Houdini

The final episode of the 2024 Spooktacular talks about the life of Harry Houdini. Houdini would rise from a challenging childhood to becoming a world-renowned escape artist and magician. This episode talks about his iconic acts, his marriage to Bess, and his role in debunking fraudulent mediums during the Spiritualism movement. This episode also talks about his rivalry with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini’s death on Halloween in 1926, and the annual séances that are held in his memory. 

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Transcript

Harry Houdini

Hello everyone! This is the fifth and final episode of the 2024 Spooktacular, and … well, it’s a good one! I’m going to be talking about Harry Houdini today. Why I picked Houdini as a topic for The Spooktacular, and the episode to come out on Halloween specifically will all make sense to you as this episode goes on, but I think it’s perfect, and I’m really excited to get started!

His birth name was Erik Weisz – Harry Houdini was the stage name he took, and it’s the name he’s known to history as, so I’m going to be referring to him as Houdini throughout this episode.  Houdini was born in Budapest, Hungary on March 24, 1874. He came from a large family and had six siblings. 

The family moved to the US in 1878. They lived in Appleton, Wisconsin. Houdini’s father, Mayer Samuel Weiss was rabbi. Mayer lost his job, and the family moved to Milwaukee, where they fell into poverty. In 1887, Mayer and Houdini moved to New York City and lived in a boarding house. Once they found permanent housing, the rest of the family came to New York from Wisconsin.

So things were better for the family, and they were all together again, but they weren’t financially secure. As a child, Houdini would work several jobs. He made his public début as a trapeze artist when he was nine, calling himself ‘Ehrich, the Prince of the Air’. Houdini was also a champion cross country runner as a child. This athleticism will be important later. 

When he was a teenager, Houdini was coached by the magician Joseph Rinn at the Pastime Athletic Club. Houdini became a magician in 1891 – he was about 17. He took the stage name Houdini from the name of the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. It’s said that Houdini added an "i" to Robert-Houdin's name, thinking the ‘I’ meant ‘like’ in French – so ‘Houdin-like’. As for the ‘Harry’ part, in later life, Houdini claimed that the name Harry, was an homage to American magician Harry Kellar, who he also admired. It’s also said that the name Harry came because Houdini's childhood nickname in his family was ‘Ehrie’ or ‘Harry’. I’m not exactly sure which one of those stories is accurate, but they both sound plausible to me.

Houdini was in a tent act with a strongman, he performed in dime museums and sideshows, and even performed in a circus, but he wasn’t exactly successful. At this point he was focusing on card tricks, and he was mostly thought of by other magicians as ‘a competent but not particularly skilled sleight-of-hand artist who lacked the grace and finesse required to achieve excellence in that craft’. Houdini would perform with his brother Theodore, who had the adorable stage name ‘Dash’. They would perform as ‘The Brothers Houdini’. They performed at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. I’m going to stop right here for a second, because you know who else was involved in the 1893 Chicago World Fair? Fellow Spooktacular subject H.H. Holmes! There’s a show called Timeless that has an episode where some people go back in time and are at the 1893 Chicago World Fair … they end up trapped in H.H. Holmes’ murder castle and are helped to escape the murder castle by Houdini. It’s a fun episode! Sorry to get sidetracked, I’ll get back to Houdini’s story now.

Houdini soon began experimenting with escape acts. In 1894, Houdini met a fellow performer Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner. She went by Bess though, and so that’s how I’m going to be referring to her. Bess and Dash dated for a while, but Bess would end up marrying Houdini and would end up replacing Dash in The Brothers Houdini – the act became known as simply ‘The Houdinis’. Bess would be Houdini’s stage assistant for the rest of his life.

Then in 1899, Houdini got his big break. He met manager Martin Beck in St. Paul, Minnesota. Beck saw an escape from handcuffs Houdini did, was impressed, and advised Houdini to concentrate on escape acts. Beck booked Houdini on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.

Within months, Houdini was performing at the top vaudeville houses in the country. Then, in 1900, Houdini went on a tour in Europe.

While in London, Houdini met with William Melville, the first chief of the British Secret Service Bureau, and gave him a demonstration of escape from handcuffs at Scottland Yard. Melville was super impressed, and Houdini was booked at the Alhambra for six months. Houdini’s show was a hit!

