After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Harry Houdini: the Original Ghostbuster

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Harry Houdini was the greatest magician that ever lived. He was also the greatest ghostbuster ever, exposing countless spiritual mediums as frauds. Why?Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by Efram Sera-Shriar, historian of the occult and author of "Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age".Get ready for the moving story of Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a son's love for his mother that would not die even after she was gone.Edited by Ella Blaxill. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

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This is a story about a battle between a magician and those who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead. It's 1922 and we're in a room in the glitzy Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. One of the most famous seances ever is about to begin, involving two of the most famous people on the planet. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Houdini, the great magician. Beside Houdini is his wife, Bess. The pair have been invited to a seance where Conan Doyle's wife, Jean Leckie, will reportedly prove her powers of mediumship.

They're all waiting, looking towards Leckie, and it doesn't take long for a spirit to seize her. It's Lekki, and it doesn't take long for a spirit to seize her. Her hands shake and she pounds the table. Even Conan Doyle has never seen the forces manifest themselves in her so strongly before. Lekki's hand jerks again and she begins to write in spasms. She scribbles page after page while her husband tears off the sheets as she fills them, handing them to Houdini to read. They begin thus.

Oh my darling, thank God, thank God at last I'm through. I've tried oh so often, now I am happy. Why of course I want to talk to my boy, my own beloved boy. Friends, thank you with all my heart for this. It is clear to everyone who the spirit possessing Leckie must be. Cecilia, Houdini's mother, the woman who brought him to America, someone he idolized and adored and still finds it hard to live without. Harry Houdini was good at keeping a poker face, but in this moment, he is visibly shaken.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes it as a sign of success and that Houdini has been convinced of Leckie's powers. But Sherlock Holmes would never have made such a blunder. Anyone can see that the emotion coursing through Houdini is not wonder or awe, but a boiling rage. As he sits there, he is filled with a thirst to once and for all, put a stop to such fakery and frauds. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And today we're telling you the story of Harry Houdini's ghost-busting crusade. Really,

this is one of the most bizarre, unexpected and strange stories that we've come across. Now here to make sense of it all for us is Dr Efrem Sirar-Sriah, who is a historian of the occult and of anthropology. He's the author of Psychic Investigators, Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age, and is currently researching the so-called Satanic Panic. Efrem, welcome to After Dark. Well, thanks for having me. We're absolutely delighted that you're here. Now

we do get a lot of amazing guests on After Dark and their research is always so fascinating, but I am genuinely so excited to speak to you and your book sounds amazing. Before we get into talking about Houdini and his relationship with spiritualism, I want to ask you a little bit about your own relationship to spiritualism because you have something of a personal relationship as well as a scholarly one, right? That's correct. And I was actually raised in a spiritualist family. I'm not a spiritualist. I'm a disbeliever, not even a skeptic. I'm a disbeliever. And it was a multi-generational family of spiritualists as well going back to the 19th century and the emergence of the movement. And because of that, I have a the 19th century and the emergence of the movement. And because of that, I have a tremendous amount of experience as a member of the community of

spiritualism, sitting in séances, but also later as an academic, investigating them through a more skeptical mindset as well. So I really understand both sides of the séance culture and of spiritualism. That's what makes historians and the subjects they study so tantalising that you have sometimes this personal connection that raises it above an academic pursuit. This is why it's going to be fascinating to talk to you today, Efraim, and we're really, really pleased, as Maddy said, to have you. But for those of us who might be a little less clued in than you are to the world of spiritualism, can you tell us what exactly is spiritualism? BD Well there's a very simple tenet to spiritualism, which is the ability to

intercommunicate with spirits of the dead from beyond the veil. It's as simple as that. That is the simple statement of what the movement is about. There are obviously complexities once you get into the different forms that I can take. But what holds all the different variations together is that ability to speak with spirits of the dead in a coherent way. Now we heard at the beginning there about Harry Houdini and we're meeting him in the 1920s when he's really at the height of his fame. Can you just set out for us a little bit about, I suppose, what he's all about and what it was that made him so famous? Well, people often ask me about the spiritualism stuff, but Houdini generally is a fascinating

figure. And he perfected the art of escapism. That's the best way to think of him. And he was known as the King of Hand handcuffs as an example because he could escape any type of handcuff. And there were even people who would spend years creating new types of handcuffs specifically to test Houdini and he'd still managed to break out of them. And he had an extensive knowledge of different types of locks so that he could practice ways of breaking them in pretty clever ways when he was doing his escapes. And he would travel around the world and every time he would succeed in whatever escape they had planned for him, he'd up it the next time. So there's this wonderful case, 1903 in Russia,

