Mediums Rare (10 page)

In the darkness, a female medium takes hold of the hand of the sitter to her left with her left hand. With her right, she removes a weighted artificial hand from beneath her robe and bends its flexible fingers over the arm of the sitter to her right.

“We must all sit very still now,” she declares.

She picks up the trumpet from the table and begins to swing it around, then puts it to her lips and hisses into it, then grunts, then moans, then finally murmurs,
“Hel-oooooo.”

“Hello,” the sitter responds.

“Do you believe?” the medium asks through the trumpet.

“
Oh, yes
,” the sitter answers.

The male medium’s associate stands in front of the cabinet, addressing the sitters. The medium’s hand slips out between the cabinet curtains, removing, from beneath the bottom of his associate’s robe, a veritable carload of luminous silk forms, faces, hands, costumes and reaching rods.

“Be it understood,” the associate vows, “Professor Oglethorpe has nothing in this cabinet with him save his spirit friends.”

“Oh, yes,”
the sitters say.

A séance room in darkness, a cabinet, its curtains extending to the ceiling.

Inside, a trap door is raised in the ceiling, a padded ladder lowered. Down which descend an endless legion of spirits enacting their ethereal performances.

All of these mediumistic ploys were well known to Harry Houdini.

He used all of them to discredit what he believed to be fraudulent psychics.

Occasionally, he went too far.

August 19-20, 1924
Boston, Massachusetts

T
he dark hotel room was so still that even the shifting of his light weight on the chair was audible. Houdini spoke suspiciously. “You have her hands grasped firmly?” he demanded.

Dr. Prince sighed. “I have her left hand held in mine,” he answered.

Would the little man ever be satisfied? he wondered.

“I have the right hand,” Dr. Crandon said slowly and distinctly. “As always.”

“Yes,
her
husband,” muttered Houdini.

“
You
accepted him, sir,” Malcolm Bird reminded the magician.

Along with Dr. Comstock, Hereward Carrington and Professor MacDougall, he sat some distance from the cabinet.

Houdini made a disgruntled sound. His small hands swept quickly above the surface of the table which separated him from the cabinet.

Then he touched the electric light wired to a telegraph key; the bell box.

Mina Crandon, known to the psychic world as Margery, sat in the heavy wooden cabinet, only her head and hands protruding. Her eyes were closed, her head slumped forward.

“Very well,” Houdini addressed her. “Ring the bell if you can. Let me hear the bell ring.”

The bell rang so immediately that his look of smug assurance vanished in an instant, replaced by one of angry surprise.

“Are you
satisfied?
” asked “Walter.”

“Contrary to all the newspaper reports,” Houdini told them before the next sitting, “I have
not
been baffled along with every other investigator.”

“You’re
still
not convinced?” Malcolm Bird looked offended. “You heard the bell last night. We all heard it.”

“Obvious fraud,” Houdini responded.

“Mr. Houdini.” Bird’s features tightened with resentment. “Every single condition in the séance room—down to the very construction of the solid wood cabinet—was yours.”

“Completely false,” the magician said. “The conditions were
not
mine.

“Further, I accuse you, Mr. Bird, of being totally untrustworthy and I forbid you from being present in the séance room any longer. I have canceled a valuable stage tour to attend these sittings and I will not be trifled with or lied to.”

Malcolm Bird, infuriated, could barely speak. “That’s it for me,” he managed to say before he stormed from the room.

Houdini’s smile was cold. “Perhaps now we can have an
honest
test,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later, Mina Crandon, attired in dressing gown, silk stockings and slippers, was helped into the cabinet by her husband.

Houdini shut the cabinet and locked it carefully.
“Now,”
he said.

He looked at Dr. Crandon. “Professor MacDougall will hold your wife’s right hand this evening.”

“You don’t trust me either?” Dr. Crandon challenged.

“In matters of this sort, I trust no one,” Houdini answered. “Least of all, you, the subject’s husband.”

“You believe I will deliberately assist her in deceiving you,” Dr. Crandon said, his expression one of ill-contained rage.

