7. Squaring the Circle :
Fraud and Phenomena at the Seances
In November 1925, fountain pen in hand, Harry Houdini turned to page 666 of the Atlantic Monthly for the latest Harvard University report on the mediumship of Mina Crandon. A year earlier, sitting on the Scientific American committee with Professor William McDougall and others, he had been sceptical about 'Margery', references to which he underlined, likewise a passage about the luminous levitating doughnuts (actually cardboard rings). 'What I saw holding the doughnut,' wrote Dr Hudson Hoagland, a distinguished neuroscientist, 'appeared to be a human right foot, the toes clamped over the periphery of the disc, creasing it in a way verified by examining the doughnut after the sit-ting.' "Aha!' annotated Houdini.
This was more than just a casual interest.
Houdini waged war on Spiritualism, demonstrating in Broadway theatres how to fake phenomena - an ironic reversal for an entertainer who started out in dime museums performing feats of escapology copied from Spiritualist stage shows (he even used a curtained cabinet).
A passion for debunking was driven by failure to contact his mother, to whose memory he was devoted. His disappointment peaked in Atlantic City in June 1922 when the entranced wife of his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a spirit letter in the correct idiom but the wrong language : English rather than Houdini's mother's inimitable mishmash of Hungarian, German and Yiddish. Four years later, in 1926, the spirits were to warn Conan Doyle: 'Houdini is doomed, doomed, doomed!' Sure enough, on Halloween that same year, he died from a ruptured appendix. In some ways Helen Duncan got off lightly with Harry Price, who by comparison was respectful and restrained in his dealings with mediums, the people the great magician called 'human vultures'
Fraud mainly concerns falsehood, but through the vagaries of perception also relates to truth - the kind of truth that sees the phenomenal in the mundane and inspires the beholder. In 1944, prosecution witnesses may have shown that poor Nellie was guilty of fraud, but defence testimonies vividly describing engagement with the spirits of the dear departed are remarkable - an alternative reality shaped by emotion. Spoken evidence was storytelling : the manufacture of truth according to desire.
Spiritualist beliefs - perceptions of 'truth' - were unusually foggy. Superficially, Houdini was an arch-scoffer but beneath there lay a yearning agnostic, angry that his spiritual quest was frustrated by impostors. There were many like him: broadly credulous but specifically sceptical. It was all very complicated. Eric Dingwall wavered about Margery yet criticized Houdini as an anti-scientific prestidigitator over his dim view of Eva Carrière, while actually being sceptical of physical mediumship to the extent that he found his Magic Circle colleague Harry Price too credulous. For that, and for not being a gentleman, Price was judged unsuitable as an SPR investigator. One thing on which Price, Dingwall and Houdini did agree was that conjurors were good at detecting fraud because of their skill in what Price called 'the art of mys-tification' - or, as Houdini put it: 'It takes a flim-flammer to catch a flim-flammer.' Dickens's anti-Spiritualist satires - for example, his 1862 article 'Worse Witches than Macbeth's' - expressed the contempt that, as an accomplished conjuror, he felt for the likes of D. D. Home.
Another Victorian conjuror, J. N. Maskelyne, unconvinced by Eusapia Palladino's Cambridge seances yet a believer in apparitions and table-turning, maintained that scientists were easiest to dupe, because they were too lofty to detect simple legerdemain.
Among many books about seance trickery, one of the earliest, Modern Spiritualism (1876), was by Maskelyne. Not all were by magicians.
Confessions of a Medium (1882) speaks for itself, and similar works came from America.
Thanks to publicity generated by Spiritualists trying to buy the entire print run, Revelations of a Spirit Medium (1891), both an indictment of Spiritualism and a textbook of tricks, had a dramatic impact, not least on the adolescent Ehrich Weiss, who was struggling to escape from Wis consin to become Harry Houdini. The following year brought Julia E. Garrett's Mediums Unmasked, which told of a dupe who thought a medium's foot draped in a handkerchief smelled like a deceased relative. In 1902 the London Magazine published an article by Philip Astor,
'A Séance with the Lights Up', and the following year saw his 'Conjuring at Home', also in the London Magazine, and the classic work Modern Spiritualism by SPR veteran Frank Pod-more.
Demand was boosted by the First World War.
By 1916 David Phelps Abbott's Behind the Scenes with the Mediums had reached its fifth edition, and several new titles appeared each year. During the 1920s, Maskelyne's descendants kept up not only his conjuring but his anti-Spiritualism with exposé articles such as 'Spiri-tualism Exploited', 'Bogus Séance Secrets Exposed', 'Rogues of the Séance Room' and
'Exposing Ghost Frauds'. Many periodicals carried articles and serializations that spread public awareness. In 1921, the popular magazine John Bull, which had demonized Germans during the war, turned on mediums in a piece entitled: 'In-dia-Rubber Spooks: Kings and Clowns on Tap for the Credulous'. A year later Price and Ding-wall published a facsimile edition of Revelations of a Spirit Medium, the Victorian original of which had by this time become the impostor's bible.