where he's put into one of the famous Siberian transport cells that go from Moscow into Siberia and these are basically impenetrable iron cages with only a slit to see into them. And there's two keys, one in Moscow to lock you in and one in Siberia to unlock it. And they put him in there basically naked and handcuffed and he still manages to break out of this thing while there's all these different Russian policemen staring at the cell the entire time. He actually manages to create a hole in the bottom of the cell and sneak out and surprise them all because they're so fixated on the door, the one door, he

doesn't even come out of that one. And it was seen as a threat to the authority of the regime of Russia at the time, so he wasn't really even allowed to advertise his great fate. And a lot of people still heard about it, and it became a symbol of freedom in this oppressive regime as well. So he was almost a folk hero in some places as well, Houdini. There's other wonderful examples. He had this famous show in the 19-teens, where he made an elephant disappear. The elephant's name was Jenny, supposedly the child of Jumbo the elephant. And for I think it was about 20 weeks, he did this performance where he would make the elephant disappear. And even today, magicians

don't actually know how he did it. They have all sorts of ideas about how it might have occurred and trap doors and all those sorts of things, but it's never been replicated in the way that Houdini did it. And it absolutely wowed audiences. So all the big time magicians you see today are deeply indebted to the sorts of things that Houdini was doing before the age of special effects and stuff that we have today, which makes it that much more oppressive. I was just showing my child the other day films of Houdini from the 1920s. It totally blew his mind. And it's this idea of skill that Houdini harnesses rather than

magic necessarily, although some people are interpreting this as magic, although he's very adamant that that's not what's happening even if he's not revealing, as in the case of Jenny, how that's being done. But join the dots for us then a little bit between spiritualism and Houdini. He doesn't see himself as part of this world in that way, but at the same time he crosses over with it. But his intersection isn't necessarily one of joy and immersion, is it? Well, I think we need to actually backtrack to the very beginnings of his career as a performer because in the 1890s, roughly between 1895 and 1899, he's turning out a modest living performing in touring dime show museums. Usually these dime show museums are traveling with these medical shows where you have some

quack doctor selling a cure-all and it doesn't matter what your ailment is this is gonna fix it and what they do is they use these cheap shows with performers like Houdini and tattooed ladies and all the sorts of things that you expect from the side shows of the 19th century and then once you're there they upsell you with these very expensive products of course they don't last long because you can really only cheat a community once. You can't come back again. So they're very short-lived, these ventures.

But Houdini is performing in those. And one of his bosses, Thomas Hill, says, you know, I bet we can make a lot of money if you start doing séances as part of the performance, doing clairvoyance. Houdini starts to perform as the great wizard or the great mystic in this period, just for a little while. He had all sorts of tricks to make it seem like he was a clairvoyant. One of the things that he really liked to do was when he got to a new town, he would go to one of the churches and walk around the cemetery and memorize as much information as possible from all the graves that he saw.

What's the person's name? Did they leave behind a child? Were they married? What years they died? What years they were born? Sometimes he would even invite one of the clerks from the church to talk about the community while he walked around the cemetery, or an older member of the community was very gossipy that would give them all the information. And then later he'd perform and have fantastic personal information about people in the community that from their perspective, this is a complete stranger and he wowed them.

But this is exactly what fake mediums were doing throughout the 19th century, exactly the sort of thing. And they even shared information. There's lots of examples of mediums taking notebooks and then sending them to their friends who are also mediums so that they would have information as well about the different communities that they're visiting, who they sat with, the information they gleaned from them. Also when they were caught out, so avoid saying these sorts of things as well because it won't work.

But he's doing the exact same thing as them in this period. He doesn't really like it. He sees it's a bit exploitative and so it slowly gets phased out of his performances. But that's the beginning of his sort of participation in spiritualism. And if we go back even further, the link between magic shows and spiritualism was there pretty much from the beginning. They emerge together and a lot of figures throughout their careers switch between being mediums and magicians and it almost becomes an arm race between them at various points as well because they all want to produce these incredible phenomena, visual phenomena, audio phenomena, and so they're trying to compete with

one another and when that competition gets really, then they expose one another. That inevitably comes out of these arms races between them. And so Houdini is part of that bigger culture. Now Ephraim, it strikes me that Houdini at the beginning of his career is, as you say, he's very much part of this culture. He's a participant in it and a beneficiary of it. He's making money by doing this, whether he believes in it or not. Of course, it seems very clear to me that he doesn't believe in it. The thing that draws him to it is the trickery of it, the mechanics of that trickery. But then the one thing that I do know about him is that by, I think it's the mid-1920s,

