Loss and grief have always made spiritualism marketable, but they also make the séance more sordid than scary. It’s one thing for a carnival barker to rig the shell game against a kid trying for a gen-u-wine gold bracelet that will turn his girl’s wrist green. It’s quite another for predators to prey upon wounded people to separate them from their money.
For that reason, as long as there have been spiritualists, there have been hard-eyed realists who doubted and despised them. Which brings us to our subject for this Halloween. It is the 99th anniversary of Erik Wiesz’s death, a fellow who spent the last years of his life branding mediums as frauds and denouncing their antics as hoaxes.
Mina Stinson was a Canadian farmer’s daughter before moving to Boston just before the First World War. Still in her teens, she was adventurous, attractive, got by for dance bands when a “canary’s” looks were more important than her voice. She married a Boston green grocer and had a little boy, but Earl Rand couldn’t hold Mina’s interest. After all, she was a “flapper” before flappers were cool, and her life with Earl bored her to tears.
But not for long. This thoroughly modern Mina divorced Earl Rand in early 1918 to hitch herself to a better prospect with social status and professional achievements. While still married to Early, she met the accomplished surgeon Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon, who removed her appendix with his new surgical technique that minimized scarring, proving that the way to a girl’s heart was through her navel. Mina and Crandon met again about a year after her surgery when America’s entrance into World War I placed him on the staff of the New England Naval Hospital. Mina’s own navel installation had healed up sufficiently to allow her to get out of Earl’s house and drive an ambulance. Her eyes locked with Crandon’s one afternoon, and they were married shortly after her divorce.
Mina Crandon was a trophy for her new husband. He was ten years her senior and had connections to Harvard, which meant an established social circle with an Ivy League cachet. Because of this it’s hard to say why Mina and her husband began acting like loons. Five years into their marriage, they began holding séances. By itself, that wasn’t crazy since during the 1920s the Ouija “talking board” game was popular, and parlor entertainments featuring rapping noises and tilting tables were as common as charades. The difference for the Crandons, though, was what supposedly happened to Mina.
Without a prior trace of anything unusual about her, she suddenly became a psychic medium with extraordinary powers. She could move objects without touching them. She could talk to dead people. The favorite visitor from the other side was her brother Walter, who had perished in a 1911 train wreck. Walter spoke in a gruff voice and had a salty tongue. He made memorable the elegant little gatherings brought together by the Crandons’ invitation at their Beacon Hill home on Lime Street. Society matrons giggled over the expletives.
As word got out, others didn’t find it so funny. Harvard’s faculty wasn’t amused, but members of it were at least intrigued enough to investigate Mina’s powers. In 1923, several attended a few séances and came away convinced that Mrs. Crandon was a clever fraud. An associate editor of the prestigious journal Scientific American, however, believed Mina was the genuine article. He suggested that she try for a $2,500 prize the journal had put up for irrefutable proof that psychic events were legitimate. She and Dr. Crandon were more than willing.
And that is how Mina Crandon met Harry Houdini.
He was the most famous magician of all time, which was no small feat for a Jewish kid from Budapest. By the time of his untimely death at age 52 in 1926, the man originally named Erik Weisz had transformed himself into Harry Houdini with a stage act featuring spectacular illusions and dangerous stunts that packed houses.
He was small at some 5’5”, compact and stocky with bowlegs, which made the sharp angles of his forehead, nose, and chin all the more arresting. Audiences all over the world were almost as fascinated by the “look” of Houdini as they were by his act, and his appearance would have made him forbidding except for his easy-going manner, bright blue eyes, and an inclination to laugh while cracking jokes. Comic relief leavened the dangerous stunts he performed, and he never condescended to his audience. He did tricks, but he never tricked ticket holders. They always got more than their money’s worth.
