Master escape artist Harry Houdini died on Halloween of 1926 from a ruptured appendix. But details of his demise remain mysterious to this day.
For over 30 years, Harry Houdini dazzled audiences with his bravura stunts and superhuman endurance. So what finally killed him?
The Hungarian-born escape artist jumped off bridges while handcuffed and wearing leg irons. He slithered out of sealed milk cans filled with water. And he devised a “Chinese Water Torture Cell” in which he was submerged and suspended upside down by his ankles. None of those did him in.
Houdini's heart-pounding getaways usually involved a healthy dose of trickery and sleight-of-hand, but they were also fraught with genuine risk. In 1915, Houdini nearly suffocated during a stunt in which he was shackled and buried under six feet of dirt.
Houdini had made a career out of surviving the impossible, which only made the circumstances of his 1926 death all the more mysterious. The 52-year-old performed before a packed house in Detroit on October 24 but was rushed to the hospital afterward with an apparent case of appendicitis. He died just a week later on Halloween, leaving his legions of admirers bewildered. 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.”
The strange series of events that led to Houdini’s demise had kicked off several weeks earlier on October 11, 1926. 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. He hobbled his way through the rest of the show but was later found to have sustained a fractured left ankle.
Against doctors’ orders, Houdini continued his tour and traveled to Montreal, where he gave a lecture at McGill University. Just a few days later on October 22, he invited some McGill students to visit him in his dressing room at the Princess Theater. The magician’s sore ankle was still bothering him, so he plopped down on a couch while the group chatted.
At some point, a student named J. 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. 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. Houdini was still reclined on the couch and had no time to prepare for the punches, which appeared to leave him in considerable pain.
Houdini was laid to rest in Queens on November 4, 1926, but rumors about his unusual death have persisted ever since. 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.
The true cause of Houdini’s demise may never be known for sure, but the majority of scholars tend to dismiss the murder theories as mere speculation. For them, the more pressing question is whether Houdini’s ruptured appendix had any connection to the stomach blows he received a few days earlier. While the evidence shows that such a condition is indeed possible, many consider it more likely that Whitehead’s punches simply caused Houdini to ignore an already existing case of appendicitis.