The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World

MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DAVID JAHER’S The Witch of Lime Street

Jaher’s narrative style is as engaging as his character portraits are colorful. Together, they bring a bygone age and its defining spiritual obsessions roaring to life. Fascinating, sometimes thrilling, reading.

—Kirkus Reviews

In this meticulously researched and entertaining work, David Jaher explores a largely forgotten chapter in Anglo-American history—the post–World War I rise of Spiritualism, born of a deep desire to commune with the spirits of slain soldiers. The cast of fascinating, masterfully drawn characters ranges from Harry Houdini, a supreme rationalist, to Margery Crandon, a self-proclaimed Boston medium with a huge following. This is, on a deep level, a cautionary tale of the bizarre, painful deception and self-deception associated with human unwillingness to accept the finality of death—especially youthful death.

—Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers and The Age of American Unreason

David Jaher’s tale of the bizarre 1920s fever fad for Spiritualism and séances is as gripping as a mystery thriller, as evocative of that post–Great War decade as a documentary, and as haunting as a ghost story. A fascinating piece of time travel to a forgotten era.

—Kate Buford, author of Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe

"Jaher’s meticulously researched account of Scientific American’s infamous contest to find an authentic medium had me racing through the pages to find out how it all turns out. To keep this spoiler free, I’ll just say that the paranormal showdown of the early twentieth century doesn’t wrap up how you may think."

—Stacy Horn, author of Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory

Copyright © 2015 by David Jaher

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jaher, David.

The witch of lime street : séance, seduction, and Houdini in the spirit world / David Jaher. — First Edition.

1. Margery, 1889–1941. 2. Women mediums—United States—Biography. 3. Spiritualists—United States—Biography. 4. Spiritualism—United States—History—20th century. 5. Houdini, Harry, 1874–1926. 6. Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859–1930. I. Title.

BF1283.C85J34 2015

133.9'1092—dc23

[B] 2105009392

ISBN 9780307451064

eBook ISBN 9780307451088

Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

Cover photographs: (Harry Houdini) Corbis; (Mina Crandon) Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett Collection

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I: The Dead Boys

The Borderland

Occult Fever

Madame Ouija

The Ether of Space

Waiting for the Sunrise

Part II: The River of Doubt

The Wand of Youth

The Magician in Love

The Spiritualist Ties

The Great Leap

The American Mysteriarch

Seek and Ye Shall Find

A Séance for Teddy

Part III: The New Wilderness

1922: Don’t Let Them Tame You

The Salt Highway

The Men from Beyond

Séance by the Sea

The Prize

The Ghost Hunters

Part IV: The Saxophone and Spirit Trumpet

1923: Speed

A Jaunt with Kitty

A Square Deal for the Psychics

The New Sherlock Holmes

The Crawford Experiment

The Eve of the Hunt

Part V: The Great Spirit Hunt

The Wizards of Sound

The Jolly Medium

You Must Not Laugh

A Waste of Science

The ABC Club

The Dark Side of Summerland

Faces in the Sky

I Am a Winner

The Spookess from Chicago

Ain’t We Got Fun

The Helson Report

Bearding the Lion

The White Dove

Sensationnel

The Boy Medium

Part VI: The Witch of Lime Street

1924: An Evening on Lime Street

Margery

Dangerous Games

Kisses from the Void

Catch Her If You Can

The Tipping of the Scales

House of Crimson

All the Muse That’s Fit to Print

A Dead Man Rising

Everything Lovely

A Shake-Up in the Contest

Who Is Margery?

A Man As Light As a Feather

Onward, Psychic Soldiers

Houdini’s Box

Showdown at the Charlesgate

The Postmortem

A Drawn Battle

Two Gospels

She Did That with Her Hair

It Was Some Party, Wasn’t It?

Voodoo Priestess

Part VII: Spirits of the Dead

1925: The Fading Light

A Stormy Forum

Showman and Scientist

A Living Demonstration

All Eyes Were on Boston

The Unkindest Cut of All

The Craziest Road of All

Houdini Won’t Talk No More

The Blooded Reporter

Lost Boys

To Hell with Harvard

Such Damn Fools

Part VIII: How Death Deals Its Cards

1926: The End of Magic

Philadelphia

Chicago/Washington

New York

Boston

Montreal/Detroit

A Grim Halloween

Will Houdini Return?

