Crandon, Mina Stinson

Crandon, Mina (1888–1941) Also known as “Margery the Medium,” Mina Crandon was one of the most famous physical mediums of the early twentieth century. She also caused controversy among the most prominent psychical investigators of her day because some passionately believed that Crandon’s powers were real while others just as passionately believed she was a fraud.

Crandon began giving séances in 1923 in Boston, Massachusetts, at the urging of her second husband, LeRoi Goddard Crandon, a wealthy surgeon and instructor at Harvard Medical School, who suspected she had a talent for communicating with spirits. He hypnotized her in an attempt to see whether she could, while in this altered state, contact a spirit guide. She apparently did this easily, by connecting with the spirit of her older brother, Walter, who had died in an accident in 1911.

Crandon’s Séances

It seemed as though Walter was present during many of Crandon’s séances, and he would often speak to the invited guests, sometimes through Crandon; other times his voice apparently came from various places in the room. Meanwhile, Crandon’s guests, who assembled in groups of four or five, sat around a table with Crandon, who often appeared to be in a trance. While in this state, Crandon sometimes wrote in foreign languages, and there was no evidence that she could speak or write these languages while in a normal, conscious state. In addition, during many of her séances, the room was filled with strange knocks and other sounds or short bursts of light, or the table in the room moved or rose a few inches into the air.

Not everyone was convinced by such evidence. For example, sometimes an object or small animal would appear out of nowhere, and skeptics accused Crandon of sneaking them into the séance room concealed under her clothes. However, the medium typically wore such revealing clothing that any such trickery would have been unlikely.

As her notoriety spread through Boston society, Crandon drew the attention of Harvard’s Department of Psychology, which formed a committee to investigate her skills. After five months of study, they concluded that most, if not all, of the séance phenomena had been faked, though their evidence for this charge was far from conclusive by modern standards. Around the same time, Crandon visited London, England, where her talents came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A novelist best known for creating the character of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle believed in spiritualism and financially supported investigations into the paranormal. He immediately became one of Crandon’s biggest fans.

Houdini Investigates

Doyle’s view apparently influenced his friend J. Malcolm Bird, an associate editor at Scientific American magazine, who wrote several articles extolling Crandon’s skills. At the time, Bird was also one of the judges of an ongoing Scientific American–sponsored contest that would award twenty-five hundred dollars to any medium who could produce a “visible psychic manifestation.” When Crandon applied for the prize in 1923, Bird so wanted Crandon to win that he neglected to tell the biggest skeptic on the judging panel, stage magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, the time and place of the panel’s investigation of the medium. Houdini, therefore, learned about the investigation only after it had begun—when he read in one of Bird’s articles that Crandon’s talents, as displayed during the judging, had baffled even the great Harry Houdini.

Outraged over Bird’s apparent lies and trickery and over the news that the committee planned to declare Crandon’s talents to be genuine and award her the prize, Houdini publicly condemned the committee’s efforts and took over the investigation himself. On July 23, 1924, he attended a séance at Crandon’s Boston home, during which a shouting match developed between Houdini and Crandon’s husband. Their argument revolved around an electric bell that was in the room so that spirits could ring it. When the bell did indeed ring, Houdini accused Crandon of using her foot to ring the bell and insisted that she be placed within a box so she could not touch anything in the room. But before the test could resume, Crandon’s husband found a long ruler in the box and accused Houdini of planting it there in order to make it look as though Crandon was going to use the ruler to reach the bell switch. (Years later, in 1959, author William Lindsay Gresham reported that Houdini’s assistant, Jim Collins, admitted that his employer had indeed planted the ruler.) Crandon’s husband ordered Houdini from the house, but the famous escape artist had the satisfaction of seeing Scientific American refuse to declare that Crandon was a true psychic.

Ectoplasm

Nonetheless, the public continued to believe in her, and Crandon continued to conduct séances. Soon these events featured a new element: a slimy, custardlike substance, which she said was ectoplasm (matter from the spirit world), that frequently oozed from her body, particularly her mouth, nose, and ears. Sometimes the ectoplasm then shaped itself into a pair of hands. Several witnesses thought that the ectoplasm looked like lung tissue, and skeptics noted that Crandon’s physician husband would have had access to such tissue, again suggesting that Crandon had sneaked foreign material into the séance room.

After the addition of ectoplasm to Crandon’s séances, several noted investigators of psychic phenomena, including J.B. Rhine, studied her supposed gifts. Most concluded that she was probably a fraud, though they could not prove it. Meanwhile, Doyle continued to praise her, and to sometimes attack her critics in print. But finally, in 1928, an event occurred that convinced most people that Crandon had indeed faked her psychic abilities. During one séance, the spirit of her brother, Walter, supposedly left his thumbprint in some wax, but upon later analysis the print proved to be that of Crandon’s dentist, Frederick Caldwell. That morning, Caldwell had provided Crandon with the wax impression after she asked him to demonstrate how wax might be used to preserve a fingerprint. Once this was revealed, Crandon’s reputation was seriously damaged. Though she continued to give séances, they were infrequent, and she became despondent and turned to drink. Her alcoholism eventually became so severe that it led to her death at age fifty-three.

Crandon’s Séances

Houdini Investigates

Ectoplasm

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