Harry Houdini: More than Magic

and I think magicians are pretty cool people typically. Um. Yeah, you know Toby, our friend Toby he um he and I were talking about um working on a magic podcast, kind of like a magic skeptics podcast, a couple of his good friends, and they're just they're just cool dudes, chill people, interesting, very witty, sharp, not pink boys at all. You guys should totally do that. This is years and years ago, said that Chip. Well, he's a big movie producer. Now, yeah,

that's magic podcast. No, thank you. Well, I'm glad to know that you found some cool magicians. Yeah, are you not familiar with cool magicians? No? I mean the magicians I know about are decidedly uncool. Oh, I see, like Ben Stiller and arrested Development instiller and arrested Development. Yeah he was Job's rival. Oh right, you know, I forgot about that kind of a white snake thing going on. I think I'm thinking mainly about the time I went to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles and I felt

like one of the cooler people there, which is unusual. Okay, full of a lot of people. I don't mean like fonds cool. I mean cool in the in the fact that they're like interesting, they are sharp, they're quitted. Uh. Um, they will take your wallet from you if you're not careful. That kind of cool, you know what I mean? Okay? Was Judini cool? Uh? In a lot of ways? He was very cool? Um, the band in a lot. No, that's pretty they were very cool. Um in a lot

of ways. I think he was cool in some other ways. He wasn't necessarily super cool. But I think overall you could say, yes, Houdini was cool in the sense that a good magician is cool. Yeah. This is one of those guys where I did a little digging to see if if we needed a like, see if he was some monster in his personal life. I didn't see anything like that. I think he was a pretty intense guy and maybe and I'm sure a man of the time,

but I didn't see anything that jumped out at me. Uh. And we should mention big thanks to boy a bunch of things. History dot com, Smithsonian Magazine which is always great, PBS New Yorker, and of course the great Harry Houdini dot com. Yes, there's also a couple of other sites that I got some stuff from, like, um, wild About Harry is a good Houdini site, And there's this, Uh, there's this some documentary series by a site called Timeline, and the one I saw was hosted by Alan Davies.

It's called Life and Magic of the Real Harry Houdin and Houdini and it was just like this, you know, hour long, pretty cool little documentary. I thought it was very neat. I got like good info from that too.

It's on YouTube too. Well. I was, Uh, I was into Houdini when I was a kid for a short time, and I think that it was probably just because it was a short time where I was, And I think a lot of kids go through a magic phase, uh, whether it's going to a trick shop and getting a fake deck or learning your first dumb little card trick that's not very good, but you think it's awesome. It's just something that I feel like almost every kid goes through a brief little magic phase and sometimes it sticks

and you become super cool. Evidently that's right, exactly. So there, I saw a couple of things that seemed to support that he wasn't a monster by the way, chuck Um. One of them was that he would go to like, um, the children's ward in hospitals and perform magic for the kids and beat them up take their money. Yeah. But I mean, like, if you think about it, that's not something that just anybody does, you know, Like that's that's

time he could be do spending doing something else. Um. He was like almost almost pathologically devoted to his mother m making sure that she was well taken care of. I think also one of the I saw that that was like a possibly a driver of his ambition as well, that he wanted to be Mom's favorite, an impressor more than any of his siblings because he was one of six. Yeah, and also that his father was never much of his success, which will get to and I think I think those

are definitely the big drivers. But he himself called himself a mom's boy, like he used those two words together. Yeah. Yeah. There's a famous picture of him with his his wife Bess and his mother and he's got like his arms around both of them and he calls them my two girls or my two sweethearts or something like that. So I mean, like, I know, hats off the best for being like, all right, let's go with it. We're gonna go with it. I'm definitely not gonna try to probably

that one LuSE it's not gonna work. So we're just gonna go with it. And I say, good for her, all right, Well should we get into it. Yeah, let's because you said something about his father, and I think that that's an important thing to understand about Houdini um from the get go, is that he was essentially born into poverty and it just got worse as he got older because his father was a rabbi, and if there is such a thing, his father was a failed rabbi.

