Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  What was not widely known was that Houdini had a great personal interest in the claims of spiritualism and a vast research library in his Harlem brownstone spanning the arcana not only of magic but also of spiritualism, “soul return,” and the occult. One friend called this enormous library a “fearful and wonderful thing.” His reasons for this obsession were personal: He longed to make contact “across the veil” with his beloved mother. After her death, he began visiting mediums across the United States and Europe in hopes of making contact.

  But as the years went by, without success, Houdini became increasingly scornful of the so-called trance mediums he had visited, maintaining that any of the spooky phenomena they seemed to manifest could be replicated by any decent magician, using un-supernatural tricks. Toward the end of his life, demonstrating how “fraud mediums” engineered their effects became part of Houdini’s most popular stage act.

  But at the same time, in private, he remained an earnest if unconvinced seeker.

  In the early spring of 1920, having followed Conan Doyle’s celebrated career as a spiritualist in the newspapers—though the two men had never met—Houdini sent Doyle a copy of his first book. The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin was the story of his own deep study of, and later disenchantment with, his idol. (Houdini came to believe that many of Robert-Houdin’s famous illusions had been pirated from other magicians.)

  In the book, Houdini also discussed the intriguing case of the Davenport brothers, a pair of famous illusionists who claimed that their phenomena were accomplished by means of supernatural power. In their most famous act, the brothers were tied up and placed in a box filled with musical instruments; after the cabinet was closed, the instruments could be heard merrily playing. When the box was opened, the brothers were still tied up as they had been at the beginning.

  Houdini maintained that the Davenports had wowed their audiences with mere stage magic. In the letter he sent to Doyle with the book, he also suggested that many spiritualists had later confessed to fraud.

  On March 15, 1920, Sir Arthur wrote back to Houdini from his East Sussex home, Windlesham Manor: “I have always wondered whether the Davenport brothers were ever really exposed. As to Spiritualist ‘Confessions,’ they are all nonsense. Every famous medium is said to have ‘confessed,’ and it is an old trick of the opposition.” At the end of his brief, breezy letter, Doyle added, “Some of our people think that you yourself have some psychic power, but I feel it is art and practice.”

  Houdini wrote back promptly and cheerily, tucking in a photograph of himself with Ira Davenport, whom he had met just before Davenport’s death in 1911. (In his usual meticulous way, Houdini had studied the Davenports’ case so thoroughly that Davenport allegedly told him, “Houdini, you know more about myself than I do!”)

  “I envy you the privilege of having met Ira Davenport,” Doyle wrote back cordially. “How people could imagine those men were conjurers is beyond me.” And thus began a long and fascinating epistolary relationship, followed by a series of personal meetings, described as “one of the strangest friendships in history,” in a 1933 book by Hereward Carrington and Bernard Ernst, who knew both these extraordinary men well and had access to their personal letters and diaries.

  Nowadays, these two remarkable men might be known as “frenemies,” but one extraordinary thing that emerges from their letters is clear evidence that even when they bitterly disagreed, they held each other in high esteem. Both men were gentlemen, through and through. In one letter to Houdini’s wife, Bess, Doyle wrote that Houdini “was a great master of his profession and, in some ways, the most remarkable man I have ever known.” Elsewhere, in his book The Edge of the Unknown, Doyle writes, “In a long life which has touched every side of humanity, Houdini is far and away the most curious and intriguing character whom I have ever encountered.”

  In his private letters, Houdini always reciprocated with a respectful doff of the hat, addressing the author as “My dear Sir Arthur.” In his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits, Houdini writes that Doyle’s name “comes automatically to the mind of the average human to-day at the mention of Spiritualism.… There is no doubt that Sir Arthur is sincere in his belief and it is this sincerity which has been one of the fundamentals of our friendship.”

  After their initial contact, the letters became increasingly chummy and lighthearted. Trying to set up a face-to-face meeting with Houdini while he was in New York, Doyle wrote, “Until Thursday is over I shall be in a turmoil. Then, when I can breathe, I hope to see you—your normal self, not in a tank or hanging by one toe from a skyscraper.” Elsewhere he wrote, “All good wishes to you, my dear Houdini. Do drop these dangerous stunts.”

