Houdini vs. the Mediums: The Magician Who Hunted Fake Ghosts

The photograph above looks like proof of life after death. Harry Houdini sits with a book open on his knees, and beside him, pale and solemn, sits Abraham Lincoln, some sixty years dead. Houdini made the picture himself. It is a fake, and he meant everyone to know it was a fake. In the 1920s photographers were selling “spirit photographs” like it to grieving families, and Houdini made his own to show how easy the trick was.

Houdini died on Halloween 1926, at 52, of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix. This Halloween marks a hundred years. Most people remember him for the handcuffs, the straitjackets and the water torture cell. Fewer remember how he spent his last years. The world’s most famous magician spent much of his time, money and reputation on a public war against spirit mediums, the people who claimed they could talk to the dead and charged for it.

“This thing they call Spiritualism, wherein a medium intercommunicates with the dead, is a fraud from start to finish,” he told a committee of Congress in 1926. “In 35 years I have never seen one genuine medium.” It was a strange crusade for a showman, and it put him up against one of the most famous writers on earth, a Harvard psychologist, a Boston society hostess, and much of the press. It also left behind something useful: a field guide to how intelligent people get fooled. Science is still adding to that guide.

Rapping in Hydesville

The movement Houdini fought began with two girls and a farmhouse. On March 31, 1848, in Hydesville, New York, Maggie Fox, 14, and her sister Kate, 11, told their parents that the strange knocking sounds in their house were messages from a spirit. The raps answered questions. Neighbors came to listen. Within a few years the Fox sisters were giving public demonstrations and private sittings, and a new religion was growing up around them.

Spiritualism, as it came to be called, promised what grieving people most want: one more conversation. According to Smithsonian, by the 1880s there were an estimated eight million Spiritualists. Séances spread from parlors to theaters. Mediums produced raps, moving tables, floating trumpets, writing on sealed slates and, later, “ectoplasm” pouring from their mouths. Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House after the death of her son Willie.

Then, on October 21, 1888, Maggie Fox walked onto the stage of the Academy of Music in New York and confessed. The raps had begun as a prank, she said. As children she and Kate had made noises by dropping an apple on a string. Later they learned to crack the joints of their toes. In front of the audience she cracked her big toe, and the sound carried through the hall. “It is a very common delusion,” she said of the spirit world. The New York World paid her $1,500 for the story. A year later she took her confession back, and the movement carried on as if nothing had happened.

Faraday’s table

Long before Houdini, scientists had already shown how the tricks could fool honest people, not just paying customers. In the 1850s Britain was gripped by “table-turning.” Sitters would rest their hands on a table, wait, and feel it begin to slide and turn under their fingers, apparently by itself. Many were sure an electrical, magnetic or spiritual force was at work.

Michael Faraday, the great experimental physicist, decided to test it. He built a simple device: a few boards stacked on the tabletop, held so that the top board could slide a little, with a light pointer attached. If the table were pulling the sitters’ hands, the top board would lag behind. If the sitters’ hands were pushing the table, the pointer would show it. In a letter to The Times dated June 28, 1853, he reported that the table moved because of “quasi involuntary muscular action.” The sitters were pushing without knowing it.

The neatest part of the experiment was what happened when the sitters could see the pointer. Once they could watch their own unconscious push, the table stopped turning. Faraday was less troubled by the tables than by the people around them. “I have been greatly startled by the revelation which this purely physical subject has made of the condition of the public mind,” he wrote. Psychologists now call this the ideomotor effect, and it explains Ouija boards and dowsing rods too.

The handcuff king meets Sherlock Holmes’s creator

Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874 and grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father was a rabbi. By the 1900s he was an international star, the “Handcuff King” who escaped from jail cells, packing crates and milk cans. He knew better than anyone how an audience could be steered to see what a performer wanted. He was also devoted to his mother, who died in 1913.

That is part of what drew him to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of Sherlock Holmes, the most rational detective in fiction, had become Spiritualism’s best-known champion. He toured the world lecturing about the afterlife, and he publicly defended the Cottingley Fairies photographs, which two English girls had faked with paper cutouts. The magician and the author became friends anyway, and for a while each hoped to convert the other.

