Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (12 page)

The other possibility is that W. J. Crawford was—to use the word choice of Harry Houdini, who saw the Goligher photographs and heard the engineer explain them over the course of a three-hour dinner—insane. Evidence for his rather weak grip on reality can be found among the captions in the SPR album I’ve been looking through today. Photograph 8E, for instance: “In this photograph are to be seen the white and grey substances. Dr. Crawford said that the grey substance left excreta marks.” On June 22, 1920, shortly before he died, Crawford wrote in his journal that he was considering the possibility that ectoplasm emerged from the medium’s rectum. He first arrived at this unorthodox notion upon finding “particles of excreta” in the white drawers that he asked the medium to put on before—and return after—the séance. It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford’s distinctive psychosis appeared to include a troublesome underwear fixation. In addition to the white drawers, we find the following “highly probable facts, resting on good authority” in a letter from a Mr. Besterman, in the SPR archives. Shortly before Crawford’s suicide, Besterman writes, Crawford “spent all his money (consequently leaving nothing) on a stack of woollen underwear for his family, sufficient to last for several years.”

After Crawford’s death, the SPR sent another researcher, E. E. Fournier d’Albe, to follow up with the Golighers. Though Fournier d’Albe had earlier in his career vouched for the authenticity of the original ectoplasm-exuding medium Eva C., he was suspicious of Goligher from the start, largely
because of Crawford’s photos. In his ninth sitting at the Goligher circle, on June 23, 1921, he confronts the spirits about the ectoplasmic cantilevers in Crawford’s photographs: “Well, I cannot make out this structure. In some places it appears as if woven. Have you a loom in your world?”

Shortly thereafter, Fournier d’Albe caught Kathleen Goligher levitating a stool with her foot. Convinced that her ectoplasm could be bought by the yard in downtown Belfast, Fournier d’Albe purchased a yard of fine chiffon, and published a shadowgraph close-up of it, run side by side with a shadowgraph of a bit of “ectoplasmic rod.” The two appear identical.

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: 

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: