12:00

them all the information. And then later

12:02

he'd perform and have fantastic personal information

12:04

about people in the community that from

12:06

their perspective, this is a complete stranger

12:09

and he wowed them. But this is

12:11

exactly what fake mediums were doing throughout

12:13

the 19th century, exactly the sort of

12:15

thing. And they even shared information. There's

12:18

lots of examples of mediums taking notebooks

12:20

and then sending them to their friends

12:22

who are also mediums so that they

12:24

would have information as well about the

12:27

different communities that they're visiting, who they

12:29

sat with, the information they gleaned from

12:31

them. Also when they were caught

12:33

out, so avoid saying these sorts of things

12:35

as well because it won't work. But

12:38

he's doing the exact same thing

12:40

as them in this period. He

12:42

doesn't really like it. He sees

12:44

it's a bit exploitative and so

12:46

it slowly gets phased out of

12:48

his performances. But that's the beginning

12:50

of his sort of participation in

12:52

spiritualism. And if we go back even

12:54

further, the link between magic

12:57

shows and spiritualism was there pretty much

12:59

from the beginning. They emerge

13:01

together and a

13:03

lot of figures throughout their careers switch

13:06

between being mediums and magicians. And

13:08

it almost becomes an arm race

13:10

between them at various points as

13:12

well because they all want to

13:15

produce these incredible phenomena, visual phenomena,

13:17

audio phenomena. And so they're trying

13:19

to compete with one another. And

13:21

when that competition gets really tight,

13:23

when they expose one another, that

13:25

inevitably comes out of these arms races

13:27

between them. And so Houdini is

13:30

part of that bigger culture. Now,

13:32

Ephraim, it strikes me that Houdini at the beginning

13:34

of his career is, as you say, he's very

13:36

much part of this culture. He's a participant in

13:38

it and a beneficiary of it. He's making money

13:40

by doing this, whether he believes

13:42

in it or not. And of course, it seems

13:45

very clear to me that he doesn't believe in

13:47

it. The thing that draws him to it is

13:49

the trickery of it, the mechanics of that trickery.

13:51

But then the one thing that I

13:53

do know about him is that by, I

13:55

think it's the mid 1920s, he publishes his

13:57

famous book, A Magician Among the Spirits, debunking

13:59

all these interview

16:00

with the press, he opens this telegram that

16:02

he received en route to

16:04

Copenhagen. Once he gets to Germany, on

16:06

gets off the boat, and informs him

16:08

his mother dies. And he's so stricken

16:10

with grief that he actually faints, and

16:12

then awakens later in tears, and

16:15

immediately cancels everything, goes back

16:17

to the United States. And

16:19

he asks his brother not even to bury

16:22

her until he arrives, which of course breaks

16:24

Jewish custom because you're supposed to within Jewish

16:26

custom be buried within 48 hours, takes

16:29

at least 10 days to sail back from

16:31

Germany. So they're doing a lot to accommodate

16:33

him. And then the night before her funeral,

16:35

Houdini just sits in a chair next to

16:37

her body. And then for

16:39

the first month after her death, he

16:41

visits her every single day at her

16:43

burial site in Queens, New York. So

16:46

it was really hard on him.

