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.

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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."

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