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Tonight on History's Greatest Mysteries.

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He was the greatest escape artist of all time.

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And his name was the embodiment of mystery and wonder.

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I'm Lawrence Fishburne.

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Even though Harry Houdini has been dead for nearly a century,

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key questions remain about his life.

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On tonight's mystery, Houdini's diaries,

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kept under lock and key in New York City,

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may answer some of those questions.

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It is the first time they have been made public.

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For the first time we're getting to see Houdini in his own words,

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the most unfiltered version of the man.

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What do the diaries reveal about the real Harry Houdini?

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His background and how he became the world's greatest showman.

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Houdini wanted to be bigger than life,

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and he would do anything towards that end.

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What was the secret of his mass appeal?

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Houdini was certainly the person who made the idea of an escape artist

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mean something to the world.

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I defy the jails of the world to hold me.

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That is a better slogan than all you need is love.

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How much did he risk to stay famous?

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Up until this point, the stakes were if Houdini fails, it's humiliation.

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Now the stakes are life and death.

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And did his all-out war against the people who claimed to speak to the dead get him killed?

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Were spiritualists bad enough to commit murder?

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Yes.

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Can a university student punch wicked hard?

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Yes.

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The legacy in life of a legend who cheated death until it found him.

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The most famous magician today is Harry Houdini.

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The first magic name people can name?

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Harry Houdini.

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Kids on the street know his name when they don't know.

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Penn and Teller.

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In any famous person's life, there are at least three different stories for any one event.

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Except in Houdini's life, there are ten stories to any one event.

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Harry Houdini kept diaries throughout his life.

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While some have been released, thousands of pages, some handwritten, some typed, have remained a mystery hidden from public view.

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A handful of trusted magicians and Houdini scholars have been allowed to read them.

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At last, the custodian of the diaries, magic historian Bill Kaluush, has agreed to make them available.

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The diaries now being made available through this documentary is a really big thing.

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And 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 can ever have in any other way.

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The diaries have been organized to help decipher the key chapters in Houdini's life where secrets and questions remain.

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Starting at the beginning.

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Harry Houdini was a personality invented by a very ambitious young man named Eric Weiss.

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When he was 30 years old, Houdini lies about where he was born in his own diary.

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What's the first mystery of Houdini? And it starts with his birth.

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Houdini was born in Budapest, Hungary on March 24, 1874.

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Yet his diary says, Harry Houdini born April 6, Appleton, Wisconsin.

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Houdini absolutely knew he was born in Budapest, March 24, 1874.

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He knew he was four years old when he came to the U.S.

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So the question is why?

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So Houdini was born Eric Weiss and no one exactly knows why the family would move to Appleton.

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The legend that Houdini apparently would always tell was that his father got in a duel with some member of the Hungarian royal family

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and ended up killing him and had to flee to America.

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What is known for sure is that Eric's father has a respectable position waiting for him in Appleton.

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They had a number of Jewish families so they needed Rabbi and that's what his father, Rabbi Weiss, did.

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He came of consciousness in this idyllic small town where his father is an honored man.

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There's beautiful fields, there's creeks to swim in.

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It is the American idyll and that's the world Eric Weiss comes to know.

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Though life is initially good for the Weiss family, circumstances soon take a turn for the worse.

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When Eric was not very old, they fired his father as the Rabbi and they left Appleton for Milwaukee and things took a bad turn.

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They lived in poverty at that point. They lived very poorly and it was a time that he wouldn't even recount.

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He wouldn't talk about his time in Milwaukee because it was so painful.

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Schooling falls out of the picture and he goes right to work. He understands very early, I've got to help.

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You know, I've got to help support this family.

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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.

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Work became all important and he was a workaholic his whole life.

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He probably gave him that drive, that grit and he was determined to make himself into something.

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But that lack of education was going to go on to haunt him.

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To help his son escape the harsh realities of the poverty they were living in now, Mayor Weiss took his son to see a magic show.

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There was a particular trick that he remembered throughout the rest of his life in fact.

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He saw Dr. Lin, who was a famous magician and he did an effect called palaginasia where it appeared as though he took a knife and cut the limbs off a living person and then restored them.

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To a young, clearly imaginative young boy, seeing somebody perform this incredibly dark and macabre act, it would have just been captivating.

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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.

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In one of the newly released diary entries, Houdini recounts the gruesome act.

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I saw Dr. Lin do it 30 years ago when I was 10 years of age in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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He pretended to use chloroform and at the time I really believed that the man's arm, leg and head were cut off.

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I think Dr. Lin's palaginasia might have been quite formative for Houdini.

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My own experience is when I was a kid I watched the Twilight Zone in Alfred Hitchcock and ever since I've wanted to do things that have to do with life and death and creepy stuff.

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So I wouldn't be surprised if Houdini said, hmm, I want to do that.

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After Milwaukee Mayor Vise 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 Eric.

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The young Houdini's life in New York was what really opened up the possibilities to him.

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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.

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He becomes very, very interested in athletics. That really is a natural for him, for his competitive nature, for his love of physical fitness.

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He becomes a boxer, he becomes a champion runner.

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His drive was more like an athlete's drive than an entertainer's and it really starts here in New York.

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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.

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I think that photograph of Houdini with all the medals is very telling of his earnest personality and desire for acceptance and success

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and showing people that he was not just another one of these nameless, faceless immigrants running around the city.

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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.

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So not only did he have the medals that he'd earned and there were quite a few of those, he'd added a couple. He was a natural exaggerator.

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Clearly, Houdini wanted to be bigger than life and he would do anything towards that end.

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In 1889, a chance discovery changes everything.

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So the young Eric in New York City stumbled across a book by Robert Houdin, the memoirs of Robert Houdin, and that seems to be a real turning point for him.

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It was about a fully rounded character and that's what I think inspired him to create his own.

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Robert Houdin is known as the father of modern magic.

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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.

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And people believed that Robert Houdin said that a magician is an actor playing the part of someone with real power.

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Houdini took this on board, I think, and realized that he had to inhabit the character 100% and to be the character he created.

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Now that he'd got the blueprint for the persona, what he needed was a name for it.

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Eric Weiss gets a job at H Richter's and Son's, Tie Factory.

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While he's working there, he meets a friend, Jacob Hyman.

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And if 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.

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And there it was, there it was, the name that you can never forget.

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One of the reasons people say his name so often is because it comes out so well.

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Houdini, Houdini.

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Eric Weiss made his own destiny in becoming Houdini and that was kind of the first stage in his transformation.

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Eric Weiss was the boy who worked in a tie shop and Houdini was the result of his decision that he was going to express himself.

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He wasn't Eric Weiss, he was Houdini.

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Eric Weiss now has a blueprint to change his life.

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He decides to commit himself to the character of Houdini completely, even if that means leaving his true past and his real birthplace behind.

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He always claimed that he was an American because I think he felt like he was a product of this new America.

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In his own words he says, Robert Houdin became my hero and guide.

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This book became my gospel. It gave him a path to fame and fortune and respectability through magic.

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For a child like Houdini who was extremely intelligent, who felt hemmed in if you like by his at a lack of education, there suddenly was his road of escape.

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By 1891 Eric Weiss has changed his name to Harry Houdini and is mapping out a route to the big time.