The Gift

Part IX: The Shadow of a Dream

The Last Dance

1930: A Troubled Spirit

I Ain’t Pretty Anymore

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life!

When the Rain Stopped

Sources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For my grandmother, Henrietta Jaher, and the memory of her son, my father, Frederic Cople Jaher

Magick…is the most perfect and chief science.

—MARCUS AGRIPPA

The Borderland

A woman in a black velvet coat pushed through the revolving doors of the Grosvenor Hotel and, waving a miniature Union Jack in each hand, waltzed slowly around the marble hall. The gentlemen loitering there watched her dance past the sitting room that had been as subdued as a séance circle moments before. Almost as one they put aside their newspapers and rose from their armchairs. Such a spectacle at eleven in the morning—in the staid Grosvenor of all places—could only mean one thing: the boys had done it at last! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was among the first to cheer. For four years the famous detective writer had displayed unwavering support for the Cause. He felt strongly that the War was worth the grievous cost.

Like many parents throughout the country, Sir Arthur’s thoughts turned at once to his son. Here was the sort of boy to whom the nation owed its gratitude! Capt. Kingsley Doyle of the First Hampshires had fought with distinction at Arras and been wounded at the Somme. To his father’s relief, he had recently been transferred to London. Sir Arthur had seen him less than a fortnight previous, looking his brave steadfast self. Now, for all of them, the long struggle was over. A raucous cheer was heard from the street. The woman in black departed without saying a word. Following her lead, Sir Arthur rushed out to witness the great celebration of November 11, 1918.

He didn’t know how so many flags could immediately appear, but they seemed to be waving from every window along Buckingham Palace Road. An old fellow was shaking a rattle as though it were New Year’s Eve. Motors were tooting. The maroons were crashing. It sounded like all of London was banging away. Jostled by a rush out of Victoria, Sir Arthur lost his bowler. Picking up another man’s hat, he joined the march to the palace. Toward the Mall boisterous soldiers converged with munitions girls in overalls. A young girl, hoisted onto the top of an omnibus, led a crowd in singing Tipperary. But then something spoiled the moment for Doyle. A motorcar pulled up with officers in staff uniforms and a hard-faced civilian. The man in plainclothes wrenched open a bottle and crudely poured whiskey into his mouth. Sir Arthur half hoped the crowd would lynch him. The British Empire had lost a million men. He felt no need to mourn them—mourning was, so to speak, against his religion. The Armistice was for him a day of communion and prayer.

When Sir Arthur reached the palace, he didn’t attempt to penetrate the cheering throng in the courtyard. Taller than most, he could see the balcony over the main entrance festooned with scarlet and gold. It had started to drizzle. A crowd of soldiers chanted, We want King George! Moments later he heard a single mighty cheer. The King in his naval uniform and the Queen in a fur coat emerged from a window and stood on the balcony waving to the crowd. A sudden hush took hold as the Guards presented arms. Officers stood at attention. Men removed their hats. The band struck up and twenty thousand voices began to sing. Sir Arthur had never heard a more rousing rendition of God Save the King.

♦

Four years earlier, under a bright August sky, Londoners then too sang the hymn and called for their Regent. War had just been declared and Sir Arthur had rushed to enlist. Despite being fifty-five at that time, he was a man with prodigious energy and verve. He still played a respectable game of cricket, broke a hundred at billiards, skied the Alpine passes, raced motorcars, and was a crack shot with both a Lee Enfield and sidearm. Respectfully, the War Board turned him down. He resigned himself to training the old chaps in the Home Guard. Few civilians, however, were as informed of the Great War’s progress as he—officially a mere deputy lieutenant in the Civilian Reserve of Surrey—for Sir Arthur had performed special service for the Crown. Asked in 1914 to lend his influential pen to the war effort, he wrote an effective piece of recruitment propaganda: To Arms! The call of duty had also inspired him to undertake an epic account of the War—The British Campaign in France and Flanders—for which the generals supplied the material. It was the younger men in his family who did the fighting. To Arms! he had urged, and to the trenches they’d gone.

