Harry Houdini was perhaps the greatest illusionist/escape artist who ever lived. He jumped into icy rivers while in handcuffs and leg irons. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He hung by his ankles from the side of a building in a straight-jacket. And he devised the famous “Chinese Water Torture Cell,” in which he was shackled and suspended upside down by his ankles and submerged in a glass box full of water.
Houdini had made a career out of surviving death-defying, often superhuman escapes. It seemed that death itself could never touch the famous illusionist. But Harry Houdini did die, on Halloween no less, of 1926 at only 52. The circumstances of his death are all the more puzzling. Details of his dying remain ambiguous to this day. So what finally killed the most famous escape artist of all times?
Houdini’s real name was Erik Weisz, born in 1874 in Budapest, Hungary. The Weisz family immigrated to the U.S. when Erik was only 4 years old. He grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, his father the rabbi of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation. As a boy, he was better known for his acrobatic feats than rabbinical studies under his strict father. In 1887, Rabbi Weiss moved his family to New York City, where they lived in a East 79th Street boarding house.
At the age of only 9, Erik ran away to join the circus. He performed as a young trapeze artist, Erik – Prince of the Air! As a teenager, he moved on to Vaudeville and magic shows. He changed his stage name to Harry Houdini after the famous French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. Young Harry quickly became known as The Handcuff King, marveling audiences with his ability to escape from any type of shackles. In 1894, he fell in love and married Beatrice (Bess) Rahner, also a New York vaudeville performer. She would become the only living soul who knew all his secrets.
“What the eyes sees, and the ear hears, the mind believes” – Harry Houdini
In 1900, he made his first European tour and conducted sensational escapes from Scotland Yard and the Washington D.C. federal prison. By 1908, Houdini graduated to far more death-defying escapes like the sealed milk can full of water, hanging off a skyscraper in a straight jacket, or jumping into an icy river while shackled. He was proud of his toned, muscled physique and often performed escape attempts nearly naked to prove he had no concealed lock picks.
Houdini’s escapes and mesmerizing charisma made him a global super-star.
In 1926 at only 52, Houdini was still famous and widely popular. He had appeared in five Hollywood films and authored several books. He was touring the country yet again, performing his daring escapes with a loving Bess at his side. But that autumn, everything went terribly wrong. The end began in October while he was on tour in Montreal, Canada.
He did shows at the Princess Theater and held a lecture on phony spiritualists at McGill University. After the lecture, he answered questions from students. Among them was Samuel “Smiley” Smilovitch, who made a charcoal sketch of the escape artist. Houdini was impressed enough by the drawing to invited Smilovitch to come to the Princess Theater, in between shows, on October 22nd to do a more detailed drawing.
Smilovitch came to visit Houdini at 5 PM with a friend, Jack Price, and a freshman medical student named Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead. While Smilovitch sketched Houdini relaxing on a couch, Whitehead asked Houdini about his physical strength. The student inquired about his claim that he could withstand any punches to the stomach.
Jack Price later recalled: “Houdini remarked rather indifferently that his stomach could resist much …. Thereupon Whitehead gave Houdini two very hammer-like blows, below the belt, after securing Houdini’s nod of permission. Houdini was reclining at the time, and the said student was more or less bending over him.”
Whitehead struck Houdini hard twice before the magician gestured for him to stop.
The student surprised Houdini and hit him before he had a chance to brace himself and tighten his abdominal muscles. The punches caused the great magician visible pain. Houdini stopped Whitehead in mid-blow on the third attempt.
Price recalled that Houdini, “looked as though he was in extreme pain and winced as each blow was struck.” Houdini obviously didn’t expect Whitehead to strike so suddenly, otherwise he would have been better prepared. The next day, Harry and Bess travelled by train to his next set of performance in Detroit, Michigan. He was now experiencing abdominal pain, which he blamed on the student’s surprise gut punches.
By the time Harry got to the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, the magician had severe abdominal pain, cold sweats, and a temperature of 104 degrees! The theatre called a physician to his dressing room who diagnosed Harry with acute appendicitis. He instructed Houdini to go to a hospital immediately. But the performer insisted on doing his opening night performance. The Garrick Theater had already sold $15,000 in tickets for that evening’s show. Neither his wife nor the doctor could convince him otherwise. Houdini said, “I’ll do this show, if it’s my last.”
