In one case, Houdini sent a female accomplice, Rose Mackenberg, to visit an Indianapolis medium named Charles Gunsolas before Houdini’s stage act arrived in town. Gunsolas charged Mackenberg twenty-five dollars to be introduced to his supposed eight-hundred-year-old Hindu guide. He also gently suggested that things might go better if she met the guide in the nude, while he acted as a kind of spiritualist chaperone, watching from the shadows. (Mackenberg demurred.) When Houdini arrived in Indianapolis later, Gunsolas was foolish enough to show up for the performance. Houdini confronted him from onstage, excoriating him for a full forty minutes while, one after another, Mackenberg and Houdini’s other incognito accomplices told of being fleeced in various ways for the medium’s phony and often licentious “services.” Gunsolas slunk out of the theater “amid the boos and catcalls of those previously counting themselves among his clients.” He also abruptly announced that he was retiring from the business. Outside the theater, skirmishes broke out, as if this were a flat-out war between those who believed and those who did not.
Which, in many ways, it was.
Sometimes Houdini could not resist going out on these fraud-busting raids in person, wearing a blond wig and glasses and calling himself “F. Raud.”
Now, on the national stage, egged on by the aggrieved masses, Houdini began issuing ever more strident attacks against the spiritualist cause. He called spiritualism “a systematic evil … the greatest self-imposed calamity in human history!” He referred to its “armies of sadly deluded followers.” And sometimes he even went further, aiming his bitter diatribe squarely at his old friend Sir Arthur. “Men like McDougall and Conan Doyle are menaces to mankind!” he railed during one performance.
The U.S. Congress seemed to agree.
Earlier that year, Houdini had testified before a joint Senate and House subcommittee that was soliciting evidence before drafting an anti-fortune-telling bill. The proposed legislation would have levied a fine or six months’ imprisonment for “those claiming to predict the future [or] unite the separated for reward or compensation.” The various panelists had made it known, in their public statements and editorials, that they were at war with “hocus-pocus magicians, rain-makers, card sharps [and] pseudo-mediums,” referring to them as “itinerant hustlers” and “un-American occultists.”
Houdini testified over the course of three days. The atmosphere in the august gallery, reporters noted, was more like a circus than a congressional hearing, with Houdini at one point waving ten thousand dollars in cash toward the audience, offering it as a reward for any medium who could reveal what his childhood nickname had been. (None could.) Rose Mackenberg also testified, making headlines when she said that a spiritualist fortune-teller from Washington, D.C., named Jane Coates had told her many senators had come in secret, seeking her occult services, and that “I know for a fact that there have been Spiritual séances held at the White House with President Coolidge.”
On the last day of the hearings, as Houdini was leaving the Capitol after his testimony, a spiritualist medium named Madame Marcia, who had angrily testified that the bill would violate her freedom of religion, screamed out a strange prophecy.
“When November comes around, you won’t be here!” she howled at the departing Houdini.
“How’s that?” he yelled back.
“You’ll be dead!”
The same prophecy had come from none other than Walter, Margery’s discarnate brother. Toward the contentious end of the Scientific American séances, Walter had snapped at Houdini one day, “You won’t live ’til Halloween!”
And the prediction was heard in Sir Arthur’s family séances in England. On April 12, 1925, their spirit guide, Pheneas, announced to the home circle, “Houdini is doomed, doomed, doomed.”
In some ways, Houdini’s angry public denunciations of spiritualism were like letters from a jilted lover—all the more angry because he was still in love. In his private letters and confidences, Houdini revealed that he still held out hope that communication across the veil of death was actually possible. Despite all his disappointments, and all his years of trying, he still believed it might be possible to make contact with his “sainted” mother. Once, during an interview with the Chicago Tribune, he suddenly stopped and said in a low voice, “My mother is here.” Elsewhere he wrote of his “strong sense of communion with worlds unseen.” In 1925, while publicly denouncing Margery, he wrote to a man in Boston, “As you know, I am not a skeptic and mediums who are genuine need have no fear.” When his older brother Bill died of tuberculosis in the winter of 1925, Houdini had locked himself in the attic for forty-eight hours, clearing his mind to receive a message from beyond. Bill and other family members, including his mother, had agreed to send a coded message or cipher from the other side after their deaths. And even though he told Sir Arthur he never used psychic power to accomplish any of his astounding stage acts, elsewhere Houdini confided that there were “many cases where [he had] escaped from quite a tight spot” by offering a prayer to his late father, Rabbi Weisz.
