The Magician and the Spirits Page 6

  Water-Torture Cell Escape

  It took Houdini three years to plan one of his most thrilling and mystifying stage illusions—and it cost over ten thousand dollars. Built by British carpenter James Collins, the tall glass box might have been a phone booth or a standing glass coffin. Houdini debuted the escape, “the greatest sensational mystery ever attempted in this or any age,” in 1912, at the Circus Busch in Berlin, to an audience gripped by the eerie sight of Houdini submerged, headfirst, in the locked box, his hair floating like anemones, his white hands groping the glass—to orchestra strains of “Asleep in the Deep.”

  With an assistant stationed nearby with an ax, set to smash the glass in an emergency, volunteers drew the curtain round. A massive stopwatch began to tick over the cell, and like Houdini, audiences must have held their collective breath. He emerged, drenched and gasping, with the cell still locked behind him, the floor still dry.

  Eating Needles on a String

  Houdini perplexed audiences (even doctors) for twenty-five years with his “East Indian” or “Hindoo” Needle-Swallowing Trick, an illusion he introduced in 1899. As he often did, he brought up members of the audience, a “committee” to rule out fraud, and had them peer up his nose and into his throat. He then asked them to watch carefully as he stuffed his mouth with sewing needles, chewing and crunching and joking all the while about “taking iron for the blood.” One paper reported, “You can hear the steel crush and snap under his iron teeth.” He then took a length of white thread and swallowed it, leaving just the end visible in his throat. At last he opened his mouth and let the committee shine a light in to confirm that his mouth was empty, before slowly, slowly reeling out a long string of threaded needles.

  With his pacing and showmanship, Houdini made this trick look new and dangerous, but it was actually nearly a hundred years old, an illusion even amateur magicians can perform.

  Several times, Houdini sat in the “control” chair beside the medium for the best vantage point. Eva C. was first searched by “lady members of the Committee” in the next room, after which Madame Bisson put her into “a mesmeric sleep” and the party would wait, often for hours.

  Houdini demonstrating the Needle-Swallowing Trick, circa 1915.

  At a séance in London on June 22, 1920, Eva C. “expelled from her mouth a great deal of foam,” which began “adhering to her veil on the inside.” Houdini suspected that her ectoplasm was in fact regurgitation, that Eva C. had worked some substance to her mouth by sleight of hand and then expelled it, a move “almost identical,” he said, to “the manner in which I manipulate my [Needle-Swallowing] experiment.”

  Houdini decided that Bisson was “a subtle and gifted assistant to Eva.” He didn’t believe her “to be honest,” and sensed something “wrong in the air” at the June 24 séance. In fact, the hosts, feeling mocked by another participant’s comment, took offense and broke up the gathering.

  Investigators discovered the figures appearing in Eva C.’s ectoplasm, like this example from 1913, were magazine cutouts.

  Too often, Houdini found, mediums imposed fixed conditions on investigators to avoid scrutiny. When faced with exposure, they found some excuse to postpone or end a séance.

  How could observers get the facts if the house rules were fixed; if séances resulted “in a blank” whenever mediums detected suspicion (and blamed investigators for bringing in “an atmosphere of incredulity” hostile to manifestations)?

  It was hard enough that mediums insisted on darkness or near darkness. Sir Arthur argued, “If you want to send a telegram you must go to a telegraph office,” but to Houdini’s mind, the condition of darkness was just another way that mediums kept clients in the dark, in more ways than one.

  In the end, he didn’t doubt that Bisson and Eva C. “simply took advantage of the credulity and good nature” of investigators. Houdini was sure they would be “authentically classified as questionable,” and during fifteen séances in Paris, scientists at the Sorbonne confirmed that Eva C.’s manifestations showed “nothing beyond the simple act of regurgitation.”

  The London Telegraph reported that the “whiteness supposed to have come from the ‘world beyond’ was nothing but a Communicant’s veil rolled up in the medium’s pocket.” Investigations by the Society for Psychical Research in London and an analysis of her ectoplasm revealed it to be made of chewed paper.

  And the ghostly faces that sometimes appeared in that ectoplasm? Celebrity shots of Woodrow Wilson, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, and French president Raymond Poincaré clipped from back issues of the French magazine Le Miroir.

  Fired up now, Houdini sat with other mediums—some hundred or so, he claimed, over six months in Great Britain, with a stint in Paris—but still he held back his thoughts and findings out of deference to Sir Arthur. “He treats Spiritualism as a religion,” Houdini complained later. “In his own mind, they are all genuine. Even if they are caught cheating he always has some sort of an alibi which excuses the medium and the deed.”

  Even if what Eva C. had on offer was not fraud—and Houdini was sure it was—he couldn’t help but wonder what the so-called material evidence presented at séances could possibly add to human understanding of “the future state of a soul.”

  The manipulation of “horrible, revolting, viscous substances” and the appearance of “hideous shapes, which, like ‘genii from the bronze bottle,’ ring bells, move handkerchiefs, wobble tables, and do other ‘flap-doodle’ stunts,” seemed to him not only deceptive but absurd.

