Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Page 11
Along with putting the Golighers through their paces, Fournier d’Albe read through Crawford’s correspondences and unpublished séance reports. Time after time, Crawford misinterpreted straightforward evidence that Goligher’s “psychic structure” was her right foot. “Touching end of structure,” read Crawford’s notes from a séance in October 1919. “On one occasion the part I felt was like bones, close together, like finger bones bent over…or toes of feet and even the nails.” If Crawford was at all suspicious, he made no mention of it.
Citing nerves, Kathleen Goligher retired from mediumship in 1922, upon the publishing of Fournier d’Albe’s book. The SPR file includes an envelope of snapshots from a rare Goligher sitting given fifteen years later, the result of tireless cajoling on the part of a researcher named Stephenson. Positioned in front of Goligher is a crudely constructed wood and chicken-wire cage, which Stephenson appears to be using to trap the ectoplasm. Kathleen looks older than her years. Her head is bowed, and her hands are clasped in her lap. No one is smiling. If not for the rabbit hutch parked at their feet, they could be the bored guests of an especially tiresome tea. Even the ectoplasm, unfurled limply on the carpet like painters’ rags, looks weary of it all.
While Kathleen Goligher relied on Crawford’s credulity to make a name for herself and her fabric-store emanations, Boston medium Margery Crandon managed to fool the best and the brightest. In 1924, Scientific American offered a $5,000 prize to any medium who could produce a verifiable “visual psychic manifestation.” The medium would have to demonstrate her talents before a committee of investigators chaired by Scientific American staffer Malcolm Bird and consisting of Harvard psychologist William McDougall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology emeritus Dr. Daniel Comstock, Society of Psychical Research officers Walter Prince and Hereward Carrington, and prestidigitator and tireless medium debunker Harry Houdini. The only medium found worthy to sit before the committee was Boston’s Margery Crandon, the wife of a Harvard-educated obstetrical surgeon and the cause of great, protracted ballyhoo over at the American Society for Psychical Research. (The ASPR, now in New York, started out in Boston.)
Twenty séances later, the Scientific American committee was hotly divided in its conclusions. Houdini and McDougall believed her to be a fraud. Comstock and Prince waffled, saying that although Margery had failed to prove herself, more data were needed. On the other side of the fence, Bird and Carrington declared their belief that her phenomena were genuine. (Both Bird and Carrington were accused of turning a blind eye—or even being party to the deceit—for reasons of personal financial gain, in the form of book royalties and lecture fees.) McDougall and Houdini pointed out that the more thoroughly constrained were Margery’s hands and feet, the less likely she was to produce ectoplasm. “The more care, the less wonder,” as McDougall put it. Houdini at one point built a special cabinet-box for her, similar in appearance to those 1960s steam cabinets in which villains would lock James Bond and spin the temperature dial to max. In the end, the committee voted not to award her the $5,000. Bird was eventually called to task by Scientific American editorial chief O. D. Munn, who pulled the latest Bird piece from the magazine at the last minute. I haven’t followed the course of Scientific American, but Bird’s earlier straight-faced seven-thousand-word blow-by-blow of a Margery séance would seem to be a low point.
The Margery ectoplasms were of an entirely different species from those of Kathleen Goligher. “The appearance is somewhat that of a sheep’s omentum,” reads the caption of a photo in the ASPR files. (An omentum is a curtain of fat that hangs down from the stomach and insulates the intestines. In actual fact, the material came from a sheep’s lung—or so concluded a team of Harvard zoologists and biologists to whom McDougall submitted the photograph for analysis three years later.) The photograph shows a pair of studious-looking men in bow ties and spectacles leaning in close over a séance table to scrutinize a singularly unappetizing mound of alleged ectoplasmic matter. Margery’s torso appears in the background, clad, somewhat incongruously, in a satin floral print dress stretched tight over her own, rather well-developed omentum. Plate 2 from the same set shows the medium slumped forward onto the séance table, looking as though she’d been shot in the head, the “matter” now poised upon her neck and ear. In Plate 14, the ectoplasm is shown escaping from Margery’s nose, whereupon it was said by the medium to assume the form of a “tracheal speaking appendage,” used by Walter—Margery’s dead brother and now spirit guide.