♦

From the beginning it had been a ghostly war. Something otherworldly had reportedly appeared in the sky over Mons, Belgium—where in their first action the British Expeditionary Force was overwhelmed by the Huns. Clouds in the shapes of celestial warriors were rumored to have protected the small army in their retreat. Firsthand witnesses to the vision seemed as elusive as the shades. Still, it became widely accepted in England that a miracle had occurred. Sir Arthur was not so sure. The German waves had met the best riflemen in Europe firing fifteen rounds a minute. Had the British really needed ghost archers from Agincourt to save them that day in Flanders? The battle had affected Sir Arthur in a more personal way. His brother-in-law Malcolm Leckie had served valiantly as a medical officer at Mons, and had died there.

When a soldier died at the front, the Tommies would say that he’d gone west. Sir Arthur was fond of that expression; it suggested to him that the boy had taken a distant journey but was not lost to his comrades and family. He might in fact still be reached via some unusual mode of long-distance communication—such as trance mediumship or automatic writing. As it happened, there was an eccentric young woman in his home at Crowborough in East Sussex who believed that she was a channel to the borderland where the dead and living might mingle.

This clairvoyant—his wife Jean’s best friend, Lily Loder-Symonds—had originally been taken in by the Doyles as a nanny. Unfortunately, she soon developed a chest ailment and began forsaking her worldly duties. When three of her brothers were killed at the Battle of Ypres, her condition worsened. On warm days Sir Arthur often read to her in the garden, where one could hear the dull thunder of the great guns across the Channel. Later, in the evenings, in a room fragrant with flowers and medicine, Lily might take up a pen and practice spirit communication. One night Malcolm Leckie’s spirit supposedly possessed Lily’s hand and came through in words Arthur and Jean recognized as his own. This was how the Doyles came to believe that the dead could be reached.

Generally, Kingsley did not question Sir Arthur’s views. Deferential and eager to please, he had studied medicine in accordance with his father’s wishes, and when the war broke out he abandoned those studies at his behest. Religion was the only subject on which they disagreed. Kingsley was devoutly Christian like his deceased mother, Sir Arthur’s first wife, and viewed Spiritualism as an occult faith. The growing sect had only a single tenet as far as Kingsley understood it—belief in survival beyond the grave—and only one established ritual: the séance. The worship of ghosts, as Kingsley saw it, was blasphemous and absurd. It dismayed him to see his father attempting to communicate with the spirits of dead soldiers and publicly encouraging the macabre practice. But he had no idea how large a role he himself would play in stoking his father’s controversial faith.

When the Foreign Office had approached Sir Arthur in the summer of 1916 to observe and report on the fighting, he eagerly agreed. For a gentleman with a military assignment this first involved the traditional visit to Savile Row. Feeling a mighty impostor, he was outfitted for the front in a wondrous khaki garb his tailor threw together. A caricature, in his mind, of an officer, he watched as silver flowers instead of pips were attached to his epaulettes. Before setting off for Europe he had pinned to his breast medals he had received sixteen years earlier as a field doctor in the Boer War. Yet Sir Arthur, rugged and adaptive, was to be no mere parade warrior at the front. Accepted without ceremony, he soon found himself gripping a gas mask and crouched in a forward observation trench. Men leaned beneath the parapets smoking and watching him curiously. Holmes, one Tommy explained to another. A gaunt corporal sat on the fire-step tending a wound to his leg. Spectral faces peered out from the dugouts and mineshafts. A shell hissed overhead. Sir Arthur saw the red flash by the German line as the earth shuddered. In front of him was No-Man’s-Land—a misty stretch of craters, tree stumps, rusty wire, and rotting dead, which he smelled but could not see. This was the borderland. For him, the most wonderful spot in the world.

Two days later, Sir Arthur had the chance to see Kingsley at Mailly. The boy had greeted him with his usual jolly grin and spoke of the preparations for a grand offensive in France. Don’t worry about me, Daddy, he had said, and then went off to fight at the Somme—where 20,000 British troops died on the first day. Something shifted for Sir Arthur after his son was almost killed there. Back in England, where Kingsley spent two months recuperating from shrapnel wounds to his neck, Sir Arthur began to advocate the spiritist balm—the séance—for those whose sons hadn’t survived. Lily had succumbed to influenza by then, however, and the spirits were temporarily silent at Crowborough.