  But the primary subject of most of these letters was spiritualism and the truth or falsity of the claims offered by the many mediums, table tippers, psychics, and mind readers currently practicing in the public square. In general, Doyle frankly admitted that there were plenty of fakes—with a caveat. “A retinue of rogues has been attracted to Spiritualism by the fact that séances have been largely held in the dark, when the object has been to produce physical phenomena,” he wrote. “This has served as a screen for villainy. When such a fraud has been discovered it has naturally come before the police courts and been reported in the papers, while the successful work of the honest mediums gets no public notice.” But Doyle also took this claim one step further, adding (incorrectly), “I am sure no medium has ever deceived me.”

  The character of the two men emerges in the letters and writings that chronicled their friendship. Doyle observed that “a prevailing feature of [Houdini’s] character was a vanity which was so obvious and childish that it became more amusing than offensive. I can remember, for example, that when he introduced his brother to me, he did it by saying, ‘This is the brother of the great Houdini.’ This without any twinkle of humor and in a perfectly natural manner.”

  For his part, Houdini complained that though he never doubted Doyle’s sincerity, “he has refused to discuss [psychic phenomena] in any other voice except that of Spiritualism and in all our talks quoted only those who favored it in every way, and if one does not follow him sheep-like during his investigations then he is blotted out forever so far as Sir Arthur is concerned.”

  Sometimes Doyle’s comments were more revelatory of himself than of Houdini. At one point, he wrote to the magician, “I see that you know a great deal about the negative side of Spiritualism—I hope more on the positive side will come your way. But it wants to be approached not in the spirit of a detective approaching a subject, but in that of a humble, religious soul, yearning for help and comfort.” Which, arguably, was precisely why there was so much fraud afoot: People “yearning for help and comfort” were practically begging to be taken advantage of.

  Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, a serious psychic investigator of the day, who knew both men and their writings, observed, “Houdini shows his bias especially by the selection, for the most part, of mediums and phenomena long regarded, by most careful researchers in America and England, as either spurious or very dubious, and by silence concerning psychics and phenomena generally treated with respect by such persons. Doyle shows his bias by the ingenuity of his defense of some of the most doubtful characters of the past and by his oversight of unpleasant particulars.”

  Though both men were public evangelists for their own point of view, Prince once said that “the fervor with which [Houdini] carried on his anti-Spiritualistic propaganda, not publicly only but in private conversation, was to me so striking, that I once told him that the preaching zeal of his father [the rabbi] had descended on him.”

  As their friendship deepened, Sir Arthur appears to have grown ever more convinced that Houdini must have been making use of some sort of “supernormal” power to accomplish his amazing stage tricks—even if he didn’t know it. Responding to critics who scoffed at this notion, Doyle wrote, “It is said, ‘How absurd for Doyle to attribute possible psychic powers to a man who himself denies them!’ Is
it not perfectly evident that if he did not deny them his occupation would have been gone forever? What would his brother magicians have to say to a man who admitted that half his tricks were done by what they would regard as illicit powers?”

  Because of this, he reasoned, Houdini would be doubly motivated to denigrate any apparent proof of the claims of spiritualism.

  This lingering dispute came to a head one May afternoon in 1922, when Sir Arthur was in New York on his lecture tour. Houdini and Bess invited the Doyles to come for lunch at Houdini’s brownstone, on West 113th Street, in Harlem. Outside the front door the two famous men posed for what would later become a famous press photograph, with the rumpled, bearlike Sir Arthur towering a full head above Houdini.

  Afterward, Houdini led his guests on a tour of his house, filled with trophies, photographs, playbills, and awards celebrating his remarkable career. Despite the vainglorious decoration, Lady Jean commented that it was “the most home-like home” she had ever seen.