Though the Margery ectoplasms seemed content to enter the world through any handy orifice, most often they emerged from between her legs. As in Plate 5: a “crude teleplasmic hand, originating from the genitals.” Based on a casual survey of the literature on all the materializing mediums, the vaginal canal was the most common ectoplasmic exit strategy. Indeed, some months before Crawford embraced his rectal theory, he posited that the substance might be issuing “from inside the legs.” And so Crawford, in inimitable Crawford style, devised an experiment involving special underpants. “The medium put on white calico knickers under my wife’s supervision,” he wrote in The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle. “Carmine powder was placed in her shoes. At the end of the séance it was found that there were carmine paths up to the top of both stockings and then inside the legs of the knickers to the join of the legs…. Thus, as I had expected for some considerable time, it was abundantly clear that the plasm issued from and returned to the body of the medium by way of the trunk.” Why the ectoplasm would have felt the need to visit the inside of the medium’s shoes before its return trip “between the legs” is a mystery Crawford did not address.
And now I’m going to pass the microphone to William McDougall. For how many chances do we have to hear a Harvard professor hold forth on vaginally extruded ectoplasm? “There is good evidence that ‘ectoplasm’ issues, or did issue on some and probably all occasions [from] one particular ‘opening in the anatomy’ (i.e. the vagina),” allowed McDougall in his summary statement for Scientific American. “The more interesting question is—How did it come to be within ‘the anatomy’? There was nothing to show that its position there and its extrusion from that place were achieved by other than normal means.” In other words—please forgive me—she stuck it up there, and then she pulled it out.
The debate over Margery and her ectoplasms raged on for a full year. Some wondered how she could possibly have room in her womanly interior for the array of objects often produced during séances. And it was at times an impressive array: In a 1925 letter from conjurer Grant Code, the medium is described as having been caught “drawing from the region of the vulva two or three objects which were exhibited on the table as Walter’s hands and terminals.” Code himself found it difficult to imagine how she managed it, and wondered whether Margery’s husband—who was after all an obstetric surgeon, a veteran of some one-hundred-plus cesareans—might have carried out a surgical enlargement of, as he put it, “Margery’s most convenient storage warehouse.”
With that, the debate deteriorated into name-calling and threats. Crandon counters Code’s implications with accusations that Code had raped his wife at a séance. The SPR’s Dr. Prince, in defense of Code, writes that Dr. Crandon was dismissed from his most recent position over the “systematic seduction of nurses.” Margery threatens Houdini with “a good beating.” Even the discarnate Walter joins the fray, calling Dr. Code “a boob.” The most damning letter of all comes from McDougall’s colleague J. B. Rhine, who was soon to put paranormal research on the more strictly experimental—if vastly less entertaining—track to card-guessing and dice-tossing. (Rhine founded Duke University’s famous Parapsychology Laboratory.) Here is J. B., sounding the much-needed voice of reason:
We left the house feeling we had witnessed nothing but a daring though artfully concealed attempt to capture notoriety. Why must we sit in darkness, while Dr. Crandon may, unannounced, flash on his white flashlight…? Why, if light injures the structures, should [the alleged spirit enti
ty] Walter seize the luminous end of the megaphone, placing his “grasping organ” right over the luminous band? Why is it that for certain acts, Dr. Crandon must be next to the medium “for her protection”? Why do they refuse to allow one to place one’s fingers lightly on the medium’s lips to test the independence of Walter’s voice?…
Returning to the matter of the warehoused ectoplasm. As regards the feasibility of such a practice, it is worth pointing out that Margery wouldn’t be history’s first vaginal smuggler of bulky carcass parts. In 1726, a rumor spread through England about a peasant woman from the outskirts of Guildford, who was giving birth to rabbits. (The story is spun out in precise and rollicking detail by medical historian Jan Bondeson, from whose remarkable book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities come these facts.) The rumor soon made its way to the Prince of Wales, who, fascinated,* promptly dispatched the court anatomist, Nathaniel St. André, to investigate. St. André, an ambitious self-promoter with no real medical training, arrived to find Mary in labor, about to give birth to her fifteenth rabbit. The fourteen siblings, all stillborn, were on display in jars of alcohol, arranged by Mary’s proud man-midwife, John Howard.† Minutes after the bewigged St. André entered the room, the forward half of a skinned four-month-old rabbit dropped into Howard’s receiving blanket. Howard conjectured to St. André that the rabbits were being crushed into pieces and skinned by the force of Mary’s contractions. Later that night, Mary “gave birth” to the back half of the animal—Bondeson describes Howard and St. André studiously putting the halves together and deeming it a perfect fit—and, later still, its skin.
