Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Hungary in 1874. When he was four, he emigrated to the US with his mother Cecelia and four brothers to meet with his father Herman, who had already moved to the States a few years before. They settled in the town of Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father was a Rabbi at a small Reform congregation. The family’s relative poverty imprinted a drive to be successful on the boy who would be Houdini. By the age of nine, in part to help support his family, Erik began working as a trapeze performer in circuses. In 1882, his family moved to New York City. Erik began performing in Vaudeville shows, then considered to be the top of the entertainment pyramid, though at first Erik didn’t make much impact.
Harry Houdini began to draw attention
In 1891, a 17-year-old Erik and friend Jacob Hyman created an act that included a basic set of card and magic tricks called “The Brothers Houdini.” In 1892 after the death of Erik’s father, “The Brothers Houdini” took their show on the road, performing at dime museums and small theaters. In 1894, Erik married 18-year-old Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner or Bess, who became his stage assistant. The pair toured as “The Houdinis.” But life as traveling performers was hard. In 1898, the 25-year-old Houdini considered quitting the business altogether, burnt out from years on the road.
In 1899 while performing in a beer garden in St. Paul, Minnesota, Harry Houdini caught the attention of one Martin Beck, a man of influence in the world of Vaudeville. After watching Houdini escape from a pair of handcuffs, Beck gave Houdini a pair of his own handcuffs to try to escape from, Houdini did so with ease. Beck put the Houdinis on the influential Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit. This meant the husband and wife would perform fewer shows but for more money. Houdini’s profile began to rise as an escape artist and he gained admiration for his skill at manipulating locks and pure brute strength.
Houdini also attracted thousands for the pure drama and showmanship of his performances. A typical act would see Houdini bound with chains and tossed in a box that was locked, roped and weighted. He then would be tossed into water. Houdini of course escaped every time. In 1908, Houdini premiered his infamous milk can trick. First, a milk can filled with water was inspected by audience members. A handcuffed Houdini was then squeezed into the milk can, which was sealed with six padlocks. A curtain was drawn and the audience held their breath along with the submerged magician. Within two minutes, Houdini would somehow break free and emerge from behind the milk can with it still padlocked. In his lifetime, no one ever knew how he did it.
Houdini created his own illusions
Houdini had a penchant for not just creating his own amazing illusions but performing other magicians’ tricks as well, only better. For instance, British magician Charles Morritt pioneered a trick where he made a live donkey disappear on stage. Houdini paid Morritt for the rights to perform the trick and then figured out how to do it, but with an elephant. According to John Cox, author of the Houdini website “Wild About Harry,” quote, “We still don’t know how he did the elephant trick. He would Houdini-ize these more common feats of magic. His mind was always innovating, always inventing.”
Part of the reason why more than 100 years later, we still don’t know the exact tricks behind Houdini’s performances is because he guarded his secrets so well. Though he was wary of imitators, Houdini didn’t patent his tricks since in the patent process, he would have to give a detailed explanation for how they worked. Those explanations would be publicly available and therefore destroy the magic. To get around this, for his Chinese water torture cell trick, Houdini staged the trick on stage in England as a one act play with only a single person in the audience. This allowed him to copyright the act instead of patenting it, meaning no one else could perform the trick and how he pulled it off could remain a secret.
Harry Houdini detested claims of otherworldly powers
While Houdini cultivated an air of mystery around his death-defying feats, he never claimed his abilities to be supernatural. In fact, Houdini grew to detest claims of otherworldly powers, becoming one of the leading critics of the spiritualist movement that was gaining momentum in Europe and the United States in the wake of World War I. In the 1890s, Houdini and his wife Bess dabbled in practicing spiritualism, attempting to summon the dead in public after researching names at local graveyards. It didn’t take Houdini long to realize the entire practice was nonsense.
According to famous magician Teller, quote, “when you are a professional magician, you want to see your art respected for what it is, not misused to mislead people about the universe.” Houdini would ultimately go on to attend seances undercover, exposing the mediums as simply skilled performers. He would also recreate their tricks at his own shows, asserting there was nothing supernatural about it.
In all, Houdini spent years attempting to expose mind readers and mediums as con artists duping an otherwise ignorant audience who might be suffering genuine grief. And while mediums and seances were no strangers to public doubt, Houdini’s vendetta was personal. In 1913, while Houdini was in Sweden to perform for their Royal Family, Cecelia Weiss, Houdini’s mother passed away. Houdini, a self-proclaimed mother’s boy was reportedly so stricken by the news that he fainted and wept uncontrollably. In the aftermath, though he had already concluded personally that spiritualism was a con, he nevertheless searched in vain for a real medium to try to contact his deceased mother.
