Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

5. HARD TO SWALLOW The Giddy, Revolting Heyday of Ectoplasm

THE LIBRARY AT Cambridge University has its very own admissions office. This is where you are sent should you be so daft as to try to walk in without a Cambridge ID. I’m waiting in the hallway outside, to apply for one-day admittance. Specifically, I’m trying to get into the hallowed Cambridge Manuscripts Reading Room, overseen by the Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives, whom I picture standing guard at the door in ankle-length robes with a massive key on a chain around his neck. I’m actually nervous about getting in.

While I wait, I read about the sacred texts on exhibit in the lobby. Amongst the many Buddhist works in the Cambridge University Library is this very important Sanskrit palm leaf manuscript, about 1,000 years old…. Cambridge University has one of the most important collections of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in the world.

Meanwhile, yours truly is here for archive item SPR 197.1.6: Alleged Ectoplasm.

Ectoplasm lived during the table-tipping, spirit-communing, strange-goings-on-in-the-dark heyday of spiritualism. It was claimed to be a physical manifestation of spirit energy, something that certain mediums—called “materializing” mediums—exuded in a state of trance. “This stuff seems to diffuse through the tissues of the [medium] like a gas, and emerges through the orifices because it passes more freely through the mucus membrane than through the skin,” wrote Arthur Findlay, founder of the Arthur Findlay College for mediumship and other spiritualist pursuits. The spiritualists described ectoplasm as a link between life and afterlife, a mixture of matter and ether, physical and yet spiritual, a “swirling, shining substance” that unfortunately photographed very much like cheesecloth.

The original ectoplasmic medium was Eva C., whose emanations drew the attentions of French surgeon and medical researcher Charles Richet. Richet was the discoverer of human thermoregulation and cutaneous transpiration, a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylactic shock, and the author of Gastric Juice in Man and Animals (can’t have a slam dunk every time). That a man of his stature spoke for the authenticity of ectoplasm made it difficult to dismiss. As did spiritualism’s roster of scientists, statesmen, and literary luminaries: William James, William Butler Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, chemist Sir William Crookes (inventor of the vacuum tube and sufferer of ridicule for his pronouncement that the luminous green gas inside his invention was ectoplasm), two prime ministers, and Queen Victoria.

Spiritualism, in a nutshell, is a religious movement devoted to communicating (via mediums) with those who have died and to proving to others, via séances and other mediumistic demonstrations, that it is possible to do so. Death is viewed not as an end to life, but merely a different phase, a changing of address and scenery. Heaven—or Summerland, as the spiritualists used to call it—was no longer an abstract but a place you could put a call in to. Spiritualism was founded in 1848, by the elder sister of two bored preteens, Margaret and Kate Fox, who took to soliciting mysterious spirit “rappings” at their farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The noises stirred the imaginations of local townsfolk and the entrepreneurial spirit of their sister, who was soon inviting strangers to the house to observe the proceedings for a modest fee. Within months the three sisters were on a nationwide tour, and spiritualism was off and running. It spread steadily and traveled overseas, peaking in the aftermath of World War I, which left millions of American and European families grieving for lost sons and sadly vulnerable to the promise of contacting them in the afterlife. Though spiritualism’s ranks have dwindled since, it retains a presence in the United States and, more prominently, England.

In 1989, possibly to its great embarrassment, Cambridge University acquired the archives of the Society for Psychical Research,[20] the preeminent investigators of the early mediums’ claims and feats. Should you wish to view, say, the file labeled “Merton, Mrs.: Investigation of ‘The Flying Armchair’” or “Gramophone Records—Alleged Trance Speech of Banta,” a young, madonna-skinned Manuscripts Room page will find it and place it in front of you with the same reverence and respect he accords items of the Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives or the seed specimens of Sir Charles Darwin.

