The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  As far as primary source material, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, has the largest collection of Houdini material in the world—including his personal scrapbooks, newspaper articles, and other material on Margery, as well as much of his correspondence with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The transcript of Houdini’s appearance before Congress, the Anti–Fortune Telling Bill, can be found in the National Archives. The Georgetown University Library has important material on the assault that killed Houdini, which can be found in Fulton Oursler’s papers.

  Most of the letters between Le Roi Crandon and Doyle are housed at the Harry Hansom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Transcriptions of correspondences between the Scientific American judges and officials can be found in the Kenneth Silverman archive at the Houdini Historical Center at the Outagamie Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin. While in Appleton I met a helpful private collector, Tom Boldt, who had more letters between these individuals, including Houdini’s correspondence with Stewart Griscom. Many of the letters between the scientists, ASPR investigators, and the Crandons can be obtained at the British SPR Archive at the Cambridge University Library—where I had some seven hundred pages of documents copied. Also in England, at the University of London, are the letters of Harry Price, who communicated with virtually all of the characters in The Witch of Lime Street.

  Many of the newspaper and magazine articles I quote from can be found at the New York Public Library. At the Boston Public Library, I was fortunate enough to cross paths with the librarian Henry Scannell, who has a keen knowledge of how to navigate the many Boston newspapers of the day, and also happens to be the grandson of Dr. Crandon’s best friend, David Scannell. In addition, the BPL has the letters between Houdini and Quincy Kilby, among others, and material pertaining to Dr. Crandon’s dismissal from Boston City Hospital. Boston University has an archive of old Boston Herald articles and many Margery stories can be obtained there. The Harvard Theatre Collection has yet more of Houdini’s letters. The A. A. Roback papers can be found in Harvard’s Houghton archives.

  Invaluable to my research was Mark Richardson’s unpublished biography of Margery, Truth and the Margery Mediumship, which was located in the Maine basement of one of Richardson’s grandsons. Some of the material that Richardson’s daughter, Marian Nestor, was preparing for her own book on Margery is held at the Duke University Library; the papers of Joseph Rhine and William McDougall are also among Duke’s holdings. Hereward Carrington’s papers can be found at the Princeton University Library and Walter Prince’s at the University of Maine. Houdini’s correspondence with Walter Lippmann can be viewed at the Yale University Library. Here in New York, Lisette Coly, granddaughter of the psychic Eileen Garrett and president of the Parapsychology Foundation, was generous in providing material on Margery, including newly discovered transcripts. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has a copy of Houdini’s famous Margery pamphlet. The Conjuring Arts Research Center in Manhattan has a vast collection of digitized Houdini material, including some of his scrapbooks. Finally, there is a nice trove of Margery material at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

  The following books were useful in researching The Witch of Lime Street:

  Houdini

  Bell, Don. The Man Who Killed Houdini. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2004.

  Christopher, Milbourne. Houdini: The Untold Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

  Gibson, Walter and Morris N. Young, ed. Houdini on Magic. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1953.

  Gresham, William Lindsay. Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959.

  Houdini, Harry. The Right Way to Do Wrong: An Exposé of Successful Criminals. Boston, 1906.

  Houdini, Harry. Miracle Mongers and Their Methods. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1920.

  Kalush, William, and Larry Sloman. The Secret Life of Houdini. New York: Atria Books, 2006.*

  Kasson, John. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

  Kellock, Harold. Houdini, His Life Story from the Recollections and Documents of Beatrice Houdini. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928.

  Meyer, Bernard C. Houdini: A Mind in Chains. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1976.

  Silverman, Kenneth. Houdini!!! New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

  Margery

  Bird, Malcolm J. “Margery” the Medium. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1925.

  Bird, Malcolm J., ed. The Margery Mediumship: Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research. 2 vols. XX–XXI 1926–1927. ASPR, 1933.

  Richardson, Mark. W. Truth and the Margery Mediumship. Unpublished.

  Richardson, Mark W., and Charles S. Hill. Margery, Harvard, Veritas: A Study in Psychics. Boston: Blanchard Printing Co., 1925.

  Tietze, Thomas R. Margery: An Entertaining and Intriguing Story of One of the Most Controversial Psychics of the Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

  The Medicine Show, Dime Museum, and Vaudeville Circuit

  Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

  Hartzman, Marc. American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers. New York: Tarcher, 2006.

  McNamara, Brooks. Step Right Up: An Illustrated History of the American Medicine Show. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976.

  Nadis, Fred. Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

  Psychic Debunking

  Brandon, Ruth. The Spiritualists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

  Christopher, Milbourne. Mediums, Mystics & The Occult. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975.

  Houdini, Harry. A Magician Among the Spirits. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924.

  Oursler, Fulton. Behold This Dreamer!: An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964.

  Proskauer, Julien J. Spook Crooks. New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1932.

