The Secret Life of Houdini (67 page)

Another spirit photo, Houdini style.
From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

“I observe that, in your letter, you put down my starting my world-mission ‘in a crisis of emotion.’ I started in 1916. My son died in 1918. My only emotion was impersonal and the reflection of a world in agony. Our regards to Mrs. Houdini.”

Those were Doyle’s last words directed at Houdini, at least in private. When Houdini sent him a note on May 5 offering to send him a copy of his book
A Magician Among the Spirits
, Doyle didn’t even deign to reply.

From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

Little Sister Will Do Exactly As Big Brother Says

T
HE SIX FRIENDS WERE SEATED AROUND
the table, bathed in the faint red glow from the specially prepared lightbulb, red light being the color of choice for those in the other world. Everyone was so solemn that Mina, the lady of the house, who was younger than the others present, began to laugh out loud.

“This is a serious matter,” Dr. Crandon, her husband, rebuked her. He had recently attended a lecture on Spiritualism by the famed English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who recommended some books for him to read. Deciding to model his own experimentation after the standard family circles in the Spiritualist literature, he had a séance table built to the same specifications of psychic researchers. Then, on May 27, 1923, he invited his friends Dr. Edison Brown and his wife, Frederick Adler, and Alex Cross to a room on the fourth floor of his Boston town house at 10 Lime Street for an exploratory séance.

They completed the psychic circle by linking hands over the table. At first, there was a slight motion under them, but then the whole table began to slide to one side, rise up on two legs, and crash back down to the floor. Something or someone was trying to get their attention.

Crandon, determined to identify the medium, sent each person out of the room, one at a time. The only time that the table remained stable was when Mina was gone. She returned to a sitting ovation. The circle now had its medium. The world would soon know her as Margery.

Mina Crandon, the artist soon to be known as Margery.
From the collection of Libbet Crandon de Malamud

By the second séance, Crandon was intent on communicating with the spirits who made their presence known by tilting the table and rapping upon it. He devised a simple code—one rap for “no,” two for “don’t know,” three for “yes,” etc.—and the spirits began to answer questions.

Crandon still wasn’t satisfied. The third sitting was on June 9, this one held at the home of Dr. Brown. Even on Brown’s regular table, in red light, the phenomena became more refined. Now a tin plate, which rested on a shelf above the table, slowly moved off the shelf and spilled onto the floor while the table remained motionless. After the plate was then placed on the table, at the request of the sitters, it moved without being touched. Crandon needed more.

“Our means of communication with your world is clumsy,” Crandon addressed the unseen spirits. “It would be much more efficient if you were to utilize the medium’s own vocal cords to convey your messages.”

The import of this was apparent to Margery. For the spirits to talk through her she would likely have to go into a trance and if that were the case, she would miss out on all the fun of the séances.

“I will do nothing of the sort,” Margery declared.

Crandon shot her a stare that could kill.

“Little sister will do exactly as big brother says,” the good doctor said, with surgical precision.

Dr. Crandon poses stoically as a spirit obscures his wife in the photo.
From the collection of Libbet Crandon de Malamud

The table rapped three times, indicating the spirits agreed with Crandon.

The group rejoined hands over the table and concentrated. Several minutes later, the attention of the others was drawn to Margery. She began touching the sides of her face in a most peculiar way, as if she were trying on new skin. Then she sighed deeply, closed her eyes, and began swaying back and forth in her chair.

Suddenly, a loud, brash, masculine voice was heard to emanate from her lips.

“I
said
I could put this through!”

It was Walter, her beloved big brother, who had been dead for twelve years.

The Crandons were a decidedly odd couple. She was young, just thirty-three, vivacious, charming, and quite attractive. A blue-eyed, blond Canadian farm girl, Margery had migrated to the Boston area to live with a sister and to escape the fundamentalist bleakness of her father. Her joy was compounded when her favorite sibling, her brother Walter, divorced his wife and moved in with his two sisters. Shortly after, Margery married Earl Rand, a grocer. Less than a year later, Walter, who worked as a locomotive fireman, was crushed to death when his train derailed on the Provincetown line. Two years later, Margery gave birth to a son.