He couldn't make it as a rabbi. I know that was. I was surprised to see that because all like everywhere I looked, it would continually say like, boy's dad just couldn't make the rabbi. Racket work, and I kind of, I don't know, I kind of naively assumed that if you were sort of giving up a life of trying to a make you know, money as a capitalist for a living by going to the church and being a steward of the church, then you would at least do Okay,

you'd think so. But I think that means that he was so charmless he couldn't even muster up a congregation to to to surround him. So he was a hard

luck kind of guy. And as a result, Harry uh was was raised in poverty, had to go to work from a very young age, and also like missed out on a formal education as a result too, And so those things kind of converge to also, I think kind of drive him to prove himself that yeah, maybe he didn't go to school and maybe he was born poor, but he could still be a superstar, he could still amaze people, he could still be um idolized. Basically. Yeah.

His his dad's name was Meyer Weiss, his mom was Cecilia Steiner Wights, and he was born Eric E. H R I C. H Viights in March of eighteen seventy

four in Hungary. Uh In Budapest, but he when he was four, he came over and joined the family in Wisconsin, and his dad did manage to have a small congregation in Wisconsin, I think in Appleton and Uh they changed immigration officers changed the name to Vice with two s is instead of an s z, and Eric went by Airy E h R I E. The only reason I mentioned Airy is because that comes into play later when he takes on the name Harry is sort of an

Americanized version of that name. So that's where the Harry came from. Um. Yes, he uh, he was. He started working I think uh and when he was still single digits, but he started performing also around the same time too. When he was nine, he made his debut as a trap He's artist, Eric the Prince of the Air nice and he was always a rather short stature. I think he topped out at five point five ft five inches

five point five um, but he was extremely fit. He decided early on that he wanted to be very athletic as much as he could be, so he really like he was doing things like you know, when he moved to New York a few years later. Um, he was doing things like running five miles around Central Park every day, which is super commonplace today, but you know in the

eighteen late late nineteenth century, that was weird. Yeah. I mean, like god knows what kind of shoes he was wearing for that kind of thing, but he would do that kind of stuff. So he was short of stature, but

also very athletic um self taught to Yeah. So, like you said, they eventually landed in New York um after you know, his again, Rabbi Weiss was not doing so well, so he was kind of always on the move trying to find somebody to listen to him, and they eventually get to New York and in eighteen nine one, which would have been uh, what's the math there? S sixteen is seventeen ish. We were trying to figure out before Ghostbusters, no no, I was trying to figure out how old

he was. Uh, he's like sixty or seventeen when he teamed up with this buddy, Jacob Himan. I'm sorry him, himman him, Why did that look weird on the paper? You may be having a stroke. I hope not. The brothers Houdini is what they called themselves, and Harry again is what he went by because of Airy and then as far as Judini goes, his favorite French magician's last name was Robert Houdin, so he threw an eye on there, and all of a sudden, he's Harry Hudini for evermore. Yeah,

I think so. I saw in that documentary that somebody told him that adding an eye to a name in French means that you're saying you're like that person. So he was saying Hohodini, like he's like Hudin Houdin hudan Um who was his idol for at least while he's growing up. And then apparently later on he kind of turned on him and exposed all of his secrets after the guy had died, which was actually not cool. It

not cool. And there I think there was also a tradition of the eye name on those kind of acts like yes, but I think he may have started that. Oh really, I'm not sure, but he was the blond niece and right right, um, I think as far as magic goes, he may have been the the originator of that because I saw some of like one of his other um uh contemporaries who who helped kind of train him was last name Heller. There was a haller like

there was no other eyes that I saw interesting. Yeah, alright, so he kicked off the big eye crazy that's still going crazy today. It is the iPhone. Um. So he I think his dad died in Uh. Harry is eighteen at this point, and he does a very unusual thing and that he actually leaves his mom behind along with his brothers, which was a big deal for him, like you said, because he was a self professed mama's boy. And he took off on the road doing his act

kind of through New York, through the mid West. I was doing okay, he was performing kind of all around. It was a bit of a grind, uh with with Hyman still sounds weird and not because of what you think. Uh. And then eighteen ninety four, his younger brother replaced him in just for a short while, because later that year he would meet eighteen year old Brooklyn Knight to name the villamina Beatrice Ronner or Bess, and she became his

magic partner. And you know, they called him assistants. She would have been the one on stage, you know, looking pretty and doing all the flourishes. And it's a tradition and magic that I know, I don't want to use word problematic, but it has changed in more recent years. Yeah, but this is at the time when a magician's assistant

was a lady in a bathing suit. Yeah, basically, and and Best was no exception to that, although if you read some of the descriptions of some of the illusions and tricks that they did together, she was just as much a magician in her own right as he was. Um, she definitely got her training from him. I think he discovered her in a singing troupe. Um. But like like she grew to be just as adapt at magic and sleight of hand as her husband, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

