The Suspicious Death Of Harry Houdini

this week on buzzfeed unsolved we look into the legendary life and suspicious death of history's most famous magician harry houdini i thought you could say david blaine you think david blaine's more famous than harry houdini he you saw the balloons right i was a little bit of a freaky kid well i mean that's a given i was a frequenter of the houdini magic shop you're a big houdine kid i was a big houdini kid uh i wish i could have seen this guy perform magic obviously i can't because he's dead that's why we're talking about him but he did yeah should we find out what happened sure i mean we better yeah let's get into it harry houdini was born eric weiss in hungary in 1874. when he was four he emigrated to the u.s with his mother cecilia and four brothers to meet with his father herman who had already moved to the states a few years before they settled in the town of appleton wisconsin where his father was a rabbi at a small reform congregation the family's relative poverty imprinted a drive to be successful on the boy who would be houdini by the age of nine in part to help support his family eric began working as a trapeze performer in circuses in 1882 his family moved to new york city where eric began performing in vaudeville shows then considered to be the top of the entertainment pyramid though at first eric didn't make much impact i know it worked out in the long run but if i'm herman yeah you know toiling to provide for my wife cecilia is that her name yeah your boy comes to you and says i'm gonna step up help out the family i'm gonna pitch in you gotta get a job i'd be like you're the best son what are you gonna do i'm going to be a trapeze artist like get out of my house in 1891 a 17 year old eric and friend jacob hyman created an act that included a basic set of card and magic tricks called the brothers houdini in 1892 after the death of eric's father the brothers houdini took their show on the road performing at dime museums and small theaters in 1894 eric married 18 year old wilhelmina beatrice raynor or bess who became his stage assistant the pair toured as the houdinis but life as traveling performers was hard in 1898 the 25 year old houdini considered quitting the business altogether burnt out from years on the road you're getting on trains left and right chugga chugga choo choo hard to fall asleep on those things can't even get a good night's sleep wake up you're in cleveland huh wake up uh you're in boise time to do magic time to do magic time to do magic can you imagine i can't imagine imagine if you woke up in florida time to get back on the train please mosquito's the size of bats get me out of here that's the part of the biopic where it's just montage he's waking up he's like what city am i in you're like do magic you son of a [ __ ] in 1899 while performing in a beer garden in saint paul minnesota houdini caught the attention of one martin beck a man of influence in the world of vaudeville after watching houdini escape from a pair of handcuffs beck gave houdini a pair of his own handcuffs to try to escape from houdini did so with ease gotta say a little weird that this man is carrying handcuffs yeah could you imagine if you're a magician on stage you're like voila i've escaped and then some guy in the audience is like huh try it with mine instead little pink fuzzy ones oh wait those are those aren't yours try it with these inside wrong pocket impressed beck put the houdinis on the influential orpheum vaudeville circuit which meant the husband and wife would perform fewer shows but for more money houdini's profile began to rise as an escape artist and he gained admiration for his skill at manipulating locks and pure brute strength don't know if you know this but this guy was stacked like tom hardy jacked dude was was big he's a moose like have you seen a picture of this guy with his shirt off there's pictures where he's like leaned out you know like brad pitt and fight club yeah that kind of look but there's other ones where he's like straight up bane like human cloud yeah guy's a goddamn transformer all right truckasaurus i just i you think of magicians you think of like sweaty nerds usually like performing card magic nowadays yeah yeah yeah yeah they didn't have muscle tech back then did they not that i know of i think he was just like eating raw meat just going into the forest and biting rabbits heads off yeah pulling it out of the hat houdini also attracted thousands for the pure drama and showmanship of his performances a typical act would see houdini bound with chains and tossed in a box that was locked roped and waited which would then be tossed into water houdini of course escaped every time in 1908 houdini premiered his infamous milk can trick first a milk can filled with water was inspected by audience members a handcuffed houdini was then squeezed into the milk can which was sealed with six padlocks a curtain was drawn and the audience held their breath along with the submerged magician within two minutes houdini would somehow break free and emerge from behind the milk can with it still padlocked in his lifetime no one ever knew how he did it how big is a milk can like no he wasn't squeezed into a milk bottle this is like a bigger like a barrel okay barrel is probably more active i was about to be very impressed that would be crazy yeah i would love nothing more to travel back in time and see him do some of this [ __ ] you know he'd kill on youtube these days he probably would but then it doesn't have the same kind of awe because it's not in front of a live audience it's easier to fabricate yeah look it's a trick obviously but the fact that no one knows how he did it pretty cool yeah this is a trick that's over 100 years old you would think by now someone would be like yeah he obviously did this i bet magicians know they probably just don't tell anybody well not for my research you wouldn't be able to you're not part of the like the league the league i've been to the magic castle three times ah they let anybody in there that's not what they told me they told me that i'm the only person they've let in the magic castle in the last 20 years yeah yeah how much did you pay to get in there uh they quite a bit they paid me that's not true it's true ryan is that true no houdini had a penchant for not just creating his own amazing illusions but performing other magicians tricks as well only better for