Mina 'Margery' Crandon (1888–November 1, 1941) was an American psychic medium who performed under the stage name 'Margery' and claimed to channel her dead brother, Walter Stinson.

[1][2] She became known as her alleged paranormal skills were touted by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and were disproved by magician Harry Houdini.

Le Roi Goddard Crandon when she entered a Dorchester, Massachusetts hospital for an unspecified operation,[6] possibly appendicitis.

[7] Mina began experimenting with séances as a hobby, possibly to distract her older husband from a morbid obsession with mortality.

With a doctor as husband, Margery was well prepared for the challenge, and her charm and lack of interest in personal monetary reward made her seem honest to the public eye.

The Scientific American prize committee consisted of William McDougall, professor of psychology at Harvard; Harry Houdini, the famous professional magician and escape artist; Walter Franklin Prince, American psychical researcher; Daniel Frost Comstock, who introduced Technicolor to film; and Hereward Carrington, amateur magician, psychical researcher, author, and manager for the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino.

[8] During a séance with the cabinet-box, Crandon requested that the sides be closed so she could move her hands freely inside the cabinet.

In response, Crandon accused Houdini and his assistant Jim Collins of placing the ruler inside the cabinet to discredit her.

[10] In 1959, author William Lindsay Gresham accused Collins of placing the ruler and quoted him as saying "I chucked it in the box meself.

[citation needed] It was suggested that the psychical investigator J. Malcolm Bird actively conspired with the Crandons in stage-managing the séances in an attempt to have a sexual relationship with Mina.

[7] Historian Ruth Brandon has noted that as Bird, Carrington and Dingwall were all personally involved with Crandon, they were biased and unreliable witnesses.

[17] Magician Fred Keating who had observed Crandon at her house suggested Carrington pretended some of her phenomena baffled him in an attempt to get financial backing for his own psychical laboratory.

[18] A review by the father of modern parapsychology, Joseph Banks Rhine, lent further insight into Crandon's performances.

[8] Rhine's report documenting the fraud was refused by the ASPR, so he published it in the Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a letter to the Boston Herald attacking Rhine's "colossal impertinence...stupidity and malignancy.

Code's exchange of letters with psychic investigator Walter Franklin Prince regarding Margery is currently held in the archives of the ASPR.

After a few minutes, a narrow dark rod appeared over a luminous checkerboard which had been placed on the table opposite Crandon.

As it passed in front of Wood he lightly touched it with the tip of his finger and followed it back to a point very near Crandon's mouth.

[8] Crandon's "teleplasmic hand" that allegedly appeared in photographs was said to resemble animal tissue and trachea, cut and sewn together.

[23] Allegations were made by some conjuring historians of Houdini and mediumship that her surgeon husband had altered her genitalia and this was where she concealed her teleplasmic hand.

[27][better source needed] Crandon used a trick in an attempt to fool psychical researchers that the "spirit" voices in her séances did not come from her own mouth.

[28] Crandon's reputation was also damaged when a fingerprint left on wax ostensibly by her channeled spirit, her deceased brother, Walter, was discovered to belong to her dentist Frederick Caldwell by a member of the Boston Society for Psychical Research.

[6][19] In 1934, Walter Franklin Prince described the Crandon case as "the most ingenious, persistent, and fantastic complex of fraud in the history of psychic research.

[19] Italian skeptic investigator Massimo Polidoro has written an entire history of Crandon's mediumship and documented her tricks.

[30] In 1933, Walter Franklin Prince wrote an article for the Scientific American that claimed J. Malcolm Bird intended to publish a confession in the ASPR in 1930 admitting that an act of fraud had taken place to trick Houdini in 1924.

"[8] Part of Bird's (rejected) report to the ASPR read: The occasion was one of Houdini's visits to Boston for the purpose of the sitting... She [Crandon] sought a private interview with me and tried to get me to agree, in the event the phenomena did not occur, that I would ring the bell-box myself, or produce something else that might pass as activity by Walter...

[8] Joseph Banks Rhine, who caught Crandon free from control and kicking a megaphone during a séance, wondered why Bird, with three years of experience, did not expose any of her tricks.