he publishes his famous book, A Magician Among the Spirits, debunking all these methods. What happens between those two dates, between the late 19th century when he's at the beginning famous book, A Magician Among the Spirits, debunking all these methods. So what happens between those two dates between the late 19th century, when he's at the beginning of his career and the 1920s when he's at the height of it, to make him want to step forward and as it were draw the veil back across this world and to expose it and really to ruin an industry that he is very much part of? What happens? Well, there's a few things that happen. One thing that's important to remember is that

he's often painted as this materialist. And that's an incorrect portrayal of Houdini. Houdini was actually very religious. His father was an Orthodox rabbi from Hungary. And throughout his life, he continued to practice Judaism. And he genuinely believed in an immaterial existence after life. That doesn't mean that he believed in the ability of spirits to communicate with the living. That's a point of contestation for him and

that's why he was throughout his life legitimately an open mind and sceptic. He wanted to see if there was any legitimacy to this and his desire to test the legitimacy is really spurred on once his mother passes away. It can't be underestimated how important the death of his mother was in terms of spurring on what becomes his passion until his untimely death in 1926 at the age of 50. So his last time with his mother was just before he went to Europe for a tour and he was the last person to get onto the boat and he spent, depending on the account, at least an hour sort of doting on his mother and having this very tender moment and she asked him to bring her back some wool slippers and he didn't want to go

because he could see already that she was elderly, she looked quite frail, she hadn't been doing well. And she's like, well, I might very well pass away this time, but go, don't stay here for me. And then by the time he arrives in Copenhagen and performs, afterwards, when he's about to do his interview with the press,

he opens this telegram that he received en route to Copenhagen once he gets to Germany and gets off the boat and informs him his mother dies. And he's so stricken with grief that he actually faints and then awakens later in tears and immediately cancels everything, goes back to the United States, and he asks his brother not even to bury her until he arrives, which of course breaks Jewish custom because you're supposed to within Jewish custom be buried within 48 hours. It takes at least 10 days to sail

back from Germany. So they're doing a lot to accommodate him and then the night before her funeral Houdini just sits in a chair next to her body and then for the first month after her death he visits her every single day at her burial site in Queens, New York. So it was really hard on him. And for years, he really struggled with the death of his mother, because they were so close. They were like best friends, essentially.

And when spiritualism is again, having a bit of a renaissance in the 20th century as a result of mass death from World War I. All these young people dying way too early. And there's so many reports saying, no, this is real. Credible reports in so far as scientific figures, legal minds, people like Arthur Conan Doyle, who are both literary and medical medical are saying this is real. You have to take this seriously. And that gets him to really rethink, is this fake or do I need to spend time

and really investigate this as an expert in deception to see maybe there is the ability for us to communicate. And that's how his friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle really begins because in this period it's very hard to get an audience with one of the high level mediums, the celebrity mediums. They're very careful about who does a sitting with them. And that's a safeguarding technique. And to get a sitting with them, you need to have someone who's in the community who will help arrange that. And because Arthur

Conan Doyle is an elite figure within spiritualist communities in the US and in the UK, he figures that if he has a friendship with Doyle, Doyle vouches for him, he can get those opportunities. And so he starts their friendship by sending him a copy of his book, which is called The Unmasking of Robert Houdin, who was a famous French magician from the 19th century, who in this book Houdini actually exposes how he himself, Robert Houdin, was taking claim for tricks that were others. So it's almost like a Penn and Teller thing where he's spoiling all those great illusions and showing how they were done.

And one of the passages in this book just mentions that the Davenport brothers, the famous spirit cabinet performers who were essentially escapists just like Houdini, they weren't real mediums. And that's how the conversation starts. Doyle takes a bit of issue with that. And he says, well, they were mediums. You got this wrong. And that's how it all really begins through this death of his mother, and then slowly building towards a correspondence with Doyle so that he can start to investigate what's really going on. So we have this scene then at the beginning that we talked about with Jean Leckie and

this supposed communication with Houdini's beloved mother. And you've just spoken so eloquently there about that bond. And it really does bring the sense of sadness to some of this that actually I had assumed he was driven by skepticism, but actually he's driven by hope in many ways that it might be possible to communicate with his mother, but that very quickly transpires not to be the case. But he then were assuming fields duped into this, attending the séance with Jean Leckie. And the falling out between himself and Arthur Conan Doyle is quite public and somewhat voiceless, right? Can you tell us a little bit about how they fall apart then? Yeah. So there's a period where they're actually quite good friends. Regular correspondents,

whenever one of them is in town, they try to visit each other. And at some point, Arthur Conan Doyle invites the Houdinis to haul a day of them for a few days in Atlantic City. And they're having a great time, and Houdini's going swimming with the Doyle children and showing them how to hold their breath under the water. There's a genuine friendship there. And that's when Doyle finally trusts Houdini enough to say, why don't we do this séance together?

