This past Halloween marked the 91st anniversary of Houdini’s death, yet his brand is alive and well. So many of us have held a lifelong fascination for his storybook rise to fame.
For over 30 years, Harry Houdini dazzled audiences with his incredible stunts and superhuman endurance. He was a Hungarian-born (1874) American escape artist, illusionist, and stunt performer, noted for his escape acts.
In some, he jumped off bridges while handcuffed and wearing leg irons, slithered out of sealed milk cans filled with water, and devised a ‘Chinese Water Torture Cell’ in which he was submerged and suspended upside down by his ankles. Another stunt saw him buried alive and only just able to claw himself to the surface, emerging in a state of near breakdown.
The story of Houdini trapped under the ice of a frozen river is a powerful part of the Houdini lore. Even though Houdini himself told this story, it’s considered to be questionable. However you be the judge?
This engagement was held near Pittsburgh. On that particular day, the river had been frozen to a depth of seven inches. A hole was cut in the ice just below the bridge and everybody, a crowd of several thousand persons had arrived to watch.
Houdini’s version of the event:
Near Pittsburg, with the handcuffs and chains in place, I was put into a trunk and the trunk bound with ropes and chains. It was dropped into the river through the hole in the ice. The handcuffs and chains about my arms and legs and the bound trunk offered no more than the usual difficulties, but when I found myself free of them all, I discovered that I had drifted with the current and when raising my head it bumped against the seven inches of ice. I couldn’t determine where the hole might be..
I knew that I must breathe, already under the water longer than the allotted time. But I didn’t give up. Instead, I found an “air pocket,” leaving an inch or more of room between the surface of the water and the ice above. I lay flat, tight up against the ice, and breathed. I realized the water came in little intermittent waves and that by keeping my face close against the ice I could move about and get an occasional breath.
It seemed at the last minute, I sensed the spirit of my dead mother. She guided me to the hole and suddenly I popped up through it. The men reached down and lifted me out onto the ice, wrapped me up and hurried me to my hotel. Everyone believed I had drowned.
Houdini’s name even appeared in a dictionary in 1920: “Houdinize: to release or extricate oneself from, as by wriggling out.”
In the 1920s, after the death of his mother, Houdini began focusing his energy on debunking psychics and mediums. Although he eventually focused on proving these people to be fakes, his initial entry into the world of the supernatural began when he attempted to contact his dead mother.
He began investigating the medium’s methods becoming a self-appointed crusader against them. He knew he could duplicate their methods on stage and it was not long before his efforts to reach his mother became secondary to his need to expose the frauds.
In 1925, Houdini opened a new show that included his debunking of psychics and mediums. In every city Houdini offered $10,000 to anyone who could exhibit supernatural phenomena that he could not emulate. The shows all sold out.
Harry Houdini, the most celebrated magician and escape artist of the 20th century, died in a Detroit hospital. Some days earlier after a lecture in Montreal he was bragging about the strength of his stomach muscles to withstand hard blows. Suddenly, one of the students punched Houdini twice in the stomach. The magician was unprepared and the blows ruptured his appendix.
Bess Houdini offer $10,000 to anyone who could contact her husband. In 1928, Arthur Ford announced that he had received a message from Houdini himself. Bess Houdini validated the message as it mentioned the code she had shared with her husband before his death.
I gather a séance does work if the right person is contacted!
