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They were terrified that he would come to town. They were terrified that he was in the room disguise. He was their worst nightmare.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. Harry Houdini, the world's greatest magician, wild audiences around the world in the nineteen twenties. He must have felt invincible, but then an evil spirit cursed him during a seance, and soon Houdini would wage war against spiritualism. He set out to debunk fraudulent mediums and
expose Charlatan's for lying to people in mourning. Author Bradricka tells us about Houdini's crusade from his book Lincoln's Ghost, Houdini's War on Spiritualism, and the dark conspiracy against the American Presidency. Let's talk about the last book. Give me a quick summary of what that book was.
Missus Sherlock Holmes was a kind of standard true crime. The seventeen year old girl gets tragically murdered, and the book is about that mystery and how it's solved, but more importantly, how it's solved by a middle aged woman, Grace Hummiston, who the press called Missus Sherlock Holmes, who just turned out, as I kept going into the book, just this amazing person who did all this cool stuff.
And what year did that take place in?
That took place around the same time, nineteen sixteen, seventeen eighteen, around that.
So you like me like the older stories, So you've got now this book that's in nineteen twenty six. What is it about these types of stories from one hundred years ago that is intriguing to you when you have so many more contemporary stories to pick from here?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
This wasn't an era that I ever really liked as kind of a student. I like the Victorians, and further on from there, I think there's something about the past. I think the real kind of easy answer is that you don't have to interview any one, right, You don't have to deal with any living people.
Don't tell everybody our secret, I know, but.
A lot of right.
I'm not saying all writers, but a lot of writers. You know, we kind of stick to ourselves. And it's just kind of nice to deal with the past in your own way and kind of discover these people through all these different ways that we try to. You know, I don't know if they're always successful. I mean, we certainly try, but try to get to the past. And
I just love the idea of visiting the past. I should say this, but I'm obsessed with time travel, and I think a lot of us start out that way, and I think about it a lot, like maybe way too much, But this is how you do it, right. You do all the research and you try and recreate that spot and time as much as you can.
And I think.
Until they invent it, until some scientists does it, this is as good as it gets.
Well, let's talk about your history project.
Here.
We have a little bit of a crossover because I have an audio book, The Ghost Club, which I think you'll mention here, and you focus in on one really important character who happened to be a member of the Club but just has this sort of otherworldly existence at so many different levels. And that's Harry Houdini, who I have to think, no matter how young our audiences, people have to have all heard about Harry Houdini. But why don't you give me a little background on your main character here.
I really hesitate in calling Houdini the kind of Taylor Swift of the early nineteen hundreds. But his range was he traveled the world, and he was on tour more than the Grateful Dead War. He was on tour, you know, three hundred and fifty days a year, and he would just do his shows and everyone loved him, right, he was hugely popular. And you know the end of the eighteen hundreds, he starts with just simple magic, and he starts with card tricks, and they call him the King
of Cards because he masters that. And then he moves on to escapes, and he masters escapes, and he starts doing more elaborate magic, more elaborate escapes, you know, everyone kind of even if you don't know who Dini, you've heard of the Escape from the Chinese Water Torture Cell, which has this ridiculous kind of vaudeville name as like the worst place you want to be and it's just a box. They throw it in the in some water,
which is still pretty bad. But what I couldn't wrap my head around is that at the kind of end of his careers in his fifties, which back then you know that was just it's wrapping up now, but he changed everything. He's such an adaptable performer, but he focuses on this real kind of social cultural phenomenon that's going on in the world, which is spiritualism, and he makes that his main focus. To me, it just seems like
I couldn't understand why did he do that? And that was like kind of the beginning of the project.
You know, one of the things from researching Ghosts Club, which was, you know about a social club of men that started with Charles Dickens and still have gone to meetings, still goes through today, where that you know, back then you had all these affluent men, including Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote Cherlock Holmes who were eating French food at very expensive restaurants. I mean, these are power players in the world, Maharashi. I mean it was just incredible.
And then talking about ghosts and fairies and you know, retelling all of these stories. It's always surprising to me when I read the profiles of those people, including Abraham Lincoln, who I feel like are rooted in science or you know, something that you would think would be very very grounding in a present world kind of way, and then they believe in all of this other stuff that that could
have been considered wild back then. And Doyle was one of them, because you know, so Sherla Combs is so scientific. And I wondered about Whodini and I guess let's keep talking about him if there was at one point did he ever feel like he had a connection to the other world when he was younger, because I know that oftentimes happened with these men in the Ghost Club.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I loved Ghost Club, by the way, and I told you this off air, and I might as well share it that this project was kind of built from a project I wanted to do on the Ghost Club, and then I saw, oh, no, Kate did a book, So then I knew I was sunk, but I loved what you did with it, and it just kind of forced me to look at something a little differently. With Houdini, he had this line that says, Whodini was a huge
fan of Abraham Lincoln. He like idolized him. And I thought, of all the people, you know, Whodini was never political, nothing like that, but he loved Lincoln.
