“On the contrary,” Cathy says, her expression hard. “The fact of psi has been established by hundreds of bonafide experiments is ESP. The evidence of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition is as well-founded as the evidence for physics. Dr. Rhine spent fifty years at Duke University compiling statistical evidence. Thousands of people, by their own report, use psi in their daily lives for practical purposes. And what you choose to call ‘undependable evidence’ consists of thousands of years of psi occurrences in every culture and religion.”
Peter tries to lighten the mood but Robert, tense, withdrawn, leaves ESPA and goes home. Taking care of Bart, he retires to his office and begins to work.
“It is appropriate, at this time,” he dictates grimly, “to bring up the subject of fraud in psi.
“As the decades passed in the 19th, then the 20th century, deceptions were increasingly revealed until a cloud of suspicion hung above the entire subject of psychic phenomena.
“Of the Fox Sisters, Houdini had the following to say—”
CLOSE UP of Harry Houdini as he scornfully says, “The Fox Sisters used Spiritualism as a means to ‘get while the getting was good’. Fortunately for the general public, Spiritualism received a severe jolt in the confession of Margaret Fox.”
“Of D.D. Home, Houdini said—” says Robert’s voice.
“His active career, his various escapades and the direct cause of his death all indicate that he lived the life of a hypocrite of the deepest dye,” Houdini says.
“Of Palladino—” Robert’s voice says.
“My opinion is that Palladino, in her crafty prime, may have possessed the agility and abundant skill in misdirection together with sufficient energy and nerve to bamboozle her scientific and otherwise astute observers,” Houdini says.
BACK TO Robert, on a sardonic roll now, CAMERA MOVING IN ON the processor screen as he speaks. “The field of psychic mediumship is crowded with examples of fraudulent behavior in the séance room.”
A. A medium, holding a sealed envelope, rubs a palmed sponge over it which makes the envelope transparent, revealing the message on the sheet inside: What about Uncle Stanley’s will?
“An odorless wood alcohol rubbed across an envelope made it instantly transparent,” says Robert’s voice. “The alcohol evaporating seconds later restored the paper to its original condition.”
We hear the male medium’s sepulchral voice declaring, “Your Uncle Stanton, no Stanley, sends his love and says—yes, yes—seek out the kingdom of the Lord, not gain from mortal legacy, does that make sense to you?”
The sitter replies, “Yes.”
The medium says, “God bless you. Next envelope, please.”
B. A sitter hands a female medium a multi-folded slip of paper—one inch by two inches—which the medium slips into an envelope. She seals the envelope, holds it up so the sitter can see the folded note inside the partly transparent envelope, then burns it all to an ash.
The medium leans over, concentrating. “This message comes from your… father, yes, your father. Believe, he says. Be thou a believer. Not like me, you understand?”
“Yes,” says the sitter.
“Repeating the action from another viewpoint,” says Robert’s voice.
CUT BACK to the sitter handing the folded slip of paper to the medium. Now we see things from the medium’s point of view. There is already a similar folded piece inside the envelope, glued in place opposite a two-inch slit in the envelope face through which the sitter’s folded note is pushed and held. The envelope is burned. Then, palmed, the sitters message is read: Am I a skeptic like my father?
C. A darkened séance room, the male medium’s voice heard saying dramatically, “I feel cold water, surges of cold water and the splash and roar of angry sea.”
CAMERA MOVES IN ON the medium to reveal him under a large black hood, using a small flashlight to read a message through a sealed envelope which reads: Brother Harry, did you suffer much when you were washed overboard and drowned?
“I see a storm raging on the ocean and I get the influence of a man, a blood relation, a father, no, a brother, a brother. He speaks the name Ha… Ha…Harry.”
“Yes,” says the woman sitter, sobbing.
Later. The medium quickly replaces the hood and flashlight under his shirt and his associate turns on the lights, the medium still “in trance”.
“As you can see,” says the associate, returning the envelope, “it is still completely sealed.”
