The Secret Life of Houdini (10 page)

“Houdini, can’t you do something on a Sunday night of a religious nature so we can get a house?” Dr. Hill asked him.

“There is one thing I can do of a religious nature and that is make a collection,” Houdini cracked.

But when the California Concert Company needed a medium, Harry, like his father before him, just shrugged and said, “Okay, that’s me.”

The notion that a medium could communicate with dead spirits was still a fairly new one. Spiritualism, the religion that held that fact as its central tenet, was conceived on March 31, 1848, in a modest farmhouse in the upstate hamlet of Hydesville, New York, when two teenage sisters, Katie and Margaret Fox, began hearing mysterious raps. Within days the girls found they had the ability to not only elicit these noises but also communicate with the alleged spirit entity that was producing them. Devising a simple “yes” or “no” code, the Fox Sisters became the first mediums in modern history. Suddenly the floodgates were open. Within years the movement had spread across the planet, and a vast number of people found that they too had an innate ability to channel messages from a spirit world that just seemed bursting with the desire to communicate with loved ones back on Earth.

As a grassroots, populist religious revival, Spiritualism adherents were often at the forefront of other reform movements, championing the cause of women’s rights, child labor concerns, and the temperance and antismut crusades. By the Civil War, one Spiritualist leader claimed eleven million converts in the United States alone.

It was a natural progression to the concert stage. The Fox Sisters themselves were the first Spiritualist “performers,” and they were soon followed by others, including Henry Slade, Minnie Williams, Madame Diss Debar, and Anna Eva Fay. Then the magicians climbed on the bandwagon. The Spiritualists soon expanded their repertoire from eliciting raps to making tables tilt, instruments float, and producing slates that had words chalked on them from communicative spirits. At first, magicians like Robert Heller and John Henry Anderson, and even Dr. Lynn, merely replicated the Spiritualist phenomenon in their own shows. Then the most eminent magicians like Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar began to expose what they considered the tricks of the mediums.

The Fox Sisters, patron saints of the worldwide Spiritualist movement.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

The idea that the dead could communicate with the living had an allure for a young Houdini. Being the son of a rabbi had predisposed Harry to a belief in both God and a hereafter. It was not such a radical jump to embrace Spiritualism, but from the very beginning, Houdini’s experiences with mediums were frustratingly disappointing. While still a teen, Harry attended a series of séances at the home of a tailor in Beloit, Wisconsin. The tailor/medium was noted for his ability to put his sitters in touch with the spirits of great historical figures like Washington, Napoleon, and Columbus by using a small trumpet, which was placed on a table in front of the sitters who encircled it. Under the protective cover of darkness, eerie disembodied voices would issue from the trumpet, the voices of the dead.

Getting in touch with Lincoln was a big mistake, though. The great emancipator was Harry’s childhood hero, and he knew every last detail of his life. Vaguely uneasy that something fishy was going on, he decided to confront the spirit.

“Mr. Lincoln, what was the first thing you did after your mother was buried?” Harry asked.

“I felt very bad,” Lincoln responded. “I went to my room and I wouldn’t speak to anyone for days.”

Harry knew that Lincoln’s first act was to get a preacher to say a proper service over her grave, which Lincoln’s father had neglected.

This led Harry to pay closer attention to what was happening in the séance room. He realized that all of the celestial notables who visited spoke with one of three voices. He also kept hearing an odd hissing sound emanating from the trumpet when the spirits talked. One day, after a séance, Harry asked the medium why this was so.

“Well, you’ve caught me,” the medium laughed. “But you’ve got to admit that I do more good than harm by consoling sorrowing people who long for a message from their loved ones.”

The Davenport Brothers sitting in their spirit cabinet.
From the collection of Ricky Jay

Harry was stunned.

“Caught him! I had no intention of catching him!…I had been innocently seeking information about what I regarded as my religion,” Houdini wrote. “It came as a painful shock to me that one whom I had trusted and believed in completely should so readily confess himself a fraud.”

Still Harry tried to cling to his faith.

“But surely all mediums are not like you? There must be some genuine ones?” he asked.

The tailor chuckled. “None that I know of. They’re tricksters—every one of them.”

Houdini’s interest in Spiritualism seemed to wane until he discovered the marvelous feats of the Davenport Brothers. The two smallish, long-haired, walrus-mustachioed Americans, had created a worldwide sensation by their feat of producing a marvelous cacophony of sounds from tambourines, guitars, violins, and bells, all while they sat with their hands securely bound by rope in a seven-foot-long cabinet. Even though they never publicly claimed supernatural powers or assistance from the spirits, their presentation was ambiguous enough for the Spiritualists to consider them legitimate mediums. Their concept of Spiritualism—bound hand and foot in a cabinet—is a direct precursor to what Houdini would develop as an escape show.

Early in 1891, Houdini found another book that impacted his life, a slim volume called
The Revelations of a Spirit Medium
by A. Medium. Houdini was enthralled, because within these covers lay the secret of every trick in the medium’s repertoire. The one revelation that particularly struck both Houdini and his friend Joseph Rinn was the fact that a medium, although seemingly securely bound with ropes, could release himself, produce phenomena, and then get back into his bonds, which, on inspection, seemed never to have been breached. Harry and Joe followed the book’s explicit directions, and in a few months they were both experts in escape from bondage with ropes.

