BEHIND THE SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Mina Crandon, best known as “Margery”, was a Boston medium who found herself embroiled in one of the most bitter controversies in American psychic research in the 1920′s.Regardless though, she was perhaps the greatest rival of magician Harry Houdini as he embarked on his own crusade against fraudulent mediums;  their bitter sparring and debates almost damaged his career beyond recognition as well.”Houdini suspected that the secret of their craft lay not in any mystical connection with the spirit world, but in clever trickery. And after sitting with more than a hundred mediums, he was sure of it. As he told an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times, “It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer.” With characteristic tenacity, he set out to expose as many mediums as he could.”

''The photograph is courtesy of the The Libbet Crandon de Malamud Collection.''

Margery the medium. Never in the ambiguous history of spiritualism in the United States has there been a medium who achieved such a world reputation for psychic phenomena and caused such extended controversy as the woman known as Margery, who suddenly manifested her abilities in Boston in the Spring of 1923. Margery, it was claimed, performed under the spirit control of her dead brother Walter. His voice first spoke through her, though later independently of her vocal chords. During a series of her seances extraordinary occurrences took place. Flowers and other objects materialized from nowhere.

Harry Houdini

Ghostly bugle calls sounded.At time ectoplasmic rods sprouted from the medium’s body that were capable of touching persons in the dark, moving objects, producing lights, and making wax impressions of themselves.There was a great diversity in the phenomena which occurred. J. Malcolm Bird, associate editor of Scientific American, who later wrote a book on Margery and became her partisan as did Hereward Carrington, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. Houdini, the magician who attended five of the seances, denounced her most hysterically.

Its safe to assume that some elements of the paranormal were present in Crandall’s seances. But to extricate the real from the fake in her case, is still a mystery she took to the grave with her in 1941.

''Figure 4 The spirit voice of Walter calls out, "The megaphone is in the air!"

Hereward Carrington, one of this country’s most noted pioneer psychic investigators, wrote:

“As a result of more than forty sittings with Margery, I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal phenomena frequently occur. Many of the observed manifestations might well have been produced fraudulently . . . however, there remains a number of instances when phenomena were produced and observed under practically perfect control.”

The opinions surrounding the Margery mediumship were as diverse as the phenomena themselves. While the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was saying, “The phenomena . . . are perhaps the best attested in the whole annals of psychic research,” America’s psychic investigator, Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, was saying, “Now, in my judgment, the Margery case will in time come to be considered the most ingenious, persistent and fantastic complex of fraud in the history of psychic research.’ ”

Conan Doyle's satisfaction.''" width="250" height="295" />

'' Because séances were conducted in darkness, it was hard to catch a skilled magician at her tricks. To limit Margery's movements during the test, Houdini constructed a box for her to sit in, but the results were inconclusive, much to Houdini's frustration and Conan Doyle's satisfaction.''

”In addition to the celebrity gained by Crandon’s ethereal brother, Mina herself became well-known for her risqué and sometimes bizarre séances. It was not uncommon for her to hold sessions in the nude and according to some, she was especially adept at manifesting ectoplasm from her vagina. It was also rumored that she had affairs with some of her would-be investigators, thus silencing a few of her most vocal critics.”

In the next few years hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles appeared about her. A committee from Scientific American and one from Harvard investigated her, and their findings were varied. Concerning margery herself, there has never been a final conclusion.

Margery in trance and her wrists held by sitters exudes ectoplasm from her ear - Date: circa 1924

What made Margery’s case unique beyond the spiritualist phenomena themselves was the quality of the people involved. Doctors, professional men, and members of the Harvard faculty were among the regular sitters at her seances. No financial considerations ever entered into the mediumship; in fact the expenses of many of the investigators were paid by Margery’s husband. Margery was the Canadian-born wife of Le Roi Goddard Crandon, a well known Boston doctor and surgeon-in-chief of a local hospital. Dr. Crandon, a harvard graduate of the class of 1894, had been for some years a lecturer at the Harvard Medical School.