16:48

And for years, he really struggled

16:51

with the death of his mother because they were

16:53

so close. They were like best friends, essentially. And

16:56

when spiritualism is again, having a bit

16:58

of a renaissance in the 20th century

17:00

as a result of mass

17:02

death from World War One, all

17:04

these young people dying way too

17:06

early. And there's

17:09

so many reports saying, no, this is real,

17:11

credible reports. And so far

17:13

as scientific figures, legal minds,

17:17

people like Arthur Conan Doyle, who are

17:19

both literary and medical, are

17:21

saying this is real. You have to

17:23

take this seriously. And that gets him

17:25

to really rethink, is this fake? Or

17:28

do I need to spend time and

17:31

really investigate this as an expert

17:33

in deception to see maybe

17:36

there is the ability for us

17:38

to communicate. And that's

17:40

how his friendship with Arthur

17:42

Conan Doyle really begins. Because

17:45

in this period, it's

17:47

very hard to get an audience

17:49

with one of the high level

17:52

mediums, the celebrity mediums. They're very

17:54

careful about who does a sitting

17:56

with them. And that's

17:58

a safeguarding technique. And to

18:01

get a sitting with them, you need

18:04

to have someone who's in the community

18:06

who will help arrange that. And because

18:08

Arthur Conan Doyle is an elite figure

18:10

within spiritual communities in the US and

18:13

in the UK, he

18:15

figures that if he has a friendship with

18:17

Doyle, Doyle vouches for him, he can get

18:20

those opportunities. And so he

18:22

starts their friendship by sending him a copy of

18:24

his book, which is called The

18:26

Unmasking of Robert Houdin,

18:29

who was a famous French magician

18:31

from the 19th century, who in

18:34

this book, Houdini actually exposes

18:36

how he himself, Robert Houdin, was

18:38

taking claim for tricks that were

18:40

others. So it's almost like

18:43

a pen and teller thing where he's spoiling

18:45

all those great illusions and showing

18:47

how they were done. And one

18:49

of the passages in this book just

18:52

mentions that the Davenport brothers, the

18:54

famous spirit cabinet performers,

18:56

who were essentially escapists, just

18:58

like Houdini, they weren't

19:01

real mediums. And that's how the conversation starts.

19:03

Doyle takes a bit of issue with that.

19:05

And he says, well, they were mediums. You

19:07

got this wrong. And that's

19:09

how it all really begins, through this

19:12

death of his mother, and then

19:14

slowly building towards a correspondence with

19:16

Doyle so that he can start

19:19

to investigate what's really going on.

19:21

So we have this scene then

19:23

at the beginning that we talked

19:25

about with Jean Leckie and this

19:27

supposed communication with Houdini's beloved mother.

19:30

And you've just spoken so eloquently there about

19:32

that bond. And it really does bring this

19:34

sense of sadness to some of this that

19:37

actually I had assumed he was driven by

19:39

skepticism, but actually he's driven by hope in

19:41

many ways that it might be possible to

19:43

communicate with his mother. But that very quickly

19:46

transpires not to be the case. But

19:49

he then we're assuming feels duped

19:51

into this attending this seance with Jean

19:53

Leckie. And the falling out between himself

19:55

and Arthur Conan Doyle is quite public

19:58

and somewhat boisterous, right? Can you tell

20:00

us a little bit about how they fall apart then?

20:02

Yeah. So there's a period

20:04

where they're actually quite good friends, regular

20:07

correspondents. Whenever one of them is in

20:09

town, they try to visit each other.