It's interesting the things that have become boys clubs over the years, and like magic is definitely one of them. It's I mean that's changed a lot over the years, but it always I mean, going to the Magic Castle and you're in, you're mainly going to see male performers and a bunch of old man dressed in suits. Uh, it's just a fund It odd that it's something that

maybe just appeals to young boys. I don't know. My sister wasn't into magic, and my brother and I were so, but there's something too much of that is just like the gender norms and expectations of society where it wasn't like presented to your sister in a way that it's like, hey, isn't this interesting? Like everything else. Yeah, there was a

documentary I saw. I'm sure I mentioned it before, um years ago, about these like up and coming teenage magicians who are all trying to make their way through competitions to the Magic Castle to like a grand showcase, and they follow these ones. There were there was at least one girl that I remember, and she was good. Um, but I mean she must have been thirteen fourteen at the time and have been into it for years. So clearly there's something you know that appeals to some girls too,

even if it's not directed towards them. He has a great documentary. You gotta see it. And by the way, since we're speaking of documentaries, you have of course seen Love on the Spectrum, have you not? No, you recommended that a few weeks ago. Just we'll just stop. I'm gonna I'll give you about six hours. Okay, you just go watch and we'll come back and finish recording. Okay, all right, Well, then another three weeks you can bring it up again. You you just have to see it. Okay,

I'll see it. It's like again, I'm giving you a gift here. Oh did you make it? No? No, just telling you about it as a gift as what I'm and say. It's that sweet. Alright, well everyone watch Love on the Spectrum and we're going to take a break and we're going to talk about Houdini's eventual success right

after this. Alright, so we got Houdini, we got best together, and now things can begin in earnest and they kind of pick up together where what Houdini had started, which was very small little venues, sometimes a side show UM, sometimes a museum like a P. T. Barnum type museum. If they were lucky, um, they were just kind of there almost part of the woodwork or the furniture um with other stuff going on. They weren't doing actual shows. And if they were doing a show, it was a

small act in a larger circus. And it was a grind from what I understand. Yeah, I mean travel back then was not as still a grind, but it definitely wasn't fun and they were on the road all the time. And then finally in they met a man named Martin Beck who was a big name and a big up and comer in the vaudeville scene, which at the time, I mean you think of vaudeville now is like these kind of little shows, But at the time that was kind of the peak of the touring world and the

live theater world. If you were doing vaudeville, that was that was sort of top of the pops. And he saw them perform in St. Paul, Minnesota and was really knocked out. He did this one of his handcuff escapes. And he also took these challenges. He was very famous for people saying, hey, can you do this? Can you get out of the ease? And uh it really you know. He would do this in public and it would help like promote his brand basically and get a lot of press.

And he was challenged with a pair of handcuffs from Beck and he got out of those and Beck said, kid, you got it being Omaha in March, and I'll pay sixty bucks, which is about eighteen hundred dollars today. So it was good money. And all of a sudden they are killing it on the vaudeville circuit. Yeah, his his um his cable to them said, I might proposition you for all next season as well. So it was like it was a big, big deal. It wasn't just that one show. Was like, Okay, you've just made it to

the big time. And so all of a sudden they're in with with Martin Beck, who basically is the king of the Western Circuit of the Vaudeville of vaudeville, and they're playing all over the place, making a lot more money than they were before, playing fewer shows, um, putting in fewer hours on stage, and getting compensated better for it. They're like, all right, this is this is pretty great.

I can I can go with this? Yeah, And he you know, I mentioned that when he would go to these towns, he would do these challenges and stunts for the public and the press. And one of the things he did that would later come back to buy him a little bit was he would always like the cops would come out and he would you know, he would have the cops lock them up and put him in handcuffs and do all this stuff, which was great press of course, but um, as we'll see later on in Germany,

that didn't go over so well with the cops. But he he was known because of this is uh, the king of handcuffs and also the celebrated police battler. Yeah, I mean, and and not only did it kind of drum up like attention in a new town where they may not have heard of him. This guy shows up to a police station, says, put me in jail, and then gets out like in five minutes or something like that. Um. But also the cops end up talking to the press and they say, we have no idea how he did it.