The name Margery was a pseudonym invented for Mrs. Crandon at the outset of her mediumship to protect her from publicity. In her ordinary daily life, she was matter-of-fact about he psychic powers and would sometimes jokingly refer to herself, a personable woman in her thirties, as a witch, adding that if she had lived 250 years earlier she would probably have been hanged.

Margery Crandon

Margery the medium had her origins in Dr. Crandon’s library. More or less by chance, early in 1923 he happened to take up books on spiritualism, at first in a desultory way and later with more concentrated interest. Although his wife did not take spiritualism seriously they talked about it together, and one day as a joke she went with a friend to a Boston clairvoyant. She did not identify herself, and she was astonished when the medium, in a trance, told her  that a spirit by the name of Walter was present. The messages that he then transmitted from Walter consisted of small personal incidents from her childhood.

A short time after this, the Crandons, with four of their friends, made a private attempt at spirit communication, gathering around a table in the living room, under a red light in their home at the foot of Beacon Hill. Before long, the table began to rotate and then tilt. One by one the sitters were sent from the room. Only in Mrs. Crandon’s absence did the table remain dead. A code of responses was soon established by which the table-tipping intelligence, who maintained he was Walter, could reply to questions.

''Figure 1 From left to right, Mr. Prince, Margery, Bird and Houdini, standing outside Margery's house.''

Subsequently, Walter began to communicate by a series of raps, and then after some time his voice asserted itself through Margery. About this time, Dr. Crandon constructed a cabinet for his wife, and her seances were conducted with the sitters joining hands in a circle. Walter,s presence was usually announced by a sharp whistle. His voice now became a standard feature of all Margery’s seances, and the table tipping and the raps were discarded. Over the months, her mediumship seemed to follow its own curious progress.

At one point, all the clocks in the house were stopped at a time pre-determined by Walter. At another seance Walter announced he would play taps, and shortly afterward the notes were faintly heard in the lower part of the house. Sometimes, the furniture in the living room would move. Once, after he called attention to the possibility, a live pigeon was found in the next room. Finally, Dr. Crandon claimed that he had observed ”faint aurora-like emanations” projecting from the region of  Margery’s fingers. This was the beginning of the ectoplasmic materializations that were to produce organs and hands of various kinds.

''Mr. Jehar, who was represented by literary agent Tina Bennett of Janklow & Nesbit, said his book will tell the story of Houdini’s campaign to discredit Margery Crandon, who made the front page of the New York Times in the 1920s as the first spiritual medium whose abilities had been verified by science. The book, entitled The Witch of Lime Street, will be out in early 2010, Mr. Jehar said.''

A wax cast was made of one of these hands. Others were photographed. Walter registered his thumb print in wax. The ectoplasmic limbs rang bells. Accompanying these materializations were psychic lights that floated about the room glowing and fading. In 1922, Scientific American offrered to pay $2,500 for any objective demonstration of psychic phenomena ans appointed an investigating committee of five prominent persons interested in this subject. Among the members was Dr. William MacDougall, president of the American Society for Psychical Research, Dr. Hereward Carrington, the author and psychic experimenter who had tested the European medium Palladino; and Harry Houdini, the magician and escape artist. During 1924,in the course of the committee’s investigations, three articles by Mr. Bird essentially favorable to Margery appeared in Scientific American. These spread the interest in her mediumship quickly and widely.

However, the report of the committee a few months later was unfavorable. Houdini, with a showman’s eye for publicity, published a lurid pamphlet denouncing Margery. Former clergyman Dr. Prince was not convinced. Yet it must be remembered that his and Houdini’s attendance at the sittings was scanty. The report and the committee were sharply attacked by the growing number of Margery’s defenders.

”Houdini was shocked and traveled to Boston to witness a séance for himself. What happened next remains shrouded in mystery — although it is clear that Crandon did not trust Houdini and the magician himself had stated that he was determined to expose the medium as a fraud. During the sessions, Houdini claimed to have seen Margery performing a number of tricks like making noises with her feet and lifting objects which were said to have moved on their own. In spite of this, he did not expose her publicly and asked that more stringent tests be performed. It was rumored that Margery had somehow outwitted Houdini — and rumors also flew that perhaps her powers were genuine after all.

