Tin Number 1 revealed, said Bremset in a letter to the SPR, “the perfect imprint of a woman’s shoe.” Tin Number 2 bore the imprint of a stockinged heel, “showing stitch marks of knitting.” The second photo in particular made Bremset feel a little ill. For he recalled that Crawford, in one of his papers, had described an impression that suggested that of “a gigantic thumb with skin, and lines similar to a human thumb [print].” Bremset sent his Tin Number 2 photo to Dr. Crawford, to see how he’d interpret it. The possibility that Bremset’s imprint had been made by a foot in a stocking appeared not to have entered Crawford’s mind. His reply stated that he hoped to prove that the impressions were made by psychic rods that carried the impressions of the area from which they emerged.
Perplexed and concerned, Bremset took a train to Belfast later that week. He describes his visit with Crawford in the SPR letter. “I had a long and earnest discussion with him about the interpretation of the facts as I saw them. He was obviously profoundly disturbed though still clinging to his new theory…. When I parted from him he looked a very worried man…. Not long afterward came his tragic death.”
Crawford drowned himself in the summer of 1920. Though his suicide note stated that his actions had nothing to do with “the work,” hearsay held that the motivating force for the suicide was a profound embarrassment upon realizing he’d been duped.
The real mystery, as far as I’m concerned, is that it took him so long to figure things out. In his book, he has included a photograph captioned “The cantilever method of levitation. A rough cantilever in position.” Yet it unequivocally depicts a strip of filmy white cloth—coming down from Goligher’s lap, dropping a foot or so, and then curving up to the bottom of a small desk. I don’t know anything about engineering, but it’s clear to me that that material isn’t “supporting” anything. It’s just hanging there limply. There’s nothing mysterious or suggestive about it. Crawford’s album contains photo after photo of Goligher with lengths of “the substance” lying on her lap, wadded on the floor at her feet, tied to the table legs, and in every case it’s impossible to mistake it for anything other than ordinary man-made cloth. One photo shows Kathleen Goligher with a pleated bunch of fabric near the neck of her white shirt, and I spent a good minute and a half trying to decide if it was fashion or ectoplasm. Many of the album photos are reproduced in Crawford’s books, but not photos 4F or 5E: Here is Goligher, her standard eyes-closed, medium-in-trance pose abandoned for the moment, openly laughing or grinning.
The other possibility is that W. J. Crawford was—to use the word choice of Harry Houdini, who saw the Goligher photographs and heard the engineer explain them over the course of a three-hour dinner—insane. Evidence for his rather weak grip on reality can be found among the captions in the SPR album I’ve been looking through today. Photograph 8E, for instance: “In this photograph are to be seen the white and grey substances. Dr. Crawford said that the grey substance left excreta marks.” On June 22, 1920, shortly before he died, Crawford wrote in his journal that he was considering the possibility that ectoplasm emerged from the medium’s rectum. He first arrived at this unorthodox notion upon finding “particles of excreta” in the white drawers that he asked the medium to put on before—and return after—the séance. It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford’s distinctive psychosis appeared to include a troublesome underwear fixation. In addition to the white drawers, we find the following “highly probable facts, resting on good authority” in a letter from a Mr. Besterman, in the SPR archives. Shortly before Crawford’s suicide, Besterman writes, Crawford “spent all his money (consequently leaving nothing) on a stack of woollen underwear for his family, sufficient to last for several years.”
After Crawford’s death, the SPR sent another researcher, E. E. Fournier d’Albe, to follow up with the Golighers. Though Fournier d’Albe had earlier in his career vouched for the authenticity of the original ectoplasm-exuding medium Eva C., he was suspicious of Goligher from the start, largely because of Crawford’s photos. In his ninth sitting at the Goligher circle, on June 23, 1921, he confronts the spirits about the ectoplasmic cantilevers in Crawford’s photographs: “Well, I cannot make out this structure. In some places it appears as if woven. Have you a loom in your world?”
Shortly thereafter, Fournier d’Albe caught Kathleen Goligher levitating a stool with her foot. Convinced that her ectoplasm could be bought by the yard in downtown Belfast, Fournier d’Albe purchased a yard of fine chiffon, and published a shadowgraph close-up of it, run side by side with a shadowgraph of a bit of “ectoplasmic rod.” The two appear identical.
Along with putting the Golighers through their paces, Fournier d’Albe read through Crawford’s correspondences and unpublished séance reports. Time after time, Crawford misinterpreted straightforward evidence that Goligher’s “psychic structure” was her right foot. “Touching end of structure,” read Crawford’s notes from a séance in October 1919. “On one occasion the part I felt was like bones, close together, like finger bones bent over… or toes of feet and even the nails.” If Crawford was at all suspicious, he made no mention of it.
Citing nerves, Kathleen Goligher retired from mediumship in 1922, upon the publishing of Fournier d’Albe’s book. The SPR file includes an envelope of snapshots from a rare Goligher sitting given fifteen years later, the result of tireless cajoling on the part of a researcher named Stephenson. Positioned in front of Goligher is a crudely constructed wood and chicken-wire cage, which Stephenson appears to be using to trap the ectoplasm. Kathleen looks older than her years. Her head is bowed, and her hands are clasped in her lap. No one is smiling. If not for the rabbit hutch parked at their feet, they could be the bored guests of an especially tiresome tea. Even the ectoplasm, unfurled limply on the carpet like painters’ rags, looks weary of it all.
While Kathleen Goligher relied on Crawford’s credulity to make a name for herself and her fabric-store emanations, Boston medium Margery Crandon managed to fool the best and the brightest. In 1924, Scientific American offered a $5,000 prize to any medium who could produce a verifiable “visual psychic manifestation.” The medium would have to demonstrate her talents before a committee of investigators chaired by Scientific American staffer Malcolm Bird and consisting of Harvard psychologist William McDougall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology emeritus Dr. Daniel Comstock, Society of Psychical Research officers Walter Prince and Hereward Carrington, and prestidigitator and tireless medium debunker Harry Houdini. The only medium found worthy to sit before the committee was Boston’s Margery Crandon, the wife of a Harvard-educated obstetrical surgeon and the cause of great, protracted ballyhoo over at the American Society for Psychical Research. (The ASPR, now in New York, started out in Boston.)
Twenty séances later, the Scientific American committee was hotly divided in its conclusions. Houdini and McDougall believed her to be a fraud. Comstock and Prince waffled, saying that although Margery had failed to prove herself, more data were needed. On the other side of the fence, Bird and Carrington declared their belief that her phenomena were genuine. (Both Bird and Carrington were accused of turning a blind eye—or even being party to the deceit—for reasons of personal financial gain, in the form of book royalties and lecture fees.) McDougall and Houdini pointed out that the more thoroughly constrained were Margery’s hands and feet, the less likely she was to produce ectoplasm. “The more care, the less wonder,” as McDougall put it. Houdini at one point built a special cabinet-box for her, similar in appearance to those 1960s steam cabinets in which villains would lock James Bond and spin the temperature dial to max. In the end, the committee voted not to award her the $5,000. Bird was eventually called to task by Scientific American editorial chief O. D. Munn, who pulled the latest Bird piece from the magazine at the last minute. I haven’t followed the course of Scientific American, but Bird’s earlier straight-faced seven-thousand-word blow-by-blow of a Margery séance would seem to be a low point.