So now you have an official endorsement that you just got for free out of like the cops and the local police, you know. So it was like it was a very smart thing to do. And he would do that from town to town to like you said, drum up publicity and also to sell tickets. Like this would be a way that his shows would go from you know, moving ho home and then to sell out with one of his publicity stunts. So he was really good at that kind of thing, alright. So he's making all this dough.

He tries to get a tour together with Beck to go to Europe because if you know, if you really back then it wasn't if you can make it in New York, you can make it. Make it anywhere. It was if you could make it in Europe, you could make it anywhere. And Beck was sort of, um, not too high on that idea. So I think they had a falling out, and Houdini put him, uh, put a tour together for he invests for themselves to go kind

of run their own show, and they did. They went to Europe and were equally as successful all over Europe and the UK performing this you know, these feats of escape. Yeah, and Russia too. He basically did a world tour over the course of five years. He invested they just like they still listen to it. We're gonna we're gonna try to really kind of make this to the next level. And he he took the same kind of um like publicity chasing stuff from town to town that he did

in the US that served him so well. He did the same thing in Europe too, and um he uh he in bests like really kind of up the act around that time, like they started coming with more and more like grander illusions and tricks and stagecraft, and um, the the European thing was a huge success in it That's what catapulted him into like superstar and he became an international star thanks to that, that five year tour. Yeah, and that was in Germany. How I mentioned earlier, the

police there, I don't think liked the fact. You know, the German police aren't known for their senses of humor, and I don't think they thought it was super cool that he would go over there and sort of uh, not making fool of them, but I think they may have some of them may have taken it that way. So they police officer in Cologne, Germany accused him of

fraud at one point Houdini fired back that that is slander. Uh. And then I think he had to go to court and expose some of his tricks, which he wasn't too wild about, but he had in order to get out of it. He had to kind of expose how he did some of these tricks. But it did work and he did get out of it. Yeah, and now he had an official court endorsement that he was no fraud,

he was an actual true magician. So and it was a big deal too because Germany at the time was under the Kaiser who ruled it with an authoritarian state, or ruled an authoritarian state, and um to take on Germany and then prevail like it took. It took khutzpah, as his dad might have said, you know so. Um. After that, they kind of go back to America. I think in nineteen o five, after five years of touring Europe a lot of money, yeah, a lot of money,

a lot more stardom. Um. This could have been a really like easy time for he Best to just settle down and say, you know what, we we've made it. We're rich, we're good, we can retire forever. Um, let's just live the good life. And they made some attempts to that. I think Best really was ready to settle down, and I think Houdini was like saying he would. So they bought a brownstone at Harlem. There was a farm

in Connecticut they bought. Mom moved in with them, and he was making the gestures of settling down, and then he said, you know what, I've gotta I've gotta get back out there. I'm getting stale. Yeah. I mean, I think one of my big takeaways from reading about his life it was that. And we'll get into some of his inventions later, but he was really an innovator and he was never content to um to just sort of

sit back and do the same old tricks. I think he always wanted to invent new stuff, new gadgets and new tricks to do for people. And I think it was in nineteen o eight, uh that he had his he developed his milk can escape, one of his more famous uh because this is you know, he did a couple of things where basically he was like, I might die if this doesn't work, And those were always the

biggest tricks. Yeah, And like in that one, it was a milk canon overside milk can, which is like a giant metal can that a human could conceivably fit into if they were very small and five ft five um and it was filled with water, and he would get in there and they would padlock the top and put a curtain behind, put it behind the curtain, and then you know, two minutes later he would ask, he would tell the audience like try to hold your breath along

with me, and which just really raised the tension of the in the theater um. And then like two minutes later he would like come up from around the curtain like soaking wet and like out of breath, but triumphant, and everybody would just go nuts. Um. And then that milk can. I don't know if it was his originally or if he like innovated it from somebody else, But he found out later that there were imitators doing the

same thing, and he hated that kind of stuff. He hated imitators, He hated people like using his work, whether they credited him or not. He just did not like that kind of thing. But then that would push him to innovate further. So he just abandoned the milk can altogether, which had brought him so much success, and moved on to like increasingly more dangerous things. Um. His greatest invention was the Chinese water torture cell, which is kind of similar to the milk can, but just even more nuts

