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Con. In Ghosts I Have Talked With,† Psychologist McComas tells how he started investigating spiritualism good-naturedly a decade ago, learned wariness and wiliness as he went along. On one of his early researches, wearing plus-fours and a gay demeanor, he went to see a slate-writer. The slate-writer informed him coldly that conditions were not right that morning, hinted that he need not return any other morning. After that Dr. McComas wore sombre clothes and a solemn face when dealing with psychic practitioners.
Dr. McComas has visited all sorts of mediums, remarkably good and ludicrously bad, and he does not believe in ghosts or ghostly manifestations for the reason that he has been shown nothing he cannot fathom, either by his own observation and experiment or through suggestions from others. He was acquainted with the late famed Harry Houdini, inexorable foe of mediums. He learned that if a face were painted on a sheet with colorless anthracine and invisible ultraviolet light were played on the sheet in darkness, the face would emerge in ghastly luminescence.
The ablest medium that Dr. McComas ever encountered was a small, shy Pennsylvania Dutchman named Cartheuser. A onetime automobile mechanic, Cartheuser had a harelip, presumably a cleft palate, a pronounced speech defect. He gave seances in Dr. McComas' own study, where there were no trick gadgets. A dim, shaded light was hung almost to the floor, so that sitters and medium were ordinarily invisible. A trumpet banded with luminous paint stood on the floor. The trumpet would rise, swing toward the medium's chair, sail around the room, tapping heads playfully here & there. It would sidle up to a sitter's ear, whisper, "Hello, hello, hello." Cartheuser had three "spirits": a scholarly family doctor, an uproarious Indian, a little girl named Elsie whose personality as revealed in her talk was charming. None of these voices had the medium's speech defect.
Dr. McComas caught the trickster first by persuading him to let a stenographer take notes behind a screen. After eyes grew used to the darkness enough light filtered through the screen for the psychologist to see the dim figure of the medium rise from his chair, pick up the trumpet, move it about, whisper in it, all without making the slightest untoward sound. Dr. McComas solved the voice problem by applying a stethoscope to Cartheuser's throat. At first he was mystified to get no throat sounds when "Elsie" was talking, soon discovered that Cartheuser at such times was deftly pinching off the stethoscope tube. That the little man could produce three clear, different voices despite his mouth defects was a feat of super-ventriloquism. Cartheuser was a virtuoso of vocal cord control.
Not the ablest but the most celebrated of Dr. McComas' mediums was "Margery" of Boston, vivacious, attractive wife of Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon. Connoisseurs of the ghostly art were so enthusiastic about her that they professed willingness to let their case rest on her alone. Dr. McComas was appointed to head a commission to investigate Margery for the American Society for Psychical Research. The other commissioners were two eminent Johns Hopkins scientists, Psychologist Knight Dunlap and Physicist Robert Williams Wood.