The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  A short time later, Smilovitz was again drawing the legend, this time as he sat in repose on a sofa in his dressing room. Houdini was relaxed, “in the best of spirits” and a thrill to be with, Smilovitz remembered. When he read his mail he had a way of flicking envelopes open, the artist noticed, with panache and dexterity. Smilovitz realized, though, that his initial impression of Houdini’s infirmity was accurate. The magician apologized for having to recline. He said he was not in the best of health and had “to take things easy.” At close quarters Smilovitz could see the weariness in his subject’s eyes and the mouth that twitched nervously.

  The Great Houdini regaled the boys with tales of his stunts, telling them that his recent feat at the Shelton Hotel was no miracle. In the casket he had only achieved a state of remarkable stillness: it was as if his heart had stopped beating and he was no longer breathing.

  While Houdini was holding forth and Smilovitz drawing him, there was a knock on the dressing-room door and Whitehead—who appeared to already know their host—was admitted. Whitehead was wearing a blue gabardine suit that looked a size too small for him. He carried with him three books, one of which the magician had apparently loaned him. There was something forced about the visitor, if not his entrance. Whitehead spoke with an exaggerated Oxford accent. His face was ruddy, his hair thin; he spoke softly, but to Smilovitz’s irritation he spoke too often. After sitting down, he began to dominate the conversation with Houdini.

  Soon the two began an intriguing contest. Houdini claimed to be able to unravel the mystery in any detective story after hearing only a few sentences read to him. Whitehead had brought with him a pulp serial and, after reading a few excerpts, Houdini successfully divined the gist of the stories. While the students complimented him, Houdini flashed a wide smile. Then the conversation turned, as Whitehead directed it, to a loftier book—one on which Houdini did not like to offer commentary.

  “What is your opinion of the miracles in the Bible?” asked the divinity student. This was just the sort of question that made Houdini uncomfortable. He said he would prefer not to answer, but he wondered how his own stunts would have been received in Biblical times. Would they too have been perceived as miracles?

  Whitehead looked affronted by the statement. He again changed the subject, this time to Houdini’s famed invincibility. As if out of nowhere, he asked, “Is it true, Mr. Houdini, that you can resist the hardest blows struck to the abdomen?”

  Houdini sidestepped the question, calling attention instead to his iron forearms and back muscles. “Feel them,” he invited.

  After the students touched his physique and expressed admiration, Whitehead repeated his question. Was it true, he persisted, that he could take any blow to the stomach? Houdini seemed to want to demur, but Whitehead wouldn’t let him. “Would you mind if I delivered a few blows to your abdomen?” Houdini nodded his assent. He still lay supine, though, and had not braced himself when Whitehead suddenly attacked with “four or five ferocious blows to his lower abdomen.”

  “Are you mad?” cried Price, “what are you doing?” Houdini stopped the assault with a wry smile and an arresting gesture of his hand. “That will do,” he said. Although the visitors were disturbed by the sudden violence, nothing had seemed immediately wrong with Houdini. He sat back down and Smilovitz finished the portrait.

  ♦

  In his affidavit, Whitehead would claim that Houdini had given him a copy of the November issue of the Scientific American, calling his attention to an article titled “How Death Deals Its Cards: Death in a Thousand Shapes Is Knocking Eternally at Everyman’s Door.” Certainly it was knocking at Houdini’s, who was wrong to assume that Whitehead was just another devoted fan. Whitehead is a mystery. It is known that he dropped out of school a few months after Houdini left Montreal. He then disappeared, becoming as elusive as a fugitive. He was arrested once for shoplifting—for stealing books on boxing and palmistry. Much later he wound up residing in a dank apartment with magazines and other reading material stacked to the ceiling, his only company two eccentric women who were drawn to mystical arts like numerology and the “Science of Being.” By that time Whitehead subsisted on disability payments he received for a head injury suffered while working as a day laborer on a construction site. He had a plate in his skull and the memory of a violent incident he almost never spoke of. The once formidable Whitehead would die of malnutrition, having revealed to practically no one that he had killed the Great Houdini.