“Yes, of course,” the sitter says. “Even if it weren’t, who could read it in the dark but—?”
“Yes,” intones the associate. “Exactly.”
D. A male sitter and a female medium sit across a table from each other, the sitter sponging clean the surfaces of six slates. The medium’s associate, standing to the left of the sitter, takes each slate in his left hand as it is cleaned and stacks the slates on a corner of the table.
There is a mantel behind the associate and sitter. As the fourth slate is being cleaned by the sitter, the associate retrieves another slate from a hiding place on the mantel, using his right hand, unobtrusively, behind the sitter’s back.
As he takes the cleaned slate from the sitter with his left hand, he instantaneously switches the two slates and, without missing a beat, adds the prepared slate to the pile on the table and places the cleaned slate in the mantel hiding place.
The medium then puts a thick rubber band around the pile of slates. “You are certain, are you,” she enjoins, “that you have thoroughly cleaned each and every slate back and front?”
“I am,” the sitter answers solemnly.
Later. The prepared slate is “come upon” and handed to the sitter. On it is the message I greet you from the Life Beyond—send you my devotion. Mother.
“Oh!” cries the sitter. “Praise the Lord!”
E. Sitters stare at a cabinet in front of which is a blank canvas on an easel, a light shining through it from behind. The illumination in the room is low and organ music plays.
CAMERA MOVES INSIDE the cabinet to show the medium using a tiny hole in the curtain to spray an atomizer on the back of the canvas.
BACK TO the sitters as a face begins appearing on the canvas, that of a little girl.
A woman sobs. “It’s Penelope!” she says. “Yes, yes,” someone else says. “It is!” says someone else. “Hallelujah,” says a man.
“Sulphocyanide of potassium for red,” says Robert’s voice flatly. “Ferrocyanide of potassium for blue and tannin for black, the chemicals remained invisible until sprayed with a weak solution of tincture of iron.”
F. In the dark, a medium takes hold of the hand of the sitter to her left with her left hand. With her right, she removes a weighted artificial hand from beneath her robe and bends its flexible fingers over the arm of the sitter to her right.
“We must all sit very still now,” she says.
She picks up the trumpet from the table and begins to swing it around, then puts it to her lips and hisses into it, grunts, moans and, finally, murmurs, “Hel-lo-o-o.”
“Hello,” the sitters respond obediently.
G. The medium’s associate stands in front of the cabinet, addressing the sitters MOS.
“Among the most absurdly simple ploys—” says Robert’s voice.
CAMERA MOVES TO the cabinet to show the medium’s hand slipped out between the curtains, removing, from beneath the tail of her associate’s coat, a veritable carload of luminous silk forms, faces, hands, costumes and reaching rods.
“Be it understood,” declares the associate, “Madame Olga has nothing in this cabinet with her save her spirit friends.” “An even more obvious ploy—” says Robert’s voice.
H. A séance room in darkness, a cabinet, its curtains extending to the ceiling. Inside, a trap door is raised in the ceiling and a padded ladder lowered.
“—down which,” says Robert’s voice as we see it happening, “descended a veritable legion of spirits performing their ethereal role
s.”
CUT TO Robert sitting in his office, the only sound the hum of his processor. He has gotten the tension out of his system and feels guilty now.
He sighs. “On the other hand,” he says, trying to be fair, “some accusations of fraud were, to say the least, questionable.”
“Among the most famous of these occurred in Boston is July, 1924.”
A darkened hotel room. Sitting in a wooden cabinet is the medium, only her head and hands sticking out of special openings.
“Locked into a solid wood cabinet—built to order for the most suspicious sitter in the group—was Mrs. Mina Crandon, known to the psychic world as Margery. Only her hands and head protruded from the box and her hands were being held.”
CAMERA DRAWS BACK TO SHOW the two men holding her hands, Dr. Goddard Crandon and Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, THEN TO the small man sitting on the opposite side of a table set in front of the cabinet. On the table top is a bell box, an electric light wired to a telegraph key.
“Now ring the bell,” challenges the small man. We see him almost glaring toward the medium.