My wife has mediumistic powers, she specializes in automatic writing, but they're very trepidatious about allowing Bess in the room as well. Because the worry always with these situations is that people can conspire together and purposely try to disrupt the proceedings and create something that really isn't there, just like you could say the opposite if you were the believer. So they don't want them both in the room and it's Houdini who's allowed to participate. There's a double perspective here. From Doyle's perspective, it's a 15 page message from Houdini's, again, mother,

elated with the ability to finally speak to her son after so long, and looking at Houdini who's gone quiet, visibly his physical appearance has changed, and from Doyle's perspective he was deeply moved and was overwhelmed with the emotion of finally speaking to his mother, and then he quietly leaves the room afterwards. From Houdini's perspective, it's first off only a five page note which already there's a discrepancy there. And the emotion that Doyle is misperceiving is that he's seething with anger. But he knows now's not the time to disrupt this. Now's the time to get that information, that evidence that I can pocket away for later when I'm ready to make a much

more informed opinion about this publicly. And I'm pretty confident that Doyle was not trying to purposely dupe Houdini here. I'm pretty sure that he himself was being duped by his wife. He was so devout in his belief of the ability of spirits to communicate that he was blind to the trickery that was going on. So he wasn't purposefully trying to exploit Houdini. I think Houdini agrees with that statement. It's more what he thought of Gene Leckie, where he knew for sure this is a sham. And there were three reasons for why he knew this message was a sham. The first was that on the top of every page, while in trance, there was a Christian cross.

Now for Cecilia, the wife of a rabbi, to put a Christian cross on every single page makes no sense to Houdini whatsoever. That's not a religious symbolism that she would have evoked within her messages. The second is that the entirety of the messages is in English, and Cecilia barely spoke English, had little command of it, especially in written form. And if she really was communicating with her son, it would have been in German. Of course, a believer would say that the medium can translate that in trance into English if they don't know that language, which is a very convenient of course way of explaining that. But it was enough for Houdini to think, well, I don't trust that my mother would allow that. And the final thing that was important was

that the date of this seance was his mother's birthday, and they don't mention that at any point in that communication. So again, it's really significant that these things put together just don't convince him that it's real. He still holds his tongue for a while. He uses Doyle to get again audiences with some other big name mediums like Anna Britton as an example, who he also thinks is a total fraud. And then finally, in 1922, he puts forward his first public statement on spiritualism in the New York Sun. And Doyle is really upset. He feels betrayed by this. Again, from his perspective, he thought he was really close friends, that if Houdini was as close as he had thought, he would have expressed this to him privately.

They could have talked it through. He could have shown him the evidence to the contrary or explain why he's misunderstanding what's going on. None of that happened. And he was taken aback by it. He saw it as an affront to his religious beliefs because Doyle sees this as the new revelation. This is the new religion. And he is the apostle spreading the word to the people. And he was blindsided by it. It really resonates with me there what you're saying about Doyle being blind to this trickery and these problems. And we did another episode fairly recently about the Cottingley Fairies

and Doyle's embroilment in that and his absolute desire to believe that it's true to the point where he cannot see what to us today in a digital age is very obviously photographic fakery. So we're going to talk about a very specific case in a moment involving Houdini and unmasking. But can you give us a sense of the kinds of tricks that Houdini does expose just in broad terms in thinking about his initial statement to the world about spiritualism? What kinds of things is he unmasking here? He is unmasking every type of phenomena that is being reported on. So one of the things that he does in this first declaration is he says, I can reproduce any mediumistic feat that you witness in a seance or a spiritualist performance.

And that's another thing that really upsets Doyle to the point where he says, well, you would need 30 years of investigating spiritualism to be an expert in order to recreate these things through illusion, which of course he has that experience basically as a magician anyways, but that's beside the point. So he can show how you can escape your bindings in a seance because it's dark. You don't have full visibility of the medium almost ever.