Now it was Sir Arthur who spoke. Throughout the grieving country he gave emphatic lectures on the miracles Lily had produced. No one could doubt his own sacrifices. At a time when the life expectancy for a fighting officer was two or three months, the roll call for soldiers from Sir Arthur’s family was answered for the most part in the next world. His sister Connie’s son, Second Lt. Oscar Hornung of the Essex Regiment—a simple and religious boy—had been killed by a bomb. Another sister, Lottie, lost her husband, Maj. Leslie Oldham of the Royal Engineers, to a sniper his first days in the trenches. A nephew of Jean’s had fallen, and so on and so on. Through Lily, Sir Arthur had heard from all of these dead boys. He published a popular book describing his odyssey into the spirit world, The New Revelation. His message to the bereaved was simple and direct: their sons were not lost! He claimed in a letter to his mother that he no longer worried that Kingsley might fall. I do not fear death for the boy, he said, for since I became a convinced Spiritualist death became rather an unnecessary thing, but I fear pain or mutilation very greatly. When Kingsley, who had recovered from his injuries and been sent once more to the front, was recalled to resume his medical training, that fear too was assuaged.

So it was that two weeks before the Armistice Sir Arthur was preparing to give a speech on Death and the Hereafter in Nottingham. By this point all was satisfactory on both fronts: his spiritist message was spreading and the Hindenburg Line smashed. Before his talk, a telegram arrived that he anticipated would contain more glorious news on the final push. It was no longer a time in the War when he feared the unexpected dispatch; Kingsley was no longer in France going over the top. But upon opening the message, sent by his daughter Mary in London, Sir Arthur could not have been more startled. And if, as he claimed, we are all encompassed by a band of etheric light, then his must have darkened as never before. His first coherent thought was to cancel the lecture, but he decided against it. Instead he rushed to London and the next day, at the Grosvenor, wrote the following to his mother: I saw [Kingsley] today, looking his brave steadfast self, in the mortuary. He will be buried on Friday at Hindhead. No flowers.

As for the talk, it had not been a difficult decision to carry on. He was shaken, of course, but how would it look if he had canceled? That his faith had not transformed him as he had claimed. He would have felt as counterfeit as when he was dressed as a martial dignitary for the front. Nevertheless, that night was hard for him. Twice at the lectern he faltered. When he read aloud the message Mary had sent, there was a horrified gasp from the crowd. They had come for a salutary speech, and were not expecting such devastating news. Not to worry, he promptly replied. For a moment he seemed to withdraw deeply inside himself and then sought out the first pair of crestfallen eyes he could lock on to. Not to worry, he repeated. My son survives!

Occult Fever

Since the Great War, the peoples of the world have turned with a quickened interest and an almost insatiable curiosity to the unsolved problem of the ages—after Death, what?

—Baltimore Sun, AUGUST 24, 1919

K ingsley had been killed by a bug, not a bullet. Shortly after the Armistice, the Spanish influenza virus also felled Sir Arthur’s only brother, Brig. Gen. Innes Doyle. An apocalyptic war had led to a medieval plague, which took more lives than the fighting that had already devastated a generation in England, France, and Germany. The world appeared to be teetering on the brink of a new dark age. Yet, like many in his movement, Sir Arthur saw the calamity as an opportunity for spiritual renewal. The unprecedented losses would turn the bereaved away from decrepit religions, he hoped, and toward spirit communion.

All the world is asking, Where are our dead boys? he observed. During this time of scientific breakthroughs and growing secularization his Spiritualist testament, The New Revelation, addressed the pressing question: What is the outcome of death? The answers from both science and religion were unsatisfactory. The revolutionary work of Rutherford and Bohr, though few understood it, appeared to suggest a soulless return to our atomic source. As for the Church, it seemed to Doyle to offer no practical insight regarding the mystery. He considered the Bible a ceremonial relic—like the cavalry sword Kingsley had carried into a conflict that would be fought with machine guns and airplanes.

A downright conflict between the old religion and the new was reported in England. A reverend complained that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is moving from city to city ministering to a popular craze. I challenge Sir Arthur to deny that Spiritualism is perilous to the mental, moral and physical health. Every second or third young lady one meets now imagines herself a modern St. Teresa! Such zealous resistance only spurred Doyle’s campaign. Like a military commander, he kept a map of England and marked with pins those places where he had spoken of the New Revelation. We must attack in the same bulldog spirit with which Foch faced the German lines, he wrote his friend Sir Oliver Lodge.

