page_title: Mina Crandon
section_title: Fraud
hierarchical_section_title: Mina Crandon / Fraud
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph taken in the early 1920s of Mina Crandons mediumship. The photographs reveals her fake "spirit" hand.
context_page_description: Mina "Margery" Crandon was a well known psychical medium who claimed that she channeled her dead brother, Walter Stinson. Investigators who studied Crandon concluded that she had no genuine paranormal ability, and others detected in her outright deception. She became well-known as her alleged paranormal skills were touted by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and were disproved by legendary magician Harry Houdini. Crandon was investigated by members of the American Society for Psychical Research and employees of the Scientific American.
  Crandon was the wife of a wealthy Boston surgeon and socialite, Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon. Her life has been extensively documented in magic and psychical literature.
context_section_description: Crandon's "teleplasmic hand" that allegedly appeared in photographs was said to resemble animal tissue and trachea, cut and sewn together. 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. The "hand" did not move after its appearance on the table before her. It lay still as if it were dead and then supposedly vanished. She refused to wear tights, or to be internally searched, but no proof that Crandon had been surgically altered has ever been published. The "hand" appeared only when Crandon sat next to her husband, who held or controlled her right hand.
  There are photos of the alleged teleplasmic hand and its position. It appeared to be coming from Crandon's groin. Various members of the audience in the séances touched the hand and described it as dead. It was also suggested that Crandon's husband may have sneaked it into the séance room. The "teleplasmic hand" was later exposed as a trick when biologists examined the hand and found it to be made of a piece of carved animal liver.
  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. According to magician John Booth this was performed by Crandon filling her mouth with water before the séance had started and when the lights were turned off, swallowing the water. Before the end of the séance she would refill her mouth with water from a corked test tube. 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. Her dentist divulged that he had taught her how to make these prints.
  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." Crandon continued to perform until her early death in 1941, at about the age of 53.
  Italian skeptic investigator Massimo Polidoro has written an entire history of Crandon's mediumship and documented her tricks.
caption: Mina Crandon with her "spirit hand" which was discovered to be made from a piece of carved animal liver.
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