Did a Punch Kill Houdini?How Houdini Died, Halloween 1926

0:00Day 9: the man on the couch

Montreal. Friday, October 22, 1926. Harry Houdini is lying on a couch in his dressing room, reading his mail. In nine days he will be dead. On Halloween. Nobody in this room knows that. You do. The world would remember one reason: a punch. A student hit him, and the man who escaped everything could not escape that. A hundred years later, the record tells a stranger story. Did a punch kill Houdini?

0:38Erik Weisz becomes Houdini

He was born Erik Weisz, in Budapest, Hungary, on March 24, 1874. Around 1878 the family emigrated to Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father became a rabbi. For most of his life he told the world he was born there, on April sixth. Remember that. He took the name Houdini from a French magician he admired, Robert-Houdin. In June 1894 he married a young performer, Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner. Everyone called her Bess.

In 1899 a booking agent told him to drop the card tricks and do escapes. Within a year he was a star in Europe. Handcuffs. Chains. A packing crate, nailed shut and lowered into New York harbor. He escaped from a milk can full of water, flew an airplane over Australia, vanished an elephant in New York and starred in silent films. From 1912 his signature act was the Water Torture Cell: upside down, locked by the ankles, in a tank of water. Hold on to that tank. The movies will need it.

1:58Why Montreal: his war on fake mediums

So why was the world's greatest escape artist in Montreal in October 1926, lecturing about ghosts? It began with his mother. In July 1913, while Houdini was performing in Europe, his mother Cecilia suffered a stroke in New York. She died on July 17, before he could get home. For weeks he barely worked. He visited her grave almost every day, and had her letters typed so he could read them again. For years he hoped a medium might bring him a real message from her. None did.

In June 1922, in Atlantic City, Lady Doyle, the wife of Sherlock Holmes's creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, produced pages of automatic writing she said came from his mother. The page began with a cross. It was written in English, which his mother barely spoke. And it never mentioned that the day was her birthday. Houdini said publicly that he had seen no proof. The friendship cooled into a public argument that lasted until he died.

Then he went to war. In Boston he sat with the most famous medium in America, known as Margery, and built a wooden box to hold her in the dark. He went to séances in disguise, often as an old man with a white beard, with a reporter and a detective beside him. He offered up to ten thousand dollars to any medium who could produce something he could not explain and reproduce. In 1926 he testified before Congress for a bill to ban fortune-telling for money in Washington. The bill never left committee. And he put the fight on stage. His last show was magic and escapes, then a whole act exposing the tricks of fake mediums.

Harry and Bess also agreed on something private: a secret code. If one of them died, any message that claimed to come from the other could be tested. Keep that code in mind.

4:10Day 20: Albany

Albany, New York. Twenty days before Halloween. As he was lifted into the Water Torture Cell, part of the apparatus struck his foot, and he broke a bone in his ankle. He finished the show, and kept touring. After Albany he seems to have dropped the water cell from his show. By the time he reached Montreal, the trick the movies would kill him with was already off the bill.

4:34Days 12 to 9: the dressing room

5:10 to 5:42: the paper-cutout scenes are a RECONSTRUCTION of three accounts (Price's, Bess's and Whitehead's), drawn for the film and labelled on screen. They are not footage.

In Montreal he played the Princess Theatre. On Tuesday, October 19, he lectured at McGill University on how fake mediums fool people. On Friday, October 22, three McGill students came to his dressing room. One, Sam Smilovitz, was sketching him. His friend Jack Price watched. The third, a first-year student named J. Gordon Whitehead, asked if it was true he could take any punch to the stomach.

What happened next, we know only from what people said afterwards. And they do not agree. Price swore that Houdini said yes, and that Whitehead struck at least four very hard blows, just right of the navel. Bess, in the biography written from her memories, said Harry was absorbed in a letter, gave an absent-minded reply the student took as a yes, and stopped him at the fourth blow. Whitehead's own sworn statement put it on Thursday, the day before. Two blows, he said, left of the navel, at Houdini's invitation. And Houdini never complained. According to Price, Houdini said at once that he had not had time to brace himself. With his broken ankle, he had not even stood up.