So I wanted to explore that.
And it turned out when he was a kid, Whodini went to a seance in Wisconsin where he grew up, in Appleton, Wisconsin, in the heart of the Midwest, Midwest, the most midwestiest you can be, if that's a word, And the medium who was doing the seance brought forth Lincoln, because Lincoln was one of the big ones that kind of all mediums somehow had access to. And he brought forth Lincoln and you know, I'll take questions, and Houdini, who was this huge, little young Houdini, was a huge
deve ote of Lincoln. Knew all these facts and all these trivia, and he asked kept asking Lincoln all this stuff. You know, what did you do after your mother died and so forth, and Lincoln, of course, the spirit Lincoln got all the questions wrong, and that's when Houdini knew that it was fake. And he was not so concerned that it was fake, but he was more concerned that it had kind of been presented as truth and it
had kind of really hurt his feelings. And afterwards he kind of hung around and talked to the medium and he said, you know, why, why did you do that?
And he said, that's what we all do.
And he had this kind of crashing down of all his ideas of maybe what magic was and what other things were, including the afterlife, and that was I think the start of it. And there were other things along the way that just made him more resolved to kind of really wipe this. They always said they weren't a religion, but they really acted like a religion, spiritualism, and he wanted to wipe the earth clean of it.
Yeah. I remember a story of a little girl from this is from the Ghost Club. A little girl who begged her father, please don't go. He was going on a transatlantic flight from the UK to America. Please don't go, Please don't go, And he said, she said, I think the ship's going to go down, and he says, no, don't be ridiculous and kisses her and gets on the Titanic. And so this is one of the many stories you
know that they talked about in the Ghost Club. But talk to me about how spiritualism was born, not specifically in the United States, as in you know who came up with it? But why why did it spread? Because it did spread pretty quickly.
I'm so glad you asked that, because that's I'm like giving you, like all these reasons why I wrote the book. This is kind of a big reason. Is this is a story about death.
It really is.
I mean you can say, like, well, it's a story about death, but really, how death is life winning? It's death. It starts with death. I mean, you have the Spanish flu pandemic, and then you have roughly the same time as World War One, and you have millions dead, millions dead. And I started, you know, doing this right at the end of the COVID pandemic, with the idea of you know, there's all these people who have died in such a short span of time.
What are we going to do? How do we deal with this?
I still don't think we've dealt with it at all, and when something like this happens, there's this sense of death as this kind of existential crime in that this isn't cool, right, that this is you know, we can kind of accept that we have to accept death right on a personal level people we know, and even with ourselves, but when it happens like that, it seems to me, and this isn't like an official analysis, but it seems to me that people kind of fight back a little
bit more. And then you have the kind of resurgence of spiritualism in America certainly where Okay, we're not going to deal with all this pain and misery of all these people gone. We can talk to them. They're still here. We can pierce the veil, and you have, all of a sudden, all these believers coming out of everywhere. And just like you said before, it's kind of that little step from the scientific like kind of stepping up or stepping down where you look at it, it gets easier
to do when there's so much death. And Okay, I believe in this because I want to talk to my brother who.
Died in the war, or my father or whoever.
Yeah, and it's that trauma of not just a death, but with war it's not unexpected. But who what parent is going to go in and think, you know that my kid's going to be one of the ones who
are going to die. They're praying it doesn't happen. It's that ripping that Lincoln felt, can you because I think what I had seen too is, you know, it was the rise after the Civil War where we hadn't experienced for one hundred years that sort of you know, devastation, and then Lincoln experienced it sort of directly, and that's where we get the stories. Can you tell me about Lincoln's experiences and his wife and all of that, just a quick little summary.
Yeah, So Lincoln loses his son very famously, and it's so tragic, and it's one of those stories that just no matter what version you read, it's just it's awful. It's true. I think historians agree that his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln looked to mediums for help. Again, like you said, the trauma, the grief, and she said that she would go to bed every night and see Willie at the foot of her bed, see his ghost, you know. And this is a mother going through trauma and of course
she has. You know, people have tried to diagnose her for decades and decades, but you know, going through going through a lot, and so there's definite points that she consulted with the medium. There's later on, after her husband dies, she takes a famous spirit photograph with the ghost of Abe Lincoln. And this is one thing that the spiritualists later on in Houdini's time, point to. They say, well,
you should believe even spiritualism because Abe Lincoln did. As for Abe himself, there's no tried and true proof, but there are plenty of anecdotes and plenty of stories. You know, mediums. There are a couple that would write books that say, you know, I sat with the president. I blacked out and came to and he said, well, thank you. You've just solved the problem of slavery. So that the mediums
are acting as the president. And this is what causes this dangerous kind of thing that that Whodini is worried.