Houdini started appearing in theatres all over the world. He performed escape acts, illusions, card tricks, and outdoor stunts, and would become one of the world’s highest paid entertainers.

In Europe, Houdini became widely known as ‘The Handcuff King’. In each city he visited, Houdini would have the local police restrain him with shackles and lock him in their jails. In Moscow, he escaped from a Siberian prison transport van. Houdini said that if he hadn’t been able to free himself, that he would have had to go all the way to Siberia, where the only key was kept.

Houdini did face some sceptics though: when he was in Colone, Germany a police officer said that Houdini made his escapes through bribery. Houdini sued this police officer, and won this case when he opened the judge’s safe. Houdini would later say the judge had forgotten to lock it.

While in Europe in 1902, Houdini went to Blois, France wanting to meet Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin’s daughter-in-law for an interview, and to get permission to visit Houdin’s grave. Houdini didn’t get permission, but still visited the grave. Houdini felt that he hadn’t been treated fairly, and would later write about this in his magazine saying that he’d been ‘treated most discourteously by Madame W. Emile Robert-Houdin’. And it seems like he held a grudge over this, because a few years later in 1906 he would send a letter to the French magazine L'Illusionniste where he said: ‘You will certainly enjoy the article on Robert Houdin I am about to publish in my magazine. Yes, my dear friend, I think I can finally demolish your idol, who has so long been placed on a pedestal that he did not deserve.’

Houdini enjoyed his success. He even bought a dress for his mother that was said to have been made for Queen Victoria. He then had a huge reception for all his relatives where he presented his mother in the dress. Houdini said it was the happiest day of his life. Houdini returned to the US in 1904 where he bought an expensive brownstone in New York City.

A popular as Houdini was in Europe, he was also a huge hit in the US. He freed himself from jails, handcuffs, chains, ropes, and even straitjackets – often while hanging from a rope in front of street audiences. Because of imitators, Houdini ended his ‘handcuff act’ in 1908. Instead, he began performing different escapes, like escaping from a locked water-filled milk can. This was real, very dangerous, and audiences absolutely loved it. Houdini also added an escape challenge act, where he would invite fans to devise an apparatus that could hold him. There were things like nailed packing crates, riveted boilers, wet sheets, and mail bags. Houdini even escaped out of the belly of a whale that had washed ashore in Boston, which … sorry, but … gross.

A lot of these challenges were arranged with local merchants with tie-in marketing, which was a new concept for the time. One other important difference with Houdini was that while others doing similar things claimed they were being helped by ‘spirits’, Houdini’s advertisements showed him making his escapes through teleportations, although to  be clear, Houdini himself never claimed to have supernatural powers.

Houdini also performed a straitjacket escape which was performed behind curtains at first, with him popping out free at the end. But Houdini and his brother, who was also an escape artist, noticed that audiences were more impressed when there weren’t curtains, and they could watch him struggle to get out. The brothers would perform straitjacket escapes while dangling upside-down from the roof of a building in the same city on several occasions.

Houdini did a lot of research on his craft of magic, and wrote a collection of articles its history. He would later expand this in a book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin which was published in 1908. Yes, that’s two years after he wrote the letter about Robert-Houdin to the French magazine. In this book, Houdini attacked his former idol Robert-Houdin as a liar and a fraud for having claimed the invention of automata and effects such as aerial suspension. I told you Houdini could hold a grudge! To be fair, many of the allegation in Houdini’s book were dismissed by magicians and researchers who defended Robert-Houdin, and magician Jean Hugard would later write a full rebuttal to Houdini’s work. I haven’t read this book, and don’t have any skin in the game as to who’s correct, but … I’d be lying if I didn’t say that my gut feeling is that I’m inclined to believe Houdini.

During his career, Houdini would explain some of his tricks in books written for the magic brotherhood. In the 1909 book Handcuff Secrets, Houdini revealed how many locks and handcuffs could be opened with properly applied force, others with shoestrings. He also said that other times, he carried hidden lockpicks or keys. He also explained that when tied down in ropes or straitjackets, he gained wiggle room by enlarging his shoulders and chest, moving his arms slightly away from his body. 

In 1912, Houdini introduced his Chinese Water Torture Cell trick, which he would perform for the rest of his life. In this trick, Houdini was suspended upside-down in a locked glass-and-steel cabinet full of water, holding his breath for more than three minutes.

