Chasing Ghosts, page 13
At this séance held on June 8, 1924, Margery the Witch of Lime Street attempts to have Walter tip the scales.
So on July 23, 1924, Houdini headed to Boston to meet Margery face-to-face, hand-to-hand, and foot-to-foot. That night’s séance found the magician seated next to the medium, holding her left hand and placing his right foot against her left. He’d heard much hullaballoo about an electric bell that rang inside a box whenever pressure at its lid completed the circuit. The box, placed in front of Margery, rang in previous séances despite her hands and feet being secured by the committee members. The bell, it was believed, had been rung by Walter. Houdini suspected that Margery had been able to leisurely and slyly free her foot enough to ring the bell. He came prepared.
“All that day I had worn a silk rubber bandage around that leg just below the knee. By night the part of the leg below the bandage had become swollen and painfully tender, thus giving me a much keener sense of feeling and making it easier to notice the slightest sliding of Mrs. Crandon’s ankle or flexing of her muscles,” he said.
The plan worked, as Houdini slowly but surely felt the movements. As the evening progressed, he detected other tricks. She freed her right hand, for example, to place a spirit trumpet on her head, and then “Walter” would fling it in any direction requested. Houdini called it the “slickest ruse I have ever detected, and it has converted all skeptics.”
Moving forward, Houdini and the committee decided to devise a restraint that would prevent any of the tactics that the magician detected after one sitting. Houdini informed Margery of his plans in a letter, stating, “I know that with your willingness you are ready to try any of the various controls and assure you that I will be agreeable to anything, where eventually no one can question the control. At no time would I permit the committee to harass or put you to an inconvenience of physical discomfiture. Harmony must reign, but the control at all times, should be satisfactory to all present.”
That comfortable, satisfactory control came in the form of a wooden box with a hole on top for Margery’s head and holes on the sides for her hands. It looked like she was wearing a secretary desk, but looks weren’t important. Results, or lack of results, were.
Once Houdini had Margery secured inside the box, with her hands being held by himself and Prince, the manifestations ceased to exist—except for the voice of Walter. The spirit accused Houdini of trying to deceive the committee by sneaking a carpenter’s folding ruler into the cabinet before Margery entered, giving her a tool that could be used to create telekinetic effects.
“Houdini, you goddamned son of a bitch, get the hell out of here and never come back,” Walter shouted. The outburst intensified with a threat. “I put a curse on you now that follows you every day until you die.”
Margery felt betrayed by the magician and saddened to see this battle of minds resort to dirty tactics. Houdini, of course, denied placing the ruler there and discounted the threat and insults, chalking it up to the medium’s frustration. “She knew I had her trapped,” he said of the incident. The folded ruler measured just six inches—a size Houdini believed Margery was entirely capable of smuggling in.
Dr. Comstock, trying to play peacemaker, suggested it might have been left by an assistant who’d helped build the cabinet, but given the thoroughness of the examination such an oversight seems unlikely. That being said, he might have been correct about an assistant being involved. William Lindsay Gresham’s 1959 book, Houdini, the Man who Walked through Walls, claimed that years after Houdini’s death, his assistant Jim Collins was asked about the ruler controversy. According to Gresham, “Collins smiled wryly. ‘I chucked it in the box meself. The boss told me to do it. He wanted to fix her good.’”
Planted or not, Houdini felt confident he’d finally stumped the Witch of Lime Street. He determined that she’d combined her skills as a secretary and musician and her athletic build to become a “shrewd, cunning woman, resourceful in the extreme, and taking advantage of every opportunity to produce a ‘manifestation.’” He also believed her husband helped by holding his wife above suspicion and thus letting go of her hand without thinking anything of it. Crandon’s collection of books explaining the methods of mediums may have offered a few lessons to build on as well.
By February 1925, Scientific American determined that Margery would not receive the prize. Only Hereward Carrington remained a believer—though emotions may have given him a bit of a bias.
A resentful Le Roi Crandon later said the entire investigation was “largely a period of comedy.” He took issue with each of the members, noting that Houdini “came with his mind made up before he started.”
Margery may have lost out on the prize, but she wasn’t done. Séances carried on and Walter remained angry with Houdini. In August 1926, he expanded on his threat by declaring “Houdini will be gone by Halloween.” Oddly enough, Walter was right (and provided specificity that Doyle’s spirit friend, Pheneas, did not).
Others continued to study Margery’s mediumship. Doyle, of course, had never lost interest and continued to champion her. In 1927, after another study exposed her as a fraud, he countered by declaring her genuine to the press.
“He and his brave wife have had to fight the narrow pedantry of scholars, the cunning tricks of conjurors, the jeers of the humorist, the malice of the prejudiced and limited scientist,” Doyle said of the Crandons.
The Sherlock Holmes creator made his own journey to the spirit world in 1930, but had he lived a few more years, a new finding from the Boston Society for Psychic Research may have shaken his confidence. Ectoplasmic fingerprints of Walter, once believed genuine, were proven by a dermatologist to belong to Margery’s dentist, who was still alive.