  After a congenial lunch, Houdini and Doyle repaired to the upstairs library. Houdini’s lawyer, Bernard Ernst, joined them there. The conversation had by then turned—once again—to certain types of “psychic phenomena” that Doyle fervently believed demonstrated the truth of spiritualist claims. In particular, he talked about the “spirit hands” that certain mediums seemed able to produce in séance. Doyle maintained that these rubbery, somewhat misshapen appendages were created out of the mysterious, moist substance known as “ectoplasm,” which appeared to emanate from the mouths, noses, and other orifices of mediums. Doyle was convinced that the study of this mysterious substance would someday constitute a new branch of science, called plasmology.

  But Houdini would have none of it. In an effort to convince Doyle that spirit hands, spirit photography, table tipping, and all the rest of it were no more than ordinary bunk, produced by simple sleight of hand, he decided to give Doyle a demonstration.

  First, “Houdini produced what appeared to be an ordinary slate, some eighteen inches long by fifteen inches high,” Ernst later recalled in his 1933 book, The Story of a Strange Friendship. In the upper corners two holes had been bored, through which long wires had been passed, with hooks on the ends. Houdini passed the slate to Sir Arthur, who examined it, and then Houdini hung the slate from hooks in the ceiling so that it was suspended in the middle of the room at about eye level, clearly visible on both sides.

  Next Houdini invited Sir Arthur to examine four cork balls, sitting in a saucer, and to select one at random. Doyle picked one, and Houdini then sliced it clean through with a sharp knife, to show there was nothing inside but cork. Then Conan Doyle randomly selected another of the four balls, which Houdini placed into a large inkwell filled with white ink. With a tablespoon, he stirred the ball around to make sure it was completely coated with ink.

  Then Houdini invited Doyle to go out of the house, in any direction he pleased, to make sure he was not being observed, and write a phrase or message on a scrap of paper, put it into his pocket, and return to the house. Doyle did so, walking three blocks from the house, turning left, and then (covering the paper as an extra precaution) jotting something on the sheet. He pocketed it and returned to the house, where Houdini and Ernst were waiting in the library.

  Houdini then told his guest to fish the cork ball, soaked in white ink, out of the inkwell and hold it up to the slate, which was still hanging in the middle of the room. When Doyle did this, the white ball appeared to attach to the slate, as if it were magnetized, and then it began to move across the slate, spelling out words as it went. Once finished, the ball abruptly dropped to the floor.

  With a theatrical flourish, Houdini asked Sir Arthur to read the words.

  Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, Doyle read out, in evident shock. This ancient prophecy of doom was the exact phrase he had written on the scrap of paper.

  In the biblical story from which the phrase is taken, the vain king Belshazzar and his host of lords are drinking wine from golden cups pillaged from the temple in Jerusalem when suddenly the king sees a disembodied human hand writing an inscrutable message on a wall. The king calls for Daniel, interpreter of dreams and riddles, who translates the message to mean that Belshazzar’s days are numbered and his reign will soon end. That very night, the king is killed.

  But if Houdini’s intention was to convince Doyle that almost any kind of psychic phenomena could be faked, it was a spectacular failure. The mene, mene, tekel, upharsin episode only cemented Doyle’s conviction that Houdini was somehow enlisting the help of the great beyond to pull off his stunts. Ernst, too, was shocked by the incident. He later wrote that he thought the trick was similar to a telepathy act Houdini had once performed onstage but had stopped doing because it was “too spooky.”

  Houdini himself later observed that “Sir Arthur thinks that I have great mediumistic powers and that some of my feats are done with the aid of spirits. But everything I do is accomplished by material means … no matter how baffling it is to the layman.”

  Baffling indeed.

  * * *

  A MONTH after this memorable incident, in June 1922, Sir Arthur and Lady Jean joined Bess and Harry Houdini at the Ambassador Hotel, in Atlantic City, for the weekend. After a bracing swim in the ocean, Houdini joined Doyle on the beach, where he was sitting in a deck chair with his bare feet in the sand, incongruously dressed in a neat dark suit. Before too long, Doyle brought up the subject of spirit photography, his new favorite subject. From under his chair, he pulled out a picture of a coffin with ghostly “spirit faces” floating around it and eagerly showed it to Houdini (who feigned interest but secretly rolled his eyes).

