Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

Duncan produced ectoplasm as readily and lustfully as she produced offspring. However the two did not typically—item SPR 197.1.6 notwithstanding—issue from the same anatomical opening. Owing to the well-publicized stunts of Margery and other 1920s mediums, those active in the 1930s were subjected to thorough body cavity searches by researchers before each séance. “Thorough” meaning:

May 14, 1931

After the séance room and cabinet had been examined, the medium was led into the room by Mrs. A. Peel Goldney…. The doors having been locked, the medium was placed upon a large settee… and in the presence of Dr. William Brown, Mrs. Goldney (who has trained and worked for many months in a midwifery hospital) made a thorough vaginal and rectal examination. The rectum was examined for some distance up the alimentary canal and a very thorough vaginal examination given.

This passage, written by magician-turned-psychic-researcher Harry Price, describes preparations for a séance undertaken in Price’s National Laboratory of Psychical Research (NLPR) in London, part of a two-month investigation of the Duncan mediumship. Price covered all the angles. He designed a special fraud-preventing “séance garment” that enrobed the entire medium, including her hands and feet, such that only her head stuck out. So even if Mrs. A. Peel Goldney had managed to miss something in her anatomical inspections, it would have been impossible for Helen to get that something out of the suit and into the open. Price’s book about the Duncan investigation includes a dozen or more photographs of the medium ensconced in her special garment. It is fashioned from satin in a loose jumpsuit style, which, in combination with Mrs. Duncan’s sizable mid-torso circumference, brings to mind late-career Elvis, or the sad clown in that Italian opera. I should point out that Mrs. Duncan was compensated for her humiliations at the NLPR. Handsomely so—five hundred pounds in all. This helps explain the medium’s seemingly inexplicable decision to risk her career in the laboratories of the NLPR.

Price was surprised and confounded to see that Helen Duncan was able, despite his precautions and within minutes of the séance beginning, to produce a six-foot-long ectoplasm. “The séance garment should absolutely preclude the secretion in or extraction from the orifices I have mentioned, even had she not been examined medically.” Forced to rule out “the vaginal-cum-rectal theory,” he came up with an equally extraordinary possibility: “That the medium possesses a false or secondary stomach (an esophageal diverticulum) like the rumen or first stomach of a ruminant, and that she is able to swallow sheets of some material and regurgitate it at leisure—like a cow with her cud.”

This was not as far-fetched an idea as it sounds—particularly in Price’s day. Search the British medical journals from the early 1900s, and you will come across lengthy articles on the subject of human ruminants: seemingly ordinary citizens who could effortlessly “bring up” portions of their most recent meal for further mastication and—quite often—enjoyment. “It is sweeter than honey, and accompanied by a more delightful relish,” a Swedish ruminator is quoted as saying in E. M. Brockbank’s “Merycism or Rumination in Man,” which ran in the February 23, 1907, issue of the British Medical Journal.

No one could say whether the condition was hereditary or learned. Brockbank cites the case of a tin worker as support for heredity’s role. “He looked upon it as a perfectly natural phenomenon, descending from his grandfather and father to himself, and to all of his sisters and brothers and to many of their children…. [His wife], a bright intelligent woman who does not ruminate, states very definitely that as soon as the children began to walk they used to bring up mouthfuls of food, which at first they spat out, later they began to rechew it, especially after a meal they liked.” Other physicians insisted the habit was passed along by imitation, citing as evidence a Swiss ruminator who lived among cows all his life, and a boy who was suckled for two years by a goat, and “acquired by imitation his foster-mother’s… habits.”

Though the act appears identical in cow and man, only in the bovine does it serve any useful purpose. Though occasional exceptions did exist, such as this 1839 Lancet case study of a farmer: “To save time, he had acquired a habit of ‘bolting’ his food… then getting on horseback, and subjecting his dinner piecemeal to mastication at his leisure.” The farmer didn’t seek medical advice until later in life, after falling into some wealth and attempting to mix with a higher cut of society, who found his habit “very disgusting.” Two papers I read implied that ruminating was accepted as normal behavior among the working class, implying that cud chewing was as common among nineteenth-century laborers as tobacco chewing among modern-day major league pitchers. These days, rumination articles are confined to literature about psychologically or developmentally impaired individuals. (Happily, there is help. A surgical technique recently perfected at the Swallowing Center at the University of Washington [25] As opposed to the Swallowing Center at Northwestern, or the Swallowing Center at the University of Southern California, or the one at Holy Cross, or the Rusk Institute, or the Nebraska Medical Center. Of course, the original “swallowing center” is a chunk of your brainstem that coordinates chewing, gagging, vomiting, coughing, belching, and licking, all with minimal fuss and no funding from the NIH. stops rumination in its tracks.)

Nor is it true that, as Harry Price suggested, human ruminants possess bovine-style multiple stomachs. This was a stubborn rumor fueled by two seventeenth-century cases of ruminating men with horns—one a unicorned Paduan nobleman and the other a bicorned monk. Autopsies of ruminants—whose stomachs were normal—put a stop to the rumor, as did a paper by a physician named Sachs, who reviewed one hundred cases of men with rudimentary horns and found only one ruminant among them. [26] I once saw a wax model of a horned human head at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, but I had no idea the condition was sufficiently common for a doctor to pull together one hundred cases for a review paper. But what do I know? Perhaps horns were the plantar warts of their day. Perhaps Sachs held a post at the Horn Center at the University of Padua.

So Harry Price was wrong to surmise that Helen Duncan was ruminating ectoplasm that she stored in an auxiliary stomach. Duncan’s was more likely a case of masterful regurgitation. Regurgitation acts were a sideshow mainstay in Price’s and Duncan’s day. In his book Regurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship , Price describes regurgitators of live goldfish and snakes, light bulbs, razors, pocket watches, bayonets, two eighteen-pound dumbbells, and a rolled umbrella. Colleague Harry Houdini watched a frog-swallower in Warsaw swallow thirty or forty glasses of beer and an unspecified number of half-grown frogs, which he would then bring up alive. I’m unclear on whether the beer helped with the process or with the man’s state of mind, or possibly that of the frogs.

Thus it is within the realm of possibility that Helen Duncan was swallowing and regurgitating sizable rolls of cheesecloth. To demonstrate the convenient compactibility of this fabric, Price bought a six-foot by thirty-inch swath, rolled it up tight, and photographed his secretary Ethel with the fabric sticking from her mouth like a Mafia gag.

Far more damning than the Ethel photo was Mrs. Duncan’s tantrum in response to a request, on May 28, 1931, that she submit to a post-séance X-ray. Price wanted to find out if she had an extra “pseudo-stomach,” and/or what was in her stomach (s). He was aware that the chances of getting a clear image through “the depths of the medium” were slim (early X-ray technology being what it was); but she was not. As the equipment was readied, Mrs. Duncan suddenly leapt from the settee, bowled over Dr. Brown, pushed aside Mrs. A. Peel Goldney, and lumbered screaming into the street. Her husband (and long-suspected accomplice) ran after her, and the two were gone for ten minutes, during which time—Price and his team suspected—she regurgitated the fabric and passed it off to him. And what a sight that must have been for genteel passersby—a panting, hysterical woman in a clown suit, throwing up a roll of cheesecloth.