20:12

And at some point, Arthur Conan Doyle

20:15

invites the Houdini's to haul a day

20:17

of them for a few days in

20:19

Atlantic City. And they're

20:21

having a great time and Houdini's going swimming

20:23

with the Doyle children and showing them how

20:25

to hold their breath under the water. There's

20:27

a genuine friendship there. And

20:29

that's when Doyle finally trusts

20:31

Houdini enough to say, why don't

20:34

we do this seance together? My

20:37

wife has mediumistic powers. She

20:39

specializes in automatic writing. But

20:42

they're very trepidatious about allowing best in the

20:44

room as well. Because the

20:46

worry always with these

20:48

situations is that people can

20:50

conspire together and purposely try

20:52

to disrupt the proceedings and

20:55

create something that really isn't there. Just like

20:57

you could say the opposite if you were

20:59

the believer. So they don't

21:01

want them both in the room. And

21:04

it's Houdini who's allowed to

21:06

participate. There's a double perspective

21:08

here. From Doyle's

21:10

perspective, it's a 15 page

21:14

message from

21:16

Houdini's, again, mother elated

21:19

with the ability to finally speak to her

21:21

son after so long and

21:23

looking at Houdini who's gone

21:25

quiet, visibly, his physical appearance

21:28

has changed. And from

21:30

Doyle's perspective, he was deeply moved and

21:32

was overwhelmed with the emotion of finally

21:34

speaking to his mother. And then he

21:37

quietly leaves the room afterwards. From

21:39

Houdini's perspective, it's first off only

21:42

a five page note, which already

21:44

there's a discrepancy there. And

21:46

the emotion that Doyle is

21:49

misperceiving is that he's seething with

21:51

anger. But he knows now's not

21:53

the time to disrupt this. Now's

21:55

the time to get that information,

21:57

that evidence that I can pocket

21:59

away for. later when I'm ready

22:01

to make a much more informed

22:04

opinion about this publicly. I'm

22:08

pretty confident that Doyle was

22:10

not trying to purposely dupe

22:12

Houdini here. I'm pretty

22:15

sure that he himself was being duped

22:17

by his wife. He was so devout

22:19

in his belief of the ability of

22:21

spirits to communicate that he was blind

22:23

to the trickery that was going on.

22:26

So he wasn't purposefully trying to exploit

22:28

Houdini. I think Houdini agrees

22:30

with that statement. It's more what he

22:32

thought of Gene Leckie, where he knew

22:34

for sure this is a sham. And

22:37

there were three reasons for why he knew this

22:39

message was a sham. The first

22:41

was that on the top of every

22:44

page, while in trance, there was a

22:46

Christian cross. Now for

22:48

Cecilia, the wife of a rabbi,

22:50

to put a Christian cross on

22:52

every single page makes no sense

22:54

to Houdini whatsoever. That's not a

22:56

religious symbolism that she would have

22:58

evoked within her messages. The

23:00

second is that the entirety of the

23:02

message is in English, and Cecilia barely

23:04

spoke English, had little command of it,

23:06

especially in written form. And

23:08

if she really was communicating with her son,

23:11

it would have been in German. Of

23:13

course, a believer would say that the

23:15

medium can translate that in trance into

23:18

English if they don't know that language,

23:20

which is a very convenient, of course,

23:22

way of explaining that. But

23:24

it was enough for Houdini to think, well, I

23:26

don't trust that my mother would allow that. And

23:29

the final thing that was important was that

23:31

the date of this seance was his mother's

23:33

birthday. And they don't mention

23:35

that at any point in that communication.

23:38

So again, it's really significant

23:40

that these things put together

23:42

just don't convince him that

23:44

it's real. He still

23:46

holds his tongue for a while. He

23:49

uses Doyle to get, again, audiences

23:51

with some other big name mediums

23:53

like Anna Britten as an example,

23:55

who he also thinks is a

23:57

total fraud. And then finally, In

24:00

1922, he puts

24:03

forward his first public statement on

24:05

spiritualism in the New York Sun.

24:08

And Doyle's really upset.

24:10

He feels betrayed by

24:13

this. Again, from his perspective, he thought

24:15

he was really close friends, that if

24:17

Houdini was as close as he had

24:19

thought, he would have expressed this to

24:21

him privately. They could have talked it

24:23

through. He could have shown him the

24:26

evidence to the contrary or explain why

24:28

he's misunderstanding what's going on. None

24:30

of that happened. And he was

24:33

taken aback by it. He saw it

24:35

as an affront to his religious beliefs,

24:37

because Doyle sees this as the new

24:39

revelation. This is the new religion.

24:42

And he is the apostle spreading the

24:44

word to the people. And

24:46

he was blindsided by it. He really

24:48

resonates with me there, what you're saying

24:50

about Doyle being blind to this trickery

24:52

and these problems. And we did another

24:55

episode fairly recently about the Cottingley Fairies

24:57

and Doyle's embroilment in that

24:59

and his absolute desire to believe that

25:01

it's true to the point where he

25:03

cannot see what to us today in

25:05

a digital age is very

25:07

obviously photographic fakery. So we're

25:09

going to talk about a

25:11

very specific case in a

25:13

moment involving Houdini and unmasking.