Surely this disappointed those who still believed, yet one had to admire Margery’s resourcefulness and creativity. Houdini may have been right about her husband’s books informing her abilities and his assistance during the séance, but it hardly seems like a strong enough explanation for Margery’s impressive showmanship. How did she master such intricate and convincing effects? Magicians typically learn from other magicians, but Margery had no such apprenticeship. Perhaps Crandon helped more than Houdini suspected. Carrington, blinded by passion, likely partook in the ruse. Even Bird was rumored to have assisted in the séances. Thurlow suggests Margery knew her audience and knew how to manage the room. Maybe one day she told Bird she didn’t feel well and might need his help, and another day shared the same message with Carrington or someone else so that no one person was helping at all times. “She had different levers she could use if she needed them,” Thurlow says.
It’s also possible that another unseen accomplice could have aided in the production of her effects. In this case, the butler literally might have done it. Thurlow believes Noguchi may have helped, particularly because in Margery’s early séances she performed automatic writing in Chinese and Japanese. “That seems like an obvious connection,” Thurlow said with a laugh. Even if a spirit wasn’t doing the calligraphy, Margery proved to be a quick study in complex languages.
As for why she got herself into this in the first place, Thurlow believes her great-grandmother may have simply been fulfilling a need. “I think for her it was fun—I honestly think that was part of her secret,” she says. “The intellectual challenge. If you’re an intelligent person and you’re not given a lot of outlets to express that, you’re going to take whatever you get.”
But these are all theories. The real whys and hows went to the grave with Margery in 1941 at the age of fifty-three, following a bout with alcoholism. All the unwanted fame combined with a consistent need to perform on the spot and defend herself from skeptics might explain her downward spiral. No table raps, automatic writing, slate writing, Ouija board messages, or other manifestations of Mina Crandon have offered the real truth.
Try as we might, answers from and about the afterlife remain the struggle of the living.
Skip Notes
5Depending on the source, the sisters’ ages range from as young as eight to as old as fifteen at the time of the initial rappings. I’ve gone with eleven and nine, which are the ages engraved on the monument to their home in Lily Dale Assembly, New York. The home of Spiritualists should know best.
6Barnum’s Hotel wasn’t owned by P. T. Barnum, though one wonders how things may have been amplified if it was. This Barnum was a cousin of the famed showman.
“Whatever it eventually turns out to be would appear to us today as strange, unbelievable and impossible as, say, the idea of an Internet would have appeared to Newton or even Einstein.”
—Guy Lyon Playfair, Enfield investigator and author of This House Is Haunted, on poltergeists in 2011
Every town in every country has a creepy old house. A house no one dares to enter. A house that rejects mortal owners. A house built of local lore as much as bricks and mortar. A house said to be occupied by ghosts. We can’t be sure if they’re trapped within its walls or if they’ve chosen to stay, whether to protest an unjust death, to right a wrong, or for other reasons unknown to the living. We can only guess why the dead dwell among the living—but if the following stories are to be believed, there’s no doubt that they do, indeed, dwell.
Heiress Sarah Winchester’s home was constructed to house the ghosts of people who had been killed by rifles produced by her family’s company.
The Winchester Mystery House
In San Jose, California, the Winchester Mystery House is distinct from other haunted houses. After all, it was never meant for people; it was built and designed specifically for its ghostly occupants.
The aptly named house was built by Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune. It took 38 years of around-the-clock construction to turn the home into the expansive rambling mansion it became. Sprawling across 2,400 square feet, it hosts 160 rooms and includes 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 40 staircases, and 47 fireplaces. The construction came to an end only when Winchester’s life did. Death, however, is where the legend of this extraordinary home begins.
Sarah’s husband, William Wirt Winchester, was the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle. Oliver’s revolutionary new design allowed riflemen to reliably fire numerous shots before having to reload. The days of watching a target escape while tediously loading another bullet were over. Between Wild West frontiersmen, Native Americans, outlaws, and the military, the guns sold by the millions and the money poured in as the bodies piled up.
Life looked good for the young Winchesters—until death had something to say about it. Sarah and William’s infant daughter tragically succumbed to a nutrient deficiency on July 25, 1866, just months after the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was born. The couple had no other children but death wasn’t done with them yet. In 1880, it claimed Sarah’s mother, William’s father, and—months later—William from tuberculosis. He left his thirty-year-old widow a $20 million fortune.
“You shall have gold without stint,” William reportedly told her in the days before his passing. “You shall build yourself a house—any kind of a house that you desire.” With her sizable inheritance, not to mention an extra thousand dollars a day in royalties from rifle sales, she could do exactly as he wished.
Sarah thought building a dream house was an excellent suggestion but sought additional guidance from a medium following William’s death. Echoing her husband’s message to an extreme degree, the psychic directed Sarah to build a big house. So big, in fact, that it could house the ghosts of the thousands, or perhaps millions, of lives that had fallen victim to the Winchester family business. These ghosts would only be appeased if she kept building onto the house. As the story goes, by continually adding to the home she would ward off her own demise. The medium directed her to move out West, far from her current home in New Haven, Connecticut. Sarah didn’t resist; moving far away from the death that had surrounded her life must have been appealing.