In Lodge he had a formidable ally. One of England’s most honored scientists, Sir Oliver had spent a lifetime attempting to harness invisible forces. He had sent radio signals before Marconi; helped perfect X-ray tubes; done groundbreaking work on the discharge of electricity. And for some thirty years he had been experimenting with psychic phenomena. Where were the dead boys? Sir Oliver believed he had some insight into the answer. It had caused a great stir during the War when he claimed to be in touch with the spirit of his dead son, Raymond, who had fallen in Flanders. Lodge wrote a book chronicling their communications and explaining the science behind it. Raymond went through twelve printings in three years and was hugely popular at the front and at home in England. It was Sir Oliver who had incited the first wartime wave of Spiritualism. The British soldier has certainly got religion, bemoaned one chaplain; I am not so sure, however, that he has got Christianity.

While Doyle spoke to the heart, Lodge appealed more to reason. He was the president of the most respected group of ghost hunters in the world, the British Society for Psychical Research. During the Mons craze these investigators showed skepticism—their finding regarding the supposed miracle of the ghost archers was negative. Sir Oliver Lodge was known in America, however, for some remarkable descriptions of the spirit world that Raymond had purportedly provided from beyond the grave. The boy told his father that he lived in a place known as Summerland. There were laboratories there that produced, not material things but essences, ethers, and gases. All earthly things could be duplicated. It seemed there was even a celestial strain of whiskey available. And astral cigars. Raymond had seen a discarnate man smoke one.

Other eminent scientists, who weren’t Spiritualists, were also linking hands in the séance. In France, Charles Richet, a Nobel laureate in physiology, experimented with the matter from which ghostly apparitions were said to form. He called the stuff ectoplasm: an ethereal yet viscous substance that entranced mediums secreted from their orifices. Germany too was gripped by an occult fever. It was there that Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a neurologist, was conducting tests involving intimate scrutiny of Richet’s prized subject, the famed medium Eva C, who was thought to issue ectoplasm, the miracle fluid, from between her legs. In the meanwhile, Lodge, a devout physicist, was focused more on interdimensional experiments than a medium’s anatomy. If some quality of the human mind could be proven to transcend space and time, then it might, many psychic researchers felt, transcend death. Doyle maintained that Spiritualism was the only religion validated by science. And he, the movement’s de facto leader, believed the battle for mainstream acceptance would be won or lost in America. To America! he urged; and there Sir Oliver went to make his uncanny claims.

Madame Ouija

The Lecture tour of Sir Oliver Lodge in this country has undoubtedly aroused a new and large interest, not only in the question of immortality and survival of consciousness after death, but also in the more specific question as to whether it is really possible to communicate, or receive communications from the known dead.

—Boston Globe, JANUARY 25, 1920

S ir Oliver arrived in New York in January 1920—as if to inaugurate the decade of the saxophone and spirit trumpet. At the time, the country was mad for the Ouija board, a crass version of the séance. If you had a question for the dead, the board would offer something! Songs were written about Madame Ouija. Moving pictures were made. Norman Rockwell painted a young couple experimenting with the Ouija for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post . Soon some of the most acclaimed American writers—Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland, and Theodore Dreiser—were caught in the psychic maze.

At Dreiser’s Greenwich Village apartment, the author of An American Tragedy and the arch-skeptic H. L. Mencken tried the Ouija together. Dreiser, the pioneering realist, was nevertheless an ardent believer in all things supernatural. He was sure that the spirits of his three dead siblings had guided him since childhood. He sat regularly with palm readers, crystal-gazers, and spirit mediums. Mencken, by contrast, disdained the occult. He particularly derided spiritism as the stuff of dingy back parlors. The pursuit of immortality bored him. Mencken could imagine living happily for a century or two—but ten million years would be dreadful, he complained. All that night, at Dreiser’s place, he scoffed at Sir Oliver’s notion of the hereafter. As a rule he never trusted physicists. They spent too much time gazing into space, he said, and were far too eager to solve mysteries. The Greenwich Village Ouija experiment was a farce for Mencken. He kept pushing the planchette to spell out his favorite obscenities.