25:16

But can you give us a sense

25:19

of the kinds of tricks that Houdini

25:21

does expose just in broad terms in

25:23

thinking about his initial statement to the

25:25

world about spiritualism? What

25:27

kinds of things is he unmasking here?

25:31

He is unmasking every type of

25:33

phenomena that is being reported on.

25:35

So one of the things that

25:38

he does in this first declaration is

25:40

he says, I can

25:43

reproduce any mediumistic fate that

25:45

you witness in a seance

25:47

or a spiritualist performance. And

25:50

that's another thing that really upsets Doyle

25:53

to the point where he says, well, you would

25:55

need 30 years of investigating spiritualism to be an

25:57

expert in order to recreate these

26:00

Which of course he has that experience

26:02

basically as a magician anyways, but that's

26:05

beside the point. And

26:07

so he can show how you

26:09

can escape your bindings in a

26:11

seance because it's dark. You

26:14

don't have full visibility of the medium

26:16

almost ever. There were a

26:18

few exceptions to that, but on average, it's a dark

26:20

setting. The medium usually

26:22

chooses who sits where. So

26:25

you could put your accomplice next to you

26:27

to help you with the ruse. And that's

26:29

exactly what a lot of them do. So

26:31

Houdini might be sitting on one side of

26:33

them to give the impression of a control.

26:35

But next to them is the partner who

26:38

can, of course, allow that person to slip

26:40

out of their bindings to ring a bell

26:42

under the table with their feet as an

26:44

example. So Houdini will just recreate it again.

26:47

Think of Penn and Teller where they do

26:49

the trick undercover and then they do it

26:51

again and show you exactly how it's done.

26:54

That's the mode in which Houdini functions. He

26:57

also shows how levitations can be

26:59

done, how table tilting works. He

27:01

even goes into the more impressive

27:03

forms like spirit trumpets where he

27:05

shows how you could put a

27:07

receiver into the trumpet that no

27:09

one can see. And you have

27:12

an accomplice in another room who essentially is broadcasting

27:15

a tiny voice through that receiver into

27:17

the horn. But if you don't know

27:19

about the construction of that device, you

27:21

don't know what you're looking for, it

27:23

would seem like something is speaking through

27:25

the spirit trumpet. So he

27:27

does all types of recreations and

27:29

exposure in that way. He publishes

27:31

it. He performs it live.

27:33

He gives tours. He'll

27:36

speak about how to create fake

27:38

photographs where Houdini is in

27:40

the same photograph of a spirit of

27:42

himself. And it's

27:44

probably a better spirit impression than

27:46

the so-called real spirit impressions that

27:48

people were producing in this period,

27:50

which again really gave a lot

27:52

of weight to the skeptics argument.

28:15

Well, after dark listeners, we have an introduction to

28:17

make on today's podcast and the person we'd like

28:20

to introduce is probably somebody you already know. And

28:22

if you don't, you should get to know his

28:24

podcast. And that of course, is Dan Snow, host

28:26

of Dan Snow's history hit podcast. Dan, welcome to

28:29

After Dark. Hey guys, well, it's a great honor

28:31

to be on the podcast tickly because it's now

28:33

such a behemoth. It's such

28:35

a juggernaut. I'm very excited. Are you

28:38

enjoying being part of the history hit

28:40

family? We absolutely are. It's

28:42

been such a joy and early on it

28:44

was so nice to borrow presenters from different

28:46

history hit podcasts and you get

28:49

to know everyone a little bit, get

28:51

to know everyone's different approaches and perspectives

28:53

to history. And I think Dan, we're

28:55

going to talk not about our own

28:57

podcast here, but about your podcast. And

28:59

the thing that I love and have

29:01

to admit to you, I have been

29:03

a real genuine listener of your pod

29:05

for many years, not to

29:07

out you on the age front here, Dan, but

29:09

I really have been genuinely a fan. And

29:12

one thing that I love in terms of that

29:14

perspective, the angle that you bring is

29:16

that it's so you make history so relevant

29:19

in terms of what's happening in the headlines

29:21

right now. Is that just your perspective on

29:23

history, Dan? Is that just how you see

29:25

the past and present and how they interlink?