Is going to happen again.
But yeah, so there's plenty of this, and a lot of people even back then would claim Lincoln talk to them or came to them for comfort at the time of his greatest grief.
So tell me Houdini's story. He grows up, he becomes this incredible, you know, magician and entertainer. Tell me, you know where you want to start with the and what his adventure is like. It starts with a curse, is what it sounds like.
Yeah, I knew I couldn't do the big comprehensive biography of Harry Houdini because that sounded like a lot of work now, But I wanted to look at just this part of his life where he fights spiritualism. It's kind of the last two years of his life more or less. Is he gets cursed by this famous there's a famous medium in Boston, and he gets cursed and the spirit says you're.
Going to die.
Houdini, enough is enough, and he doesn't take it seriously at all, though there are some points later on he'll write, well, if I get hit by a car, you're going to say the curse worked. But sure enough, two years later he's dead. So it's not that the curse worked, but those are the facts. So I wanted to look at those two years and see what he did and how he did it to, like I said, fight against this really powerful and you know, when you said, these are
powerful people. Spiritualism was a really powerful movement, and he had found that they had infiltrated, you know, into kind of all aspects, you know, not just the everyday American who would go to a seants now and again as a kind of this weird kind of spiritual entertainment, but also into things like churches and businesses and even government. So that's the part I wanted to focus on.
I'm wondering, you know, Houdini, just from my research with Ghost Club, had clashed with quite a few people. You had people who really believed deeply in spiritualism, and then there were quite a lot of skeptics, and then there were some in the middle. So do you get very much into Houdini's very famous sort of a dissolving relationship with Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes, who was an incredible devoted spiritualist and you know, believed his wife was
automatic writing, I think is what his wife did. So tell me, you know what about that relationship is before the curse happens after that relationship or before it starts to crumble.
Kind of around the same time, and I have a great story for that. So Doyle and Houdini are at one point great friends because Houdini wants to be the perfect American, like really likes being friends with celebrities. He thinks it's really cool, and he really respects Sir Arthur
and so forth. And then, as you alluded to, Sir Arthur after World War One has a lot of loss in his life and turns completely to spiritualism and becomes really the most famous figurehead of the movement and speaks really eloquently and goes on lecture tours and has slides of just ghosts everywhere and converts people on the.
Spot and believes everybody. I think, I don't know if I remember him criticizing any medium that he ran across. He believed everything they said.
What drives Houdini nuts is that Sir Arthur, who is very smart and like you said, it creates homes right, the ultimate detective. What drives Houdini nuts is that Doyle will find a way to explain every little thing. So if a medium makes a mistake, Doyle has a reason why. So a great example of this is Doyle invites Houdini and his wife Bess to Atlantic City for a small
vacation with the family, et cetera. And while they're there, Doyle, who's constantly trying to convert Houdini, says, you know, sit with my wife and she will do a seance for your mother. Houdini's mother had died in nineteen thirteen. They're famously extremely close, and this really affects Sudini in a great way. So they sit for the seance and she does, like he says, automatic writing. She becomes possessed, her eyes roll back in her head and she just starts writing.
And she presents these pages to Houdini and they're from his mother, and she says, I miss you so much. I can't wait till you come join me. It's so wonderful here and so on and so forth. And Houdini stares at her and he says, this is I'm paraphrasing. He says, this is fine, but he says, my mother never spoke a word of English. She was Hungarian, and so of course the automatic writing was all in English.
And Sir Arthur says, well, in the afterlife they have spiritual colleges, and she would have learned English by that, Oh God. And Houdini's furious. And that's when the fight is well and truly on.
Well because he's insulting Doyle's wife. Not just a medium. I mean, this is Doyle's wife who he just absolutely adored and believe and oh yeah, said she was brilliant, and so yeah, that's pretty incredible. That must have been very uncomfortable after that happened. So the curse comes up,
and let's say the medium was fake. What would be the motivation do you think for a medium to declare that one of the most famous people in the world is going to die in the next however many years, what's that motivation?
Yeah, I mean that's the question.
Because the Spiritualists, like I said, were very powerful, and they had a governing body called the National Spiritualists Association, who's still around today. And they were really awesome. And when I dealt with them, they gave me their secret file they had on Houdini, which was really cool and a lot of other really great stuff. They're super nice, they were very powerful, they were making a lot of money.