5:51Day 8: the night train

That night he could not sleep. On Saturday he did two more shows in pain, then boarded the night train to Detroit. At first the newspapers said a reporter had hit him. Then a student at his lecture. The university said nothing happened at the lecture, and the theatre said he arrived in Montreal already ill. The story was still changing. It would change again.

6:19Day 7: Detroit, the last show

In Detroit a doctor told him it was appendicitis, and that he needed a hospital. The theatre was sold out. He put off the hospital for almost a day, to finish a show. He went on stage with a fever of 104. He got through the show, just, and collapsed when it was over.

6:39Days 6 to 1: Grace Hospital

On Monday afternoon, October 25, surgeons at Grace Hospital removed his appendix. It had already burst. Infection had spread through his abdomen. In 1926 there were no antibiotics. Penicillin was discovered two years later, and not used to treat patients until the 1940s. His doctors tried a new serum, never used on a patient before. Twice a day they posted his temperature for the newspapers. Tuesday: a hundred and two. Wednesday: ninety-nine point four. For a day, the numbers came down. On Friday evening he relapsed, and the surgeons operated again. Saturday: a hundred and three.

7:25Day 0: Halloween

He died on Sunday afternoon, October 31, 1926. Halloween. He was fifty-two. His brother said his last words were: I'm tired of fighting. The next morning The New York Times ran the words: death due to poisoning. It meant infection, not poison. At the time, his doctors blamed the punches.

7:52The certificate and the insurance file

Strange to say, the one document that had to name the cause never mentions a punch. His death certificate says: diffuse peritonitis. Contributing cause: a ruptured appendix. Where was the illness contracted? Montreal. Was there an autopsy? No. There is no punch on it. No blow, no injury, no accident. Even here the showman's story survives: born, it says, in Appleton, Wisconsin.

So how did a punch become the cause of death? The answer is in an insurance file. Two months after his death, his insurance company said there was no evidence of any punch. It paid the ordinary twenty-five thousand dollars, not double. Then Bess filed for the double payment, with sworn statements from three McGill students. In June 1927 the insurer changed its mind. It paid double, fifty thousand dollars, and accepted the punch as the cause. That decision, more than any doctor, made the punch the official story.

Doctors today are far less sure. Appendicitis caused by a blow is rare, and nobody can prove it here. The punches may simply have hidden an infection that was already starting. So: the blows happened. He played on in pain. An infection killed him on Halloween. Whether one caused the other, nobody can show.

9:25Afterwards

He went home in a bronze coffin he had built for his act. It had been left behind in Detroit by mistake. On November 4, two thousand people came to his funeral in New York. He was buried beside his mother, his head resting on her letters, as he had asked.

The student who threw the punches, J. Gordon Whitehead, was never charged. He died in Montreal in 1954, in an unmarked grave. In 1953, Paramount's Houdini, starring Tony Curtis, gave the story a Hollywood ending: he passes out upside down in his water torture cell, in front of an audience. It never happened that way. In 2007 a great-nephew asked to have his body dug up and tested for poison. No court petition was ever filed. Houdini still lies where he was buried in 1926.

And this year, Whitehead's grave in Montreal finally got a headstone: Falsely Accused No More.

10:34The code

Which leaves the code. The message would begin with Rosabelle, the name of a song Bess sang on stage when they were young. The rest used the code from their old mind-reading act, in which words stood for numbers, and numbers for letters. In January 1929 a medium named Arthur Ford delivered it, word for word, and Bess signed that it was correct. But the code words had already been published, the year before, in a biography written with her help. In 1934 she swore she had never received a genuine message from her husband. How Ford got it has never been proven.

Ten years to the day after his death, on Halloween 1936, Bess went up to the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood for one last séance, broadcast on the radio. Houdini did not come. She switched off the small electric light that had burned beside his photograph since he died. A man who spent his last years exposing fake mediums died on the one night of the year made for ghosts. Since 1946, every Halloween, someone somewhere has set a chair for him. This Halloween, the hundredth, they will try again. He has never sat in it. The code they agreed, decoded, reads two words. Rosabelle. Believe.