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Houdini decides to quit his very good job at the tie factory and go after the dream of becoming a magician.

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And actually Jacob Heyman joins him and they form a partnership, the Brothers Houdini.

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Where they could get work at that time were dye museums.

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The dye museums were entry level show business.

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You paid your dime and you went in and there might be Cardo the magician doing his card manipulations on one platform.

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On the next platform there might be a performer who was eating fire.

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So if the audience lost interest in you they would just drift over to the fire eater or the comedians.

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You get to do the same thing over and over and over again, sometimes 15, 20 times a day.

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If you swallowed your needles and regurgitated them threaded 15 times a day for two years you're gonna get good at it.

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While honing his skills on the Dye Museum Circuit, Houdini gets terrible news.

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So Houdini was performing in New York in 1892 when somebody ran up and said, hey magician your father's dying.

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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.

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Eric Weiss 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.

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That drove him his entire life.

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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.

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He's trying to prove to himself that he's honoring his commitment to his past father.

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But at this point in his life, Houdini doesn't have the skills to become a successful performer.

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Houdini was like any other hack magician really, you know, he was playing in dime museums, you know, trying to scrape a living.

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He's got no prospects and that he's going to go potentially broke. He goes back and lives with his mother on the Upper East Side in New York City.

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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.

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By 1898, the 24 year old Houdini, now married to fellow performer, Bess Rohnner, is going nowhere.

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Yet within a year, he'll be the most famous magician who's ever lived. But how?

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Around 1899, Houdini has developed, 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.

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It was kind of Houdini's first step into the world of escapology. The problem is, not many people own handcuffs.

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Then, very quick on his feet, he realized, well, who has handcuffs? And he goes, he starts going to the police departments and he escapes from them and this is a great calling card for the show.

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I defy the jails of the world to hold me. It is a literal celebration of freedom from all these people who were, you know, first generation Americans.

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As he arrives to perform in Chicago in 1899, he has an idea that will change his fortunes forever.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Just a few months later, Houdini met a man who would launch him into the big time.

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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.

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His name was Martin Beck. Beck was a vaudeville impresario and he ran the Orpheum circuit.

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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.

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And so Beck said, look, Houdini, I can put you into the Orpheum theater chain, but forget about the magic, lose the magic.

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Just concentrate on escape. Be the guy who can escape from anything.

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The advice that Beck gave Houdini in that moment was the thing that changed the course of history.

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By the summer of 1899, Houdini had been booked to play a chain of prestigious theaters all across the West Coast of America.

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And every time he arrived somewhere new, Houdini makes a beeline for the police station.

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Each time he would arrive in a new city, he would go to the police department and challenge them.

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And of course he made sure the newspaper reporter was with him.

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It was a great system to be able to walk into a police department and walk out with a front page newspaper story.

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Houdini was really, really good at getting people to tell stories about him.

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He was probably the first person to really use the press in a way that would be recognized today.

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Manipulating the press corresponded with his rise as a performer.

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They go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.

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By 1900, 26-year-old Houdini, the man who could escape from anything, is a huge draw.

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And he's got a new strategy for getting attention. The legendary Houdini Challenges.

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The challenges are critical to understanding Houdini.

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You can't understand Houdini and his fame, why he's enduring in our culture.

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You can't understand any of those things if you don't understand the challenges.

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In every town where he plays, Houdini lets himself be put to the test in some new way.

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In one case it was a giant paper bag, which doesn't sound difficult to get out of, but you had to do it without tearing the bag.

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He would escape from inside a giant American football, lots of safes as well.

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I believe there was one escape that he did from a large dead whale.

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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.

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And they're going to pick a side, you know, who's going to win, who do you want to win.

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And it was really smart. Not only the things that he was doing were unique and so would get new press attention,

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but at the same time was our town going to be the town that beat Houdini.

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There's only one problem.

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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.

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For years people have wondered how these challenges came about. A lost diary entry provides the answer.

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Writing about a show in England Houdini says in a kind of gibberish, Friday challenge, box built on stage, had three men of Burroughs sawmill, same firm as last time, gave the foreman Coburn, pray pound.

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The other two men received, be quick.

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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.

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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'd paid.

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Challenges were really delivered to Houdini's door. He most often arranged the challenge and then dramatized it.

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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.

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When Houdini gets to Russia, he gets the idea to challenge the police to escape from the Siberian transport cell, which is the box car that you get thrown in and taken to Siberia.

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So it has this lure around it as the ultimate, ultimate you're done for.

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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.

191
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And they lock him in and he escapes. The news of this just went across the country as fast as it could.

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It immediately transported him to the status of iconic folk hero legend.

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The themes of his act really were relatable no matter where you were in the world. You know, people in Russia and people in the UK and people in America, they all wanted to see somebody get one over on authority.

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They wanted to see the underdogs succeed and those are universal themes.

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He's now arguably the most famous man in Russia. He's the most famous person in Germany, London and America.

196
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He's dotting his way to becoming the most famous performer in the world.

197
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In his diary, Houdini revels in how he's treated by fans and possibly embellishes the details.

198
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He writes, was cheered over and over again as they sang, and will you know come back again.

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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.

200
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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.

201
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It's just too much for me to buy into.

202
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I think when Houdini wrote in his diary, it was a part of an ongoing fantasy life that he had and a part of that fantasy was an extreme exaggeration of what went on.

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It was how Houdini would wanted reality to be. So he wrote it down because if it was in his diary, maybe it happened, maybe in his imagination.

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He was carried shoulder high around the town.

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I have to think that he was writing these with the idea that in the future other people are going to be reading this.

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And he wanted to make sure that they knew how great he was. For Houdini, it's all about legacy.

207
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By 1905, the transformation is complete. All traces of Eric Weiss have been destroyed.

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The persona of Houdini is a fresh start. A man without a past. He could build a legend around.

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When you get to the point where Nier is famous as Houdini and you have a narrative, it was really important for him that it was upheld.

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He knew the diaries were going to be found. If you know your narrative will be told one day why not try to control it while you're alive.

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He wanted to be the all-American boy. That whole self-liberation thing just maps right on to the way America saw itself.

212
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Eric Weiss might have been born in Budapest, but was it Houdini born in Appleton, Wisconsin?

213
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The 31-year-old Houdini returns to America to reclaim his position as the country's greatest showman.

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And his diaries reveal he is prepared to stop at nothing to keep his seat on the throne.

215
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By about 1905, Houdini was hugely famous in Europe, but it came at the cost of his fame in America.

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The problem was, in the void of him being gone, what happens? A lot of copycats started to spring up.

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A lot of guys that were trying to do his act, and not even guys that were copying his name.

218
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Everybody was the new Houdini, Budini, Moudini, all of the different iterations of him.

219
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He showed up at people's performances and challenged them.

220
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Oh, really cleverly orchestrated to make great little stories.

221
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But I would not have argued with Houdini over a parking spot. He was a scrappy little mother.

222
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In Houdini's lost diaries for the first time, we find evidence of a secret plan to destroy a fellow performer with calculated precision.

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I am going to make a rival act for Minerva, so have advertised for good swimmer females.

224
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Rehearsing Wanda Tim in Rose's office for the new act, she'll call her Oceana.

225
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Minerva was a female escape arts.

