ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 24
The Last Bow: Houdini’s Final Performance
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On the night of October 24, 1926,
Harry Houdini walked onto the stage of the Garrick Theatre in Detroit running a
fever of 104 degrees, having already been told by a doctor to go straight to a
hospital instead. He performed the entire show anyway, the last of his life,
and collapsed shortly after the curtain fell. The man who had spent three
decades convincing audiences he could escape anything, handcuffs,
straitjackets, a locked and submerged milk can, would be dead within the week,
undone by something considerably more mundane than any of his stunts: a
ruptured appendix.
On October 11, performing in Albany, a piece of equipment struck his already-injured ankle during his Water Torture Cell escape. By October 22, in Montreal, Houdini was resting in his dressing room at the Princess Theatre when a McGill University student, testing a boast Houdini had made about his stomach's resilience, delivered several hard punches to his abdomen before Houdini had fully braced for them. Houdini finished his remaining Montreal shows regardless, then boarded a train for Detroit still in pain. A doctor who examined him there found signs of appendicitis and advised immediate surgery. Houdini went onstage instead. Whether the Montreal blows actually caused the rupture, worsened a condition already developing, or had nothing to do with it at all remains genuinely disputed among biographers and medical historians to this day, and this column won't pretend the question is settled. What's certain is simpler and sadder: by the time anyone operated, the appendix had already burst, and peritonitis had set in. He died at Grace Hospital on Halloween, a week after his final bow.
Houdini spent the final years of his
career not performing escapes but actively hunting fraudulent mediums,
testifying before Congress, infiltrating séances in disguise, and publishing
his 1924 exposé A Magician Among the Spirits
specifically to arm the public against the con artists profiting off grief. He
wanted, genuinely, to believe contact with the dead was possible, having spent
years searching for a medium who could put him back in touch with his beloved
mother; he simply never found one he couldn’t catch cheating. His skepticism
became so central to his public identity that it’s arguably his
second-most-famous legacy after the escapes themselves. And it's precisely
because of that legacy that his own death immediately became the occult event
his life’s work had argued against. Houdini and his wife Bess had agreed on a
secret code before his death, a way for his spirit to prove genuine contact if
an afterlife existed and he could reach her. Bess held an annual séance
attempting exactly that contact for ten years afterward, finally extinguishing
a candle she'd kept burning in his memory in 1936 and declaring, “It is
finished.” The tradition didn't end there. Magicians and Houdini devotees still
hold a version of that séance every Halloween, a century later, attempting to
reach a man whose entire professional reputation was built on proving that
exactly this kind of contact couldn't be faked, only performed.
That crusade cost Houdini one of the
more consequential friendships of his later life. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
creator of literature’s most famous rationalist detective, was paradoxically
one of Spiritualism's most committed public believers, convinced that mediums
offered genuine proof of survival after death. The two men were close for a
time, Doyle even insisted at one point that Houdini's escapes were themselves a
form of genuine supernatural dematerialization, a claim Houdini found almost
insulting given how hard he'd worked to master them as craft. Their
relationship finally broke over the medium Mina “Margery” Crandon, whom Doyle
and much of the Spiritualist establishment championed as the genuine article
and whom Houdini, sitting on the Scientific American investigating
committee, caught performing tricks he recognized immediately from his own
professional repertoire. The friendship never recovered, and the public feud
between the world's most famous skeptic and one of its most famous believers
became, in its own way, as closely watched as any stage act either man ever
performed.
Readers of Modern Occultist already
know we’ve been spending real time with Houdini’s legacy this issue. Our
current feature draws on new research into his personal library and collecting
habits, and includes our interview with Dr. Eric
Colleary, the Cline Curator of Theatre and Performing Arts at the
University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, where Houdini's Library is
both a current exhibition
and Colleary’s own accompanying book. If today’s post has you thinking about
the gap between the public Houdini, escape artist and skeptic, and the private
man who kept searching for proof of something beyond, that feature is the place
to keep reading. (Check out Issue Four
for the full piece!)
And be sure to visit us tomorrow for the unedited, full interview with Dr. Eric Colleary!
By
Eric Colleary | Abbeville Press
Houdini’s Library, published by Abbeville Press, comes
from Dr. Eric Colleary, the Cline Curator of Theatre and Performing Arts at the
University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, whom readers of this issue
already know from our own interview with
him. Houdini wasn’t only a performer; he was, by all accounts, a
genuinely obsessive collector, and every corner of his West 113th Street
townhouse in New York was packed with books, pamphlets, prints, playbills, and
clippings documenting the full history of magic and theatrical performance.
Colleary, who oversees the Ransom Center’s own Houdini holdings, draws on that
collection directly, pairing his own research with a wealth of material most
readers have never had the chance to see, to reconstruct the library Houdini
spent a lifetime building.
What makes the book worth pairing
with today’s post is how it reframes everything this post has just covered.
Houdini the skeptic, the man who hunted fraudulent mediums and died arguing
against easy belief in the supernatural, was also, it turns out, a serious
historian of his own field, assembling primary sources on magic and
spiritualism with the same rigor a scholar would bring to the task. Reading
about his collection alongside the story of his final weeks gives a fuller
picture of a man who wanted the truth badly enough to spend a fortune documenting
it, not just performing against it onstage.
This is a visually rich collector’s
volume as much as a biography, built around the physical objects Houdini
surrounded himself with, and readers wanting a more straightforward narrative
life should pair it with a conventional biography instead. But for readers of
this magazine who've already met Colleary in our own pages this issue, his book
is the natural next stop, and the current exhibition built from the same
research is on view now at the Harry Ransom Center for anyone who can make the
trip to Austin.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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