A postmortem, performed by St. André’s staff back at the court, uncovered pellets of “common rabbit Dung” in the rectum, an obvious indication of fraud that went unnoted by St. André. The ignorant anatomist vouched for Mary’s authenticity, and the prince ordered the peasant woman brought to London, where she and Howard enjoyed a brief spell of fame and (relative) wealth. Unfortunately for Mary, one of her London visitors was the respected obstetrician Sir Richard Manningham. When Mary tried to pass off half a hog’s bladder as her placenta, Manningham—you have to love this guy—came back the following day toting a fresh hog bladder for comparison. Whereupon Mary, having no good explanation for why her placenta carried the “strong urinous Smell peculiar to a hog’s bladder,” burst into tears.
Mary Toft’s final downfall came at the hands of a porter at her lodgings. Unable to procure rabbits in central London, she had tried to bribe a porter into tracking some down. The porter talked, and Mary eventually confessed. She explained that when the doctors’ backs were turned, she would transfer into her birth canal a rabbit, or rabbit portion, which she had had concealed in a special “hare pocket” inside her skirt. Whether John Howard was in on the hoax or simply another victim of it was never clear. What is clear is that male medical professionals could be ruinously susceptible to vaginal deceits.
IT’S 1:40 P.M. now, but no one at my table has left for lunch. I pick up the box of ectoplasm and rest it on my lap. It’s worse than I thought. Slipped under the string is a three-by-five card, upon which is typed the official archive summary:
Material alleged to have been captured from Mrs. Helen Duncan, materialising medium, at a seance in 1939…. She had been stripped and searched but with no vaginal examination. The material was smelling and had bloodstains on it which appeared at regular intervals. The suggestion was that the blood had soaked into the material while it was folded up, and that the most likely explanation was that it had been secreted in the vagina.
Inside the box, a yellowed paper envelope is tied with a length of pink bias tape. It’s a large envelope, bigger and heavier than a four-month-old rabbit. I would put the weight at close to a pound. That is a lot of stinky ectoplasm. It’s a lot of stinky ectoplasm to spread out and examine in the still, reverent hush of the Cambridge Manuscripts Reading Room. I want to smuggle it out of here and open it up in the ladies’ room, but my bag is checked in a locker downstairs, as per manuscripts room rules. Oh, for a hare pocket.
I turn to the Helen Duncan file, in the hopes that by the time I am done reading, the people at my table will have fainted from hunger or gone home. Duncan was ectoplasm’s last stand. And what a stand it was. A histrionic Scotswoman of poor health and bad habits, Duncan weighed close to 250 pounds. She smoked constantly and moved with obvious difficulty, often requiring assistance to rise from her seat and make her way across the séance room. She had nine children, who hung from her hems and scaled her bulk like small mountaineers. One biographer described the youngest child atop her lap, dandling the flesh that hung down from her massive upper arms. Her séances were high drama. She tended to swoon and fall off her chair and occasionally wet herself in the frenzy of spiritual possession. She once emerged from the séance cabinet naked under a floor-length “ectoplasmic veil.” For those whose interest in spiritualism was purely voyeuristic, Helen Duncan was the hottest ticket in town.
