Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: They were terrified that he would come to town. They
Speaker 2: were terrified that he was in the room disguise. He
Speaker 2: was their worst nightmare.
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 1: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
Speaker 1: podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
Speaker 1: research for my many audio and book projects has taken
Speaker 1: me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
Speaker 1: with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
Speaker 1: and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
Speaker 1: crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
Speaker 1: good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
Speaker 1: unpublished details behind their stories. Harry Houdini, the world's greatest magician,
Speaker 1: wild audiences around the world in the nineteen twenties. He
Speaker 1: must have felt invincible, but then an evil spirit cursed
Speaker 1: him during a seance, and soon Houdini would wage war
Speaker 1: against spiritualism. He set out to debunk fraudulent mediums and
Speaker 1: expose Charlatan's for lying to people in mourning. Author Bradricka
Speaker 1: tells us about Houdini's crusade from his book Lincoln's Ghost,
Speaker 1: Houdini's War on Spiritualism, and the dark conspiracy against the
Speaker 1: American Presidency. Let's talk about the last book. Give me
Speaker 1: a quick summary of what that book was.
Speaker 2: Missus Sherlock Holmes was a kind of standard true crime.
Speaker 2: The seventeen year old girl gets tragically murdered, and the
Speaker 2: book is about that mystery and how it's solved, but
Speaker 2: more importantly, how it's solved by a middle aged woman,
Speaker 2: Grace Hummiston, who the press called Missus Sherlock Holmes, who
Speaker 2: just turned out, as I kept going into the book,
Speaker 2: just this amazing person who did all this cool stuff.
Speaker 1: And what year did that take place in?
Speaker 2: That took place around the same time, nineteen sixteen, seventeen eighteen,
Speaker 2: around that.
Speaker 1: So you like me like the older stories, So you've
Speaker 1: got now this book that's in nineteen twenty six. What
Speaker 1: is it about these types of stories from one hundred
Speaker 1: years ago that is intriguing to you when you have
Speaker 1: so many more contemporary stories to pick from here?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 2: This wasn't an era that I ever really liked as
Speaker 2: kind of a student. I like the Victorians, and further
Speaker 2: on from there, I think there's something about the past.
Speaker 2: I think the real kind of easy answer is that
Speaker 2: you don't have to interview any one, right, You don't
Speaker 2: have to deal with any living people.
Speaker 1: Don't tell everybody our secret, I know, but.
Speaker 3: A lot of right.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying all writers, but a lot of writers.
Speaker 2: You know, we kind of stick to ourselves. And it's
Speaker 2: just kind of nice to deal with the past in
Speaker 2: your own way and kind of discover these people through
Speaker 2: all these different ways that we try to. You know,
Speaker 2: I don't know if they're always successful. I mean, we
Speaker 2: certainly try, but try to get to the past. And
Speaker 2: I just love the idea of visiting the past. I
Speaker 2: should say this, but I'm obsessed with time travel, and
Speaker 2: I think a lot of us start out that way,
Speaker 2: and I think about it a lot, like maybe way
Speaker 2: too much, But this is how you do it, right.
Speaker 2: You do all the research and you try and recreate
Speaker 2: that spot and time as much as you can.
Speaker 3: And I think.
Speaker 2: Until they invent it, until some scientists does it, this
Speaker 2: is as good as it gets.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about your history project.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 1: We have a little bit of a crossover because I
Speaker 1: have an audio book, The Ghost Club, which I think
Speaker 1: you'll mention here, and you focus in on one really
Speaker 1: important character who happened to be a member of the
Speaker 1: Club but just has this sort of otherworldly existence at
Speaker 1: so many different levels. And that's Harry Houdini, who I
Speaker 1: have to think, no matter how young our audiences, people
Speaker 1: have to have all heard about Harry Houdini. But why
Speaker 1: don't you give me a little background on your main
Speaker 1: character here.
