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Harry Houdini Exposes Boston’s Witch of Lime Street

Harry Houdini, the world’s most famous magician, came to Boston in 1924 to expose as a charlatan a popular medium named “Margery.” He succeeded, but in the process he got drawn into a public battle that involved allegations of fraud, infidelity, academic malpractice and the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Houdini was no stranger to Boston. In 1908, he jumped off the Harvard Bridge with his hands handcuffed behind his back and chained to a collar around his neck. Then in 1911 he escaped from the belly of a dead, 1,600-pound sea turtle on the stage of B.F. Keith’s theater.

Houdini about to jump off the Harvard Bridge.

In addition to his death-defying escapes, Harry Houdini unmasked spiritualists who claimed to communicate with the dead. Which is how he ended up in a séance on Beacon Hill with “Margery,” the toast of Boston society and the wife of a well-known surgeon.

In Margery, Houdini almost met his match.

Harry Houdini

Houdini was born Ehrich Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a rabbi. The family immigrated to Appleton, Wisc., in 1878. At nine, he performed publicly as a trapeze artist. He turned to magic as a teenager, getting his first big break at 25 to perform his escape act on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.

His escapes grew more dangerous and difficult. He escaped from locked, water-filled milk cans, from chains, ropes, coffins and jails. He escaped from straitjackets while hanging from a rope outside a building. In the Chinese Water Torture trick, he would hang shackled and suspended by his feet on stage, his head immersed in a tank of water.

Debunking Spiritualists

Houdini’s mother died in 1913. He called it “a shock from which I do not think recovery is possible.” For years he attended seances hoping to communicate with her “beyond the veil.” But every time he discovered the medium to be a charlatan. The deceptions infuriated him, and he began to wage war on fraudulent mediums and psychics.

His training in magic made him well-equipped for the task. He called himself the “scourge of Spiritualism.”

Houdini shows how “spirit photographs” are done

For centuries people had tried to communicate with the dead, but in the United States Spiritualism took off in 1848 with the Fox sisters of New York state. They claimed to be mediums who talked to the dead through mysterious rappings during seances. After they won fame and fortune with their act, they admitted it was all a hoax. Spiritualism caught fire anyway, spurred in the United States by the carnage of the Civil War. Grieving families sought comfort in seances where they could communicate with their dead.

By the 1920s, interest in Spiritualism revived after the staggering loss of life during World War I and the influenza pandemic. And plenty of people believed in “Margery,” one of the last, best-known spiritualists.

Mina Crandon

Her real name was Mina Crandon, the third wife of a wealthy doctor and yachtsman, Le Roi Goddard Crandon. A Boston Brahmin, he was a Harvard Medical School graduate, surgeon at Boston City Hospital and commodore of the Boston Yacht Club. People described him as dour, autocratic and suave, with a morbid fear of death.

Le Roi Goddard Crandon

He also had an un-aristocratic nickname, “Button-Hole” Crandon, a reference to his appendectomies. He did them through the belly button to avoid leaving a scar. But his career cratered when he operated on a pregnant woman, having misdiagnosed her as having cancer. She lost the child and sued, so he quit abruptly.

Mina, born Mina Stinson on a Canadian farm, was the antithesis of her much older husband. She was pretty, vivacious, athletic and eager to hang on to her sugar daddy.

Mina Crandon and Harry Houdini. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

She had married once before, to a Boston grocer. Fearful that her second husband would tire of her, as he had of his previous wives, she began demonstrating her gifts as a medium. Mina rapped on tables, stopped watches, produced live pigeons and began talking to her dead brother, Walter. Walter sounded a lot like Mina only with a husky voice and a scatological vocabulary.

Brahmins and middle-class Bostonians came to her seances. Then her husband took her to London to see Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and a believer in spiritualism. Mina convinced Doyle of her paranormal abilities and he became her ardent supporter.

As her fame grew, she acquired her own nickname: The Witch of Lime Street.

Scientific American

On a hot July day in 1924, Harry Houdini and three other men climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the Crandons’ Lime Street house on Beacon Hill. They belonged to a Scientific American committee that examined the claims of psychics and medium. In 1923, Scientific American offered a $2,500 prize to any medium who could convince the committee of his or her supernatural abilities.

