I said, “Why? What’s the matter with it?”
“Why, everything in the room, all the flowers and everything, was lit up”, she replied.
I said, “How did you know that? I thought you were in a trance”. She laughed and walked away.
At another séance we were permitted to see the ectoplasm. I was sitting in front of a checkerboard which had been placed on the center of the table opposite Margery, the squares of which had been painted along the edges with luminous paint. Several objects were placed on this which were supposed to be moved by the ectoplasm. Margery had a luminous star attached to her forehead, so that we could keep track of her face in the dark. After a few minutes a narrow dark rod appeared, silhouetted over the luminous checkerboard. It moved from side to side and picked up one of the objects. Later on, as it passed in front of me, I reached out very carefully and touched it with the tip of my finger, following it back until I came to a point very near Margery’s mouth. It seemed probable that she was holding it in her teeth. A moment or two afterwards I took hold of the tip of it very quietly and pinched it. It felt like a steel knitting needle covered with one or two layers of soft leather. Neither Margery nor the control gave any evidence of having realized what I had done — though we had been warned beforehand on no account to touch the ectoplasm, as it would be sure to result in the illness or possible death of the medium.
At the end of the sitting, Margery was alive and in good spirits. Beer and cheese were brought, and we talked over things that had happened. At these sittings everything was taken down by a stenographer and subsequently typed for the benefit of the committee. I said, “Oh, there’s one thing I forgot to mention, and I should like to have it taken down now”.
Dr. Crandon objected, insisting that only things said during the séance should be transcribed. I finally persuaded him, however, by representing it as a matter of slight importance, and he said, “All right, go ahead”.
The stenographer got out her pencil, and I began dictating slowly and solemnly a complete description of my “experiment” with the ectoplasm. Margery gave a shriek and fell back in her chair, pretending to faint. She was carried out of the room, and the committee was asked to depart. Later they pretended she was dangerously ill for weeks as the result of my “brutality”.
Chapter Eighteen.
Wood and the Police — a Great, Scientific Detective Solves Bomb and Murder Mysteries in Real Life
A Morgan case?” repeated Wood, puzzled and a bit impatiently. “You say a Morgan case? It must be a mistake. I never had anything to do with any Morgan case”.
I said, “But, heck, it’s here in this list of crimes, murders, mysteries, fires, bombs, explosions…
“Oh, of course”, said Wood. “Why didn’t you say explosions? It means the Wall Street bomb. I helped at the request of Tom Lamont, one of the Morgan partners”.
The “Wall Street bomb case” was a wholesale murder outrage that will never be forgotten by New York. Just before noon on September 16, 1920, a driver who passed so completely unnoticed that no description of him was ever obtained left a horse-drawn yellow wagon at the curb in front of the United States Assay Office, across the street from the Morgan bank. He hitched the horse to an iron block and disappeared, forever, in the hurrying crowds. A few moments later, with the street even more crowded, the big barrel bomb in the wagon exploded, killing thirty-nine persons, crippling scores, inflicting slighter wounds on at least four hundred — also damaging the Morgan bank, the United States Subtreasury and Assay Office, and other adjacent financial buildings. Wood’s account of his part in the case is as follows.
Some days after the explosion, Lamont, who had a summer home not far from mine at East Hampton and whom we had known as a neighbor for years, phoned and asked if I would go in to New York the following Monday morning and see if I could find any clues which might lead to the reconstruction of the bomb and the possible apprehension of the perpetrator. This was my first invitation to participate in a criminal investigation, and I doubted that I could be of any help. But Lamont felt differently. He had seen my laboratory in the old barn, had heard me talk about complicated phenomena in physics and the chemistry of explosives. I went down, as requested, and was first introduced to Sherman Burns, son of Detective William J. Burns, then director of the Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, who had been called in to work with the police.
Sherman took me to police headquarters, where I was ushered into the private office of Captain James J. Gegan, head of the Bomb Squad. Standing in front of me, beside Gegan’s desk, and leaning against the wall like a pair of old cavalry boots, were the two hind legs of the wretched horse which had drawn the cart containing a barrel filled with iron sash weights, with a high explosive bomb packed at its center. Gegan told me all they had found out, which amounted to very little beyond what everybody knew through the newspapers. The Morgan corner had been a shambles of dead and dying men and women. Nobody knew just what had happened. The troops had been called out, and everything was confusion. I asked Captain Gegan if they had subsequently found any fragments of the bomb’s structure or mechanism, since these if identifiable might lead to conclusions concerning the occupation of the perpetrator — might even be traced.
Captain Gegan said, “No. We’ve gone over a cartload of stuff, swept up in the street after the explosion. There were the sash weights, of course, but we’ve gone over the debris with a fine-tooth comb, and there’s nothing identifiable in the heap but parts of the wagon and harness”.
I asked him if he still had the stuff, and he took me into an adjoining room where there was a pile that resembled the dirt and scrap heap behind a blacksmith shop. It didn’t look promising, but I began grubbing. Presently I pounced on a fragment which I felt sure was a part of the bomb. It was a curved fragment of metal which might have been part of a thin-walled iron or steel cylinder, possibly eight inches in diameter. There was a hole in its center. On its outer surface and crossing the hole was a narrow lateral stripe, scored with deep parallel grooves or ridges. I had seen similar grooves on rock surfaces when studying geology at Harvard a quarter of a century earlier, which the professor called “slickensides”, formed on the opposed surfaces of rocks subjected to great pressure and undergoing lateral displacement. I showed this to Gegan, and said, “Here’s a part of the actual bomb”.
After further search, I found not only half a dozen similar fragments, but some pieces of a heavy steel hoop. One of them had a hole the same size as that in the first cylinder fragment and curved to the same degree, so that the hoop must have fitted snugly around the cylinder. Moreover, these hoop fragments were “slickensided” on the inside where they had been pressed in close contact with the outer surface of the cylinder when it had exploded. They had been drawn under heavy pressure against it, and this, as in the case of the rock surfaces studied in geology, had formed the parallel grooves and ridges.
I said to Captain Gegan, “We can now reconstruct the container of the explosive. It was a steel cylinder, probably a long one, eight inches in diameter, bound with steel hoops, fastened to it with rivets or something similar, passing through these holes”.
Furthermore, it seemed to me evident that it must have been originally a staple article or part of some staple article of machinery, extemporized as a container for the explosive. The next problem was to find out where it had come from, whether from a plumber’s shop, an automobile factory, an engine factory, or where. This part, of course, was up to the police. I was overoptimistic perhaps about their skill in running such clues to earth. Captain Gegan asked if I had any further suggestions. I called his attention to the fact that all the iron sash weights had serial numbers and two letters cast in relief on their surfaces. I advised detailing a squad of police to scatter to every iron foundry within a radius of miles, with samples of the window weights, and to see whether any foundry could recognize them or identify their “vintage”. Their age might show whether they came from a building that had been torn down or from a new one in process of construction. These might all be basic clues when suspects began to be rounded up and when their backgrounds, locales, and occupations were checked. I don’t know what obstacles and dead ends the police ran into — but as you know, the perpetrator was never found. Since the police were aided by Burns and by the Department of Justice, and since rewards totaling over $80,000 were offered, it is a mystery they never got anywhere.