Escape artist Harry Houdini is shown before being lowered in a packing crate into the ice-covered Detroit River in 1907.
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This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the legendary magician Harry Houdini.
He earned his reputation by freeing himself from traps that seemed impossible for a mere mortal to survive.But Houdini couldn’t escape the ultimate fate waiting for him in Detroit on Oct. 31, 1926, and his spirit still haunts the Motor City.
A life defying death
Houdini performed in Detroit 19 times between the early days of his career in 1894 and the final show of his life in 1926.
The trajectory took him from being a bottom-of-the-bill act to one of the most famous entertainers in the world.
He escaped obscurity by declaring no set of handcuffs or jail cell could hold him. He dangled upside down from office buildings wearing a straitjacket, dramatically removing them in full view of those raptly watching below. Sometimes the buildings housed a local newspaper, ensuring free publicity for Houdini’s upcoming stage shows.
In 1906, Houdini jumped two dozen feet from Detroit’s Belle Isle Bridge into the frigid river below, bound with two sets of police handcuffs. He emerged unscathed, but the legend around it grew. The escape artist had leaped into a hole in ice covering the river, the story went, finding air pockets to breathe in before finally surfacing.
Reports from the time show the river was not actually frozen. But that didn’t stop movies decades later from portraying it that way.
He even scared his assistants
As his fame grew, and a series of other magicians began copying his escapes, Houdini ramped up the stakes, stacking one increasingly death-defying feat on top of another.
By 1914 he had unveiled his signature stunt, the Water Torture Cell, a coffin-sized box, filled with water.
Houdini was lowered into it head first, both his ankles and the top of the box locked. A curtain was raised to hide the magician’s method of escape from the audience.
Even Dorothy Young, who toured with Houdini as a stage assistant when she was 17-years-old and had seen the act many times, had goosebumps.
“Mrs. [Houdini] always stood in the wings because they had a secret code in case he couldn’t get out,” Young said in a 2004 interview with NPR. “I always watched because it was very exciting!”
Houdini’s final show
Young was the last surviving person to have worked with Houdini before she, too, died in 2011.
A few years before her death, Young recalled how many movies exaggerated the circumstances of Houdini’s demise. He did not, as at least one movie depicts, dramatically struggle to escape the torture cell.
Houdini’s death likely stemmed from an incident just before his arrival in Detroit.
Houdini routinely boasted that he could withstand any blow to his stomach. In his dressing room at a show in Montreal, a college wrestler accepted that challenge and punched him several times before Houdini could tighten his muscular midsection.
“One time he showed me that he had a way of doing it,” Young said. “And to think those boys didn’t give him a chance to get himself protected.”
Houdini was in severe 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, a curator at the Detroit Historical Museum.
Dimick said Houdini only made it through one performance.
“He doesn’t have the strength to put his makeup on before the show, and he’s kind of collapsing during the intermissions of the show,” Dimick said. “And then he has to be literally carried from the Garrick Theater back to his hotel.”
Houdini was taken to Grace Hospital, where doctors found he had ruptured his appendix.
Several days and two surgeries later, on Halloween, Houdini breathed his last.
Houdini’s Detroit haunts have vanished
Now the theater, the hotel, even the hospital are gone.
The Detroit funeral home that embalmed him became a girls’ art school, which also eventually shut its doors.
But two decades ago, the then-head of the school, Juanita Hammond would take visitors up a creaky set of stairs to a locked storage area with an indented floor once used to drain bodily fluids from corpses.
“Houdini was laid out here by the Hamilton Funeral Home, in this room here,” Hammond said on a tour in 2004.
Hammond said some students worried the magician’s presence never left the school.
“Some say, ‘I’m not going back to the kitchen because I might see Houdini,'” she said.
Searching for his spirit
The escape artist’s wife, Bess Houdini, spent years trying to see or talk with her husband again after his death. She held séance after séance searching for his ghost, though the magician himself spent his final years exposing psychics he said preyed on the bereaved.
But at a séance on Halloween a decade after her husband’s death, Bess Houdini finally said good night to Harry.
She reenacted the scene in a movie 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 return,” she said. “This proves he was right. For if it would have been possible, I would have had some sign from him in the past 10 years.”
Still trying to make contact
That has not stopped others from trying to reach the Great Houdini in the great beyond, sometimes incorporating old pieces of his stage act.
At the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Mich., about 100 miles west of Detroit, John Sherwood banged on an empty, aged metal can from Houdini’s workshop that has been the centerpiece of several séances.
“That is the Houdini milk can,” Sherwood said. “Houdini would jump into this while it was filled with warm water, and he would be locked inside with six Mastodon locks.”
Like the torture cell, a screen surrounded the milk can to prevent the audience from seeing how Houdini escaped.
He would invite the audience to try to hold their breath while he was doing it.
After several minutes with no sign of Houdini, the crowd would scream for his assistants to let him out.
In reality, Houdini would have escaped long before and would be backstage reading a newspaper while the tension built.
Finally, with the crowd’s anxiety at a fever pitch, Houdini’s assistants would splash him with water — since he had dried off by then — and the Master of Suspense would emerge from behind the screen, theatrically panting.
The audience would erupt in cheers.
Will Houdini return for a bite to eat?
Decades later, Sherwood said séance participants would surround the milk can and other Houdini artifacts as they tried to contact him.
Sherwood said some séances have tried to coax the magician back to the land of the living “by essentially appealing to Houdini’s Jewish heritage by placing a lox and bagel sandwich into the milk can and invited Houdini’s spirit to take a bite out of it.”
Sherwood is orchestrating another séance this Halloween. Though previous attempts were not successful, Sherwood said the centennial of Houdini’s death might be the perfect time for the magician to appear, if for no other reason than Houdini’s sense of showmanship.
“I’ve always said that the greatest publicity stunt that Harry Houdini ever pulled off was dying on Halloween because after that the mythology about him grew by leaps and bounds,” he said.
It has also conjured conspiracy theories. Was Houdini’s death certificate altered to purposely make it appear he died on Halloween? Was the wrestler who punched him a hitman sent by angry psychics to assassinate the escape artist?
In some ways Houdini’s death mirrors the stunts he performed in life — shrouded in mystery.
