The Magician and the Spirits Page 5

  A sensational trial followed in April and May, one that echoed the larger debate between believers and skeptics, science and faith, and put Spiritualism on the witness stand along with Mumler.

  The prosecutor argued, “Man is naturally both credulous and superstitious, and in all ages of the world imposters and cheats have taken advantage.”

  He listed numerous ways spirit photographs might be faked, though no one seemed quite sure what Mumler’s exact methods were. One thing was clear: spirit “extras” were less likely to turn up when those methods were under scrutiny. One esteemed portrait photographer testified that he saw no foul play in Mumler’s technique, but most experts backed the prosecution: ghostly effects were easily achieved through earthly means. One boasted that he could photograph “a man with an angel over his head, or with a pair of horns on his head, just as I wish.”

  P. T. Barnum, 1855.

  The prosecution also called to the stand master showman P. T. Barnum, who had blasted spirit photography in his 1866 book, The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages, but Mumler’s lawyer challenged his testimony. Why was Mumler on trial when Barnum wasn’t? His museum had been known to feature, just for starters, a dried mermaid. “Have you never . . . taken money for the exhibition of spurious curiosities?” the lawyer asked.

  “I think,” Barnum said, as the courtroom roared with laughter, “I may have given a little drapery with it sometimes.”

  The defense, for its part, mainly called Mumler’s satisfied clients, including a state senator and a former US justice, sitters convinced that he had given them precisely what they came for.

  “Persons of all classes, professions, and shades of opinion were present” at Mumler’s trial, reported the New York World. The crowd was one of “the most intelligent that ever assembled in a New York police court,” with “journalists, lawyers mighty in criminal proceedings, authors, physicians, artists, sculptors . . . all deeply interested in the solution of a question which they believe can only be answered by one of two alternatives—‘A fraud’ or ‘A miracle.’”

  “Let me say to you that a great responsibility rests upon you, and your decision . . . will be looked after by the ‘spiritual world’ with more than ordinary anxiety. Trusting you will be equal to the emergency, I am spiritually yours.”

  —AMELIA V. BROOKS,

  FROM A LETTER TO JUDGE DOWLING PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 21, 1869

  Mumler himself insisted that he didn’t know—had never claimed to know—how spirits were managing to show up and have their portraits taken. Charged with deciding whether felony and misdemeanor charges should be presented to the grand jury, Judge John Dowling was “morally” certain Mumler’s clients had been tricked, but since no one had actually caught the photographer red-handed, or proved deceit in his methods, the justice was obliged to let him go.

  William Mumler photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the “ghost” of her husband.

  But Mumler’s reputation moved with him, and though he set up shop again in Boston and continued to take portraits—including a famous view of widow Mary Todd Lincoln being comforted by her spirit husband, the assassinated President Lincoln—his tarnished career never fully recovered.

  In 1875, a few years after the Mumler trial, an artful French medium and photographer named Édouard Isidore Buguet was similarly arrested and charged. When police seized the contents of Buguet’s studio as evidence, they found a stash of life-size doll heads: the model for spirit “extras.” After admitting in court that he double exposed for his effects, he was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail and a fine of five hundred francs.

  Airy Images

  Magicians, too, used ghostly pictures to amaze their public. At phantasmagoria shows, illusionists projected pictures on a waxed screen, toying with the focus and using hidden lanterns to change the size and shape of the spectral figures they projected. These “air images,” as handbills and ads called them, often featured celebrities—living and dead—like Napoléon Bonaparte.

  Robertson’s phantasmagoria, Paris, 1797.

  What’s interesting about Buguet’s case is that some of his clients—educated people from all walks of life who had sat for the photographer and received spirit portraits of loved ones—refused to accept his guilt or surrender their faith, even after Buguet explained the mechanics of his deception.

  A police officer testified that Buguet had shown off the portrait of a woman who’d served as the spirit sister of one sitter, the mother of another, and the friend of a third. Buguet even showed how he had used the image of a live subject who proved “much annoyed at his premature introduction to the Spirit world.”

  Spirit photography faded out for a time but reemerged, alongside demand for other spirit manifestations, in England especially, in the wake of the war and pandemic.

  In the 1910s and ’20s, medium William Hope and his famous Crewe Circle perfected the technique of adding “extras” to unexposed film. Like Mumler and Buguet before him, Hope gained a following and attracted controversy.

  Along with Mumler’s, Hope’s projected images had made a stir during Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Carnegie Hall lectures.

  Spirit photograph by Édouard Isidore Buguet, circa 1873.

  Spirit photograph by William Hope, 1920.

  Doyle told of visiting Hope and his medium, Mrs. Buxton, in 1918, after his son Kingsley’s death, and again in the summer of 1919. At his third Hope séance, he got an image of his son. The audience let out a collective gasp when Doyle projected on the screen the slide of misty Kingsley staring tenderly at his father.

  The spirit was not “a very good likeness,” Doyle confessed to the rapt crowd at Carnegie Hall—too youthful—but he added, “You may realize how consoling it was to me, in any circumstances, to see my son again.”