  ♦

  Sometime after Whitehead left his dressing room, Houdini told his niece, Julia, that due to a “misunderstanding of his remarks,” a student had assaulted him before he could stand up and prepare for it. He complained of stomach pain but tried not to let the condition affect him. Believing himself able to transcend any malady, Houdini performed that night—even though he was too weak to undress himself afterward. On the train to Detroit, his next engagement, his pain became so intense that Bess insisted a wire be sent for a doctor to meet them upon their arrival.

  Though the physician diagnosed appendicitis, Houdini refused to cancel his bookings. He gave his show that night with a 104-degree temperature. But he was sluggish and hoarse and could not pull off the entirety of his routine. Collapsing after the first act, he was revived, then fainted again after the final curtain. Back at the hotel, a hysterical Bess summoned a young surgeon, Dr. Charles Kennedy, who arrived at three in the morning. When told of the blows Houdini had received, Dr. Kennedy pleaded with him to enter a hospital. He still refused. It took a call from his New York physician to persuade him.

  Examining him at Grace Hospital, the surgeons determined that Houdini had peritonitis. The punches, they said, had burst his appendix. They gave him twenty-four hours to live. But the doctors had not taken into account the preternatural strength of their patient. For six days Houdini hung on while enduring two operations. The pain was excruciating. His bowels were paralyzed, yet no one heard him complain. He was polite, ever-smiling, and upbeat with his attendants and with the family members who had rushed to his bedside. He felt that he would recover and be back onstage shortly. His dire condition was no secret, however. The nation hung on press releases from the hospital and there was great hope when a miracle serum brought his temperature down to normal. But it was a medical chimera, like false hope from a spirit medium.

  In one of their bedside conversations, Houdini told Dr. Kennedy that he wished he had been a surgeon. “You actually do things for people. I, in almost every respect, am a fake,” he lamented. During other exchanges he talked about his boyhood in Appleton. When he said he had a yen for Farmer’s Chop Suey, a Jewish dish from his childhood, Doctor Kennedy went to a delicatessen across the street and returned with the meal, which appeared to comfort him. Houdini was not quiet on his deathbed. He spoke often of Spiritualism and the victory his death would be for the movement.

  Finally he told his brother Dash that he couldn’t fight anymore. A short time later he uttered the name Robert Ingersoll. They were strange final words, since he had never known the great orator who died a quarter century earlier. But Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic,” had preached against the bane of religion—he equated Christianity with superstition, as Houdini had Spiritualism. They were the two most famous skeptics of their respective generations, and in the magician’s death throes, the name Ingersoll came to him.

  It had been a sunny day, yet Dash recalled that just as Houdini closed his eyes, “the heavens clouded over and it poured rain like I have never seen it pour before.” Houdini was declared dead at 1:26 p.m. on Halloween, 1926. Even the date of his passing had linked him to the spirits, and some found it poetic justice that on the day the dead return to Earth, he left it.

  A Grim Halloween

  At the Lime Street séance that Halloween, Walter arrived whistling in a minor key—then the spirit communicated that Houdini’s crossing would not be easy, for the wizard was still “much confused and resistant to the idea of death.” Without gloating over Hou
dini’s passing, Walter indicated that he would have one more encounter with him. “I am not sure but that I will have something to do with Houdini and his admission.”

  Dr. Crandon observed that Walter had prophesied Houdini’s death innumerable times over the last year by saying, “Give Houdini my love and tell him I will see him soon.” The sitters wanted to know whether or not Walter had caused the tragedy.

  “Look out don’t get superstitious,” the ghost cautioned. Spirits had “nothing to do with a human death,” he told them, “but sometimes we can see a little farther ahead than you can.” As if to prove it, Walter made a prescient statement concerning the future of psychic research—promising that the field “would have moved faster if Houdini could have lived to advertise it.”

