Elaine M. Kuzmeskus Libros

"Houdini the Magician Stumped," proclaimed the Boston Herald in 1924. Who was this medium who baffled Houdini? None other than Margery Crandon, the wife of a prominent Boston surgeon. "Margery the Medium" made headlines throughout the 1920s. She captivated not only Harvard professors, but the editors of Scientific American with her amazing physical mediumship. Margery was very much a woman of her time- the Roaring Twenties. By the time the Twenties were in full swing, Margery and her second husband Dr. Le Roi Crandon became interested in psychic phenomena. In May of 1923, Dr. Crandon invited two couples to join them in a table-tilting seance. During the evening, he discovered that his wife had a genuine gift for communicating with the spirits. Within months, Margery produced psychic music, direct voice, trumpet seance, and even apports. She not only fascinated her husband, but the scientific community in the United States and England. While Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle championed Margery's mediumship, Harry Houdini denounced her as a fraud. Was Margery Crandon too good to be true or was she the last of the great physical mediums?"

In the aftermath of the Civil War, distraught Connecticut residents turned to Spiritualism as a means of connecting with their lost loved ones. Daniel Dunglas Home of New London held his first public séance as a teenager in 1851, and he reportedly levitated and handled hot coals without injury. Famous Litchfield native Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, Calvin, were believers, and Harriet's sister Isabella Beecher Hooker practiced mediumship. After the death of their son Willie, President Abraham Lincoln and the first lady invited Hartford medium Nettie Colburn Maynard to conduct secret séances at the White House. Even today, believers congregate at the Pine Grove Spiritualist Camp. Author Elaine Kuzmeskus investigates this dramatic, mystical history.