There were a few exceptions to that, but on average it's a dark setting. The medium usually chooses who sits where, so you could put your accomplice next to you to help you with the ruse, and that's exactly what a lot of them do. So Houdini might be sitting on one side of them to give the impression of a control, but next to them is the partner who can of course allow that person to slip out of their bindings, to ring a bell under the table with their feet as an example. So Houdini will just recreate it. Again, think of Penn and Teller where they do the trick under cover and then they do it again and show you exactly how it's done. That's the mode in which Houdini functions. He also shows how levitations

can be done, how table tilting works. He even goes into the more impressive forms like spirit trumpets where he shows how you could put a receiver into the trumpet that no one can see and you have an accomplice in another room who essentially is broadcasting a tiny voice through that receiver into the horn. But if you don't know about the construction of that device and you don't know what you're looking for, it would seem like something is speaking through the spirit trumpet.

So he does all types of recreations and exposure in that way. He publishes it, he performs it live, he gives tours. He'll speak about how to create fake photographs where Houdini is in the same photograph of a spirit of himself. And it's probably a better spirit impression than the so-called real spirit impressions that people were producing in this period, which again really gave a lot an introduction to make on today's podcast. And the person we'd like to introduce is probably somebody you already know and if you don't you should get to know his podcast

and that of course is Dan Snow, host of Dan Snow's History Hit. Dan, welcome to After Dark. Hey guys, well it's a great honour to be on the podcast, particularly because it's now such a behemoth, it's such a juggernaut. I'm very excited. Are you enjoying being part of the History Hit family? Oh we absolutely are. It's been such a joy. And early on, it was so nice to borrow presenters from different History Hit podcasts and get to know

everyone a little bit, get to know everyone's different approaches and perspectives to history. And I think, Dan, we're going to talk not about our own podcast here, but about your podcast. And the thing that I love and have to admit to you, I have been a real genuine listener of your pod for many years, not to out you on the age front here, Dan, but I really have been genuinely a fan. And one thing that I love in terms of that perspective, the angle that you bring is that it's so you make history so relevant in terms of what's happening in the headlines right

now. Is that just your perspective on history, Dan? Is that just how you see the past and present and how they interlink? Thanks, Maddie. Yeah, I bet you've been listening to it ever since you were in primary school. Of course. My passion, I came from a family of journalists, but I always loved history. As you say, history is urgent. History is the reason that we've got too much carbon in our atmosphere. It's the reason that America and China are eyeing each other up in the South China Sea. It's the reason that Vladimir Putin thinks Eastern or all of Ukraine is part of Russia.

All of these things, which are affecting our lives, those of our families, loved ones, children and their children and their children, all of those things are deeply rooted in our past. So my passion is those episodes where I take up something that we're seeing today, Ukraine, the fervor of the American election, Brexit, Taiwan and Middle East Israel-Palestine. And I try and look into the deepest. So that is my passion. Having said that, I also just love banging out an episode on Francis Drake or Florence Nightingale, you know, the great narrative stories. I like doing both. I've always wanted my pod. I've never wanted to pin it down. I think like you guys with your

podcast, you actually wanted to find yourself as widely as possible because it just makes it more interesting for us when we go to work. But one of the things that works really well, I think, on your podcast, and if they're after dark listeners who don't listen to Dan's podcast, do because one of the things we share in common is this broad view, but really bringing in, as you're saying, Dan, individual narratives to help locate those histories within people's lives and within the lives of people who are listening today. And what kind of narrative drive do you think mostly appeals to you when it comes to history? Because, you know, we can all do facts and figures, we can all Google Google but what is it about those big sweeps of narrative history that really gets

your interest piqued? Well you said it better than I could do I think really but it's the fact that it's the greatest they're the greatest stories ever told like the best stories are true stories and then as well as these incredible kind of dramatic arcs that touch the lives of everybody it's the human beings within them. It's the fact that we know enough about what it was like to be Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he drove through the streets of Sarajevo that day. We kind of have a pretty good idea of what was going through Kaiser Wilhelm's head as he mulled over the big decisions and Tsar Nicholas as they mulled over the decisions that basically plunged the world into catastrophic war and condemned their own families and their own

regimes to oblivion or worse. So it's just those, as you say, the individuals being caught up in it is so fascinating. So it's telling the big story and then cutting back and reminding everyone that there are families and humans driving these events and becoming caught up in these events. Thinking about some of those stories that we have in common, Dan, and some of those human elements that drive us all, I think, to tell history. The thing that I think we share is a love of stories and history set on ships. Now, we have covered so many ships on After Dark, and they're always the most popular.