* * *
UNFORTUNATELY, HOUDINI’S “3 Shows in One!” tour did not get off to the sort of start he’d hoped for. In early October, Bess, who was traveling with the show, grew quite feverish and ill. Houdini attended to his sick wife with such solicitude that he barely slept for three days. Then, on the night of October 11, perhaps thrown off his game by anxiety and lack of sleep, he was performing the Chinese Water Torture Cell act when he managed to break his left ankle while hanging in the device that held him upside down. When he finally emerged from behind the curtain, he was soaking wet and victorious but also limping and clearly in pain. A doctor took a look at the ankle and recommended that he be immediately taken to the hospital to have it set in a cast. But Houdini, with his characteristic disdain for pain or even any mortal limits, insisted on finishing out the show. Later that night, after the performance, he had his left foot set in a cast, but against medical advice he insisted on continuing his tour.
So it was that Houdini arrived in Montreal on October 18 in a somewhat fragile state, still tired and limping from his broken ankle. The next afternoon he regaled over a thousand students from McGill University, telling them that they needed to ignore pain and fear, “and then the miraculous is possible.” Afterward, he appeared to shove a long sewing needle through his cheek, just to prove the point.
After several nights of performances in Montreal, Houdini was relaxing on a couch backstage when two McGill students, Sam Smilovitz and Jacques Price, stopped by for a visit. It was the morning of October 22, a Friday. Houdini, as usual, was congenial and generous with his time, confessing to the boys that his ankle was still painful and that he’d gotten through the last week “through force of will.” As they chatted, Smilovitz began doing a freehand sketch of the famous magician. After a short while, another student, J. Gordon Whitehead, entered the small backstage dressing room. Whitehead, a thirty-year-old postgraduate researcher at McGill, was an amateur boxer, and according to Smilovitz he was “powerfully built.”
According to Price’s later recollection, Whitehead began asking about Houdini’s strength, and the magician boasted that the muscles in his forearms, back, and shoulders were extremely powerful, asking the boys to feel them. Then Whitehead asked if it was true, as had been widely rumored, that Houdini was able to withstand any blow to his stomach. Houdini remarked “rather unenthusiastically” that his stomach muscles were also quite strong and was in the process of getting up off the couch, apparently to demonstrate this, when, quite abruptly, Whitehead lunged forward and delivered a series of “hammer-like blows” to Houdini’s stomach. Houdini seemed to be unprepared for this.
“Hey there!” Price yelled. “You must be crazy! What are you doing?” But Whitehead delivered another blow to Houdini’s abdomen with all his strength.
After the fourth or fifth punch, Houdini held out his hand and said, with amazing equanimity, “That will do!” He was not doubled over in pain; in fact, afterward
he took a few minutes to look at Smilovitz’s sketch and said, “You make me look a little tired in this picture.” Then he added, “The truth is, I don’t feel so well.” After a short while, the three students left, and Houdini cordially thanked them for visiting.
Three hours later, when his assistant Julia Sawyer stopped in to see Houdini in his dressing room, he was clearly steeling his nerves against pain. Nevertheless, Houdini insisted on performing his show that night. During the intermission, he collapsed on a backstage couch in a cold sweat. After two more nights of performances in Montreal, he caught a night train to Detroit, but as soon as he arrived there, he finally sought medical attention. A doctor diagnosed appendicitis and recommended that he immediately enter a hospital to have the burst appendix removed. But Houdini once again insisted on pushing forward with the show. At intermission, he spiked a fever of 104 and collapsed, twice, in a cold sweat. After the show was over that night, he was at last taken to the hospital, where doctors opened him up and discovered that infection had spread through his abdominal cavity (peritonitis). After the operation, he seemed to improve, but then, over the next several days, his condition dramatically worsened.
