Erich Weisz, better known as the world-famous magician and escape artist, ‘Harry Houdini’, stunned the world with his mind-bending, supernatural abilities for over thirty years until his death on October 31, 1926.
After performing for a full house in Detroit on October 24, Houdini was rushed to the hospital for an apparent case of appendicitis. Just one week later, the seemingly ‘unkillable’ escape artist died on Halloween night. Doubts immediately arose surrounding his death, questioning how such an infamous death-defying man could have finally lost to something as minuscule as appendicitis. Reporters researching his strange passing soon discovered a series of suspicious events leading up to Houdini’s death, starting on October 11, 1926.
On October 22, after giving a lecture at McGill University, Harry Houdini invited some McGill students to his dressing room at the Princess Theater. One student decided to test Houdini’s claim that he was ‘resistant to hard punches to his abdomen’, proceeding to violently punch the unprepared magician multiple times in the stomach. Witnesses note Houdini’s obvious pain after the attack, though the artist simply brushed it off. Only a few hours later, however, Houdini began complaining of intense stomach pain and cramping. Although his condition continually worsened, Harry Houdini insisted on performing his next show at the Garrick Theater in Detroit, collapsing immediately following the final curtain.
Through surgery, doctors discovered that the magician’s appendix had ruptured a few days prior, poisoning his insides and leading to his death a few days later, on Halloween. The rarity of appendicitis being so deadly led to the assumption that the punches Houdini had received from his student days earlier had been the cause.
But was it an accident? Or a murder?
Houdini, a known skeptic of Spiritualism, had spent years trying to prove the religion’s views false. In doing so, he accumulated many enemies, but could he have also acquired a murderer?
Researchers propose that the death of the magician could have been a well-planned assassination by the Spiritualism community, rather than a mere accident. The group’s history of poisoning enemies, along with the lack of an autopsy to confirm what killed Houdini, makes this theory not so far-fetched. So, could the student throwing punches have delivered the deathly blow?
We may never know.
