“When I was young, I set up fake sessions, so I knew very well what really happened during those meetings.”īut it is true that his mother would have a role in that conversion of the magician in an active claimant of paranormal scams. “Houdini was never a believer in spiritualism”, summarizes the writer and popular scientist Massimo Polidoro, author of Final Séance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle (Prometheus Books, 2001). Arthur Conan Doyle, the father of that second Houdini On the other, that his interest in spirits was not something that had come about because of that tragic event, as a child he had already seen sessions and began to suspect that they were a cheat. On the one hand, Houdini’s biographers note that his attendance at those sessions did not begin until almost a decade after the death of his mother.

Harry Houdini with his mother and wife, his” two sweethearts”. He became a taciturn specter who spent long periods in the cemetery, lying on the grave and talking to the earth.Īccording to this version, from then on he began to attend séances to contact his mother, which led him to discover the deceptions of the mediums and to initiate his personal crusade against this fraud. After the death of his mother, in 1913 because of a stroke, Houdini was not the same again. Since his birth in Budapest, through the emigration of his family to the US and his triumph as a magician, Erik Weisz – his real name – always professed a deep adoration for his mother, whom he qualified as his angel on Earth, the lighthouse who guided him and one of his two loves, along with his wife Bess. Credit: Famous Players – Lasky Corporation.”, USĪccording to the most popular version, it was the death of his mother that led Houdini (Ma– October 31, 1926) towards spiritualism. Houdini is famous for his escapism shows. There was not one Houdini, but two: until 1922 he was the show man and even the silent movie star, in his last years he was the hunter of fake ghosts.

But perhaps the greatest exploit of escapism of the most famous magician of all time was to rid many others of the deceptions of mediums and spiritualists. When we think of Harry Houdini, what inevitably comes to mind is the image of an athletic man in underclothes, loaded with chains and escaping from the most unlikely of prisons: a water tank, a safe or a milk jug sealed with padlocks.

Bess houdini