Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (13 page)

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:

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.)

Nor is it true that, as Harry Price suggested, human ruminants possess bovine-style multiple stomachs. This was a stubborn rumor fueled by two seventeenth-century cases of ruminating men with horns—one a unicorned Paduan nobleman and the other a bicorned monk. Autopsies of ruminants—whose stomachs were normal—put a stop to the rumor, as did a paper by a physician named Sachs, who reviewed one hundred cases of men with rudimentary horns and found only one ruminant among them.
†

So Harry Price was wrong to surmise that Helen Duncan was ruminating ectoplasm that she stored in an auxiliary stomach. Duncan’s was more likely a case of masterful regurgitation. Regurgitation acts were a sideshow mainstay in Price’s and Duncan’s day. In his book
Regurgitation and
the Duncan Mediumship
, Price describes regurgitators of live goldfish and snakes, light bulbs, razors, pocket watches, bayonets, two eighteen-pound dumbbells, and a rolled umbrella. Colleague Harry Houdini watched a frog-swallower in Warsaw swallow thirty or forty glasses of beer and an unspecified number of half-grown frogs, which he would then bring up alive. I’m unclear on whether the beer helped with the process or with the man’s state of mind, or possibly that of the frogs.

Thus it is within the realm of possibility that Helen Duncan was swallowing and regurgitating sizable rolls of cheesecloth. To demonstrate the convenient compactibility of this fabric, Price bought a six-foot by thirty-inch swath, rolled it up tight, and photographed his secretary Ethel with the fabric sticking from her mouth like a Mafia gag.

Far more damning than the Ethel photo was Mrs. Duncan’s tantrum in response to a request, on May 28, 1931, that she submit to a post-séance X-ray. Price wanted to find out if she had an extra “pseudo-stomach,” and/or what was in her stomach (s). He was aware that the chances of getting a clear image through “the depths of the medium” were slim (early X-ray technology being what it was); but she was not. As the equipment was readied, Mrs. Duncan suddenly leapt from the settee, bowled over Dr. Brown, pushed aside Mrs. A. Peel Goldney, and lumbered screaming into the street. Her husband (and long-suspected accomplice) ran after her, and the two were gone for ten minutes, during which time—Price and his team suspected—she regurgitated the fabric and passed it off to him. And what a sight that must have been for genteel passersby—a panting, hysterical woman in a clown suit, throwing up a roll of cheesecloth.

Upon their return to the lab, Helen, visibly calmed, agreed to—nay, insisted upon—the X-ray. Price, no fool, took Mr. Duncan aside and asked him if he would object to being searched. Mr. Duncan did object, “murmuring something about his underclothing.” It always comes down to underpants with these guys.

More support for the regurgitation theory comes from the research department of the London Spiritualist Alliance, which conducted some of its own investigatory séances with Mrs. Duncan. On June 12 of that same summer, Helen was asked to swallow a pill containing methylene blue, so that anything regurgitated would be marked by the dye. No cheesecloth appeared that night (though the medium at one point attempted to pass off her tongue as ectoplasm).

Two weeks after the last Duncan séance, the council of the NLPR called Mr. Duncan in to a meeting and confided their suspicions. They were well armed. Price had with him a detailed and damning eleven-page lab report of a chemical analysis of a cutting of Duncan ectoplasm, which Mrs. Duncan’s spirit guide Albert agreed to make available. (Price describes this séance as resembling a sewing bee, with its seated circle of men and women, all poised with scissors, awaiting Albert’s go-ahead.) The council then showed Duncan a photograph of his wife draped in her ectoplasm side by side with a photo of Price’s ever-game secretary Ethel similarly posed and draped with a length of Woolworth’s cheesecloth. Duncan was unable to tell the difference. Finally, at a “heart-to-heart” on June 22, Mr. Duncan concurred that it was likely that the ectoplasm was produced by regurgitation, though he insisted that it was “subconscious regurgitation.”

“We pointed out,” writes Price, “that … in that case she would have to … buy the cheese cloth subconsciously … and swallow the bag subconsciously.” The aptly named Dr. Price offered Mr. Duncan one hundred pounds to convince his wife to be filmed in the act. Duncan promised to do what he could, but the couple lit out for Scotland the following morning.

The ectoplasm in the box at my feet is dated 1939, so Helen got up to her tricks at least once more. It’s possible the sample is one of the last of its species. It had been three years
since Margery had been coaxed out of retirement for the dispirited rabbit-hutch sitting. Kathleen Goligher had long since disappeared from the scene. There hadn’t been an article about ectoplasm in the
New York Times
for twelve years. For all I know, this is the last sample ever produced, ectoplasm’s Ishi.

Inside the box is an envelope tied with a length of pink bias tape. I take it out and place it on the table. I pull one end of the pink ribbon, slowly and with drama, like a man uncorseting his lover. Rather than the more typical and compactible cheesecloth or chiffon, it is some kind of cotton with a satiny finish. The stains are faint and brown, the smell manageable but detectable. I unfold it to get a rough idea of size—I’d say ten feet by three feet. It’s huge. It’s as though the Keeper of Manuscripts and Archives came in drunk one day and got the Shroud of Turin mixed up with Helen Duncan’s ectoplasm. The Hebrew reader glances up, then returns to her work without comment.

I don’t care how many children marched down the Duncan birth canal; I have a hard time believing any woman could “secret” this much fabric through that size opening. Barring a visit to the surgical practice of Boston gynecologist Dr. Crandon, my guess is that Mr. Duncan—who insisted on being seated next to his wife at séances—slipped it to her undetected.

Despite his travails with the Duncans, Harry Price did not give up hope that some mediums were possessed of genuine powers. Price’s book concludes with an optimistic pronouncement about the authenticity of the medium Rudi Schneider, known for ejaculating during particularly heady séances. (To my surprise and his credit, Schneider did not try to pass off the ejaculate as ectoplasm.) I don’t have the full story on Schneider, nor am I going to go dig it up, because I want to get back to the present. Fast-forward to the NLPR of 2004: The
University of Arizona Human Energy Systems Laboratory, where they test modern-day mediums.

I put the ectoplasm back in its envelope, tie the pretty pink ribbon, and return the box to its keeper. By 8 p.m., I’m back in London, at a Pakistani restaurant down the street from my hotel. In honor of Margery Crandon, I order lamb.