Harry Houdini: A Ghost Story

Blues MK. Two. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to I Adore Mia Moore by Color Me Bad? And why would I play you that specific slice of heart shaped creola cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America. On September twenty fourth, nineteen ninety one, and that was the day of the Red Hot Chili Peppers released the album Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic,

further stoking the myth of Harry Hoddin's ghost. On this episode, the Occult, Fame, Grief, the Chili Peppers, and the Ghost of Harry Houdini. I'm Jake Brennan. In this his disgraceland. John Fruchante, guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He was staring at a missing panel on the ceiling, watching the darkness inside stare back at him. He heard the sounds again, strange noises, voices, and then a disembodied

scream somewhere between pleasure and pain. John thought about what his friend and bandmate, Chili Peppers bass player Flee had told him the other day. That he saw a lady dressed in black walking around this place, but not just any lady. She was there, and also she wasn't there. She was translucent, a ghost. John Fruchante wasn't sure what he expected from this rehab mansion in the Laurel Canyon

neighborhood of Los Angeles, but it wasn't this. For decades, Laurel Canyon, nestled up in the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, have been a creative sanctuary for artists and musicians. In the nineteen sixties, it was ground zero for the counterculture movement. Home to Mama Cass, Frank Zappa, the Birds in Buffalo, Springfield It's where Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell fell in love and then dropped out of love.

It's where John Lennon dropped acid for the first time while the actor Peter Fonda told him what it was like to be dead. Okay, that last one technically happened in Bennett at Canyon, I think, but it's like right

next door, so you know, close enough. And now, in nineteen ninety one, roughly a quarter century after the Summer of Love, John Fruchianta and the Red Hot Chili Peppers found themselves carrying on that rich tradition, living in a four bedroom house and Laurel Canyon, specifically on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which was referred to aptly and quite simply as the Mansion.

Along with their producer Rick Rubin an engineer Brendan O'Brien, the band had installed a makeshift studio inside the mansion so that they could record their fifth studio album there. That album, Blood Sugar Sex Magic, would transform the group from freaky stylely La Seinsters into one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. But more on that in

a minute. The idea was that the Chili Peppers would live and work in the same space for the duration of the album's recording, thus isolating themselves from the influence of the outside world while also tapping into their deep musical brotherhood. Or, as the band's lead singer Anthony Keita so poetically put it, by not recording in a traditional studio, they avoided the quote anal retentive vibrations of the sterilicity

involved with that sort of courting environment unquote. But drummer Chad Smith, the odd man out in the Chili Peppers in more ways than one, didn't want to spend every night in the mansion with the other guys. He just met the girl that he was pretty sure he was going to marry one day at after hours hanging with these dudes. The last thing he wanted to do was hang out with them some more, go put socks on their dicks or whatever it was they were doing, and

not when he had a lady waiting for him back home. Plus, the mansion was creepy as fuck. Weird shit happened there all the time. But this being the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the same band that was currently laying down new tunes with titles like Suck My Kiss, and Sir Psycho sexy. The supernatural vibe of the place quickly took a turn from creepy to horny. John was the first one to hear it, the sounds of a woman getting laid in

one of the other rooms. It sounded so real, but just like the trapdoor in the ceiling, John couldn't see anything. It didn't matter. The moaning, the panting, the shrieking climaxes, they couldn't be ignored. Up to that point, John had focused solely on the music he was making with the band, and they had a tight deadline, a deadline that Warner Brothers Records was holding firm. But he just couldn't hold

out any longer. He spent the next night in that room, turned on by all that weird ghost sex, a room

in which, as he later told Interview Magazine, he furiously masturbated. Still, John and the others were curious as to who or what these spirits were, so they called in a team of paranormal experts to investigate, or should I say so called paranormal experts, Because after a few visits in which the investigators seemed to become possessed by whatever was in the house, it became apparent that they were simply trying to scare the band in order to make a quick buck.

Cut to a few months later, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were the ones making the Bucks. Big Bucks, released in September of nineteen ninety one, and led by the tremendous success of the ballad Under the Bridge, Blood Sugar, Sex Magic made the band megastars. And while that album was making its way up the charts, and John, Anthony, Flee, and Chad all returned to their respective homes in the

Greater Los Angeles area. Back on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, ghosts continued to haunt the living, and just because a team paranormal investigators tried to take the Chili Peppers for a ride, it didn't mean that the spirits inside the place weren't real.