226
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Houdini wanted the whole world to believe that he used his superhuman strength and ability and cunning to affect all of his escapes.

227
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He was the symbol of indestructible virility.

228
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So if some small woman could do his act, that completely undermined this whole aspect of his character.

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He had to just destroy her career.

230
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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.

231
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Houdini was a battler. He was a fighter. And that is a kind of person I don't understand.

232
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My heart is not with him on the jealousy and on the insecurity.

233
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That's just a part of him that is sad and I don't relate to.

234
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The only reason you could think that he feels threatened by these guys is his ego.

235
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It wasn't enough for Houdini to succeed. Everybody else had to fail.

236
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Houdini's vendetta doesn't stop with his peers.

237
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In 1908, he turns on the very man who gave him the blueprint for his persona, Robert Houdin.

238
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There was a point in his career where he was wealthy, he was famous all over the world.

239
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So he achieved that goal. So what's next?

240
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And I think for Houdini, something that he longed to be was recognized as a great scholar and a great writer.

241
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He had a lifelong desire, almost a sort of pathological one, to be accepted on an intellectual level as a serious figure.

242
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As someone who was not just physically agile and a clever stage man, but also who was worth listening to.

243
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And this probably harks back to his childhood when he had to give up his education.

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His father had been an academic and it really riled him that he didn't have that respect.

245
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But you can't go back and redo all those years of schooling that he missed.

246
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So he thought the way to do this is to write this very scholarly history of magic.

247
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I think he thought that will be the crowning piece of my career.

248
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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,

249
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which would be the birthplace of Robert Houdin, his namesake, and attempt to see his family.

250
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And he thinks he is going to be welcomed with open arms and they go, Houdini's here? So what? What are we supposed to do?

251
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And they didn't even want to talk to him.

252
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His daughter gave him the big brush off. She really wasn't interested.

253
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That was the one thing he couldn't take. He couldn't bear being dismissed. So he got his own back.

254
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The Houdini approach is to turn everything into a wrestling match. Everything is a takedown. Everything is a challenge.

255
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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?

256
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That's a very Houdini thing to do.

257
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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 that were created by others and stolen by Robert Houdin.

258
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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 a.m. to 12 midnight.

259
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In 1908, Houdini releases his book, The Unmasking of Robert Houdin, but his takedown bad fires.

260
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Not only was the book saying Robert 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.

261
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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.

262
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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.

263
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To further compound his woes about the reaction to his, a masking of Robert Houdin, his ticket sales had started to slow a bit as well.

264
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Harry's not playing those big, big theaters as he was used to. And it might have been because people were starting to kind of be tired from his handcuff act.

265
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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 the theater as I was ashamed to let her see the class of show I was with.

266
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In another, he writes, I'm not featured is this week the first step toward oblivion.

267
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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.

268
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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.

269
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1907, the appeal of Harry Houdini is faltering.

270
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Audiences are losing interest, so he needs to find a way to win them back. The option he picks is the most dangerous imaginable.

271
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The avenue that Houdini chose in order to broaden the scope of his appeal was jeopardy, was death.

272
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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.

273
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Smart magicians make life and death a central part of magic. Dumb magicians don't.

274
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If all you're doing is producing little bouquets and bunnies, you probably won't find your way deeply into the heart of the public.

275
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His bridge jumps were really the first introduction of danger and jeopardy into the Houdini canon of performance.

276
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He would go to a bridge, highly publicized, surrounded by thousands of people that were coming to sea.

277
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And he would be restrained with handcuffs. And then he would jump into the river below.

278
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There is 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.

279
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The thrill of watching somebody live or pass. I mean, that's a great story to have.

280
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What could be a more perfect dramatic gesture than leaping off a bridge in danger of drowning because you're manacled,

281
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pausing, and then emerging triumphant at the surface? It's a perfect symbol of resurrection.

282
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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 the most.

283
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Bridge jump and mother alone. I wanted to have her with me, it being my first big jump manacled. Ma saw me jump.

284
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The sentence that haunts me most about Houdini and his mother is when he was doing bridge jumps.

285
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And the entry he makes is ma saw me jump. And I think about that a lot.

286
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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.

287
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Harry's mother, Cecilia, was everything to Harry. I mean, he made an oath with his dad that he would forever look after his mother.

288
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And this moment in time was to show his mom that he had done well for himself and lived up to what he said he was going to.

289
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He certainly idolized her. She was a very, very formidable figure that he was spending his entire life trying to impress.

290
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However, in the same entry, Houdini writes, I thought something might happen. He knew that these jumps could easily prove fatal.

291
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The bridge jumps are, without doubt, the most dangerous thing that he ever performed.

292
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If you hit the water wrong from 30 feet, then you could really, really hurt yourself or even die.

293
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Obviously, it's very difficult to swim when you're restrained. There could be a current.

294
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There could be something underneath the surface of the water that he's going to hit and spike himself on.

295
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A lost diary entry Houdini made in 1910 shows just how dangerous these jumps actually were.

296
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Dive 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.

297
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It was really interesting about the diary entry. You can tell that that was something that had scared him.

298
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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.

299
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Up until this point, the Hancock Act, the stakes were if Houdini fails, you know, it's humiliation, but now the stakes are life and death.

300
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He's pushing the boundaries of what a human body can do, so that naturally lifted his persona to another level.

301
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Houdini was transforming himself into a superhero, a Superman.

302
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But by 1909, he was kind of being eclipsed by a new type of daredevil.

303
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It was the early days of aviation and there was an obsession with it pretty much worldwide.

304
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Lots of people doing it and stealing the headlines, but it was still very, very dangerous at that point.

305
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Flight had become a topical thing and it was quite magical. I mean, the people want to fly.

306
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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.

307
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So people are rooting for pilots.

308
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And I'm sure that Houdini thought, hey, I should be getting all that acclaimed. Why aren't you paying attention to me?

309
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So of course, what does he do? He buys an airplane and becomes a pilot.

310
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The very first pilots, these were real daredevils. I mean, these guys were dropping like flies.

311
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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.

312
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And when they died, he marked dead.

313
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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.

314
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And if he could succeed, he has now beaten all of these people who died trying.

315
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His first flight was a disaster. You know, he crashed quite badly.

316
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Although it's, I think he's quite telling that in the diary entry for that.

317
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He talks about the cost of the crash rather than the risk to his life.

318
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Smashed machine broke propeller all to hell, have now paid 12,000 marks on machine biplane.

319
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Houdini's entire life was built around his being able to do any exploit better than anyone else.

320
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So how could he possibly allow himself not to be the first person to break a flying record?

321
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So it's like Houdini had to find a country where no one had flown an airplane yet.

322
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It didn't matter which one it was, but Australia is the one that was available.

323
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So off he went.

324
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In January 1910, Houdini, his wife, and his precious French biplane board a steamer and sail to Melbourne, Australia.

325
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The shock when Houdini got there was that various people are also trying for this prize to be the first, you know.

326
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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.

327
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And now he was on the verge of losing.

328
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From Houdini's diary, we learned how almost immediately after arriving, his competitor, Ralph Banks, experiences a terrifying crash.

329
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He writes, came down after a terrible dive head first.

330
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Banks escaped with a blackened eye, torn lips, and a scratched limb. It was a miraculous escape.

