Tonight on "History's Greatest Mysteries"...
He was the greatest escape artist of all time,
and his name was the embodiment of mystery and wonder.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Even though Harry Houdini has been dead for nearly a century,
key questions remain about his life.
On tonight's mystery, Houdini's diaries,
kept under lock and key in New York City,
may answer some of those questions.
It is the first time they have been made public.
Goodwin: For the first time, we're getting to see Houdini in his own words,
the most unfiltered version of the man.
Fishburne: What do the diaries reveal
about the real Harry Houdini, his background,
and how he became the world's greatest showman?
Caveney: Houdini wanted to be bigger than life
and he would do anything towards that end.
What was the secret of his mass appeal?
Teller: Houdini was certainly the person who made the idea
of an escape artist mean something to the world.
Jilette: "I defy the jails of the world to hold me."
That is a better slogan than "All you need is love."
How much did he risk to stay famous?
Cox: Up until this point, the stakes were
if Houdini fails, it's humiliation.
Now the stakes are life and death.
Fishburne: And did his all‐out war
against the people who claimed to speak to the dead
get him killed?
Were spiritualists bad enough to commit murder?
Yes. Can a university student punch wicked hard? Yes.
The legacy and life of a legend who cheated death until it found him.
( music playing )
The most famous magician today is Harry Houdini.
The first magic name people can name?
Harry Houdini.
Kids on the street know his name
when they don't know Penn and Teller.
Culliton: In any famous person's life,
there are at least three different stories for any one event.
Except in Houdini's life,
there are 10 stories to any one event.
Fishburne: Harry Houdini kept diaries throughout his life.
While some have been released, thousands of pages‐‐
some handwritten, some typed‐‐
have remained a mystery, hidden from public view.
A handful of trusted magicians and Houdini scholars
have been allowed to read them.
At last, the custodian of the diaries,
magic historian Bill Kalush
has agreed to make them available.
The diaries now being made available through this documentary
is a really big thing.
This would be the first time
that we'll be able to peruse these diaries
and learn more things about Houdini's life and career
than we could ever have in any other way.
Fishburne: The diaries have been organized to help decipher
the key chapters in Houdini's life
where secrets and questions remain‐‐
starting at the beginning.
Culliton: Harry Houdini was a personality invented
by a very ambitious young man named Erik Weisz.
Fishburne: When he was 30 years old,
Houdini lies about where he was born in his own diary.
Cox: What's the first mystery of Houdini?
And it starts with his birth.
Houdini was born in Budapest, Hungary, on March 24th, 1874,
yet his diary says,
"Harry Houdini born April 6th, Appleton, Wisconsin."
Kalush: Houdini absolutely knew he was born in Budapest,
March 24th 1874.
He knew he was four years old when he came to the U. S.,
so the question is why.
Lynch: So, Houdini was born Erik Weisz and no one exactly knows
why the family would move to Appleton.
The legend that Houdini apparently would always tell
was that his father got in a duel
with some member of the Hungarian royal family
and ended up killing him and had to flee to America.
Fishburne: What is known for sure is that Erik's father
has a respectable position waiting for him in Appleton.
Kalush: They had a number of Jewish families,
so they needed a rabbi,
and that's what his father Rabbi Weisz did.
He came of consciousness in this idyllic small town
where his father is an honored man.
There's beautiful fields, there's creeks to swim in.
It is the American ideal, and that's the world
Erik Weisz comes to know.
Fishburne: Though life is initially good for the Weisz family,
circumstances soon take a turn for the worse.
Kalush: When Erik was not very old,
they fired his father as the rabbi.
And they left Appleton for Milwaukee,
and things took a bad turn.
They lived in poverty at that point.
They lived very poorly.
And it was a time that he wouldn't even recount.
He wouldn't talk about his time in Milwaukee because it was so painful.
Cox: Schooling falls out of the picture and he goes right to work.
He understands very early, "I've gotta help.
I've gotta help support this family."
Kalush: He went out and did whatever it took
when food needed to be on the table,
from selling flowers to shining shoes,
to selling papers or being a messenger boy.
Work became all important and he was a workaholic his whole life.
Zenon: It probably gave him that drive, that grit,
and he was determined to make himself into something.
But that lack of education was going to go on to haunt him.
To help his son escape the harsh reality
of the poverty they were living in now,
Mayer Weisz took his son to see a magic show.
It was a particular trick that Houdini remembered,
throughout the rest of his life in fact.
Kalush: He saw Dr. Lynn, who was a famous magician,
and he did an effect called palingenesia,
where it appeared as though he took a knife
and cut the limbs off of a living person and then restored them.
To a young, clearly imaginative young boy,
seeing somebody perform this incredibly dark and macabre act,
it would have just been captivating.
It's going to fire his imagination.
It's going to be the thing that he's talking about
and will remember for the rest of his life.
Fishburne: In one of the newly released diary entries,
Houdini recounts the gruesome act.
"I saw Dr. Lynn do it 30 years ago
when I was ten years of age in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
He pretended to use chloraform,
and at the time I really believed
that the man's arm, leg, and head were cut off."
I think Dr. Lynn's palingenisia
might have been quite formative for Houdini.
My own experiences, when I was a kid
I watched the "Twilight Zone" and Alfred Hitchcock,
and ever since, I've wanted to do things
that have to do with life and death and creepy stuff.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if Houdini said,
"Hmm, I want to do that."
Zenon: After Milwaukee, Mayer Weisz moved the family
to New York City to look for work
and it was almost as though
that was the place where the Houdini persona
started to take shape in young Erik.
Young Houdini's life in New York
was what really opened up the possibilities to him.
It was not until he got to Manhattan
that I think he suddenly looked up
and saw the potential of America
and of making his name there.
Cox: He becomes very, very interested in athletics.
That really is a natural for him,
for his competitive nature, for his love of physical fitness.
He becomes a boxer. He becomes a champion runner.
His drive was more like an athlete's drive than an entertainer's,
and it really starts here in New York.
Caveney: The great thing about athletics is
if you win that race, you are the best,
you are number one,
and they give you a little medal to prove it.
Cuiffo: I think that photograph of Houdini with all the medals
is very telling of his earnest personality
and desire for acceptance and success
and showing people that he was
not just another one of these nameless,
faceless immigrants running around the city.
On closer examination, some of them appear to be genuine medals
and some of them are sort of milk bottle caps
that he's fashioned into medals.
Cuiffo: So not only did he have the medals that he'd earned,
and there were quite a few of those,
he'd had added a couple.
He was a natural exaggerator.
Clearly, Houdini wanted to be bigger than life
and he would do anything towards that end.
Fishburne: In 1889,
a chance discovery changes everything.
Zenon: So the young Erik in New York City stumbled
across a book by Robert‐Houdin,
"The Memoirs Of Robert‐Houdin,"
and that seems to have been a real turning point for him.
It was about a fully rounded character,
and that's what I think inspired him to create his own.
Caveney: Robert‐Houdin is known as the father of modern magic.
He was one of the first people
to ever levitate another human being.
And Robert‐Houdin levitated his little son,
and he called it the ethereal suspension.
