Escape artist Harry Houdini is shown before being lowered in a packing crate into the ice-covered Detroit River in 1907.
AP photo
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AP photo
This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of legendary magician Harry Houdini.
He earned his reputation by freeing himself from traps that seemed impossible for a mere mortal to survive. But Houdini could not escape the ultimate fate that awaited him in Detroit on October 31, 1926, and his spirit still haunts the Motor City.
A life defying death
Houdini performed in Detroit 19 times between the beginning of his career in 1894 and the last performance of his life in 1926.
The trajectory took him from low-billed actor to one of the most famous artists in the world.
He escaped the darkness by declaring that no set of handcuffs or prison cells could hold him. He hung upside down from office buildings, clad in a straitjacket, removing them dramatically in full view of those watching excitedly below. Sometimes the buildings housed a local newspaper, providing free publicity for upcoming Houdini shows.
In 1906, Houdini jumped two dozen feet from Detroit’s Belle Isle Bridge into the freezing river below, secured with two sets of police handcuffs. He emerged unscathed, but the legend around him grew. According to the story, the escape artist had jumped into a hole in the ice covering the river, finding pockets of air to breathe before finally surfacing.
Reports from the time show that the river was not actually frozen. But that didn’t stop movies decades later from depicting him that way.
He even scared his assistants
As his fame grew and a series of other magicians began copying his escapes, Houdini raised the stakes, piling one more and more death-defying feat on top of one another.
In 1914, he unveiled his signature waterfall, the Water Torture Cell, a coffin-sized box filled with water.
Houdini was lowered into it headfirst, his ankles and the top of the box locked. A curtain was raised to hide the magician’s method of escape from the public.
Even Dorothy Young, who toured with Houdini as a stage assistant when she was 17 and had seen the act several times, had goosebumps.
“Mrs. (Houdini) was always standing backstage because they had a secret code in case he couldn’t get out,” Young said in an interview with NPR in 2004. “I was always watching because it was very exciting!”
Houdini’s Last Show
Young was the last surviving person to work with Houdini before his death in 2011.
A few years before his death, Young recalled how many films had exaggerated the circumstances of Houdini’s demise. As at least one film shows, he did not have to struggle dramatically to escape the torture cell.
Houdini’s death likely stemmed from an incident just before his arrival in Detroit.
Houdini regularly boasted that he could withstand any blow to the stomach. In his dressing room at a show in Montreal, a college wrestler accepted this challenge and punched him several times before Houdini could tighten his muscular abdomen.
“One time he showed me he had a way of doing it,” Young said. “And to think those boys didn’t give him a chance to protect himself.”
Houdini was in great pain and doctors advised him to rest. But he refused to cancel a series of shows already scheduled in Detroit.
Houdini was under financial pressure to fulfill his contract, according to Jeremy Dimick, curator at the Detroit Historical Museum.
Dimick said Houdini only managed one performance.
“He doesn’t have the strength to put on makeup before the show and he collapses during intermissions of the show,” Dimick said. “And then he literally has to be transported from the Garrick Theater back to his hotel.”
Houdini was taken to Grace Hospital, where doctors found that he had ruptured his appendix.
Several days and two surgeries later, on Halloween, Houdini breathed his last.
Houdini’s haunts in Detroit are gone
Today, the theater, the hotel and even the hospital have disappeared.
The Detroit funeral home that embalmed him became an art school for girls, which eventually closed its doors.
But twenty years ago, Juanita Hammond, then the school’s principal, took visitors up a creaking staircase to a locked storage area with a recessed floor once used to drain bodily fluids from corpses.
“Houdini was displayed here by Hamilton Funeral Home, in this room here,” Hammond said during a 2004 tour.
Hammond said some students feared the magician’s presence would never leave the school.
“Some people say, ‘I’m not going back to the kitchen because I might see Houdini,'” she said.
In search of his mind
The escape artist’s wife, Bess Houdini, spent years trying to see or speak with her husband after his death. She held session after session in search of his ghost, although the magician himself spent his final years denouncing mediums who he believed preyed on the bereaved.
But during a session on Halloween, a decade after her husband’s death, Bess Houdini finally said goodnight to Harry.
She re-enacted the scene in a film a few years later, appearing in a cameo as herself.
“And you remember what he always said about these things? That it was impossible for the dead to come back,” she said. “This proves that he was right. Because if it had been possible, I would have received a sign from him in the last 10 years.”
I’m still trying to make contact
That hasn’t stopped others from trying to reach the Great Houdini in the afterlife, sometimes incorporating old bits of his stage act.
At the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan, about 100 miles west of Detroit, John Sherwood knocked on an empty, weathered metal tin can from Houdini’s workshop that was the centerpiece of several sessions.
“It’s the Houdini milk can,” Sherwood said. “Houdini would jump in while it was filled with warm water, and he would be locked inside with six Mastodon padlocks.”
As in the torture cell, a screen surrounded the milk can to prevent the audience from seeing how Houdini escaped.
He invited the audience to try to hold their breath while he did so.
After several minutes with no sign of Houdini, the crowd shouted for his assistants to let him out.
In reality, Houdini would have run away long before and would be behind the scenes reading a newspaper while the tension rose.
Finally, when the crowd’s anxiety was at its peak, Houdini’s assistants doused him with water – since he was then dried – and the Master of Suspense emerged from behind the screen, panting theatrically.
The audience would burst into joy.
Will Houdini come back for a bite?
Decades later, Sherwood said session participants surrounded Houdini’s milk can and other artifacts as they tried to contact him.
Sherwood said some sessions attempted to bring the magician back to the land of the living “by essentially appealing to Houdini’s Jewish heritage by placing a salmon and bagel sandwich in the milk can and inviting Houdini’s spirit to take a bite.”
Sherwood is orchestrating another session this Halloween. Although previous attempts were unsuccessful, Sherwood said the centennial of Houdini’s death might be the perfect time for the magician to appear, if only for Houdini’s showmanship.
“I always said the greatest publicity stunt Harry Houdini ever pulled was dying on Halloween, because after that the mythology about him grew by leaps and bounds,” he said.
It also sparked conspiracy theories. Was Houdini’s death certificate altered to make it appear he died on Halloween? Was the wrestler who hit him a hitman sent by angry psychics to murder the escape artist?
In a way, Houdini’s death mirrors the stunts he pulled in his life – wrapped in…
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