331
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What I take from that diary entry is that Houdini saw this as a great opportunity.

332
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The door was cracked open and he still had the opportunity to be first.

333
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The only thing that would have made him happier is if Ralph Banks had crashed and killed himself.

334
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Two weeks later, Houdini manages to beat Banks to the prize. His diary records his delight.

335
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First wheel flight in Australia. I went up three times, never in any fear and never in any danger.

336
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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 plane.

337
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He had to figure out other ways to keep his name in the headlines.

338
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And of course, when you're doing things that are death-defying, you have to keep upping the ante.

339
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And that's a slippery slope to be trapped on.

340
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In 1916, determined to cement his position in the United States, he was the first to fly in that country.

341
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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.

342
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A highly potent combination of danger, jeopardy and drama that is still today perhaps the most iconic image in magic history.

343
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The aerial straightjacket escape.

344
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Houdini figured out how to take what could be a crappy little trick, which is getting out of a straightjacket.

345
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And figured out how to make that into a gigantic outdoor spectacle.

346
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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.

347
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It's like the Mona Lisa. It's one of a kind.

348
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I have a photograph of Houdini escaping from a straightjacket upside down.

349
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The traffic is completely stopped. There's no room for a car to move, but there is one car in place.

350
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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.

351
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There is a look in that of pure love and pure identification.

352
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The kind of thing that we often see nowadays with great football players.

353
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He was able to pull that out of people doing what was essentially a magic act. That's a miracle.

354
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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.

355
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Houdini had found a niche in adding danger into his performances.

356
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There were thousands of people there to see him risk his life.

357
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And I guarantee that the thought process from that moment was, OK, this is great, but how do I bring this on stage?

358
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How can I bring all of the elements that I get from the bridge jump into my show?

359
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And so that was his challenge.

360
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A lot of Houdini's escapes and stunts revolved around the theme of water.

361
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He almost had an obsession with water, you know, having been a championship swimmer when he was younger.

362
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There was the manical bridge jumps into the river.

363
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Then he started doing it on stage, padlocked inside a milk churn full of water.

364
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But the ultimate one was the Chinese water torture cell.

365
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And the great thing about this was the visual, you know, for one it made a perfect poster.

366
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It's a nightmare image. It's a great, great, great nightmare image.

367
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If I walked by a theater and saw a poster with that image, I would buy a ticket.

368
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It really was like a human sacrifice for the gods.

369
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It looked like a torture device, some crazy despots idea of what to do with Christians, you know,

370
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instead of feeding them the lions, drop them in this tank.

371
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Doing the water torture cell escape is extremely dangerous.

372
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It's essentially a glass coffin on stage.

373
00:44:54,000 --> 00:45:00,000
He would have an apparatus of shackles that would come to attach around his ankles.

374
00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:06,000
They could slowly, on his command, lower him down into the icy water.

375
00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:10,000
And the minute they start dipping you down into that water, you know,

376
00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:14,000
your whole body is now flooding with endorphins, you know.

377
00:45:14,000 --> 00:45:16,000
The adrenaline is rushing.

378
00:45:16,000 --> 00:45:20,000
And at the same time, you want to remain calm because you're still controlling your breathing.

379
00:45:20,000 --> 00:45:24,000
So you don't want the moment to get the best of you.

380
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:31,000
So already in your mind as an audience member, you're seeing this incredible dramatic moment

381
00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:34,000
when Houdini's in there struggling and drowning.

382
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:39,000
The genius bit of showmanship was asking the audience to hold their breath with him, you know.

383
00:45:39,000 --> 00:45:41,000
So you kind of invested emotionally.

384
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:47,000
Franz Kukall was his main assistant at the time, and he would stand clutching an axe,

385
00:45:47,000 --> 00:45:54,000
increasingly agitated as a giant stopwatch ticked down the seconds that Houdini was underwater.

386
00:45:54,000 --> 00:45:57,000
And all over the audience, you could hear people going,

387
00:45:59,000 --> 00:46:00,000
as they ran out of air.

388
00:46:00,000 --> 00:46:03,000
Three minutes, four minutes, you know, this is impossible.

389
00:46:03,000 --> 00:46:06,000
He's some kind of, you know, superhuman.

390
00:46:06,000 --> 00:46:11,000
And some guy comes in with an axe and breaks it, and the glass explodes, and the water explodes.

391
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:14,000
All of this is happening, never happened, mind you.

392
00:46:14,000 --> 00:46:17,000
But this has now happened in your head.

393
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:21,000
And just at the point where everybody thought, well, that must be it.

394
00:46:21,000 --> 00:46:24,000
He's a goner. He's got to be dead in there.

395
00:46:24,000 --> 00:46:29,000
Houdini would whip out the curtain, completely drenched, out of breath, but succeeded.

396
00:46:29,000 --> 00:46:32,000
And the crowd went wild.

397
00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:44,000
Out of Houdini's whole repertoire, the kind of two iconic images really are the suspended straight jacket escape,

398
00:46:44,000 --> 00:46:47,000
and the dangling upside down in the water torch itself, you know.

399
00:46:47,000 --> 00:46:50,000
Those two images, oddly enough, would secure his legacy.

400
00:46:52,000 --> 00:46:55,000
So he's escaped from everything you can imagine escaping from.

401
00:46:55,000 --> 00:46:58,000
And there's only one thing that you can't escape from.

402
00:46:59,000 --> 00:47:04,000
His diaries offer evidence that death is already on Houdini's mind.

403
00:47:04,000 --> 00:47:11,000
He writes, Ma, Vess, and I go to the photographer's gulakirst and have our photos taken.

404
00:47:11,000 --> 00:47:15,000
I hope not the last time together. Who knows.

405
00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:18,000
The old must die, and the young can.

406
00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:27,000
That diary entry is very interesting, in one, in the fact that it's Houdini really,

407
00:47:27,000 --> 00:47:35,000
expressing a lot of emotion, which again, up to that point, his writings are very practical and scientific in a way,

408
00:47:35,000 --> 00:47:40,000
and perhaps it's part of his process of his awareness of life moving on,

409
00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:46,000
and he's coming to a new phase in his life, and knows that his mother is going to die.

410
00:47:46,000 --> 00:47:51,000
If you do think of these things, what would I do without this person?

411
00:47:51,000 --> 00:47:56,000
And I think Houdini thought of that quite often, because she was a very central point to the family.

412
00:47:56,000 --> 00:48:03,000
After Houdini's father died, he became the head of the house, and with this oath to take care of his mother,

413
00:48:03,000 --> 00:48:09,000
he's starting to see her getting frailer, and we could see it in photographs of her at that time.

414
00:48:10,000 --> 00:48:15,000
In August 1913, Houdini boards a ship for Denmark.

415
00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:22,000
The gangplank was pulled away, and we started in to throw those long paper-colored strips overboard to the folks onto the pier.

416
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:28,000
Ma caught a few of them that I threw adroitly to her, and eventually we steamed away,

417
00:48:28,000 --> 00:48:33,000
and that was the last sight I saw of my darling mother alive.

418
00:48:34,000 --> 00:48:40,000
His mother had a stroke while he was on the ship, and his brother sent telegrams,

419
00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:46,000
and when he finally opened the telegram and read that his mother had died, he fainted.