And people believed it.
Robert‐Houdin said that a magician is an actor
playing the part of someone with real power.
Zenon: Houdini took this on board I think
and realized that he had to inhabit the character 100 percent.
He had to be the character he created.
Now that he'd got the blueprint for the persona,
what he needed was a name for it.
Cox: Erik Weisz gets a job at H. Richters and Sons‐‐ a tie factory.
While he's working there, he meets a friend, Jacob Hyman.
And the story goes that it was Jacob who said,
"If you take the name Houdin and add an I on to the end,
in French that means 'like Houdin'."
And there it was.
There it was, the name that you can never forget.
One of the reasons people say his name so often
is because it comes out so well.
Houdini. Houdini.
Lynch: Erik Weisz made his own destiny in becoming Houdini,
and that was kind of the first stage in his transformation.
Brandon: Erik Weisz was the boy who worked in a tie shop.
And Houdini was the result of his decision
that he was going to express himself.
He wasn't Erik Weisz. He was Houdini.
Fishburne: Erik Weisz now has a blueprint to change his life.
He decides to commit himself
to the character of Houdini completely,
even if that means leaving his true past
and his real birthplace behind.
Cox: He always claimed that he was an American,
because I think he felt like he was a product of this new America.
In his own words he says, "Robert‐Houdin became my hero and guide.
This book became my gospel."
It gave him a path to fame and fortune
and respectability through magic.
Brandon: For a child like Houdini,
who was extremely intelligent,
who felt hemmed in, if you like,
by his utter lack of education,
there suddenly was his road of escape.
Fishburne: By 1891, Erik Weisz has changed his name
to Harry Houdini and is mapping out a route to the big time.
Houdini decides to quit his very good job at the tie factory
and go after the dream of becoming a magician.
And actually, Jacob Hayman joins him
and they form a partnership, the Brothers Houdini.
Where they could get work at that time were dime museums.
Culliton: The dime museums were entry‐level show business.
You paid your dime and you went in,
and there might be Cardo the Magician
doing his card manipulations on one platform.
On the next platform, there might be a performer who was eating fire.
So, if the audience lost interest in you,
they would just drift over to the fire‐eater or the comedians.
You get to do the same thing over and over and over again.
Sometimes, you know, 15, 20 times a day.
If you've swallowed your needles and regurgitated them threaded
15 times a day for two years, you're gonna get good at it.
Fishburne: While honing his skills on the dime museum circuit,
Houdini gets terrible news.
So, Houdini was performing in New York in 1892,
when somebody ran up and said, "Hey, magician, your father's dying."
Cuiffo: The story goes,
his father was almost waiting for Houdini.
Everybody else was gathered around the bed,
and his father made Houdini swear an oath
to take care of his mother
and take care of his family after he passed away.
Cox: Erik Weisz took this very, very seriously,
and spent the rest of his life honoring that oath
to take care of his mother.
And that drove him.
That drove him his entire life.
Zenon: There are countless entries in the diaries
about how much money he's sending home.
But the fact that he's writing it down kind of suggests
that he's almost reassuring himself
that he's doing what he should do.
Kalush: He's trying to prove to himself
that he's honoring his commitment to his passed father.
Fishburne: But at this point in his life,
Houdini doesn't have the skills
to become a successful performer.
Houdini was‐‐ like any other hack magician, really, you know,
he was playing in dime museums trying to scrape a living.
He's got no prospects, and he's going to go, potentially, broke.
He goes back and lives with his mother
on the Upper East Side in New York City.
And he's desperate.
He's willing to sell his best secrets.
He's willing to sell anything he knows.
And that doesn't work. There's no real demand.
Fishburne: By 1898, the 24‐year‐old Houdini,
now married to fellow performer Bess Rahner, is going nowhere.
Yet within a year,
he'll be the most famous magician who's ever lived.
But how?
Around 1899, Houdini has developed or bought a new act,
which was escaping from handcuffs.
He would challenge the audience to bring handcuffs to the theater,
and he would escape from them.
It was kind of Houdini's first step into the world of escapology.
The problem is not many people own handcuffs.
Then, very quick on his feet,
he realized, well, who has handcuffs?
And he starts going to the police departments.
And he escapes from them,
and this is a great calling card for the show.
Jillette: "I defy the jails of the world to hold me."
It is a literal celebration of freedom
from all these people who were, uh, you know,
first‐generation Americans.
Fishburne: As he arrives to perform in Chicago in 1899,
he has an idea that will change his fortunes forever.
He went to the local police station
and he challenged them to lock him up.
And he took the press with him
so that they could document what happened.
Kalush: He gets put on the front page of the Chicago paper
with a drawing of Houdini's face, which is a stepping off point.
Houdini immediately understood how critical this was and how important this was.
Caveney: The first time Houdini saw his name and his picture
on the front page of a newspaper,
this must have been like a drug to him.
The incident in Chicago was arguably the greatest turning point
of his entire career and created the blueprint
of how his success evolved from then on.
Fishburne: Just a few months later, Houdini met a man
who would launch him into the big‐time.
So, in St Paul, Minnesota, Houdini met a man
who was probably the most influential person
that he'd met in his life up until that point,
and maybe ever actually.
His name was Martin Beck.
Beck was a vaudeville impresario
and he ran the Orpheum circuit.
Caveney: So, Martin Beck had a lot of clout,
and he saw Houdini and he did his magic tricks,
but he also did his escapes.
And he thought that's something different. That's interesting.
So Beck said, "Look, Houdini,
I can put you into the Orpheum Theatre chain.
But forget about the magic. Lose the magic.
Just concentrate on escapes.
Be the guy who can escape from anything."
Goodwin: The advice that Beck gave Houdini in that moment
was the thing that changed the course of history.
Fishburne: By the summer of 1899,
Houdini had been booked to play a chain of prestigious theaters
all across the west coast of America.
And every time he arrived somewhere new,
Houdini makes a beeline for the police station.
Each time he would arrive in a new city,
he would go to the police department and challenge them.
And of course, he made sure the newspaper reporter was with him.
It was a great system
to be able to walk into a police department
and walk out with a front page newspaper story.
Jillette: Houdini was really, really good
at getting people to tell stories about him.
Yeah, he was probably
the first person to really use the press
in a way that would be recognized today.
Manipulating the press corresponded with his rise as a performer.
They go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.
Fishburne: By 1900, 26‐year‐old Houdini,
the man who could escape from anything, is a huge draw.
And he's got a new strategy for getting attention‐‐
the legendary Houdini challenges.
The challenges are critical to understanding Houdini.
You can't understand Houdini and his fame,
why he's enduring in our culture,
you can't understand any of those things
if you don't understand the challenges.
Fishburne: In every town where he plays,
Houdini lets himself be put to the test in some new way.
Zenon: In one case it was a giant paper bag,
which doesn't sound difficult to get out of,
but he had to do it without tearing the bag.
He would escape from inside a giant American football.
Lots of safes as well.
I believe there was one escape that he did from a large dead whale.
Goodwin: Escapes are inherently boring,
but the moment you put a human element to it,
now all of a sudden there's stakes
that the audience can relate to,
and they're gonna pick a side.
