"I am Houdini, and you are a fraud!"
Saint No. 9: Harry Houdini
Harry Houdini was a skeptic who wanted to believe. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century Spiritualism was extremely popular - had essentially attained the status of a religion - and Houdini had encountered it often. Being a professional magician, stage "mentalist" or mind-reader, and escape artist, he recognized the tricks that spiritualists and mediums used to produce ghostly effects and to pretend to genuinely read minds. However, he did not turn his attention seriously to debunking Spiritualism until after the death of his beloved mother, Cecelia Weiss. The wife of his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, offered to contact her for him. However, writing though Lady Doyle, the Hungarian Jewish Mrs. Weiss drew a cross on the paper and wrote a fluent message in English, a language she never learned to speak.
Houdini was, to say the least, unconvinced (though Conan Doyle was not, and later took it personally when Houdini stated that he had never seen a genuine psychic experience.) He began seeking out mediums, looking for the genuine article, but ruthlessly exposing them all as one by one he found the evidence of their fraudulence. He joined the panel from Scientific American magazine that had offered a $2500 reward to any medium who could prove her psychic gifts were genuine, and eventually added five thousand dollars of his own money. That was during probably his most famous public battle with a psychic, his effort to expose Margery Crandon, "The Blond Witch of Lime Street." He never proved to the satisfaction of the general public that she was a fraud, but he did convince the Scientific American panel that her evidence did not merit the cash reward.
(Houdini's friendship with Conan Doyle fractured over this incident and they fought it out in print. If you think drama is somehow endemic to LiveJournal, believe me, there have been ways to air your drama in public like a whiny bitch for many, many decades.)
Before he died, Houdini agreed with his wife and lifelong assistant Bess that if it were possible, he would try the experiment from the other side; if there really were any way for spirits to communicate with the living, that he would find a way to talk to her, and they agreed on a secret message to ensure that it was really him. Bess duly held a seance on the anniversary of Houdini's death for the next ten years; but Houdini never appeared. Indeed, in 1929 a medium actually produced the secret phrase: "Rosabelle, believe," expressed in the code that they had used in their stage mentalist act years before - but it turned out that Bess had accidentally revealed the phrase more than a year before, and the evidence was worthless. She quite sensibly decided that ten years was enough, and that what her husband had actually managed to provide from beyond the grave was one more piece of evidence that Spiritualism was bunk; and gave the seances up as a bad job in 1936. However, more credulous Houdini fans continue the tradition to this day.
As a crouchback and vvvexation have pointed out, Houdini's legacy of exposing psychic charlatans and frauds is being carried on in the present day by James "the Amazing" Randi, another successful magician and escape artist. He has founded the James Randi Educational Foundation to research paranormal claims and promote critical thinking. The JREF has raised the prize for a demonstrable example of paranormal activity to one million dollars.
The prize remains unclaimed.
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