Duncan produced ectoplasm as readily and lustfully as she produced offspring. However the two did not typically—item SPR 197.1.6 notwithstanding—issue from the same anatomical opening. Owing to the well-publicized stunts of Margery and other 1920s mediums, those active in the 1930s were subjected to thorough body cavity searches by researchers before each séance. “Thorough” meaning:
May 14, 1931
After the séance room and cabinet had been examined, the medium was led into the room by Mrs. A. Peel Goldney…. The doors having been locked, the medium was placed upon a large settee…and in the presence of Dr. William Brown, Mrs. Goldney (who has trained and worked for many months in a midwifery hospital) made a thorough vaginal and rectal examination. The rectum was examined for some distance up the alimentary canal and a very thorough vaginal examination given.
This passage, written by magician-turned-psychic-researcher Harry Price, describes preparations for a séance undertaken in Price’s National Laboratory of Psychical Research (NLPR) in London, part of a two-month investigation of the Duncan mediumship. Price covered all the angles. He designed a special fraud-preventing “séance garment” that enrobed the entire medium, including her hands and feet, such that only her head stuck out. So even if Mrs. A. Peel Goldney had managed to miss something in her anatomical inspections, it would have been impossible for Helen to get that something out of the suit and into the open. Price’s book about the Duncan investigation includes a dozen or more photographs of the medium ensconced in her special garment. It is fashioned from satin in a loose jumpsuit style, which, in combination with Mrs. Duncan’s sizable mid-torso circumference, brings to mind late-career Elvis, or the sad clown in that Italian opera. I should point out that Mrs. Duncan was compensated for her humiliations at the NLPR. Handsomely so—five hundred pounds in all. This helps explain the medium’s seemingly inexplicable decision to risk her career in the laboratories of the NLPR.
Price was surprised and confounded to see that Helen Duncan was able, despite his precautions and within minutes of the séance beginning, to produce a six-foot-long ectoplasm. “The séance garment should absolutely preclude the secretion in or extraction from the orifices I have mentioned, even had she not been examined medically.” Forced to rule out “the vaginal-cum-rectal theory,” he came up with an equally extraordinary possibility: “That the medium possesses a false or secondary stomach (an esophageal diverticulum) like the rumen or first stomach of a ruminant, and that she is able to swallow sheets of some material and regurgitate it at leisure—like a cow with her cud.”
This was not as far-fetched an idea as it sounds—particularly in Price’s day. Search the British medical journals from the early 1900s, and you will come across lengthy articles on the subject of human ruminants: seemingly ordinary citizens who could effortlessly “bring up” portions of their most recent meal for further mastication and—quite often—enjoyment. “It is sweeter than honey, and accompanied by a more delightful relish,” a Swedish ruminator is quoted as saying in E. M. Brockbank’
s “Merycism or Rumination in Man,” which ran in the February 23, 1907, issue of the British Medical Journal.
No one could say whether the condition was hereditary or learned. Brockbank cites the case of a tin worker as support for heredity’s role. “He looked upon it as a perfectly natural phenomenon, descending from his grandfather and father to himself, and to all of his sisters and brothers and to many of their children…. [His wife], a bright intelligent woman who does not ruminate, states very definitely that as soon as the children began to walk they used to bring up mouthfuls of food, which at first they spat out, later they began to rechew it, especially after a meal they liked.” Other physicians insisted the habit was passed along by imitation, citing as evidence a Swiss ruminator who lived among cows all his life, and a boy who was suckled for two years by a goat, and “acquired by imitation his foster-mother’s…habits.”
Though the act appears identical in cow and man, only in the bovine does it serve any useful purpose. Though occasional exceptions did exist, such as this 1839 Lancet case study of a farmer: “To save time, he had acquired a habit of ‘bolting’ his food…then getting on horseback, and subjecting his dinner piecemeal to mastication at his leisure.” The farmer didn’t seek medical advice until later in life, after falling into some wealth and attempting to mix with a higher cut of society, who found his habit “very disgusting.” Two papers I read implied that ruminating was accepted as normal behavior among the working class, implying that cud chewing was as common among nineteenth-century laborers as tobacco chewing among modern-day major league pitchers. These days, rumination articles are confined to literature about psychologically or developmentally impaired individuals. (Happily, there is help. A surgical technique recently perfected at the Swallowing Center at the University of Washington* stops rumination in its tracks.)