"Who's gonna win, Who do you want to win?"
And it was really smart.
Not only the things that he was doing were, you know,
unique, and so would get new press attention.
But at the same time, was our town
going to be the town that beat Houdini?
Fishburne: There's only one problem.
In all these provincial towns,
you might not have enough people
to volunteer to do challenges
or even to respond to you to do challenges
to keep the show up every night.
Fishburne: For years, people have wondered
how these challenges came about.
A lost diary entry provides the answer.
Writing about a show in England, Houdini says, in a kind of gibberish,
"Friday challenge, box built on stage.
Had three men of Burrows sawmill,
same firm as last time.
Gave the foreman Cockburn pray pound.
The other two men received 'be quick'."
Kalush: There's something that I didn't understand until reading the diaries,
and that's that Houdini would actually pay people
to come up on stage and challenge him.
He would write it in a secret code in his diary.
I can't really explain why he would only put those bits in code.
Maybe he just didn't like the idea that he paid.
Challenges were really delivered to Houdini's door.
He most often arranged the challenge
and then dramatized it.
Fishburne: Thanks to his formula, Houdini becomes a sensation
throughout the United States and Europe.
But it is in Russia that the persona of Harry Houdini,
the man who could escape from any shackles,
really sets fire to the imagination.
When Houdini gets to Russia, he gets the idea
to challenge the police to escape
from the Siberian transport cell,
which is the boxcar that you get thrown in and taken to Siberia.
So, it has this lure around it as the ultimate,
ultimate, you're done for.
Well, they lock Houdini in and they're very diligent.
They search him in every possible place you can imagine
that could hide any sort of implements.
And they lock him in and he escapes.
The news of this just went across the country as fast as it could.
Cuiffo: It immediately transported him
to the status of iconic folk hero legend.
The themes of his act really were relatable
no matter where you were in the world.
People in Russia and people in the UK
and people in America,
they all wanted to see somebody
get one over on authority.
They wanted to see the underdog succeed,
and those are universal themes.
He's now arguably the most famous man in Russia.
He's the most famous person in Germany, London, and America.
He's dotting his way to becoming the most famous performer in the world.
Fishburne: In his diary, Houdini revels in how he's treated by fans,
and possibly embellishes the details.
He writes, "Was cheered over and over again as they sang,
'And will you no come back again.'"
In another, he writes, "Mob waited for me and took me shoulder high.
Carried me home and upstairs. Had to make a speech from the window."
It just seems very odd that the audience wouldn't go home,
they would wait out in front of the theater for him to come out,
and then pick him up on their shoulders and carry him to a hotel.
It's just too much for me to buy into.
Brandon: I think when Houdini wrote in his diary,
it was a part of an ongoing fantasy life that he had,
and part of that fantasy was an extreme exaggeration of what went on.
It was how Houdini would have wanted reality to be, so he wrote it down.
Because if it was in his diary, maybe it happened.
Maybe in his imagination he was carried shoulder high around the town.
Caveney: I have to think that he was writing these
with the idea that in the future
other people are gonna be reading this.
And he wanted to make sure that they knew how great he was.
For Houdini, it's all about legacy.
Fishburne: By 1905, the transformation is complete.
All traces of Erik Weisz have been destroyed.
The persona of Houdini is a fresh start,
a man without a past he could build a legend around.
When you get to the point when you're as famous as Houdini
and you have a narrative, it was really important for him that it was upheld.
He knew the diaries were gonna be found.
If you know your narrative will be told one day,
why not try to control it while you're alive?
He wanted to be the all‐American boy.
That whole self‐liberation thing just maps right on
to the way America saw itself.
Erik Weisz might've been born in Budapest,
but wasn't Houdini born in Appleton, Wisconsin?
Fishburne: The 31‐year‐old Houdini return
to reclaim his position as the country's greatest showman.
And his diaries reveal
he is prepared to stop at nothing
to keep his seat on the throne.
By about 1905, Houdini was hugely famous in Europe,
but it came at the cost of his fame in America.
Problem was, in the void of him being gone, what happens?
A lot of copycats started to spring up,
a lot of guys that were trying to do his act,
and there were even guys that were copying his name.
Goodwin: Everybody was the new Houdini, Boudini, Moudini,
all of the different iterations of him.
He showed up at people's performances and challenged them.
Oh, really cleverly orchestrated to make great little stories,
but I wouldn't have wanted‐‐ I would not have argued
with Houdini over a parking spot.
He was a scrappy little mother.
Fishburne: In Houdini's lost diaries,
for the first time we find evidence
of a secret plan to destroy a fellow performer
with calculated precision.
"I'm going to make a rival act for 'Minerva'
so have advertised for good swimmer females."
Rehearsing Wanda Timm in Rose's office for the new act.
Shall call her Oceana."
Caveney: Minerva was a female escape artist.
Houdini wanted the whole world to believe
that he used his superhuman strength
and ability and cunning to affect all of his escapes.
Brandon: He was the symbol of indestructible virility.
So if some small woman could do his act,
that completely undermined this whole aspect of his character.
He had to just destroy her career.
And one way to do that was to find another woman
that he could control and build her up,
give her the advertising that she needed,
and to get her in there to destroy Minerva.
Houdini was a battler, he was a fighter,
and that is a kind of person I don't understand.
My heart is not with him on the jealousy
and on the insecurity.
That's just a part of him that is sad and I don't relate to.
The only reason you could think that he feels threatened
by these guys is his ego.
It wasn't enough for Houdini to succeed.
Everybody else had to fail.
Fishburne: Houdini's vendetta doesn't stop with his peers.
In 1908, he turns on the very man
who gave him the blueprint for his persona,
Robert Houdin.
There was a point in his career where he was wealthy.
He was famous all over the world.
So he achieved that goal. So what's next?
And I think for Houdini, something that he longed to be
was recognized as a great scholar and a great writer.
Sandford: He had a lifelong desire,
almost a sort of pathological one,
to be accepted on an intellectual level
as a serious figure,
as someone who was not just physically agile
and a clever stageman,
but also who was worth listening to.
Zenon: And this probably harks back to his his childhood
when he had to give up his education.
His father had been an academic,
and it really riled him that he didn't have that respect.
Caveney: But you can't go back and redo all those years
of schooling that he missed.
So he thought the way to do this
is to write this very scholarly history of magic.
I think he thought, "That will be the crowning piece of my career."
When Houdini got the idea to write this encyclopedia of magic,
it was natural for him to want to go visit the source of it all,
which would be the birthplace of Robert‐Houdin,
his namesake, and attempt to see his family.
Caveney: And he thinks he is gonna be welcomed with open arms.
And they go, "What? Houdini's here?
So what? What are we supposed to do?"
And they didn't even want to talk to him.
His daughter gave him the big brush‐off.
She really wasn't interested.
That was the one thing he couldn't take.
He couldn't bear being dismissed.
So, he got his own back.
Cox: The Houdini approach is to turn everything into a wrestling match.
Everything is a takedown. Everything is a challenge.
That's what the public likes.