instance british magician charles morit pioneered a trick where he made a live donkey disappear on stage houdini paid morit for the rights to perform the trick and then figured out how to do it but with an elephant according to john cox author of the houdini website wild about harry quote we still don't know how he did the elephant trick he would houdini eyes these more common feats of magic his mind was always innovating always inventing end quote that would be like me saying like hey nice turtleneck shane asking you where you got it and then the next day i walk into the office and my turtleneck is much bigger than yours it's like all the way up here i'd feel pretty devastated if you complimented and then the next day i just saw your judging eyes just like oh you like this turtleneck oh this old thing part of the reason why more than a hundred years later we still don't know the exact tricks behind houdini's performances is because he guarded his secrets so well though he was wary of imitators houdini didn't patent his tricks since in the patent process he would have to give a detailed explanation for how they worked those explanations would be publicly available and therefore destroy the magic to get around this for his chinese water torture cell trick houdini staged the trick on stage in england as a one-act play with only a single person in the audience this allowed him to copyright the act instead of patenting it meaning no one else could perform the trick and how he pulled it off could remain a secret how do they do that nowadays is the same thing what in terms of keeping tricks a secret yeah i don't know i know i think that's some like uh inside baseball stuff for magicians only things that magicians let us know in the comments well i know because i'm in that you know no you're not you're not a magician i've never seen you do magic wait isn't that the best trick of all no actually it's pretty that's not impressive i guess if you're good enough you don't even have to worry about copyright because who's going to figure it out that's what i was just going to say yeah if they figure it out good for them while houdini cultivated an air of mystery around his death-defying feats he never claimed his abilities to be supernatural in fact houdini grew to detest claims of otherworldly powers becoming one of leading critics of the spiritualist movement that was gaining momentum in europe and the united states in the wake of world war one in the 1890s houdini and his wife bess dabbled in practicing spiritualism attempting to summon the dead in public after researching names at local graveyards it didn't take houdini long to realize the entire practice was nonsense do you agree with that no oh i thought i got you so talking to the dead we're going to get into this more later in terms of what i believe i'm very curious to find out your stance on uh life after death i guess you'll just have to stay tuned according to famous magician teller quote when you are a professional magician you want to see your art respected for what it is not misused to mislead people about the universe end quote houdini would ultimately go on to attend seance's undercover exposing the mediums as simply skilled performers he would also recreate their tricks at his own shows asserting there was nothing supernatural about it in all houdini spent years attempting to expose mind readers and mediums as con artists duping an otherwise ignorant audience who might be suffering genuine grief and while mediums and seances were no strangers to public doubt houdini's vendetta was personal in 1913 while houdini was in sweden to perform for the royal family cecilia weiss houdini's mother passed away houdini a self-proclaimed mother's boy was reportedly so stricken by the news that he fainted and wept uncontrollably in the aftermath though he had already concluded personally that spiritualism was a con he nevertheless searched in vain for a real medium to try to contact his deceased mother of course he'd be sad it's his mother yeah heartbreaking this is important to point out though because it's not so much that he overall believes spiritualism is just not real it's more that he believes the majority of the people who are practicing spiritualism like mediums and psychics all that are con men flim-flam men i respect i continue to respect him and here is where my belief aligns with his i believe in ghosts but i don't believe every place is haunted that claims it's haunted nor do i believe every medium is telling the truth but i do believe in ghosts so me and houdini are a bit simpatico yeah houdini like believes like one percent of things and you believe like 95 of things right yes like three percent yeah i'm just saying we've been to a lot of places and uh you seem to buy into a lot look i'm trying to conduct a very thorough investigation and if i find anomalies i'm going to report them but that's not to say that every place we've been to has been haunted and to prove it i will name one place that is not haunted for sure that we've gone to and that is drum roll please in 1922 houdini was invited to a seance being held by lady doyle the wife of his friend sir arthur conan doyle the author of sherlock holmes sir doyle believed through spiritualism he could communicate directly with his son kingsley who had tragically died in the 1918 influenza epidemic further sir doyle believed houdini himself possessed supernatural abilities something houdini adamantly denied nevertheless it appears sir doyle's admiration for houdini's otherworldly gifts was at least partially the reason why the two celebrities friendship began yeah so doyle believed that houdini was like a demon or something that had supernatural powers and houdini was like dude i just do magic but he refused to accept that and he the guy was just like nah no you're magic you're holding out on me bro well i mean i know the feeling as somebody who has a friend who's only with him because of his gift i have the vision of the vision and i have adamantly denied it over and over in many episodes on this show yet i insist that you ryan bergara have the vision ever since you fell into that pile of bricks it's a weird symbiotic relationship that i could kind of relate to so i don't have the vision his brain is cracked i could hear you just because you're sorry your brain is cracked at the seance conducted by lady doyle held at the ambassador hotel in atlantic city the hostess