The Houdini Conspiracy

Houdini later theorized and rationalized away all the phenomena his pamphlet exposes on the seances.  He explained everything that Margery produced as a result of her being a clever contortionist able to contort her limbs to extremes that made her able to ring bells, produce lights and make physical objects fly through the air all without leaving her seat.  She was a ventriloquist able to speak in low tones and laugh in feminine tones simultaneously.  For Houdini's hyper-skeptical mind, this was the only explanation possible.  But he failed to expose any of the phenomena as fraud like he had so many lessors even though sitting next to her, holding her hand.  He was not confident enough. So, he came up with a ridiculous contraption that he surmised would make Margery's performance impossible.  He would construct a wooden box, place the medium in it and completely encase her so she would scarcely be able to move.  It resembled the stocks that prisoners were put in during medieval and old colonial times.  It immobilized the neck and arms. The box had eight separate locks, Houdini was so obsessed with locks, with three holes only, for Margery's head and her two arms.  And as Conan Doyle later remarked, it was beefy enough to contain a gorilla rather than a petite woman.  But Houdini was desperate at this point to change the mind of the Committee judges and decided he had to risk all in an exuberant blitz of misdirection and obfuscation.  After all, these men were eggheads and knew nothing about illusion. He should be able to plant doubts in their minds. First, he had to shut down the medium's phenomena and this was the best way, so he thought.  The stakes couldn't be higher. All America was watching, and Houdini's reputation was riding on it.  He had to come out the victor by hook or by crook and he knew it.  He was clearly out of his league now and had to find a way back to familiarity and safety, back to his scorched earth tactics on the small timers.  They were easy marks, whereas this was quickly turning into a disaster.  Houdini had written extensively by now, sent letters far and wide that documented his boasting and his protestations that all Spiritualism was a fraud. If now he had to eat all those words, he would choke to death, so to speak, and become the laughingstock of the whole world and be its master fool, not its master showman. This is something that the vain, conceited ego of Houdini could not suffer.  If this medium Margery upstaged him now, all would be lost.