Most fraudulent mediums restricted themselves to clairvoyance and psychometry, where the only hazard was being wrong and for which excuses were legion: spiritual interference, difficulty in raising vibrations, weakness in the communicating spirit or sceptical feelings harboured by the sitter. Good results, by contrast, came from 'pony books': card indexes containing personal details of local Spiritualists which could be lent to visiting mediums. Travelling companions and booking agents could also make surreptitious enquiries. Harry Price advised giving nothing away when visiting a medium to the extent of not speaking and removing rings several days before a sitting to let the marks fade.
Once useful information had circulated, a good memory could produce impressive readings. In 1938, Mollie Goldney went back to a medium who mentioned 'Bessie and Alec White', names Mollie had invented at a seance two years earli-er.
According to psychic investigator Arthur
Wilkinson, forgetting 'when things got sticky' was also important, as were quick wits and an innocent face. A medium's best asset, however, was the client's high expectations, raised further by high fees. Vague insinuations were confirmed by sitters who wanted to help clairvoyants make contact, not to test them. Seances were social engagements where civility took precedence over belief and disbelief alike.
Accordingly, shrugged Wilkinson, 'If you have the flair for stunts and some showmanship, well, the field is wide open for you.' Materialization mediums, he added, require only 'muslin, masks, trumpets and a colossal cheek'. Even where ectoplasm was involved, etiquette dic tated that physical mediums were forgiven the clumsiest of manipulations. "With the paid performer you pounce upon him and expose him the minute you have seen through his trick,' observed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 'But what are you to do with the friend of your host's wife?' Darkness also helped: the dim light required to protect ectoplasm provided optimal conditions for conjuring. Even red light was often dimmed as seances progressed. Props were daubed with luminous paint - from Margery's doughnuts to the ubiquitous trumpets and crucifixes - and what helped with visibility also assisted in deception. A luminous business card allowed a medium to read in the dark and luminous plates framed many a ghostly face. Harry Price once saw a medium use a flask of phos-phorized oil to project a pale spectral light, and silver of ferrocerium - lighter flints - came in handy. Books and articles on chemical conjuring had been around for years: John Scoffern's 'Ex-plosive Spiders and How to Make Them' and
'Firework Pie for a Picnic' dated from the 1880s. Light shows, from lantern lectures to the movies, inspired ambitious frauds, a point illustrated tangentially by a German accusation in 1930 that the Angels of Mons had been propagandist motion pictures of projected aeroplanes onto clouds above the trenches to imply that heaven favoured England.
In the end, restrictions imposed by mediums said more about them than about the spirits they invoked. As one sceptic observed, the movement of objects using ectoplasmic rods never exceeded a medium's muscular capabilities. The contrary claim was that spirits rejected extravagant demonstrations as vulgar - a sensibility that would explain why no medium ever caused the laws of physics to be rewritten.
Physical mediumship relied on the same misdirection used by stage magicians. But the context was different, mainly an emotional relationship, often a spontaneous one, between medium and sitter. Consider the words of Albert, Helen Duncan's spirit guide: 'There is a lady here beside me who entered the spirit world quite recently.
On the earth plane she suffered from a serious and painful ailment situated in the lower part of the abdomen; eventually her heart was affected and she passed away.' This was a description given hundreds of times: non-specific, open-ended, trite. But the quotation comes not from a disgusted sceptic but from a seance-goer in Blackpool in 1942, who was thrilled by Albert's message and positively identified the spirit as his deceased wife. Mrs Duncan and mediums like her - although there was no one quite like her - were only one half of the equation. Helen sometimes bullied sitters into accepting her messages, becoming red in the face if they refused; but usually this was unnecessary. The audience were willing if unwitting participants in the creation of an illusion. The supernatural has no monopoly over the miraculous: the secu-lar, the banal, the everyday, all our thoughts and feelings and passions - these things are full of wonder, too.
Predictions about sinking warships are a case in point. There were many theories about how news of HMS Barham leaked out: it came from survivors returning from Alexandria; a German propaganda broadcast had been picked up; Mrs Duncan was an enemy spy. A simpler solution is that the prediction was never made, at least not as reported, and the same applies to HMS Hood.inl In 1941 any medium might have thought of battleships, of which there were just a handful and all in peril. Italy's entry into the war in 1940 left the Royal Navy isolated in the Mediterranean, and it was well known that the Barham had been torpedoed in December 1939 and bombed during the withdrawal from Crete in May 1941. In that battle, nine ships had been sunk, including the cruiser HMS Gloucester, with the loss of over seven hundred men. The Hood, sunk the same month, had been famously the world's largest warship in 1939 - an obvious choice for imagining a naval catastrophe. At the seance attended by Brigadier Roy Firebrace, the message was only that 'a great British battleship has just been sunk', which was unremarkable given this was during the Battle of the Atlantic, which had been costly from early in the war when HMS Courageous and the battleship Royal Oak were sunk. The sinking of HMS Ark Royal just days before the Barham focused attention, and Portsmouth, where the families of many of the Barham's 1,200 sailors lived, was as much a target for a predatory medium as a battleship was for a U-boat. Percy Wilson considered the sailor's materialization to be 'rather straight evidence of the survival of the boy who came back to speak to his mother'; but one can also see how a cheesecloth shape could have turned into a youth with 'HMS Barham' on his hat, either through faulty perception or retelling of the tale. In fact, the classic story was wrong: the sailor was a petty officer and so would have worn a peaked cap, not a round hat with a cap tally. Even if he had been recently promoted, and therefore still 'square-rigged', in wartime all tallies read just 'HMS' for security reasons.