Most of them, to a person, hated Houdini because if he had his way, they would be out of a job. They would be out of a very lucrative job. Mediums were like making a lot of money and Houdini ultimately, you know, one of the big narratives in the book is he testifies before Congress and in support of a bill that it's kind of a small bill, it's an anti fortune telling bill, but it's one of those bills that can be interpreted as you know, kind of putting
restrictions on spiritualism and spiritualist readings. There would be a license fee, there would be all this other sorts of stuff. So they were looking, they were making a lot of money,
and they saw Houdini as a threat. And you could see this, and they would have all these conferences like all over the world, and they would just shout out how terrible Houdini was and he was just the worst thing to happen to the movement, and that people must shut their eyes to what he was saying and believe in the afterlife, believe in what their relatives were telling them.
So when I started to see that in all these speeches that were just too spiritualist, it made me realize that they were taking this much more seriously than a kind of parlor trick of let's spook Udini and curse them.
You would think that must dim from complaints or something of the way I framed it in Ghost Club is picturing a woman who was scraping together all of her money because she lost her son in World War One. And you know, I'm not talking about these influential men who had you know, millions, hundreds of thousands and would meet in London like the woman who is saving all of her money and maybe not even feeding her kids because she wants to connect with her dead soldier son
one more time. Do you think that was the motivation or do you think there was some sort of weird competition between the standard religions you know as we know it and spiritualism.
I think yes to all that.
I think there was definitely this kind of lower middle class appeal to spiritualism. Those are the folks that lost the most people in both tragedies, and also kind of I don't want to say, but more like kind of open to this kind of alternative religion. Even though they said it was never a religion, it totally was. But it was also a competition with Houdini for entertainment dollars, you know, because people pointed out and it's hard not
to see it that way. That is he kind of is that the apex of his career and this other like movement is in every city in America, you have people, you know, what should I pay for? Should I go punt down money for the magician or for another kind of magician that would let me talk to like you said, my dead son.
So his relationship with Doyle is sort of this integrated. He gets this curse and he's also testing mediums. I think is from what I remember. Can you tell me some of the good stories that you came up with, because I remember a pair of brothers who would drag a a closet I think, are a cupboard all over America and the Davenport brothers, I think, yeah, right, and then you would hear Knox, and you would hear a piano playing and all kinds of stuff, and the two
guys were standing there. So there were a lot of opportunities to disprove table spinning and the automatic writing, and there were physical tools that medium used. So was he able to dispel some stuff in a creative way?
Yeah?
I describe parts of this to somebody. They said, well is this scary? Is this book scary? And I'm like, well, yeah, some parts are terrifying, but some parts are like really hilarious because some of the stuff that both sides would do, that the spiritualists would do to try and convince their people who had paid good money, but then the people are trying to catch them. It's just really this cat
and mouse. So Houdini had this group that he called the Secret Service because he kind of saw himself as this kind of president of magic, which he really was, but he had this group called the Secret Service, and they would go around the entire country. They would usually go ahead of him where he would go on tour and kind of stake the place out. And some of the best parts of this is that they were mostly women. His best agents were women.
Do you think mediums that's their number one client when they think it's women mostly? Yeah, interesting, Yeah, that was the reason.
And it was because people, you know, thought the secret agent would be the guy, and also that they said that the woman agent could disguise herself in a number of different ways. So his number one agent, and my favorite person in the whole book was this woman named Rose Mackenberg and she was from Brooklyn and she just got hooked up with Houdini in kind of a really
weird way. She goes to a seance and she just totally debunks it because she's just this no nonsense, you know, don't tell me this is a ghost when it's really this. And he hires her and she goes on this solo crusade, even away from Houdini but working for him, of just
shutting down all these mediums. And she has a million stories, like there's one like you said, where instruments would play and there was a drum playing and a trumpet was playing and this is all and everyone can see this, and the idea is that, oh, it must be the spirits who are doing right, and Rose just refused to
believe it. So she comes back the next night. She disguises herself as this old lady, and once the lights go out and they start doing it again, she gets off her seat and crawls around the room and she goes behind the drum, the bass drum, and looks inside
and she's like, will I touch ectoplayism? And she writes all these great like diaries and stuff, so we have this awesome first person view of it all, and she finds there's a guy in there, a little person who's just banging the drum, and there's this great moment where they both just stare at each other because they're terrified that one's gonna tell on the other, and they just back off and she later, you know, busts the medium
and it's all over. But there's there's just so many stories like this of these people who weren't Houdini but believed in his crusade that would go and break down even you know, from the simplest local spirit medium too. There's another there's a journalist named Virginia Swain who gets sent to He sends to a spiritualist camp in Illinois called Chesterfield. It's still there today, and she's there for a couple weeks and the stuff that happens is just
completely bananas. But at the end they discover who she is and they try to lyncher, but she gets out in time and reports it to the newspapers and it runs in syndication.