The performance was not his best and the show would indeed be Houdini’s last. Between the first and second acts, Bess used ice packs to cool him down. He proceeded to struggle through his routine before collapsing on the stage after the final curtain.
After the performance, Houdini still refused to go to the hospital. Harry and Bess checked into his Detroit hotel as usual. But the pain was so great that Bess called for an ambulance at 3 AM and demanded he be rushed to nearby Grace Hospital.
Doctors performed emergency surgery and successfully removed Harry’s appendix. It was already ruptured though and had infected his abdomen. He now had severe peritonitis, a difficult-to-treat condition in 1926. After a second, desperate operation on October 28th to try and remove the infected areas, the great Houdini succumbed to sepsis. Antibiotics would not be discovered for another three years. The magician clung to life until Halloween, October 31st, 1926, when he died in Bess’s arms.
His last words to her were, “I can’t fight anymore.”
The official cause of Houdini’s death was peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix. At the time, doctors believed this was a result of Whitehead’s punches in Montreal. However, we know today that cases of “trauma-induced appendicitis” are extremely rare—but in 1926, the diagnosis was widely accepted.
Houdini was buried at Machpelah Cemetery, a Jewish graveyard in Queens, New York on November 4th with over 2,000 fans and mourners present. An obituary in the New York Times commented on the shocking death of, “the man who so often had seemed to thousands to be cheating the very jaws of death.”
Poor J.G. Whitehead must have went through his life thinking he had killed the great Harry Houdini. The question still remains whether Houdini’s ruptured appendix was a result of the stomach punches or not? While the timing implies a connection, it’s is more likely that Whitehead’s punches caused Houdini to ignore the pain from a worsening appendicitis. By the time Bess convinced him to go to the hospital, it had burst and was too late for him to survive.
Rumors about his unusual death have persisted ever since. Many of the theories tend to focus on the magician’s contentious relationship with Spiritualists. Houdini had spent much of the 1920s debunking Spiritualist mediums and exposing their frauds. He even testified in front of the U.S. Congress in support of a bill to outlaw fortune-telling in Washington, D.C.
Communication with the dead, was an absolute craze in the Roaring Twenties.
World War I had killed 16 million across the globe. Then the Spanish Flu pandemic had taken 50 million more. The world was traumatized by so many losses. Not surprisingly, psychic mediums who purported to contact dead loved ones quickly became celebrities. Charlatans employed clever tricks to dupe gullible people into thinking they had supernatural abilities.
Could Harry’s de-bunking have gotten him murdered by angry members of the Spiritualist community? No autopsy was performed, however, to confirm that Houdini’s death was anything more than a burst appendix. Even poor J.G. Gordon Whitehead was thought a suspect. Was the student perhaps in league with the Spiritualists? There is no evidence, however, to connect Whitehead to any criminal plot.
The famous Boston medium Mina Crandon, claimed to conjure the voice of her dead brother, Walter, as a spirit guide to the after life. After being publicly de-bunked and humiliated by Houdini, Crandon said that Walter had proclaimed that “Houdini will be gone by Halloween.” Ironically and sadly he was.
To Crandon’s believers, Walter the ghost’s prediction and Houdini’s death proved Spiritualism was true. To others, it fueled a conspiracy theory that Spiritualists had poisoned Houdini to punish and silence him. There’s no evidence for this, so Crandon’s “curse” was purely coincidental.
In what amounted to his ultimate test of Spiritualism, Houdini promised Bess that he would try to communicate with her from beyond the grave. Bess dutifully held a séance for the next nine years on Halloween nights, attempting to contact the spirit of her late, beloved husband. The secret message they agreed upon, “Rosabelle Believe,” never came.
In 1936, 10 years after Houdini’s passing, Bess held a much-anticipated Final Séance in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. She and a few close friends lit a candle, and formed a circle holding hands. She asked one last time for some sign that he could hear them. They waited half an hour and nothing happened. Alas, her beloved Harry could not escape from beyond the grave.
“Houdini did not come through,” she declared to the public. “My last hope is gone. It is finished. Good night, Harry.”
I believe this was posted before. Interesting story though. What a way to make a living. Think he’d win AGT today?