Automatic Writing

On the topic of gullibility, here is a story that we like to share with our banker friends during our “seminars” on magical thinking (much better paid than real magic shows and the audience is less demanding).

In the summer of 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invited his friend, the magician Harry Houdini, and his wife Bess to join them for a week at Atlantic City. The vacation was going well, and everyone was having a good time, until Sir Arthur suggested that his wife Jean could put Houdini in touch with Houdini’s beloved mother Cecelia, who had died almost a decade earlier.

Sir Arthur was of course famous for being the creator of the ultimate scientific rationalist Sherlock Holmes, however he had also been converted to spiritualism after losing his son and brother during World War I. When he saw Houdini perform his act during a tour through England, he became convinced that Houdini had genuine supernatural powers. And he had great faith in his wife’s talent as a medium.

For Houdini, the situation was complicated. For one thing, he knew that his illusions were the product of stagecraft, not magic, and that Sir Arthur was overly gullible. He had also authored a book in which he revealed the tricks of a number of magicians and mediums. It was inspired in part by earlier, unsuccessful attempts to contact his mother, who he had seen as “the guiding beacon of my life.” But at the same time, he liked Doyle – and he really missed his mother. So he agreed to give it a go.

The séance was held at the Doyles’ hotel room. After turning down the lights, Lady Jean went into what appeared to be a deep trance. Then she grabbed a pen and started scribbling manicly on sheets of paper – what spiritualists called automatic writing – as if she were channeling the spirit of Houdini’s mother. Houdini read the sheets as she finished them, fifteen in all before she wound herself down. But his awkward feelings were not relieved.

The letter said all the usual things that one might expect from a long-dead mother (love you, missing you, the Doyles are great, etc.) but it was written in perfect English (his mother was Hungarian and spoke little English), the first sheet was decorated with a cross (she was a Jew), she didn’t mention that it was her birthday that day, and so on. He didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to realise he was being conned.

Not wanting to spoil the evening, or their relationship, he didn’t say anything at the time; but matters came to a head later that year when he wrote an article saying that no medium had ever been proven to be able to contact the dead. Evidence-based, they were not. Doyle took it personally, and the friendship was effectively over.

Doyle continued to write books and give lectures promoting spiritualism. Houdini remained a skeptic, but still held out some hope that it might be possible to communicate with the departed – being a magician didn’t make him completely immune to magical thinking. He arranged a code with his wife, so that if she tried to contact him after his death through a medium she would know whether it was genuine. After he died in 1926, of a ruptured appendix on Halloween, Bess kept trying, but to no avail. She finally stopped the séances in 1936, famously announcing that “ten years is long enough to wait for any man.”

By that time, the craze for spiritualism was already losing some of its energy. And today, of course, most people see séances as something from an earlier, less scientific age. We know that for many people the desire to communicate with lost relatives is so great that they are willing to suspend disbelief; and that doing so makes them susceptible to the con-artists and fraudsters who Houdini had worked to debunk. But that doesn’t mean that we are immune to the power of magic – even when we are trying to be rational.

Bankers (and others) beware.