Moreover, witnesses reported that, although the Barham was mentioned at the seance, the ship's name was extracted from the sitter by Mrs Duncan speaking as 'Albert'
These explanations are mundane; the wonder lies in the fact that it was really possible for a woman to recognize her son or husband. Of course, the seance conditions at the Master's Temple were ideal for illusion. It was impossible to adjust completely to the darkness, as Stanley Worth testified, and the forty-watt red bulb that Mr and Mrs Homer described to the police was more like a five-watt. The cabinet concealed all, the music muffled all, the gloom shrouded all, and the show was kept moving by Mrs Brown's and Mrs Homer's commentary, which identified shapes and asked sitters to claim the spirits. The seating plan also helped the Homers control visiting strangers - an old medium's trick to stack the odds in her favour.
But the impression was magical. After seeing Helen Duncan perform in 1931, William McDougall said 'that when the general dure and circumstances demanded by the medium are such as suggest fraud and favour fraud, the observer is justified in regarding the phenomena as fraudulent, even if he is not able to suggest any plausible explanation'. And yet manifestations need not have been genuine to be phenomenal.
Not only was the believer's experience remarkable but the theatrical skill of materialization mediums was remarkable, too. Ectoplasm may well have been butter muslin, blotting paper, wood pulp or egg white - but the artistry of its manipulation was something else.
Mediums had long used props. In the 1870s, Madame Blavatsky had been forced to leave Cairo after a ghostly arm was found to be a long glove stuffed with cotton wool suspended by threads, and Maskelyne detected Eusapia Pal-ladino's dummy hands at Cambridge in 1895.
But pre-seance searches made prop use difficult
the Homers even obliged a man who asked for the cabinet chair's upholstery to be ripped open
and touring mediums had to use whatever they could hide on or in themselves. Usually this meant fabric, but discreetly inflated balloons and rubber gloves were also used. The clammy matter Dingwall felt on Margery's thigh may have been an animal lung, inflated with a pump hidden between her legs. Others likened her ectoplasm to raw liver, half a brain and an armadillo's back. As a rule, it was best to keep things simple. 'The experimental results are so impossible by fraud', William Crawford said of the Golighers, 'that it would have been quite unnecessary to take any means to prevent fraud.
Yet when Kathleen Goligher came out of retirement in 1936, a camera revealed a thread running down one leg attached to ectoplasm slithering across the floor. C. V. C. Herbert, the SPR's Research Officer, experimented by dragging a handkerchief attached to a length of cot-ton, slowly winding it towards him round the stub of a pencil. In weak light, observers found the trick almost impossible to detect.
But how were full-figure materializations achieved? Lighting from beneath silk treated with phosphorus, olive oil and alum water produces a luminous vapour, which is perhaps how the illusionist David Devant made a 'ghost in silken gauze' glide across a hall and then evaporate before twenty astonished guests. Helen Duncan essentially played 'bogey-bogey with a sheet over her head', as Charles Loseby put it, and transmuted into six-foot-tall 'Albert' by holding up an arm (tall spirit forms commonly only had use of one arm). The Edinburgh ghostbuster Esson Maule was photographed mocking up Helen's tricks. One shows her with a handkerchief over her face and a vest on her head, face poking through an armhole; in another she draws the cabinet curtains around herself to control how much of her white-swathed body could be seen. Add to this mix thick black stockings, quiet on wooden floors and invisible in semi-darkness, and the effect was that of a slim floating figure. An odd noise heard prior to Peggy's airy entrance was traced to a squeaking floor-board: Helen had lowered herself to her knees to exceeded a medium's muscular capabilities. The contrary claim was that spirits rejected extravagant demonstrations as vulgar - a sensibility that would explain why no medium ever caused the laws of physics to be rewritten.
Physical mediumship relied on the same misdirection used by stage magicians. But the context was different, mainly an emotional relationship, often a spontaneous one, between medium and sitter. Consider the words of Albert, Helen Duncan's spirit guide: 'There is a lady here beside me who entered the spirit world quite recently.
On the earth plane she suffered from a serious and painful ailment situated in the lower part of the abdomen; eventually her heart was affected and she passed away.' This was a description given hundreds of times: non-specific, open-ended, trite. But the quotation comes not from a disgusted sceptic but from a seance-goer in Blackpool in 1942, who was thrilled by Albert's message and positively identified the spirit as his deceased wife. Mrs Duncan and mediums like her - although there was no one quite like her - were only one half of the equation. Helen sometimes bullied sitters into accepting her messages, becoming red in the face if they refused; but usually this was unnecessary. The audience were willing if unwitting participants in the creation of an illusion. The supernatural has no monopoly over the miraculous: the secu-lar, the banal, the everyday, all our thoughts and feelings and passions - these things are full of wonder, too.