We've done The Bounty, we've done HMS Terra. Recently listened, Dan down to your episode on HMS Wager. I say listen, I ran to that. I have never downloaded anything quicker in my entire life. But for after dark listeners who do love a ship story, can you recommend any episodes on your pod or indeed episodes that are not set on ships but that people absolutely need to hear? Jason Vale So yeah, HMS Wager that you mentioned, that's just a story that you couldn't make up. Shipwreck and mutiny, murder, an astonishing escape story. And that's true of episodes, for example, on Mutiny on the Bounty, Captain Bly on the Bounty. I quite liked a recent one. Was Scott's expedition

to the South Pole, was it actually sabotaged? It was definitely let down by, well, perhaps incompetence on the part of many people involved, but was it actually maliciously sabotaged? That's the big question. That's a huge one. But if people want to get away from the ice and the water, the desert and the mountains are available. So I've done a series on ancient Egypt recently, and a series on the Inca in the Andes, which was an amazing experience. I got to walk the Inca trail through the Andes and just explored a civilization I knew nothing about. Well, you heard it here, folks. You can get your news and your olds

from Dan Snow's History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And honestly, you will not regret it. Download every episode right now. Canada may be known for its landscapes and friendly people, but beneath the surface lies a darker side of crime, history, and the paranormal. Since 2017, the award-winning Dark Poutine podcast has explored the shadowy corners of the Great White North and beyond, delivering chilling tales from a uniquely Canadian perspective. Hosted by Mike Brown and Matthew Stockton

with over 300 episodes and fresh releases every Monday, Dark Poutine is your weekly ticket to the creepier side of Canada. Listen to Dark Poutine on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's face it, most meal replacements are rough, unsensitive stomachs, not Sperry. Sperry is a complete plant-based meal

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with code podcast 15. Sperry. Trust nature. One of the most famous debunking missions that Houdini went on involves a woman we'd like to introduce to you now, and her name is, or is it, Marjorie. The most famous purveyor of ghosts Houdini ever busted was Boston's Mina Crandon, or Marjorie as she was known. Crandon was arguably America's greatest medium, supremely gifted or supremely deceptive, depending on where you stand. She could, apparently, produce ectoplasm and make objects levitate. She could use telekinetic energy to ring bells around a room and channel the voice of a spirit

called Walter. Harry Houdini's unraveling of Crandon's claims was slow and expertly observed. It was a drawn out affair. It began with friendly exchanges and the holding of hands in the seance. But soon we encounter something altogether less kumbaya. August 1924, Antudini has built a box that looks like a medieval torture device. He is helping Marjorie Crandon inside. A small audience watches on. In many ways, this is like the beginning of one of his own shows, as onlookers eagerly await to find out what happens next.

Except this is supposed to be the opposite of a magic box. There are no trap doors, no secret mirrors. It's a box of anti-magic designed to stop Crandon in her tracks. a box of anti-magic designed to stop Crandon in her tracks. Only her head and hands emerge from the box. Houdini looks at his work. Surely now, when the séance begins, nothing will happen. No bells will ring. No faces will appear.

Nothing at all will happen when the lights go out. Right? Ephraim, I'm looking at two images on my computer here while we talk. And one of them is of Marjorie. I think this photograph actually taken by Houdini. It's outside of her house. It's a brick built townhouse. It's got a smart front door with a fan light above it. And she's in this sort of lovely 1920s dress with that really low waistline. And it's quite a relaxed image. It looks quite intimate. They obviously knew each other. And the second image that I'm looking at is the front cover of Houdini's text debunking her. There's this I think it's the almost medieval torture box that Anthony described there. Is it Houdini? Is it Marjorie inside? It's quite hard to see from here. But it's quite comic, it's quite

humiliating, it's quite an aggressive front cover. I think this just shows the two sides of the relationship that they have, this professional relationship that obviously disintegrates. So is this just a repetition of the kind of relationship breakdown that he has with Arthur Conan Doyle and others? Is this a big moment in his career? What's going on? In terms of his career, he's already a big time celebrity. So his participation in this investigation by this point, it's pretty standard. It doesn't surprise anyone. I think what's important to understand is that with Marjorie's investigation,

it all starts with a challenge that's set by the periodical Scientific American, where they say, we will give $2,500, which is a tremendous amount of money in 1924, to anyone who can scientifically prove spiritualist phenomena as real. There's a few early people who go forward to try and get that money, and there's a five-person panel that Scientific American chose to investigate these mediums when they came forward, and one of the members was, of course, Harry Houdoudini and he famously said, it takes a flimflammer to know a flimflammer. Fantastic quote of course. He was great for sound bites. The first few he so quickly exposed that it scares people away for many months. No one else wants to even bother trying because you're not going to pull a fast one on Harry Houdini. But Marjorie

is building an important reputation within the spiritualist community at this time. Her rise to fame is very quick and it's partially because she's rolling within the elite circles of Boston and Boston has a very old, very influential spiritualist community. They're one of the first communities after those communities in New York State to develop and her husband is a very influential surgeon within the Boston community with one might say an unhealthy fixation with death. And he's actually the one that introduces Marjorie to spiritualism. It's through that relationship that she discovers her mediumistic powers.