It's amazing. And you know the stories of debunking these mediums, I mean, they've range from what I found, They ranged to really simple spotting. So you know, we can talk about One of my favorite things is the spiritual photography. I can't remember if there's a is there a phrase for that or is that what it is?
Yeah? Spirit photos?
Yeah, yeah, and you know the idea of the double exposure, and people didn't really understand that, So did Whodini. Do you think, like, how would he know or how were these people know what to look for? And how would they not get exposed to the medium world? You know, as well, somebody's out there looking at you. Be careful and this is how you might change yourself so that you don't get caught or something like that.
Oh, that's such a great question. Yeah.
They were terrified of that. They were terrified that he would come to town. They were terrified that he was in the room disguised. He was their worst nightmare. And the cool thing I found about Whodini is that he would kind of he just assumed it was all fake. And the way he would know for sure is if he could replicate it, because that's how he did his magic tricks. He would see a magic trick and say, well I can do that, and they'd figure it out.
So with the Spirit photos, he just got a camera and just messed around with it at his house in Harlem, and they just there's stories of him and his brother, just like you know, messing around with this camera for hours, and he eventually produces a series of photos and he produces one a very famous one where he's talking to Lincoln, and he releases this one and some of the New York papers pick it up, like Whodini sees the light,
Whodini speaks to Lincoln. And then he comes around, you know, after all this and says, you know, you're all morons.
I did this in my basement.
And then he shows how he does it like he does like a newspaper or magazine article where he goes step by step how he made the spirit photo. So he tries to debunk it and make it as practical as possible.
Do you think that convinced people? And the press is covering it right? Does this get through to the people? And it was an extraordinary number. I can't remember how many Americans it was, one hundred thousand or something associated themselves with spiritualism in the twenties a lot. Did you have a better number than that?
I did not have a number, and I think it was a ton more. Yeah, because just looking at like every city in the newspaper they would advertise, so even if they didn't have a church like New York and DC and all the big cities would have a church or many church, but there were always people coming around or that were just camped out there as like your local media, right, I've heard one hundred the same for
people that were kind of card carrying members. But there were so many that were just doing it, going to the seances, talking these people, paying to these people. So it's hard to think. But your first question is the best one, is like did this work? Did he convince anybody? Because that's the one I really wanted to know, because I think that resonates today a little bit. You know,
here's all this overwhelming evidence. Can I convince you? No? Okay, So I don't know if it convinced as many people. I know it didn't convince as many people as he wanted it to.
And he never expressed doubts in any way. I mean with the loss of his mother. So William Yates, the poet, the famous poet, was also in the ghost Club. He had lost his mother also, and that is what tipped him into spiritualism. Was this just awful loss. So it's interesting when one one way goes, you know, one person goes one way and one goes the other. And it seems like Houdini was angry about being lied to about his mother, and that's kind of what at least the
emotional part of it. What about his wife, What did his wife believe?
Was it best best?
Yeah, Houdini did try to reach his mother through mediums, and it was almost I think it was doomed to fail because he kind of knew it wasn't going to work. But there's lots of stories and lots of anecdotes that he did try and he was kept trying, and that one of the main reasons he went after this, just like you said went after the spiritualist, is because they
let him down. It was also because there he had all these scrap books that he collected of all these evil things that spiritualism had done to people who like driving them to suicide or kill their parents. But Bess is the real enigma because no one knows what she was. His constant companion. She was more than you know, just the kind of magician's wife. She was his assistant on stage forever in the beginning, and then kind of you know, did some more behind the scenes stuff as to what
she believed nobody knows. There's very little left behind. After Houdini died, she started doing a seance for him to contact him. But it's hard to tell, like how much of that was heartfelt and how much of that was a kind of promotional stunt, right, yeahmative, But during the mix of it, when it's when Houdini's cursed and you know, in his crusade, it's really hard to see what she thought. She was a real enigma to me, and I found
something about her. I think about her in the book that I put in an epilogue that might be kind of like the missing key to all of it.
Does Houdini throughout all of this, is he ever stumped? Do you think by a medium or you know, somebody who is you know, claiming to be I mean they called him a lot of different things. It was like mystic mediums. Yeah, the people who were kind of the conductors. Did he find anybody who stumped him or that you know of, or where he came close to saying.
Maybe, I don't know, Yeah, there was one, and there's only one.
Because you get this feeling that he Whodini was kind of I mean, he fascinates me. I don't claim to know him at all. He's one of those subjects where you just kind of have to write all the way around him and then you get kind of kind of get a sense of it. But a lot of times I think he was kind of a jerk. Like people would say, here's my medium act you mean, he would just say, no, that's bunk, that's you know, that's ridiculous. There was one that stumped him that he didn't know
how they did it. There was some woman who had died in Los Angeles. They took a picture of her casket because it's you know, that's what people did, and there was this weird light around it, like by her head. And for some reason he always would come back and say, this is the one I couldn't explain. And I don't know why, because it seems like that would be like the most easiest thing to do. But for whatever reason, he said, and he would said this a bunch of times, this is the one I cannot explain.
