called her “Kid” and identified the name of their childhood dog, “Victor.” Through the lips of Eileen Garrett, Walter said: “Kid you certainly are an old fraud, but I am in on it.”

  The message in effect relayed what Eileen thought of Margery. Years later she remarked that Mrs. Crandon was “probably the most utterly charming woman I have ever known” and that there was an “indefinite something in her presence and eye that made one think she was a medium.” Eileen also divulged that Margery, in her desperation, proposed they work together in fraud. “That is why I always think it is a great danger for a medium to seek publicity, because the Crandon mediumship was wrecked on publicity—she didn’t need money, she had plenty of money, her husband was a surgeon. She became a great physical medium, the whole of America went mad about her, and she began, of course, having to turn it on; she had her raps and her knocks, she was a sensitive…A very very beautiful girl, she certainly had the whole of the psychic world on its toes. But, again, fraud stepped in. There was not money, there was the power of the press and power of her personality, she could do no wrong. Dingwall, all of them, were all at her feet. Price, Carrington…all of them.”

  In truth, not all of them.

  In 1934 Walter Prince obtained a report proving that the supposed fingerprints of dead Walter—which Margery had been manifesting since 1926—were an exact match to a living member of the ABC Club. Years earlier her friend and dentist, Dr. Frederick Caldwell, had suggested that dental wax might make the perfect cast to absorb Walter’s spectral hand impressions. He had given her a sample with his own prints, and she had apparently kept them and presented them on countless occasions as Walter’s. Even some of her most devoted supporters could not tolerate this final revelation—one brought to Prince by E. E. Dudley, a former ASPR officer and Margery admirer. “Some of the rats show symptoms of leaving the ship,” Prince commented after publishing the exposé that finally and incontrovertibly ruined Margery.

  Soon thereafter, he too left his body.

  Although Dr. Crandon had warned ten years earlier that Prince was dying of heart disease, the dogged investigator may have wanted to outlive, if not the youthful Mrs. Crandon, then at least her mediumship. Two days after his journal published the exposé, Prince finally succumbed to his many ailments. “Not one day and not one hour did I think Margery’s phenomena genuine,” Prince had said. And yet, given the influence of her patrons, Margery had remained the jewel of the ASPR for a decade. Her current champion was William Button, a prosperous New York lawyer, who in 1931 became president of the society. A fifty-nine-year-old married man, Button had an intense romantic affair with Margery. They were living at the Plaza together. In what some saw as the pot calling the kettle black, Hereward Carrington said that “Button is so emotionally involved with Margery that he has lost all sense of perspective and even of decency….For the first time in history an S.P.R. is being run by a medium!”

  Occasionally, Margery received wider notoriety. Curious as to whether the psychic channel might be a viable method of communication, the engineers at Bell Labs conducted a brief study of her mediumship. They determined that “it will probably not replace the telephone in the foreseeable future.” And then, in January 1934, she became the first medium to manifest a ghost heard on the radio, when Station WBZ broadcast the voice of dead Walter singing “Roaming in the Gloaming” with a Scottish accent. “I must be going. G’by,” he whispered as he finished the song. The final time Margery’s effects received national attention was in February 1938, when Time reported that—in an attempt to match the telepathy tests Joseph Rhine was conducting on Eileen Garrett and other psychics—Margery guessed the right suit and number of nineteen out of twenty playing cards drawn from a deck purportedly hidden from her physical vision.

  ♦

  Some had predicted that the Crandons’ marriage would end with the crash of the mediumship. Yet while leading independent lives they maintained a frayed bond until the end of the decade. Margery was gravely concerned when, on December 22, 1939, Roy fell in front of their home and fractured his pelvis. She never seemed to recover from his death five days later, at the age of sixty-six, of bronchial pneumonia. In a service that bore none of the vibrancy of Sir Arthur’s send-off, the doctor’s cremated remains were buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.

  What was once a center for the most unusual medley of gaiety and spirit communion, reporters now found to be “a hushed and darkened” place and Margery “visibly grieved.” At 10 Lime Street, she told them Roy’s health had been declining for two years, and in that period the couple had abandoned their endeavors in psychic research. More surprisingly she stated, “I do not contemplate making any efforts to communicate with him in after life.”

  Dr. Crandon died without the attention he had craved as the Galileo of psychic science. As a surgeon-in-chief until the last year of his life, he earned admiration and affection from some of his medical colleagues. A few in his family, particularly his sister Laura, revered him. Spiritualist researchers, like Mark Richardson, eulogized him as a “valiant warrior.” However, even before he became interested in psychic phenomena, Dr. Crandon bore a certain stigma. His first two marriages had been disasters and Margery, the third wife, was suspected of being a gold-digger who wanted her son to attend Harvard and have all the opportunities of a Beacon Hill gentleman.

