Houdini!!!
The Career of Ehrich Weiss by Ken Silverman

pages 305-306
A Magician Among the Spirits

    Spiritualism game Houdini a new arena for his literary ambitions. He approached it as a contender, publishing in the spring of 1924 his richest volume since "The Unmasking -- A Magician Among the Spirets." A dozen or so book-length exposés of fraudulent mediums had appeared since the first days of Spiritualism, such as "Spirit-Rapping Made Easy," or "How To Come Out As a Medium" (1860). The subject lent itself to lurid treament, but Houdini aimed at writing something sober and cogent, on the order of Frank Podmore's scholarly two-volume "Modern Spiritualism" (1902). He tried to sketch the development of modern Spiritualism through chapter-length studies of a half-dozen celebrated mediums, followed by a miscellany on ectoplasm, spirit-photos, magicians as detectors of fraud, and the like. He believed that the book would lose him money and make him enemies. But he considered the writing of it a duty, "an obligation and that is all there is to it."

    At the same time, in gathering the inside secrets of the séance room, Houdini energetically exchanged hundreds of letters with informants at home and abroad. A Los Angeles man, for instance, sent him the method of a medium who produced manifestations under ingeniously difficult test conditions. Houdini wrote up the details: the medium was thoroughly searched before entering her cabinet, where she was left standing in a bowl of flour: she could not step out without leaving telltale tracks. "This is the way she works," Houdini recorded: "She has two tubes made, one for her rectum and one for her vagin [sic]. In one she places about 7 to 10 yards of [blank] skin and in her vagin she conceals a pair of silk stockings.

    "When the cabinet is closed as it is impossible to go out of the floor without leaving footprints she reaches and gets out the silk stockings, puts them on her feet, steps out of the bowl of flour, gets her second lot and is able to leave the cabinet without besmearing the floor or leaving footprints. After the materializations she goes back to the cabinet, conceals her loads, takes off her stockings and steps back into the bowl of flour."

    page 363

    Houdini did not wait for mediums to come to his stage and be exposed. He went out hunting them. Much as he once went after Kleppinis and other would-be Houdinis who claimed to be miracle workers, he tracked them down, hounded them, shamed them, and if possible hauled them to court. His zeal was personal, but molded by the decade's moonshine busts and Red-scare roundups of Communists. Rather as the U.S. Attorney General's department had created a General Intelligence Division (soon to be called the Federal Bureau of Investigation), he organized what he called "my own secret service department."

    Houdini's private FBI had informants and paid undercover agents all over the country. The brassiest of most knowing of them was a Toledo magician, Rober Gysel (1880-1938). Considering himself a sort of Houdini Midwest, he ridiculed Doyle as "the nickel-plated dumbell of Spiritualism," performed his own Margery exposeé, and boasted that he could explain the methods of any medium "from Kansas City to New York City." At least he had exquisite taste in bamboozlements. He sent Houdini his pamphlets on "Psychic Fakery."

    Gysel had much to say too about mediumship on the wild side. He thought all mediums "oversexed," and knew about a so-called "developing class" in Chicago, where, for a fee, females could develop their psychic gifts. "The stunt was that the male medium would ask the girl or woman to take the medium's penis and place it in her mouth and to draw semen from it, the medium claiming that it is nothing but pure blood, mingled with said wonderful supernormal power. Can you beat this?"