It's interesting. I wonder what people think with spirit photography. I think it was William Hope was the big one, the big spirit. He was the one who had Doyle with Lincoln and you know, some really famous photos. Yeah, I wonder what the explanation was for why still film would be able to pick up on a spirit or a light associated with the spirit with that the human eye wouldn't come up with. And I always just thought I wish somebody could explain what they were thinking with that.
That's a great question, because I think we take that for ranted. And it's not like photography was new, but it was still I think photography was mysterious, yeah right, not like not the average person knew how to do it. And it seemed like if there was something with anything visual that if you saw it, it was like that kind of took the place of I don't want to say it took the place of science because science is seen two. But it was so easy to believe what
you would see. And this like Doyle's famous He makes his film The Lost World with the dinosaurs, and he shows it in New York and people are like, oh my god, these are real, and if you've seen them, they look like gumby, right, But it's if you see it, you believe it. And I don't want to say that, well, you know, people were just naive in the twenties, but I think it's just the scope of experience, of historical experience of what you see.
Well, of course Doyle hints at his beliefs in Christmas Carol, one of my favorite stories, but that Beneezer Scrooge and all of that. So the opposite just having faith, the opposite of the very clinical and scientific Sherlock Holmes. So there's this two year period right where Houdini's going on this crusade. What is he thinking the endgame is going to be? Because he cannot debunk everybody in America, and of course there were just plenty in the UK, and
he would come to the UK often. Did you get a sense for was it going to Congress and getting some kind of legislation all the books to stop these people?
He really wanted that bill to pass. It's this just really outrageous. All these scenes of him in front of the Congressional committee, like doing magic tricks to try and convince him.
It's just it's priceless.
But I think the answer is he really wanted that to pass, but he really thought he could wipe it out. I mean, he had that kind of ego. He was Houdini. He thought everything was possible. And of course you can't wipe out, you know that kind of phenomenon. It kind of ends eventually, kind of naturally on its own, and plenty of people believe in it today.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think he thought he could, he could really do it. He was that kind of manic.
So one of the things I think about, and what I was thinking about in the book, and I knew you would too, is is that idea of having that faith versus the scientific whatever the evidence is, and having somebody go through and debunking, and how upsetting that must have been to the true believers. And then sometimes I think does it do any harm? Like? What is the harm? So you've got the woman that I made up. She's saved up her money, she's lost a son, she's in
a lot of pain, and she has a medium. The medium says, your son is standing over your right shoulder, and he is telling me I love you, mom, Everything is fine. I will see you when I'm meant to see you, and you know, God be with you or whatever he says. So I was thinking about that, and I had wondered if Hodini had thought about that two way. Is there harm actually harm in that?
I don't think there is. I think it's kind of wonderful. I think Houdini though there was no either or, and he would say I know exactly what he would say. He would tell the story of the Robbins family. Husband and wife in Iowa live on a farm trying to have a child. They finally succeed. They have this beautiful daughter named Constance Vivian. She dies five hours later, you know.
Wrecked with grief, the mother goes on a trip a few months later to Chicago, meets with her sister, so and so forth, meets a medium and the medium says, I can bring her back to you. And she says, talk like, you know, so I can see her. She's like, no, I can bring her back to you. She gives her an elaborate series of instructions. They have to go back to their house and wait to be given the sign,
and they have to wear all white. And on the night in the night she gives her put flowers all through the child's room and they're wearing all white and they sit there in the dark and wait and there's no sound. It's just pure silence and nothing happens. And this is kind of I think this is the best part of the story. The husband goes, well, I'm going to bed, So he gets up and he doesn't want to wait anymore. He goes to bed, and the wife is still sitting there and she hears steps on the
staircase and the door opens and there's a shape. She says, it's not a person, it's a shape, and it's holding a baby, and she gives the baby to her and it's her daughter, she says, down to the two birthmarks, it's her. She goes to the press. She says it's a miracle. The husband comes around eventually and says believes
in it too, how do you explain it? Soon after, the woman says, I'm moving to California to be with this medium who did all this to work in her spiritual center and spread the good word and the hood days. Separate with the husband and that's that. A couple of years later, the spiritual center kind of breaks down for fraud and all this other stuff, and the woman is interviewed by the press missus Robinson. She says, I know this isn't my daughter anymore, but I really want to
keep her. My only fear is that she will disappear through a window someday, like she's a ghost. So Houdini loved that story because that story is the worst, right, instead of the comforting aspect, you have the medium who prays on and this really happened. This wasn't just some like plenty of these things are just stories, but this happened and gives her a child, and then it extracts money from her, you know, over a period of five years.
