The Magician and the Spirits Read online

  But scientists, he argued, were as likely to be duped as anyone, and for the same reasons. In an aside in his book Miracle Mongers and Their Methods, Houdini classifies scientists as either “serious-minded”—hard at work solving natural mysteries and benefiting humankind—or “credulous” and “wonder-loving.” Science failed, he argued, when investigators were blind to “the flimsy juggling of pseudo-mediums.”

  Houdini maintained that the wonder-loving scientist was easy to lead and easy to fool. Many of these great minds were, like his friend Sir Arthur, “fortified in their belief by grief.” The number one barrier to their success as investigators was their “perfect willingness to be deceived,” an eagerness that actually helped mediums produce fraudulent results.

  It was no accident, Houdini believed, that brilliant, rational men like Sir Arthur and Sir Oliver Lodge—a renowned physicist and psychic researcher who eventually converted to Spiritualism—embraced the faith after losing sons in the war.

  To Houdini’s mind, these were grieving men determined to see what they wanted to see, evidence or no evidence. Doyle had all but said so: “The objective side of it ceased to interest, for having made up one’s mind that it was true there was an end of the matter.” When Houdini called him on this statement, Doyle claimed that his investment in Spiritualism began two years before his son Kingsley’s death, in a mood of universal inquiry.

  As for Sir Oliver Lodge, Houdini saw no other explanation for why one of England’s most honored scientists would “permit his pen to lay before a thinking world” impossibilities like this:

  A table can exhibit hesitation, it can seek for information, it can welcome a newcomer, it can indicate joy or sorrow, fun or gravity, it can keep time with a song as if joining in the chorus and most notably of all it can exhibit affection in an unmistakable manner.

  “What has all this to do with the spirit of the departed?” Houdini ranted.

  How is it possible to accept such silly nonsense? Think of it! A table with intelligence, brains—a table with consciousness—a table with emotion. Yet that is the sort of reasoning used by Sir Oliver in his book, “Raymond.” . . . When we read of a mind of such high culture being overcome by such misfortune we are moved to compassion.

  Sir Oliver’s grief following the death of his son, Raymond, in the war made him, in other words, an easy mark, just like Sir Arthur.

  DURING DOYLE’S SECOND AMERICAN TOUR AND Houdini’s western excursion in 1923, both men and their families wound up registered at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.

  A local paper got wind of it and published a sensational headline: “DOYLE IN DENVER DEFIES HOUDINI.”

  Doyle had, the reporter claimed, challenged Houdini to honor his boast and re-create séance phenomena using only a magician’s tricks. The manifestation Doyle had in mind? Houdini must reunite Doyle with “the Ma’am,” Doyle’s mother, at a wager of five thousand dollars.

  Doyle scoffed at the headline. He would never propose such a “blasphemous and absurd” thing, and Houdini—used to being misquoted and misrepresented in print—believed him. But their recent sharp exchanges in the New York press had wrecked their mutual trust.

  Though they met several times in Denver, even visiting a local spirit photographer together, their friendship was now strained to the point of snapping. They couldn’t get past their arguments—the Atlantic City séance, Eva C., William Hope and the Crewe Circle—or ignore incompatible worldviews and a swelling resentment.

  “There is nothing that Sir Arthur will believe that surprises me,” Houdini complained.

  Doyle admitted that he found Houdini’s prejudice, vanity, and fixation on publicity distasteful.

  And after another squabble, over a manuscript that Houdini believed Doyle had promised him, they parted ways.

  “I am very sorry this breach has come,” said Sir Arthur, “but ‘friendly is as friendly does,’ and this is not friendly.” He returned to England, and despite one more exchange of letters—and a continued professional interest in each other—the two men never met again.

  SPIRITUALISM (AND IN MANY WAYS, SIR ARTHUR) had helped Houdini earn the intellectual credibility he had always wanted. These days he was corresponding with the inventor Thomas Edison and playing golf with poet and writer Carl Sandburg. He was more than a respected entertainer; he was important, someone his rabbi father would have been proud of.

