They agreed upon a secret message, Rosabelle believe, that only they were privy to. Before his death, Houdini and his wife Beatrice swore to each other that, after the first of them entered the great beyond, the living spouse would attempt to contact their departed love for ten years. The blows ruptured his appendix, a death sentence at the time.Įver the showman, Harry Houdini managed to deliver spectacles from beyond the grave. The student punched Houdini in the stomach multiple times before Houdini had a chance to ready himself.

Houdini, reclining on a couch, casually replied that his stomach could endure a lot. While visiting with fans in his dressing room at the Princess Theater in Montreal, a college student asked if it was true that Harry could withstand any blow to his abdomen. Harry Houdini died on Halloween, October 31, 1926. Houdini attended hundreds of séances, often in disguise, aggressively debunking mediums and, more often than not, putting them out of work. His crusade was well documented by the American press. Infuriated, he turned against these con artists, and Houdini, with his unparalleled skills and knowledge of stagecraft and deception, was uniquely suited to expose them. By most accounts, Houdini approached séances with a skeptical but open mind, but instead of finding a direct line to his mother in the afterlife, Houdini found an endless line of charlatans and fools. While the story is likely beset with a pinch of myth making, Houdini, adrift without his mother’s counsel and example, set out to explore the world of mediums and séances. Not until she lay dying did I realize how inexpressibly futile is a man’s intelligence.” When she died in 1913, Harry Houdini unmoored.

In his diary, Houdini wrote, “My mother was everything to me. Harry Houdini’s mother was, by all accounts, a singular influence on his life.

The amazing harry houdini