Years later, after Rick Rubin purchased the mansion at two four five one Laurel Cannon Boulevard and continued to use it as an unorthodox studio, the band Slip Knot had their own creepy encounter with an apparition while recording there, this time the ghost of a Man in the tuxedo. The legend of Rick Rubin's Haunted Mansion grew partly because it was commonly being referred to as the Houdini Mansion, named for the iconic illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini,

who died back in nineteen twenty six. While calling Rick's Place the Houdini Mansion is something of a misnomer because there is no evidence that Houdini ever lived at two

four five one Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Now just down the road Apiece, there's another mansion, this one at two four zero zero Laurel Canyon Boulevard, as well as its smaller guesthouse across the street, number two four three five, and there is some evidence that Harry Houdini and his wife Bess may in fact have resided at one or both of these addresses when Houdini was in town to shoot a couple of movies near the end of the silent film era, and it was in this exact area, the

twenty four hundred block of Laurel Canyon, that a small but devoted group of people gathered every year On Halloween night, October thirty first, the anniversary of Harry Houdini's death, They gathered to perform an annual ritual, and they performed this ritual in nineteen thirty six and nineteen fifty six, even as late as nineteen ninety one, at the moment that blood, sugar, sex magic was being blasted from car windows cruising down

nearby Hollywood Boulevard. This ritual was conducted under the belief that Harry Houdini, the greatest escape artist of all time, had saved his best trick for last, that he was going to find a way to escape from the great beyond, to tear the fabric between this world and the next, and furthermore, that this group of true believers would be his guide as he made his unprecedented exit from the suite hereafter carrying out the ritual, did so hidden amongst

laurel canyons, flora and fauna, lit only by candlelight, emboldened not by blood or sugar or sex, but by magic, black magic, reaching into the dust of the past, peering through the veils of time, reality, and reason to do the impossible, to wake up a dead man and bring.

occur in conformity with will. While the yacht rock band America once insisted in the top ten single that you can do magic, many of you out there probably think that in reality, magic is a bunch of bullshit, And you know what, you're not wrong. Stage magic, magic for entertainment, all that pick a card, any card, rabit out of a hat. Stuff. Yeah, that's total bullshit, bullshit by design. It's not magic. I'm putting air quotes around that word, by the way, so much as it is sleight of hand,

smoke and mirrors, misdirection. You know this though, but seeing as you also know, is believing and getting you to believe in something um believable is the whole game when it comes to being a magician. Harry Houdini, for one, understood this better than most. This is why he took

the breaking out of handcuffs. Not only was his mouth tape shut, but completely naked, so that he theoretically had nowhere to hide a key, and if you were alive way back at the turn of the twentieth century and saw Houdini do the impossible and only his birthday suit. He did so knowing the old story about how when he was barely old enough to walk, he was already picking the locks of his mother's treat box where she

kept her homemade apple cake. My point, you went into the experience already believing that there was something special about the guy, the Harry Houdini we all think of now in twenty twenty four, the illusionists who slipped out of straight jackets, who cheated death while submerged upside down in what he called the water torture chamber. That was a persona created in a large part by Houdini's very real limitations. Ask any magician then and now, and they'll tell you

Harry Houdini was a shitty magic man. What he was good at was escaping from situations that John Q. Public could never manage to escape from. That's how Houdini's legend was made. He was the world's first escape artist. And not only was he the first, more importantly, he was the best. At least that's how he promoted himself Houdini was aggressive when it came to self promotion, and he took no prisoners. You get in his way, you steal his thunder, you attempt to rewrite his story, you should

prepare to be destroyed. Even the great magician from whom Houdini took a stage name, Jean Eugene Robert Houdin, eventually found himself and his disciples crosshairs at five five and all muscle. The man formerly known as Eric Weiss, a native of Budapest, even though he'd have you believe he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. Harry Houdini like the greatest of showmen and the toughest of bullies. Anyone who listened to prove him wrong. Bring him us at a cuffs

and he'd break free. Lock him in a prison cell and he'd bust out. But Houdini was no superman. He wasn't an alien from another planet. He was only human. The means and methods of his particular brand of illusion were real, and thus the one thing that really got Houdini's goat was when someone tried to undermine all his hard work, his real work, by giving credit to magic. Spiritualists were having their moment at this time in history,

the early nineteen hundreds. Now, I'll think of a spiritualist like a medium, someone who claims they can communicate with the dead. In Houdini's eyes, spiritualists were like those guys hired to investigate the ghosts who convinced John Fruchiante to rub one out in a haunted mansion, and they were a cheap parlor trick, a hoax. Houdini had more respect for the common criminal, the person who was openly cheating you.