On October 29, Houdini confided to Bess, “Be prepared, if anything happens.” This admonition was not just a warning to his wife in the event of his death but an apparent veiled reference to their secret message. As he had done with his brother Bill and other family members, Houdini had arranged with Bess to attempt to communicate a secret cipher from the other side, should his current illness take him there.
On October 31, Houdini confided to his brother Theodore, “I’m tired of fighting, Dash. I guess this thing is going to get me.” At 1:26 that day, Harry “Handcuff” Houdini died, still conscious to the end, with his beloved Bess’s arms wrapped around him.
It was Halloween.
Houdini had managed to escape Walter’s prediction for two years, but it finally caught up with him. And according to some people, Houdini knew the predictions would come true. He was expecting his own death.
“I know for a fact that Houdini knew, although perhaps he did not know that he knew, that he was going to die.” This remarkable sentence tops off a three-page letter written to “My dear Sir Arthur” on December 27, 1926, two months after Houdini’s passing. The writer is Fulton Oursler, a magician and novelist who was friends with both Doyle and Houdini, whom he’d met fifteen years earlier. The letter paints a vivid scene of Houdini’s final days. “My experience with him for the last three or four months of his life was most peculiar,” Oursler wrote Doyle. “Upon at least three occasions, and I believe five or six, he called me on the telephone at my house, waking me at seven o’clock in the morning, which is the middle of the night to me, and he was in a quarrelsome mood. He would talk for an hour, for two hours, telling me how important he was, telling me what a great career he was making. In his voice there was a feminine, almost hysterical note of rebellion as if his hands were beating against an immutable destiny.”
* * *
THE DEATH of Houdini was news around the world. When he was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Queens, New York, on November 4, 1926, two thousand people attended his funeral. He was buried in the same metal coffin in which he’d duplicated the feat of the magician Rahman Bey, who was sealed inside, underwater, for more than an hour. (Houdini, who carried the coffin with him on tour, later duplicated the trick but beat Bey by half an hour.) According to Houdini’s instructions, he was buried with his head resting on a packet of his mother’s letters.
No doubt there were some who expected the great escapologist to rise from his own coffin, like Christ unbound. Houdini was, after all, not just a gifted magician but someone who had seemed to make the impossible possible, to demonstrate that the human spirit was transcendent, eternal, and unstoppable—even though he and Sir Arthur still disagreed about whether that transcendent spirit would return to earth.
Condolences poured in from around the world. When he was contacted by a reporter from The New York Times for some comment on the death of the man who called him a menace to mankind, Sir Arthur responded with his usual graciousness and generosity of spirit: “I greatly admired him, and cannot understand how the end came for one so youthful. We were great friends.… We agreed upon everything except spiritualism.”
Bess Houdini received more than three thousand telegrams. But though her grief, like Houdini’s life, was extravagantly public, she suffered in privacy. “The world will never know what I have lost,” she wrote. Later, while going through her husband’s papers, she came across a letter he had written to her, a handwritten note that seemed to float like a paper boat across the river of death:
Sweetheart, when you read this I shall be dead. Dear Heart, do not grieve; I shall be at rest by the side of my beloved parents, and wait for you always—remember! I loved only two women in my life: my mother and my wife. Yours, in Life, Death and Ever After.
A month after Houdini’s death, Bess wrote to Sir Arthur. She offered to give him a number of books on occult subjects out of Houdini’s private collection, knowing that he more than anyone would likely appreciate them. But Doyle declined.
“I thank you for your kind letter and your offer of books,” Doyle wrote back. “At the same time it might place me in a delicate position if I were to accept them. I shall probably sooner or later have to write about this remarkable man, and I must do so freely and without any sense of obligation.”