So, hey, how about combining the history of magic
with a takedown of the most famous magician of all time?
That's a very Houdini thing to do.
Cuiffo: He took on in full force to kind of assassinate
the character of Robert‐Houdin,
mainly by trying to show that a lot of the effects
and things that Robert‐Houdin claimed to be his were not his,
were created by others and stolen by Robert‐Houdin.
Fishburne: Destroying the legacy of his former hero becomes an obsession.
He writes, "Wrote material for magicians' biography all day.
Did not even dress.
Worked from 6 AM to 12 midnight."
In 1908, Houdini releases his book,
"The Unmasking Of Robert‐Houdin."
But his takedown backfires.
Caveney: Not only was the book saying Romero‐Houdin
was not the father of modern magic,
but the tone of it was just so intense.
"The prince of pilferers," I think Houdini said.
I think he hurt his argument by being so intense.
I do think this was the biggest black eye Houdini ever suffered.
And if Houdini were here with us today,
I think he would agree.
Kalush: He had to show the world how smart he was.
And I think that this was just his ego crying out to say,
"Look at me. I'm also intelligent."
I think it was a shameful moment.
Zenon: To further compound his woes about the reaction
to his "The Unmasking Of Robert‐Houdin,"
his ticket sales had started to slow a bit as well.
Terbosic: Harry's not playing those big, big theaters he was used to,
and it might've been because people were starting
to kind of be tired from his handcuff act.
Fishburne: His lost diaries reveal Houdini's anger
at not making it onto the posters for a Cleveland performance.
He writes, "I did not want Ma to come to theater
as I was ashamed to let her see the class of show I was with."
In another he writes, "Am not featured.
Is this week the first step toward oblivion?"
Goodwin: I think that the diary entries really show
that he understood that he'd had the success,
but it was slipping out of his grasp.
Houdini realized that he had one of two options.
He could either reinvent himself,
or he was on the downward trajectory of his career already.
Fishburne: 1907. The appeal of Harry Houdini is faltering.
Audiences are losing interest,
so he needs to find a way to win them back.
The option he picks is the most dangerous imaginable.
The avenue that Houdini chose in order to broaden
the scope of his appeal was jeopardy, was death.
Cox: Houdini himself would say,
"Human beings don't want to see
another human being die,
but they do love to be there when it happens."
Smart magicians make life and death a central part of magic.
Dumb magicians don't.
If all you're doing is producing, you know,
little bouquets and bunnies,
you probably won't find your way deeply into the heart of the public.
Goodwin: His bridge jumps were really the first introduction
of danger and jeopardy
into the Houdini cannon of performance.
He would go to a bridge, highly publicized,
surrounded by thousands of people
that were coming to see him.
And he would be restrained with handcuffs.
And then he would jump into the river below.
Terbosic: There are said to be 10,000 people
on the banks of this river and on this bridge
to see Harry to do this jump
and to do this crazy, death‐defying escape.
The thrill of watching somebody live or pass,
I mean, that's a great story to have.
Teller: What could be a more perfect dramatic gesture
than leaping off a bridge in danger of drowning because you're manacled,
pausing, and then emerging triumphant at the surface?
It's a perfect symbol of resurrection.
Fishburne: In a lost diary entry, Houdini reveals
that the bridge jumps were not just to drive ticket sales,
but to impress the person he loved most.
"Bridge jump and mother along.
I wanted to have her with me,
it being my first big jump manacled.
Ma saw me jump."
The sentence that haunts me most
about Houdini and his mother
is when he was doing bridge jumps,
and the entry he makes...
...is, "Ma saw me jump."
And I think about that a lot.
It seems like, at least in my experience,
if you're a performer, there is a sense in which
you're always performing for your parents.
Terbosic: Harry's mother Cecelia was everything to Harry.
I mean, he made an oath with his dad
that he would forever look after his mother.
And this moment in time was to show his mom that he'd done well for himself
and lived up to what he said he was going to.
Teller: He certainly idolized her.
She was a very, very formidable figure
that he was spending his entire life trying to impress.
Fishburne: However, in the same entry,
Houdini writes, "I thought something might happen."
He knew that these jumps could easily prove fatal.
Goodwin: The bridge jumps are without doubt,
the most dangerous thing that he ever performed.
If you hit the water wrong from thirty feet,
then you could really, really hurt yourself or even die.
Obviously, it's very difficult to swim when you're restrained.
There could be a current.
There could be something
underneath the surface of the water
that he's gonna hit and spike himself on.
Fishburne: A lost diary entry Houdini made in 1910
shows just how dangerous these jumps actually were.
"Dived 31 feet manacled.
Jumped. Made a bad jump.
Received a terrible smash in the face
from the water on right side and knocked the wind out of me
and gave me a swollen cheek.
Goodwin: What's really interesting about the diary entry,
you can tell that that was something that had scared him.
He's really taking his life in his hands.
But at the same time, he knew that that was a level that he had to go to
to make the public care.
Up until this point, the handcuff act,
the stakes were if Houdini fails, you know, it's humiliation.
But now the stakes are life and death.
Cuiffo: He's pushing the boundaries
of what a human body can do.
So, that naturally lifted his persona to another level.
Zenon: Houdini was transforming himself
into a superhero, a superman.
But by 1909, he was kind of being eclipsed by a new type of daredevil.
It was the early days of aviation
and there was an obsession with it pretty much worldwide.
Lots of people doing it and stealing the headlines,
but it was still very, very dangerous at that point.
Kalush: Flight had become a topical thing,
and it was quite magical.
I mean, people want to fly.
That's just, I think, something that's in our nature.
We all have something in us that wants to be able to do that.
So, people are rooting for pilots.
Caveney: And I'm sure that Houdini thought,
"Hey, I should be getting all that acclaim.
Why aren't you paying attention to me?"
So, of course, what does he do?
He buys an airplane and becomes a pilot.
The very first pilots, these were real daredevils.
I mean, these guys were dropping like flies.
And there's lots of entries in his diary that show almost‐‐
you could say it's almost morbid,
but he would keep track of people,
and when they died, he'd mark "dead."
Caveney: It does seem a little macabre
that Houdini would cut these pictures out
and stick them in his diary,
as if he was trying to convince himself of how dangerous this was,
and if he could succeed,
he has now beaten all of these people who died trying.
Zenon: His first flight was a disaster.
He crashed quite badly.
Although I think it's quite telling
that in the diary entry for that
he talks about the cost of the crash
rather than the risk to his life.
Fishburne: "Smashed machine,
broke propeller all to hell.
Have now paid 12,000 marks on machine biplane."
Houdini's entire life
was built around his being able to do
any exploit better than anyone else.
So, how could he possibly allow himself not to be
the first person to break a flying record?
Caveney: So, it's like Houdini had to find a country
where no one had flown an airplane yet.
It didn't matter which one it was,
but Australia is the one that was available.
So, off he went.
Fishburne: In January 1910, Houdini, his wife,
and his precious French biplane
board a steamer and sail to Melbourne, Australia.
The shock when Houdini got there was that various people
are also trying for this prize to be the first, you know?