  If Walter now sounded less vindictive, there was a sense from Margery partisans that a higher justice had been meted out. “Well, Walter has GOT Houdini, and I hope Houdini is enjoying it. His ‘sainted Mother’ will have something to howl about now,” wrote Robin Tillyard. In a letter to Dr. Crandon, the scientist speculated that Whitehead had been operating under Walter’s psychic influence when he assaulted Houdini. In Boston, Joseph DeWyckoff expressed satisfaction that the magician he likened to a “Jew renegade” had entered the fourth dimension; it was an “eye for an eye,” he told Dr. Crandon.

  That attitude was not expressed by Margery herself, who seemed genuinely saddened by Houdini’s passing. In a statement to the press she praised Houdini’s virility, determination, and physical courage, and said that she had enjoyed entertaining him in her home, though “at other times and places we have had our differences.”

  For Margery, Houdini had been a man of action among old fussbudgets and callow graduate students. “He had sat with us four times,” she remembered, “and his behavior here was a pleasant contrast to that of certain men high in academic circles.” Surprisingly to some of the reporters, Margery portrayed his death as a “serious loss” to psychic science, since wherever he went he created an interest in spirit mediumship. Still, the newspapermen would not let go of their rivalry. When asked if she had “willed” his death, she declined to comment and ended the interview.

  Will Houdini Return?

  The Great Houdini’s death “was most certainly decreed from the other side,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed. If that were so, the police could not investigate a spectral curse or warning, but Dr. A. A. Roback, the first Harvard psychologist ever to sit with Margery, wondered if the Spiritualist movement had “gotten rid of its most formidable foe” with the elimination of Houdini. No one found out whether Whitehead was acting out of impulse or some perceived higher calling when he assaulted him. There was no police inquiry. What voices, if any, the divinity student heard were never determined. Sir Arthur, however, knew what he had heard from his spirit guide just before the tragedy. “Houdini is doomed, doomed, doomed,” Pheneas had warned. And the next day the conjurer was fatally assaulted.

  Sometime before that, Sir Arthur told Dr. Crandon that Houdini had a “pay-day coming soon.” But despite the premonitions, Sir Arthur seemed shaken and perplexed by the tragedy. “His death is a great shock and a deep mystery to me,” he told the newspapers. “He was a teetotaler, did not smoke, and was one of the cleanest living men I have ever known. I greatly admired him, and cannot understand how the end came for one so youthful. We were great friends. He told me much in confidence, but never secrets regarding his tricks. How he did them, I do not know. We agreed upon everything excepting spiritualism.”

  In truth, they had not been friends for some time. Houdini and Sir Arthur had fought a proxy war on Lime Street. When the spirits warned of the approaching tragedy, Sir Arthur hadn’t tried to get through to his former friend, “for he would only have mocked at them, and us, if we had sent them on,” he wrote Bess Houdini.

  While searching for answers to the Houdini enigma, Sir Arthur began to communicate with his widow. And Bess, touched by Sir Arthur’s expressions of grief, tried to make a final peace between him and Houdini. Her husband, she told Doyle, had admired him immensely and “would have been the happiest man in the world had he been able to agree with your views on spiritism.”

  Sir Arthur believed her. But then he had always seen Houdini as essentially a fallen hero. His crusade “was a general wild attack upon all that we hold dear,” Doyle wrote Bess, “but beyond all that, I can see quite a different person—a loving husband, a good friend, a man full of sweet impulses. I have never met anyone who left so mixed an impression upon my mind.”

  Sir Arthur hoped that in death—just as Kingsley had apologized in the next life for his prior skepticism toward Spiritualism—Houdini would make amends for his destructive wrongheadedness. Practically as soon as the magician was lowered into the ground, in the same coffin in which he had performed the Shelton pool miracle, Sir Arthur hoped to hear from him.

  Bess desperately wanted her own reunion with Houdini. His death sent her into a prolonged period of despair—and she sought solace in séances and alcohol. When in the doldrums she prayed for a communication, she told Sir Arthur. On one such occasion there was a crashing report caused, she said, by a mirror spontaneously shattering. She took it as a sign from her dead husband. On his deathbed he had vowed to try to return to her, and Doyle assured her that they’d hear from him. But with no message as yet, Bess reconciled herself to the more traditional ways of communion. “When next I go to my dear one’s last resting place,” she wrote Sir Arthur, “I will place a flower for you.”

