Mina Crandon

[[File:Houdini with Malcolm Bird and Mina Crandon.jpg|thumb|right|165px|Harry Houdini (left), Malcolm Bird (back), Mina Crandon (middle), O. D. Munn (right) in 1924]]
{{Psychic}}
'''Mina Crandon''' (1888-1941, née Stinson) also known as "'''Margery'''" was an [[United States|American]] [[Spiritualism|spiritualist]] [[medium]].

==Biography==
Crandon grew up on a farm in [[Canada]] but moved to Boston as a young woman. She married Earl Rand, a grocer. They had one son. She later met Dr. LeRoi Goddard Crandon when she entered a Dorchester, [[Massachusetts]], hospital for an operation. Dr. Crandon was her surgeon. She later divorced Rand and married Crandon. 

Her second husband, Dr. Crandon, was a wealthy Boston physician and professor of surgery at Harvard. Both Crandon and her husband took interest in [[spiritualism]] and took part in [[seance]]s. She claimed to be able to contact her deceased brother Walter by [[mediumship]] and her seances were widely reported, causing much publicity and controversy.

Crandon died an [[alcoholic]] in 1941.

==Fraud==
[[File:Mina Crandon Fraud Ectoplasm.jpg|thumb|left|Crandon in a seance with an [[ectoplasm]] hand made out of animal tissue.]]
Crandon was a famous medium in the 1920s known for producing [[ectoplasm]] during her seance sittings. She produced a small ectoplasmic hand from her stomach which waved about in the darkness. Her career ended however when biologists examined the hand and found it to be made of a piece of carved animal liver.<ref>[http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mNGno8qc9IkC&pg=PT30&lpg=PT30&dq=mina+crandon+%22liver%22&source=bl&ots=oHePBCFd1-&sig=AFBE7D-S21LBRzYA1MejFiZW8is&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Z1zPUPOTNueS0QWzsIHADQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA Ghosts, Apparitions and Poltergeists: An Exploration of the Supernatural through History]</ref> The escape artist [[Harry Houdini]] had also exposed the mediumship tricks of Crandon.

Crandon also claimed to produce wax impressions of spirit fingerprints but was exposed as a fraud as she had been using moulds of fingerprints from her living dentist Dr. Kerwin and pretended in the [[seance]] room that they were [[spirit]] fingerprints from her deceased brother Walter. According to Zusne and Jones (1989), "When in 1932 it was discovered that the spirit fingerprints left behind on a piece of wax (spirit fingerprints had become a specialty of Margery's) were those of Margery's dentist, very much alive, rather than those of Walter, the Boston Society for Psychical Research published a report on it, describing Margery as the most ingenious and persistent fraud in the annals of psychical research."<ref>Leonard Zusne, Warren H. Jones ''Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking'' 1989, p. 217</ref>

The Italian skeptic Massimo Polidoro has written an article that has documented the fraud of Crandon.<ref>[http://www.cicap.org/new/stampa.php?id=101010 Houdini ''v.'' The Blond Witch of Lime Street: A Historical Lesson in Skepticism]</ref>

==Sexual activities==
Crandon's husband was known for displaying nude photographs of her in her [[mediumship]] sessions. Mina Crandon was described as a very beautiful lady who men found "too attractive for her own good". Psychical investigator Malcolm Bird was actively conspiring with the Crandons in stage-managing the seances in an attempt to have a [[sexual]] relationship with Mina. Reports, however, suggest that Mina found Bird repulsive. Instead she held amorous affections for the [[psychical researcher]] Hereward Carrington with whom she had an affair.<ref>William Kalush, Larry Ratso Sloman The Secret Life of ''Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero'' 2006, pp. 419-420</ref>

==See also==
*[[Eusapia Palladino]]

==References==
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[[Category:Paranormal]]

Categories: Paranormal