We know because he wrote and published a book called The Right Way to Do Wrong, which, besides being a great title, was all about how to commit crimes and actually get away with them. But again, Harry Houdini was only human, and even he could be convinced to give the whole spiritualism thing a try, especially when his beloved mother, Cecilia died of a stroke in nineteen thirteen at the

age of seventy two. Cecilia was Houdini's rock. Some even said she was the motivation behind his career, that the reason he worked as hard as he did was because he once promised his father that he Houdini would take care of his mother till her dying day, and now that day had arrived, and Houdini, pained and grieving, would do anything to speak with her again. So years later, when his good friend, the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, along with Doyle's wife Lady, invited

Houdini and his wife Bess to a seance. Houdini took the bait the Doyles, like many at the time bodily stock and spiritualism. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hoped that by performing the seance, by contacting Houdini's dead mother, he could bring some solace to his friend in the time of great need. Let's set the scene. The room is dark, the blinds are drawn. The faint sound of ocean waves gently lapping a nearby beach here carried on the wind

through an open window. Candle flames flicker on a table in the center of the room, and they toss shadows on the wall at one end of the table, the Houdinis at the other end, The Doyles. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hung his head and Harry Houdini followed his friend's lead and did the same. The Lady Doyle began to speak, Cecilia, Cecilia Weiss, are you here? This was the same question Houdini himself had been asking for years now, Mama, Mama, are you here? He sought out his dead mother in dreams.

He often startled awake in a cold sweat, reaching out for her, but she was never there when he called. She was always just out of reach. Tonight, however, when Lady Doyle asked that question, Cecilia, are you here tonight? The question was answered by three loud knocks on the table. Every muscle in Houdini's body tensed up, his throat clenched, The flames of the candles on the table flapped wildly, as if something had just passed through them. Was his

mother really here in this room with him? Right now? Harry Houdini, the world's greatest skeptic, could feel the impossible happening. He was starting to believe. Suddenly, Lady Doyle picked up a pen from the table in front of her and began writing on sheets of paper. She wrote fast, and seeing that she wasn't even looking at what she was writing, auto writing they called it psychography, allowing a spirit to

miss manipulate your hand and write for you. Houdini knew this to be one of the buzzwords around spiritualism, and now he was watching it happen in the flesh. And by the time Lady Doyle had finished, she had written on fifteen pieces of paper, all of it a long, loving message to Houdini from his deceased mother, or so

the Doyle said. The papers were handed over to Houdini and he began to read, but not before he noticed what Lady Doyle had drawn at the top of the first page across odd, he thought, seeing as his family was not Christian but Jewish. And then as he began to read in earnest he was struck by how the words were written in English, not in German, which was the only language his mother spoke. That was all the

proof he needed. He didn't even need to know that the three knocks on the table at the start of the seance had actually been made by Lady Doyle herself, not by a spirit. Harry Houdini had been hoodwinked by a friend. No less, he'd been made to look like a do and Houdini would not be made to look like a doe. The seance ruined Houdini and Doyle's friendship forever. It also sent Houdini on a crusade against spiritualism. He publicly took on bogus mediums who were conning people out

of their money. He testified before Congress and hopes that he could single handedly outlaw seances altogether. They were bad for Houdini's image. They were bad for business, and around this time, the nineteen tents the nineteen twenties, business was very good for the world's pre eminent escape artist. Harry Houdini was one of the most famous people on the planet, as big as Babe Ruth or Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was a master of the moving picture. Movies dazzled American audiences,

and they were their own kind of magic. For Harry Houdini. Cinema was another illusion, another conduit from which to saturate the market with his brand, which is why in nineteen nineteen, Harry Houdini and his wife Bess pulled up stakes from their home in New York City and went out west to Los Angeles, so that the world's greatest escape artists could become a big movie star. Instead, he became something else, immortal.