  Houdini’s lecture tour and book were his ticket to continued success at a time when his physical strength and dexterity were winding down. He also just enjoyed showing up Sir Arthur, outing clever (but not clever enough) mediums, and grading and participating in scientific investigations.

  By Houdini’s day, there had already been a number of notable attempts by science to wade into the murky waters of psychic investigation.

  In the early 1870s, English chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes—who served as president of the SPR for several years and later of a like organization called the Ghost Club—observed some of the most celebrated mediums of his day, including Kate Fox and D. D. Home.

  “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this brainy man was hoodwinked,” Houdini believed. Even if investigators were not—like Doyle and Lodge—in a crisis of grief, they were susceptible, under close quarters and in the forced intimacy of the séance room, to a range of other emotions.

  Other critics of Crookes agreed, attributing his tendency to rule in favor of fraudulent mediums to gullibility, poor eyesight, and, in the case of a fetching young medium named Florence Cook, romantic involvement.

  Crookes perfectly illustrated Houdini’s argument that scientists were only human, inexperienced with bald (and often artful) deception, and easily duped. They certainly weren’t “immune from the influence of personal magnetism,” of which mediums like Cook and Home had plenty. Though his psychic research was discredited, Sir William Crookes was one of the first modern scientists to allow for the existence of paranormal forces that science could not (yet) explain.

  The ghostly “materialization” of Katie King (who much resembled the attending medium, Florence Cook) on the arm of physicist Sir William Crookes, 1874.

  The Seybert Commission, formed at the University of Pennsylvania from a bequest by Spiritualist Henry Seybert—Houdini could think of no “fairer-minded and more impartial” committee—met in the 1880s to assess slate-writing medium Henry Slade and others. Their report opens with a nod to Spiritualism as a religion. The members of the group were “deeply impressed with the seriousness of their undertaking” and felt all compassion for “crushed and bleeding hearts” in search of hope and consolation. Nothing in their report, they urged, should be seen as “indicating indifference or levity.”

  But the tone of the report is usually exasperated. Like Houdini, the committee grumped about the requirement of darkness and other unscientific conditions mediums imposed: “No one . . . can demand of us that we should accept profound mysteries with our eyes tight shut, and our hands fast closed, and with every avenue to our reasoning faculties insurmountably barred.”

  Overall, the committee found “an unwillingness on the part of Mediums to have their powers freely and thoroughly investigated”—a fact that made the work “difficult and expensive.”

  Despite rules that made it hard to judge with clear eyes, the Seybert Commission ruled Slade’s work fraudulent without a doubt: “This phenomenon can be performed by legerdemain [sleight of hand].”

  In addition to slate writing, the Seybert Commission investigated spirit rapping and other manifestations. Their report, published in 1887, left no room for doubt: “We have not been cheered in our investigations by the discovery of a single novel fact.” Spiritualist phenomena were not only sheer fraud inflicted on an unsuspecting public, they were also tedious.

  The report may have convinced some but did little to stem the flow of inquiry. In a materialist age whe
re the boundaries of faith and science were on everyone’s mind—and the question of life after death on everyone’s lips—unorthodox scientists were venturing into all branches of paranormal study, from clairvoyance to poltergeists. A doctor in Haverhill, Massachusetts, attempted to weigh the soul (according to his calculations, a body lost—give or take—twenty-one grams when a spirit vacated at death). Even Charles Darwin’s colleague and collaborator Alfred Russel Wallace wondered about those mysteries which “science ignored because it could not explain.”

  One line of investigation that Houdini may not have been aware of—or chose not to feature in his exposé—was a study by the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) of the trance medium Leonora Piper.

  In the beginning, the ASPR was a small band of curious (and courageous; their quest to explore the likes of ESP and survival after death was soundly ridiculed by mainstream science) researchers headed by psychologist William James.