And where the child came from. You know, all these reporters try to find and no one's figured it out. So that would be his answer that for all the small comforts it can give someone, there were people who were really preying on people who were grieving.
I think that the stories have been so interesting for me. The interesting also part is the mechanics of the mediums in this time period. I looked it up because you and I didn't know the definite numbers, and I looked it up and it was at its heyday around the you know, late eighteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds before it kind of turned into fringe religion more than anything else. Eight million people in the United States and
Europe combined identified as spiritualists. Well million, that's incredible. It was such a big deal and then it sort of faded and faded into oblivion. And then what a lot of people now associate that with is like miss Cleo. Do you remember Miss Cleo?
Oh?
Yeah, from the TV commercials. So I had wrestled with it in my book. But what do you think do you think we can talk to you know, the people in a different realm? Is there a different realm?
So I wrote this book from Whodini's, you know, kind of like his point of view that it's all not real, because I knew if I separated that it would be too difficult to navigate, and I don't think it would work. So I knew I had to do it through Houdini's way. And then you can, you know, see how he dismantles all of it and gets to what I think he thought was more than that. I think what his version of magic was that being set. I have a ghost story.
So I do believe it, and I had it in the book as like the last chapter, and they said cut that what I kind of at first I was mad, but I agree because you have to stay on Houdini's you know that this was was to him, it was all fake, and nobody would talk him out of it, just like Doyle. Doyle's the counterpoint, Like you said, he
could not be talked out of it. And I really wanted to get that because of you know, things going on today, of being so focused that you kind of you can can miss things, you can miss the truth. But yeah, no, I do think and my version of it is kind of Whodini's version. Hohodini thought the greatest thing that can happen to you in life is coincidence. He thought coincidence was just pure magic, more so than
any kind of sign or card trick. He said, when there's good coincidence, he's like, that is the best thing there. I totally agree with that. I think that can be better than a ghost story, if that makes sense. But yeah, no, I do think there's something right. I mean, you made me answer it.
What do you think.
I grew up myself in what was always told was a haunted farmhouse. I say it in the book. You know that it was owned by the county's first undertaker, and have we had original floors And I looked under the trapdoor in the closet one time and there was no insulation. I mean it was woodplanks. These were legit floors from eighteen ninety, I think is when it was built. And I've always just thought, what is it in those floors because it was before and then during embalming when
he worked. So if you just think about all of that, I just I'm not convinced that having that many bodies in a house, many of them were murder victims or domestic violence or whatever, that there isn't some residue literal, literal and figurative residue that's there. But you know, I mean, living in a house from eighteen hundreds, there's creeks and it scared me to death growing up. But what's your ghost story?
My mom broke her wrist many many years ago, and she fell down the stairs and she had to go to the hospital get it like set in eight places. You know, it's really bad. And she kept saying, I was pushed, I was pushed, and she you know, ended up like in the adjacent room. So something happened. So whatever, you know, she's recovering. I don't want to say it's funny,
but she had to like elevate her her arm. So my dad, like you know, goes up and screws this giant metal hook in the ceiling and then you know, wheels her arm up. So the whole time she's like, looks like she's answering a question in a classroom. She's a teacher, so anyway, she keeps saying, you know, I was pushed, and then she said, someone's poking me.
Someone's poking me. Like, what are you talking about? Mom?
Then she sees someone on TV, a kind of local medium called the Ghost Lady. I live in Cleveland. She's still around, and she was saying for Halloween, you could like go to some bar and she would tell you about ghosts.
I don't know.
So my mom wants to bring her to the house, and you know, she's in a lot of pain. She's not that kind of person, but we're like, okay, we'll do it. And somebody came and she said, you have a ghost. You have a child, a girl. She followed you home from school. And we're sitting in the room and I'm not really buying this, and my dad's next to me, he's not really buying it. And she's like, oh, but she has a dog with her, And all of
a sudden, I'm like, okay, let's go. Let's tell me more about the ghost stop because that's the coolest part, right. She's like, well, she's a golden labrador, so apparently she didn't mean to knock my mom down the stairs or so forth, but she did, and she doesn't want to leave. I have a younger brother and sister. And she's like, she likes her sister's room. It's very pink, creepy. Yeah, and well it gets worse. She goes she likes the pony, and I'm like, okay, this is all you know, you
can come up with this. The pony's name is Princess, and my sister turns white and she's like, it is princess. Now at this point, I'm like, that's a gamble to say princess. It's not like the worst gamble, right, but it's still a gamble.
It was it was a little impressive, right, Yeah.
And so she's like, okay, now I'm going to like tell them to go home. This is like the Poltergeist moment. This is the part that I never understand. But you know, people claim they can do it, so that's great.
