The "Margery" Séances and Houdini's Sittings for the Scientific American Prize

Mina Marguerite Stinson was born in 1888 on a farm near Picton, Ontario. She had been a church secretary in Boston. In 1918 she married the surgeon Dr Le Roi Goddard Crandon. In the spring of 1923, séances began in their elegant four-story brick house at 10 Lime Street, on Beacon Hill.

Her spirit control was "Walter", said to be her elder brother Walter Stinson, killed in a railroad accident. Sitters reported raps "from the tap of a finger-nail to the kick of a heavy boot". Furniture moved. A table lifted with a sitter on it. Ralph Harlow, a regular sitter, heard Walter's voice "wander about the room". Sometimes it whispered close to his ear. Sometimes it came from a far corner, or from the centre of the table. Hamlin Garland heard "a vigorous, humorous rough-and-ready man" who "ordered us about like children."

Scientific American offered $2,500 to the first medium who could produce conclusive psychic manifestations under test conditions. The committee included the Harvard psychologist William McDougall, the psychical researcher Walter Franklin Prince, the physicist Daniel Frost Comstock, Hereward Carrington and Harry Houdini. Associate editor J. Malcolm Bird served as secretary. In print he called her "Margery". The contest ran 90 sittings from April to July 1924.

July 23, 1924. Houdini sat on her left. He had worn a silk rubber bandage on his calf all day. The bell box rang. "The bell ringing began and I positively felt the tendons of her leg flex," he wrote. To him, she had freed her foot and stretched it to the box.

July 24. The table moved and rose. The cabinet was thrown over. The megaphone flew. Houdini had an answer for each. Her head and shoulders pushed the table. Her foot overturned the cabinet while Bird was out of the room. The megaphone sat on her head like a dunce cap, then dropped with a jerk.

In August he returned with his own cabinet-box, leaving only her head and hands outside. On August 25 a bell box still rang, its lid found forced open. A collapsible ruler turned up inside the cabinet. Houdini said she rang the bell with it using her neck. The Crandons said Houdini or his assistant Jim Collins had planted it. Both men denied it. On August 27, under a stricter box with her feet locked in, nothing happened at all.

Houdini called it "the slickest ruse I ever detected." "All fraud. Every bit of it." Bird thought otherwise. "She does resort to trickery at times, but I believe she is fifty or sixty percent genuine." Carrington alone voted in her favour. In February 1925 the committee awarded no prize, without explicitly alleging fraud. "We have observed no phenomena of which we can assert that they could not have been produced by normal means."

Later investigators went further. In 1926 Wood traced a dark rod to a point very near her mouth. It was a knitting needle covered in leather. The Rhines saw her foot kick the megaphone. "Walter's" wax thumbprints matched her dentist, Frederick Caldwell. In 1930 Bird wrote that normal means had produced phenomena, a paper the American Society for Psychical Research suppressed. Prince called it "the most ingenious, persistent, and fantastic complex of fraud in the history of psychic research." Dr Crandon dismissed it all as "mud-slinging". And in August 1926, "Walter" predicted Houdini's death. Houdini died on October 31, 1926.

The case split the American Society for Psychical Research and led to the founding of the Boston SPR. It pushed J. B. Rhine toward laboratory ESP research. David Jaher retold it in The Witch of Lime Street in 2015. Mina Crandon died at Lime Street on November 1, 1941.