And that's also why she performs as Marjorie and not Mina Crandon. She wants to sort of have a separation between her public and private life. So when she holds these séances, she's Marjorie. Otherwise, everyone knew her as Mina. As you've already said, that there was all sorts of different phenomena that she produced and perfected through performance with all sorts of members of the Boston community and also people like Doyle who came and visited her and was convinced that everything she could produce including the ectoplasm which we haven't even talked about yet was legitimate. to the Houdini affair by three different, very well established, psychical researchers of the era. One of them was Herford Carrington, British psychical researcher, very good reputation, but he was actually having an affair with her.

So how credible is it when he has this personal relationship with Crandon to say, well, she's legitimate? Another one was J. Malcolm Byrd, another, you know, fairly well-known psychical researcher who also had an unhealthy fixation with her and tried to have an affair but was rejected. And then he becomes an important assistant of hers within the investigation room, which then brings into question whether or not you can trust his testimony when he talks about it. And the third major person to investigate her was Eric Dingwall, who was an anthropologist, key member of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain. He was also convinced. But again,

they think in this case skeptics that he was easily swayed to believing that it was legitimate because of the very sexualized nature of a lot of Marjorie's performances with nudity. And Dingwall was known as Dirty Ding. That was his nickname and he had an extensive collection of erotica and also his anthropological research specialized in sexual practice amongst different cultures. So he would have loved a hyper-sexualized performance. That's right up his street. Again, there were questions about whether there were sufficient controls,

whether he may have been not paying close enough attention because of, again, the acts that were being committed within the seance room at the time. So by the time Houdini gets there, there's a lot of credible people who are saying this is real. And it's very important for him to take it So by the time Houdini gets there, there's a lot of credible people who are saying this is real. And it's very important for him to take it as seriously as possible.

Because again, when it comes to testimony, and that's usually what it comes down to, my version of what happened versus your version, that's circumstantial evidence. Doesn't hold up in court. And it doesn't hold up in debates about spiritualism for the same reason. You need hard evidence. Hard evidence means you catch the person cheating. So one of the things that Houdini does in this investigation is he prepares himself so that he can catch all the types of things he would do if he were to perform these tricks. So as an example, he wore a rubber band around his leg all day prior to make his leg numb and

Very easily be able to sense anything touch it because of the circulation loss he rolls up his leg so he can feel the movement of her under the table in the darkness and He writes in his own notes that he could very clearly feel her foot go over him towards where the bell was located in this box and Manipulate it to make the sound stuff like that so he knew what he would do and he was ready for any of the obvious ways for someone to cheat and He was able to catch that no one was convinced and that's why they're saying look everything you're saying Houdini makes sense But you're not actually catching it in the act here

You're just giving a good explanation for how it happens. And that's when the box is brought in. He's like, okay, well, if I make it absolutely impossible for her to use her legs and feet, her arms are restricted, there's no ability for her to get out of her chair because she's locked into this seat that's in a box, that is a much more concrete physical control that she can't manipulate. And I mean, different versions of the account, but one of the more extreme accounts is she still managed to produce the phenomena, but when the lights are raised, the lock of the box has very clearly been manipulated and she's broken out of it.

Other accounts say nothing happened. But in either case, it definitively showed that she wasn't able to produce those incredible phenomena when in the box. And so she doesn't get the money and slowly her career falls apart after that. It strikes me that Houdini does end the careers of lots of people despite belonging to the same industry of performance and trickery to a certain extent. But one of the most amazing and unbelievable, I suppose, stories associated with Houdini that I was aware of before we started this conversation actually comes after he dies. So we're going to hear from Anthony now to set the scene, and then we're going to talk about the details of this, because it is, it's a remarkable and I think fairly ironic end to the story. We end where we began, in a séance room. But this time it's 1936 and Bess Houdini is once again

waiting for the spirits to come. It's been 10 years since he died, 10 years since Houdini passed to the other world beyond the veil, or since his earthly remains began to mingle with the dirt. Once again, depending on how you see things. Before he died, Houdini, the buster of spiritualists, the rationalist in a world of make-believe, had given his wife a secret code. If it was, in fact, true that the spirit realm existed, he would come to her and he would give her this code so she would know it was him. Bess sighed and nodded at the medium to let them know she was ready.

