The Secret Life of Houdini (63 page)

By 1889, Conan Doyle was convinced of the basic indestructibility of the human soul. By then he was writing full-time and his Holmes stories were beginning to catch on, a pleasant development since he now had a wife and son to support. As his success grew, he began to branch out—writing sprawling historical novels and answering a call to wanderlust. He was like an English Teddy Roosevelt, large, raw-boned, walrus-mustached, roaming the world in ill-fitting clothing, soaking in experience. He accompanied Lord Kitchener on his Egyptian campaign and traveled to South Africa for a firsthand glimpse of the Boer War. It was his book on that war and his defense of English foreign policy that led to his knighthood in 1902.

By then, Doyle was one of the most celebrated authors in the world. He had killed off his fictional detective Holmes, and then revived him when an old friend named Fletcher Robinson told him of the legend of a phantom hound that haunted the man who killed the dog and his wife. To the delight of the literate world, Holmes returned in the book
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, originally planned as a collaboration between the two men. In 1906, Doyle’s wife died after a long bout of tuberculosis. A year later he married Jean Leckie, who he had fallen in love with ten years earlier, supposedly maintaining a secret, platonic relationship with her as his wife’s health slowly deteriorated.

It was through his second wife, Jean, that Doyle finally embraced Spiritualism as a religion. The ranks of Spiritualism began to swell as grieving families sought to come to terms with the loss of their soldier sons in World War I. Doyle saw the devastation firsthand, visiting the French and Italian fronts. Back at home, Jean’s friend Lily Loder-Symonds moved in with the family. Lily was an avid Spiritualist and a devotee of automatic writing. In autumn of 1916, she produced a series of messages from her dead brothers. Skeptical of automatic writing, Conan Doyle quizzed her about a conversation he had years earlier with Jean’s dead brother Malcolm. When she accurately recalled the conversation, Doyle was convinced.

Now Doyle saw the war as a spiritual conflict between forces beyond comprehension using the competing armies as mere pawns. The war had wreaked havoc on the Doyle-Leckie families, ten members dead from combat or disease. Doyle lost his brother, his son Kingsley, two brothers-in-law, and many nephews. “Where were they? What had become of those splendid young lives? They were no longer here. Were they anywhere?” Doyle would ask in a later lecture on Spiritualism. “The question was [by] far the most pressing in the world. It filled my mind.” He began to connect the rappings and table thumping of Spiritualist séances with attempts by dead spirits to communicate. “I understood at last that these foolish phenomena were really not so foolish, but had a purpose. They were signals.”

On September 7, 1919, the signals bore full fruit. Doyle and his wife attended a séance given by Evan Powell, an amateur medium. They went to Powell’s hotel room, accompanied by a few friends. The medium insisted he be searched and then tied to a wooden chair by Doyle. A megaphone with luminous paint was placed beside him. The room was darkened. Suddenly a deep, strong voice issued from the void. It was the voice of an Indian spirit, Black Hawk, Powell’s spirit control. He told them that “Leely” wanted to speak with “the Lady of the Wigwam.” It was Jean’s by then departed friend Lily.

Thrilled with the séance, the Doyles returned the next night. “Then came what to me was the supreme moment of my spiritual experience,” Doyle would write. “Almost too sacred for full description.”

In the darkness, a voice called out.

“Jean, it is I.”

Lady Doyle felt a hand on her head and she cried out.

“It is Kingsley.”

Doyle heard the word “
Father
.”

“Dear boy, is that you,” he whispered.

“
Forgive me!
” the voice said.

Then a large, strong hand rested on his head and he felt a kiss just above his brow.

“Tell me dear, are you happy?” Doyle asked.

There was silence and Doyle feared that he was gone.

“
Yes,
” the voice finally answered. “
I am so happy.
”

That was the turning point in Doyle’s life. “Therefore my wife and I determined that we would, so far as possible, devote the rest of our lives to trying to make people understand that this subject is not to be laughed at, but that it is really the most important thing in the world,” Doyle wrote, obsessed with spreading the gospel of Spiritualism. With this monomania came the intolerance of the true believer. “He carried it to extreme lengths showing impatience with anyone who expressed the slightest doubt,” an acquaintance noted.

“With all modesty I am inclined to ask, is there any man on this globe who is doing as much psychic research as I?” Doyle would later ask. “I have clasped materialized hands…I have listened to prophecies which were quickly fulfilled. I have seen the ‘dead’ glimmer up upon a photographic plate which no hand but mine had touched…I have seen spirits walk round the room in fair light and join in the talk of the company. I have heard singing beyond earthly power…If a man could see, hear, and feel all this, and yet remain unconvinced of unseen intelligent forces around him, he would have good cause to doubt his own sanity. Why should he heed the chatter of irresponsible journalists, or the head-shaking of inexperienced men of science, when he has himself had so many proofs? They are babies in this matter, and should be sitting at his feet.”

Doyle began to recruit an army of believers. What better way to aid in this crusade than by spreading his gospel and converting other prominent men? Now Doyle received another important communication. It wasn’t from a departed spirit, though; it was from the very corporeal Master Mystifier, Harry Houdini.

“Have you read that some of the folks like Conan Doyle…are dabbling in Spiritualism again?” Houdini wrote Kellar at the very beginning of 1918. With his move into film and his hoped-for retirement from the stage, Houdini was planning to write more books, and one of his first projects was a tome about Spiritualism. Houdini had maintained interest in the subject since his own days as a phony medium before the turn of the century. He had even been approached by a prestigious lecture bureau at the end of 1919 to take the negative side of the subject and debate a prominent Spiritualist like Conan Doyle or Sir Oliver Lodge, a British scientist who had converted to Spiritualism after getting in touch with his dead son, Raymond. Houdini turned the offer down mainly because he was about to travel to England for six months to make up bookings that had been postponed by the war.

