We were recently fortunate enough to be able to attend the Houdiniana auction orchestrated by Potter and Potter in Chicago (the entire catalog is available here in PDF form).
Among the thousands of Houdini-related antique books, posters, photographs, props and other items was one piece of particular interest to ghost racket aficionados; Harry Houdini’s personal scrapbook of his ongoing battle with fake spiritualists.
The large, 125-page leather-bound scrapbook was unknown to Houdini buffs until it was discovered in California during 2013. It contains many hundreds of clippings from American, British and other newspapers and magazines, most of them dating from 1925 and the great majority concerning the exploits of (mostly then-) famous spiritualists. Other clippings detailing Houdini’s own exposés of psychic fakery; Houdini also wrote numerous notes in the margins.
To learn much more about this amazing artefact from the annals of the ghost racket, check out this post by John Cox – the editor of the fabulous Wild About Houdini blog – detailing how he was able to help authenticate the scrapbook shortly after it was first discovered by a California antique dealer.
A pattern is emerging; just as episode 1 of Houdini and Doyle drew together a circa 1900 social issue (the treatment of inmates in a Magdalene laundry) and a seemingly supernatural mystery (a ghostly murderer), A Dish of Adharma weaves the radical women’s suffrage movement together with a case of attempted assassination via (apparent) reincarnation.
During the dramatic opening sequence, a young boy holding a bouquet of flowers approaches Lydia Bellworth, a suffragette who has chained herself to a set of railings as a political protest. Lowering the bouquet to reveal a pistol, he then shoots her in the arm, saying “You murdered me!”
Houdini, Doyle and Stratton are quickly on the case. It transpires that the boy – a runaway adoptee – has been plagued by dreams and visions of a life that he has not lived and believes himself to be the reincarnation of a bohemian artist named Martin Upton, who died some twelve years earlier. Upton is revealed to have been the secret lover of Lydia Bellworth.
The investigators discover that the boy – whose real name is Peter – has actually become fixated upon the life and death of Martin Upton via obsessively studying Upton’s secret journal, to the point that Peter’s own identity has become submerged. Eventually the truth comes out – Lydia Bellworth really did kill Marton Upton, because he refused responsibility when she became pregnant with his child, who was then adopted out immediately after birth. In a truly Dickensian turn of events, that child turns out to be none other than young Peter.
The boy is reunited with his loving adoptive parents and (one hopes) recovers his own identity, independent of that of his murdered father.
A Dish of Adharma offers us a suitably twisty gothic mystery and some further insights into the lives and psyches of our protagonists. Doyle struggles to be a good father to his young daughter Mary, who is beginning to question her own role and future in a society that systematically devalues girls and women. Meanwhile, Houdini’s fascination with the still-enigmatic Adelaide Stratton leads them into a “truth-trade” game that may betoken a deeper future relationship between them.
Random observations:
Although the mystery is again revealed to have a strictly non-supernatural (if only just plausible) solution, the question remains as to how Peter was able to lead Houdini, Doyle and Stratton to the exact site of his father’s secret, unmarked grave. Obviously, that information could not possibly have been contained in Martin Upton’s journal. Doyle suggests that it might be evidence of “spirit guides” and Houdini doesn’t have a ready retort. Logically, the implication is that Peter had, in fact, learned or deduced where Martin was buried, though how he might have done that is never addressed.
One of Houdini and Stratton’s “truth trades” involves each of them writing their greatest fear upon a scrap of paper, swapping papers and then reading each other’s answers (as it turns out, both of them fear “being unloved”). It’s later implied that this coincidence of written answers was a sleight-of-hand illusion on Houdini’s behalf; when Adelaide asks him whether it was a trick, he shows her a number of identical scraps of paper bearing different answers such as “losing family” and “spiders”. The suggestion is that he somehow matched his own answer to hers, out of a collection of likely responses (a cold reading-style application of the Barnum/Forer effect).
The “trick” as actually shown, however, would have relied entirely on luck or very shrewd guesswork; there was no possibility of a sleight-of-hand substitution of one scrap of paper for another. Perhaps the implication is that Houdini did not want to reveal the depth of his interest in Adelaide, and so sought to camouflage it (and give himself an “out”) by pretending that it actually was just a trick.
RATING:
‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ _ _ _
Seven out of ten ibangs for Episode 2 of this intriguing series.
The notion of a crook playing the ghost racket for fun and profit was already a narrative cliche by 1923. The phantasmagorical powers of the fake spook go unexplained in this early Felix the Cat cartoon; sometimes it’s best to just let art flow over you.