In 1922 Doyle’s wife, Jean, held a séance for Houdini in a hotel room in Atlantic City. She went into a trance and produced pages of automatic writing, supposedly from Houdini’s mother. Houdini was polite at the time. Privately he was unmoved. As Smithsonian notes, each page was headed with a cross, but his mother had been Jewish and the wife of a rabbi. Houdini later called Doyle “one of the greatest dupes.”

Earlier that year, according to Michael Shermer in Scientific American, Houdini had tried a demonstration of his own at his home in New York. He had Doyle write a phrase in secret, out of his sight. Doyle chose “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” the writing on the wall from the Book of Daniel. Then a cork ball, dipped in ink, appeared to roll by itself across a hanging slate and spell out the same words. Houdini told Doyle it was a trick and begged him not to “jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily ‘supernatural,’ or the work of ‘spirits,’ just because you cannot explain them.” Doyle was not persuaded. He came to believe that Houdini really had psychic powers and was simply hiding them.

Houdini’s line is worth remembering, because the same mistake turns up whenever something unexplained appears, from a 72-second radio signal from deep space to a mysterious light in the sky. Not knowing how something was done is not evidence that magic did it.

The $2,500 question

In December 1922, partly in response to Doyle, the magazine Scientific American offered two prizes of $2,500, one for a genuine spirit photograph and one for “conclusive psychic manifestations” produced under test conditions. The author David Jaher has called the magazine “the ’60 Minutes’ of their time.” The judging committee was built to be credible. It included William McDougall, head of the psychology department at Harvard; Daniel Comstock, a physicist formerly at MIT; Walter Franklin Prince of the American Society for Psychical Research; the psychic researcher Hereward Carrington; and Houdini. The magazine’s associate editor, J. Malcolm Bird, served as secretary.

Houdini’s job, as Jaher told Smithsonian, was to stand “as a guarantee to the public that none of the tricks of his trade have been practiced upon the committee.” Scientists, he believed, were exactly the wrong people to catch a medium. They were trained to study nature, and nature doesn’t cheat. “The more highly educated a man is along certain lines, the easier he is to dupe,” Houdini said. In a letter in November 1922 he put it more sharply: “mal-observation is the curse of all description.”

It was an old lesson. A century earlier, crowds across Europe had been fooled by the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing machine that hid a human player inside, and some of the cleverest people of the age had argued about how it might really think. A magician looks at a cabinet and asks where the person is hiding. A scientist asks how the machine works.

The bandaged leg and the bell box

After rejecting several candidates, Bird settled on a medium the newspapers came to call “Margery.” Her real name was Mina Crandon, a charming 36-year-old married to a prominent Boston surgeon, Le Roi Crandon. In her home on Lime Street she held séances in which her dead brother, Walter, spoke through her, rang bells, moved objects and tilted tables. According to the Psi Encyclopedia, the committee held about ninety sittings with her between April and July 1924. Bird published an enthusiastic article before the committee had reached any verdict.

Houdini had been touring and arrived late. His first séance with Margery was on July 23, 1924. He came prepared. According to his own pamphlet, reproduced by PBS American Experience, he had worn a tight rubber bandage around his leg below the knee all day, so that the skin would be tender and he would feel the slightest movement against it. In the dark he sat beside Margery with his leg pressed against hers.

The test object was a “bell box,” a wooden box about 14 by 6 by 5 inches with a hinged lid. Pressing the lid rang an electric bell inside. Walter was supposed to ring it from the spirit world. Houdini said he could feel Margery’s ankle slowly sliding and her leg muscles tightening each time the bell rang. Later, he said, a megaphone that seemed to float in the dark had simply been put on her head like a dunce’s cap. At another sitting, on July 24 at Comstock’s hotel, he said she used her head to push the table over. Bird, as Houdini told it, believed she was “fifty or sixty percent genuine.”

The box, the ruler and the thumbprint

Houdini’s answer was a box. He had a wooden cabinet built that enclosed Margery up to her neck, with holes for her head and arms, so she couldn’t reach anything with her feet or knees. Malcolm Bird photographed her in it, with Houdini seated alongside.

The box sessions turned into accusations on both sides. The lid was forced open during one sitting. At another, a pencil eraser was found in the bell box, and the Crandons claimed Houdini had planted it to stop the bell from ringing. Then a small folding ruler turned up inside the cabinet, which Margery could have used to press the lid of the bell box. Walter, speaking through the medium, accused Houdini of having his assistant, Jim Collins, put it there. Both men denied it. A 1959 biography said Collins later admitted planting the ruler, but the Houdini historian Massimo Polidoro has cast doubt on that story.

