The search for Margery - Notes on a Strange World - medium associated with Houdini

MP: Since you are talking about houses: While on my search for material and information for my book I went to Boston and tried to locate the house where Mina lived and where the famous seances with Houdini and the Scientific American team took place. However, due also to time constraints, I was not able to find it. Does the house still exist, I wonder?

AT: Yes, 10 Lime street is still there. I have written to the owners to ask if I could meet them but they've never responded. My mother was born there and I'd like to see it for personal history, but no luck. I am dying to find out if they found any secret passages, etc. As an interesting note, the photo of her most often reproduced (standing in a doorway) was actually of the building next door. 10 Lime doesn't have a recessed doorway. I understand that the photo was taken by Houdini, and I saw a note somewhere asking him to keep that fact rather secret, for fear of their "reputations"--I presume to keep it a secret that they actually got along long enough to take a picture! I do suspect that they were quite similar in the aspect of having been hard working class and yet outsmarted a lot of very self-satisfied people. Plus they each had some aspect of themselves that society used to dismiss them--he being Jewish and her being female. Neither of which were qualities held in high value by many of the participan ts, from what I can tell....

MP: Was Houdini and the Scientific American investigation ever talked about in your family?

AT: I didn't know anything about the Scientific American episode other than it had been a scandal, until I read Ken's book. Houdini was a respected name in the household but his name also held a great aura of sadness and shame. I remember my mother telling me that when the Boston Globe stated that Houdini announced her to be a fraud, my grandfather went out and bought all of the newspapers so that Mina wouldn't read it. While I agree with Houdini that one can only explain the sceances as a combination of theater and audience participation, the seances he was at were pretty simple. I would really like to know how they managed the more complicated seance events. I also don't feel that Houdini was quite up front himself--he seemed to be playing his own games. However, he was treated terribly by Dr. Crandon and some of the others and that pretty much entitles Houdini to act however he wanted, to my mind.

MP: You said that after 1926, Dr. Crandon presumably no longer believed in Margery. What do you think of him? Did he help her in some of her trickery or was he really a complete believer?

AT: I think Dr. Crandon must have been convinced of the experiments--I don't think anyone can write so consistently to intimate friends for so many years and have it be a lie. I think that Conan Doyle (whose friendship was dearly valued by my greatgrandparents) and Dr. Crandon truly thought they were foraging at the frontiers of science, as strange as that seems now....I take Bird's testimony regarding a sexual relationship with a grain of salt. He strikes me as a rather charming but unbalanced and not entirely trustworthy person--tragic, too--as he disappeared (from what I know) after all this... probably not a person it would be wise to get too intimately involved with. Would she even dare get involved with such a person, if her highest priority was to keep Dr. Crandon happy? Of course, relationships do not always make sense, but Bird sets off alarm bells even for me, eighty years later.