Here’s a fascinating piece of ghostbuster history; a Movietone newsreel interview with Harry Price, who investigated numerous purportedly psychic phenomena during the early-mid 20th century. With his seemingly affected “upper class” accent and abrupt, awkward movements, HP is clearly not a natural presenter. Still, he does a good job showing off the London Council for Psychical Research’s facilities, including their impressive library, several interesting museum artefacts, a lab full of cutting-edge 1930s technology and a seance room equipped with apparatus to test claims of clairvoyance and telekinesis.
This 2015 ITV telemovie is very loosely based on Neil Spring’s HP-inspired novel, The Ghost Hunters(2013).In effect, being filtered through two different fictional media, the detail of the movie’s plot admits only a little historical accuracy; but of course, as a work of fiction it makes no claim of documentary realism and can only be fairly judged on its own merits.
The story opens with HP (Rafe Spall) conducting a dramatic seance at a home in London during, or very shortly after, the First World War. As it then transpires, Price has gimmicked the sitting for maximum spooky effect. Clearly, he is riding high as a ghost racketeer – until, shockingly, a disturbed young soldier who has bought into Price’s line of afterlife patter commits suicide right in front of him.
(Cut to the opening titles, a nice montage of the tools of the ghost-hunter’s trade – ’20s-vintage cameras, phonographs, metronomes and other such apparatus.)
Several years later, a sadder and wiser Harry Price has changed tack and is making his living as an investigator of seemingly paranormal phenomena, with the cloud of his former charlatanry hanging heavily about him. He is hired to investigate the strange case of Grace Goodwin (Zoe Boyle), the young wife of fast-rising Liberal MP Edward Goodwin (Tom Ward); Grace has recently been discovered wandering the streets of London, naked and disoriented, and seems to be suffering from a case of ghostly possession.
Price visits the couple’s home and quickly learns that it is a former workhouse. Sarah Goodwin’s strange visions seem to revolve around the ghost of a young boy who died there many years before.
HP is assigned the couple’s maid, Sarah Grey (Cara Theobold) as an assistant and discovers her to be a natural skeptic and a shrewd detective in her own right. Sarah has her own reason to distrust psychic mediums; her mother is a seance groupie, spending money they can’t afford in a series of attempts to contact her late husband. The point is effectively made that mediums, for all their frequent chicanery, were often the closest thing to therapists available to ordinary people during the early 20th century.
In an interlude from the main action, Price disrupts and debunks one of these public seances, for all the good it does; the true believers in the audience boo him off the stage and then the angry psychic strikes a nerve in aggressively cold reading Harry backstage, provoking Harry to knock him down. Eventually, we gather that Harry’s wife was sadly lost to insanity and that Harry seems to blame himself for not being able to help her.
Harry and Sarah proceed to puzzle out clues and mysteries towards discovering the real source of Mrs. Goodwin’s bizarre behaviour, calling upon the additional help of two of HP’s associates as the case becomes ever more convoluted.
Albert Ogoro (Richie Campbell) is a chemist by day and faux-voodoo witch-doctor by night. His main function in the story, other than to provide chemical analysis, is to illustrate another perspective on the ethics of the ghost racket. From Albert’s point of view, his clients are in such desperate straits that, if his sham-shamanism offers them some comfort, what’s the harm? He applies that logic in “assisting” Harry during a late-night vigil at the Goodwin home, but in this case his trickery (in the form of a rather implausible mechanical spider device secreted inside a grand piano) does no particular good.
Vernon Wall (Lewis Reeves), a hard-nosed young reporter who clearly has some unresolved “history” with Harry, nevertheless also agrees to help and tracks down a former secret lover of Mrs. Goodwin’s, whose presence in the Goodwins’ lives seems to have sparked the current dire situation. As it transpires, the politician is insanely possessive of his wife and, upon discovering her infidelity (and that she was pregnant with another man’s baby), he began secretly dosing her with home-brewed barbiturates, causing her to miscarry and then suffer terrifying hallucinations as she withdrew from the drug.
Goodwin reacts violently when Sarah confronts him with the truth and knocks her unconscious. Very curiously, as she comes to, she seems to see the same ghostly young boy who has been haunting Grace Goodwin. Charitably, it might be assumed that Sarah is now so deeply involved with the case that her imagination conjured a spectral child; less charitably, this vision reads as an incongruous “maybe it’s all true after all” cop-out on behalf of the writer. There’s no time to worry about that, though, as Mr. Goodwin has gone berserk and is attempting to drown his wife in the bath tub – but Harry Price arrives in the nick of time and saves the day.
The story ends with Harry inviting Sarah, who is now out of a job, to become his full-time assistant. She says she’ll think about it – leaving the way open for their adventures to be continued in some form, perhaps as a regular series …
RATING:
‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽_ _ _
Seven ibangs out of ten for this effective, atmospheric and well-acted ghost-hunter procedural.