We'll be right back after this We're, We're, We're. Contrary to popular belief, Harry and Bess Houdini never owned the mansion at twenty four hundred Laurel Canyon Boulevard, the one just down the road from Rick Rubin's mansion, nor did they own the guest house across the street. Those were the property of Ralph M. Walker, a department store executive

who happened to be friends with the couple. Hard evidence is scarce, but let's just say it is very likely that Ralph Walker let the Houdinis crash in his guesthouse while they were in town for Harry to shoot two movies,

The Grim Game and Terror Island. Rumor had it that the guesthouse had an elevator that dropped you underground, where you could make your way through a dark tunnel passing beneath Laurel Canyon Boulevard and find yourself surfacing over at the Big House, a three story, eleven bedroom, nine bathroom Mediterranean style villa with a ballet room and a big

stage for musicians. The whole underground tunnel business fits perfectly with Houdini's image a master escape artist who could secretly escape from his own home and you never saw exactly how he did it, how he got out of a coffin six feet underground, or how he pulled off the metamorphosis act, the one where he was bound with rope and locked inside a trunk, only for the trunk to be opened and revealed that he was no longer there and instead his wife Bess was in his place, bound

in the very same way. Maybe fake rivets, fake screws, or fake welds, and the construction of the apparatusus. Maybe real handcuffs were swapped of for trick handcuffs. He kept audiences guessing, is the point, and he also made sure they had some skin in the game by welling their challenges. There was no problem he couldn't solve, and no outside force he couldn't beat. You could even punch him in the stomach if you wanted. He would easily absorb the

blow with what appeared to be prodigious strengths. Houdini couldn't remember if he had actually issued that last challenge publicly to be punched in the stomach, but in nineteen twenty six, a student at McGill University in Montreal was telling him that, yes, indeed he had and Furthermore, the student wanted HOODII to prove it now. Hoodini was tired. His career as a movie star never took off like he expected it would, and one of the two movies he made, The Grim Game,

didn't even get released. He was fifty two years old and these days increasingly worn out by the physical demands that his job as an illusionist required. His fight against the spiritualist movement was a losing battle, not as great of a loss as that of his mother, whose death thirteen years earlier still weighed heavily on his mind. This is all to say he wasn't operating at one hundred percent.

And I haven't even mentioned the incredible pain happening in his stomach, pain that he'd been experiencing for weeks but had not told anyone about, not even best. But here in Montreal at McGill, he was still a god, still revered by an adoring public that was humbled to have the world's greatest escape artist in their presence, or so thought the two students currently interviewing Houdini for the school paper.

That interview was on hold for a moment, however, as a third student entered the room and brazenly asked if he could test one of Houdini's standing challenges. He wanted to punch Houdini as hard as he could. Pudini paused for a moment. Again, he couldn't remember actually making that challenge to the public, but it didn't matter. He was motivated not only by a promise he once made to his father, but by his own iconic status, by his

dominance as the most incredible entertainer of the day. He would defend that status and that dominance by any means necessary, even if the crowd was small, like it was today. So Houdini accepted the student's challenge. He began to stand from where he was seated, but before he could straighten his back, tense up the right muscles, and get his athletic body in the proper stance for such an attack, the kid came in hot with a clenched fist. Three

punches in quick succession to Houdini's ribs and stomach. Houdini doubled over Jesus Christ. That hurt, and he could hardly get his bearings before the kid swung again. He landed another punch as Houdini was going down, and another, and another about seven in total. Houdini's insides were in turmoil. He thought his stomach hurt before, but now it was

on fire. Still, he couldn't actually show that he was in pain, so he simply offered a tense smile to the three kids in the room and politely said that'll do. He wanted to put the whole ord ill behind him, the pain, the humiliation. But later that night, while performing on stage in Montreal, Houdini began to sweat. His heart was pounding in his ears, and the pain in his stomach was getting unbearable. After the show, he collapsed. He was hot and then cold. His temperature spiked to one

hundred and two. He took a train to Detroit for his next show, and there a doctor made the diagnosis the Houdini was suffering from appendicitis. He was instructed to go to a hospital for immediate surgery. Houdini declined treatment. The show must go on and all that. So he took the stage in Detroit without one hundred and four degree fever. He collapsed twice. His eyes burned, his lips quivered. He slipped in and out of consciousness. His dreams began