  Though the debate of the day was lively, the mysteries posed by Spiritualism were not new. Look back, James pointed out, and “you will find there was never a time when these things were not reported just as abundantly as they are today. . . . The phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the surface of history.”

  The investigation into Leonora Piper gripped James and his ASPR colleagues perhaps more than any other, leading to more than two decades of research.

  When she was eight years old in Nashua, New Hampshire, circa 1865, Leonora was playing in the garden when something slammed into her right ear. She heard a hissing. The hiss became an “s” and then a name—“Sara”—and the name stretched into a sentence. Leonora ran indoors howling for her mother and explained, through sobs: “Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but with you still!”

  The girl’s alarm alarmed her mother, who scribbled down what had happened.

  Less than a week later, a letter arrived. Her aunt had died on the same day, around the time of the incident in the garden.

  Leonora’s family wanted nothing to do with spirit phenomena and worked hard to move past it. They would have known about children like the Fox sisters, who were paraded about as spectacles. It was no life for a child from a respectable, churchgoing family. They did their best to ignore the event and all it suggested.

  Years later, after she married and moved to Boston, Leonora visited a healer who billed himself as clairvoyant, for help with an old injury that doctors seemed unable to diagnose or soothe. The moment the psychic touched her, her head swarmed with voices and she fell down, entering her own trance; so began a reluctant career as a psychic medium.

  Word circulated fast, and strangers began to show up at her door on Beacon Hill. One of them, in the late summer of 1885, was the widowed Eliza Gibbens, mother-in-law of the ASPR’s William James, who was astonished and told her eminent son-in-law so.

  James scheduled his own visit with Mrs. Piper. He was surprised, at his sitting, to find none of the usual props: bells and trumpets, chairs in a circle, mahogany cabinets. Just a plain, soft-spoken woman in a chair, who apologized that there would be no sensational spirit shows in her parlor; there might, in fact, be nothing at all. She would enter a trance and see what her spirit guide had in mind.

  William James, who came in skeptical, left convinced. He enlisted twenty-five associates to book sittings with Mrs. Piper, so they might compare notes—the beginnings of an investigation that would last, off and on, until Piper retired in 1927.

  In his 1896 ASPR presidential address, James argued that a single instance could undermine any “universal proposition.” It might be true that most mediums were frauds, deceiving the innocent and gullible; but what if one, just one, were genuine? It was a game changer, he argued, or could be:

  If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.

  Had Houdini investigated Piper, would she have swayed him? The clear advantage of being a mental over a physical medium is that there are no revealing clues—doll heads, regurgitated fabric, phosphorous oil—to expose. There’s no hard evidence. Investigators can only trace the medium’s data to an “earthly” source or catch her or him in the furtive act of gathering intelligence. A frustrating position for a skeptic—something Houdini repeatedly denied he was.

  “I am not a scoffer,” he argued. “I firmly believe in a Supreme Being and that there is a Hereafter.” In fact, the first stop he made whenever he returned from a trip was to the “hallowed spot” where his beloved parents were buried. “Both promised me faithfully innumerable times in this life that if they could aid and protect me from their graves or from the Great Beyond, they would do so. My mind has always been open and receptive and ready to believe. . . . I am not a skeptic. . . . If convincing evidence is brought forward I will be the first to acknowledge my mistake.”

  NINE

  It Takes a Flimflammer to Catch a Flimflammer

  “All mediums hate to have a magician attend a séance.”

  ~Harry Houdini

  The Seybert Commission’s ruling against the slate writer Henry Slade had been partly a commonsense call. The writing on Slade’s slates fell into two classes: writing that answered specific, real-time questions and writing that came as voluntary “contributions” from spirits. The replies (dashed off in the heat of the moment) were a “crude scrawl, abrupt in composition, and often almost or quite illegible.” The others were neat and tidy, careful “even to punctuation”; investigators concluded that these contributed slates were carefully prepared in advance and slipped into the proceedings.

