Harry Houdini

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A man stands on a vaudeville stage and works a sealed slate, a small folding trumpet, and an ordinary table; under the gaslight the slate fills with writing no hand has touched, the trumpet rises and floats, the table raps out answers to questions. The audience has seen, a few minutes earlier, the same effects attributed in a darkened parlor to the returning dead. Harry Houdini’s point, made again and again in the last decade of his life, was that he had produced them by the methods of his trade — and that anyone who knew those methods could do the same. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, the son of a rabbi whose family emigrated to the United States when he was a small child, he is remembered twice over: as the most celebrated illusionist of his age, and as the period’s most relentless exposer of mediums who claimed to summon the dead.

From Appleton to the handcuff act

The family that landed in 1878 settled first in Appleton, Wisconsin, where Mayer Samuel Weiss held a rabbinical pulpit; the surname was anglicized to Weiss and the boy’s name to Ehrich. The pulpit did not last, and the household moved through Milwaukee to New York under steady financial strain, the kind of immigrant poverty that left a permanent mark on a child who would spend his adult fortune lavishly and give much of it away. He took the name Houdini in homage to the French conjuror Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the watchmaker-magician who had professionalized stage magic in the nineteenth century; the borrowing was an act of devotion he would later, characteristically, turn against its object in a debunking book that demolished the very legend he had once revered. His younger brother Theodore performed the same craft under the name Hardeen, and the two worked the dime museums and beer halls before the break came.

Fame arrived around 1899 with the handcuff act, which the impresario Martin Beck moved onto the major vaudeville circuits. Houdini would challenge any police force to restrain him, slip their irons, and walk free; the escapes grew larger — the milk can, the straitjacket dangled above a city street, the Chinese Water Torture Cell — until he was among the most recognized performers alive. What underlay every one of them was a discipline of method: a complete, unsentimental command of how an effect of the impossible is engineered, how attention is steered, how a confederate is concealed, how a lock yields. That discipline is the hinge of the whole story. The man who could free himself from any restraint had, by training, an exact map of how marvels are manufactured — and that map he eventually turned on the séance room.

The post-war surge and the campaign against the mediums

Spiritualism, the movement holding that the living can communicate with the departed through gifted mediums, had grown out of the Hydesville rappings of 1848 and the harmonial cosmology of the Poughkeepsie seer Andrew Jackson Davis, itself layered on the older substrate of Mesmerist trance — the magnetic somnambulism descended from Franz Anton Mesmer and the wider practice of mesmerism that had taught the nineteenth century to expect lucid speech and hidden knowledge from a body apparently asleep. The movement had crested and receded once already. After 1918 it surged a second time, carried on the mass bereavement of the First World War and the influenza that followed: a generation of parents and widows who had buried their dead far away, often without a body to bury, and who came to the séance for one more word. Houdini understood the grief exactly, because he carried his own, and he never mocked the bereaved. His contempt was reserved for the medium who sold them a forgery.

The campaign of his final decade was methodical, not theatrical, and this is its distinctive feature. He knew from the inside every device by which a confederate might rap a table, float a luminous trumpet, or produce writing on a sealed slate — the slate-writing effect, perfected a generation earlier by mediums in the line of Henry Slade, he reproduced at will by ordinary substitution and palming. He attended séances in disguise, sometimes with a stenographer and a plainclothes officer planted in the circle, and afterward stood up to reveal himself and reproduce the manifestation in full light. He maintained a corps of undercover investigators who preceded him into each city on tour, the chief of them Rose Mackenberg, who in assumed names and characters sat with local mediums days ahead of his arrival, gathered the patter and the fraud, and handed him the case ready-made. He gave a public lecture-demonstration in which any spirit phenomenon a sitter cared to name was performed and then exposed.

His 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits (Harper & Brothers) laid out the case at book length, working through the historic mediums one by one — the Fox sisters, the Davenport brothers, Slade, Eusapia Palladino — and through the mechanics of each class of effect. The book’s argument was not that the supernatural is impossible; it was narrower and harder to answer. A man trained in deception, watching a marvel he has himself reproduced by trickery, is the person best placed to say whether trickery will account for it — and in every case he had personally tested, it did.

The Scientific American committee and Margery

The most consequential of those tests came through Scientific American, which in 1922 offered a cash prize to any medium who could produce a genuine psychic manifestation under controlled conditions. The investigating committee drew together the Harvard psychologist William McDougall, the psychical researchers Walter Franklin Prince and Hereward Carrington, the physicist Daniel Frost Comstock, and Houdini — a panel deliberately mixing the credulous, the cautious, and the hostile, of the kind that the Society for Psychical Research in London had pioneered when Henry Sidgwick and Eleanor Sidgwick built their protocols of control around mediums like Eusapia Palladino, and when William Crookes had taken the instruments of the laboratory into the séance with results that divided the scientific world.

