Houdini's Secret

 

A long time I wrote an article on how a lot of modern stories about the magician and skeptic Harry Houdini had been selectively edited, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/05/houdini-code.html. I have come across another example, this time in a book from 1968, Voices From Beyond by Brad Steiger. It addresses Houdini's investigation into the medium Margery Crandon. It was regarded as his greatest challenge; was he, the ultimate fake psychic cracker, about to encounter the real thing at last? Margery had a reputation for openness and honesty. She had been willing to cooperate with psychical researchers for her entire career. The scientists applied every know method at their disposal for outwitting trickery. She was tied up, sealed off in cupboards and gagged. She passed with flying colours every time. Skeppers will never accept that a psychic is real; they always have an unshakeable assumption that the psychic is using fraudulent methods of some kind. If the skeppa can't find the method; it doesn't matter, it is still there, lying deep somewhere inside the medium's chicanery in a place that hasn't been located yet... but it will be one day... promise! The book claims that accusations of dishonesty cut both ways. Harry Houdini was regarded as the ultimate challenge. Like James Randi, he offered a cash incentive to anybody who could prove themselves real under laboratory conditions. Margery was a physical medium whose powers were said to move objects and produce spirit voices, often that of her dead brother Walter Stinson. In the 1920's a committee of parapsychologists organized by Scientific American ran a project on Margery Crandon and in 1924 invited Houdini to assist them. Houdini suggested a test that involved Mrs Crandon ringing an electric bell by means of psychokinesis, a skill she regularly professed. However, when the séance started the voice of Margery's guide boomed out, instructing the committee secretary, Malcolm Bird, to take the bell out of the room and examine it. Byrd did so and saw that the bell had been sabotaged. Rubber insulators had been placed over the contacts to stop it ringing. Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6005208-voices-from-beyond. Houdini had arrived with the bell at the laboratory, but nobody thought to check him to see if he were trying to pull a fast one. Modern reports of this study tell a different tale to Steiger's sources. As with Project Alpha, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/12/james-randi-dishonest-liar.html, we don't know for certain that this accusation against Houdini is true, it was never formally investigated; but we must rid ourselves of this notion that skeptics are always going to behave openly and are immune to the moral weaknesses all other people suffer.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/skeptics-portal.html.