  Proskauer, Julien J. The Dead Do Not Talk. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.

  Rinn, Joseph F. Sixty Years of Psychical Research. New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1950.

  Roach, Mary. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  MEMOIRS: The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), Our American Adventure (1923), Memories and Adventures (1924), Our American Adventure (1923), Our Second American Adventure (1923).

  DOYLE ON SPIRITUALISM: The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), The Coming of the Fairies (1921), The Case for Spirit Photography (1925), The History of Spiritualism (1926), The Edge of the Unknown (1930), Pheneas Speaks: Direct Spirit in the Family Circle, reported by Conan Doyle (1927).

  Baker, Michael. The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery. London: Paddington Press (UK), 1978.

  Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1949. Reprint. New York, Carroll & Graf, n.d.

  Ernst, Bernard M. L., and Hereward Carrington. Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Story of a Strange Friendship. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, Inc., 1933.

  Green, Richard Lancelyn, and John Michael Gibson. Letters to the Press: The Unknown Conan Doyle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986.

  Lellenberg, Jon, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. The Penguin Press: New York, 2007.

  Lycett, Andrew. The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Free Press, 2007.

  Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.

  Pearson, Hesketh. Conan Doyle: His Life and Art. London: Methuen, 1943.

  Stashower, Daniel. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

  Sir Oliver Lodge

  Jolly, W. P. Sir Oliver Lodge: Psychical Researcher and Scientist. Associated University Press
es, Inc., 1975.

  Lodge, Sir Oliver. Raymond, or Life and Death. London: Methuen, 1916.

  Lodge, Sir Oliver. Past Years: An Autobiography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.

  Spiritualism and Psychic Research

  Aykroyd, Peter H. History of Ghosts: The True Story of Séances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters. New York: Rodale Books, 2009.

  Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

  Besterman, Theodore. Some Modern Mediums. London: Methuen & Co., 1930.

  Bird, Malcolm J. My Psychic Adventures. New York: Scientific American Publishing Co., Munn & Co., 1924.

  Blum, Deborah, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

  Bradley, Dennis H. Towards the Stars, The Wisdom of the Gods. London: T. Werner Laurie Limited, 1924.

  Brian, Denis. The Enchanted Voyager: The Life of J. B. Rhine, an Authorized Biography. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982.

  Carrington, Hereward. The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism. Boston: H. B. Turner & Co., 1907.

  Carrington, Hereward. Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena. New York: B. W. Dodge & Co., 1909.

  Carrington, Hereward. Psychical Phenomena and the War. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1918.

  Carrington, Hereward. Modern Psychical Phenomena. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929.

  Carrington, Hereward. The Story of Psychic Science. London: Rider and Company, 1930.

  Carrington, Hereward. Psychic Oddities: Fantastic and Bizarre Events in the Life of a Psychical Researcher. London: Rider and Company, 1952.

  Dingwall, Eric. Revelations of a Spirit Medium. Arno Press, 1922.

  Ebon, Martin. They Knew the Unknown: Fascinating Case-Studies of Famous Men and Women in History Who Explored the Reality Beyond Our Senses. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1971.

  Estabrooks, G. H. Spiritism. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947.

  Garland, Hamlin. Forty Years of Psychic Research: A Plain Narrative of Fact. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

  Garrett, Eileen. Adventures in the Supernormal: A Personal Memoir. 1949. Reprint, Parapsychology Foundation Inc., 2006.

  Harlow, S. Ralph. A Life after Death: Twenty Years of Research on Death, Near-Death Experiences and Survival of the Personality. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.

  Inglis, Brian. Natural and Supernatural: A History of the Paranormal. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977.

  Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Random House, 1965.

  Lawton, George. The Drama of Life after Death: A Study of the Spiritualist Religion. New York: Henry Holt, 1932.

  Leonard, Todd. Talking to the Other Side. A History of Modern Spiritualism and Mediumship. New York, iUniverse, Inc., 2005.

  Machen, Arthur. The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915.

  McComas, Henry Clay. Ghosts I Have Talked With. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1935.

  McConnell, R. A., ed. Encounters with Parapsychology. 1982.

  Moore, Robert Laurence. In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  Murchison, Carl, ed. The Case for and Against Psychical Belief. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1927.

  Murphy, Gardner, and Robert O. Ballou, eds. William James on Psychical Research. New York: Viking Press, 1960.

  Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

  Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Virago, 1989.

  Podmore, Frank. Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism. London: Methuen & Co., 1902.

  Price, Harry. Confessions of a Ghost Hunter. New York: Putnam & Co., 1936.

  Prince, Walter Franklin. The Enchanted Boundary: Being a Survey of Negative Reactions to Claims of Psychic Phenomena, 1820–1930. Boston: Boston Society for Psychical Research, 1930.