So is this an exorcism? Is this like is that what she's saying? She's going to do an exorcism?
It's Poultergeys go to the light.
Oh and I think exorcism is taking the devil out of you.
Yeah, no, they're not evil. But so here I step in because I'm kind of a freak. I said, hold on, I want to take a picture. So I have like four cameras, I have like digital camera, a little camera, and I take pictures of the staircase where they're on and okay, okay, now you can do your thing.
And she's like, she does not like me the medium.
And she does her thing, and I go check the you know, later on, I checked the cameras, all the digital cameras and so forth.
Absolutely nothing.
I take one photo with one of those like plastic cameras with the real film, and I took a bunch like around the house. Those all developed great. The one of the staircase pure white, and I don't have a flash. So this happens, and I'm like, so I don't know. But then my sister she had said the girl had
died in a sledding accident. And my sister, who's like kind of annoying about this, like looked it up, like researched it, and she says, I found out who the girl was, and I said, I never want to know that because if she used some real I'm like that. And I felt like Kudini, like this is where the rage comes from.
You know, why would you?
Yeah, it's the deposite of what you're talking about, like for comfort, like use this this girl's tragedy to just get like a couple hundred bucks. So I didn't really buy the ghost story, but it could have been a ghost story.
I want your sister to email me.
My sister's a huge fan of you, so yeah, and.
Then we'll confront the medium together.
Yeah, but it's a good it's a good story. Now.
I mean, it's pretty public knowledge how Houdini dies. I did not realize it until I looked it up. But can we put a conclusion on this, because you know, my hope was that he just sort of went to sleep and just didn't wake up and then you know, a curse whatever. And Bess's like, well, I don't know, but he had a pretty painful death, right.
Yeah.
It was Halloween ninety nine years ago this year. He had ruptured appendix infection. The story is that right before he was going to give a lecture at McGill university, a student kind of walked into his dressing room, and there's different versions of what happened, but basically just started
punching him in the stomach. The general anecdote of the stories that Houdini dared him to do so because he had he could like make his stomach like super ripped and nobody could touch him, which sounds a lot like Houdini, right. The problem with the story is that there's no evidence of Houdini ever doing this before, because when he would do something, he would do it a billion times, like his famous taking his thumb off trick or all this
kind of stuff. So what I found in the book is I knew I couldn't and a lot of people have looked at like, you know, what happened when he was in the hospital and what happened in the punching. I looked more at the background of his assailant, who was a guy named Gordon Whitehead who grew up in this really small town in British Columbia. All these Houdini characters just go through history and they don't say anything.
He says very little in the historical record. But I found that he had a very radicalizing childhood, a possibly radicalizing childhood with spiritualism, very anti immigrant, very right wing. Houdini was an immigrant but tried to disguise it his entire life. You always said, I'm from Appleton, Wisconsin, And only after he died was it revealed that he was
born in Hungary. So I kind of put this portrait of him together where there could be reasons of him going And I want people to think if there reasons for him going after Houdini and not just hey buddy, let me punch you in the stomach and see if it hurts.
It was a vicious attack.
There were two eyewitnesses, and there's some weird connections where he says some strange things. But maybe there doesn't need to be an exact connection to think of that. Maybe he was one of these people, like you said earlier, a believer who once they're seeing Houdini kind of wreck their belief system, just got angry. I mean, I don't know that for sure at all.
Yeah, Well, do you think that Whodini would have been pleased with the demise of Spiritualism, which I think I don't even know. Spiritualism as a major movement made it out of the nineteen twenties, but I'm not sure. It seems like it would be ripe for a resurgence around the Great Depression, but I'm just not sure it lasted much longer than Hudini.
Yeah, I mean there's still If you go to Lilydale in New York once a year, they have a huge festival and they're really nice and really cool, and lily Dale is a spiritualist community. You can go there and get your you know, get a reading or whatever, and they have a lot of really important artifacts there. You know, I wondered if it would after COVID. I think it has. I have this kind of weird theory that spiritualism, the
new spiritualism is Facebook. That Facebook has become this kind of afterlife that you know, once a year, I'll get a happy birthday for someone that I, you know, was friends with who's died, and people will just shower with happy Birthday, Happy heavenly bird, which is, like you said, I think that's comforting, and that's I mean, who am I to to judge that, But I think Facebook has become that kind of space, and now with AI, like
everyone's kind of hosting pictures of themselves, like doing something in Ai. It's like this idealized heavenly image. Yeah, that facebooks where everything's perfect, everything, everybody's happy, everybody's I mean I'm not happy at all at Facebook, but just people like they live on I mean, some part of that is cool, but to me, some part of that is really it feels like spiritualism in a way.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinner's All About the Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't. All this has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold More Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More and If you know of a historical crime that could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words