to mix with reality. He saw faces, not only the faces of those standing by his bed like best, but faces from his past traveling medicine shows. Sideshow freaks, a Japanese acrobat who once taught him how to swallow a ball and cough it back up, the barker who gave him a crash course and how to slip free from ropes. The ghosts of his own mind haunting him or welcoming him. He wasn't quite sure. He just wanted it all to stop, so he finally relented and agreed to allow the doctors

in Detroit to remove his appendix. In the end, it didn't matter, the damage was already done, whether the punch from that McGill student caused the appendicitis, had just made it worse, or whether it even had nothing to do with the appendicitis at all. Six days after that punch and five days after surgery, Harry Houdini died on Halloween, October thirty first, nineteen twenty six, but not before he'd spoken to the attending surgeon from his hospital bed. The surgeon,

doctor Charles Kennedy, was glad that Houdini was recovering. Hodini's fever had gone down, and he was once again thinking clearly, and that clarity led to some reflection. He told the surgeon that he'd always wanted to be a doctor and that he regretted not doing so, and the surgeon couldn't believe what he was hearing. Houdini was the greatest illusionist on the planet. He was rich, he was famous, and

he brought people great joy. Wudini responded, not like he was speaking to a surgeon, but like he was speaking to a priest. The difference between you and me, Hudini said, is that you actually do things for people. I, in almost every respect, am a fake.

possible to LEVI. Take the table, move it, lift the table, move it, wrap on it.

heard in that recording. Edward Saint was a former Carnival barker who became professionally and romantically involved with Bess a few years after Houdini died, when she was depressed, drinking and smoking way too much and throwing parties in seances back at what came to be known as the Houdini Mansion. Not Rick Rubin's mansion on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, but Ralph Walker's three story Mediterranean style villa just down the road, the one with the guest house connected by an underground tunnel.

Like those parties, best, Houdini's rooftop seance was strictly invitation only. Three hundred people total, the CNB scene of Hollywood, captains of industry, the true heads of spiritualism, all of them craning their necks to get a glimpse of the dimly lit table where Bess and Edward Saint went through the motions. Bess claimed that she and her late husband had made a pact that the first one to die would attempt

to contact the other from the afterlife. She further claimed that they had developed an intricate code, a string of words that her dead husband would communicate to her in order to prove that it was really him. And in addition to the code, Harry Houdini's ghosts would then unlocked the pair of handcuffs resting on a table. In so many words, Bess Houdini claimed that she was attempting the

greatest magic trick ever, bringing back the dead. Of course, it was total bullshit, as much bullshit as a card trick. Her dead husband could have told you that it was nothing more than spiritualist hoke entertainment. You could even call it insurance to make sure that Harry Houdini's name and legend stayed relevant in the annals of time, even as time marched on. It was also the last time Best led a public seance, but it wasn't the last time the living tried to make contact with the ghost of

Harry Houdini. A few miles northwest of the Knickerbocker on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, among the willow trees, sycamore, and cottonwood. Year after year, on Halloween night, they gathered those who believed in those who wanted to believe. They gathered when Ralph Walker's mansion and guesthouse were still standing, and they gathered when both properties burned to the ground in the

Great Fire of nineteen fifty nine. They gathered as ivy began to consume the ruins, and they drew pentagrams on crumbling pillars and burned candles on the remains of staircases. They planted a wooden cross in the yard and draped it with ceremonial beads. They sang out archaic incantations, hymns to the underworld, designed to summon forth the greatest escape artists who ever lived. And then there in the moonlight,

someone saw it. A figure, a man. He was walking the grounds, dressed in a suit and a bow tie. He was there and he wasn't as translucent as a sliver of thinly sliced garlic. They followed closely behind, and the man made no sound. It was like he was walking on air. Seconds later, he disappeared into the mist. He reappeared months later in Chicago, walking right into someone's bedroom. Then in Long Beach, took possession of a medium and

spoke through her mouth. Soon after that, he was seen in Kansas City, in Detroit, in Montreal, and the people who saw Houdini's ghost all over the country swore that what they saw was real, that he really had come back from the dead. But how was his sleight of hand misdirection? Old fashioned bullshit? As they say, a magician never reveals his tricks. To do that will be a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created

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