Sarah’s search for the perfect site ended in San Jose when a drive led her to a thirty-acre lot with an eight-room home under construction. This was it. With nearly limitless means, she convinced the owner to sell her the home and the surrounding land. The construction crew stayed on but Sarah took charge of the design, directing the constant building, tearing down, and rebuilding efforts. Her life became an endless barrage of hammers and saws.
The work was hectic and surely a bit confusing to the carpenters, not to mention the neighbors. A local high-society woman once attempted to reach out to Sarah for a visit but her request was reportedly denied with a request of the widow’s own: mind your business and leave me alone. It was also reported that Sarah was so “annoyed” by her neighbors’ “revelry” on one occasion that she bought their property the next day.
On the other hand, people in her employ were generally treated well. Sarah did whatever she could to treat them fairly and to help improve their work conditions. Gardeners, for example, benefited from her innovative zinc subfloor and window drip pans in the north conservatory that cleverly directed water runoff from the plants to the garden below.
Over time, the house became a mishmash of architectural oddities. Several doorways lead to nowhere or, even worse, lead to a fifteen-foot drop to the ground below. Staircases are equally as strange, with some heading straight to a ceiling and others requiring an excessive amount of walking to ascend just a few feet. In one instance, a switchback staircase running a hundred feet in length takes seven turns with forty-four steps, each with risers no higher than a couple inches, just to climb a mere nine feet to the second floor. Ascending or descending from one floor to another introduces occasional upside-down support posts. Adding to these curiosities is the prevalence of the number thirteen throughout the estate. There are thirteen subpanels in the grand ballroom ceiling panels, thirteen windows in the thirteenth bathroom, thirteen steps on a staircase, and thirteen panes of glass in certain windows. Thirteen other examples could probably be found as well. All these architectural anomalies beg the question: why?
An example of the switchback staircases with two-inch-high risers in the Winchester Mystery House.
No one knows for sure, which is how the Mystery House earned its moniker. Even Sarah’s own name for the house is a mystery. She called it Llanada Villa, which translates from Spanish to “house on flat land.” If she had a special reason for the name, she kept it, like most things, to herself. Aside from her niece, who served as her secretary, and the maid staff, Sarah lived in the home alone. Unless, that is, the ghosts moved in. Some believed the home’s many oddities were designed to confuse evil spirits, as if they wouldn’t know how to navigate the circuitous staircases or be too befuddled by superfluous doors to stick around. The numerous chimneys were thought to have been tailored to life with ghosts as well, based on a theory that spirits like to escape through them. “When the clock tolled the hour for them to return to wherever it is they came from there was no need of undignified jostling and bumping of elbows,” explained one newspaper. “It is doubtful if ever in the haunted castles of Europe ghosts could get such service.” The same paper also noted that while the number thirteen is typically considered unlucky, ancient tales about the number consider it unlucky for evil people only. It suggested that bad ghosts would steer clear of those areas.
This line of thinking also explains the privacy of Sarah’s séance room, located right near her bedroom. It seemed Sarah went to great lengths to ensure no one but her—including unwanted ghosts—could get there, even if they wanted to. According to one report, she weaved her way through an “interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways” on her way to a button that opened a secret panel leading to another room, like the original Batcave, “and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her.” The description goes on to suggest she climbed out of a window onto the top of a staircase that took her down one story, where another flight brought her right back upstairs. “This was supposed to be very disconcerting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps.”
Considering the séance room is located right near her bedroom, making it easy to spend her evenings chatting with the spirits, this convoluted path may have been a colorful exaggeration. Then again, much of the speculation may have been embellishments designed to stir up excitement and deepen the mystery.
Some of the strangeness might have straightforward explanations. Take the switchback staircases with the unusually low risers, for example. It’s far more likely that these were built to accommodate Sarah’s debilitating arthritis than to confuse malevolent spirits.
In researching her book on Sarah Winchester, Captive of the Labyrinth, author Mary Jo Ignoffo suggests that other oddities, like the stairs and doors to nowhere, are simply a result of damage that occurred during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which preceded the creation of the Richter scale but was later estimated to be around a 7.9. Wreckage may have just been sealed off and landings may have collapsed. Ghosts, Ignoffo believed, had nothing to do with it. As for the rest of the unusual designs and construction quirks, she chalks it up to Sarah’s interest in architecture and having the cash flow and space to experiment.
Maybe Sarah did take up architecture as a hobby, but given the prominence of Spiritualism, it’s not unlikely that she dabbled in communications with the dead, too. Her home may have ultimately represented an amalgamation of both interests. If she truly believed her life depended on nonstop construction, she was prepared to live another forty to fifty years at the time of her death, based on the stockpile of materials she’d stowed away in three large storehouses. Ghosts or no ghosts, heart failure claimed Sarah’s life on September 5, 1922, at the age of eighty-two.