Unlike the flying armchair, which officers of the SPR swiftly dismissed as hokum, ectoplasm was the subject of elaborate and stone-serious scientific inquiry for more than two decades. Scientific American sponsored an investigation of materializing mediums that was covered in four consecutive issues during 1924. In 1922, the elite Sorbonne University in Paris assigned a team of scientists to sit in on fifteen séances with Eva C., with the specific goal of testing the authenticity of her ectoplasm. (It flunked.) The September 1921 Popular Science Monthly observed that ectoplasm “can assume the shape of a hand or a face or even a whole figure” and is “curiously like human skin in cellular structure.” In 1922, Harvard University graduate student S. F. Damon was featured in the New York Times for his belief that ectoplasm was the elusive “first matter” of the ancient alchemists. The Times index for the years 1920 to 1925 includes more than a dozen entries under “ectoplasm,” ranging from straight-faced coverage of research to more farcical forays, such as “Man Bites a Ghost and Upsets Seance” (“Gallagher actually got a mouthful of ectoplasm….”). Yet you look at any one of the hundreds of photographs of ectoplasm “materializing” from a medium, and it’s clear it was bunk. And not even well-executed bunk. As ghost-biter Gallagher so eloquently put it: “That there stuff is just gauze!” What was going on? What happened to the minds of science that they would, even for a moment, buy into this?

The admissions office lady calls me in and asks for my ID and an “academical letter of introduction.” I hand her a printout of an e-mail from the Keeper of the SPR Archives (Dear Madam,… The Alleged Ectoplasm is not a pleasant object, I should warn you!). And that’s it. I’m in.

The reading room is on the third floor. It has ceilings all the way up in heaven and enormous multipane windows with benedictive shafts of light angling down onto the students. The woman across the table is hunched over a notebook, translating and transcribing from an ancient bundle of brittle blue airmail letters penned in Hebrew. The youth to my left is sacrificing his vision and social life to medieval land transfers. A page arrives with my requested materials: six files, a photo album, and a box containing the Alleged Ectoplasm. The box is made of decoratively patterned cardboard and tied up with a piece of string, like something brought home from a pastry shop. It is larger and showier than I expected. I set it on the floor before anyone can ask what’s inside. The plan is to open it later, when my tablemates have left for lunch.

The top file is labeled “Goligher, Kathleen.” This file goes with the photo album, which contains photographs of Miss Goligher and her visible ectoplasms, dated 1920–1921. Goligher was the inspiration for the theories and experiments of Dr. W. J. Crawford, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Queen’s University of Belfast. The Golighers were a family of spiritualists—all four daughters worked as mediums—known for their lively séances, held in a tattily wallpapered Belfast sitting room. The sittings unfolded in the typical manner of the spiritualist séance. The medium would disappear behind a curtain or inside a medium cabinet. The lights would be put out—mediums claimed light compromised their abilities and damaged the ectoplasm—and a round of hymns and prayers begun. The medium would fall into a trance and begin producing “demonstrations,” as they are still called today by spiritualists, of the presence and power of whatever spirits he or she had drawn to the room. Most commonly, the spirits would show their stuff by making a table at the center of the séance circle tilt or rise. Since everyone was holding hands, the table appeared to be levitating[21] without the help of anyone seated in the circle.

While most spiritualists were satisfied with the explanation that it was the energy of their spirit friends that was causing the table to rock and rise, Crawford wanted to know exactly how, and by what scientific principles, the dead were accomplishing this. Following a series of experiments involving scales and pressure sensors, he came up with a theory of bendable ectoplasmic rods and cantilevers, which he set forth in embarrassing detail in the 1920 E. P. Dutton hardcovers The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle and Experiments in Psychical Science. (Such was the gullibility of the day that Dutton published five of Crawford’s books without a modicum of queasiness. A 1919 letter in the Dutton archives describes Crawford’s discoveries as being “of such enormous importance to physics that it is not too much to suppose that they may shew the way to a complete upsetting of present ideas and the building of a new theory on the constitution of matter.”[22])

Applying laws of physics and engineering, Crawford calculated that for tables up to thirty pounds, an unsupported or “true” cantilever was employed. The ectoplasmic rod issues “from the torso” (more about this euphemism to come) of the medium, travels parallel to the floor until it reaches the center point of the table, and then changes direction, rising up in a column of four-inch diameter to meet the underside of the tabletop, where it grips the surface by means of a suction-based grasping organ. (He claimed to be able to hear the suckers”—never a good word choice for W. J. Crawford—“gripping and sliding over the wood.”) If the table weighed more than thirty pounds, Crawford concluded, a supported cantilever was employed by the spirits: It angled down and met the floor, which it used for support, before bending and rising to meet the table.

Crawford attempted to prove the existence of the two types of ectoplasmic cantilevers by setting a pressure-recording apparatus under the séance table. This consisted of two pieces of wood that, when pressed together, would complete a circuit, causing a bell to ring. Crawford describes telling Goligher’s spirit helpers—or “operators”—to begin a series of levitations, first with a true ectoplasmic cantilever and then a supported ectoplasmic cantilever. As he predicted, the bell rang only when the supported cantilever was in use.