In February 1925 the committee announced its verdict. According to the New York Times report, four of the five members voted that Margery had not proved her case. Only Carrington believed in her. But this was not the clean victory Houdini wanted. Prince, Comstock and McDougall said they had found no proof of spirits, and also that Houdini hadn’t proved fraud either. McDougall had independently concluded that she was cheating, but he didn’t credit Houdini with exposing her. Houdini didn’t wait for anyone. In January 1925 he had already exposed her methods on stage at Boston’s Symphony Hall and published a 40-page pamphlet titled Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium “Margery.”

The final blows came after Houdini’s death. Margery’s séances moved on to new wonders, including wax thumbprints left by “Walter” in dental wax. In 1932 E. E. Dudley, a fingerprint expert who had worked with her supporters, discovered that the Walter prints taken in 1926 matched the thumbs of Frederick Caldwell, Margery’s own dentist, who had supplied the wax. And in 1930 Bird himself, once her greatest champion, gave the leaders of the American Society for Psychical Research a paper admitting he had long known some of the phenomena were produced by normal means. Margery, he said, had once asked him to ring the bell box for her in case Walter didn’t. The society refused to publish it. Mina Crandon died on November 1, 1941.

Undercover widows

Houdini could not attend every séance in America, so he hired investigators. The best of them was Rose Mackenberg, a private detective from New York. According to the Wellcome Collection, she would go ahead of his tour, study the local clothes and accents, and then attend séances in disguise, often as a grieving widow. In one case, posing as “Mrs Rosalind Richards,” she helped expose a medium named Herman E. Parker. She kept up the work long after Houdini died and investigated hundreds of mediums over about 30 years.

Her reports gave Houdini his best material. He would name names from the stage, sometimes with Mackenberg present. He built a whole section of his show around fake mediums: slate writing, spirit hands, tables that rose by themselves, all done in full view and then explained. The aim was not just to embarrass the mediums. It was to make the audience feel how convincing the tricks were from the inside.

Spiritualism was also a big business. The magician and investigator Julien Proskauer estimated that by 1932 some 30 million people a year were visiting mediums and fortune-tellers in the United States, spending about $125 million. That made the fight political as well as scientific.

Houdini goes to Washington

In 1926 Houdini tried to make fortune-telling for pay illegal in Washington, D.C. A bill, H.R. 8989, would have banned fortune-telling for money in the District. Congress held hearings on February 26 and in May 1926. Houdini introduced himself to the committee: “I am an author; I am a psychic investigator for the scientific magazines of the world: and then I am a mysterious entertainer.”

The hearings were part science lesson, part circus. According to Smithsonian, about 300 mediums, astrologers and fortune-tellers came to watch and argue. Houdini demonstrated how spirit messages appear on sealed slates. He whispered into a congressman’s ear through a spirit trumpet in the dark to show how easily a voice from nowhere could be faked. Mackenberg testified that a Washington medium, Mrs. Coates, had told her that séances were held at the White House under President Calvin Coolidge. The New York Times reported the claim on May 19, and it was denied.

The mediums fought back, and tempers ran high. In one exchange, Houdini snapped that “Jesus was a Jew, and he did not charge $2 a visit.” Some members of Congress worried about religious freedom, and others simply didn’t see why the government should protect grown adults from their own choices. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” said Representative Ralph Gilbert of Kentucky. The bill died in committee.

Montreal, Detroit and Halloween

In October 1926 Houdini was performing at the Princess Theatre in Montreal. On October 22, a McGill University student named J. Gordon Whitehead visited his dressing room. According to witnesses, Whitehead asked whether Houdini believed the miracles in the Bible were true, and whether it was true that he could take any punch to the stomach. Before Houdini could brace himself, Whitehead hit him several times. Montreal also appears in the story of Wilder Penfield, who mapped the human brain at McGill a few years later, though there is no connection beyond the city.

Houdini went on to Detroit in pain. When he arrived at the Garrick Theatre on October 24 for what would be his last performance, he had a fever of about 104 degrees. He finished the show and was afterward taken to Grace Hospital. He died there on October 31. Whether the punches caused his appendicitis or simply masked its warning signs has been debated ever since.