and even more dangerous. Yeah, that's easily his most famous trick. That's the one that you always see if you look up Houdini's greatest tricks. It's it's like you said, it's the same thing, but it's a clear tank of water. And he is lowered from his ankles, um, I think, sometimes cuffed, sometimes in a straight jacket, and uh, you know, you can see him, and of course then they raised the curtains so you can't see what's going on. Are we gonna tell people how they how he does some

of this stuff? I'll tell you what. Since there's so much to say about him anyway, we probably don't have time. But there's a really great Gizmoto article It says like, um, the secrets behind Houdini's ten Greatest Tricks. That really does a great job of explaining it. I am. Oh, yeah, I mean, let's just say this. Judini was very good at things like getting out of handcuffs. He was a master of like locks and lock picking. So he did

learn like tons and tons of skills. It's not to say that if a magician has a trick and you learn how to do it that they're not skilled. But when it comes to some you know, these contraptions, they're they're rigged. Of course it's not real magic. He didn't purport to be doing real magic. Uh. He just wanted to be a performer in de light audiences and he did that. Yeah, sometimes the answer is really simple, like oh, there's hinges or it's not really yeah exactly, like there's

a there. Like when you find these explanations, you're like, oh, that's that's still pretty interesting that he was able to do this, and and a lot of times like he would, he would take longer purposefully than he needed to. He could get out of these things in a matter of seconds, but he might say, like take two minutes to appear, um, just to keep the tension ratcheted up, make it that much more amazing. But he also like some of the slight of hand that he and Best would do. Um.

I read that his handcuff tricks. He was the guy

who started handcuff tricks um, like escaping from handcuffs. Um. And when somebody came up and said, like, I had these cuffs specially made for you, and I want to see if you can get out of them, like he would, he would ask to examine them, asked to examine the key, and Best would just kind of be standing there looking too, and she'd she'd make note of what the key looked like, and then she'd slip away without anybody noticing, backstage to their huge giant ring oh keys, find a key that

looks similar, and then like give Harry a kiss or like like something like that, and they would exchange keys, and then he would hand their key back to the person and palm the key that they had been letting him inspect and then managed to swap it out again later on. So like the sleight of hand, and like the trickery that was involved in and of itself, is

is masterful. Like I don't like if you if you take actual magic out of the equation, I don't see how this could be any less impressive, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean every time I've seen and I haven't been to many magic shows, but like at the Magic Castle, you want to be entertained and you want someone to perform a good trick, no one in the audience, I mean, you want the audience leaving going, boy, how did they do that? Not? Was it was that real?

Were they conjuring the dark magic? Right? I enjoyed the you know, the Magic Castle. I know I told this on movie Crush. I don't know if I ever talked about it here, But they have all these small parlor rooms, uh, in addition to the big main room where the big show is exactly, But the little parlor rooms what is

really what I enjoyed. They were very small, like not many people in there, and that was just like good old fashioned card tricks and stuff like that, where you're just so well practiced, and those were just always the most fun for me. The big shows. I could take it early bit. Well, you would have liked who Deni's early work because that's pretty much what it consisted of, close up magic and card tricks. Yeah, it's like David Blaine.

I love all those early specials. But then when he was like, let me go stand on this thing for three years, and I didn't really care as much. You know, he didn't like his three year standing phase. So, um so he stood on a thing, right, Yeah, he stood on a big tall thing. He did. I think he was also frozen in a block of ice too. Maybe sure it was the thing. Um So, so who did? He's got like this whole he just keeps innovating and innovating and like just wowing the public more and more

and he keeps going. Um but there's there's also like these other things happening at the same time. Like the earliest early twentieth century was like a really innovative time if you think about it. One of the things that came out of it was the beginning of movies, and so who didn't He was like the kind of person who was like, yes, I can use that to do magic. All I have to do is perform one trick. Once capturing on film, we can just show everybody in the film.