420
00:48:52,000 --> 00:48:58,000
He canceled a contract, he got right back on the ship, and went home.

421
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:05,000
The story about sitting by his mother's bedside was legendary.

422
00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:15,000
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.

423
00:49:16,000 --> 00:49:20,000
That night, Houdini places a gift by his mother and writes,

424
00:49:20,000 --> 00:49:24,000
she looked so dainty and restful, only a small spot on her cheek,

425
00:49:24,000 --> 00:49:29,000
and the face which haunted me with love all of my life is still and quiet,

426
00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:34,000
and when she does not answer me, I know that God has taken her to his bosom

427
00:49:34,000 --> 00:49:38,000
and given her the peace which she denied herself on this earth.

428
00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:43,000
Some of the pros in that diary entry about, you know,

429
00:49:43,000 --> 00:49:47,000
I'm sure she's peaceful in heaven and all of that sort of stuff,

430
00:49:47,000 --> 00:49:53,000
is less powerful to me than the fact that he brought home a pair of slippers

431
00:49:53,000 --> 00:50:00,000
that she had requested before he left so that he could put those slippers in the coffin with her.

432
00:50:02,000 --> 00:50:04,000
It's very touching, it's very touching.

433
00:50:05,000 --> 00:50:11,000
Once his mother has died, he really starts to question his place in the world.

434
00:50:12,000 --> 00:50:17,000
That anchor that drove him for so many years to provide for her and achieve success

435
00:50:17,000 --> 00:50:23,000
and fulfill the oath of his father was now gone, in a sense he had fulfilled it,

436
00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:27,000
but now here he is facing the question, what's next?

437
00:50:28,000 --> 00:50:34,000
As he turns 50, his life is at a turning point, his beloved mother is gone,

438
00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:39,000
and his diaries reveal his body is beginning to fail too.

439
00:50:39,000 --> 00:50:43,000
The pursuit of immortality is taking its toll.

440
00:50:43,000 --> 00:50:50,000
He writes, Dr. Parsons examines my body and ankle, claims I am in danger of death.

441
00:50:53,000 --> 00:50:56,000
His body's not holding out, it's got a lot of injuries,

442
00:50:56,000 --> 00:51:00,000
and his escape career kind of feels as though it's behind him now pretty much.

443
00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:04,000
So he's got to find something new, he's not a guy to just lie down and take it, you know?

444
00:51:04,000 --> 00:51:07,000
So as though he needs a new challenge.

445
00:51:14,000 --> 00:51:20,000
By 1920, 50-year-old Houdini is about to undertake the greatest challenge of his life.

446
00:51:20,000 --> 00:51:24,000
He wages war against the new scourge sweeping the nation.

447
00:51:24,000 --> 00:51:26,000
Spiritualism.

448
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:37,000
It is most basic form spiritualism is a belief that you can communicate with the dead.

449
00:51:37,000 --> 00:51:44,000
Spiritualism has this tremendous resurgence in the 1920s, especially after World War I.

450
00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:49,000
With millions dead, families are desperate to speak to their lost loved ones,

451
00:51:49,000 --> 00:51:52,000
and a new breed of performer emerges.

452
00:51:52,000 --> 00:51:57,000
The medium, a person who claims they can commune with the dead.

453
00:51:57,000 --> 00:52:03,000
Spiritualism at the time is it's a combination of a lot of things.

454
00:52:03,000 --> 00:52:07,000
It is without a doubt a religion.

455
00:52:07,000 --> 00:52:13,000
At the same time it is organized crime, at the same time it is fraud.

456
00:52:13,000 --> 00:52:20,000
But spiritualists were not just wrong, they were really immoral.

457
00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:26,000
Houdini was very conflicted over the question of spiritualism.

458
00:52:26,000 --> 00:52:29,000
He wasn't an out and out skeptic.

459
00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:32,000
He didn't really believe that he could communicate with the dead.

460
00:52:32,000 --> 00:52:36,000
However, he would have given it anything to be able to contact his mother after she died.

461
00:52:36,000 --> 00:52:41,000
But every time he approached someone who claimed to be able to do that,

462
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:46,000
it was always crass rubbish, and he could see how the tricks were done.

463
00:52:46,000 --> 00:52:52,000
Desperate to find out the truth for himself, Houdini embarks on his own investigation.

464
00:52:52,000 --> 00:52:56,000
I think he thought this was a great intellectual pursuit,

465
00:52:56,000 --> 00:53:02,000
but actually Harry Houdini was entering in probably the most dangerous part of his career.

466
00:53:03,000 --> 00:53:09,000
In 1920 he decided to reignite his literary ambitions by writing a book about spiritualism.

467
00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:13,000
And it was possibly an odd choice, bearing in mind how badly he got burnt after writing

468
00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:16,000
the unmasking of Robert Houdini a few years previously.

469
00:53:16,000 --> 00:53:22,000
Houdini reached out to Arthur Conan Doyle, who was kind of spiritualism's leading light,

470
00:53:22,000 --> 00:53:24,000
really, the main advocate, if you will.

471
00:53:24,000 --> 00:53:28,000
He was very famous at the time, being the author of Sherlock Holmes, obviously.

472
00:53:28,000 --> 00:53:33,000
He had a very keen antennae, always for any sort of celebrity endorsement.

473
00:53:33,000 --> 00:53:43,000
Lady Doyle was holding her own séances and ostensibly building her own powers of psychic ability.

474
00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:47,000
She was an automatic writer. That meant she went into sort of a trance.

475
00:53:48,000 --> 00:53:56,000
A pen in her hand would appear to flow across a piece of paper with words that were not hers,

476
00:53:56,000 --> 00:53:59,000
but that she was receiving from an unseen entity.

477
00:54:03,000 --> 00:54:09,000
By way of introduction, Houdini sends Conan Doyle the unmasking of Robert Houdin.

478
00:54:09,000 --> 00:54:12,000
And within a month, Doyle invites him to visit.

479
00:54:15,000 --> 00:54:21,000
Doyle said, listen, I agree with you that there's fraud, but I found the real thing.

480
00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:23,000
Houdini was excited.

481
00:54:23,000 --> 00:54:29,000
Houdini's lost diary suggests genuine anticipation, not skepticism.

482
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:33,000
Met Lady Doyle and the three children had lunch with them.

483
00:54:33,000 --> 00:54:35,000
They believe implicitly in spiritualism.

484
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:39,000
Sir Arthur told me he has spoken six times to his son.

485
00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:42,000
No possible chance for trickery.

486
00:54:42,000 --> 00:54:46,000
There's no doubt that Houdini wanted to believe that you could contact the dead, you know?

487
00:54:46,000 --> 00:54:49,000
He had a vested interest in his mother's case, obviously.

488
00:54:49,000 --> 00:54:55,000
In the summer of 1922, Arthur Conan Doyle invites Houdini and Bess down to Atlantic City

489
00:54:55,000 --> 00:54:58,000
to spend the weekend and have a good time.

490
00:54:59,000 --> 00:55:04,000
And it's during this time that Doyle invites Houdini to a private science.

491
00:55:04,000 --> 00:55:10,000
Doyle said, you know, your mother is trying to get in contact with you through Lady Doyle.