Caveney: This drove Houdini crazy.
He'd spent a lot of money and a lot of time
and a lot of effort to own that crown,
and now he was on the verge of losing it.
Fishburne: From Houdini's diary,
we learned how almost immediately after arriving,
his competitor Ralph Banks
experiences a terrifying crash.
He writes, "Came down after a terrible dive, head first.
Banks escaped with a blackened eye,
torn lips, and a scratched limb.
'Twas a miraculous escape."
Caveney: What I take from that diary entry
is that Houdini saw this as a great opportunity.
The door was cracked open, and he still had the opportunity to be first.
The only thing that would've made him happier
is if Ralph Banks had crashed and killed himself.
Fishburne: Two weeks later, Houdini manages to beat Banks to the prize.
His diary records his delight.
"First real flight in Australia.
I went up three times.
Never in any fear and never in any danger."
Caveney: I don't know how much effect that first flight in Australia
had elsewhere in the world,
because all over the world there were people
who were the first to fly in that country.
He had to figure out other ways to keep his name in the headlines.
And of course, when you're doing things that are death‐defying,
you have to keep upping the ante.
And that's a slippery slope to be trapped on.
Fishburne: In 1916, determined to cement his persona
as the greatest showman who ever lived,
the 42‐year‐old Houdini
unleashes his masterpiece to the world‐‐
a highly potent combination of danger, jeopardy, and drama
that is still today perhaps the most iconic image in magic history.
The aerial straitjacket escape.
Teller: Houdini figured out how to take what could be a crappy little trick,
which is getting out of a straitjacket,
and figured out how to make that
into a gigantic outdoor spectacle.
There is nothing like that image,
just a man upside down hung by his ankles,
holding this restraint before he drops it to the ground.
It's like the Mona Lisa. It's a one of a kind.
Teller: I have a photograph of Houdini escaping
from a straitjacket upside down.
The traffic is completely stopped.
There's no room for a car to move,
but there is one car in place.
And that car has on the top of it
a 15‐year‐old boy leaning on his elbow like this
and gazing up at what is obviously an iconic hero.
There is a look in that of pure love
and pure identification.
The kind of thing that we often see nowadays
with great football players,
he was able to pull that out of people
doing what was essentially a magic act.
That's a miracle.
Fishburne: Houdini takes the most dangerous path imaginable
to win back the adoration of the crowd.
But the more daring he becomes,
the more his audience expects.
Houdini had found a niche
in adding danger into his performances.
There were thousands of people there to see him risk his life.
And I guarantee that the thought process from that moment was,
"Okay, this is great, but how do I bring this on stage?
How can I bring all of the elements
that I get from the bridge jump into my show?"
And so, that was his challenge.
A lot of Houdini's escapes and stunts revolved around the theme of water.
He almost had an obsession with water.
Having been a championship swimmer when he was younger,
there was the manacled bridge jumps into the river.
Then he started doing it on stage
padlocked inside a milk churn full of water.
But the ultimate one was the Chinese water torture cell.
And the great thing about this was the visual.
For one, it made a perfect poster.
Teller: It's a nightmare image.
It's a great, great, great nightmare image.
If I walked by a theater and saw a poster
with that image, I would buy a ticket.
Tersebic: It really was like a human sacrifice for the gods.
Cox: It looked like a torture device.
Some crazy despot's idea of what to do with Christians.
Instead of feeding them to the lions, drop 'em in this tank.
Tersebic: Doing the water torture cell escape is extremely dangerous.
It's essentially a glass coffin onstage.
He would have an apparatus of shackles
that would come to attach around his ankles.
They could slowly on his command
lower him down into the icy water.
And the minute they start dipping you down into that water,
your whole body is now flooding with endorphins.
The adrenaline is rushing.
And at the same time you want to remain calm
because you're still controlling your breathing.
So you don't want the moment to get the best of you.
Teller: So, already, in your mind as an audience member,
you're seeing this incredible dramatic moment
when Houdini's in there struggling and drowning.
Zenon: The genius bit of showmanship
was asking the audience to hold their breath with him.
So, you're kind of invested emotionally.
Goodwin: Franz Kukol was his main assistant at the time,
and he would stand clutching an axe,
increasingly agitated,
as a giant stopwatch ticked down the seconds
that Houdini was underwater.
And all over the audience you could hear people going...
( exhaling )
...as they ran out of air.
Three minutes, four minutes.
How‐‐ this is impossible.
He's some kind of, you know, superhuman.
And some guy comes in with an axe and breaks it.
And the glass explodes and the water explodes,
and all of this is happening.
It never happened, mind you,
but this has now happened in your head.
And just at the point where everybody thought,
"Well, that must be it. He's he's a goner.
He's gotta be dead in there."
Houdini would whip back the curtain,
completely drenched, out of breath, but succeeded.
And the crowd went wild.
Out of Houdini's whole repertoire,
the kind of two iconic images really
are the suspended straitjacket escape
and the dangling upside down in the water torture cell.
Those two images, oddly enough, would secure his legacy.
So, he's escaped from everything you can imagine escaping from,
and there's only one thing that you can't escape from.
Fishburne: His diaries offer evidence
that death is already on Houdini's mind.
He writes, "Ma, Bess, and I go to the photographers Gulekurst
and have our photos taken‐‐
I hope not the last time together.
Who knows? The old must die and the young can."
Cuiffo: That diary entry is very interesting in‐‐
one, in the fact that it's Houdini really expressing a lot of emotion,
which again, up to that point,
his writings are very practical and scientific in a way.
And perhaps it's part of his process of his awareness of life moving on,
and he's coming to a new phase in his life
and knows that his mother is going to die.
Kalush: You do think of these things.
What would I do without this person?
And I think Houdini thought of that quite often,
because she was a very central point to the family.
Caveney: After Houdini's father died,
he became the head of the house.
And with this oath to take care of his mother,
he's starting to see her getting frailer,
and we can see it in photographs of her at that time.
Fishburne: In August 1913,
Houdini boards a ship for Denmark.
"The gang plank was pulled away,
and we started in to throw those
long paper colored strips overboard
to the folks onto the pier.
Ma caught a few of them that I threw adroitly to her,
and eventually we steamed away,
and that was the last sight I saw
of my darling mother alive."
Cox: His mother had a stroke while he was on the ship
and his brother sent telegrams.
And when he finally opened the telegram and read
that his mother had died, he fainted.
He canceled a contract.
He got right back on the ship and went home.
Cuiffo: The story about sitting
by his mother's bedside was legendary.
This is probably the closest account we have of him
facing real death of somebody who he really loved
in a way that he didn't love anybody else.
Fishburne: That night, Houdini places a gift by his mother
and writes, "She looked so dainty and restful,
only a small spot on her cheek,
and the face which haunted me
with love all of my life is still and quiet.
And when she does not answer me,
I know that God has taken her to his bosom
and given her the peace which she denied herself on this Earth."
Some of the prose in that diary entry about,
you know, I'm sure she's peaceful in heaven and all of that sort of stuff,
is less powerful to me than the fact
that he brought home a pair of slippers
that she had requested before he left
so that he could put those slippers in the coffin with her.