It's gonna be great because I'm like forty three now and I'm I'm really starting to feel it, you know, hanging upside down in a straight jacket from a crane six stories up or underwater in a tank like that, that wears on a person having to do at night after night after night after night. Right, So he has people exactly, So he was really well sometimes thousands, Like he could draw a crowd, you know, at the height of his stardom for sure. Um, but he like he

was very much drawn to film for that reason. One of the big problems was is he was like zero good at acting from whatever by all accounts, Yeah, he was like me, zero good at acting. I've seen you act. You took that beasting. I thought you actually got stung by a b I was that was one good. I wasn't zero good, Okay, if we're on a scale of one to I was one. But man, it was better than Houdini. Uh. But it was the beginning of movies, and people would go see anything that you put up

on the silver screen. So he was a big star. He was like one of Hollywood's big first action heroes, and he, like everything he did, went at at full bore and said, all right, here's what i'm gonna do. I'm gonna start a production company and all these other movie ventures, and none of those were super successful, but he did have a brief stint as kind of the

big action guy of the day. Um, and these are things that like, I think most people Judini aficionados of course know all this stuff, but if you just know Judini is a magician, you may not know that he was a movie star or that he was a pretty um advanced inventor. Because he's coming up with all of

these contraptions and machines himself to do these tricks. And so he realized early on part of the problem with that was if you want to safeguard something, you would file a patent, But in order to file a patent, you have to explicitly show how the thing works. So he was caught in a between a rock and a hard place magician wise, because he hated being ripped off, but he didn't want to reveal these tricks to get

a patent on these machines. A lot of them. If you look through his list of patents that he got a lot of them he never even ended up using or were abandoned kind of midway through the process of getting them patented. Um. But he found a loophole in performing these things on stage and getting them a copy written as a live act. Right, So with a patent you had to explain technically how the whole thing worked,

not the case with the copyright. Now, you just you do a play and you copyright it and you're you're you're good to go. And that's essentially what he did with the Chinese water torture cell. He did a performance in front of legendarily, I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a pretty good story in front of one single person on live on stage as a one act play, and that enabled him to copyright it

in England. Yeah. I think he also copyrighted maybe the Metamorphosis, um yeah, which was yeah, which he would just write a play and then in the play this trick would happen to describe the trick, but he didn't describe how the trick to work. He just described, say, from like the audience's vantage point, and then bam. It was copy written, and anybody who tried that same trick would be infringing on his copyright. Pretty smart. I think we gotta say

talk about that metamorphosis for a second though. It's worth saying. So it was it turned himself into a butterfly. It was, you know, he turned himself into Franz Kafka. That's a very literary joke. UM. So he Best would be standing there, Um helping him get into a sack, would pull the drawstring at the top of the sack. He would get into a box. The box would be chain trust padlocked, um, and then Best would put a screen up, clap three times, and then on the third clap, the screen would come

down and it would be Houdini standing there. He would unlock the box and open up the the giant mail bag and there was Best popped out. And we're talking in a matter of seconds, a matter of seconds, this thing happened, and that was the metamorphosis. And that was a really good example of how good bestcot because apparently they could trade places in reality with this trick. And you can find out how it worked at his Moto article. Um. But they had it down to where she could change

places with him in three seconds. You're doing Gizmoto a big service here. Well, Gizmoto did the world a big service by writing that article. So I'm just I'm just paying it forward backward. I guess let's before we break, let's talk a little bit about his aviation career. Can we do that, because if you're thinking aviator Harry Judini, the answer is yes. Because he was such a driven man.

He would uh in performer. The Wright brothers had proved that you could fly, so he was like, I need to get in on that, because what's better to draw a crowd out in public than to do something like flying. So he bought a by plane for about five grand in Europe, which is a lot of money back then, still a lot of money, but you know it's even

more because it's modern times, because of inflation. Uh. And he took it to Australia, supposedly took out the first life insurance policy for an airplane accident in the history of the world, and uh toward Australia and was the very first person to fly an airplane on Australian soil. Yeah,

that's pretty historic if you think about it. And that was like another good example of there was this new innovative thing going on and he wanted in on it, so he went and did it and then on until he didn't want to do it right once it became kind of common place, he's like, oh, I'm done flying. Yeah that was Houdini. Alright, So we'll take our last break here and we'll come back and talk about his

battle with his spiritualists and his odd demise right after this. Okay, Chuck, you promised a battle with the spiritualists, and I want to hear about it. Even though I think we kind of talked a little bit about Houdini and our Spiritualism episode, and I know we definitely talked about yeah, there's just no way. And I know we talked about his death in our appendix episode. Not to give too much away, Yeah, he's kind of appeared a couple of times. So he