wrapped on the table three times and claimed to be in contact with houdini's mother lady doyle wrote out 15 pages of messages for houdini who thanked the doyles and left quietly while many may have scoured the pages for some comfort from a loved one beyond the grave houdini seethed the pages were all in english a language his mother never spoke let's say you're a houdini oh god i regret saying that because now you're going to take 10 minutes to get in character as houdini and apparently all that takes is you slicking your hair back what in the name yes this is shame a day in his morning dump every morning [Laughter] empty this vessel anyways a houdini this person's saying they're communicating with a dead relative 10 seconds into the seance you realize this this is a blown stir because they're they're saying they're speaking in a language that that relative never spoke it's very funny to me that houdini sat there and let this person scroll out 15 pages worth both and didn't go like she didn't speak english the pettiness of this guy i'm gonna make this person like really sell it for like an hour do you think he was seething or was he sort of like you seething okay yeah cause i'd be i'd be pissed so would you not say anything i would be livid and i would want them to feel shame the seance with the doyles seems to have been the final straw for houdini who now set out to expose spiritualists as frauds with renewed determination houdini had already written a book miracle mongers and their methods a complete expose of the modus operandi of fire eaters heat resistors poison eaters venomous reptile defiers sword swallowers human ostriches strongmen etc which exposed the tricks and trades of various sideshow level acts claiming miraculous feats he started off at the the bottom of the barrel doing a bunch of sideshow acts essentially now here he is writing a book exposing all these sideshow acts like what do the sword swallowers do to him what did the the human ostriches do to them dude by the way humanoid human ostrich is a person a human who just eats anything like glass or like a [ __ ] soda can my mind david blaine did that i'm just saying it's weird for me to just have him go i hate spiritualists i'm going to come after every sideshow performer there ever was and make sure no one could perform except me well but at the same time someone could take him down too if they figured out his tricks they could go after him and nobody's doing it so i guess he's the best and if he wants to take everybody else down then good for him houdini followed that book up with a magician among the spirits a scathing expose on the spiritualist trickery he also went forward with a 40-page illustrated pamphlet dedicated to taking down one popular medium in particular boston's mina crandon also known as marjorie the pamphlet was appropriately titled quote houdini exposes the tricks used by the boston medium margaery end quote for as uh gifted as he was as a magician not much of a ward smith this man would have worked as a youtube title that's true a little long i'm clicking he gets his name up front you know he's not just like the fraud marjorie he's like yo i'm in this one check it out do you think houdini would have been an expose vlogger in today's world big time with just thumbs of him going like yeah like looking surprised with question marks on it is marjorie real you'll never believe what i found when i googled shane midday houdini also began lecturing around the country about quote fraudulent spiritualistic phenomena and quote going so far as to testify before congress in 1926 lobbying for a bill to regulate mediums and fortune tellers potentially threatening to charge those quote pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation end quote with a crime unfortunately for houdini his campaign would be a short-lived one on october 11 1926 houdini broke his left ankle during a performance in albany new york being a goddamned professional houdini finished the performance and went against doctor's orders by traveling to his next set of performances in montreal while in montreal houdini took time out of his schedule for one of his favorite pastimes giving a lecture at mcgill university about what fraudulent huckster's spiritualists were after a matinee performance several days later some medical students from mcgill visited houdini in his dressing room one of the students jocelyn gordon whitehead presumably because houdini's reputation as a jacked dude with incredible strength preceded him asked if he could punch the magician in the stomach houdini said yes but before he could tighten his gut the student dealt a few fast and hard blows i just can't imagine going up to someone to be like hey can i punch you and bruce is like jesus christ oh [ __ ] are you dead big fan like it sounds like houdini couldn't even get out a syllable yes before the guy was throwing a couple haymakers like he was just revved up the whole show was like a sick trick i'm gonna i'm gonna punch the [ __ ] out of that guy when i get the chance and houdini first i'm gonna ask houdini began to complain of stomach cramps that evening during a 15-hour train ride to his next show in detroit houdini was in a great deal of pain both from his stomach and his shattered ankle arriving in the motor city with a 104 degree fever a doctor was brought to the theater and diagnosed houdini with acute appendicitis and told the magician he needed to get to the hospital immediately houdini refused apparently declaring quote i'll do this show if it's my last end quote prophetic yeah i'd be like it was his last i'm not gonna do this show i would go to the hospital houdini somehow made it through the show and eventually his wife convinced him to finally go to a hospital on october 24th houdini had an emergency operation to remove his already burst appendix he underwent a second operation on october 28th but on october 31st 1926 harry houdini succumbed to a severe case of sepsis this is interesting because i always thought it was like bam and then he's just like ow yeah yeah dead r.i.p i didn't realize it was so protracted yeah he did another show newspapers almost immediately began to speculate about foul play with his final curtain drawn at the height of his popularity it's time to jump into theories surrounding what brought down history's most famous magician our first theory and the most widely accepted is that whitehead's meathead