Soon after Sir Oliver disembarked in New York for his lecture tour, a new play called Smilin’ Through opened on Broadway. The Times called it a fair-to-middling spiritualistic fantasy. But it was the smash of the season. Such wonderful things are happening in the world now that you can’t shut your eyes to them, can you? the star of the show, Jane Cowl, gushed. And when men like Sir Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle declare that something is true you must at least pay some attention to it.

Sir Oliver himself disliked the theater. It was a new kind of science he preached; he had no miracles to deliver. Intrigued by his work, even a skeptical Thomas Edison joined the quest to establish proof of survival. Edison, no friend to the Spiritualists, would announce work on a mechanism to register the messages of those who had crossed over. I can make an apparatus better than ouija for talking with the dead—if they want to talk, Edison claimed. He knows that many will quarrel with him, many will misunderstand him, the Times reported. But he knows too, that ten million men and women who have lost dear ones in the war are hungering for word or knowledge as to the existence of life after the life we know.

The two most inventive minds of their respective nations, Edison and Lodge, were both now working on some means to contact the departed. Marvels like the telephone and wireless made access to any plane or across any distance seem possible. There was a sense in the New World of a new frontier opening.

The Ether of Space

S uch was the buzz surrounding Lodge’s American tour that a distinguished surgeon felt compelled to attend Evidence for Survival at Boston’s Symphony Hall and indulge superstition one frigid January evening. Sir Oliver Lodge was the inventor of the coherer, a kind of radio detector that could receive electric waves. And fittingly, the doctor had never seen Symphony Hall so densely packed and charged with energy. Spectators were even seated onstage, right next to the podium. It was a wonderful audience, reported the Globe, composed largely of the intellectuals of Boston, with probably a few more women than men.

It was mentioned in the program that Sir Oliver Lodge had twelve children. One of them had famously died in the war. That loss had inspired him to make his first trip across the pond to speak in more than fifty North American cities. Because the doctor recoiled from anything pious, he was comforted in knowing that the clergy had spoken against Lodge’s tour. Priests warned that Christians were not permitted to seek knowledge from the dead. A prominent rabbi had called mediumship and the Ouija as nefarious an addiction as drugs. Both skeptical and curious, the doctor wondered if Sir Oliver might hold a public séance that very evening and summon before the stage lights that burning cross—the ghost of his son Raymond!

The doctor’s expectations were quickly dispelled. Sir Oliver had an august presence as he strode onto the platform. The Englishman had a massive domed head and a well-coiffed white beard. At six feet four inches, he towered over his listeners, appearing as stalwart as a Connecticut farmer. He looks as Lincoln might have looked—had he lived, wrote the Globe reporter. Sir Oliver began by saying that he could remember when the telephone was roundly jeered. Years earlier he had seen one of the first English demonstrations of Mr. Bell’s invention. The London crowd had dismissed it as a magician’s hoax. Sir Oliver asked the Boston audience to maintain a more open mind. For science, he declared, has brought us close to the mystery of life.

Lodge then spoke of the atom. An ounce of atomic matter had the force, he asserted, to raise the German fleet sunk at Scapa Flow and deposit it atop the mountains of Scotland. When the crowd murmured its disbelief, he assured them that few scientists would disagree with his statement. Was the possibility of spirit contact so much more outrageous? He prophesied a day when homes would be powered by atomic energy and each family would speak daily to loved ones in the other world.

He mentioned nothing that night about séances with his dead son but instead compared the human body to a kind of telegraph. Mind could act on mind; this he called telepathy. He and his colleagues at the Society for Psychical Research had studied the phenomenon for decades. He said that some psychics were able to communicate with discarnate minds. Such transmissions came through the Ether of Space: the supreme field that he knew to exist. We all have etheric bodies, he explained, which psychics see as bands of variegated light. When a soldier was cut down, he abandoned his physical body—like a shriveled cocoon—for his perfect and permanent form. Some called it the soul. But since we cannot dissect the soul—and here the surgeon felt that Lodge was speaking directly to him—we deny its existence. Do not be afraid of death, Lodge urged. Death was a barbarous word! It meant extinction. He preferred to see death as emigration. The boys going west.