Joining Houdini were Columbia University professor Malcolm Bird, parapsychologist Hereward Carrington and Scientific American publisher O.D. Munn.

Earlier that year, the magazine published an article by Bird claiming the committee was about to award the prize to the Boston medium, who he identified as “Margery.”

The article enraged Houdini, who called it “piffle.” He also demanded to sit in on a “Margery” séance. Thus he and the others traveled to Boston in July.

Bird and Carrington had stayed overnight with the Crandons, which shocked Houdini. “It is not possible to stop at one’s house, break bread with him frequently, then investigate him and render an impartial verdict,” he wrote. Their verdict was anything but impartial – they’d attended 20 seances with Margery and wanted to give her the prize. What Houdini didn’t know (yet) was that Carrington was sleeping with her, and Bird very much wanted to.

The Scientific American committee: Walter Franklin Prince, Daniel Frost Comstock, Mina Crandon, O.D. Munn, Houdini

Houdini Unmasks Margery

For her séance, Mina wore a filmy dressing gown, bedroom slippers, silk stockings and nothing else. Before it began, she hiked her skirt above her knees and then asked for darkness. Her husband sat to her right, and the others, all sitting around a wooden table, held hands. Houdini easily exposed one of her tricks. She sat at a table, “immobilized,” between the men who held her hands and feet. Then she made a bell ring inside a “spirit bell box” – a locked wooden box on the floor.

Houdini described what happened:

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 her muscles.

Illustration from Houdini’s book exposing Margery

… I could distinctly feel her ankle slowly and spasmodically sliding as it pressed against mine while she gained space to raise her foot off the floor and touch the top of the box. …When she had finally maneuvered her foot around to a point where she could get at the top of the box the bell ringing began and I positively felt the tendons of her leg flex and tighten as she repeatedly touched the ringing apparatus.

More Tricks

Houdini exposed her other tricks. When the table “levitated,” Houdini reached out and felt her head as it lifted the table.

When she made a megaphone fly through the air, Houdini figured out she ‘d put it on her head during a momentary diversion that freed her hand. She then jerked her head to make the megaphone drop at his feet.

Illustration from Houdini’s book exposing Margery

Houdini Exposes the Tricks

Houdini insisted that Scientific American publish an expose of Mina Crandon, but the editors held off. He then published a 40-page pamphlet, Houdini Exposes the tricks used by the Boston Medium “Margery” to win the $2500 prize offered by the Scientific American.

He also took to exposing Mina Crandon’s tricks during his stage show.

His denunciations didn’t hurt Mina Crandon – in fact, the publicity helped her. She continued performing, adding new tricks to her repertoire. For example, she produced “ectoplasm” from a bodily orifice. It turned out to be an animal liver she hid in her lap.

She also claimed “Walter” could leave a fingerprint in wax. Upon examination, it turned out to belong to her dentist.

Her husband tried to discredit Houdini in Spiritualist periodicals. He clearly hated the magician. Crandon wrote a letter to A. Conan Doyle, complaining, “this low-minded Jew has any claim on the word American.” Doyle, for his part, published a defense of Margery in the Boston Herald. Houdini then threatened to sue Doyle.

Houdini posing with bonds. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Back and forth they went, Houdini and the Crandons attacking each other in the press. Houdini had the advantage of the stage and his own showmanship. He returned to Boston and posed for photographers in front of City Hall holding $10,000 in bonds. He promised to give the money to charity if he failed to duplicate every spiritualist manifestation. “This is especially aimed at Mrs. L.R. G. Crandon,” he said.

Walter, from beyond the veil, predicted Houdini would die within the year. He wasn’t far off. Houdini died on Halloween in 1926, from sepsis, which resulted from a blow to the stomach. He promised his wife he’d try to contact her from beyond the grave.

Margery denied to the press that she’d put a curse on him.

The Real Story

Why did she do it? To save her collapsing marriage. Her husband had begun to tire of her and treat her harshly unless she gave him a good séance.