Rosabelle, believe

Houdini had prepared for the possibility that he was wrong. He and his wife, Bess, agreed on a secret code. If either of them died, the other would try to reach them through a medium, and the code would prove the message was real. Mediums all over the country soon claimed to have it.

In January 1929 one of them seemed to succeed. A popular young medium named Arthur Ford held a séance for Bess at her home and delivered a message in the old mind-reading code the couple had used in their stage act. It spelled out “Rosabelle, believe.” “Rosabelle” was a song from the couple’s early days together, and the message also alluded to her wedding ring. On January 9 the New York Times reported that Bess had confirmed it was the code. Among those in the room was John W. Stafford of Scientific American.

The triumph didn’t last. Critics pointed out that “Rosabelle” was already public, and that the couple’s mind-reading code had been printed in Harold Kellock’s 1928 biography, Houdini: His Life Story, written with Bess’s cooperation. Anyone who had read page 105 could have built the message. Bess never treated the pact as settled.

She kept trying for ten years. Every Halloween she held a séance. The last “official” one took place on Halloween 1936 on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, broadcast on radio. At the end she put out the candle she had kept burning beside his photograph. “Houdini did not come through,” she said. “I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me, or to anyone.”

Why smart people get fooled

A century later, psychologists have tested what Houdini knew by instinct. In 2003 Richard Wiseman, Emma Greening and Matthew Smith of the University of Hertfordshire published a study in the British Journal of Psychology in which they staged fake séances for volunteers. During the séance, an actor suggested that a table was rising into the air. It never moved. Afterward, about one third of the participants reported that it had moved.

In a second experiment, people who already believed in the paranormal were more open to suggestion than skeptics, but only when the suggestion fit what they believed. About one fifth of all participants thought the fake séances had contained real paranormal phenomena. The researchers didn’t need ectoplasm or trumpets, just a dark room, an expectation and a confident voice.

That fits a pattern that turns up again and again in the history of science, from the newspaper readers who swallowed the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 to the modern researchers who found that a brain scanner could appear to show activity in a dead salmon. We see what we expect, fill in gaps and trust our own perceptions far more than we should. Faraday saw it in 1853. Houdini built a career on it. “Do not jump to the conclusion,” his warning to Doyle, still holds up.

He also had a point about expertise. Prince, McDougall and Comstock were intelligent, careful men, and they disagreed for months about a woman who, it later turned out, had relied on very ordinary methods and helpers. They were trained to measure the world, not to catch someone working against them. A magician starts from the assumption that the most important thing in the room is happening somewhere he isn’t supposed to look. As a Los Angeles Times writer put it at the time, “It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer.”

A century of empty chairs

The séances didn’t end with Bess. Detroit magicians revived the tradition in 1946, and Houdini séances have been held on Halloween in various places ever since. This year, for the centenary, there are more than ever.

In New York, Houdini’s old brownstone at 278 West 113th Street in Harlem is hosting a 100-Year Séance on October 31, with three sittings of 13 guests each. The first, led by the magician Dorothy Dietrich, starts at 1:26 p.m., the hour of his death, and costs $2,500 per seat, the same amount as the 1924 prize nobody won. The evening sessions are led by the medium Jessica Jane Peterson. In Detroit, the city where he gave his last performance and died, the Detroit Historical Society is holding “Houdini 100: Magic & Mystery” on Halloween night. Houdini performed in Detroit 19 times between 1894 and 1926.

For anyone who prefers evidence to ghosts, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is showing “Houdini’s Library” through January 24, 2027. The exhibition draws on the enormous collection of books he gathered on magic, spiritualism and fraud, which the center acquired in 1958. Its treasures include a 1584 first edition of Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, one of the first books to explain conjuring tricks in order to argue that so-called witches had no supernatural powers. Houdini’s crusade, it turns out, had a 340-year-old ancestor on his own shelves.

Joe Nickell, a longtime investigator of paranormal claims, summed up the annual ritual to Smithsonian: “The Houdini no-show. He was always going to be a no-show.” That might be the most fitting tribute. A hundred years after his death, Houdini is still keeping his side of the bargain, and every empty chair makes his argument for him.

Further reading