desire to hit another person accidentally caused the appendicitis that led to houdini's demise however according to a 2013 study in the world journal of emergency surgery appendicitis as the result of blunt force trauma is extremely rare to the extent that there is still debate whether it could ever happen of course there's still the possibility that houdini was developing appendicitis independently of the punches either way this theory postulates that houdini was simply the victim of random bad luck and that refusing medical treatment certainly did not help matters if your appendix is not doing great and maybe doctors out there can holler at us and let us know if it got punched would it make it worse i'm sure it wouldn't help no but like i just said they're not even sure that it could be caused by blunt force trauma it's possible that it was just gonna happen regardless in fact this might have actually been in a weird way if you want to spin this it could have been like a lucky turn of events if he went to the hospital yeah but in the same way maybe it's unlucky because of the punch he was like well i got punched i'll be fine whereas if it would have happened without the punch i see he doesn't strike me as the kind of cat that would be like stomach's hurting out of nowhere gotta go get this checked out yeah he's probably more like i've escaped from a milk can i could do anything i guess yeah yeah hubris go to the hospital if you're hurting yeah moral of the story our second theory is that whitehead was an assassin sent to try to murder houdini by punching him to death houdini had no shortage of enemies whether it was the other magicians he was constantly belittling the individual mediums he was writing pamphlets discrediting or the entire field of spiritualism that he was lobbying to make illegal perhaps someone got fed up with houdini and wanted to prevent him from doing any more damage admittedly this theory is a little weak as we already said trauma caused appendicitis if it even exists at all is very rare so it would be a pretty ineffective assassin who chooses that as their preferred means of murder i will say it's a very narrow window if this person was the perfect assassin to know that there was a .001 percent chance that you could cause appendicitis from blunt force trauma despite despite some people not even thinking that's possible but whitehead was a med student yes but them saying that there's a very very rare chance does not mean it's not like smog's scale that you have to shoot a little arrow into it's just saying like the likeliness of that happening is almost impossible like not that there's a very specific technique yeah like they don't have posters at med school where they're like all right here's the kill zone right here if you punch right here this guy's appendis is going to go boom our final theory is that someone from the spiritualist underworld poisoned houdini while he was in the hospital we've already mentioned the spiritualist community's potential motivation for assassination and according to a houdini biography the secret life of houdini poisoning was their preferred method of murder despite receiving death threats houdini and bess traveled without security apart from explaining why random med school students could punch him on a whim this means there would have been plenty of opportunity for a spiritualist with a syringe to get to a houdini while he recovered from surgery houdini was buried without an autopsy meaning there is no evidence to disprove or prove this theory the poison's weird because he was clearly in distress well before he went to the hospital so at that point yeah i guess you could finish the job but it seems like he was in pretty dire straits so yeah i mean sepsis is is not a he's not a joke nothing funny about sepsis i'm not laughing seems like you're throwing down the gauntlet sepsis no laughs here what do you want from me man nothing i'm just saying we're not laughing at it i'm not i'm laughing at you not laughing i'm laughing at you not laughing at sepsis which is not something to laugh about he's laughing at sepsis i'm laughing you not laughing houdini's sudden death shocked the world the new york times wrote of the collective disbelief that houdini quote who so often had seemed to thousands to be cheating the very jaws of death end quote could die from the likes of appendicitis if some angry spiritualists were behind houdini's death their plan ultimately backfired even in death houdini worked to discredit their field as he and his wife had agreed that when one of them died the other would try to contact their deceased spouse for three years best tried to make contact with her late husband no medium was ever able to relay their pre-arranged code cool which is i won't lie baller ball areas yeah i feel like we should develop some sort of code between us that if one of us dies well i'll tell you what oh in the event of my untimely death fingers crossed it doesn't happen if it does i will do everything in my power to prove that ghosts are real i will show up at every haunted house and i will paint the walls with like ghosts are real this is ryan bergara suck it shane stuff like that it'd be funny if like you if ghosts were real and you were on this mission and you died and you just went straight to hell would you even hunt for me if i died not a ghost not even in my in my memory just like one um i'd like turn on the radio every now and then you could do the thing that ghosts do which is manipulate the airwaves what if you did a spirit box session and it was the clearest one ever but it still sounded like i itched right in first i told you ghosts since we're unable to reliably communicate with harry houdini the mystery of whether he was murdered by slighted fortune tellers or simply the victim of gastrointestinal trauma remains like the secrets behind some of his amazing tricks unsolved [Music] there's conjecture around his death here but i i feel pretty safe in saying that he likely suffered injuries or had appendicitis before it's possible whatever jokes aside promise me you'll investigate my apartment after i die if i die i promise don't cross your feet you you uncross those fingers promise me right now on camera i promise are you crossing anything no you promise what i promise that i will uh ghost hunt after you die to uh see if you're out there we could just cut out the wink it was [Music] genuine [Music] you