The following month, Houdini placed the medium in a wooden box with a hole in the top for her head and holes on each side so that her hands could be held during her entire séance. According to reports from the session, Margery’s spirit control, Walter, took such a dislike to Houdini that the top of the box was allegedly ripped off by an invisible force.

The séance continued the next evening and Margery was placed back in the box. Shortly after she went into her trance and her spirit guide came through, the committee asked that she ring the bell which had been placed in the box with her. Immediately, Walter (the spirit guide) exclaimed that Houdini had done something to the bell so that it would not ring. An examination of the bell revealed that a piece of rubber had been wedged against the clapper so that it would not ring! However, there was no proof that Houdini has tampered with it.

A short time later, Walter also said that Houdini had placed a ruler inside of the box so that he could later accuse Margery of cheating. The ruler too was found and later, Houdini’s assistant, Jim Collins would say that he had been instructed to place it there in case Houdini could not find another way to prove she was a fraud. Whether true or not is not readily verifiable either, as this appeared in a 1959 book by William Lindsay Gresham after Collins had died. However, at the time,It certainly appeared that Houdini had been caught cheating and he was widely discredited for it, leading many to doubt the integrity of some of his earlier investigations.

In this case, the committee scheduled further tests of Mrs. Crandon but they were later cancelled. The decision on Margery’s abilities was split and because of this, the money was never awarded. Houdini further outraged the Crandon’s and their supporters when he published a small book called Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium Margery. He was as adamant about the fact that Margery was doing nothing more than offering clever tricks as her supporters were that what she was doing was genuine.”

Other investigations were conducted. At a series of seances with an English representative of the Society for Psychical Research, Margery produced varieties of ectoplasm including a much more embryonic hand than the earlier one, spongy and feeling like blancmange. This hand was photographed under red light. When the photographs were examined, experts from Harvard reported that the so-called ectoplasm was composed of the lung tissue of some animal.

Perhaps the most directly damaging evidence against Margery was the discovery in 1932 that the wax impressions shown for six years as Walter’s psychic thumbprints were really those of a Boston dentist. The dentist, still alive and practicing, admitted that he had once made several such impressions in dental wax at Mrs. Crandon’s request. To this charge the Crandon’s never replied.

”Believers were enthralled by this new manifestation. It was almost as if the spirit was leaving a calling card, even better. This, along with the whole question of Margery’s mediumship, caused a major upheaval in Spiritualist circles. Unfortunately though, the suspicion of fraud never left her and many became disillusioned when thumbprints supposedly impressed in wax by Crandon’s ghostly brother Walter, were shown to be exact matches for the thumbprints of Crandon’s dentist, Dr. Kerwin. Police experts testified that there could be no mistake in this. The ruse was discovered when E.E. Dudley, a former officer of the ASPR, began collecting thumbprints from every individual ever known to have attended one of Margery’s séances. Thanks to this, “Walter” was demoted to the status of a disembodied voice only.” ( Troy Taylor )

”There is a psychology and a very delicate balance of sensitivity which must be fully appreciated, in order to investigate mediumship, especially physical mediumship. So often, people fail to recognize the acute sensitivity of a medium, let alone that of the spirit workers. The success of mediumship depends upon many factors, most of which we simply do not understand. Here is where, in our opinion, many Spiritualists and parapsychologists failed miserably with respect to the Margery mediumship. Over 50 years later, we cannot help but feel that the real implications behind Margery Crandon’s mediumship were severely neglected and have eluded us.

Was Mina Margery Crandon a fraud? This, only the reader can answer? Personally, we do not feel the question of fraudulence or honesty is even the cardinal issue here. After extensively researching this case, we have formulated our own opinions. We can only hope that you not judge Margery, or any medium, solely on the basis of superficial facts. When dealing with mediumship, facts can be just as eluding as fantasy; furthermore, truth is, very often, stranger than fiction. Let us not look only at the stated facts and opinions. Let us look at what these facts have to say about mediumship.”