  Spirit Wordsmiths

  Many spirits had literary aspirations. The fifteen (or five, if you believe Houdini) pages that the Doyles transcribed for Houdini from his dead mother during the Atlantic City séance are a fraction of the spectral output. The writer Thomas Mann attended a séance in Berlin where a typewriter clacked away of its own volition with the medium nowhere near. “Any mechanical deception or sleight-of-hand tricks,” Mann reported, “were humanly impossible.” The spirits of scribes and statesmen like Shakespeare and Lincoln often waxed eloquent at séances.

  And spirits passed on good wishes and warnings to loved ones through Spiritualist newspapers like Boston’s Banner of Light, which kept a resident medium on staff and published what came through on a special message page. The contents of The Spirit Messenger and Star of Truth, both published in 1852, were said to be written and edited by spirits. In Spiritualist camps and communities like Lily Dale, in western New York, mediums served spirits by relaying messages to the pilgrims who showed up seeking consolation or communion with their dead.

  HOUDINI STILL HADN’T REVEALED HIS TRUE feelings to Sir Arthur about Lady Doyle’s message from his mother, and he continued to fume and investigate independently. He formally “began a new line of psychical research,” assembling his findings for a lecture series and book on the subject.

  If there was any “reality to the return, by Spirit, of one who had passed over the border,” he would find it and devote “heart and soul and what brain power I possess” to the problem.

  Reflecting on the kind of bald deception he saw in Eva C., Houdini again regretted “trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed” when he had been a fake medium with the medicine show. At the time, he saw his skill for deception as play, a tool of his professional repertoire—like handcuffs and straitjackets. But the Atlantic City séance and the painful memories it stirred up had deepened his long-standing preoccupation with mortality and death.

  With the years, he learned to identify with the bereaved who attended séances. “I too would have parted gladly with a large share of my earthly possessions for the solace of one word,” he admitted—one word “genuinely bestowed.”

  Losing his mother didn’t launch his escalating crusade to expose charlatans. But her “visitation” a decade later, and his renewed pain in light of the Doyles’ séance, revealed t
o him the power that fake mediums held in the lives of grieving people. For the first time, the showman who had taken that power lightly “realized that it bordered on crime.”

  Houdini vowed never to step into “a séance room except with an open mind.” The trouble was, he knew quite a few of the tricks physical mediums used to achieve their effects. It was hard to stay impartial when logic told him there was a material explanation for phenomena billed as psychic.

  He knew that to make a spirit “rap” on a séance table, all you had to do, in the dark, was lift a leg and deftly knock the knee bone against the underside of the table, or fasten a wooden block beside the knee in advance and strike the wood sideways against a table leg. These and other methods took skill and practice but were by no means difficult.

  One of Spiritualism’s founders, Maggie Fox, had exposed her method for rapping (cracking her toe joints) decades ago, and Houdini had even observed a phenomenon where clients at séances contributed “involuntary and subconscious” table rapping and tapping, perhaps to spice up dreary proceedings.

  “I have attended séances where I have caught some one obligingly cheating to relieve the monotony.”

  —HOUDINI

  Making tables levitate, another staple in spirit circles, was easily accomplished with help from a confederate, an assistant secretly planted in a séance.

  Confederates, in fact, came in handy for all manner of phenomena.

  Many magicians relied on secret codes for psychic mind-reading acts, as Houdini and Bess had early on; mediums and their confederates employed these methods, too, using clever silent codes or gestures to communicate their intentions to each other.

  Once, while he was touring England, Houdini himself had given a dark séance where “just at the psychological moment a Spirit came through the window and walked around on the wall and ceiling of the room. . . . On the bill with me,” he explained, “were two acrobats.”

  Sometimes, when a wealthy patron or an influential reviewer was attending, everyone at a séance was a confederate except the “mark.”

  A lantern slide of a séance featuring musical instruments, circa 1926.

  When the circle linked hands (as much to reassure the mark that the medium wasn’t up to no good as to pool the group’s energies and attract spirits), a common trick was for three confederates to sit together. This freed up the one in the middle to roam around the dark room and produce phenomena.

  Even without confederates, savvy mediums could put on a show by smuggling in gadgetry. They concealed flat packets of clothing in their undergarments—“preferably cobweb-fine French muslin” brightened in spots with luminous oil made from phosphorus—or, since clothing was often searched beforehand, wore boots with hollow heels for storing supplies.

  When a séance attended by investigators required participants to link hands and overlap feet (to ensure no escape-artist tricks on the part of the medium), some wore hard-toed boots that allowed them to deftly slip out a foot or feet, using these extremities and the strength of their legs to tip tables or thump out noises.

  One female medium used a clever wire dummy coated with a fine skin of rubber, inflating it during a dark séance to look like the spirit form of a child. When it was deflated, the medium could fold it back up and wear it as a bustle neatly hidden under her skirts.

  Some mediums wore special rings to correspond to a pin in the center of séance tables; hooking the ring there allowed them to manipulate the table.