Scientific American‘s judging committee for $2,500 challenge had as its most famous member Harry Houdini. Including magicians made sense — there was an amateur illusionist on the board along with Houdini — since their trained eyes could see through sleight-of-hand artifice, cleverly manipulated objects, and deceptive lighting effects. The committee had already debunked a couple of “mediums” by the time Mina Crandon came to its attention in 1924. The problem with Houdini was his touring schedule, and as it happened, he wouldn’t even know that Mina Crandon was submitting herself to the committee until everything was nearly settled.
To protect her identity, Scientific American referred to her as “Margery,” and she soon became the most famous medium in the history of psychic phenomena. Her séances amazed the journal’s judges. They dodged flying objects thrown by unseen hands. A table did more than tip; it toppled over. Lights winked, a bell secured in a box rang, luminescent wands hovered over luminescent checkerboards. They were on the verge of awarding Mina Crandon the prize when they thought to inform Harry Houdini, almost as an afterthought. He immediately cleared his calendar and descended on Boston like a man possessed.
In a way, he was. Houdini had once believed in spiritualism. Early in his career had even used it in his act when searching for something to set himself apart. He described his pretending to read minds and channel the dead as “a lark,” but after a time, he dropped the hokum. He saw grieving people wanting to believe it, and it made him ashamed. Then when his mother died, he wanted to believe again and tried to communicate with her at séances. But he quickly discovered that every medium he consulted was a fraud. He discerned their most elaborate effects to be cheap tricks easily duplicated by even clumsy illusionists.
He set aside part of his act to debunk spiritualists by showing how easily they deceived with their shabby effects. He published a book to reach a wider audience. And he discovered that some people who believed in this stuff refused to be persuaded and could never be convinced. His reputation for skepticism, though, made him a prized member of the Scientific American prize committee. And in July 1924, Harry Houdini at last saw two séances conducted by Mina Crandon. He immediately knew she was a fraud and was appalled that the committee was planning to declare her legitimate. He denounced everything about its “investigation.”
He had reason to. Committee members had accepted overnight hospitality at the Lime Street residence, had dined with the Crandons, and had become chummy with Mina. One had borrowed money from Dr. Crandon in amounts he could never repay, and some of the others, including the editor who had started the whole thing, occasionally slept with Mina, suggesting that her best tricks were not the séances but the guys supposedly investigating them. In that respect, Houdini wasn’t surprised that Mina not only claimed to summon spirits but was a “free” one herself who sometimes conducted séances in the nude. It sounds more provocative than it was; séances were always held in darkness. But the committee’s collective imagination shed light on everything but Mina’s deception.
What mystified Harry Houdini was why Mina and her husband were going to all this trouble. They didn’t need the money, and they certainly should not have wanted the notoriety. Yet, Houdini set aside the question of motive. His main concern was to quash the notoriety and expose the deception. He mounted a campaign so vehement that one of the committee’s more prestigious authorities exclaimed that Harry Houdini was the most obstinate man he had ever met.
All the same, because of Harry Houdini, Mina Crandon did not receive the prize.
The Crandon investigation was an episode in Houdini’s life rather than a milepost. Two years after it, he was still debunking cheap trick artists preying on grieving people. In October 1926, after a performance in Montreal, he was chatting with a couple of college students when one thought to test Houdini’s boast that his muscle tone could withstand any blow. Without warning, the young man struck Houdini four times in the abdomen, and the magician experienced an increasing pain for the few days left to him. Something — his appendix, colon, spleen, something — was broken inside him, and a raging fever forced him to bring down the curtain midway through his performance in Detroit a couple of days later. The doctors at Grace Hospital couldn’t save him. He died about half past one on Halloween.
Told the news, Mina Crandon gave a gracious statement to the press. She praised Harry Houdini’s tenacity. He might have smiled from “the other side.” Mina was tastefully dressed and said nice things about him, a fellow trickster, an enemy. Mina was behaving like a headliner, achieving for at least an instant what Harry Houdini had always been.
It took his dying, which was the greatest escape of all and turned out to be Harry Houdini’s finest trick, a transformation of a cheap con artist into Vaudeville’s highest rank of stardom. At the end, Harry Houdini made Mina Crandon a Class Act.