  In December 1921—busy making his own skeptical inquiries in light of his ongoing debate with Sir Arthur—Houdini tried to call on Hope and have his picture taken with a spirit. He was told the photographer’s engagements “would keep him busy for months.”

  The Curious Case of the Vanishing Lion

  On February 24, 1922, not long after William Hope and his Crewe Circle set up shop in London, Harry Price and a fellow investigator went undercover to Hope’s studio at the British College of Psychic Science. Their task was to commission spirit portraits for inspection without letting on who they were.

  By then it was common practice to bring your own photographic plates (in a lightproof plate holder) for the medium to “magnetize” (this was how photographers assured sitters that no tricks were involved in the processing stage). Price had marked his plates beforehand—using X-rays—with a lion emblem, invisible to the naked eye. When Hope’s séance with Price wrapped up, a spirit image had manifested on the plate, but close inspection showed no lion. The SPR accused Hope of switching the plates and plate holders.

  Later the same year, Price published his findings, outing Hope as a fraud. But faithful followers stuck by him, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a book called The Case for Spirit Photography in his defense.

  Hope uniformly refused to submit his methods to scientific scrutiny, but an undercover sting by the SPR would soon expose him.

  Disillusionments aside, Doyle continued to support the photographer and his circle, and Hope stayed in business until he died in 1933.

  One of the last images Doyle projected on the screen during his Carnegie Hall lectures was a photograph taken by medium and former cleaning lady Ada Emma Deane. Doyle introduced it as “the greatest spirit photo ever taken.”

  Fairies on Film

  With the 1922 publication of his book The Coming of the Fairies, Sir Arthur endangered his already reduced credibility by championing photographs taken by young
Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances, two girls who claimed to play with fairies in their Cottingley garden in rural Yorkshire, England. To Doyle, “proving the existence of fairies” meant “opening the way to a new world,” and the controversy spanned decades, even after his death.

  In 1983, when she was seventy-six years old, Frances finally confessed that the fairies had been traced from Princess Mary’s Gift Book, cut out, pasted on cards, and positioned with hat pins.

  “Among all the notable persons attracted to Spiritualism,” psychic investigator Harry Price said of Doyle, “he was perhaps the most uncritical. His extreme credulity, indeed, was the despair of his colleagues, all of whom, however, held him in the highest respect for his complete honesty.”

  Elsie Wright’s photograph “Alice and the Fairies,” July 1917.

  Taken at a memorial ceremony on November 11, 1922, in London’s Whitehall during two minutes of silent prayer for Britain’s war dead, the image showed the sky over the Armistice crowd swarming with the faces of young men killed in battle . . . milky, lost, neckless heads with shocked eyes and furrowed brows.

  According to the New York Times, when the picture filled the screen in Carnegie Hall, the whole house gasped. A number of women sobbed violently, and Doyle had to pause the presentation while they were comforted.

  It later came out that the disembodied faces in the sky belonged to thirteen soccer and boxing celebrities, all alive and well. The greatest spirit photograph ever taken turned out to be a great big hoax, and the joke was on Sir Arthur. (Unfortunately, the image hasn’t aged well.)

  “From a logical, rational point of view,” said Houdini—though he wouldn’t have been able to convince Sir Arthur, who, not surprisingly, defended Ada Deane even after she was exposed—“spirit photography is a most barefaced imposition . . . evidence of how unscrupulous mediums become and how calloused their consciences.”

  The Even More Curious Case of the Reappearing Lion

  On March 3, 1922, a week after the Price investigation into Hope and the Crewe Circle, a wrapped photographic plate arrived in the mail at the SPR offices. The mystery plate, once developed, revealed the distinct imprint of both a ghost and a lion.

  An SPR “counter” committee, including society member Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, concluded that Price had been bamboozled, along with Hope, by a furtive enemy of mediums and psychic science out to sabotage the proceedings.

  These allegations prompted Doyle to quit the SPR the following year.

  A portrait of psychic investigator Harry Price, inscribed to Houdini, 1921.

  The proof was plain, he argued, in what would soon become a standard mode of attack for him: “For upwards of forty years there have been standing offers of money in the amounts ranging from five hundred to five thousand dollars for a single case of so-called phenomena which could be proven actually psychic.” No spirit photographer had ever volunteered. “If there are any who are operating honestly,” Houdini challenged, “let them come forward with proof and take the reward.”

  “Poor, dear, loveable, credulous Doyle. He was a giant in stature with the heart of a child.”

  —HARRY PRICE, PSYCHIC INVESTIGATOR

  SIX

  Manifestations!

  “Strange how people imagine things in the dark! Why, the musical instruments never left our hands yet many spectators would have taken an oath that they heard them flying over their heads.”

  ~Ira Davenport

  Back when Houdini first arranged to visit spirit mediums on Sir Arthur’s recommendation, his first stop was a Mrs. Anna Brittain. “The best,” Doyle claimed.

  Brittain’s best effort—talking a lot and in generalities—didn’t impress Houdini one whit. “This is ridiculous stuff,” the magician reported in his diary.