29:27

Thanks, Maddie. Yeah, I bet you've been listening to it ever since you

29:29

were in primary school. Of course. My passion,

29:31

I came for a family of journalists, but

29:34

I always loved history. As you say, history is urgent.

29:37

History is the reason that we got too much

29:39

carbon in our atmosphere. It's the reason that America

29:42

and China are eyeing each other up in

29:44

the South China Sea. It's the reason that

29:46

Vladimir Putin thinks Eastern or all

29:48

of Ukraine is part of Russia. All

29:50

of these things which are affecting our lives, those

29:52

of our families, loved ones, children and their children

29:54

and their children, all of those things are

29:57

deeply rooted in our past. So my

29:59

passion. is those episodes where

30:02

I take up something that we're seeing today, Ukraine,

30:05

the fervor of the American election,

30:07

Brexit, Taiwan, and

30:09

Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and

30:11

I try and look into the Deep History. That

30:14

is my passion. Having said that, I also just

30:16

love banging out an episode on Francis Drake or

30:18

Florence Nightingale, you know, it's a great narrative stories

30:20

mystery. I like doing both. I've always wanted my

30:22

pod. I've never wanted to pin it down. I

30:24

think like you guys with your podcast, you actually

30:26

wanted to find yourself as widely as possible because

30:28

it just makes it more interesting for us when

30:30

we go to work. But one of the things

30:32

that works really well, I think, on your podcast,

30:34

and if there are after dark listeners who don't

30:36

listen to Dan's podcast do because one of the

30:38

things we share in common is

30:40

this broad view, but really bringing

30:42

in, as you're saying, Dan, individual

30:45

narratives to help locate

30:47

those histories within people's lives and within

30:49

the lives of people who are listening

30:51

today. And what kind

30:53

of narrative drive do you think mostly appeals

30:55

to you when it comes to history? Because,

30:57

you know, we can all do facts and

31:00

figures. We can all Google. But what is

31:02

it about those big sweeps of narrative history

31:04

that really gets your interest peaked? Well, you

31:06

said it better than I could do, I

31:08

think, really. But it's the fact that it's

31:10

the greatest that the greatest stories ever told,

31:12

like the best stories are true stories. And

31:15

then as well as these incredible kind of

31:17

dramatic arcs that touch the lives of everybody, it's

31:19

the human beings within them. It's the

31:21

fact that we know enough about what

31:23

it was like to be Archduke Franz Ferdinand as

31:25

he drove through the streets of Sarajevo that day.

31:27

We kind of have a pretty good idea of

31:29

what was going through Kaiser Wilhelm's head as he

31:32

mulled over the big decisions and Zarnikolas as

31:34

they mulled over the decisions that

31:36

basically plunged the world into catastrophic war

31:38

and condemned their own families and their

31:40

own regimes to oblivion or worse. So

31:42

it's just those, as you say, the

31:44

individuals being caught up in it is

31:46

so fascinating. So it's telling the big

31:49

story and then cutting back and reminding

31:51

everyone that there are families

31:53

and humans driving

31:55

these events and becoming caught up in these

31:57

events. Thinking about some of

31:59

those. stories that we have in

32:01

common, Dan, and some of those

32:03

human elements that drive us all,

32:05

I think, to tell history. The

32:07

thing that I think we share

32:10

is a love of stories and

32:12

history set on ships. Now, we

32:14

have covered so many ships on After Dark, and they're

32:16

always the most popular. We've done The Bounty, we've done

32:19

HMS Terror, recently listened down

32:21

to your episode on HMS Wager. I

32:23

say, listen, I ran to that. I

32:25

have never downloaded anything quicker in my

32:27

entire life. But for After

32:30

Dark listeners who do love a ship story,

32:32

can you recommend any episodes on your pod

32:34

or indeed episodes that are not set on

32:36

ships, but the people absolutely need to hear?