“Incensed when he read in the newspapers that Margery had baffled all investigators including himself,” says Robert’s voice, “Harry Houdini cancelled his stage tour to attend this sitting—his first—with Mrs. Crandon.”
“Ring the bell if you can,” demands Houdini. “Let me hear the bell ring.”
CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON the bell as it rings. CLOSE UP on Houdini as his look of smug assurance vanishes.
A bitter argument ensuing later—Houdini and the committee members: Professor William McDougall, Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock, Dr. Prince, Hereward Carrington and Malcolm Bird, the committee’s secretary and the special target of Houdini’s ire.
“It is immaterial to me that the bell rang!” he rages, putting down the incident to “obvious fraud”. When Bird points out that the conditions in the séance room—even to the construction of the cabinet—were Houdini’s own, the splenetic magician says that the conditions were not his and further accuses the secretary of being “untrustworthy” and “forbids” him from being present in the séance room any longer.
Bird, infuriated and insulted, resigns as secretary, storming from the room.
Houdini smiles. “Now we will have an honest test,” he says.
The following night. Mina Crandon, attired in dressing gown, silk stockings and slippers, is helped into the cabinet by her husband. Houdini carefully shuts and locks the cabinet. Tonight, he says, Dr. Crandon will not hold his wife’s right hand, Professor McDougall will.
There is a brief discussion of this until Dr. Crandon accedes to Houdini’s demand. Dr. Prince will, as usual, hold the medium’s left hand.
Before the lights are extinguished, Houdini says he wants to make one final check on the cabinet, unlocks and opens it and looks inside, aided by his assistant.
Apparently satisfied, he re-locks the cabinet, the sitters take their places and the lights are put out.
Margery’s “control”, Walter (ostensibly her deceased brother), comes through immediately. His voice is furious as he accuses Houdini of having hidden a collapsible ruler under the cushion beneath the medium’s feet. He refuses to continue with the sitting and the lights are turned on, the cabinet unlocked and opened.
Under the foot cushion, the collapsible ruler is found.
The room erupts with angry voices, fading as Robert’s voice comes in.
“Houdini accused Mrs. Crandon of having concealed the ruler. Mrs. Crandon and her husband countered that the cabinet had been completely checked by the magician and his assistant before the séance and no ruler found, accusing Houdini of placing the ruler in the cabinet just prior to the sitting in order to discredit Mrs. Crandon.”
BACK TO Robert. “The mystery was never resolved,” he says. He hesitates, then stands and searches through his bookshelves, coming down with a book. Opening it, he finds an entry and dictates again.
“Interestingly enough,” he says, “although Houdini always stated that he’d never witnessed a single genuine psychic manifestation in his life, he once told Hereward Carrington that during an engagement in Berlin—”
We see Houdini walking onto stage to begin his show.
As he moves, his eyes are drawn to the opposite wing and he reacts in shock as he sees his mother, wearing a shawl over her head, smiling at him.
He is torn between his duty to the audience and his stunned reaction at the sight of his mother. He says a few words to the audience, then looks back toward his mother.
She is gone.
His expression blank, Houdini begins to perform.
“At the very moment Houdini saw his mother,” says Robert’s voice, “she was dying in New York.”
Robert starts as the telephone rings. It is Cathy inviting him to ESPA the next day. They have found a highly interesting “subject” in the form of a nightclub entertainer named Teddie Berger. Did Robert happen to see the item in the newspapers—it was on late night t-v news programs as well—about a clairvoyant vision during his act saving the lives of two children and their babysitter from a burning house many miles away?
“I think I did,” says Robert.
He hesitates a moment then apologizes for his “over-reaction” that afternoon; if he had her telephone number he would have called to say he was sorry.
Cathy counters with her own apology, she shouldn’t have been so “pushy”. It’s just that she feels so strongly about her work.
“I understand,” he says.
“Friends again?” she asks.
Robert smiles. “Of course.” He almost says more, then decides against it.
