After the July 23 séance, Houdini left the Crandon home much impressed by the famous Margery–though not by any supernatural powers, he hastened to assure his colleagues. At his hotel later that evening, the magician explained how and why his conclusions differed from theirs. One feat that had baffled the other sitters was the ringing of a’spirit bell box,’ a small wooden clapper-box that sounded an electric bell when pressed from the top. Although Margery’s hands were held by the sitters on either side of her and her feet were in contact with theirs, the bell box rang repeatedly throughout the séance–a phenomenon she attributed to Walter.

Usually the bell box sat on the floor between Margery’s legs, but Houdini had insisted that it be placed on the floor at his own feet. Despite this precaution, the bell rang as merrily as ever. Houdini had a ready answer: ‘I had rolled my right trouser leg up above my knee,’ he later wrote. ‘All that day I had worn a silk rubber bandage around that leg just below the knee. By night the part of the leg below the bandage had become swollen and painfully tender, thus giving me a much keener sense of feeling and making it easier to notice the slightest sliding of Mrs. Crandon’s ankle or flexing of her muscles….I could distinctly feel her ankle slowly and spasmodically sliding as it pressed against mine while she gained space to raise her foot off the floor and touch the top of the box.’ In short, Margery’s agile foot, not a spirit visitor, had been responsible for the ringing bell.

Another of the evening’s mysteries had involved a megaphone that–according to the disembodied voice of Walter–had been levitated in the darkness above the sitters’ heads. ‘Have Houdini tell me where to throw it,’ the voice had commanded.

‘Toward me,’ answered Houdini, whereupon the megaphone instantly crashed to the ground in front of him. Here, too, Houdini had an explanation. Earlier in the proceedings, he said, when one of Margery’s hands momentarily came free, she had snatched up the megaphone and placed it on her head, like a dunce cap. In the total darkness of the séance room, no one would have seen her do this. Later, with both of her hands again under control, the medium had made the megaphone sail through the air simply by snapping her head forward. ‘This,’ Houdini acknowledged, ‘is the ’slickest’ ruse I have ever seen….’

To assure proper control at future séances, Houdini designed a special ‘fraud-preventer’ cabinet, a slant-topped crate with openings for the medium’s head and arms. Once inside, Margery’s movements–and the opportunities for deception–would be severely limited. Reluctantly, Margery agreed to conduct a séance from within the cabinet, but not before Dr. Crandon and Houdini exchanged such harsh words that Walter himself felt compelled to call for a truce.

The first séance with the cabinet was not a success. Acting on a tip from Walter, Dr. Crandon discovered a small pencil eraser wedged into the bell box to prevent it from ringing. Outraged, the physician accused Houdini of attempting to sabotage the proceedings–a charge the magician repeatedly denied.

Another attempt proved even more dismal. A collapsible carpenter’s ruler–which might have been used to manipulate the bell box and other apparatus from within the cabinet–was discovered at Margery’s feet. Margery’s defenders saw this as a craven attempt by Houdini to discredit her. ‘Houdini, you God damned bastard, get the hell out of here and never come back!’ exclaimed the voice of Walter at the séance. In Houdini’s view, the folding ruler had been planted to impugn his testimony, and he resented that anyone would take Walter’s word over his.

By the time Scientific American finally declined to grant the prize to Margery, in large part due to Houdini’s exposures, the combustible magician had quarreled, sometimes violently, with every member of the committee. Bird, whom Houdini suspected of active collusion with the Crandons, had resigned as secretary. In his final verdict of the Margery phenomenon, Houdini wrote, ‘My decision is, that everything which took place at the seances which I attended was a deliberate and conscious fraud….’

From the great beyond, Walter weighed in with a prediction: Houdini, he said, would be dead within a year. Houdini managed to thwart the prophecy, but only just. He died on October 31, 1926, of complications following a blow to the stomach. In an interview with the press, Margery offered a few words of conciliation, praising Houdini’s virile personality and great determination.