  But the real exposure began when Seybert investigators, in the spirit of a magician’s debunking, introduced sleight of hand of their own: “One of our number, on three occasions, [used] a pocket mirror, carefully adjusted” to watch what was happening under the table. Unknown to Slade, the mirror “gave back the reflection of fingers, which were clearly not Spiritual, opening the slates and writing the answer.”

  In A Magician Among the Spirits, Houdini cheers this approach: “The only way to conduct a successful [investigation] is to get the committee together previous to the séance, discuss the expected manifestations, formulate some plan for concerted action and if possible assign each member some specific part.” What’s more, he said, “These parts should be rehearsed.” (Spoken like a true showman.)

  The commission not only refused to sit passively by in the dark while their subjects staged deception, they later invited “an eminent professional juggler” and friend of Houdini’s, master magician Harry Kellar, to demonstrate his own slate writing methods, but without pretense of assistance from Beyond.

  Houdini with magician Harry Kellar, circa 1912.

  Throughout the 1880s, Kellar had demonstrated methods for table tipping, spirit materialization, and other phenomena at his own shows. For the commission, the magician performed “independent slate-writing far more remarkable” than any medium’s. They were baffled.

  Kellar had done the deed in broad daylight, first presenting a slate, perfectly clean on both sides. He held the slate and a stub of slate pencil under the leaf of the table the group was seated around. “Our eyes never for a fraction of a second lost sight of [the magician’s] thumb,” the 1887 report claimed. “It never moved; and yet in a few minutes the slate was produced, covered on both sides with writing.”

  Kellar had far outperformed Slade, producing messages not only in English but in Chinese, Dutch, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Gujerati. His method? He’d paid the hotel owner to let him construct a trapdoor in the floor of the room, and then laid a cushy rug over it. His assistant, Barney, had stood at attention below
the floor with a variety of slates.

  “A fake, pure and simple,” Kellar remarked. “But that’s what all Spiritualistic manifestations are.”

  On to Safer Swindles

  “Spirit slates,” Houdini wrote in 1924, “are now listed in the catalogues of houses dealing in conjuring apparatus and the fraud mediums who formerly made use of them are employing the safer and easier swindles of automatic writing, trance or trumpet messages, and the ‘ouija board.’”

  Slate with a chalk message ostensibly from the spirit of Abraham Lincoln via the medium Pierre L. O. A. Keeler (date unknown).

  The courts also made use of magicians’ expertise to reveal fraud. P. T. Barnum (who had guest-starred at the trial of spirit photographer William Mumler) wasn’t the only showman officially summoned to expose “humbug.” In 1888, popular magician Alexander Herrmann gave a public demonstration at Manhattan’s Academy of Music. To help aid investigators and inform the public, he duplicated table tipping, spirit materialization, and other tricks used by the medium Ann O’Delia Diss Debar to swindle her victims.

  In the heyday of both magic and Spiritualism, fake spirit mediums were often magicians gone rogue. “It is much more lucrative to be a charlatan medium,” Houdini observed, “than an honest magician.” Fellow illusionists knew better how to set traps and prove trickery than “the grave scientist” who set out to “solve the problem by mathematics or logic.”

  Sir Arthur spoke of seeing spirit manifestations “with my own eyes” or hearing spirit voices “with my own ears,” and to Houdini’s mind, sight and hearing were the weakest and most easily deceived of the senses.

  Why Did They Do It?

  Though he questioned her authenticity and intent (as he did the motives of most mediums), Houdini credits Eusapia Palladino “in her crafty prime” as a master of misdirection. Born into extreme poverty in the Neapolitan district of Italy and orphaned as a child, Palladino was uneducated and largely illiterate, but managed to bamboozle “more philosophic and scientific men than any other known medium.” Houdini, who as a boy of twelve had run away from home to escape the indignities of poverty, reveals a grudging respect for Palladino’s origin story. Taken in by an “acrobat or conjurer” at thirteen, she learned quickly—and found her ticket out—as a “professional phenomena producer.”