While at Mr. Feilding’s home in London I had the pleasure of meeting
this Dr. Crawford and talking with him for several hours. During the
talk he showed me pictures of what he claimed was ectoplasm exuding
from different parts of Kathleen Goligher’s body and told me he was
going to use them in a forthcoming book.
“Do you honestly believe that everything you have experienced through
your contact and experiments with the girl is absolutely genuine?” I
asked him.
“I am positive in my belief,” he answered.
After he had gone Mr. Feilding turned to me and asked:
“What do you think of Dr. Crawford?”
“He seems mad to me,” I answered.
“Houdini, you are mistaken,” he replied.
Nevertheless I do not think that Dr. Crawford was the right man or had
the right sort of a mind for an investigation. To me his credulity
seemed limitless. E. E. Fournier d’Albe’s report of Dr. Crawford’s
seance with the Goligher Circle coincides with my judgment. In a
communication addressed to “Light” in August, 1922, d’Albe referring to
his own tenth seance says:
“I found to my surprise that I could myself with some little
management, produce the phenomena with my feet exactly as I had
observed them.”
Dr. Von Schrenk-Notzing[101] charged d’Albe with entering his
investigation with “prejudice against the genuineness of the Goligher
phenomena.” This d’Albe denied, saying:
“I had gone to Belfast fresh from Eva C’s seance with a strong
conviction of reality and with firm faith in Dr. Crawford’s
reliability and accuracy. I expected a gifted medium surrounded
by her honest folks, but then came the blows: first, the
contact photographs, then the evidences of trickery. The sight
of the ‘medium’ raising a stool with her foot, filled me with
bitter disappointment. _The simple, honest folks all turned out
to be an alert, secretive, troublesome group of well-organized
performers._”
Here is the experience of a man, who, with a mind _prejudiced in
favor_, entered upon a series of tests expecting full confirmation of
impressions already gotten from his experiences with Eva C., but though
ready to believe, not biased against the conclusions or rational
deduction. His summary, though brief, is worthy of note:
“The Goligher Circle has repeatedly been urged, by myself
and others, to submit to further investigations by a fresh
investigator, but so far without success. If it does consent, I
can predict two things with confidence:
I. No genuine psychic phenomena will be observed.
II. No evidence of fraud will be obtained, as the members of
the Circle are exceedingly wary, and the evidence of trickery
which I obtained was gathered under conditions which they had
not foreseen, but which they will doubtless avoid in the future.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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