For a man who spent his last years calling spirit mediums frauds, Harry Houdini had an awkward credential. In the late 1890s, scraping for income, he and his wife Bess held séances on stage themselves. His papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin include an undated poster, possibly from 1897, advertising a "Spiritualistic Entertainment" by Professor Houdini.
He never pretended otherwise. "It takes a flim-flammer to catch a flim-flammer," he told the Los Angeles Times. Between 1920 and his death six years later, that conviction turned a famous escape artist into a full-time crusader against fraudulent mediums, ended his friendship with the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and carried him into a hearing room on Capitol Hill.
A message in the wrong language
Spiritualism, the religious movement built on the belief that the living can speak with the dead, began in the 1840s with the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York. It surged again after the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, when grieving families turned to parlor séances and Ouija boards. One of its most prominent champions was Arthur Conan Doyle, a trained physician who believed he had spoken with his dead son.
Houdini met Doyle and his family on April 14, 1920, according to the Ransom Center's chronology. Houdini had lost his mother, Cecilia, in 1913. He once wrote that the loss began his search for a genuine medium, though some Houdini experts doubt that account. On June 18, 1922, Doyle's wife, Jean, who practiced automatic writing, offered to reach her. She produced a five-page message.
Houdini kept quiet in the room and drew his own conclusions afterward. The message was in English, a language his mother barely used. And, as Smithsonian magazine notes, each page was topped with a cross, an odd choice for the wife of a rabbi. Twelve days later he wrote to the New York Times setting out his skepticism.
A cold war in print
The two men argued in newspapers and from lecture stages. In May 1923 the Oakland Tribune ran a feature headlined "Houdini Unmasks the Mediums," and Doyle answered within days. On December 24 that year Doyle wrote to complain that Houdini attacked his faith "bitterly and offensively," and "often also untruly." Houdini's book A Magician Among the Spirits, written with uncredited help from C. M. Eddy Jr., appeared in May 1924. When Houdini offered Doyle a copy, the friendship ended.
Doyle went further than disagreement. He came to believe that Houdini himself had genuine psychic powers and was using them to block the mediums he claimed to be exposing. Houdini, for his part, later told Congress that Doyle was "one of the greatest dupes." By 1924 he was touring on a lyceum lecture circuit, illustrating his talks with specially made glass lantern slides.
The medium on Lime Street
In 1922, at Doyle's suggestion, Scientific American announced a contest to find scientific proof of spirit contact. Accounts of the money and timing differ. The magazine's own retrospective describes a $5,000 competition, while Smithsonian dates the offer to 1924 and describes a $2,500 prize for physical manifestations, the figure Houdini later used in the title of his pamphlet. The judges included scientists, psychical researchers and Houdini. The early contestants were quickly dismissed. "I never saw such awkward work in my life," Houdini noted after one session.
Then came Mina Crandon, the wife of a Boston surgeon, who held séances at her home on Lime Street and took no money for them. The magazine called her Margery. In her sittings bells rang in the dark, a phonograph played on its own, a voice said to be her dead brother's spoke to the guests, and unseen hands pinched them and pulled their hair.
Houdini attended his first séance with her on July 23, 1924, and called her "all fraud." On August 25 the committee seated her in a box of Houdini's design, nicknamed the Margie Box, and reinforced it the next night. After a fifth sitting on August 27, the press reported that Margery had failed. He published a 40-page pamphlet on her methods, and on January 2, 1925, demonstrated them at Symphony Hall in Boston. After nearly 100 sittings the committee agreed with him, and in 1925 the magazine declared the case over as far as its investigation was concerned.
The record is less tidy than the legend. The Library of Congress, which holds Houdini's library on magic and spiritualism, says he never exposed Margery as an outright fraud. What he did was stop her from winning. The fight also turned ugly. Her husband wrote to Doyle that "this low-minded Jew" had no claim to the word American.
Congress, 1926
In the spring of 1926 Houdini testified for a bill, sponsored by Representative Sol Bloom of New York, that would have outlawed fortune-telling for pay in the District of Columbia. Spiritualism, he told the House committee, was "a fraud from start to finish." He whispered through a spirit trumpet into a congressman's ear and showed how slate messages were written in advance.
Spiritualists packed the hearings, and the author David Jaher counts some 300 fortune tellers, mediums and astrologers in attendance. One medium, Jane B. Coates, insisted that her religion went back to Jesus Christ. Houdini replied, "Jesus was a Jew, and he did not charge $2 a visit." The committee was not persuaded. Representative Ralph Gilbert of Kentucky, a former judge, conceded the fraud but argued that the First Amendment protected the faith, and the bill died in committee.
The punch and the rumors
Less than six months later, on October 22, 1926, a student named J. Gordon Whitehead struck Houdini several times in the stomach in his dressing room at the Princess Theater in Montreal, after asking whether he believed the miracles of the Bible. Houdini gave his final performance at the Garrick Theater in Detroit on October 24, had his appendix removed the next day, and died of peritonitis on October 31, Halloween. He was 52.
The popular version says the punches killed him. Doctors at the time called it traumatic appendicitis, but the Guardian notes that modern medicine has since rejected that theory, and it remains unknown whether the blows played any part. Murder theories have done no better. No autopsy was performed, Margery's spirit control, Walter, had once declared that Houdini would die soon, and in 2007 descendants of his brother Theodore pressed for an exhumation to test for poison, joined by Margery's great-granddaughter. Suspicion is not evidence.
Rosabelle, believe
Before he died, Houdini and Bess agreed on a code he would send if contact proved possible: "Rosabelle believe." She held séances every Halloween for ten years. In 1929 the medium Arthur Ford produced the code, but Bess later said the episode had been faked, and Ford's biographer found evidence after Ford's death in 1971 that the words could have been pieced together from existing clues.
On Halloween 1936, after a last séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, Bess announced that "Houdini did not come through," and put out the candle she had kept by his photograph. Magicians still hold Houdini séances every year, knowing exactly how they will end. The Society of American Magicians, which he once led, used to gather at his grave in Queens on Halloween. The crowds and vandals grew so bad that the group now meets in November, on the anniversary of his death by the Jewish calendar.