Despite Houdini’s exposures, Margery emerged from the debacle essentially unscathed. In the séance room, she went on to better things. By the end of 1924 she had begun to produce ‘teleplasmic’ manifestations similar to those of Eusapia Palladino, a famed Italian medium. Sitters were now treated to the sight of ectoplasm–said to be the substance of spirit emanations–issuing from Margery’s nose, mouth, ears, and other body openings. The emanations, once extruded from the medium’s body, sometimes formed themselves into the shape of crude hands. These ectoplasmic limbs, the medium claimed, were responsible for the ringing of the bell box and other phenomena.

Eric J. Dingwall, an officer of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, was one of the first to investigate Margery’s latest wonder. Having evidently won the confidence of Walter, Dingwall was permitted to view the teleplasmic emanations by the light of a red lamp, which Dr. Crandon flashed on and off to reveal brief glimpses of the phenomenon. Too much light, Crandon explained, would have an inhibiting effect on the ectoplasm. ‘The materialized hands are connected by an umbilical cord to the medium,’ Dingwall wrote to a friend, ‘they seize upon objects and displace them.’ Later, when Dingwall was permitted to clasp one of the teleplasmic hands, he described it as feeling like ‘a piece of cold raw beef or possibly a piece of soft wet rubber.’

Mid-way through his investigations, however, Dingwall began to entertain doubts. Dr. Crandon’s lamp never allowed him to see the ectoplasm actually extrude from Margery’s body; he had only seen it after the fact. Odder still, photographs revealed that many of the emanations appeared to be hanging from slender, almost invisible threads. Others who examined the photographs noted that the ectoplasm looked suspiciously like animal lung tissue, a substance Dr. Crandon might have obtained through his work at Boston hospitals. Dingwall’s final report on the matter was inconclusive.

Margery remained characteristically unconcerned. In an earlier age, she noted, she would have been executed as a witch. Now she found herself the subject of learned investigations. ‘That represents some progress, doesn’t it?’ she asked.

Sitters continued to file into the séance room at Lime Street. One investigation after another raised the possibility of fraud, but none seemed able to make the allegations stick. Even J.B. Rhine, later to become one of the driving forces of paranormal research, was intrigued by Margery, but he came away unimpressed by what he had seen. As ever, Conan Doyle defended the medium. When Rhine published an unflattering account of his experience with Margery, Conan Doyle bought space in several Boston newspapers to run a reply. The black-bordered message read simply: ‘J. B. Rhine is an ass.’

By 1928, Margery had added yet another effect to her repertoire, one that promised to excite even more speculation. In recent séances, Walter had hinted that it might be possible for him to leave behind a fingerprint. On a visit to her dentist, Dr. Frederick Caldwell, Margery asked if the hot wax used to take dental impressions might also be used to obtain Walter’s fingerprint. Caldwell demonstrated how well the wax preserved his thumbprint and gave Margery his sample print and all the necessary materials to make new ones.

That very night, Walter left a thumbprint in the wax. When a so-called fingerprint expert used by the Crandons said the print matched one taken from an old razor that once belonged to Walter Stinson, Margery appeared to have confounded the skeptics. Yet when psychic researcher E.E. Dudley set out to compare Walter’s wax print with those of people in the Crandon circle, he made a surprising discovery: Walter’s thumbprint was identical in every way to that of Margery’s dentist, Dr. Caldwell. Someone had apparently used the sample thumbprint Dr. Caldwell had made for Margery to create a metal die-stamp suitable for making impressions in wax. The ax had finally fallen. Even many devoted adherents backed away from their earlier endorsements. Malcolm Bird, once her staunchest defender, admitted that at times he had been guilty of elaborations and half-truths. The scientific community let it be known that Margery’s séances no longer held any interest.

The medium’s decline was rapid and tragic. With the death of Dr. Crandon in 1939, Mina grew melancholy and depressed and turned to alcohol for consolation. She began to look older than her years; one visitor described her as ‘an overdressed, dumpy little woman.’ She seemed to have difficulty controlling her emotions. During one séance the medium grew so distraught that she climbed to the roof of the Lime Street house and threatened to throw herself off.

Mina Crandon died at the age of 54 in 1941. In the end she had been worn down not so much by the assaults of adversaries like Houdini, but by the entreaties of her supporters, who continually demanded new and better miracles from her. As Eileen Garrett, a fellow medium, observed, ‘Margery’s best friends were her worst enemies.’

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This article was written by Daniel Stashower and originally appeared in the August 1999 issue of American History magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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