Many of the theories tend to focus on the magician’s contentious relationship with Spiritualism, a pseudo-religion whose adherents once claimed it was possible to communicate with the dead through séances and mediums. Houdini was laid to rest in Queens on November 4, 1926, but rumors about his unusual death have persisted ever since. Doubts Arise Over the Escape Artist's Death Houdini’s life insurance company was even forced to pay his wife a double indemnity for an accidental death.
Such cases of “traumatic appendicitis” are extraordinarily rare-one study found only a couple dozen instances over a nearly 20-year period-but in 1926, the diagnosis was widely accepted. Gordon Whitehead had given him during their backstage encounter in Montreal. At the time, the magician’s doctors firmly believed that the illness was the result of the walloping J. The official cause of Houdini’s death was listed as peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix. Despite a grim prognosis, the magician clung to life until October 31, when he died with his wife Bess and his two brothers by his side. Doctors successfully removed his appendix, which was found to have ruptured several days earlier, but it had already poisoned his insides. That same night, he was taken to a Detroit hospital and prepped for surgery. He proceeded to struggle through his routine before collapsing immediately after the final curtain.
A doctor suspected appendicitis and instructed Houdini to go to a hospital, but the performer insisted on taking the stage for his opening night show at the Garrick Theater. The magician developed severe abdominal pain, cold sweats and fatigue, and his temperature rose to 104 degrees. His condition only worsened the next day, when he boarded an overnight train to Detroit for a new run of performances. Houdini brushed off the incident at the time, but that same evening, he began to complain of discomfort and stomach cramps. Houdini was still reclined on the couch and had no time to prepare for the punches, which appeared to leave him in considerable pain. According to witness Sam Smilovitz, when Houdini said the rumors were true, Whitehead abruptly delivered “four or five terribly forcible, deliberate, well-directed blows” to his stomach. Gordon Whitehead arrived and asked Houdini if it was true that he could resist hard punches to his abdomen-a claim the magician had supposedly made in public. The magician’s sore ankle was still bothering him, so he plopped down on a couch while the group chatted. Just a few days later on October 22, he invited some McGill students to visit him in his dressing room at the Princess Theater. He hobbled his way through the rest of the show, but was later found to have sustained a fractured left ankle.Īgainst doctors’ orders, Houdini continued his tour and traveled to Montreal, where he gave a lecture at McGill University. While being shackled into his Chinese Water Torture Cell during a performance in Albany, New York, the conjurer was struck on the leg by a piece of faulty equipment.
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The strange series of events that led to Houdini’s demise had kicked off several weeks earlier on October 11, 1926. An obituary in the New York Times expressed shock at the sudden passing of the man “who so often had seemed to thousands to be cheating the very jaws of death.” Houdini's Final Performance He died just a week later on Halloween, leaving his legions of admirers bewildered. The 52-year-old performed before a packed house in Detroit on October 24, but was rushed to the hospital afterwards with an apparent case of appendicitis. Houdini had made a career out of surviving the impossible, which only made the circumstances of his 1926 death all the more mysterious. In 1915, Houdini nearly suffocated during a stunt in which he was shackled and buried under six feet of dirt. The heart-pounding getaways usually involved a healthy dose of trickery and sleight-of-hand, but they were also fraught with genuine risk. The Hungarian-born escape artist jumped off bridges while handcuffed and wearing leg irons, slithered out of sealed milk cans filled with water, and devised a “Chinese Water Torture Cell” in which he was submerged and suspended upside down by his ankles. For over 30 years, Harry Houdini dazzled audiences with his bravura stunts and superhuman endurance.
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