  Richet, Charles. Thirty Years of Psychical Research: Being a Treatise on Metaphysics. W. Collins Sons, 1923.

  Shepard, Leslie A., ed. Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. New York: Gale Research/Avon Books, 1978.

  Sinclair, Upton. Mental Radio. 1930.

  Stuart, Rosa. Dreams and Visions of the War. London: C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., 1917.

  Tabori, Paul. Pioneers of the Unseen. London: Souvenir Press Ltd., 1972.

  Tanner, Amy. Studies in Spiritism. New York: Appleton, 1910.

  Weisberg, Barbara. Talking to the Dead: Katie and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism. New York: HarperOne, 2005.

  Westwood, John Haynes. There Is a Psychic World. New York: Crown Publishers, 1949.

  The Times

  Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. New York: Harper & Row, 1931.

  Blom, Philipp. The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900–1914. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

  Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925. London: Victor Gollancz Limited, 1933.

  Dos Passos, John. U.S.A. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938.

  Edison, Thomas. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tales of the Jazz Age. 1922. Reprint. New York: New Directions, 1996.

  Leuchtenburg, William E. The Perils of Prosperity: 1914–1932. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

  Mencken, H. L. A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writings. New York: Vintage, 1982.

  Millard, Candice. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. New York: Anchor, 2006.

  Rischin, Moses. The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University, 1977.

  Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1980.

  Sullivan, Mark. Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925. 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926–35.

  * * *

  * Specific secondary source for a few of the letters between Dr. Le Roi Crandon and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people who helped me in a long and labyrinthine research pursuit: Tom Ruffles at the Society for Psychical Research, Ellen Berlin at the Boston University Medical Campus, Emily Beattie at the Boston University School of Medicine, Joan Smeltzer at the Department of Psychology at Harvard, Tess Hines at the Mary Evans Picture Library, and Jim Matlock, for providing information on the ASPR. There were a number of professors who shared their knowledge with me, among them: Mark Leff and Carol Symes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Leonard Dinnerstein, an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona; and especially my séance companion, Erika Dyson, at Harvey Mudd College, who generously shared her unparalleled knowledge of and research into the history of Spiritualism. The historian Kirk Davis Swinehart was a most valued friend and colleague. Walter Meyer Zu Erpen was kind enough to provide his information on J. Malcolm Bird. And the psychic researcher Lawrence Leshan shared his time and memories. Some writers on psychic phenomena who were also particularly helpful include Stacy Horn, Mary Roach, and Peter Aykroyd, with whom I had a long and enlightening conversation. On magic, William Kalush at the Conjuring Arts Research Center was of great assistance. And Kenneth Silverman graciously steered me toward all the right places for research material. Houdini collectors who shared their material include Mark Willoughby, John Hinson, Larry Weeks, and Sid Radner. John Cox was also a great friend to the book.

  I am extremely grateful to Tom Boldt for providing amazing material from his personal Houdini collection, and for ushering me into the Houdini séance circle. Mark Biscoe offered a very important helping hand and manifested a research gem on Margery. Susan Hunsdon was a tireless proofrea
der. And, above all, my father, Frederic C. Jaher, contributed in myriad ways to the conception and development of The Witch of Lime Street.

  Like many authors of history, I have a deep appreciation for the librarians and archivists who have assisted me in obtaining material for this book. In particular, I would like to thank Virginia Appuzo and Lynda Unchern at the Cambridge University Library, Tansy Barton at the Senate House Library at the University of London, Clark Evans and Margaret Keickhefer at the Library of Congress, Elizabeth Dunn at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, Emilie Hardman at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, Jessica Murphy at the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, AnnaLee Pauls at the Princeton University Library, Margaret Sullivan with the Boston Police Department, Elizabeth Bouvier at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Randy Roberts at Pittsburg State University, Reina Williams and Julia Gardner at the University of Chicago Library, Gail Fithian, Megan Fleming, and particularly Henry Scannell, at the Boston Public Library, Alan Thibeault at the Boston Herald, Alexandra Solodkaya at the Pickering Educational Resources Library at Boston University, Matt Carpenter at the Houdini Historical Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, Jean Cannon, Helen Adair, Rick Watson, and Richard Workman at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Elaine Smith and Desiree Butterfield-Nagy at the Raymond Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Jeanette Mockford, Andrea Martin, and Shelley Sweeney, at the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, Nicholas Scheetz at the Georgetown University Library, and Gina Halkias-Seugling and Anne Garner at the New York Public Library. Finally, on the research front, my deep appreciation goes out to David Smith, formerly of the NYPL, for all his effusive help and for opening up so many literary doors to me. And I am forever indebted to Dr. Warren Platt, the NYPL’s former expert on religious studies, for his friendship and invaluable and voluntary service as the research assistant on The Witch of Lime Street.