Doyle went on to say, “I have never concealed my belief that some of his ‘tricks’ were of psychic origin. On one occasion he told my wife that you yourself did not know how he did some of them.” Then, surmising that Houdini might suffer pangs of remorse after awakening on the other side only to discover that the claims of spiritualism were true, Doyle confided to Bess, “I am sure that, with his strength of character (and possibly his desire to make reparation), he will come back. I shall be very glad, if you get a message, if you will tell me.”
Bess had confided to Sir Arthur that she and her husband had agreed on a secret message that he was to send her once he reached the distant shores of death. Houdini also told her that he would try to send the same message to Sir Arthur (though he did not tell Doyle what the message was). Though the cipher itself was secret, the fact that Houdini had made such a pact with his wife was about as public as the morning headlines. In fact, all over the world, psychics and mediums began trying their luck at cracking the “Houdini code,” and “it was a poor month when there was no newspaper mention of Houdini and his code,” one observer wrote.
In her private correspondence with Sir Arthur, Bess continued to insist that Houdini did not make use of so-called supernormal power to accomplish his tricks but still held out the hope that they might exist. “If, as you believe, he had psychic power, I give you my word he never knew it,” Bess wrote in a letter dated December 16, 1926. Even so, Bess wrote, “as I told Lady Doyle often—he would get a difficult lock, I stood by the cabinet and would hear him say, ‘This is beyond me,’ and after many minutes, when the audience became restless, I nervously would say, ‘Harry, if there is anything in this belief in Spiritism—why don’t you call on them to assist you?’ And, before too many minutes passed, Houdini had mastered the lock.”
At the same time, her husband never stopped longing for his departed mother. “Often, in the night, I would awaken and hear him say, ‘Mama, are you here?’ and how sadly he would fall back on his pillow and sigh with disappointment,” Bess told Sir Arthur. “He did so pray to hear that sentence from his beloved mother, but as the world did not know of the secret buried in his heart … he hoped, and never, despite what was printed, gave up hope of hearing that one word—‘forgive.’
“Two days before he went to his beloved mother, he called me to his bedside.… He held my hand to his heart and repeated our solemn vow of our compact. ‘Mother has not reached me, dear. I never had that one precious word, but you, my dear, must be prepared if anything happens, dear, you must be prepared.
When you hear those words you will know it is Houdini speaking. The same message will go through to Sir Arthur, but in that formation only. Never, despite anything, will I come through otherwise’; and with his dying kiss (although we did not know it then) I vowed to wait for that, and only that, message.”
In her despairing search for some message from her lost love, in January 1927 Bess offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward to any medium who could conclusively prove that he or she had made contact with her husband. She was deluged by “messages from beyond” from supposed psychics, none of them close to the secret cipher she longed to hear. “Tell my friends I still live” … “Tussle with death was agony” … “Praise to thee, whose power dominates all creatures” … And so on. All bogus. Some mediums even came to the door of Bess’s house on Payson Avenue in New York, bearing strange religious and talismanic gifts, as if that were an adequate substitute for direct contact with her husband.
Though she had not yet heard what she longed to hear, she told Sir Arthur in one letter, “Please believe me when I say that I have taken an oath to tell the world when I do hear from him—also if a message directly to you, with our code, comes through.… Surely our beloved God will let him bring me the message for which I wait, and not the silly messages I get from the various people who claim to hear from him.”
In his return letter, Sir Arthur both praised and castigated his departed friend. Houdini, he agreed, was “a loving husband, a good friend, a man full of sweet impulses.” And “so far as his work was confined to really fake mediums, we were all in sympathy. But he got far past that. It was a general wild attack upon all that we hold dear.… [Y]ou can understand that, to those of us who had personal experience, a hundred times over, in the matter, it was annoying to be placed in the position of either being a fool or a knave.”
Over the next several years, this remarkable correspondence continued, as chronicled in a 1933 book by two contemporaries of both Houdini’s and Doyle’s, Hereward Carrington and Bernard Ernst. “The most important thing upon earth,” Sir Arthur wrote to Bess in one letter, “is to prove immortality.” And he earnestly wished that it might be the great Houdini himself who was the one to prove it.
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