Add in: Chaotic, Concealment, Cleverness, Confederacy, Chicanery, Conjuring, and Conspiracy, and it makes for the most intriguing story ever over the past 100 years. Beyond all that, it was bewildering, befuddling, baffling, beguiling and bewitching. It was far too much for the scientific mind, and not nearly enough for the skeptical mind. More than a dozen Harvard professors, instructors, and graduate students bucked heads over it. It received front-page coverage in Boston and New York.
Now, one-hundred years later, it remains a mystery, although most historians seem convinced that it was nothing more than a giant hoax, one that carried on for several years, beginning in 1923 and through 1926. In fact, it was 100 years ago, on July 1, 1926, that Dr. Joseph Rhine, one of the founders of the field of parapsychology, observed it and declared it all chicanery. Wikipedia mentions Rhine’s conclusions and clearly suggests that it was fraudulent. Other references lean toward fraud.
I’m referring to the mediumship of Mina Crandon, who went by the name “Margery” (middle photo). Wikipedia calls it a “stage name,” but all indications are that it was a pseudonym intended primarily to protect her privacy and the professional reputation of her husband, Dr. Leroi Crandon, who in addition to his private practice in Boston was an instructor in surgery at Harvard University.
Margery discovered her mediumistic abilities in 1923, at age 34. Most of the phenomena produced through her trance mediumship were physical, including levitations of a table, apports (objects floating around the room) the materialization of hands and arms, the ringing of a bell not within her reach, paraffin hand molds purportedly produced by spirits, but the primary phenomenon was a voice said to be that of Walter Stinson, Margery’s older brother, a Canadian who had been killed in a railroad yard accident in 1911 (bottom right photo). He served as something of a director for all the phenomena.
Read More – Psychical Research: Confusing, Conflicting, Confrontational, and Controversial
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