492
00:55:10,000 --> 00:55:17,000
Houdini didn't go there or even consider it that Doyle was going to try to defraud him or fool him.

493
00:55:17,000 --> 00:55:20,000
He was really wondering whether it would work.

494
00:55:20,000 --> 00:55:24,000
He really hoped perhaps his mother might come through.

495
00:55:25,000 --> 00:55:30,000
This extraordinary diary entry details what happens in the room.

496
00:55:30,000 --> 00:55:36,000
Sir Arthur asked Lady Doyle who was standing alongside of me and was it my mother.

497
00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:44,000
Lady Doyle's hand struck the table three times, signifying yes, that my mother was alongside of me.

498
00:55:44,000 --> 00:55:52,000
Shortly thereafter, a pencil in Lady Doyle's hand began to move, apparently, of its own accord.

499
00:55:52,000 --> 00:55:57,000
And he received a several pages long message from his mother.

500
00:56:00,000 --> 00:56:04,000
Houdini transcribes everything Lady Doyle had claimed his mother told her.

501
00:56:04,000 --> 00:56:10,000
He's cautious and he is recording everything that happened in this seance

502
00:56:10,000 --> 00:56:15,000
because this is going to become a point of dispute later on. It's very important.

503
00:56:16,000 --> 00:56:19,000
Part of that message reads,

504
00:56:19,000 --> 00:56:23,000
Never had a mother such a son. Tell him not to grieve.

505
00:56:23,000 --> 00:56:27,000
God bless you too, Sir Arthur, for what you are doing for us.

506
00:56:27,000 --> 00:56:33,000
A happiness awaits him that he has never dreamed of. His eyes will soon be opened.

507
00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:38,000
And Houdini didn't show it at the time, but I think it must have enraged him

508
00:56:38,000 --> 00:56:43,000
because in looking at that, what he can see is I'm being manipulated.

509
00:56:43,000 --> 00:56:45,000
They think I'm stupid.

510
00:56:48,000 --> 00:56:53,000
Now, of course, Houdini's a superstar. Arthur Conan Doyle is a superstar.

511
00:56:53,000 --> 00:56:59,000
They are going to drag him into press interviews like Britney Spears has dragged into interviews.

512
00:56:59,000 --> 00:57:02,000
They're going to say, what did you think?

513
00:57:02,000 --> 00:57:09,000
And at this point, Houdini says, I don't believe it was real. It couldn't have been.

514
00:57:10,000 --> 00:57:14,000
On December 19th, 1922, the gloves come off.

515
00:57:14,000 --> 00:57:19,000
Houdini writes a deposition that declares Lady Doyle to be a fraud.

516
00:57:19,000 --> 00:57:24,000
Of course, Conan Doyle and his wife, Lady Doyle, took great umbrage to this.

517
00:57:24,000 --> 00:57:26,000
They were very upset. They took it personally.

518
00:57:26,000 --> 00:57:31,000
The fact that his wife's mediumship specifically was being questioned

519
00:57:31,000 --> 00:57:35,000
was, I think, really what lit the blue touch paper with Doyle.

520
00:57:35,000 --> 00:57:37,000
He was absolutely incensed.

521
00:57:38,000 --> 00:57:44,000
Writing in the press, Houdini vows that he will seek out and expose all fake mediums.

522
00:57:44,000 --> 00:57:52,000
Houdini felt that absolutely gut level as a moral issue of the greatest power.

523
00:57:52,000 --> 00:57:58,000
Houdini was facing a pretty powerful, essentially, mafia of spiritualists.

524
00:58:00,000 --> 00:58:03,000
People were making money hand over fist.

525
00:58:03,000 --> 00:58:08,000
It was popular with the Upper Crust, so that there was a lot of money to be stolen.

526
00:58:08,000 --> 00:58:11,000
It was a real, real good racket.

527
00:58:11,000 --> 00:58:16,000
These people were really crazy successful and rolling in dough.

528
00:58:16,000 --> 00:58:22,000
There had been mediums in the past who had poisoned people or beaten people or killed people over these very issues.

529
00:58:22,000 --> 00:58:25,000
He went to it with open eyes.

530
00:58:26,000 --> 00:58:29,000
The End

531
00:58:31,000 --> 00:58:36,000
1923, Houdini's war against bogus mediums is about to accelerate.

532
00:58:40,000 --> 00:58:45,000
And to bolster his case, he teams up with Scientific American magazine.

533
00:58:46,000 --> 00:58:54,000
Scientific American offered a $2,500 prize if you could demonstrate something that would be essentially supernatural

534
00:58:54,000 --> 00:58:56,000
in the presence of their committee.

535
00:58:57,000 --> 00:59:04,000
One of the members of the Scientific American committee, Malcolm J. Byrd, proposed a woman named Marjorie,

536
00:59:04,000 --> 00:59:09,000
who was a medium in Boston to be one of the candidates for this prize.

537
00:59:10,000 --> 00:59:19,000
Houdini learned of this. He said, wait a minute, no one's getting any prize until I sit with Marjorie.

538
00:59:19,000 --> 00:59:21,000
Marjorie was a very interesting medium.

539
00:59:21,000 --> 00:59:25,000
She was the third wife of Dr. LaRoy Crandon.

540
00:59:25,000 --> 00:59:34,000
She and her husband started doing these seances in their home, inviting the top tier of Boston society.

541
00:59:34,000 --> 00:59:37,000
And what went on in these seances was wild.

542
00:59:37,000 --> 00:59:42,000
You know, some mediums might levitate a table to show a spirit is present.

543
00:59:42,000 --> 00:59:47,000
It's said that Marjorie's table would actually get up and chase people out of the room.

544
00:59:48,000 --> 00:59:51,000
People said they lost weight because of the psychic energy.

545
00:59:51,000 --> 00:59:56,000
She channeled her dead brother, who told dirty jokes.

546
00:59:56,000 --> 01:00:04,000
Marjorie also did her seances nude except for a silk kimono, and you could search the medium if you so desired.

547
01:00:04,000 --> 01:00:10,000
She was just the most interesting and exciting medium of that time. She was a star.

548
01:00:11,000 --> 01:00:22,000
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 Marjorie wasn't real.

549
01:00:22,000 --> 01:00:29,000
This is the championship bout, the greatest medium against the greatest exposure of fraudulent mediums.

550
01:00:29,000 --> 01:00:31,000
Kind of everything hangs in the balance.

551
01:00:32,000 --> 01:00:39,000
It was probably a pretty tense night, that first seance. They were sort of feeling each other out.

552
01:00:39,000 --> 01:00:43,000
They didn't really know how Houdini was going to respond.

553
01:00:47,000 --> 01:00:50,000
Marjorie channeled her dead brother, Walter, to speak through her.

554
01:00:50,000 --> 01:00:56,000
The spirit said, what would you like me to do with this trumpet?

555
01:00:57,000 --> 01:01:05,000
And Houdini said, well, make it full to the floor. I'm sure enough, a second or two later in the dark room, it clattered to the floor.

556
01:01:08,000 --> 01:01:15,000
It actually hit Houdini on the feet. Marjorie was thrown back in her chair, and that was the main event.

557
01:01:15,000 --> 01:01:22,000
And for Houdini, it was by the book, classic fraud tricks that he's known about for many, many years.