After the presentation, Lodge met the doctor, who was handsome in a blue-blooded way—five foot eight, slightly stooped, and slender—naturally curious and well mannered. He told Sir Oliver that his fascinating oration had given at least one naysayer deep pause for thought. Could Lodge recommend how one might pursue further inquiry? It must be said that Sir Oliver had little respect for the intellectual depth of most Americans, but the doctor asked reasonably good questions. He was direct yet deferential. Cards were exchanged. He was Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon, who lived in Beacon Hill with his wife, Mina, who had not attended the lecture.

Remembering that evening, Dr. Crandon later said, I couldn’t understand it. It did not fit into any pattern I had previously known about scientists. So I asked to meet him after his lectures. We talked for some time that first night.

Sir Oliver Lodge has put the whole question of spiritism and survival after death in a somewhat new light—a light that appeals to many intellectual people, the Globe reported. The inventor of the electric ignition had sparked interest in spirit contact in the naturally skeptical city of Boston. However, Dr. Crandon had not found the Ether of Space to be such an eccentric theory. Einstein had once entertained it. And so, he had much to consider during his cab ride to Lime Street.

Waiting for the Sunrise

I n September of 1918, Dr. Crandon had married a lovely and spirited bride—he in his white naval uniform with black epaulettes; she in an ivory satin gown with organdy bows on her shoulders. The minister, linking their matrimony to the coming peace, spoke of renewal. Very few attended the simple bayside service near New London, Connecticut. The War was still on, and the newlyweds had both been previously married. For their honeymoon the doctor took his bride to the same resort in the Bahamas where he had taken the previous two Mrs. Crandons. Unfortunately, the couple returned from their jaunt just as New England was erupting in fever. As a lieutenant commander at the New London Naval Hospital, Dr. Crandon was in the very eye of the pandemic. Where were the dead boys? He had seen them stacked in the morgue ceiling high. For reasons no one understood, the illness afflicted young men and women. Thousands a week were dying in American cities. Many of Dr. Crandon’s patients drowned in their own blood and mucus. His attempts to provide them with liquid oxygen were futile. New London soon ran out of coffins.

Mina Crandon raised her husband’s spirits during those traumatic first months of their marriage. Friends said she lightened his lonely at the top disposition. So effectively did the doctor command that he was slated to take charge of Wards Island in New York—one of the largest naval hospitals in the country. As it happened, by 1919, the emergency had ended and Dr. Crandon was discharged with honors. He was then forty-six and married to a woman still in her twenties, and there was no denying the aphrodisiacal effect of a mortal crisis, or that his position must have appealed to Mrs. Crandon. The doctor owned two fine schooners and an elegant home in Beacon Hill. He had three degrees from Harvard, including his MD and a graduate diploma in philosophy. His work ethic was extraordinary. Earlier in his career he had endured twelve-hour shifts at Boston City Hospital, then read the deep thinkers well into the morning. He became instructor of surgery at Harvard, and in that position made extensive use of cadavers. He liked to point this out to strangers at parties, for some reason. Mrs. Crandon was an animated contrast to her wry husband. In Boston society they were a much talked-about couple, known for throwing splendid cocktail parties at their home in Beacon Hill.

There were gatherings with endless rounds of martinis and The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise playing on the Victrola. Guests nattered on about the possibility of speakeasies on the Hill and Prohibition agents raiding their homes. They would all be lawbreakers soon, they vowed. Once, when the discussion turned from the Red Scare—the recent citywide police strike—to spooks, someone had suggested a Ouija party. But dancing and charades were Mina’s preferred entertainment. A fetching blonde, she had a youthful figure and, it was often remarked, sparkling blue eyes. Yet she did not seem vain, like the doctor’s second wife, or callow. She had seen something of life and had brought a young son to Beacon Hill from her previous marriage. She was also a practicing Christian, Roy told his secular Harvard friends, and played the cello with the Union Congregational Church Orchestra. He had once gone to see her perform there. She was in a white cotton dress and had an Egyptian band on her bob that made her look half priestess, half flapper. He wore his tweeds—the lone unbeliever in the church, he assumed—watching her play like some jazz sister in rapture. Dr. Crandon thought then of the new beginning the minister at their wedding had promised. Where was his sunrise?

