by I’ll be posting more about the sad story of Mina Crandon later, she was a well-known medium who lived in Boston (and in New York for a time). But I found a reference to Margery (the name she went by in order to protect her identity) in a May 10, 1947 Saturday Evening Post article about Bell Labs by Milton Silverman titled, Ma Bell’s House of Magic.
“In a purely extracurricular study, they observed the famous medium, Margery, as she attempted to send thought messages from New York to another medium on Boston.” After the seance the engineers dryly reported, “As a means of communication, the method does not hold much promise at this time. It will probably not replace the telephone in the foreseeable future.”
Before writing this book I would never have believed that Bell Labs would have shown an interest in Margery, (even as a matter of idle curiosity, as they seem to imply in this article) but I was always on the lookout for things like this—any interest in the paranormal from labs, universities, the military and businesses—and I found them often.
The photograph is courtesy of the The Libbet Crandon de Malamud Collection.
