Houdini’s public crusade had its roots in a private grief. The death of his beloved mother in 1913 had been “a shock from which I do not think recovery is possible.” In the intervening years he had attended hundreds of séances, but his longing to contact his mother soon turned to rage at the obvious deceptions he encountered. It galled him to see the public bilked by unscrupulous mediums whose talents, he thought, were no more supernatural than those of “honest” magicians. He soon vowed to devote the remainder of his life to exposing fraudulent mediums. Even in this, the magician could not entirely restrain his flair for the dramatic. Often he attended séances wearing a false beard and mustache or some other camouflage, the better to observe without being detected. When he had gathered enough evidence to make an exposure, he would leap up, tear off his disguise, and shout, “I am Houdini! And you are a fraud!”

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Houdini needed no disguise when he called upon Margery; the medium relished the chance to convert such a notorious skeptic. Some observers saw this encounter as an acid test–not just of Margery’s mediumship, but of spiritualism itself. But if Houdini truly maintained an open mind on the subject, as he often claimed, there was little evidence of it that night as the small séance room came alive with otherworldly activity. A spirit bell rang. A voice called to him in the darkness. A megaphone crashed to the floor at his feet. If these manifestations impressed him, he gave little sign. When the lights came back on, Houdini thanked his hostess and took his leave. On the drive back to his hotel, the magician gave voice to his true feelings. “I’ve got her,” he declared. “All fraud.”

Mina Crandon seemed an unlikely medium. Where the celebrated Helena Blavatsky, founder of the movement known as Theosophy, had been solid and serious, Mina Crandon resembled nothing so much as a light-hearted flapper. Even Houdini conceded that she was an exceedingly attractive woman, and one psychic researcher cautioned his colleagues to “avoid falling in love with the medium.” The daughter of a Canadian farmer, Mina had moved to Boston as a teenager to play piano, cornet, and cello in various local dance bands and orchestras. After working as a secretary, an actress, and an ambulance driver, Mina divorced her first husband and married Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon, a former instructor of surgery at the Harvard Medical School, in 1918. She was barely 30. Dr. Crandon was at least a dozen years older.

It was Dr. Crandon who introduced his wife to the paranormal. In the spring of 1923 he had become intrigued by an account of “table tipping,” a rudimentary form of mediumship not unlike a Ouija board. Crandon ordered a table constructed to the exact dimensions specified in the book he had been reading. Toward the end of May, Crandon and his wife invited four of their friends to join them in an attempt to recreate the table-tipping experiment. Following Crandon’s terse instructions, the sitters took their places at the table, joined hands, and waited for some sign of a spirit presence.

Nothing happened. Mina began to feel silly. “They were all so solemn about it that I couldn’t help laughing,” she recalled. “They reproved me severely, and my husband informed me gravely that ‘This is a serious matter.’”

Then, abruptly, the table began to move–only slightly at first, but then more violently, tilting up on two legs before crashing loudly to the floor. Crandon demanded to know which of his guests possessed the mediumistic talent necessary to cause this manifestation. One by one, the physician instructed his friends to remove their hands from the séance table. The table stopped its rocking only when the last of the sitters lifted her hands. Dr. Crandon had his answer. The medium was his own wife.

At first, the very idea of being a medium seemed a great lark to Mina. All through the summer of 1923 the Crandons conducted one séance after another. In each case, Mina appeared to exhibit some strange new power. Indeed, it seemed that Dr. Crandon had only to read of some new psychic manifestation before Mina could duplicate it.

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