Houdini, the medium's voice rang out, Houdini, are you there? What was the answer? We don't know. From thinking about how Houdini dies, famously he dies of a ruptured appendix. But we also know that there's a student who sucker punches him in the stomach several times leading up to this. Is there an outside chance, I suppose, speculating that spiritualists had a hand in his death? I mean, he has ruined the careers and reputations of so many people. Is this an assassination? Jocelyn Whitehead, who's the student that you're talking about, he's actually a boxer. So he wasn't just a student, but he knew exactly how to throw a punch as well. Was ultimately responsible for those punches that may or may not have

led to his ruptured abdomen. He already was a little unwell anyways and he could have had an inflamed appendix and then when he gets punched in the stomach he assumes the pain that he's experiencing is from those blows and not actually something else that's going on. Although they do realize that he needs to have an emergency surgery and he rejects that idea because the show must go on and he doesn't want to cancel any of his engagements and he dies as a result of not seeking surgery when he should have. But one of the reasons for why this conspiracy is often repeated is because it's alleged that Whitehead asked him a question about whether or not Houdini accepts the truth

of the Bible, something along those lines. But that's not a spiritualist thing. That's more of a creationist argument than it is a spiritualist argument. So I think it's hard to say if this is a targeted attack in that way But it certainly seems to me that this was an opportunity for someone who's trying to make a name for themselves as a boxer Here's that Houdini can withstand a blow to his stomach when you know as one of his tricks that he's done before and so takes The opportunity to do it but Houdini wasn't prepared for these blows, and that's another thing that's really important to the story, is that at the time he was distracted,

he was backstage reading some mail, he was sitting down on the sofa, he's sort of half-listened, he's like, yeah, yeah, I can do that. And then without being ready, he just starts punching him while he's sitting down, and so he didn't have time to prepare himself, to tighten his abdomen, any of the things he normally would have done and So with after a few blows he stops him and says okay, that's enough and then says this isn't how we normally do this

Performance and sort of brushes it off after that but there would be reasons again for this conspiracy in that Spiritualism had taken a massive hit that same year just a few months earlier in 1926 when he becomes the star expert for a group of politicians in Washington, DC, who are trying to put forward a bill to regulate fortune telling in the United States. And he, in this very famous set of congressional hearings, shows many of the ways in which this fake phenomena is

done and it ultimately leads to the success of a bill that now makes it very difficult on fake mediums when they're exposed. There are major legal consequences, but because of that win, some people again are saying, well, it's convenient. He dies just a few months later that year after anchoring so many spiritualists in these congressional hearings. I am increasingly actually such a fan of Houdini and not because of his trickery and his performances necessarily, but because of what's happening. It's so engaging to see somebody who is so passionately rational. I find that very engaging and he draws me in the more I find out about

him. So it really has been so incredible to chat to you about this, Efren. But I think potentially the note to end on is to talk about what the legacy in one sense is in relation to current seances, because obviously seances still happen today. And Houdini is one of the people, is he not, that people continually try to contact. And I'm just wondering, what do we know about that? Why? I mean, I could draw my own conclusions, I think, but I'd love to hear your take on this, why people want to contact Houdini and modern seances. Well, I think it's fun to say a short list of the most popular celebrities to be encountered in the séance and they are John Lennon and there's been some famous televised séances with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson more recently.

Those are the three most common and it's often the case that spiritualists will say that spirits love music so it just makes sense that a musician would want to be part of the spiritualist world and they'll play the music of course to get the séance started to invite the spirit in. The Houdini case is slightly different in that it's a way for spiritualists to again undermine skeptics. Because Houdini of course can be positioned, depending on how you see him, as being one of the chief historical skeptics of spiritualism, even though he was open-minded,

he was still a skeptic. And so the success of bringing his spirit to Seance undermines the work that he did throughout his life to try and expose fake mediumship. Well, here his spirit is, credibly seen right by your own eyes in this performance. So obviously you can completely ignore all of his busting that he did during his career. That's the, I think, the driver there. I've never been to a séance with Houdini's spirit appearing. I have been to multiple Freddie Mercury ones over the years, which are always really fun. There's never anything particularly personal about Freddie that we learn from these things. It's always stuff that you would have been very easily able to glean from any biography or

nowadays website that's available to you. But it's always really fun when a medium goes into the character of one of these celebrities. I feel like there'd be a beautiful irony if Houdini's spirit did appear and he'd be trying to debunk the very thing that had conjured him. Ephraim, it's been an absolute joy to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for listening along to this episode. You can get in touch with us to tell us how much you've enjoyed it, to give us ideas for new episodes. You can email us at afterdark at historyhit.com. That's afterdark at historyhit.com. And if you feel so inclined and we would very much appreciate it, you can leave us a five star review wherever

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