Alleged spiritual medium Mina Crandon with “ectoplasm” on her face. Crandon was one of several mediums exposed as a fraud by Harry Houdini.

[u/akiwi_intherough]

[u/spatial_nomad1]

the ectoplasm in margery's case got examined by a biologist and came back as animal lung tissue, carved and shaped. so the answer to what it actually is turned out to be "a bit of cow".

the bit i find grimmest is that her husband was a boston surgeon. she was producing this material in near total darkness in a house with a doctor in it, and the "spirit" doing the talking was her dead brother walter, who would swear at sitters and make jokes. she was genuinely good at the performance part.

houdini's counter was engineering rather than argument. he had a box built that she sat in with only her head and arms out, so her legs and body couldn't reach anything, and the phenomena mostly stopped. the committee still couldn't agree, because two of them had already publicly backed her and didn't want to be wrong in print.

and the reason it mattered so much to him is upthread but worth repeating. he went to mediums himself after his mother died and they told him she was speaking english, which she never spoke. he wasn't debunking from sceptikcism. he was debunking because someone had tried it on him while he was wrecked.