Channel: BuzzFeed Unsolved Network

Views: 4,391,328

Rating: 4.951026 out of 5

Keywords: BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed Unsolved, BuzzFeed Unsolved Network, Cold case, Creepy, Mini doc, Mystery, PL-Unsolved, PL-UnsolvedTrueCrime, PL-UnsolvedTrueCrime-S7, Ryan bergara, SffZ, Shane madej, The Suspicious Death of Harry Houdini, Unsolved, bizarre, buzzfeed unsolved network, cold case, investigation, mystery, ryan and shane, shane madej, theories, true crime, unexplained mysteries, unsolved, unsolved mysteries, unsolved mystery, unsolved network, unsolved true crime

Id: Bj6ulLJGPB8

Length: 29min 23sec (1763 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/daesgatling]

IDK what the mystery is. It's pretty obvious he either ruptured a bad appendix getting hit or it caused it to swell up and burst. I know it's debatable/rare but bodies are weird.

Also I always just sort of speculated that when the curtain closed during a stunt where someone is locked in a water tank, a stagehand runs out and unlocks all of them before locking them again. But I am no magician.

[u/hi-its-me-shauna]

My grandpa was at the theatre grounds in Montreal when he was punched and watched the performance that night. Blew my mind as a kid that he even got to see him haha

[u/TheDailySlice]

Does anyone else think this season has been pretty weak so far? I want to see episodes like the Boy in the Box or the Collar Bomb Killer. These ones just aren’t mysteries or aren’t true crime

[u/Rodimus-Primus]

Been a while since I've seen the episode but it seems Ryan called out Moon River Brewing, what happened there, been a while since I saw that episode?

[u/Pol_Slattery]

I didn’t think that this episode was much of an unsolved mystery. Everyone pretty much just acknowledges the appendicitis thing and that everything else that happened made it worse. But I am from his hometown in WI(I even went to Houdini elementary school) so I really appreciated the ep cause I’ve been learning about his life since early childhood :)

[u/Bethorz]

I would agree there wasn’t much of a mystery this episode but I absolutely loved this episode, a good story and good conversations between Shane and Ryan

[u/Its_ya_boi_snekface]

Idk man just bad timing and one hell of z stomach she. Also, Doyle straight up thinking he was a demon? Mad respect