Crawford didn’t stop there. He wanted more proof. He wanted the sort of proof he could carry out of the séance room and show to his colleagues. Which brings us to Experiment 4—“Impression on modeler’s clay of bottom of cantilever column”—and to the beginning of Crawford’s tragic demise. Here is Crawford describing the experiment:

In the Goligher file on the table in front of me is a mounted black and white photograph of a similarly obtained “cantilever” impression. It was not made by Crawford, but by a contemporary of his, a psychic researcher named Henry Bremset, who attempted to replicate Crawford’s experiment at a different séance circle. He filled two shortbread tins with putty, placed them under the séance table, and explained to the medium what he hoped to achieve.

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.

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:

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.

Mary Toft’s final downfall came at the hands of a porter at her lodgings. Unable to procure rabbits in central London, she had tried to bribe a porter into tracking some down. The porter talked, and Mary eventually confessed. She explained that when the doctors’ backs were turned, she would transfer into her birth canal a rabbit, or rabbit portion, which she had had concealed in a special “hare pocket” inside her skirt. Whether John Howard was in on the hoax or simply another victim of it was never clear. What is clear is that male medical professionals could be ruinously susceptible to vaginal deceits.

IT’S 1:40 P.M. now, but no one at my table has left for lunch. I pick up the box of ectoplasm and rest it on my lap. It’s worse than I thought. Slipped under the string is a three-by-five card, upon which is typed the official archive summary:

Inside the box, a yellowed paper envelope is tied with a length of pink bias tape. It’s a large envelope, bigger and heavier than a four-month-old rabbit. I would put the weight at close to a pound. That is a lot of stinky ectoplasm. It’s a lot of stinky ectoplasm to spread out and examine in the still, reverent hush of the Cambridge Manuscripts Reading Room. I want to smuggle it out of here and open it up in the ladies’ room, but my bag is checked in a locker downstairs, as per manuscripts room rules. Oh, for a hare pocket.

I turn to the Helen Duncan file, in the hopes that by the time I am done reading, the people at my table will have fainted from hunger or gone home. Duncan was ectoplasm’s last stand. And what a stand it was. A histrionic Scotswoman of poor health and bad habits, Duncan weighed close to 250 pounds. She smoked constantly and moved with obvious difficulty, often requiring assistance to rise from her seat and make her way across the séance room. She had nine children, who hung from her hems and scaled her bulk like small mountaineers. One biographer described the youngest child atop her lap, dandling the flesh that hung down from her massive upper arms. Her séances were high drama. She tended to swoon and fall off her chair and occasionally wet herself in the frenzy of spiritual possession. She once emerged from the séance cabinet naked under a floor-length “ectoplasmic veil.” For those whose interest in spiritualism was purely voyeuristic, Helen Duncan was the hottest ticket in town.

Duncan produced ectoplasm as readily and lustfully as she produced offspring. However the two did not typically—item SPR 197.1.6 notwithstanding—issue from the same anatomical opening. Owing to the well-publicized stunts of Margery and other 1920s mediums, those active in the 1930s were subjected to thorough body cavity searches by researchers before each séance. “Thorough” meaning:

This passage, written by magician-turned-psychic-researcher Harry Price, describes preparations for a séance undertaken in Price’s National Laboratory of Psychical Research (NLPR) in London, part of a two-month investigation of the Duncan mediumship. Price covered all the angles. He designed a special fraud-preventing “séance garment” that enrobed the entire medium, including her hands and feet, such that only her head stuck out. So even if Mrs. A. Peel Goldney had managed to miss something in her anatomical inspections, it would have been impossible for Helen to get that something out of the suit and into the open. Price’s book about the Duncan investigation includes a dozen or more photographs of the medium ensconced in her special garment. It is fashioned from satin in a loose jumpsuit style, which, in combination with Mrs. Duncan’s sizable mid-torso circumference, brings to mind late-career Elvis, or the sad clown in that Italian opera. I should point out that Mrs. Duncan was compensated for her humiliations at the NLPR. Handsomely so—five hundred pounds in all. This helps explain the medium’s seemingly inexplicable decision to risk her career in the laboratories of the NLPR.

