Flashback

When Houdini escaped from the Hill

By James Dempsey

On Dec. 10, 1925—according to the student newspaper, The Tomahawk—more than 1,000 people packed the auditorium at Holy Cross for a performance by Harry Houdini—a virtual sellout, considering the student body numbered 1,084.

This was not the famous escapologist’s stage performance—which he would take on the road the following year—but a lecture, demonstration and slide show on his bête noire, spiritualism.

Houdini had begun his professional career at the age of 17 performing magic tricks for the pleasure-seekers at Coney Island. His talent, dedication to his craft and public relations savvy soon brought him international fame. He performed astounding stage magic and mastered the art of escaping from handcuffs, strait jackets and prison cells. One of his more famous illusions was escaping after being immersed upside down and manacled in a tank of water. Often, this escape was effected within minutes, but Houdini would wait behind the curtain to intensify audience suspense before calmly stepping into view. His one area of professional failure was in film; he made a number of movies, but none was successful.

Houdini’s debunking of various psychic frauds had infuriated spiritualists around the country, but he was careful in specifying the real target of his campaign.

“I am not attacking any religion,” Houdini told the Holy Cross audience. “I am simply exposing the filthiest profession in the world.”

He reiterated his standing offer of paying $10,000 to charity if anyone could prove communication with the dead. This was his life work, he said, claiming to have amassed 50,000 books on the subject (a misprint, perhaps: only 3,988 of his books were given to the Library of Congress after his death). Most of his criticism at that time was aimed at Margery Crandon, the Boston medium who, for a time, fooled a Harvard committee on psychic research. Curiously, one of Crandon’s staunchest admirers was author of the unswervingly ratiocinative tales of Sherlock Holmes.

“People who imagine they see forms of the dead come back to life should consult their family physician,” Houdini said, adding that “the Ouija board is the first step to insanity.”
Publicity followed Houdini everywhere. During his visit to Worcester, when he also played at the Worcester Theater, the Massachusetts State Association of Spiritualists filed suit against him for having an accomplice purportedly steal the church’s charter while pretending to receive a $13 reading. And the local paper noted that the automobile of Houdini’s attorney, James C. Donnelly, disappeared from Commercial Street during the wizard’s visit—an incident that yielded the cheerfully alliterative headline, “Mystery Magician’s Counsel Mystified By Missing Motor.”

Incidentally, there is some confusion as to where the “Auditorium” in which Houdini spoke was located. The O’Kane lecture hall was sometimes set up to take in the entire student body, according to Holy Cross historian and professor of history, Rev. Anthony Kuzniewski, S.J., but there is the possibility that the talk may have taken place in the basement of St. Joseph Memorial Chapel—which could also have accommodated the studentry.

The following year after his Holy Cross appearance, while touring, Houdini allowed a fan to punch him in the stomach to demonstrate his ability to endure physical blows. A burst appendix led to peritonitis and death.