The Witch of Lime Street

The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I did not know anything about the Spiritualism movement during the 1910-1930. I had no idea Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a huge promoter of it in Europe and America, that Houdini felt it was his duty to debunk mediums, or that Scientific American ran a contest to find an authentic medium. That being said, this history does tend to drag on a bit long, and can be somewhat confusing--the medium was in a closet, but could move things around with her head? There are a lot of characters and the author's choice to sometimes conceal who he is talking about at the beginning of chapters made it more confusing. Also, some of the parts that seemed especially intriguing, a hit and run with the victim found in his doorway, kids disappearing, affairs between judges and the medium--were not investigated very deeply. I don't know if there was a lack of documentation, but after about the 50th description of seances, I was ready to discover something real.

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the inventor said that "the time will come when science will be able to prove all the essentials of what faith has asserted."