  Mediums claim to contact the dead through psychic or paranormal means, and the means vary: some psychics are clairvoyant and work visually; others are clairsentient or clairaudient and rely on their intuition or hearing. Some channel, summon, or “materialize” spirits.

  Houdini next sat for a séance with Mrs. Wriedt, a medium known for attracting spirit voices.

  That, too, was a bust. His dead were dead silent.

  “She was afraid of me,” Houdini guessed, and in fact, the medium later informed Sir Arthur that the magician was “out to make trouble.”

  “I never look for trouble,” was the not-so-innocent reply.

  Sir and Lady Doyle hosted Wriedt at their estate a few days later with contrasting success: as the Doyles, a friend, and the séance medium sang together at a table in the children’s nursery, a fifth, “very beautiful” voice joined in, distinct from Mrs. Wriedt’s. “Now, is not that quite final?” challenged Doyle.

  Whether Houdini went looking for trouble or not, he found it. “You have a reputation among Spiritualists of being a bitterly prejudiced enemy,” Doyle assured him.

  Some mediums refused to sit for him at all.

  Table lifting or “tilting” trick using a pin and slotted ring, 1898.

  Spectral Rock and Roll

  Table tipping, like the popular Ouija board or planchette, was all the rage at “home circles” or séances in the nineteenth century. Participants laid their hands lightly on a special three-legged table, fingertips touching, while someone posed a question. As “spirit” energy surged through their hands, the table would vibrate, tip, “gallop,” or rap out a coded reply (all easy phenomena to fake, according to Houdini).

  Chemist and physicist Michael Faraday threw cold water on the Victorian fad for table tipping. His experiment proved that even earnest (non-faked) rocking and rolling was the result of the involuntary muscle contractions of the living, a case of collective unconscious at work, not a visitation from the dead.

  To “get truth in the matter,” said Doyle, “you must submit in a humble spirit.”

  Whether Houdini accepted the fact or not, the ball was emphatically in the other court. The “forces beyond,” his friend warned, “are repelled by frivolity or curiosity but act under the impulse of sympathy.”

  Spirit, Blow Your Horn

  Since before the days of the Davenport brothers, music and musical instruments provided a favorite channel for ghosts to make their presence known at séances. At formal “trumpet circles,” a medium placed a dedicated metal horn in the ring as the group concentrated together to draw forth a spirit. If an invisible presence arrived, the horn floated up and a voice began to sound.

  Houdini and “reformed” medium Mrs. Benninghofen of Chicago, here demonstrating her methods of psychic deception with a spirit trumpet, 1926.

  The medium Eva C., 1912.

  One medium whom Houdini was eager to observe was the mysterious and much-discussed Eva Carrière or “Eva C.” from France.

  When mediums entered altered states of consciousness, they claimed spirits communicated through their voices, gestures, features, or bodies. By far one of the strangest techniques that mediums worked with, and a fashionable one in the 1920s—in the way that “rapping” was fashionable in the time of the Fox sisters—was to enter a trance and produce a substance called ectoplasm. Supposedly created from a spirit’s energy field, ectoplasm was sticky, glutinous, unsavory-looking stuff that issued from a medium’s nose, ears, and other orifices. Thought to be a spirit’s consciousness or emotion given form, it often assumed the shape of human limbs and faces.

  Ectoplasm, which had to be made in near darkness (mediums claimed it dissolved in the light), was Eva C.’s specialty.

  Psychic Show-and-Tell

  Mental mediumship, it’s said, occurs within a psychic’s consciousness. Through mental telepathy (thought transference), the medium sees, hears, or feels what a spirit communicator—a “control” or “guide”—wants to share. The content is subjective. It’s up to the sitter to recognize or interpret
whatever message is delivered. Spirit communicators have plenty to say, speaking through the channel of a medium, but nothing to show.

  Physical mediums, on the other hand, work in league with spirit “operators” to demonstrate spirit presence. In near darkness, with help from this select breed of medium, the spirit makes or manifests something: ectoplasm, phantom hands, spectral music, orbs of light. Raps echo over walls. A planchette glides across a Ouija board. The operator from Beyond might even cause objects—or the medium herself—to levitate. These alleged phenomena are objective, witnessed by everyone present at

  a séance.

  Houdini upside-down in the Water Torture Cell, circa 1912.

  Houdini managed to get a sitting with the medium but had to work hard for it. Like many Spiritualists, Eva C.’s handler, Madame Juliette Bisson, believed that magicians were biased against psychic phenomena. She didn’t trust them. Houdini won Bisson over by inviting the pair to a performance of the Water-Torture Cell Escape. The illusion so baffled and impressed Bisson and Eva C. that they asked to attend a second performance, and extended the invitation Houdini was after. “You are a magnificent actor,” Bisson said, “who cannot call himself a prestidigitator [magician], a title beneath a man of your talent.”

  Houdini sat in on several three-hour séances with Bisson and Eva C. held by the Society for Psychical Research. He refrained from “scoffing” and went in with “the will to believe” but with eyes wide open, “taking in even the most minute details and keeping on my guard against any trickery.”