Subject to Change

The family of Harry Houdini wants to have his body exhumed, to determine his cause of death. Officially, it is believed that a ruptured appendix killed Houdini.

Houdini died at age 52 on Halloween 1926, days after the athletic magician was repeatedly punched in the stomach by a college student testing the performer’s abdominal muscles.

His death certificate listed him as a victim of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix. No autopsy was performed, though, and rumors that he was murdered started almost immediately.

I had always assumed that story was some sort of urban legend. Perhaps that’s because of the conspiracy theory that the family is now trying to end once and for all, that Harry Houdini was actually poisoned.

The authors suggest the likeliest suspects were members of a group known as the Spiritualists. The magician devoted large portions of his stage show to exposing the group’s fraudulent seances.

Houdini received an assortment of death threats from the Spiritualists over his final years.

In the Houdini biography, authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman explore a November 1924 letter in which one of the movement’s devotees, Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, said Houdini would “get his just desserts very exactly meted out … I think there is a general payday coming soon.”

Poisoning? Threats from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? You can’t write fiction this good.