Houdini believed Crandon aided and abetted his wife in the ruse. He hit the nail on the head. Her husband discovered her fraud, but he enjoyed the attention and excitement. Plus, he’d lost prestige in recent years because of the lawsuit. The Spiritualist business was a way of getting it back.

Malcolm Bird, the Columbia mathematician, later admitted that Mina had approached him and asked him to help in her deception. Houdini also learned that her other ardent supporter, Hereward Carrington, not only slept with her, but borrowed money from her husband.

Dr. Crandon died in 1939, and Mina fell into a deep depression. She began to age quickly, put on weight, drank heavily and lost her looks. She died Nov. 1, 1941 — the day after Halloween.

As she lay on her deathbed, a paranormal researcher Nandon Fodor asked her if she would confess to the tricks she’d used. Mina told him to go to hell.

With thanks to The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush and Larry Sloman. This story last updated in 2022.

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Epes Sargent Tries to Get America to Believe in Ghosts

In the 1860s and 1870s, many Americans grew obsessed with spiritualism and communicating with the dead. The movement, which began in 1848 in upstate New York, caught fire after the war, and it had no bigger supporter than Epes Sargent.

Epes Sargent, author, journalist and editor, devoted a good portion of his career to trying to convince readers in the reality of the spirit world. He believed spirits were actually talking, moving objects and otherwise interacting with people.

Sargent belonged to a well known American clan that included Revolutionary War soldiers and the painter John Singer Sargent. His own fame came from his writing. Born in 1813, he became a reporter for the Boston Daily Advertiser and the Boston Daily Atlas, reporting on politics in Washington, D.C. He would move to New York in 1839 and work in magazines there until he returned to Boston in 1847.

By his 30s, Sargent had established himself as a playwright, journalist and poet. In addition, he wrote a series of books for school children to teach spelling and grammar. In his role as editor of the Boston Evening Transcript, he began to bring the abolition movement into mainstream political discourse.

Epes Sargent and the Ghosts

Frances Conant and her ghost brother in William Mumler’s photograph.

Yet late in his life, Sargent’s career took a fanciful turn. He became an ardent spiritualist. Leaving behind the journalist’s skepticism, Sargent began publishing full-on defenses for the spiritualist movement.

The idea of ghosts communicating with the living was nothing new, but spiritualism had gotten a significant boost of publicity with the Fox sisters. In 1848 they began demonstrating how spirits communicated with them through rapping and knocking sounds in their upstate New York home. The phenomenon percolated and others joined in over the next 25 years, conducting séances and other spiritualist rituals.

One of the more prominent spiritualists in Boston was Frances Ann Conant. For 17 years, up to her death in 1875, Conant gave free, public seances in Boston. Originally from Portsmouth, N.H., Conant moved to Boston after getting married. She then got involved with an avid group of spiritualists in the city.

One regular ghost at Conant’s seances was Dr. John Dix Fisher. Fisher, founder of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, would offer medical advice from the grave through Conant, who acted as a medium.

Photographs of the Dead

Another practitioner of spiritualism was William H. Mumler, a Boston photographer who had the gift of photographing ghosts. He traveled to Bridgewater to photograph Master Herrod, a young psychic, with a ghost hovering over his shoulder. He took a picture of Frances Conant with her brother’s ghost behind her. And, most famously, he photographed Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, standing behind her.

Sargent swallowed it all. He published three books on spiritualism, The Proof Palpable of Immortality, The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism and Planchette, or the Despair of Science. The Planchette preceded the Ouija Board. It was a small platform that held a pencil and people could use it to write messages from spirits.

Beliefs Debunked

Sargent’s books were filled with his own personal experiences as well as historical references to spiritual phenomena. Sargent died in 1880, and there is no record of his having contacted the living after death. As for Conant, Mumler and the Fox sisters, all were pretty well debunked.

Mumler, who caused a national stir with his photograph of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, went to trial for fraud in 1869. Though not convicted, the trial ended his career as a ghost photographer.

Conant was debunked by showman P.T. Barnum, who published a book about the world’s greatest frauds. He said that Conant relied heavily on obituaries to inform her about the dead people she spoke with.