The wooden post had been securely fastened to the boards, which had previously been nailed to the floor of the bedroom. A large metal ring was then bolted to the center of the post. Now the Russian pulled a stool up in front of the column and sat down. He ran his fingers through his large mustache and nodded that he was ready.

The first thing the young man did was to nail the Russian’s coat to the stool. Then he tied the older man’s wrists together with some bandages. Pulling out a needle and some thread, he then sewed the knots together. On top of that, he slathered on some thick layers of surgeon’s plaster. With the hands immobilized, he began to work on the neck. He ran the bandages around the Russian’s neck and then ran them through the ring that was affixed to the post. He then nailed the ends of the cloth to the post. The last step was to secure the man’s ankles to the legs of the stool. Content that the older man was completely immobilized, the young man made one last sweep of the room, looking for trapdoors or false walls or panels. Then he placed a cup and saucer and spoon on a nearby chair. When he drew the curtains, the room was pitch black. He sat down and he waited.

Within seconds, a tambourine began to beat out a slow, sad tune. Suddenly, he heard the sound of nails being driven into wood. The carnival of noise pierced the darkness and a chill ran down Houdini’s back.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there
are
people with the power. I can actually feel spirits in this room!

“You may ask any question that comes into your mind,” Dr. Josef Gregorowitsch said. “The spirits will answer. One rap for yes, two for no.”

Houdini peppered the man with questions, and each time the spirits rapped the answer out by banging the spoon against the cup.

“Open the curtains,” Dr. Gregorowitsch commanded, and Houdini went to the window and drew the curtains back. When he turned around, he was amazed to see that the Russian was tied exactly as he had been before the manifestations began.

Houdini had met Gregorowitsch a few weeks earlier, when he had begun his run at a dime museum in Milwaukee in 1892. A dapper, top-hatted gentleman had continuously come to Harry’s shows and when they struck up an acquaintance, Gregorowitsch told the magician that he was a Spiritualist, faith healer, and hypnotist. Houdini taught him some sleight of hand. Gregorowitsch, in return, invited him to witness some of his séances. The first one was a circle convened around the sickbed of a woman who the doctors had predicted was near death. A glass was held in the air; Gregorowitsch invoked the spirits, and when the gaslights were turned up, the glass was filled to the brim with the healing potion. The subsequent séances were interesting, but the private demonstration in Gregorowitsch’s bedroom (which was nearly adjacent to a Milwaukee police station, further testament to the medium’s honesty in Houdini’s eyes) had convinced him that perhaps he had been too hasty to write off all spirit mediums as frauds. When Houdini asked Gregorowitsch for an explanation that night, the Russian just smiled paternally and said, “My boy, you are much too young to understand this. Perhaps some day the spirits may help you duplicate these weird tests.”

So when Houdini’s father died later that year, it was not out of the question that he would attempt to communicate with him by seeking out mediums, especially after his Milwaukee experience. Although Mayer Samuel had an insurance policy, the trying economic conditions prior to his death had forced him to miss some premium payments. Houdini pawned his watch, a treasured gift from his father, and used the money to visit a few mediums to try to get in touch with his father and ascertain what to do about the insurance snafu. Houdini brought his mother to the séances, and Rabbi Weiss was contacted. Instead of advice, he was far more interested in telling his wife and son how happy he was in the after-life. “It seemed strange to me that my father, knowing our pinched circumstances, would say any such thing,” Houdini wrote.

The old German’s heart was beating with anticipation as he knocked on the door of the stately house on Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s north side. For most people in May of 1893, the place to be was on the
south
side of town, where twenty-seven million visitors from around the world were flocking to the amazing Columbian Exposition. But this old man had no interest in riding the massive Ferris wheel or taking in an astonishing demonstration of electricity by Nicola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current.

No, this German was intent on having sexual relations with his dead wife, and Professor Slater, the thin, handsome man who opened the door, was the person who could make that possible. Why not? Slater had already cured him of his eye problem, giving him a pail filled with a thick brown substance that had been magically infused with healing powers. In gratitude, the man had sent Slater a check for a thousand dollars, double the agreed-upon fee. And when he was informed that the spirits had been the means of his cure, he had asked Slater to see if those same spirits could bring his dearly departed wife back.

On his second visit he was ushered into a small room that was heavily draped in black velvet. He was shown to a seat, and then Slater sat down opposite him. The lights were turned off, throwing the room into total darkness. A soft ethereal melody began playing from the Victrola.

“O spirits from the other side, I call upon you to make your presence felt,” Slater intoned. “Reunite poor Mr. Schiller with his wife of twenty-five years. Shatter that baleful veil that separates us from our loved ones. Return, return, return.” The medium began palpably shaking and a cold breeze swept into the room.

Suddenly, a faint white glow was visible on the far side of the room. A chill went down Mr. Schiller’s spine. Slowly the glow began to take on the shape of a human, the features becoming more and more distinct. It was her! It was Mrs. Schiller!