Once in England, he settled into his typical routine. “Am very busy,” he wrote to a friend. “Taking a few shots for a proposed new picture, appearing at Trade showings, writing a book against Spiritualism, and doing my Show as usual.” At this stage, Houdini was researching his book and it seemed to be hard going. Although Houdini was thought by a leading British psychic researcher to have powers of dematerialization after he had served as a committeeman during one of Houdini’s Milk Can escapes, most mediums were wary of sitting for him.

Houdini’s attitude toward communication between the dead and the living was complex. There had been strange circumstances in his own life that he had been unable to explain. In Berlin once, he had been handcuffed and roped and locked in a cabinet so securely that he thought that he wouldn’t be able to escape. Bess, on hearing his groans, realized that he was in deep trouble and began to pray for assistance from Rabbi Mayer Samuel, who, before his death, had promised the young boy that if he ever ran into any difficulty, he would return to aid him. Within seconds, Houdini had solved the mystery of the cuffs and had escaped. Years later, while en route to a performance in Europe, Houdini saw a fleeting vision of his mother. The next day he was informed that she had died.

“I too would have parted gladly with a large share of my earthly possessions for the solace of one word from my loved departed—just one word that I was sure had been genuinely bestowed by them,” he wrote. “In this frame of mind I began a new line of psychical research in all seriousness and from that time to the present I have never entered a séance room except with an open mind devoutly anxious to learn if intercommunication is within the range of possibilities.” So it was both as researcher and seeker that Houdini sought out mediums during his stay in England. Who could be a better character reference for him than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?

Soon after arriving in England, Houdini dispatched a copy of his book
The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin
to Doyle. On March 15, 1920 Doyle wrote and thanked him for the book and asked him a question about the Davenport Brothers, the American performers who were thought to have been aided in escaping their secure rope ties by cooperative spirits. “Some of our people think that you have yourself some psychic power, but I feel it is art and practise,” Doyle commented. Within two months, Doyle would change his mind.

Houdini was tactful in his correspondence with Doyle. When the author pressed him on whether the Davenports had real occult power or were just tricksters, Houdini responded diplomatically, “I am afraid that I cannot say that all their work was accomplished by the spirits…. You will note that I am still a sceptic [sic], but a seeker after the Truth. I am willing to believe, if I can find a Medium who, as you suggest, will not resort to ‘manipulation’ when the Power does not ‘arrive.’”

Now the floodgates were open. Doyle suggested two or three honest mediums, singling out Mrs. Annie Brittain as the best. “In a series of 72 clients whom I sent her, she got through 60 times, 5 failures and the rest half and half,” he wrote. On April 25, accompanied by Bess and their niece Julia, they sat with Mrs. Brittain. Houdini’s diary entry reflects his disappointment. “Mrs. Brittain not convincing. Simply kept talking in general. ‘Saw’ things she heard about. One spirit was to bring me flowers on the stage. All this is ridiculous stuff.”

Two weeks earlier, Houdini had finally met the Doyles. He went alone as Bess “was not able” to make the trip. Houdini lunched at their house and was regaled with tales that would make a materialist cringe. “Sir Arthur told me he had spoken six times to his son,” he wrote in his diary. “No possible chance for trickery.” A few days later he wrote Kellar. “[Doyle] saw my performance Friday Night. He was so much impressed, that there is little wonder in him believing in Spiritualism so implicitly.”

By the end of May, Doyle was convinced that Houdini was masking his true occult powers. The magician was playing in Bristol and had accepted and won a challenge to escape from a packing box built onstage. “I heard of your remarkable feat in Bristol. My dear chap, why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time?” Doyle wrote him.

With his search for a genuine medium stalled, Houdini turned his attention to spirit photography, a phenomenon where depictions of spirits were unintentionally captured in the course of taking regular photographs. Houdini wrote Doyle asking to see some photos taken by a psychic researcher named Crawford but Doyle didn’t have the photos on hand. “They are too precious to have lying around…. But I have something far more precious—two photos, one of a goblin, the other of four fairies in a Yorkshire wood. A fake! you will say. No, sir, I think not. However, all inquiry will be made. These I am not allowed to send. The fairies are about eight inches high. In one there is a single goblin dancing. In the other four beautiful, luminous creatures. Yes, it is a revelation.”

The Doyles and the Houdinis cavort in Denver.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Houdini was too polite to comment on the fairy pictures. Doyle stuck to his guns and eventually published a book touting the photos as real and revelatory. Years later, the teenager who took the photos of her nine-year-old niece cavorting with the fairies would admit that the pictures were faked. If Doyle had done better research, he would have determined that the fairies had been cut out of one of the most popular children’s books of 1915, a book that contained one of his own stories.

Houdini was disappointed by his experiences with mediums in England. “I went to 100 spiritualistic Séances trying to discover something
new
—it is the same old routine,” he wrote Robert Gould Shaw, the theater collector. “Booth & Jefferson believed in it—I have an open mind, but am still to be converted.” A year later, by the summer of 1921, Houdini was asking the newspapermen to keep his name out of any stories that involved exposing fake mediums. He needed access to the world of Spiritualism to research his new book. At the same time, he was being drawn into the controversy by both the media and the rabid anti-Spiritualist faction among his closest friends. It was all a result of his latest book,
Miracle Mongers and Their Methods
.