The Fox sisters, meanwhile, outed themselves as fakes, explaining that one sister produced the mysterious rapping sounds herself. She did it by cracking her toes.

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Stratford Knockings Brought Throngs of Spiritualists to Connecticut

In 1850, the Rev. Eliakim Phelps and his family returned to their home one day –the scene of what was known as the Stratford Knockings – to discover their house draped in black funeral crepe. It hung on the door and over the mirrors, traditionally a sign that someone had recently died.

On one of the beds, they discovered Mrs. Phelps’ nightgown laid out with the arms of her garments folded over the chest, as if worn by a body that was laid to rest in a coffin. While many might have taken this as a threatening sign to move along, for Phelps and his family it was just a fairly routine day in their house.

The Phelps mansion, as everyone at the time knew, was haunted. Two kinds of spirits inhabited it. There were evil ones who broke windows, pricked people with pins and committed other threatening acts like knocking people around. Then there were the helpful spirits who communicated with raps and knocking and brought people lost objects.

Welcome to the age of spiritualism. Spiritualism, within Christian circles, exploded in popularity in 1848 in New York when three young women – the Fox sisters – became celebrities claiming they were communicating with a spirit of a dead person in their home. At that point, the dead began to speak up in a number of places.

Stratford Knockings

On March 10, 1850, the phenomenon moved to Stratford, Conn. Eliakim Phelps, a Congregational minister, told of his shock the first time he discovered his house inhabited by spirits. It happened after church one day, when the family returned home to find the house invaded. Someone or something had thrown around clothes, opened drawers and strewn belongings about.

Suspecting burglary, Phelps took a quick inventory. While the family silver was plain to see, along with money and other valuables, nothing was missing. Puzzled, he assumed that perhaps the burglars had fled upon the family’s return, or had simply lost their nerve.

Illustration from an article about the Stratford knockings in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine

Phelps had owned the mansion for two years. Matthias Nicoll built the house for his daughter Elizah and her husband Captain George Dowdall in 1826. Dowdall made his living in the China trade, and the second floor of the house looked like the upper deck of a sailing vessel. Dowdall died in China several years after he built the house. He never used it as he intended — as a retirement home, as he intended.

Phelps acquired it and used it seasonally, also spending time in Philadelphia with his blended family. Both he and his wife had lost their spouses and both brought children to the marriage. They had a three-year-old together.

Potatoes and Books

In the days ahead, more strange things began occurring. Books, fireplace tools, a potato began appearing in odd locations. Things fell from the shelves and objects disappeared from locked containers. Windows were smashed.

Phelps began consulting others, including ministers and spiritual investigators, to figure out what was going on.

The newspapers, meanwhile, heard of the Stratford Knockings and began publishing accounts of the strange happenings. Since everyone loves a good haunting or curse, curious strangers began stopping by, hoping to glimpse an unusual event or witness the Stratford knockings first hand. The events were well documented in popular books about spiritualism, including Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions, published in 1855. Phelps spent a good deal of time explaining and defending the stories about the house.

Spiritualism, meanwhile, was exploding in popularity, with both defenders and detractors drawing crowds to debate its merits.

Harry Phelps

In the Phelps home, 11-year-old Harry seemed to receive the most visits by the spirits, and people declared him a medium. Séances were held, and the spirits tapped out answers to questions, explaining at one point that they were smashing windows and disrupting the house purely for the fun of it.

In the fall, the family left for Philadelphia. Phelps sent the rest of the family along ahead of him, curious to find out if the “happenings” would continue. They diminished, but he still observed the odd item falling to the floor. Or else he found it in the wrong place.

When the family returned in 1851, the strange occurrences restarted, with objects going missing. Conversations with ghosts via rapping on the table continued. Friendly spirits would help the family locate lost objects. But evil ones set fire to Phelps’ papers.

All the while, newspapers, ministers, spiritualists and skeptics had a field day arguing over the merits of the Stratford Knockings story. The Phelps family left Stratford in 1852 and sold the house to the publisher of the New York Sun, Moses Beach, in 1859. Beach’s paper, like many other publications, made hay with the Phelps story.

Witchcraft?