  After a short while, Doyle excused himself to go up to the hotel room for his usual afternoon nap. But a few minutes later, a small boy came scampering down the beach with the illustrious author in tow; Lady Doyle had dispatched the boy and her husband to fetch Houdini. Doyle brought the news that Lady Jean “might have a message coming through” for Houdini and would be willing to give him a private sitting and perhaps even make contact with his beloved mother. (From here forward, most of the particulars of this story are in dispute. According to Doyle’s later recollection, it was Houdini who requested the séance, not the other way around. Doyle later wrote, “The method in which Houdini tried to explain away, minimize and contort our attempt at consolation, which was given entirely at his own urgent request and against my wife’s desire, has left a deplorable shadow in my mind which made some alteration in my feelings towards him.”)

  At this point, someone snapped a photograph of the two famous men—both wearing straw hats and smiling gaily, Houdini wearing a rumpled white suit, Doyle still wearing his dark one. Then Doyle turned to Bess and asked if she would mind if he and Houdini could be alone with Lady Jean. “Smilingly, my good little wife said, ‘Certainly not, go right ahead, Sir Arthur; I will leave Houdini in your charge,’” Houdini later recalled.

  Now, according to Houdini’s later account, his wife “cued” him—that is, communicated a secret message using a code they’d developed for his stage act, something they were able to do in the presence of others, while appearing to be merely chatting or doing nothing but “the most innocent things.” The primary thing Bess communicated, Houdini claimed, was that the night before she had told Lady Doyle about the great love Houdini had for his mother, including his love of laying his head on her breast to hear her heartbeat. (Never mind how improbable it seems that this message could have been conveyed in code.)

  Houdini and Doyle walked up the beach to the Doyles’ hotel suite, where Lady Doyle met them. The shades were drawn, and the three of them sat down at a table on which lay a couple of pencils and a writing pad. (Lady Jean’s apparent psychic talents involved “automatic writing”—the ability to slip into a trance state and “channel” messages by writing on paper.) They put their hands on the table, and Sir Arthur started the séance with a devout prayer.

  “I excluded all earthly thoughts and gave my whole sou
l to the séance,” Houdini recalled. “I was willing to believe, even wanted to believe. It was weird to me and with a beating heart I waited, hoping that I might feel once more the presence of my beloved Mother.”

  In a few moments, Lady Doyle appeared to be “seized by a Spirit.” Her hands began to shake, and her voice trembled as she called out, asking for a message to come through her. “Sir Arthur tried to quiet her, asked her to restrain herself, but her hand thumped on the table, her whole body shook and at last, making a cross at the head of the page, started writing,” Houdini recalled.

  Then she began furiously writing—fifteen pages in all—with Sir Arthur tearing off each sheet of the pad as she finished and handing them to Houdini without even reading them. Doyle later described what he saw: “It was a singular scene, my wife with her hand flying wildly while she scribbled at a furious rate, I sitting opposite and tearing sheet after sheet from the block as it was filled up, and tossing each across to Houdini, while he sat silent, looking grimmer and paler every moment.”

  The scrawled message began, “Oh, my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through—I’ve tried, oh, so often now I am happy.… [N]ever had a Mother such a son—tell him not to grieve—soon he’ll get all the evidence he is so anxious for.… I am so happy in this life—it is so full and joyous—my only shadow has been that my beloved hasn’t known how often I have been with him all the while.”

  Conan Doyle interrupted at one point to ask Houdini if he would like to speak to the spirit directly, requesting proof that it was indeed Houdini’s mother who was speaking. Doyle suggested that Houdini ask the question, mentally, “Can my mother read my mind?” and Houdini dutifully did so. Lady Jean began scribbling furiously: “I always read my beloved son’s mind—his dear mind—there is so much I want to say to him—but I am almost overwhelmed by this joy of talking to him once more.… God bless you, too, Sir Arthur, for what you are doing for us—for us, over here—who so need to get in touch with our beloved ones on the earth plane—if only the world knew this great truth.… [A] happiness awaits him that he has never dreamed of.”