  After Andover, John Crandon became a Harvard-educated physician like his stepfather. Again like Roy, he did his surgical residency at Boston City Hospital, where he took part in dangerous and exacting studies. As both subject and scientist, he lacerated himself and endured scurvy ailments for months in order to demonstrate the curative power of vitamin C. His achievements in medicine notwithstanding, John Crandon was a chronically anxious and unhappy man. He married and had two children, but even within the family he almost never spoke of the phenomena that had haunted him since childhood. Nor did John discuss Margery—except to say that some of her work was “genuine particularly in the early years.” Roy he called “a great benefactor and a good father”; he insisted that he “never thoug
ht about the possibility of his being a scoundrel,” though he said that “there’s a bit of the psychopath in everyone.”

  ♦

  For all of Roy’s agnosticism and scientific training, he developed into an inspired dissident who spoke against materialism even as he lived affluently, and against religion even as he became a leader of the Spiritualist faith. “Psychic Research has about as much to do with religion as golf,” he once remarked, while at the same time advocating it as the remedy for agnosticism. He, like those researchers who sought proofs of eternal life, were filled with contradictions, as if none of them could really decide whether they were mystics or scientists.

  The Harvard psychologists had speculated that Roy took up Spiritualism as a reaction against his puritanical upbringing. But his extremism and experiments with the supernatural showed that he absorbed more of his heritage than he threw out. He never reconciled his rational bent with the mystical strain in his bloodline—his father the Ethical minister, his grandfather the spiritist healer, and his Pilgrim ancestors who had sought a place unspoiled by immorality and materialism. When those Pilgrims arrived to build their shining city on a hill, they brought their superstitions. And when the beatific vision failed to materialize, the New World was seen from their plagued and besieged settlements as a land where occult forces reigned.

  Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life!

  Following the death of her husband, Margery began to retreat from the friends—the members of the ABC Club—who had been in her circle since the early days of her mediumship. After a while, the worst was conjectured. “The poor woman ended up drunk in a degenerate state in New York, in a cheap hotel,” Hudson Hoagland remembered. Actually, what saved Margery from the abject fate of the Fox sisters was that even after her last exposure, she had not lost her patrons. Though he spent as much time at his Maine home as she did in New York, Dr. Crandon had never left her. When he died she had his estate as well as the continued support of Button and Richardson. And yet, few were certain of what became of her.

  In the second autumn of the Second World War, Francis Russell, a Canadian journalist and historian, decided to find out. His interest had first been piqued eight years earlier when a colleague at Harvard sat with Margery for a series of convincing séances. So impressed was Russell’s friend that he had given the medium a copy of his first novel, River’s End, and had inscribed within it a tribute to her: “I have seen, and I have believed.” Later, however, he came to disbelieve. At a subsequent sitting Walter produced an ectoplasmic hand that the novelist, upon feeling it, was certain was that of a corpse—probably a child’s. He later theorized that the doctor was sneaking body parts out of the hospital, and warned Russell that it was all a “weird business.”

  By 1940, no one else was reporting on the case. With all of Europe in flames and America beginning to mobilize, the controversy Margery had caused a decade and a half earlier seemed distant and unreal to Russell. Partially for that reason, he wanted to meet and write about her.* Upon contacting Mark Richardson, he was surprised to hear that she still conducted séances. And he was soon invited to one. On a stormy evening Richardson accompanied him to Lime Street for a sitting scheduled for eight o’clock. Guests there were no longer fawned over by servants. Mrs. Crandon herself greeted them. Russell did not see the faintest resemblance, though, to the ravishing medium he had read about. “She was an overdressed, dumpy little woman,” he noted, “amiable, yet with a faint elusive coarseness about her that one sensed as soon as she spoke.” The social preamble was also a thing of the past. Margery led her guests directly to the séance room, a homely studio with chintz curtains, leather armchairs, imitation Chippendales, and a brick fireplace. There were about ten people standing around. Margery showed them a cup Sir Arthur had given her in recognition of her “heroic struggle” and a photograph Sir Oliver had signed.

  “Everybody ready?” she asked. In response the circle gathered around the legendary table. “Let’s have a little music,” she said. Richardson cranked the Victrola and “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” crackled from the horn. The lights went out. The song ended. For minutes nothing happened and Russell felt an unbearable tension. Margery sighed, then began to groan like some dying animal. There was a rush of air, a shrill whistle. Then came the voice that seemed to emanate from above the head of the medium. Walter had arrived for his last recorded visit.

  The goal of the sitting had been to contact Dr. Crandon and get wax impressions of his fingerprints. Nothing like that happened. There was much banter between the ghost and guests, but Roy didn’t come through when Richardson asked for him. “Not tonight, Doc,” said Walter. “Next time, maybe.” Silence ensued, like a dying wireless broadcast.