Over the years, the hauntings were legendary in town. Some speculated that they had a connection to the death of Goody Bassett, a woman hanged near the house in 1651 for witchcraft.

Most, however, believed Phelps’ bored, much-younger wife and his stepchildren created the story to liven up their sleepy lives in Stratford. Given that events largely started and stopped whenever Harry left or rejoined the household, most of the blame has focused on him. It’s unclear if Phelps had joined the conspiracy or if his family duped him.

The house itself has long since been demolished, and the Stratford Knockings haven’t been reported in many years.

This story about the Stratford Knockings was updated in 2022.

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Harriet Wilson Describes Racism in 1859. Few Cared.

On April 19, 1859, Harriet Wilson copyrighted and deposited a copy of her novel in the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.

She called her novel Our Nig Or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House . It was the first ever published by an African American on the North American continent. In it, Harriet Wilson told her own story: of her mother’s abandonment, of her indentured servitude to a cruel mistress, of her eventual decision to fight for herself.

The novel got little notice until 1983, when scholar Henry Louis Gates established her identity. The book, wrote Gates,

…stands as a hallmark of literary history as the first novel published by an African American woman in the United States; and it subtly combines compelling storytelling with unflinching indictments of Northern anti-black racism.”

Harriet Wilson

Indentured Servitude

Harriet Adams was born on March 15, 1825 in Milford, N.H., to Margaret Ann Smith, who was white, and Joshua Green, an African American hooper of barrels. Her father died when she was young and her mother abandoned her when she was six at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr. The court bound the orphaned child to the Hayward family as an indentured servant.

Scholars believe Our Nig is a fictionalized account of her abuse by Mrs. Hayward and her daughter. They mocked her, beat her and forced to do hard physical farm labor.

Hutchinson Family Singers

The Haywards had connections to the abolitionists in town and to the Hutchinson Family Singers. In Our Nig, Harriet Wilson vehemently denounced Northern racism and hypocrisy. But she also told a story about a young girl who learned to fight back.

The crucial scene comes in Chapter 10, when her character ‘Frado’ is told to fetch wood by her mistress, ‘Mrs. Bellmont.’

She was sent for wood, and not returning as soon as Mrs. B. calculated, she followed her, and, snatching from the pile a stick, raised it over her.

“Stop!” shouted Frado, “strike me, and I’ll never work a mite more for you;” and throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and independent thoughts.

By this unexpected demonstration, her mistress, in amazement, dropped her weapon, desisting from her purpose of chastisement. Frado walked towards the house, her mistress following with the wood she herself was sent after. She did not know, before, that she had a power to ward off assault.

Escape

Harriet Wilson turned 18 in 1853 and could finally leave the Haywards. She quickly married a man named Thomas Wilson, who claimed to be a fugitive slave. She had a child, George Mason Wilson, but his father soon abandoned them. He admitted he made up the fugitive slave story to gain support from abolitionists.

Harriet worked as a seamstress and a house servant. She also sold a hair restoration product, but she couldn’t earn enough to take care of her young son. She left him in the Poor Farm. And she wrote her novel, hoping it would support them. In the preface to Our Nig she wrote:

Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.

A few weeks after she copyrighted the novel, George C. Rand and Avery published it anonymously. It faded into oblivion, possibly because its indictment of Northern racism offended abolitionists. George then died at the age of seven.

Moving On

Hattie Wilson gave up trying to earn a living in Milford. She moved to Boston, where she became a spiritualist, communicating with the dead. People knew her as “the colored medium.” Harriet gave lectures, either entranced or in her normal state, at camp meetings, theaters and in private homes. She spoke, often humorously, about her life experiences, about childhood education and about labor reform. She traveled to Chicago as a delegate to the American Association of Spiritualists convention.

From 1879 to 1897, she worked as a housekeeper at a Boston boardinghouse on the corner of Berkeley and Tremont streets. She also worked as a healer and nurse. She died at age 75 at the Quincy Hospital in Quincy, Mass.

In 2006, The Harriet Wilson Project raised money to create a bronze sculpture of Harriet Wilson in Milford, N.H.

This story was updated in 2022.

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