Houdini took part in a seance
In 1922, Houdini was invited to a seance being held by Lady Doyle, the wife of his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of “Sherlock Holmes.” Sir Doyle believed through spiritualism he could communicate directly with his son Kingsley, who had tragically died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Further, Sir Doyle believed Houdini himself possessed supernatural abilities, something Houdini adamantly denied. Nevertheless, it appears Sir Doyle’s admiration for Houdini’s otherworldly gifts was at least partially the reason why the two celebrities’ friendship began.
At the seance conducted by Lady Doyle held at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, the hostess rapped on the table three times and claimed to be in contact with Houdini’s mother. Lady Doyle wrote out 15 pages of messages for Houdini, who thanked the Doyles and left quietly. While many may have scoured the pages for some comfort from a loved one beyond the grave, Houdini seethed. The pages were all in English, a language his mother never spoke.
The seance with the Doyles seems to have been the final straw for Houdini, who now set out to expose spiritualists as frauds with renewed determination. Harry Houdini had already written a book, “Miracle Mongers and Their Methods: A Complete Expose of the Modus Operandi of Fire Eaters, Heat Resisters, Poison Eaters, Venomous Reptile-Defiers, Sword-Swallowers, Human Ostriches, Strong Men, etc.” Which exposed the tricks and trades of various sideshow-level acts claiming miraculous feats.
Houdini targeted mediums
Houdini followed that book up with “A Magician Among the Spirits,” a scathing expose on the spiritualist trickery. He also went forward with a 40-page illustrated pamphlet dedicated to taking down one popular medium in particular, Boston’s Mina Crandon, also known as Margery. The pamphlet was appropriately titled quote, “Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium Margery.”
Houdini also began lecturing around the country about “Fraudulent spiritualistic phenomena”, going so far as to testify before Congress in 1926, lobbying for a bill to regulate mediums and fortune tellers, potentially threatening to charge those “pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation,” with a crime. Unfortunately for Houdini, his campaign would be a short-lived one.On October 11th, 1926, Houdini broke his left ankle during a performance in Albany, New York. Being a goddamned professional, Houdini finished the performance and went against doctor’s orders by traveling to his next set of performances in Montreal.
Harry Houdini complained of stomach cramps following punch from local student
While in Montreal, Houdini took time out of his schedule for one of his favorite pastimes, giving a lecture at McGill University about what fraudulent hucksters spiritualists were. After a matinee performance several days later, some medical students from McGill visited Houdini in his dressing room. One of the students, Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, presumably because Houdini’s reputation as a jacked dude with incredible strength preceded him, asked if he could punch the magician in the stomach. Houdini said “yes” but before he could tighten his gut, the student dealt a few fast and hard blows.
Houdini began to complain of stomach cramps that evening. During a 15 hour train ride to his next show in Detroit, Houdini was in a great deal of pain, both from his stomach and his shattered ankle, arriving in the Motor City with a 104 degree fever. A doctor was brought to the theater and diagnosed Houdini with acute appendicitis. He told the magician he needed to get to the hospital immediately. Houdini refused, apparently declaring “I’ll do this show if it’s my last.”
Houdini somehow made it through the show and eventually his wife convinced him finally go to a hospital. On October 24th, Houdini had an emergency operation to remove his already burst appendix. He underwent a second operation on October 28th. But on October 31st, 1926, Harry Houdini succumbed to a severe case of sepsis.
Harry Houdini Death Theories
Whitehead’s meathead desire to hit another person accidentally caused the appendicitis that led to Houdini’s demise.
However according to a 2013 study in the World Journal of Emergency Surgery, appendicitis as the result of blunt force trauma is extremely rare, to the extent that there is still debate whether it could ever happen. Of course, there’s still the possibility that Houdini was developing appendicitis independently of the punches. Either way, this theory postulates that Houdini was simply the victim of random bad luck and that refusing medical treatment certainly did not help matters.
Whitehead was an assassin sent to try to murder Houdini by punching him to death.
Houdini had no shortage of enemies, whether it was the other magicians he was constantly belittling, the individual mediums he was writing pamphlets discrediting or the entire field of spiritualism that he was lobbying to make illegal. Perhaps someone got fed up with Houdini and wanted to prevent him from doing any more damage.
Admittedly, this theory’s a little weak. As we already said, trauma-caused appendicitis, if it even exists at all, is very rare. So it would be a pretty ineffective assassin who chooses that as their preferred means of murder.
Someone from the spiritualist underworld poisoned Houdini while he was in the hospital.
We’ve already mentioned the spiritualist community’s potential motivation for assassination and according to a Houdini biography, “The Secret Life of Houdini,” poisoning was their preferred method of murder.
Despite receiving death threats, Houdini and Bess traveled without security. Apart from explaining why random med school students could punch him on a whim, this means there would have been plenty of opportunity for a spiritualist with a syringe to get to a Houdini while he recovered from surgery. Houdini was buried without an autopsy, meaning there is no evidence to disprove or prove this theory.
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