“I believe it possible that you already have,” Houdini replied.

Dr. Crandon shuddered, attempting to repress his fury. “She is accustomed to my holding her right hand,” he said.

A look of anger twisted the magician’s face. “Either Professor MacDougall holds her right hand or I will declare this sitting null and void and consequently do all within my power to discredit any further sittings by your wife.”

Dr. Prince took hold of Dr. Crandon’s arm to restrain him. Crandon looked at him abruptly, then back at Houdini. He was about to speak when his wife said, “It’s all right, Goddard. Let it be.”

Dr. Crandon filled his lungs with slow, deep breath, then nodded once and moved to one of the chairs against the wall.

“Dr. Prince will, as usual, hold the mediums’ left hand,” Houdini said, giving the word ‘medium’ an emphasis of obvious scorn.

Dr. Crandon began to rise from his chair, then sank back down as Carrington reached out and gripped his shoulder.

“The man is intolerable,” Crandon murmured.

Carrington’s smile was partly sad, partly amused. “I know,” he replied quietly.

As Dr. Comstock was moving to extinguish the lights, Houdini said, “One moment, I want to check the cabinet again.”

“Dear God.” Dr. Crandon looked around the room as though to avoid the sight of the small magician as Houdini unlocked and opened the cabinet again, then peered inside, feeling around the interior, aided by his assistant.

“Very well,” he finally said.

He closed the cabinet again and re-locked it. He and his assistant took their places by the table as Dr. Comstock turned off the lights and felt his way to his chair.

Within a minute, Margery’s “control”—ostensibly her deceased brother Walter—burst through, his voice incensed.

“We will not continue with this sitting!” he said. “The
magician
plans to trick us!”

“What?”
Houdini sounded outraged.

“He has hidden a collapsible ruler under the cushion beneath the medium’s feet!” raged “Walter.” “There will be no sitting! Turn on the lights!”

A frowning Dr. Comstock rose and felt his way back to the light switch.

“I forbid this!” cried Houdini.

“
There will be no sitting!
” Walter cut him off.

As the lights went on, Houdini lunged to his feet and over to the cabinet, features stone-like. With quick, angry movements, he unlocked the cabinet and threw it open. Reaching down, he jerked a folded ruler from beneath the cushion under Mrs. Crandon’s feet; held it up in triumph.

“Announcing the existence of this ruler is obviously a cheap device to avoid its discovery and, at the same time, discredit me,” he said derisively.

“A cheap device to discredit my wife, you mean!” Crandon broke in loudly. Again, he had to be restrained by Carrington.

Houdini pointed at the cabinet, his expression one of contempt.

“I accuse our so-called
medium
of concealing this ruler in the cabinet to besmirch my reputation!” he cried.

“A lie!” raged Crandon.

“Mr. Houdini, you and your assistant checked the cabinet completely just before we started,” Dr. Prince reminded him.

“We did not—” began Houdini.

“You even re-opened the cabinet to check it again mere seconds before we started,” Prince interrupted the magician.

“In order to place the ruler inside and discredit my wife!” Dr. Crandon shouted.

“False!” Houdini screamed at him. “
False! False! False!”

The mystery was never solved. Houdini denied that he had placed the ruler in the cabinet. So, too, did Dr. Crandon and his wife.

At the very least, Houdini’s accusations of fraud in this case were questionable.

Oddly enough, although it is generally assumed that Houdini went to his grave claiming that he had never witnessed a single, genuine psychic manifestation in his life, he once told Hereward Carrington that, while performing in Berlin, he had, in fact, experienced exactly such a manifestation.

He was walking onto the stage to begin his show when his eyes were drawn to the opposite wing.

There, he saw his mother standing, a shawl over her head.

Smiling at him.

Torn between his sense of duty to the audience and his stunned reaction to the sight of his beloved mother, Houdini spoke a few words of greeting to the audience, then looked back quickly at the wing where he had seen his mother.

She was gone.

Houdini, stricken, commenced his show.

Later, to discover that, at the moment he had seen his mother, she was dying in New York.