32:39

So yeah, HMS Wager, you mentioned that's just

32:42

a story that you couldn't make up.

32:44

Shipwreck and mutiny, murder, an astonishing

32:46

escape story. And that's true of episodes,

32:49

for example, on the mutiny on the

32:51

bounty, Captain Blar on the bounty. I

32:54

quite liked a recent one, was Scott's expedition

32:56

to the South Pole, was it actually sabotaged?

32:58

It was definitely let down by, well,

33:01

perhaps incompetence on the part of many

33:04

people involved, but was it actually maliciously

33:06

sabotaged? That's the big question. That's a

33:08

huge one. But if people want to get

33:10

away from the ice and the water, the desert

33:12

and the mountains are available. So I've done a

33:14

series on Ancient Egypt recently, and a series on

33:17

the Inca in the Andes, which was an amazing

33:19

experience. I got to walk the Inca Trail through

33:21

the Andes and just explored a

33:23

civilization I knew nothing about. Well,

33:26

you heard it here, folks. You can get your

33:28

news and your alts from Dan

33:30

Snow's History here, wherever you get your

33:32

podcasts. And honestly, you will not regret

33:34

it. Download every episode right now. This

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supply. Hi,

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35:30

One of the most famous debunking

35:33

missions that Houdini went on involves a

35:35

woman we'd like to introduce to you

35:37

now, and her name is, or is

35:39

it, Marjorie. The

35:43

most famous purveyor of ghosts

35:45

Houdini ever busted was Boston's

35:47

Mina Crandon, or Marjorie as

35:49

she was known. Crandon

35:51

was arguably America's greatest medium,

35:54

supremely gifted or supremely deceptive,

35:56

depending on where you stand.

36:00

She could, apparently, produce ectoplasm

36:02

and make objects levitate. She

36:05

could use telekinetic energy to ring bells

36:07

around a room and channel the voice

36:10

of a spirit called Walter. Harry

36:14

Houdini's unraveling of Crandon's claims

36:16

was slow and expertly observed.

36:19

It was a drawn-out affair. It

36:22

began with friendly exchanges and the holding

36:24

of hands in the seance. But

36:27

soon we encounter something altogether less

36:30

kumbaya. August

36:32

1924, and Houdini has built

36:34

a box that looks like

36:36

a medieval torture device. He

36:39

is helping Marjorie Crandon inside. A

36:42

small audience watches on. In

36:44

many ways, this is like the beginning of one of

36:47

his own shows, as onlookers eagerly

36:49

await to find out what happens

36:51

next. Except

36:53

this is supposed to be the opposite of a magic

36:55

box. There are no trapdoors,

36:58

no secret mirrors. It's

37:00

a box of anti-magic designed to

37:03

stop Crandon in her tracks. Only

37:06

her head and hands emerge from the box. Houdini

37:09

looks at his work. Surely

37:11

now, when the seance begins, nothing

37:14

will happen. No bells

37:16

will ring. No faces will

37:18

appear. Nothing at

37:20

all will happen when the lights go out.

37:24

Right? Ephraim,

37:27

I'm looking at two images on my

37:29

computer here while we talk. One

37:32

of them is of

37:34

Marjorie. I think this photograph is

37:36

actually taken by Houdini. It's outside

37:38

of her house. It's a brick-built

37:40

townhouse. It's got a smart

37:42

front door with a fan light above it. She's

37:45

in this lovely 1920s dress

37:47

with that really low waistline. It's

37:50

quite a relaxed image. It looks quite intimate.

37:52

They obviously knew each other. The

37:55

second image that I'm looking at is

37:57

the front cover of Houdini's text.

40:00

the first communities after those communities

40:02

in New York state to develop.