hated the spiritualism movement. Uh. From the very beginning, it seemed like, um again, he was a performer and a magician who performed these really well thought out tricks, but he m The idea from him was never I'm really doing this stuff. It's I'm a I'm a master at performing these escapes. He was really rubbed by the spiritual us because he thought they were trying to con everybody because they were by saying we're really doing this stuff, and he's like, no, you're just performing like me. But

you're saying you're really doing it, and I don't like that. Yeah, you're taking advantage of people's grief, probably fleecing money out of them. Like there's a lot wrong with what you're doing. And apparently so he was good friends for a brief time with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who wrote the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, who was at least as famous as Houdini by this time we're talking the early nineteen twenties,

if not more famous because of Sherlock Holmes. Um and Doyle was a huge adherent of spiritualism, enormous, one of the most gullible, smart people who ever lived. Um and Judini really wanted to be friends with him, so he kind of kept his sentiments about about spiritualism to himself, and the Doyle's invited Hudini you over for a seance because by this time Houdini's mom had died, and apparently he feigned dead away when he got the news, like he was in Europe at the time, and when he

woke up, he's just sobbing uncontrollably. I'm sure he still went on stage. That was just what Houdini did, but he took it rather hard. So when the Doyles like invited him over for a seance, he went into it open minded, hoping, you know, beyond hope. He would have loved to have spoken to his mom. But also I think he was already had the kernels of skepticism, like in the modern sense of the word, growing inside of him, and he really it really rubbed him the wrong way.

Like the whole thing started when his mother inhabited the body of Mrs Doyle, Lady Doyle um and and made the sign of the Cross, which a lifelong Jewish mother would never do. And apparently it went downhill from there and it really rubbed him the wrong way and he really resented it, and that led to the following out of his friendship with Doyle. But also like his all out just war on spiritualism and spiritualists. Yeah, I mean,

he ended up in court. He testified in front of Congress in support of a bill that outlawed fortune telling in d c. H. And he specifically took on we took on a lot of people, but um, Marjorie the spiritualist Marjorie Mina Crandon was the wife of a Boston surgeon and and pretty big in that movement. And he got together with Scientific American magazine on a committee that they formed and exposed her basically and even put out a pamphlet forty page pamphlet called Houdini Exposes the trick

used by the Boston medium Marjorie. Yeah, dude, it was a very specific title. It was a very public war between them. At one point they had dueling stage presentations in Boston which within days of each other. And Um, Houdini finally got um so that he was part of a committee for Scientific American who was looking to award Bucks for evidence of actual mediumship you know of I guess, um like actual information from the other side or whatever. And he he saw to it that she didn't get

that she lost. But it was apparently a Harvard student who ended up unmasking or he just wrote that pamphlet suggesting how she was probably doing it. And then also he added he added an act to his larger act, which was kind of like a seance, and he would explain how this was all being done, which is pretty cool. It was cool. What wasn't cool was how he died. Yeah is that here to say? And I'm sure I've made fun of Jay Gordon Whitehead before, but I'll do

it again. Yeah. So here's what happened. He um, he fractured his ankle in a performance doing the in thes water torture cell. And that kind of started this run of bad luck. Um, if you believe in that kind of thing. So he fractured his ankle, he's already a little bit hobbled. Um. His doctor said, you probably shouldn't be performing right now. He said, no, no, no, I'm

gonna do it anyway. I'm on tour and he went to Montreal and gave a lecture at McGill University where, um, he invited these students backstage and you know the story you've heard is true, like the hey, can you take a punch to the stomach? I've heard you can? And Houdini is laid up on the couch because of this ankle says, yeah, I'm pretty good at that. And this guy, Jay Gordon whitehead. And this is a quote. It says abruptly delivered four or five terrible, terribly forcible, deliberate, well

directed blows, like just started wailing on his stomach. Apparently, uh, he wasn't ready for it. He wasn't tightened up or you know, didn't have those abs rock solid. And it was decidedly uncool. Yeah, yes, not not just in cool, not funds cool, not cool by any definition. Apparently. Um, that same witness said that hoodin he was like, that'll do with his response to that, yeah, and he tried to play it off, you know, but he was like that really hurt. And it just kept getting worse too,