It's very touching. It's very touching.
Brandon: Once his mother has died,
he really starts to question his place in the world.
That anchor that drove him for so many years
to provide for her and achieve success
and fulfill the oath of his father was now gone.
In a sense, he had fulfilled it.
But now here he is facing the question, what's next?
Fishburne: As he turns 50, his life is at a turning point.
His beloved mother is gone and his diaries reveal
his body is beginning to fail, too.
The pursuit of immortality is taking its toll.
He writes, "Dr. Parsons examines my body and ankle.
Claims I am in danger of death."
Zenon: His body's not holding out,
he's got a lot of injuries,
and his escape career kind of feels as though
it's behind him now pretty much.
So he's got to find something new.
He's not a guy to just lie down and take it, you know?
It's as though he needs a new challenge.
Fishburne: By 1920, 50‐year‐old Houdini
is about to undertake the greatest challenge of his life.
He wages war against the new scourge sweeping the nation‐‐ spiritualism.
Zenon: In its most basic form, spiritualism is a belief
that you can communicate with the dead.
Cox: Spiritualism has this tremendous resurgence in the 1920s,
especially after World War I.
Fishburne: With millions dead, families are desperate
to speak to their lost loved ones,
and a new breed of performer emerges, the medium,
a person who claims they can commune with the dead.
Spiritualism at the time is‐‐
it's a combination of a lot of things.
It is without a doubt a religion.
And at the same time, it is organized crime.
At the same time, it is fraud.
But spiritualists were not just wrong.
They were really immoral.
Cox: Houdini was very conflicted over the question of spiritualism.
He wasn't an out and out skeptic.
Zenon: He didn't really believe that you could communicate with the dead.
However, he would've given anything to be able to contact his mother after she died.
Brandon: But every time he approached someone
who claimed to be able to do that,
it was always crass rubbish
and he could see how the tricks were done.
Fishburne: Desperate to find out the truth for himself,
Houdini embarks on his own investigation.
Cox: I think he thought this was a great intellectual pursuit.
But actually, Harry Houdini was entering
into probably the most dangerous part of his career.
Zenon: In 1920, he decided to reignite
his literary ambitions by writing a book about spiritualism.
And it's possibly an odd choice,
bearing in mind how badly he got burnt after writing
"The Unmasking of Robert‐Houdin" a few years previously.
Houdini reached out to Arthur Conan Doyle,
who was kind of spiritualism's leading light, really,
the main advocate if you will.
He was very famous at the time,
being the author of Sherlock Holmes, obviously.
He had a very keen antennae always
for any sort of celebrity endorsement.
Cox: Lady Doyle was holding her own seances
and ostensibly building her own powers of psychic ability.
Kalush: She was an automatic writer.
That meant she went into a sort of a trance.
Sandford: A pen in her hand would appear to flow
across a piece of paper with words that were not hers
but that she was receiving from an unseen entity.
Fishburne: By way of introduction, Houdini sends Conan Doyle
"The Unmasking of Robert‐Houdin."
And within a month, Doyle invites him to visit.
Cox: Doyle said, "Listen, I agree with you that there's fraud,
but I've found the real thing."
Houdini was excited.
Fishburne: Houdini's lost diaries
suggest genuine anticipation, not skepticism.
"Met Lady Doyle and the three children. Had lunch with them.
They believe implicitly in spiritualism.
Sir Arthur told me he has spoken six times to his son.
No possible chance for trickery."
There's no doubt that Houdini wanted to believe
that you could contact the dead, you know?
He had a vested interest in his mother's case, obviously.
In the summer of 1922,
Arthur Conan Doyle invites Houdini and Bess down to Atlantic City
to spend the weekend and have a good time.
Cox: And it's during this time
that Doyle invites Houdini to a private seance.
Doyle said, you know,
"Your mother is trying to get in contact with you through Lady Doyle."
Houdini didn't go there or even consider it
that Doyle was going to try to defraud him or fool him.
He was really wondering whether it would work.
He really hoped perhaps his mother might come through.
Fishburne: This extraordinary diary entry
details what happens in the room.
"Sir Arthur asked Lady Doyle,
who was standing alongside of me,
and was it my mother?
Lady Doyle's hands struck the table three times
signifying, yes,
that my mother was alongside of me."
Sandford: Shortly thereafter,
a pencil in Lady Doyle's hand began to move,
apparently of its own accord.
Cox: And he received a several pages long message from his mother.
Fishburne: Houdini transcribes everything Lady Doyle
had claimed his mother told her.
Cox: He's cautious and he is recording everything
that happened in this seance because this is going
to become a point of dispute later on.
It's very important.
Fishburne: Part of that message reads,
"Never had a mother such son. Tell him not to grieve.
God bless you, too, Sir Arthur, for what you are doing for us.
A happiness awaits him that he has never dreamed of.
His eyes will soon be opened."
And Houdini didn't show it at the time,
but I think it must've enraged him.
Because in looking at that, what he can see is,
"I'm being manipulated. They think I'm stupid."
Teller: Now, of course, Houdini's a superstar.
Arthur Conan Doyle is a superstar.
They are going to drag him into press interviews
like Britney Spears is dragged into interviews.
They're going to say, "What did you think?"
And at this point Houdini says,
"I don't believe it was real. It couldn't have been."
Fishburne: On December 19th 1922, the gloves come off.
Houdini writes a deposition that declares Lady Doyle to be a fraud.
Of course, Conan Doyle and his wife Lady Doyle took great umbrage to this.
They were very upset. They took it personally.
Sandford: The fact that his wife's medium‐ship
specifically was being questioned
was I think really what lit
the blue touch paper with Doyle.
He was absolutely incensed.
Fishburne: Writing in the press,
Houdini vows that he will seek out and expose all fake mediums.
Teller: Houdini felt that absolutely gut‐level
as a moral issue of the greatest power.
Houdini was facing a pretty powerful,
essentially mafia of spiritualists.
Jillette: People were making money hand over fist.
And it was popular with the upper crust,
so that there was a lot of money to be stolen.
It was a real, real good racket.
These people were really crazy successful and rolling in dough.
Kalush: There had been mediums in the past who had poisoned people
or beaten people or killed people over these very issues.
He went into it with open eyes.
Fishburne: 1923.
Houdini's war against bogus mediums
is about to accelerate.
And to bolster his case, he teams up with "Scientific American Magazine."
Kalush: "Scientific American" offered a $2,500 prize
if you could demonstrate something
that would be essentially supernatural
in the presence of their committee.
Cuiffo: One of the members of the "Scientific American" committee,
Malcolm J. Bird, proposed a woman named Margery,
who was a medium in Boston,
to be one of the candidates for this prize.
Cox: When Houdini learned of this, he said, "Wait a minute.
No one's getting any prize until I sit with Margery."
Cuiffo: Margery was a very interesting medium.
Kalush: She was the third wife of Dr. Lee Roi Crandon.
She and her husband started doing these seances in their home,
inviting the top tier of Boston society.
Cox: And what went on in these seances was wild.