  ♦

  For all his kindness, Bess wanted to send Sir Arthur some of the prized books from Houdini’s massive collection on Spiritualism. This gift he refused. He was working on a long piece on Houdini that chronicled his machinations against Margery. In many ways the article turned into a panegyric, where Sir Arthur commended him as “exceedingly lovable,” “charitable,” “the bravest man of his generation.” He didn’t want the world to think he had softened his case against Houdini because of any gifts from his widow. Yet Bess insisted that Sir Arthur accept a certain item that Houdini had always wanted him to have. It was the one marked “Not to be sold at any price”: a diary of sketches by an obscure Victorian artist.

  The Gift

  In Charles Doyle’s sketch of a midnight hunt, the moon reflects off a bog while hounds pursue their demon-faced feline quarry. Devoutly Catholic, Charles drew an angel over the hellish setting. The winged cat leaps away from her light. A white horse rears, almost throwing its rider. Sir Arthur believed his father was a medium who channeled his occult visions onto canvas. Unfortunately, like many with the Gift, Charles Doyle’s downfall was alcoholism. He had a nervous tremor in his hands, which young Arthur had noticed whenever he held a fork or brush, or while scaling fish he caught for dinner. When Arthur grew up to become a doctor, and saw patients with the same affliction, he could not help but think of delirium tremens as the symptom of a soul about to crumble.

  There was something of the windblown to Charles Doyle, due less to his gaunt appearance and reedlike frame than an unusually ethereal nature. “His thoughts were always in the clouds,” Sir Arthur recalled, “and he had no appreciation of the realities of life.” In a self-portrait from the book Bess sent, Charles drew himself as a wisp of a man, caught in the talons of a massive raven—all but defenseless against the monsters he imagined.

  So magical and macabre was the work of Charles Doyle, who drew and painted ghosts and faeries, that the fear among his drinking cronies, when he disappeared during Arthur’s childhood, was that the struggling artist, reduced to bartering his sketches for burgundy wine, had gazed into the dark well once too often. It was whispered that he was incarcerated for a violent crime, or in the netherworld that was his subject.

  In reality, Charles had become the living skeleton in the Doyles’ family closet. In a society where patrimony was everything, Sir Arthur revealed to no one the truth behind Charles’s disappearance—that he was confined to a mental asylum. Turning away from
his father, Sir Arthur rejected his mysticism. He became an agnostic doctor and then the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who personified deductive thinking. Yet just after Charles died alone in the asylum, Sir Arthur killed off Holmes and joined the Society for Psychical Research. Ultimately, for both father and son, it was the invisible world that beckoned.

  In the sketch book Sir Arthur received were many classic examples of his father’s work—where helpless men are spirited away by mammoth birds or lured to God-knew-where by winged sirens. One picture was particularly meaningful to Sir Arthur. It was of dead soldiers lying in a field, the light of their souls ascending in unison to heaven. Putting the book aside, Sir Arthur looked out for a moment at the misty Sussex downs. He had no doubt that Houdini had delivered the book and silently he thanked him. Let anyone try to disprove the presence at this moment of the magician by his side.

  The Last Dance

  The manifestations of the séance room are childish entertainment, unless true.

  —DR. LE ROI CRANDON

  Margery was “almost as hard to bury as the League of Nations,” Life magazine reported. Even now she represented what newspapers called an “unconquerable hope.” Houdini had only been gone a few weeks before the Crandons took their case, via a national lecture tour, directly to the man in the street. In Buffalo, Cincinnati, Chicago, Denver, and on the Pacific coast, among other places, the doctor made a case that still resonated. The highlight of the tour came in Canada where, according to one Christian pastor, Roy enlightened “the finest audience ever seen in Winnipeg.” During their visit Margery’s phenomena were declared “absolutely genuine” by T. G. Hamilton, Canada’s most respected conductor of psychic research. Yet this campaign, far from the eastern hubs of journalism and science, was like winning a string of provincial victories while the Mecca of psychical research was burning.