One of Houdini’s most famous non-escape stage illusions was a trick that he bought from a magician named Charles Morritt. Houdini made a full-grown elephant vanish from the stage of the Hippodrome Theatre in New York City in 1918.

Houdini also served as president of the Society of American Magicians from 1917 until his death in 1926. I love this, because this shows how devoted Houdini was to magic. He wanted to create a large, unified national network of professional and amateur magicians. When he traveled, he would give long, formal speeches to the local magic club, and usually threw a banquet for the members at his own expense. He was quoted as saying ‘The Magicians Clubs as a rule are small: they are weak … but if we were amalgamated into one big body the society would be stronger, and it would mean making the small clubs powerful and worthwhile. Members would find a welcome wherever they happened to be and, conversely the safeguard of a city-to-city hotline to track exposers and other undesirables.’ With the Society of American Magicians, Houdini had created the most successful and longest-surviving organization of magicians in the world. It now has almost 6,000 dues-paying members and almost 300 assemblies worldwide. I love that!

Houdini was also President of the Magicians' Club of London.

In 1919, Houdini moved to Los Angeles to be in movies. It wasn’t very successful, and he gave it up in 1923 saying that quote ‘the profits are too meager’.

In 1923, Houdini became president of Martinka & Co., America's oldest magic company. The business is still in operation today.

In the final years of his life, Houdini launched his own full-evening show, which he billed as ‘Three Shows in One: Magic, Escapes, and Fraud Mediums Exposed’.

What did Houdini mean by that last part? Something else that was going on during Houdini’s lifetime was The Spiritualism Movement. I’ve talked about Spiritualism on this podcast before, but a brief definition of it is: a 19th and early 20th century religious movement that focused on communicating with the dead through mediums - thanks, Google! Houdini was not really a fan of Spiritualism. Houdini was always pretty clear that the illusions he performed were just that: illusions. He practiced and trained very hard to do these illusions, and was very clear that what he performed were illusion, not ‘magic’. Houdini believed that many of the people who claimed to be psychics and mediums weren’t being honest, and that they were frauds who were taking advantage of bereaved people. In the 1920s, Houdini started debunking and exposing these fake psychics and mediums. Through his training in magic, he was able to expose frauds who had been able to fool scientists and academics. There was a magazine called Scientific American that had a committee that offered a cash prize to any medium who could successfully prove supernatural abilities, and Houdini was a member of this committee. This prize was never collected. As Houdini’s reputation as a ‘medium-buster’ grew, Houdini started attending séances in disguise, with a reporter and a police officer.

Houdini would go on to debunk many frauds, which he wrote about in his book A Magician Among the Spirits.

One of Houdini’s most famous debunkings actually costed him a friendship. Houdini was friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who created Sherlock Holmes. There isn’t an episode of Door Key about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but he’s definitely been mentioned a few times. I just love it when people I’ve done episodes about or even mentioned in previous episodes make cameos like this! Anyway, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a firm believer in spiritualism, and didn’t believe in Houdini’s debunkings. In fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle started to believe that Houdini himself was a powerful spiritualist medium and that he’s used his paranormal abilities to perform his tricks. Doyle even accused Houdini of using these paranormal powers to block the powers of the mediums he had debunked! This ended up causing a huge disagreement between the two friends. This really came to a head in 1922. Doyle’s wife Jean was a self-proclaimed medium, and she claimed that she could contact Houdini’s mother, who had died in 1913. Houdini was a sceptic about Spiritualism, but I kind of like to think of him like Mulder from The X-Files – he wanted to believe. So he agreed to this séance. The séance was held. During this séance, Jean wrote down messages that appeared to be from Houdini’s mother, including one that said ‘Thank God! At last, I’m through!’ The messages were 15 pages of English, opening with a cross drawn on the page. Houdini let Jean finish, but at the end revealed that his mother didn’t speak English, and that she was Jewish, so wouldn’t have drawn a cross. This made Houdini sad, but it also made him angry. He would write scathing reports about this séance, calling Jean a fraud. This disagreement became public, leading Doyle to view Houdini as an enemy. 