558
01:01:22,000 --> 01:01:30,000
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.

559
01:01:35,000 --> 01:01:43,000
But other heads prevailed and advised him to wait for at least one more seance, before they made any public statement about her.

560
01:01:43,000 --> 01:01:50,000
So for the second seance, he devised this contraption, essentially a box that contained her entire body.

561
01:01:50,000 --> 01:01:59,000
Stopping her from doing anything, proving in theory that it was the spirit Walter that was actually doing the physical manifestations.

562
01:01:59,000 --> 01:02:05,000
There's so many fascinating dynamics in that second seance, because Houdini does get his limitations put in place.

563
01:02:06,000 --> 01:02:12,000
And that succeeds in stopping Marjorie from making any physical manifestations from occurring.

564
01:02:12,000 --> 01:02:16,000
It was an acrimonious seance to put it very mildly.

565
01:02:17,000 --> 01:02:24,000
Walter started singing little songs, calling Houdini epithets, anti-Jewish epithets.

566
01:02:24,000 --> 01:02:31,000
The phrase, you're a son of a Houdini, was the one that sort of take away phrase of the seance.

567
01:02:35,000 --> 01:02:41,000
It must have affected him, it was a direct personal attack on Houdini and also the memory of his mother.

568
01:02:41,000 --> 01:02:48,000
It did make him very angry, and Walter then became threatening and started saying that Houdini wasn't going to live.

569
01:02:48,000 --> 01:02:52,000
That he was going to put a curse on him, that was going to last until the day he died.

570
01:02:54,000 --> 01:03:04,000
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.

571
01:03:05,000 --> 01:03:18,000
In February 1925, the Scientific American rejected Marjorie's claim to their prize.

572
01:03:20,000 --> 01:03:28,000
I think it was a major victory for Houdini, and if this had gone the other way, I think it could have been very damaging to Houdini's reputation.

573
01:03:28,000 --> 01:03:34,000
He had this opportunity now to keep his name in front of the public in a different way altogether.

574
01:03:34,000 --> 01:03:42,000
He discovered that he no longer had to jump off a bridge into a freezing cold river to end up on the front page.

575
01:03:42,000 --> 01:03:50,000
He could expose exactly how these mediums are doing what they're doing, and he still got huge press coverage.

576
01:03:50,000 --> 01:03:59,000
So he went for it, despite the danger and regardless of the threats and the other insults that were thrown his way.

577
01:04:00,000 --> 01:04:08,000
What Houdini I don't think knew he was monkeying with was the level of complete immorality.

578
01:04:08,000 --> 01:04:15,000
Spiritualists at the time were organized as criminals and were also part of organized crime.

579
01:04:15,000 --> 01:04:20,000
It's like you're dealing with, you know, a drug cartel.

580
01:04:20,000 --> 01:04:24,000
Many of these people wanted to see him dead.

581
01:04:32,000 --> 01:04:42,000
1925, Houdini's secret diaries reveal he has a new obsession, one that many believe would lead to his demise.

582
01:04:43,000 --> 01:04:53,000
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.

583
01:04:53,000 --> 01:05:01,000
He would go in and get out reading, he would play a lot, and as soon as they slipped up he would be like, ah, it is I, Houdini, I'm shutting this place down.

584
01:05:03,000 --> 01:05:10,000
After this information was gathered he would use it in his show, and he would publicly expose the most egregious of these mediums.

585
01:05:10,000 --> 01:05:18,000
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.

586
01:05:18,000 --> 01:05:24,000
All of these things made great press at the same time that they were actually making a very important point.

587
01:05:26,000 --> 01:05:30,000
The mediums and their shrinking wallets are livid.

588
01:05:31,000 --> 01:05:37,000
Spiritualists were very fond of making indirect death threats. Houdini doesn't have long to live.

589
01:05:37,000 --> 01:05:47,000
You know, Houdini's not long for this world. So the atmosphere around him included an element of really virulent hostility.

590
01:05:50,000 --> 01:06:01,000
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.

591
01:06:02,000 --> 01:06:11,000
For all of his public bravado, Houdini is becoming greatly unnerved by these constant threats.

592
01:06:14,000 --> 01:06:21,000
Obviously Houdini was fronting it out, but you get the idea that behind the scenes he was actually quite worried. You know, these organizations had real clout behind them.

593
01:06:21,000 --> 01:06:32,000
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.

594
01:06:32,000 --> 01:06:40,000
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.

595
01:06:40,000 --> 01:06:43,000
That's a difficult thing emotionally to deal with.

596
01:06:44,000 --> 01:06:49,000
By the fall of 1926, the feud is taking its toll.

597
01:06:50,000 --> 01:07:00,000
He seemed to be breaking a little bit. He called a longtime friend, Joseph Dunninger, to come over at midnight in a rainy night.

598
01:07:00,000 --> 01:07:07,000
He collects Houdini, they drive off, and suddenly Houdini says, you know, turn around, Joe, go back to the house.

599
01:07:07,000 --> 01:07:14,000
Houdini gets out, stands staring at his house, and then gets back in the car and says, OK, we can go.

600
01:07:14,000 --> 01:07:18,000
And they leave and Dunninger turns and sees that Houdini's crying.

601
01:07:18,000 --> 01:07:25,000
That's when Harry proclaims to Joe, that's the last time I've seen my house. I will never see it again.

602
01:07:25,000 --> 01:07:33,000
Turns out that was the last time he saw his house. But it's fascinating. Did Houdini have a premonition of his own death?

603
01:07:33,000 --> 01:07:43,000
On October the 19th in 1926, Houdini gave a lecture at McGill University in Montreal.

604
01:07:43,000 --> 01:07:48,000
Houdini was giving these spiritualistic lectures. It was like his new act in a way.

605
01:07:48,000 --> 01:07:55,000
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.

606
01:07:57,000 --> 01:08:01,000
He spoke very vitriolically about Marjorie and Lady Doyle.

607
01:08:01,000 --> 01:08:10,000
It raised the hairs in the backs of the reporters next enough to mention it in the papers that it was quite a scathing attack, which inevitably got back to them.

608
01:08:13,000 --> 01:08:20,000
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.

609
01:08:21,000 --> 01:08:30,000
And it was at this casual gathering of students, after this lecture, where he started to boast that he could withstand punches.

610
01:08:32,000 --> 01:08:40,000
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.

611
01:08:42,000 --> 01:08:47,000
And to his credit, Houdini didn't react, didn't went, just stood there and took it.

612
01:08:47,000 --> 01:08:55,000
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.

613
01:08:56,000 --> 01:09:08,000
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.

614
01:09:10,000 --> 01:09:16,000
They sit with Houdini. Houdini is laying down on the couch, relaxing while this student begins to sketch him.

615
01:09:17,000 --> 01:09:22,000
Shortly after, another student comes in, J. Gordon Whitehead.

616
01:09:25,000 --> 01:09:29,000
He came in and immediately started initiating a lot of conversation with Houdini.

617
01:09:30,000 --> 01:09:36,000
Apparently the conversation turned towards his physical strength and his ability to withstand a blow to the stomach.

618
01:09:37,000 --> 01:09:39,000
Whitehead said, could I test your stomach muscles?