You know, some mediums might levitate a table
to show a spirit is present.
It's said that Margery's table would actually get up
and chase people out of the room.
People said they lost weight because of the psychic energy.
She channeled her dead brother, who told dirty jokes.
Margery also did her seances nude except for a silk kimono,
and you could search the medium if you so desired.
She was just the most interesting
and exciting medium of that time.
She was a star.
Behind the scenes, Conan Doyle and Crandon
were writing to each other and concerned
that Houdini was going to be on this committee
to try to prove that Margery wasn't real.
Cox: This is the championship bout.
The greatest medium
against the greatest exposer of fraudulent mediums.
Kind of everything hangs in the balance.
Kalush: It was probably a pretty tense night, that first seance.
They're sort of feeling each other out.
They didn't really know how Houdini was going to respond.
Cuiffo: Margery channeled her dead brother Walter to speak through her.
Sandford: The spirit said,
"What would you like me to do with this trumpet?"
And Houdini said, "Well, make it fall to the floor."
And sure enough, a second or two later in the darkened room,
it clattered to the floor.
Cuiffo: It actually hit Houdini on the feet.
Margery was thrown back in her chair,
and that was the main event.
And for Houdini, it was by the book classic fraud tricks
that he's known about for many, many years.
They go back to the hotel,
Houdini and the "Scientific American" committee,
and he says as much and wants to out her immediately
like they've done with other mediums before that.
Sandford: But other heads prevailed
and advised him to wait for at least one more seance
before they made any public statement about her.
Cuiffo: So for the second seance, he devised this contraption,
essentially a box that contained her entire body.
Kalush: Stopping her from doing anything,
proving in theory that it was the spirit Walter
that was actually doing the physical manifestations.
There's so many fascinating dynamics in that second seance
because Houdini does get his limitations put in place,
and that succeeds in stopping Margery
from making any physical manifestations from occurring.
It was an acrimonious seance, to put it very mildly.
Kalush: Walter started singing little songs,
calling Houdini epithets, anti‐Jewish epithets.
The phrase, "You're a son of a ‐‐, Houdini,"
was the one‐‐ the sort of takeaway phrase of the seance.
Cuiffo: That must have affected him.
It was a direct personal attack on Houdini
and also the memory of his mother.
It did make him very angry,
and Walter then became threatening
started saying that Houdini wasn't going to live,
that he was going to put a curse on him
that was going to last until the day he died.
Cuiffo: Houdini had won this battle, had succeeded in stopping her.
And now it was just coming out as this vitriol
that would then soon really explode in the months to come.
In February 1925, the "Scientific American"
rejected Margery's claim to their prize.
Kalush: I think it was a major victory for Houdini.
If this had gone the other way,
I think it could have been very damaging
to Houdini's reputation.
He had this opportunity now to keep his name
in front of the public in a different way altogether.
Caveney: He discovered that he no longer had to jump off a bridge
into a freezing cold river to end up on the front page.
He could expose exactly how these mediums are doing what they're doing
and he still got huge press coverage.
So, he went for it,
despite the danger and regardless of the threats
and the other insults that were thrown his way.
Jillette: What Houdini I don't think knew he was monkeying with
was the level of complete immorality.
Spiritualists at the time were organized as criminals
and were also part of organized crime.
It's like you're dealing with, you know, a drug cartel.
Caveney: Many of these people wanted to see him dead.
Fishburne: 1925.
Houdini's secret diaries reveal he has a new obsession,
one that many believe would lead to his demise.
Cuifo: Houdini would go to these mediums himself, sometimes in disguise‐‐
there's a great photo of Houdini as an old man‐‐
partly for his own entertainment
under the guise of getting research.
Lynch: He would go in and get a reading and he would play along.
And then as soon as they slipped up, he would be like,
"Ah, it is I, Houdini, and I'm shutting this place down!"
Kalush: After this information was gathered, he would use it in his show,
and he would publicly expose the most egregious of these mediums.
Teller: I believe that Houdini's passion was absolutely genuine.
But I don't think at any point
he ever forgot that conflict makes a great story.
All of these things made great press
at the same time that they were actually making a very important point.
Fishburne: The mediums,
and their shrinking wallets, are livid.
Spiritualists were very fond of making indirect death threats.
"Houdini doesn't have long to live."
"Houdini is not long for this world."
So the atmosphere around him included
an element of really virulent hostility.
Cuiffo: People writing him letters threatening him,
putting curses on him.
It became a new level of aggression towards Houdini,
enough that he would mention it in newspaper articles.
Fishburne: For all of his public bravado,
Houdini is becoming greatly unnerved
by these constant threats.
Zenon: Obviously, Houdini was fronting it out,
but you get the idea that behind the scenes
he was actually quite worried.
These organizations had real clout behind them.
Teller: There's hostility in the air.
There's criminal activity on all sides.
There's this weird feeling of hatred that he,
I don't believe, previously had been living with.
I don't think he had been living with that poisonous sort of thing
where there's a group of people that just hate you all the time.
That's a difficult thing emotionally to deal with.
Fishburne: By the fall of 1926,
the feud is taking its toll.
Kalush: He seemed to be breaking a little bit.
He called a long‐time friend, Joseph Dunninger,
to come over at midnight in a rainy night.
Cox: He collects Houdini. They drive off.
And suddenly Houdini says,
"Turn around Joe. Go back to the house."
Houdini gets out, stands staring at his house,
and then gets back in the car and says, "Okay, we can go."
And they leave, and Dunninger turns and sees that Houdini's crying.
That's when Harry proclaims to Joe,
"That's the last time I've seen my house.
I will never see it again."
Cox: Turns out, that was the last time he saw his house.
But it's fascinating. Did Houdini have a premonition of his own death?
Goodwin: On October the 19th in 1926,
Houdini gave a lecture at McGill University in Montreal.
Cuiffo: Houdini was giving these spiritualistic lectures.
It was like his new act in a way,
and it was a much easier act to perform
because it was basically a lecture.
But he would demonstrate some of the methods
that fraudulent mediums would use.
Goodwin: He spoke very vitriolically
about Margery and Lady Doyle.
It raised the hairs on the backs of the reporters' necks
enough to mention in the papers
that it was quite a scathing attack,
which inevitably got back to them.
Goodwin: After the lecture, Houdini is relaxing
in a common room or dressing room.
He's surrounded by students
and people that wanted to talk to him.
Cuiffo: And it was at this casual gathering of students after this lecture
where he started to boast that he could withstand punches.
Cox: He said, "Hey, if anyone wants
to punch me in the stomach, I can take it."
And a student named Gerard Pickleman
did indeed punch him in the stomach.
Goodwin: And to his credit, Houdini didn't react,
didn't wince, and just stood there and took it.
And that was kind of the wrap‐up of the evening.
So that was ostensibly punch number one for Houdini
while he was in Montreal.
Tuesday, he does this performance.
Then that Friday, Houdini goes to the theater,
and he's met at the theater
by two students who want to chat with him.
They sit with Houdini.
Houdini's laying down on the couch relaxing
while this student begins to sketch him.
