The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher

Author:David Jaher [Jaher, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307451064
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-10-06T04:30:00+00:00

House of Crimson

In Walter Prince’s dream, the doomed young woman begged him to hold her hand while she was beheaded—as if by a guillotine. One of his hands was in her hair and he could feel the bloody dampness. His other hand was caught in teeth that clenched his fingers—fastening then refastening; her disembodied head would not release him. The next day, he discovered while reading the Evening Telegram that a woman named Sarah Hand, a mental patient on leave from an asylum, had—at the same time as his dream and not far from his home in Flushing, Queens—laid her head on the rails in front of a train, which decapitated her. She had wanted to prove, she said in a letter the authorities discovered, that her severed head might exist consciously, apart from her body. Following his own investigation of the case, Prince determined that his premonition was hard to attribute to chance. Her photograph resembled the woman in his nightmare.

This was not the only time that Prince had a personal psychic experience. Proofs of mind acting on mind came to him in the manifestation of his own harrowing dreams, though he had not had any like them recently. He had no intimation that anything was amiss during the period of the Scientific American contest. He was a troubled man, but they were natural worries that plagued him in May, when he first visited 10 Lime Street.

If Margery had any tricks up her kimono sleeves, then Dr. Prince, known for solving the Antigonish hoax, was considered the most qualified of the ASPR investigators to expose them. According to Doyle, Prince was an arch-skeptic. At least one medium had won Prince’s deepest affection, yet he had the reputation for being detached and uncompromising. He disapproved of the casual contact between the researchers and Margery—the lively sublunary activities that were taking place on Lime Street: Carrington dancing with the medium; Bird playing charades with her friends. Neither did he trust experiments devised by a Tech physicist who knew nothing of magic, hobnobbed with Hollywood moguls, and tried to habituate a spirit to his fancy cameras.

The one psychic whom Dr. Prince believed in was named Theodosia. Years earlier he had discovered that the disturbed young girl, a victim of brutal abuse, had extraordinary mediumistic powers. He wrote a 1,300-page report on her various personalities. Then he adopted her, and tried for the rest of his life to heal her. Recently, in a public debate with Houdini, Prince challenged the magician to match the raps that Theodosia had produced at his Flushing home. Uncharacteristically, Houdini demurred. He was sure that the phenomena in the Prince house were easily explained but did not wish to call the researcher’s daughter a fake.

Prince appeared to be drawn to distraught females, or they to him, but he was wary of the dangerous side to a medium’s hysteria. He had seen such mayhem in Antigonish, when an unstable young woman almost brought her family’s home down like the House of Usher.

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