The leading contender was Mina Crandon, the wife of a prominent Boston surgeon, who sat under the name “Margery” and produced, in trance, the voice of her dead brother Walter along with rappings, levitations, and the ringing of a bell in a sealed box. Carrington was persuaded; several of the committee leaned toward awarding the prize. Houdini, attending the Boston sittings in July 1924, was not, and he said why in concrete terms: with his trained sense of a body’s position in the dark he judged that she freed a hand or a foot to work the effects. For the decisive sittings he built a wooden confinement cabinet — the sitters called it the Margie Box — that left her head and hands free to be watched but pinned the rest of her. The séance failed inside it; an accusation of a planted ruler and the collapse of trust between Houdini and Carrington followed. In early 1925, with the Crandons declining further tests under his controls, the committee voted to withhold the prize. The Margery case became the most bitterly fought episode of his campaign and the one in which the value of a conjuror on such a panel was most plainly demonstrated and most fiercely resented.

The break with Conan Doyle

The campaign brought him into open and painful conflict with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The two had been genuine friends. Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had become after 1916 the most prominent Spiritualist in the English-speaking world, his conviction hardened by the wartime dead, and he had at first taken Houdini’s own escapes for true supernatural feats — a dematerialization, he suggested, rather than a trick. The rupture began at Atlantic City in June 1922, when Doyle’s wife, Jean, who practiced automatic writing, held a sitting at which she filled page after page in the voice of Houdini’s late mother. Houdini, who had longed for exactly that contact, found the message impossible to accept: it was written in fluent English, a language his mother had barely spoken; it was headed with a Christian cross, incongruous from a rabbi’s widow; and it said nothing of the fact that the day was her birthday. He concluded, with grief rather than triumph, that Lady Doyle had channeled her own kindness and not his mother at all.

The friendship did not survive the publication of A Magician Among the Spirits, after which Doyle broke off contact. Each man was certain the other had mistaken the nature of the marvelous. Doyle held that Houdini possessed real mediumistic powers he perversely refused to admit, and that his exposures only proved how strong those powers must be; Houdini held that the phenomena Doyle trusted were tricks, and that a great mind could be deceived precisely because it did not know how the trick was done. Neither moved the other an inch, and the loss of the friendship was real on both sides.

Washington and the fortune-tellers

In February 1926 the campaign reached the federal capital. Houdini testified across four days before the House Committee on the District of Columbia on a bill to make fraudulent fortune-telling a crime in the District. He demonstrated mind-reading and cold-reading on the spot, exposed the methods, and argued that the trade preyed on the grieving and the desperate. The hearings turned into chaos — mediums and their husbands packed the room, order broke down, police were called, and Houdini was nearly struck. The bill did not pass. But the four days fixed in public memory the figure he had become: not a showman attacking a rival entertainment, but a man insisting, in front of the legislature, that the power to detect a fraud belongs first to the person who can commit it.

Grief, the code, and the lapsed vigil

What he was reaching for runs underneath the whole campaign. Houdini had been extraordinarily close to his mother, and her death in 1913 left him grieving for the rest of his life; the Atlantic City séance wounded him so deeply precisely because he had wanted it to be true. He is reported to have said, even while tearing the fakes apart, that he hoped to find a single medium who was not one, and never did. With his wife, Bess, he made the arrangement that has outlasted almost everything else about him: a secret code, drawn from the spelling cipher of their old two-person mentalism act, by which — if the dead could speak at all — he would send back a prearranged message. The phrase was “Rosabelle, believe,” after the song she had sung when they met, the word inscribed inside her wedding ring.

He died of peritonitis, from a ruptured appendix, on 31 October 1926 — Halloween — nine days after a McGill University student in Montreal had punched him in the abdomen to test his standing claim to absorb any blow. Whether the punches caused the rupture or merely preceded it has never been settled medically; the appendix was already infected. Bess held a séance for the code on the anniversary of his death each year afterward. On the tenth, on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood on Halloween 1936, before a large gathering and an inner circle of thirteen, nothing came that she would accept as the message. She put out the candle she had kept burning beside his photograph and ended the vigil, saying ten years was long enough to wait.

Sources and scholarship

The standard modern biography is William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero (Atria, 2006), which documents the debunking campaign and the network of undercover investigators in detail; Kenneth Silverman’s Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (HarperCollins, 1996) remains the most careful scholarly life. Houdini’s own A Magician Among the Spirits (Harper & Brothers, 1924) is the primary statement of his case and is in the public domain. The séance-fraud controversies that framed his campaign are set in their period by Frank Podmore’s skeptical history Modern Spiritualism (Methuen, 1902, 2 vols.) and, from inside the movement, by Doyle’s The History of Spiritualism (Cassell, 1926). On the methods of the investigating committees, the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research document the control protocols that researchers like the Sidgwicks and Carrington brought to mediumship; the relevant early volumes are openly readable through the Internet Archive’s hosting of the SPR Proceedings. The Margery case generated its own literature, including Houdini’s 1924 pamphlet Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium “Margery” and the committee members’ competing accounts, and remains the test case for what a trained conjuror can contribute to the evaluation of a psychic claim.

His standing rests less on any single exposure than on the principle he made his own: that the verdict on a marvel begins with the person who can build one. He spent the last years of a career given to manufacturing the impossible insisting that a manufactured wonder be told apart from a wonder that was not — and the test he proposed was simply to put, in the room with the medium, the one person who already knew how the effect was done.

→ Related: Hereward Carrington · Henry Sidgwick · Eleanor Sidgwick · William Crookes · Eusapia Palladino · Spiritualism · Victorian Psychical Research Spr · Mesmerism · Franz Anton Mesmer