Shortly after, another student comes in‐‐
J. Gordon Whitehead.
He came in and immediately started initiating
a lot of conversation with Houdini.
Sandford: Apparently the conversation turned towards his physical strength
and his ability to withstand a blow to the stomach.
Whitehead said, "Could I test your stomach muscles?"
Some people characterized it as sudden,
that Whitehead suddenly came at him and started punching him.
Sandford: And he hit him two or three times
before one of the other students told him to lay off.
By then, the damage had almost certainly been done.
I don't think he was aware of the severity of it.
Even the night that he was attacked in his dressing room,
he went on and gave a show.
They basically had to force him to go to hospital,
at which point they decided that they needed to operate.
And as soon as they opened him up, the doctors, the surgeon,
realized just how serious the situation was.
Kalush: They didn't have antibiotics like we have now.
Probably they knew that there wasn't much chance.
He basically hung on for‐‐ what was it? Seven or eight days.
He was in his brother Theo's arms,
and he said, "I'm tired of fighting.
I guess this thing is going to get me."
And we would lose Harry Houdini on October 31st, 1926.
Cox: Houdini's death really did shock people.
The Great Houdini, who couldn't be defeated, is suddenly dead.
It was truly shocking.
I think people had a hard time
accepting the fact that the great Houdini,
the guy that defied death all of his life,
was punched in the stomach by a college kid
and it killed him.
It's like, how can that be?
There's gotta be more to it than that.
Kalush: Almost immediately,
there were rumors in the newspapers
and swirling around that Houdini had been murdered.
Cox: And like any time a celebrity dies,
it opens the door to conspiracy theories.
The tabloid press begin
to make these suggestions almost from the beginning.
Kalush: All those threats, it just raises the question
as to were there plots against him?
Cox: What exactly happened?
How could Houdini be brought down so quickly?
Was there more to the story?
Fishburne: Halloween, 1926.
Houdini the superman is dead.
Immediately, rumors begin to swirl.
Had Houdini been murdered?
The first group that fall under suspicion are the spiritualists.
After their relentless campaign of death threats,
they are impossible to ignore.
Jillette: True believers, once you get someone
who's talking about God and the great beyond,
that's an end that justifies any means.
And I also know the spiritualists are, um, terrible,
terrible, awful criminals,
and are not beyond poisoning.
Cox: The great beneficiaries of Houdini's death
were spiritualists and people like Doyle and Crandon.
They'd become the leading lights in the spiritualist movement.
With Houdini out of the way, the world was their oyster.
Cuiffo: We know that the spiritualists
were definitely celebrating this moment.
Crandon was kind of gloating to Doyle
that Houdini was dead.
Kalush: The newspapers began reporting
that Doyle had been predicting Houdini's death.
Cuiffo: So it does seem plausible that perhaps
in this vast decentralized network
of fanatical spiritualists that somebody could take that
in very real way and act on it.
Kalush: So I think Houdini expected something to happen.
He took to carrying a gun.
Fishburne: People ask, "Was J. Gordon Whitehead part of a plot to kill Houdini?
People were trying to tie Whitehead to spiritualist movement
and say that he knew Crandon
and maybe they had colluded in some way
in order to murder Houdini.
Kalush: And it also seems quite evident
that Houdini was aware of who Whitehead was
before this happened in his dressing room.
It wasn't just a stranger who wandered in.
He was returning a book.
He also claimed in his deposition
that he was in touch with Houdini two more times
before Houdini left Montreal.
So, I think it's likely that Whitehead
was connected in some way to spiritualists.
Fishburne: Eyewitness testimonial, rarely seen in public since,
claims Whitehead asked Houdini a series of questions
before he punched him in the stomach.
Kalush: One of the tactics of the spiritualists at that time
were to try to turn the conversation to the point
where they said that Jesus and the apostles were actually mediums.
Man: And at one point, Whitehead does ask Houdini,
you know, how do you explain the miracles in the Bible?
Are those frauds?
Kalush: Houdini then said,
"Well, if I had lived back in those times,
what would they have thought of me?"
And this sort of set off Whitehead,
and Whitehead came forward
and punched Houdini in the abdomen.
And the stories have been on both sides,
but two of the witnesses say
that Houdini did not invite it or encourage it.
Were spiritualists bad enough to commit murder?
Yes.
Did people believe in spiritualism enough
that they would kill for that?
Yes.
Was Houdini kind of a macho‐‐
wanted to show how tough he was?
Yes.
Can a university student punch wicked hard?
Yes.
Culliton: There's all kinds of ways to murder somebody.
You can shoot 'em, stab 'em, poison 'em,
push 'em out a window.
But who has ever murdered somebody
by punching them in the stomach?
It doesn't really make sense,
even by the wildest stretch of the imagination.
I don't think Houdini in his final hours
was ever under the impression that it had been anything
but a terrible accident or a misunderstanding.
Fishburne: In fact, on his deathbed,
Houdini himself ruled it out.
He stated to his nurse Sophia Rosenblatt that,
"The poor boy didn't mean it."
Sophie Rosenblatt's deposition says that,
you know, in a moment of lucidity,
Houdini says very clearly that if the blows were the cause of it,
that Whitehead didn't‐‐ didn't know what he was doing.
Houdini felt it was an accident.
And to hear him say "that poor boy"
is‐‐ is‐‐ is moving.
Fishburne: The official cause of death was peritonitis.
His appendix, hugely inflamed,
hadn't been operated on in time and had ruptured.
Goodwin: The truth is, how he died was very simple.
And I think it was very difficult for the public
and the media to accept it,
and they wanted to make something more of it.
So it's almost a sort of ridiculous end
to this fantastic, magnificent life.
And it's hard to accept,
but I believe the facts do support that.
Fishburne: So should responsibility for the death lie with Houdini himself,
allowing himself to be punched when he knew his body was failing him?
It seems the desire to cheat death at every turn
finally got the better of him.
On November 2nd, 1926,
people wept openly as Houdini's body was returned
to his adopted home city of New York.
Cox: People turned out.
They wanted to get one last look
at Houdini, you know,
in the box that he'll never escape.
Kalush: It's almost like a state funeral.
And it speaks to, A, not just how famous he is,
but also how well‐loved he was.
Terbosic: In Harry Houdini's obituary,
he was referred to as a scientist.
And I'm sure as a young Harry Houdini
who had dropped out of school,
that probably brought a smile to his face.
Fishburne: So having delved into the secrets
hidden in Houdini's lost diaries,
just who was the man behind the mask?
Kalush: I think Houdini was the American dream.
He came from almost nothing.
And through just grit,
and hard work and ingenuity and imagination,
he did everything in his life he wanted to do.
Very few entertainers or performers can become synonymous with their art.
His legacy as a performer will live on forever.
Jillette: And it's just so odd
that the superstar of the 20th century
ended up being a magician.
And all we can do is thank God he wasn't a ventriloquist.
Fishburne: Houdini's diaries are a chance to probe the mind
and personality of the first global celebrity.
While he was a complex and uniquely driven man,
Houdini succeeded because
in the turmoil and change of the 20th century,
he gave back to the world a sense of wonder and magic.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."