The Margery ectoplasms were of an entirely different species from those of Kathleen Goligher. “The appearance is somewhat that of a sheep’s omentum,” reads the caption of a photo in the ASPR files. (An omentum is a curtain of fat that hangs down from the stomach and insulates the intestines. In actual fact, the material came from a sheep’s lung—or so concluded a team of Harvard zoologists and biologists to whom McDougall submitted the photograph for analysis three years later.) The photograph shows a pair of studious-looking men in bow ties and spectacles leaning in close over a séance table to scrutinize a singularly unappetizing mound of alleged ectoplasmic matter. Margery’s torso appears in the background, clad, somewhat incongruously, in a satin floral print dress stretched tight over her own, rather well-developed omentum. Plate 2 from the same set shows the medium slumped forward onto the séance table, looking as though she’d been shot in the head, the “matter” now poised upon her neck and ear. In Plate 14, the ectoplasm is shown escaping from Margery’s nose, whereupon it was said by the medium to assume the form of a “tracheal speaking appendage,” used by Walter—Margery’s dead brother and now spirit guide.
Though the Margery ectoplasms seemed content to enter the world through any handy orifice, most often they emerged from between her legs. As in Plate 5: a “crude teleplasmic hand, originating from the genitals.” Based on a casual survey of the literature on all the materializing mediums, the vaginal canal was the most common ectoplasmic exit strategy. Indeed, some months before Crawford embraced his rectal theory, he posited that the substance might be issuing “from inside the legs.” And so Crawford, in inimitable Crawford style, devised an experiment involving special underpants. “The medium put on white calico knickers under my wife’s supervision,” he wrote in The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle. “Carmine powder was placed in her shoes. At the end of the séance it was found that there were carmine paths up to the top of both stockings and then inside the legs of the knickers to the join of the legs…. Thus, as I had expected for some considerable time, it was abundantly clear that the plasm issued from and returned to the body of the medium by way of the trunk.” Why the ectoplasm would have felt the need to visit the inside of the medium’s shoes before its return trip “between the legs” is a mystery Crawford did not address.
And now I’m going to pass the microphone to William McDougall. For how many chances do we have to hear a Harvard professor hold forth on vaginally extruded ectoplasm? “There is good evidence that ‘ectoplasm’ issues, or did issue on some and probably all occasions [from] one particular ‘opening in the anatomy’ (i.e. the vagina),” allowed McDougall in his summary statement for Scientific American. “The more interesting question is—How did it come to be within ‘the anatomy’? There was nothing to show that its position there and its extrusion from that place were achieved by other than normal means.” In other words—please forgive me—she stuck it up there, and then she pulled it out.
The debate over Margery and her ectoplasms raged on for a full year. Some wondered how she could possibly have room in her womanly interior for the array of objects often produced during séances. And it was at times an impressive array: In a 1925 letter from conjurer Grant Code, the medium is described as having been caught “drawing from the region of the vulva two or three objects which were exhibited on the table as Walter’s hands and terminals.” Code himself found it difficult to imagine how she managed it, and wondered whether Margery’s husband—who was after all an obstetric surgeon, a veteran of some one-hundred-plus cesareans—might have carried out a surgical enlargement of, as he put it, “Margery’s most convenient storage warehouse.”
With that, the debate deteriorated into name-calling and threats. Crandon counters Code’s implications with accusations that Code had raped his wife at a séance. The SPR’s Dr. Prince, in defense of Code, writes that Dr. Crandon was dismissed from his most recent position over the “systematic seduction of nurses.” Margery threatens Houdini with “a good beating.” Even the discarnate Walter joins the fray, calling Dr. Code “a boob.” The most damning letter of all comes from McDougall’s colleague J. B. Rhine, who was soon to put paranormal research on the more strictly experimental—if vastly less entertaining—track to card-guessing and dice-tossing. (Rhine founded Duke University’s famous Parapsychology Laboratory.) Here is J. B., sounding the much-needed voice of reason:
We left the house feeling we had witnessed nothing but a daring though artfully concealed attempt to capture notoriety. Why must we sit in darkness, while Dr. Crandon may, unannounced, flash on his white flashlight… ? Why, if light injures the structures, should [the alleged spirit entity] Walter seize the luminous end of the megaphone, placing his “grasping organ” right over the luminous band? Why is it that for certain acts, Dr. Crandon must be next to the medium “for her protection”? Why do they refuse to allow one to place one’s fingers lightly on the medium’s lips to test the independence of Walter’s voice?…
Returning to the matter of the warehoused ectoplasm. As regards the feasibility of such a practice, it is worth pointing out that Margery wouldn’t be history’s first vaginal smuggler of bulky carcass parts. In 1726, a rumor spread through England about a peasant woman from the outskirts of Guildford, who was giving birth to rabbits. (The story is spun out in precise and rollicking detail by medical historian Jan Bondeson, from whose remarkable book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities come these facts.) The rumor soon made its way to the Prince of Wales, who, fascinated,[23] promptly dispatched the court anatomist, Nathaniel St. André, to investigate. St. André, an ambitious self-promoter with no real medical training, arrived to find Mary in labor, about to give birth to her fifteenth rabbit. The fourteen siblings, all stillborn, were on display in jars of alcohol, arranged by Mary’s proud man-midwife, John Howard.[24] Minutes after the bewigged St. André entered the room, the forward half of a skinned four-month-old rabbit dropped into Howard’s receiving blanket. Howard conjectured to St. André that the rabbits were being crushed into pieces and skinned by the force of Mary’s contractions. Later that night, Mary “gave birth” to the back half of the animal—Bondeson describes Howard and St. André studiously putting the halves together and deeming it a perfect fit—and, later still, its skin.
A postmortem, performed by St. André’s staff back at the court, uncovered pellets of “common rabbit Dung” in the rectum, an obvious indication of fraud that went unnoted by St. André. The ignorant anatomist vouched for Mary’s authenticity, and the prince ordered the peasant woman brought to London, where she and Howard enjoyed a brief spell of fame and (relative) wealth. Unfortunately for Mary, one of her London visitors was the respected obstetrician Sir Richard Manningham. When Mary tried to pass off half a hog’s bladder as her placenta, Manningham—you have to love this guy—came back the following day toting a fresh hog bladder for comparison. Whereupon Mary, having no good explanation for why her placenta carried the “strong urinous Smell peculiar to a hog’s bladder,” burst into tears.
23
Gynecological preoccupations are a running theme with the Princedom of Wales. Two and a half centuries later, the Prince of Wales would be caught in an intercepted cell phone call voicing his desire to be reincarnated as his lover’s tampon.
24
The man-midwife, with his arsenal of forceps and knives, was a recent arrival on the obstetrical scene and much resented by the gentle guild of midwifery. “Yea, infants have been born alive, with their brains working out of their heads, occasioned by the too common use of instruments,” warned midwife activist Sarah Stone in her 1737