40:04

And her husband is a very

40:07

influential surgeon within the Boston community

40:10

with, one might say, an unhealthy fixation

40:12

with death. And he's

40:14

actually the one that introduces Marjorie

40:16

to spiritualism. It's through that relationship

40:19

that she discovers her mediumistic powers.

40:21

And that's also why she performs

40:23

as Marjorie and not Mina Crandon.

40:25

She wants to sort of have

40:27

a separation between her public

40:30

and private life. So when she holds

40:32

these seances, she's Marjorie. Otherwise,

40:34

everyone knew her as Mina.

40:37

As you've already said that there was all sorts

40:39

of different phenomena that she produced and

40:41

perfected through performance with all sorts

40:44

of members of the Boston community.

40:46

And also people like Doyle, who

40:48

came and visited her and

40:51

was convinced that everything she

40:53

could produce, including the ectoplasm,

40:55

which we haven't even talked

40:57

about yet, was legitimate. She

40:59

was also investigated prior to

41:01

the Houdini affair by three

41:04

different very well-established

41:06

psychical researchers of the era. One

41:08

of them was Hertford Carrington, British

41:11

psychical researcher, very

41:13

good reputation. But he was actually

41:15

having an affair with her. So

41:17

how credible is it when he

41:19

has this personal relationship with Crandon

41:21

to say, well, she's legitimate. Another

41:23

one was J. Malcolm Byrd, another

41:26

fairly well-known psychical researcher who also

41:28

had an unhealthy fixation with her

41:31

and tried to have an

41:33

affair but was rejected. And then

41:35

he becomes an important assistant of

41:37

hers within the investigation room, which

41:39

then brings into question whether or

41:41

not you can trust his

41:44

testimony when he talks about it.

41:46

And the third major person to

41:48

investigate was Eric Dingwall, who was

41:51

an anthropologist, key member

41:53

of the Society for Psychical Research

41:55

in Britain. He was also convinced.

41:57

But again, they think... in

42:00

this case, skeptics, that he

42:02

was easily swayed to believing

42:04

that it was legitimate because

42:06

of the very sexualized nature

42:09

of a lot of Marjorie's performances

42:11

with nudity. And Ding

42:13

Hwa was known as Dirty Ding. That

42:16

was his nickname. And he had an

42:18

extensive collection of erotica and also his

42:20

anthropological research specialized in sexual practice amongst

42:23

different cultures. So he would have loved

42:25

a hypersexualized performance. That's right up his

42:27

street. Again, there were questions

42:29

about whether there were sufficient controls, whether

42:31

he may have been not paying

42:34

close enough attention because of, again, the

42:36

acts that were being committed within the

42:38

sales room at the time. So

42:40

by the time Houdini gets there, there's a lot of

42:43

credible people who are saying this is real. And

42:47

it's very important for him to take it as

42:49

seriously as possible because,

42:51

again, when it comes to testimony,

42:54

and that's usually what it comes down to,

42:56

my version of what happened versus your version,

42:58

that's circumstantial evidence. It doesn't hold up

43:00

in court. And it doesn't hold up

43:02

in debates about spiritualism for the same

43:05

reason. You need hard evidence. Hard evidence

43:07

means you catch the person cheating. So

43:09

one of the things that Houdini does

43:12

in this investigation is he prepares himself

43:15

so that he can catch all the types of things he

43:17

would do if he were to perform these

43:19

tricks. So as an example, he wore

43:21

a rubber band around his leg all

43:23

day prior to make his leg numb

43:26

and very easily be able to sense

43:28

anything touch it because of the circulation

43:31

loss. He rolls up his leg

43:33

so he can feel the movement of her under

43:35

the table in the darkness. And

43:37

he writes in his own notes that

43:39

he could very clearly feel her foot

43:41

go over him towards where the bell

43:43

was located in this box and manipulate

43:46

it to make the sound, stuff like

43:48

that. So he knew what he would

43:50

do. And he was ready

43:52

for any of the obvious ways for

43:54

someone to cheat. And he was

43:56

able to catch that. No one

43:59

was convinced.