  Not surprisingly, Spiritualist performers preferred to host séances in the comfort of their homes. In one medium’s house, investigators found a trapdoor beneath a cabinet. It opened into a passage leading to a back room, and that room contained a trapdoor out of the building.

  WHEN HE COLLECTED HIS RESEARCH IN THE BOOK A Magician Among the Spirits, Houdini would devote a good dozen pages to the ingenious ways in which mediums collected information about their clients. Their campaigns were often planned far in advance of a séance and involved everything from blackmail and bribery (one young man, “greatly in debt,” was compelled to take a job in the Bureau of Records and “furnish the medium with copies of certain documents”) to arranging to have accomplices hired as domestic servants and chauffeurs in the homes of wealthy families. “If it is possible to steal the records of great political parties,” Houdini argued, “how much easier to steal the secret papers of a family.”

  Mediums would hire confederates to troll “the ‘gilded lobster palaces’ of Broadway,” hotel cabarets, Turkish baths, and so on, and get their victims drunk to gain their confidence or to rifle through their clothing for telltale letters or documents.

  How Fake Mediums Obtain Information

  To get the skinny on their clients, fakes in Houdini’s day would:

  postpone séances to buy time and dig up dirt

  scan death, birth, engagement, and marriage notices in newspapers

  employ young men to mingle discreetly with guests at social events

  make trips on steamers to collect morsels of scandal in smoking and card rooms

  review court records of property and mortgages

  tap telephone wires

  plant assistants as waiters in restaurants, as well as business and luncheon clubs

  plant clerks in metropolitan hotels to open, read, and return guests’ letters

  hire switchboard operators to intercept messages and transcribe conversations

  bribe servants, building superintendents, and elevator operators to make daily reports

  employ pickpockets to secure letters and business documents

  work for a time as traveling salesmen or fake census takers

  Houdini speaks of mediums hiring “a quiet couple for the express purpose of attending funerals, mixing with the mourners, and gathering information.” The culprits would “dress some little woman demurely and place her in the reception room where she greets the visitors, telling them her troubles and naturally receiving confidences in return.” He even recounts the tale of “an old-time circus grafter who, having been cleaned out in Wall Street . . . invested what little capital he had and all he could borrow in a beauty parlor.” The grafter took what he learned there and set himself up as a medium, “the venture yielding handsomely the first year.”

  The fact was, people told things about themselves without being remotely aware they were doing it. “Under the excitement of the moment their subconscious mind speaks,” as Houdini put it, “while their conscious mind forgets. This does not escape the medium.”

  Outrageous though some of these methods sound, when there was money to be made, Houdini believed, fake mediums (he called them “human wolves,” “human leeches,” and “human vultures”) would stop at nothing. Those “resourceful in obtaining information have made millions of dollars,” he asserted, “blood money made at the cost of torture to the souls of their victims.”

  A program advertising Houdini's open challenge to mediums, circa 1924.

  SEVEN

  A Menace to Health and Sanity

  “How long a private friendship can survive such an ordeal I do not know, but at least I did not create the situation.”

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The fragile peace between Houdini and Doyle depended on Houdini’s silence, his willingness to tread softly around the topic of Spiritualism. But it wasn’t his nature to sit things out. Inside, he was seething. He didn’t like feeling misrepresented or the sensation of being a pawn in his friend’s evangelical campaign. Houdini respected and admired Doyle for his mind and his worldly success. He may even have been intimidated by a fame greater than his own, one rooted in intellectual achievement and social status rather than strength, skill, and spectacle.

  When he finally expressed his views on Spiritualism, Houdini did so for the world to
hear, in an article in the New York Sun titled “Spirit Compacts Unfilled.”

  All of his many investigations, he wrote, had left him unconvinced about the “possibility of communication with the loved ones who have gone beyond.”

  His article winged its way across the Atlantic to Sir Arthur, who was stunned. What about Atlantic City? the writer fired back in a letter. “I saw what you got and what the effect was upon you at the time.”

  Doyle resisted what must have been a fierce urge to publish a rebuttal: “I have no fancy for sparring with a friend in public.” But they had reached an impasse. “I have done my best to give you the truth,” Doyle said. “There are lots of other subjects on which we can all meet in friendly converse.”

  For a while longer, the friends agreed to disagree, but Houdini liked being censored even less than he liked being quiet; he responded to Doyle’s disapproval with sarcasm: “You write that you are very sore. I trust it is not with me, because you, having been truthful and manly all your life, naturally must admire the same traits in other human beings.”

  He let on, at last, that the Atlantic City séance had been, for him, a bust, though he hadn’t said so at the time. He had wanted so much to hear from his mother that he hushed his doubts about the crosses marked on Lady Doyle’s pages and Cecilia Weiss’s sudden and inexplicable mastery of the English language.

  Doyle struck back in a letter:

  I read an interview you gave some American paper the other day, in which you said my wife gave you nothing striking when she wrote for you. When you met us, three days after the writing, in New York, you said—“I have been walking on air ever since,” or words to that effect. I wonder how you reconcile your various utterances!