like just that that. You know. Later that night he had stomach cramps. The next day he was racked with abdominal pain um and it was finally bad enough that he went to a doctor and his doctor was like, I think you might have appendicitis. You should go to a hospital, and whodin? He said, never, I have to perform tonight and went on stage in Detroit and gave what came ended up being his final final performance I think, on October nine. Because that doctor was absolutely right. It

was appendicitis, and he was in big trouble. Yes, it was too late for him. Um, it was a rupture dependix. He died on Halloween on October three, be first, with Bess and a couple of his brothers at his bedside. And what's really what's what the debate is. You know, there was a lot of debate over the years about whether or not he was murdered uh and had been being poisoned by the Spiritualist, or whether the spiritual is hired this kid to go beat him up uh and

wail on his stomach or whatever. Yeah, exactly, And I think most people that really know have come out and said, none of that stuff is really true. That's really probably all speculation. But what the real question is is whether or not it's possible and whether or not those punches to the stomach actually ruptured his appendix, or did he already have an appendicitis happening and this might have just brought it to light or exacerbated it, or just maybe

maybe it was just ill timed all the way around. Yeah. I think in our Appendix episode we landed on the idea that no, it definitely didn't rupture his appendix. And apparently there's a study UM that looked at twenty years worth of pendicitis and could only find just a handful of UM appendixes that were ruptured from like violence or trauma. So it can't happen, but it's really rare. And even Jay Gordon Whitehead Biff probably didn't rupture UM Houdini's appendix.

But what he did do was he gave Houdini a good reason why his his abdomen would hurt right there, and which would cause Hudini to just ignore it for longer than he otherwise might have had it had it been a mystery sensation that he couldn't attribute it to anything, And so Jay Gordon might had probably did and at least indirectly lead to Houdini's death. But it was a neglected appendix or appendicitis that finally got him, and he died of sebsis on Halloween in x in Detroit, of

all places. Yet uh so the kind of to put a tag on the spiritualist thing UM. Before he died, he told best, he was like, hey, listen, I've got an opportunity here if I'm about to die, uh to really prove this this spiritualism thing is really bunk, Because I'm gonna try from the other side to get back in touch with you. And you're gonna have to have these seances and try and get in touch with me. And and this is going to prove it once and for all. And for about a decade after his death,

Best did hold a seance. It never worked, of course, and she eventually quit. But the Magic Castle still has Houdini seances, I think every year. Uh. I don't know if you can just buy a special ticket or if you have to be invited to that. I know you have to be invited to get in period, but I don't know. I don't know how you get into that seance.

You gotta know somebody who at least knows somebody who knows somebody probably, um, I want to make fun of the some that theory though one more time about spiritualism. So there was a book called The Secret Life of Houdini where the um the authors said that if one were just suspect Hudini, a victim of foul play, the section of organized crime that was composed of fraudulent spirit mediums must be considered likely suspects. It's like something off

a history channel or something, you know. Yeah, and fun to make fun of. Yeah, you got anything else about Houdini? I got nothing else? All right? Well I don't have anything else either, But there's plenty more to learn. There's tons of websites dedicated to Houdini. There's like lots of documentaries out there and there it's pretty cool to go check them out. And also check out the gizmotor article. And since I missaid, misspoke Gizmoto, it's time for a listener, mayo.

I'm gonna call this another correction. Okay, good they're rolling in lately, Yeah, we're rolling in them. Hey, guys, just listen to the latest episode on Mental Records. And we heard from quite a few people on this one, by the way. Uh, and as always it was great stuff. However, I think Josh provided a bit of unfortunate misinformation and claiming that sex offenders have the highest rate of recidivism. While this is a common claim, the evidence does not

support it. Uh. There are as always a lot of different variables in the research on the topic. Notes that there are so many different factors here to consider, but the straight statement that sex offenders have been shown to have the highest recidivum rates of any criminal is not supported by the data anyway. There's a lot more research out there as well, but I think that the statement about recidivim rates reinforces the false belief among many that

sex offenders are more likely to reoffend. Keep up the good work, Mike. Uh. And Mike's in a bunch of links uh that I went through and um it appears that as correct. Yeah, we got that one wrong. Huh. So thanks to Mike and everybody who wrote in to say it's not true, because we don't want to paint anybody in an unnecessarily bad light. Agreed. Okay, if you want to be like Mike, can get in touch of

this with the correction, especially a vital correction. We love to hear those, and you can shoot us an email to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H