Houdini died on October 31, 1926. He was 52 years old. The cause of his death is listed as peritonitis, which is swelling of the abdomen. This swelling was possibly related to appendicitis, but also possibly related to punches to his abdomen he had received about a week and a half earlier. Let me explain: Houdini had a performance on October 22 in the Princess Theatre in Montreal. Two students Jacques Price and Sam Smilovitz saw Houdini talking to a guy named Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead in his dressing room. Houdini was laying back on a couch because he’d broken his ankle while performing a few days earlier. According to the witnesses, Whitehead asked Houdini quote ‘if he believed in the miracles of the Bible’ and ‘whether it was true that punches in the stomach did not hurt him’. Houdini casually replied that his stomach could endure a lot. Whitehead then delivered quote ‘some very hammer-like blows below the belt’.

Houdini is said to have winced at each punch, and stopped Whitehead, gesturing that he’d had enough. He hadn’t had time to prepare himself for the punches. Remember, Houdini had a broken ankle, so couldn’t rise from the couch and put himself in a better position to brace himself for the punches.

Houdini would go on to perform that night even though he was in great pain. He was in constant pain for the next two days, but didn’t go to a doctor. When he finally did, he had a fever of 102 Fahrenheit, which is 39 Celsius, and acute appendicitis. Doctors advised him to have immediate surgery. Houdini turned down the surgery as he had a show in Detroit Michigan. He would perform that night with 104 degree fever (that’s 40 degrees Celsius). This would be his last performance. There are reports that he passed out during the show, but was revived and continued. After the show, he was hospitalized at Detroit’s Grace Hospital, where he would die on October 31.

There’s speculation about Houdini’s appendicitis, whether it was there before he got punched in the stomach or if the punch caused it. I won’t be getting into that here. There’s also speculation that Houdini was killed by spiritualists who were angry about Houdini’s Anti-Spiritualism. I won’t be getting into that either except to say that in my personal, uneducated, speculative opinion that’s not true.

Houdini's funeral was held on November 4, 1926, in New York, with more than 2,000 mourners in attendance. He was interred in the Machpelah Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, with the crest of the Society of American Magicians inscribed on his grave site. 

But I’m not done talking about Houdini yet, I want to talk about his afterlife. Remember I said earlier that Houdini was a sceptic when it came to Spiritualism … well, he was, but like I said earlier, I think he wanted to believe. Before Houdini died, he and his wife Bess made an agreement that if it were possible to communicate from the beyond after death, that he would contact her with a secret message. My understanding is that the secret code they agreed to was ‘Rosabelle believe’ – Rosabelle was their favorite song.

Bless Bess’ heart, she held yearly séances on Halloween for ten years after Houdini's death, hoping to hear from him. In 1936, after the last unsuccessful séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel, she put out the candle that she had kept burning beside a picture of Houdini since his death. In 1943, Bess would say that ‘ten years is long enough to wait for any man’. My heart. Can I just say that I want to give poor Bess a big hug?

Bess would die of a heart attack on February 11, 1943. She was 67.

The tradition of holding a séance for Houdini continues to this day, held by magicians throughout the world. The Official Houdini Séance was organized in the 1940s. Yearly Houdini séances are also conducted in Chicago at the Excalibur nightclub on behalf of the Chicago Assembly of the Society of American Magicians. There’s also one held at the Houdini Museum in Scranton by magician Dorothy Dietrich. 

And remember how I said earlier that there were theories that spiritualists had murdered Houdini? Well on March 22, 2007, Houdini's great-nephew George Hardeen announced that the courts would be asked to allow exhumation of Houdini's body to investigate the possibility of Houdini being murdered by spiritualists. The family of Bess Houdini opposed the application and suggested it was a publicity ploy. In 2008, it was revealed the parties involved had not filed legal papers to perform an exhumation. Which, thank goodness … I’m usually all in favor of testing like this to solve mysteries, but in this case I don’t think there’s a need for it, and I say let poor Houdini rest in peace.

And that’s it for 2024’s Spooktacular – all 5 episodes of it! I had so much fun doing it, and I really appreciate you all for listening! If you’re new to Door Key because of the Spooktacular, I’m so glad you’re here! Episodes of Door Key are about regular, non-spooky history topics when it’s not October, and I hope you’ll stick around to check it out.

Now that the Spooktacular is over, Door Key will be returning to its regular every-other-Thursday schedule. However, Door Key is going to be taking a break, so I’ll be talking to you all about a regular, non-spooky history topic once it returns.

Wordpress / PBS.org  / Britannica  / Wikipedia

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