Price was surprised and confounded to see that Helen Duncan was able, despite his precautions and within minutes of the séance beginning, to produce a six-foot-long ectoplasm. “The séance garment should absolutely preclude the secretion in or extraction from the orifices I have mentioned, even had she not been examined medically.” Forced to rule out “the vaginal-cum-rectal theory,” he came up with an equally extraordinary possibility: “That the medium possesses a false or secondary stomach (an esophageal diverticulum) like the rumen or first stomach of a ruminant, and that she is able to swallow sheets of some material and regurgitate it at leisure—like a cow with her cud.”

This was not as far-fetched an idea as it sounds—particularly in Price’s day. Search the British medical journals from the early 1900s, and you will come across lengthy articles on the subject of human ruminants: seemingly ordinary citizens who could effortlessly “bring up” portions of their most recent meal for further mastication and—quite often—enjoyment. “It is sweeter than honey, and accompanied by a more delightful relish,” a Swedish ruminator is quoted as saying in E. M. Brockbank’s “Merycism or Rumination in Man,” which ran in the February 23, 1907, issue of the British Medical Journal.

No one could say whether the condition was hereditary or learned. Brockbank cites the case of a tin worker as support for heredity’s role. “He looked upon it as a perfectly natural phenomenon, descending from his grandfather and father to himself, and to all of his sisters and brothers and to many of their children…. [His wife], a bright intelligent woman who does not ruminate, states very definitely that as soon as the children began to walk they used to bring up mouthfuls of food, which at first they spat out, later they began to rechew it, especially after a meal they liked.” Other physicians insisted the habit was passed along by imitation, citing as evidence a Swiss ruminator who lived among cows all his life, and a boy who was suckled for two years by a goat, and “acquired by imitation his foster-mother’s… habits.”

Though the act appears identical in cow and man, only in the bovine does it serve any useful purpose. Though occasional exceptions did exist, such as this 1839 Lancet case study of a farmer: “To save time, he had acquired a habit of ‘bolting’ his food… then getting on horseback, and subjecting his dinner piecemeal to mastication at his leisure.” The farmer didn’t seek medical advice until later in life, after falling into some wealth and attempting to mix with a higher cut of society, who found his habit “very disgusting.” Two papers I read implied that ruminating was accepted as normal behavior among the working class, implying that cud chewing was as common among nineteenth-century laborers as tobacco chewing among modern-day major league pitchers. These days, rumination articles are confined to literature about psychologically or developmentally impaired individuals. (Happily, there is help. A surgical technique recently perfected at the Swallowing Center at the University of Washington[25] stops rumination in its tracks.)

Nor is it true that, as Harry Price suggested, human ruminants possess bovine-style multiple stomachs. This was a stubborn rumor fueled by two seventeenth-century cases of ruminating men with horns—one a unicorned Paduan nobleman and the other a bicorned monk. Autopsies of ruminants—whose stomachs were normal—put a stop to the rumor, as did a paper by a physician named Sachs, who reviewed one hundred cases of men with rudimentary horns and found only one ruminant among them.[26]

So Harry Price was wrong to surmise that Helen Duncan was ruminating ectoplasm that she stored in an auxiliary stomach. Duncan’s was more likely a case of masterful regurgitation. Regurgitation acts were a sideshow mainstay in Price’s and Duncan’s day. In his book Regurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship, Price describes regurgitators of live goldfish and snakes, light bulbs, razors, pocket watches, bayonets, two eighteen-pound dumbbells, and a rolled umbrella. Colleague Harry Houdini watched a frog-swallower in Warsaw swallow thirty or forty glasses of beer and an unspecified number of half-grown frogs, which he would then bring up alive. I’m unclear on whether the beer helped with the process or with the man’s state of mind, or possibly that of the frogs.

Thus it is within the realm of possibility that Helen Duncan was swallowing and regurgitating sizable rolls of cheesecloth. To demonstrate the convenient compactibility of this fabric, Price bought a six-foot by thirty-inch swath, rolled it up tight, and photographed his secretary Ethel with the fabric sticking from her mouth like a Mafia gag.