619
01:09:40,000 --> 01:09:45,000
Some people characterized it as sudden. That Whitehead suddenly came at him and started punching.

620
01:09:49,000 --> 01:09:54,000
And he hit him two or three times before one of the other students told him to lay off.

621
01:09:55,000 --> 01:09:59,000
By then, the damage had almost certainly been done.

622
01:10:04,000 --> 01:10:12,000
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.

623
01:10:15,000 --> 01:10:21,000
They basically had to force him to go to hospital, at which point they decided that they needed to operate.

624
01:10:21,000 --> 01:10:28,000
And as soon as they opened him up, the doctors, the surgeon, realized just how serious the situation was.

625
01:10:30,000 --> 01:10:36,000
They didn't have antibiotics like we have now. Probably they knew that there wasn't much chance.

626
01:10:37,000 --> 01:10:48,000
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.

627
01:10:48,000 --> 01:10:50,000
I guess this thing is going to get me.

628
01:10:51,000 --> 01:10:54,000
And we would lose Harry Houdini on October 31, 1926.

629
01:11:03,000 --> 01:11:12,000
Houdini's death really did shock people. The great Houdini, who couldn't be defeated, is suddenly dead. It was truly shocking.

630
01:11:12,000 --> 01:11:25,000
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.

631
01:11:26,000 --> 01:11:30,000
It's like, how can that be? There's got to be more to it than that.

632
01:11:32,000 --> 01:11:38,000
Almost immediately there were rumors in the newspapers and swirling around that Houdini had been murdered.

633
01:11:39,000 --> 01:11:49,000
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.

634
01:11:50,000 --> 01:11:56,000
All those threats, it just raises the question as to were there plots against him.

635
01:11:57,000 --> 01:12:01,000
What exactly happened? How could Houdini be brought down so quickly? Was there more to the story?

636
01:12:09,000 --> 01:12:21,000
Halloween 1926, Houdini the Superman is dead. Immediately rumors begin to swirl, had Houdini been murdered.

637
01:12:24,000 --> 01:12:34,000
The first group that fall under suspicion are the spiritualists. After their relentless campaign of death threats, they are impossible to ignore.

638
01:12:35,000 --> 01:12:44,000
True believers, once you get someone who's talking about God and the great beyond, that's an end that justifies any means.

639
01:12:45,000 --> 01:12:52,000
And I also know the spiritualists are terrible, terrible, awful criminals and are not beyond poison.

640
01:12:55,000 --> 01:13:01,000
The great beneficiaries of Houdini's death were spiritualists and people like Doyle and Crandon.

641
01:13:01,000 --> 01:13:08,000
They become the leading lights in the spiritualist movement with Houdini out the way. The world was oyster.

642
01:13:09,000 --> 01:13:18,000
We know that the spiritualists were definitely celebrating this moment. Crandon was kind of gloating to Doyle that Houdini was dead.

643
01:13:20,000 --> 01:13:25,000
The newspapers began reporting that Doyle had been predicting Houdini's death.

644
01:13:26,000 --> 01:13:37,000
So it does seem plausible that perhaps in this vast decentralized network of fanatical spiritualists that somebody could take that in a very real way and act on it.

645
01:13:37,000 --> 01:13:42,000
So I think Houdini expected something to happen. He took to carrying a gun.

646
01:13:44,000 --> 01:13:49,000
People ask, was J. Gordon Whitehead part of a plot to kill Houdini?

647
01:13:50,000 --> 01:14:04,000
People were trying to tie Whitehead to the spiritualist movement and say that he knew Crandon and maybe they had colluded in some way in order to murder Houdini.

648
01:14:05,000 --> 01:14:13,000
And it also seems quite evident that Houdini was aware of who Whitehead was before this happened in his dressing room.

649
01:14:13,000 --> 01:14:25,000
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.

650
01:14:25,000 --> 01:14:33,000
So I think it's likely that Whitehead was connected in some way to spiritualists.

651
01:14:34,000 --> 01:14:45,000
Eyewitness testimonial, rarely seen in public sense, claims Whitehead asked Houdini a series of questions before he punched him in the stomach.

652
01:14:48,000 --> 01:14:59,000
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.

653
01:15:00,000 --> 01:15:08,000
And at one point Whitehead though does ask Houdini, you know, how do you explain the miracles in the Bible? Are those frauds?

654
01:15:11,000 --> 01:15:19,000
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.

655
01:15:20,000 --> 01:15:30,000
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.

656
01:15:32,000 --> 01:15:44,000
Were spiritualists bad enough to commit murder? Yes. Did people believe in spiritualism enough that they would kill for that? Yes.

657
01:15:44,000 --> 01:15:57,000
Was Houdini kind of a macho, kawantashog tuffy was? Yes. Can a university student punch wicked hard? Yes.

658
01:15:58,000 --> 01:16:09,000
There's all kinds of ways to murder somebody. You can shoot them, stab them, poison them, push them out a window. But who has ever murdered somebody by punching them in the stomach?

659
01:16:09,000 --> 01:16:24,000
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 misunderstanding.

660
01:16:26,000 --> 01:16:36,000
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.

661
01:16:37,000 --> 01:16:49,000
Sophie Rosenblatt's deposition says that in a moment of lucidity, Houdini says very clearly that if the blows were the cause of it, the whitehead didn't know what he was doing.

662
01:16:50,000 --> 01:16:56,000
Houdini felt it was an accident, and to hear him say that poor boy is moving.

663
01:16:57,000 --> 01:17:07,000
The official cause of death was peritonitis. His appendix hugely inflamed hadn't been operated on in time and had ruptured.

664
01:17:09,000 --> 01:17:19,000
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.

665
01:17:19,000 --> 01:17:29,000
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.

666
01:17:31,000 --> 01:17:39,000
So should responsibility for the death lie with Houdini himself, allowing himself to be punched when he knew his body was failing him.

667
01:17:40,000 --> 01:17:44,000
It seems the desire to cheat death at every turn finally got the better of him.

668
01:17:45,000 --> 01:17:55,000
On November 2nd, 1926, people wept openly as Houdini's body was returned to his adopted home city of New York.

669
01:17:56,000 --> 01:18:04,000
People turned out, you know, they wanted to get one last look at Houdini, you know, in the box that he'll never escape.

670
01:18:05,000 --> 01:18:09,000
It's almost like a state funeral.

671
01:18:10,000 --> 01:18:16,000
And it speaks to, A, not just how famous he is, but also how well loved he was.

672
01:18:17,000 --> 01:18:29,000
And 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.

673
01:18:29,000 --> 01:18:38,000
So having delved into the secrets hidden in Houdini's lost diaries, just who was the man behind the mask?

674
01:18:39,000 --> 01:18:53,000
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.

675
01:18:54,000 --> 01:19:04,000
Very few entertainers or performers can become synonymous with their art. His legacy as a performer will live on forever.

676
01:19:04,000 --> 01:19:23,000
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.

677
01:19:24,000 --> 01:19:33,000
Houdini's diaries are a chance to probe the mind and personality of the first global celebrity.

678
01:19:34,000 --> 01:19:45,000
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.

679
01:19:46,000 --> 01:19:51,000
I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.

680
01:19:53,000 --> 01:19:58,000
History's Greatest Mysteries