Surprisingly, his outlook would change through the influence of a Spiritualist. Sir Oliver Lodge had presented as pioneering research what Dr. Crandon had always associated with superstitions of the horse-and-buggy days: that old black magic. We met again, the doctor said of their encounter. We became friends. Sir Oliver suggested some reading for me, and I began, feeling somewhat foolish, but certainly intrigued.

Dr. Crandon soon realized that the séance was the one place where science and the pursuit of a hereafter merged. Darwin had solved the mystery of the origin of man, but what of his postmortem fate? The answer might be revolutionary, for biology and classical physics would become as outmoded as orthodox religion if Lodge were right about Spiritualism and the Ether of Space.

Thus, as the 1920s started, a new horizon beckoned to Dr. Crandon. This had as much to do with his family life as the Spiritualist revival. One of the preeminent surgeons in Boston, Dr. Crandon was a gynecologist and obstetrician. He knew that he would not be delivering his own baby—as he was no longer able to reproduce—so the Crandons decided to take in an orphan. Roy’s father, who had been president of the Ethical Society of Boston, encouraged such humanitarian impulses. But oddly—as if Roy thought forsaken children were more an English tradition—the child he desired was searched for and found through intermediaries in London.

Roy had always wanted a son; if his name were to die, that was no kind of immortality. To his consternation, though, the London orphan did not adjust to his new home in Beacon Hill. Both the new child and Mina’s son called their patriarch Dr. Crandon rather than Father. Whatever issues developed in their home beyond that is a matter of privacy.

But we do hear about these boys through the Boston newspapers in the summer of 1921. They had been playing off Point Shirley on a raft that tore loose from its mooring. Caught in a current, they were carried toward dangerous waters. Hundreds watched while two strong swimmers rescued them. The newspapers identified the distressed children as two small boys, six and eight years respectively. The younger child was John, Mrs. Crandon’s son. The older was the English boy who remains nameless and unknown; saved from the sea but lost in the ether.

The Wand of Youth

T he first stop for the magician was the cemetery. Upon returning to New York from one of his movie productions or magic tours, it was his ritual to visit the Queens grave site of Cecilia Weiss. At the height of his fame he told a movie magazine that his greatest ambition was to prove himself worthy of the mother who raised him. The umbilical was the one bond he had never slipped in his career as an escape artist. Even when touring abroad, as long as Cecilia lived he would try to return home for her birthday. When anxious he would rest his head on her chest—just like when she calmed him as a child. He had always wanted to be the center of his mother’s life, but this was rarely possible growing up. She had six other needy children vying for her affections and a defeated husband whom she cherished. Her third son, Ehrich, hoped to do something extraordinary to win her attention. When he grew up to jump from bridges, his mother was his imagined audience.

Before winning acclaim as an escape artist, he had been a trickster on the dingy circuit—a medicine-show mountebank, even a fraud medium. Yet when it came to judging right from wrong he had a venerable model in his father. Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss had always abided by the strictures of the Talmud and had also earned a law degree in Budapest to bolster his authority. Many evenings he recited moral fables to his sons and daughter. But despite his scholarly air, he was in worldly ways a failure. There was no magic in Mayer Samuel’s life except for his young and devoted second wife, Cecilia. His efforts lacked the relentless drive that would become their third son’s trademark.

In 1878, four years after Ehrich’s birth, Mayer Samuel found a rabbinical position in the town of Appleton, Wisconsin, and brought his family from Hungary to join him in the New Wilderness. In the magician’s memory, his parents sit together under pine trees in an Appleton park, drinking coffee, speaking intimately—a moment of connubial bliss during an unusually stable period for the family. It was not that life was easy in Appleton; Mayer Samuel earned a mere $750 yearly as a rabbi—barely enough for the frugal Weisses to scrape by. In light of all that followed, though, Ehrich idealized an early childhood that included surrey rides, winter sledding, and steamer excursions on the Fox River. Most exciting of all was when the traveling circuses—Barnum’s and Forepaugh’s—pitched their tents outside of town. Sneaking under canvases, the boy encountered firewalkers, Arabian jugglers, and magicians—with names like Peerless Mysteriarch of Three Continents or The Wonder Working Wizard of the World—who claimed