Far more damning than the Ethel photo was Mrs. Duncan’s tantrum in response to a request, on May 28, 1931, that she submit to a post-séance X-ray. Price wanted to find out if she had an extra “pseudo-stomach,” and/or what was in her stomach (s). He was aware that the chances of getting a clear image through “the depths of the medium” were slim (early X-ray technology being what it was); but she was not. As the equipment was readied, Mrs. Duncan suddenly leapt from the settee, bowled over Dr. Brown, pushed aside Mrs. A. Peel Goldney, and lumbered screaming into the street. Her husband (and long-suspected accomplice) ran after her, and the two were gone for ten minutes, during which time—Price and his team suspected—she regurgitated the fabric and passed it off to him. And what a sight that must have been for genteel passersby—a panting, hysterical woman in a clown suit, throwing up a roll of cheesecloth.

Upon their return to the lab, Helen, visibly calmed, agreed to—nay, insisted upon—the X-ray. Price, no fool, took Mr. Duncan aside and asked him if he would object to being searched. Mr. Duncan did object, “murmuring something about his underclothing.” It always comes down to underpants with these guys.

More support for the regurgitation theory comes from the research department of the London Spiritualist Alliance, which conducted some of its own investigatory séances with Mrs. Duncan. On June 12 of that same summer, Helen was asked to swallow a pill containing methylene blue, so that anything regurgitated would be marked by the dye. No cheesecloth appeared that night (though the medium at one point attempted to pass off her tongue as ectoplasm).

Two weeks after the last Duncan séance, the council of the NLPR called Mr. Duncan in to a meeting and confided their suspicions. They were well armed. Price had with him a detailed and damning eleven-page lab report of a chemical analysis of a cutting of Duncan ectoplasm, which Mrs. Duncan’s spirit guide Albert agreed to make available. (Price describes this séance as resembling a sewing bee, with its seated circle of men and women, all poised with scissors, awaiting Albert’s go-ahead.) The council then showed Duncan a photograph of his wife draped in her ectoplasm side by side with a photo of Price’s ever-game secretary Ethel similarly posed and draped with a length of Woolworth’s cheesecloth. Duncan was unable to tell the difference. Finally, at a “heart-to-heart” on June 22, Mr. Duncan concurred that it was likely that the ectoplasm was produced by regurgitation, though he insisted that it was “subconscious regurgitation.”

“We pointed out,” writes Price, “that… in that case she would have to… buy the cheese cloth subconsciously… and swallow the bag subconsciously.” The aptly named Dr. Price offered Mr. Duncan one hundred pounds to convince his wife to be filmed in the act. Duncan promised to do what he could, but the couple lit out for Scotland the following morning.

The ectoplasm in the box at my feet is dated 1939, so Helen got up to her tricks at least once more. It’s possible the sample is one of the last of its species. It had been three years since Margery had been coaxed out of retirement for the dispirited rabbit-hutch sitting. Kathleen Goligher had long since disappeared from the scene. There hadn’t been an article about ectoplasm in the New York Times for twelve years. For all I know, this is the last sample ever produced, ectoplasm’s Ishi.

Inside the box is an envelope tied with a length of pink bias tape. I take it out and place it on the table. I pull one end of the pink ribbon, slowly and with drama, like a man uncorseting his lover. Rather than the more typical and compactible cheesecloth or chiffon, it is some kind of cotton with a satiny finish. The stains are faint and brown, the smell manageable but detectable. I unfold it to get a rough idea of size—I’d say ten feet by three feet. It’s huge. It’s as though the Keeper of Manuscripts and Archives came in drunk one day and got the Shroud of Turin mixed up with Helen Duncan’s ectoplasm. The Hebrew reader glances up, then returns to her work without comment.

I don’t care how many children marched down the Duncan birth canal; I have a hard time believing any woman could “secret” this much fabric through that size opening. Barring a visit to the surgical practice of Boston gynecologist Dr. Crandon, my guess is that Mr. Duncan—who insisted on being seated next to his wife at séances—slipped it to her undetected.

Despite his travails with the Duncans, Harry Price did not give up hope that some mediums were possessed of genuine powers. Price’s book concludes with an optimistic pronouncement about the authenticity of the medium Rudi Schneider, known for ejaculating during particularly heady séances. (To my surprise and his credit, Schneider did not try to pass off the ejaculate as ectoplasm.) I don’t have the full story on Schneider, nor am I going to go dig it up, because I want to get back to the present. Fast-forward to the NLPR of 2004: The University of Arizona Human Energy Systems Laboratory, where they test modern-day mediums.

I put the ectoplasm back in its envelope, tie the pretty pink ribbon, and return the box to its keeper. By 8 p.m., I’m back in London, at a Pakistani restaurant down the street from my hotel. In honor of Margery Crandon, I order lamb.