As he hangs up, Bart comes trudging into the office and puts his head on Robert’s lap, looking at him. He strokes the Lab with gentle fingers. “What’s the matter, Bartie?” he says. “Does it hurt?” He looks at the dog with a worried expression.
They are sitting in Peter’s office, waiting for the arrival of Teddie Berger; he is forty minutes late. (“Not a harbinger of things to come, I trust,” says Peter.) Briefly, they discuss the Margery sittings with Houdini.
If nothing else, says Peter, they had the valuable outcome of defining the need for stringent controls when testing psi phenomena. From the late 1920’s onward, laboratory experiments began to play an increasingly important role in psychic research.
“Strange man, Houdini.” Peter comments. “Even though they never proved he put that ruler in the cabinet, those sittings brought him into final disrepute with professional psychic researchers who were tired of his endless rantings that he was able to see through trickery when they were not, that psychics were cheats and liars, every one of them.” He looks “offended”. “Including the immortal Palladino no less.”
“Unforgivable,” says Cathy, straight-faced.
Teddie arrives now, with him CARLA HESSE, 19, a total contrast in appearance to the short, swarthy complexioned, almost perpetually scowling Berger; she is tall, blonde, light-complexioned and beautiful, a perfect Aryan type, a fact which, on the surface alone, tells a story and will, later, reveal even more.
Teddie is already sorry he agreed to the testing. He does not, he informs them, “cotton to the gobbledegook of mediumism.”
Peter tries to calm the glowering Berger. “It should reassure you—” he begins.
“Nothing reassures me,” Teddie states his dismal case. “On the contrary, everything dismays, dispirits and disgusts me.”
“It’s always good to have a philosophy of life,” says Robert, unable to hold his tongue.
Teddie darts a dour glance in his direction, then catches something in Robert which intrigues him; something more than Robert assumes.
The beginning steps of Teddie’s investigation almost end it prematurely: a general physical, lab examinations, neurological studies, audiometric and opthalamological tests, brain scans.
“What the hell are you doing?” Teddie growls. “Drafting me into the Army?”
“Rout
ine,” says Peter.
“Well, it’s stupid,” Teddie fumes. “You want a demonstration of clairvoyance or the goddam three-minute mile?”
“Calm down,” says Carla airily.
“Baah!” snaps Teddie. He doesn’t like Stafford either. “Does he have to be here?” he sotto voces, loud enough for Stafford to hear.
Finally, the tests begin, Teddie in a comfortable reclining chair inside a room the walls of which are double metal separated by four inches of acoustic insulation. (“To prevent any possibility of your hearing—” Peter starts. “I know what possibilities you’re trying to prevent,” Teddie interrupts. “Let’s get on with it.”) The room has an inner and outer door both of which fasten with a refrigerator type locking mechanism.
Teddie lights a cigar. “You really have to do that?” Cathy asks.
“You make your conditions, sweetpea, I make mine,” crabs Teddie.
She represses a smile, somehow sensing that the contentious Berger is far more bark than bite.
With Cathy observing, Teddie sits with pad and pencil as, in another room, Peter slips a file card at random into an enormous unabridged dictionary. The dictionary is then opened to that page and the first item in the first column that can be drawn is selected. An ESPA artist sketches the item—in this case, a suspension bridge—Robert hangs it on the wall and, depressing an intercom switch, Peter tells Teddie to commence.
In less than ten seconds, Teddie’s voice is heard. “Well, let’s go,” he gripes. “I haven’t got all day.”
“You’ve already done the first one?” Peter inquires.
“Would I say let’s go if I hadn’t?” Teddie counters.
Peter shakes his head and, once more, sticks the file card into the dictionary.
Later; ten tests completed. They compare the sets of drawings and discover, to their astonishment, that nine out of ten are so close to the original that Teddie might have, also, sketched them from the dictionary.
“Which is exactly what I did,” he says as though the point is obvious. “You think I’m going to waste my time trying to read peoples’ minds? And that picture of a horse is lousy, it looks like a damn hippocampus.”