  Margery asked for light, she yawned and smiled, stretched her fleshy arms—and made no apologies for her diminished powers. As her visitors left, she shook hands with each at the top of the stairway. “You must all come to tea next Sunday,” she insisted. “I have a feeling it’s going to be important. All of you, next Sunday—but not before five o’clock. I have to see about Roy’s grave earlier,” she chortled. “The landscape gardeners have made an awful mess of it, planted hydrangeas. Roy hates hydrangeas. Now don’t forget—next Sunday at five.”

  Russell, who never saw her again, was not unaffected by the demonstration. He found Walter’s personality and presence to be so tangible—“a kind of poolroom johnny from the other world”—that he speculated, as many had previously, that Big Brother was a secondary personality that emerged when Margery was unconscious; for no one, the journalist surmised, could be that good an actress.

  ♦

  In the last years of her life, Margery spent part of her time with William Button in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just three blocks from where Houdini had resided. Around the time that her relationship with the ASPR president ended, she also had a falling-out with Mark Richardson. Her most enduring supporter, the scientist whom Walter affectionately called “Doc,” had become too interfering in his efforts to get her to stop drinking. They became “bitterly estranged,” and by 1941 she was often alone at 10 Lime Street. The séances were over. The spirit once known throughout the country was now, like Banquo’s ghost, only evident to one person. Many evenings Margery sat with a pad in hand, scratching out messages from Walter. By then she realized something that had been reinforced with every loss or defection: only the dead were there for her. In October, when she knew she was dying, an investigator named Nandor Fodor tried to get her to explain her methods and admit her deceit. Her voice was so weak, many degrees fainter than Walter’s whisper, that Fodor couldn’t at first hear her response. After asking her to repeat herself, she said “sure,” more audibly, then, according to him, “I said you could go to hell. All you psychic researchers can go to hell.” With a flicker of her old humor, she smiled, attempted to laugh, and told him, “Why don’t you guess? You’ll all be guessing…for the rest of your lives.”

  Margery, like Houdini, appeared ready to leave her body on Halloween, but she hung on until 1:30 the following afternoon, when she died at home of liver cirrhosis. That evening Mark Richardson claimed to hear a series of inexplicable raps at his house on Marlboro Street. Four years later, Francis Russell also reported a strange occurrence—which he would use to conclude his story on Margery. It was a stifling August afternoon just after the war and he was walking along Cornhill behind Boston City Hall when he stopped under the shade of the awning of a secondhand bookstand. Browsing through the outdoor rack, he came across a copy of his old friend’s novel, River’s End, among the twenty-five-cent throwaways and opened it. There on the flyleaf was the unblemished inscription: “I have seen, and I have believed.”

  * * *

  * Russell’s article would not be published until 1959, in Horizon.

  When the Rain Stopped

  Margery had spoken affectionately of her old rival in her final days. And in addition to the lighthearted, almost amorous, pictures of her and Houdini, she had ret
ained this memory. During the magician’s last visit to Lime Street the two of them sat briefly alone in her son’s room, where she had suggested that he, clearly exhausted, could take a nap prior to their final Charlesgate séance. While reclining on John’s bed, Houdini told her about his most wondrous effect. It had occurred, he recalled, on the Fourth of July at Seacliffe, Long Island—when rain began to fall just as his nephew and other children were preparing to set off fireworks. As the heavens tore loose, the boy turned to Houdini and asked him to make it stop.

  “Rain and Storm, I command you to stop,” the wizard had ordered, raising his hands in supplication to the rain gods. Moments later the storm ended. When his nephew said it would have stopped anyway, Houdini reversed the hocus-pocus, this time ordering the “great Commander of the rain” to make it pour again. As if willed by Houdini, more rain fell. The children urged him to end it as he had before, but he felt he had pushed his luck far enough. At least, that was what he told Margery.

  Proceeding downstairs, Margery could hear the murmuring of Roy, Prince, and Munn—voices had always carried well at Lime Street. After joining them she mentioned Houdini’s feat to the dubious men in her parlor. They thought it a coincidence, of course, or a story—only in myth could magicians control the forces of nature. Margery was not so skeptical. Many of her best effects, she said, had come during storms. The more electricity in the air, the better her performance.

  Sources

  A complete list of sources would encompass an entire book in itself. This is so because the primary source material for The Witch of Lime Street was collected from newspaper articles spanning well over a decade, journals and magazines, and extensive correspondences. All incidents depicted and everything in quotations are taken from the record. There are a few passages where conversations are described speculatively: examples of this are Houdini’s meeting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Windlesham and his conversation with Margery in her son’s bedroom. The dialogue in those scenes is not taken from the mind of the author, but rather from the mouths of the characters—as they expressed these specific thoughts and words on other occasions.