Sometime in 1917, Margery had been hospitalized, most likely for appendicitis, and she was operated on by Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon. Crandon was a Boston Brahmin who could trace his lineage to one of the original twenty-three
Mayflower
passengers. His father was the president of the Boston Ethical Society. Le Roi graduated from Harvard Medical School and then eleven years later received a master’s in philosophy from Harvard. He was one of the most prominent surgeons in the Boston area, earning the nickname “Bellybutton Crandon” for his innovative technique of doing appendectomies through the belly button to avoid unseemly scars. It was this procedure that resulted in a scandal that nearly cost him his job when he operated on a woman who was reporting appendicitis-like symptoms but in actuality was suffering from another undiagnosed ailment. The blow to his reputation led him to other outlets to feed his bloated ego. He immediately joined the Boston Yacht Club and bought a yacht. Within a year, he had a new trophy wife too, marrying Margery shortly after she divorced her grocer husband. The new couple continued to purchase their groceries from Margery’s ex.

Crandon was a peculiar man. Arrogant, dour, antisocial, he seemed to live in his own world. Margery, almost twenty years his junior, was his third wife. He had honeymooned each bride at the exact same resort in the Bahamas. An atheist, he was morbidly preoccupied with his own death; perhaps this was his intellectual attraction to the Spiritualist notion that death was not the end. Now with a medium in his own household, they held nightly séances that eventually expanded beyond the intimate circle of friends and became a sought-after destination in Boston society. In this way, Crandon could enjoy the company of a prestigious expanded social circle with Margery acting as both hostess and mystic.

Margery collapses under the weight of her ectoplasm.
From the collection of Libbet Crandon de Malamud

Less than a month into Margery’s mediumship, Crandon fired off a letter to “Dr.” Arthur Conan Doyle, who was in the United States for his second Spiritualist lecture tour. He reported Walter’s communications through his sister and asked for advice. He also invited Doyle to sit with them in Boston. Doyle responded from a train in Canada, warning that a medium might be placed at risk going into a trance in a large circle where “undesirable elements” might be attracted. “It is different where all are religious Spiritualists. There you have a guardian control.”

Crandon immediately responded. “My little circle have now become all religious spiritualists and I feel that we have a guardian control in the brother of the Psychic…. Repeatedly putting the question of danger to the Psychic up to Walter he replies, ‘Do you think I would let anything happen to her?’”

A relationship was quickly formed, then cemented in December of that year, when Crandon and his wife sailed to London, where she gave a number of séances before various psychic groups and then sat at Conan Doyle’s London apartment. Sitting in a makeshift cabinet consisting of a three-way screen covered by a rug, in the dark, Walter manifested at once, tilted, and then levitated the table. Crandon then turned on a regular white lightbulb and the table continued to levitate. All hands were visible on the tabletop, and Margery’s feet were controlled in a unique way—they were nestled in Sir Arthur’s lap. Back in the dark, Walter whistled, shook the cabinet so violently that the rug flopped down over Margery’s head, and made a dried flower from the shelf materialize on the floor. Perhaps it was the flower production, perhaps it was the unique foot control, but Doyle remembered Crandon’s “charming” wife fondly, and spread the word of her mediumship. It was through Doyle’s recommendation that Margery became a candidate for the prize that had been offered by
Scientific American
magazine, which sought out a medium who could “produce a visible psychic manifestation” to the full satisfaction of their panel of judges, one of whom happened to be Harry Houdini.

“You will be doing the human race a favor when you get your Spiritistic book on the market,” W. S. Davis wrote Houdini. “And the sooner the better. A man like yourself is needed at this time, to correct general misconception and to expose ignorance and superstition.” By May of 1924, the zealous Davis got his wish. Houdini’s
A Magician Among the Spirits
was an eminently readable social history of Spiritualism and the mediums and entertainers associated with that movement. There were chapters on key personalities ranging from the Fox sisters to D. D. Home to Palladino and Dr. Slade, the celebrated slate writer. Houdini exposed the secrets of slate writing and spirit photography. In a chilling section, he chronicled the many deaths associated with the movement, including a family who according to a witness was “cranky on spiritualism” and “no fewer than four of them agreed to take poison!” They were not alone. In Providence, Rhode Island, a fourteen-year-old rapping medium named Almira Bezely tapped out a message that her infant brother would die. Almira helped the prediction along by purchasing arsenic and administering it to her sibling. Years later, in the same town, a Ruth McCaw was sentenced to twelve years in prison for poisoning her stepson, Leon, who somehow managed to survive. Oddly, she wasn’t tried for the death of her stepdaughter, Elsie, who was handicapped and eventually succumbed to the poison. McCaw confessed to trying to kill Leon and noted that the spirits had prompted her actions.