Speaker 2: I really hesitate in calling Houdini the kind of Taylor
Speaker 2: Swift of the early nineteen hundreds. But his range was
Speaker 2: he traveled the world, and he was on tour more
Speaker 2: than the Grateful Dead War. He was on tour, you know,
Speaker 2: three hundred and fifty days a year, and he would
Speaker 2: just do his shows and everyone loved him, right, he
Speaker 2: was hugely popular. And you know the end of the
Speaker 2: eighteen hundreds, he starts with just simple magic, and he
Speaker 2: starts with card tricks, and they call him the King
Speaker 2: of Cards because he masters that. And then he moves
Speaker 2: on to escapes, and he masters escapes, and he starts
Speaker 2: doing more elaborate magic, more elaborate escapes, you know, everyone
Speaker 2: kind of even if you don't know who Dini, you've
Speaker 2: heard of the Escape from the Chinese Water Torture Cell,
Speaker 2: which has this ridiculous kind of vaudeville name as like
Speaker 2: the worst place you want to be and it's just
Speaker 2: a box. They throw it in the in some water,
Speaker 2: which is still pretty bad. But what I couldn't wrap
Speaker 2: my head around is that at the kind of end
Speaker 2: of his careers in his fifties, which back then you
Speaker 2: know that was just it's wrapping up now, but he
Speaker 2: changed everything. He's such an adaptable performer, but he focuses
Speaker 2: on this real kind of social cultural phenomenon that's going
Speaker 2: on in the world, which is spiritualism, and he makes
Speaker 2: that his main focus. To me, it just seems like
Speaker 2: I couldn't understand why did he do that? And that
Speaker 2: was like kind of the beginning of the project.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things from researching Ghosts Club,
Speaker 1: which was, you know about a social club of men
Speaker 1: that started with Charles Dickens and still have gone to meetings,
Speaker 1: still goes through today, where that you know, back then
Speaker 1: you had all these affluent men, including Houdini and Arthur
Speaker 1: Conan Doyle who wrote Cherlock Holmes who were eating French
Speaker 1: food at very expensive restaurants. I mean, these are power
Speaker 1: players in the world, Maharashi. I mean it was just incredible.
Speaker 1: And then talking about ghosts and fairies and you know,
Speaker 1: retelling all of these stories. It's always surprising to me
Speaker 1: when I read the profiles of those people, including Abraham Lincoln,
Speaker 1: who I feel like are rooted in science or you know,
Speaker 1: something that you would think would be very very grounding
Speaker 1: in a present world kind of way, and then they
Speaker 1: believe in all of this other stuff that that could
Speaker 1: have been considered wild back then. And Doyle was one
Speaker 1: of them, because you know, so Sherla Combs is so scientific.
Speaker 1: And I wondered about Whodini and I guess let's keep
Speaker 1: talking about him if there was at one point did
Speaker 1: he ever feel like he had a connection to the
Speaker 1: other world when he was younger, because I know that
Speaker 1: oftentimes happened with these men in the Ghost Club.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 2: And I loved Ghost Club, by the way, and I
Speaker 2: told you this off air, and I might as well
Speaker 2: share it that this project was kind of built from
Speaker 2: a project I wanted to do on the Ghost Club,
Speaker 2: and then I saw, oh, no, Kate did a book,
Speaker 2: So then I knew I was sunk, but I loved
Speaker 2: what you did with it, and it just kind of
Speaker 2: forced me to look at something a little differently. With Houdini,
Speaker 2: he had this line that says, Whodini was a huge
Speaker 2: fan of Abraham Lincoln. He like idolized him. And I thought,
Speaker 2: of all the people, you know, Whodini was never political,
Speaker 2: nothing like that, but he loved Lincoln.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to explore that.
Speaker 2: And it turned out when he was a kid, Whodini
Speaker 2: went to a seance in Wisconsin where he grew up,
Speaker 2: in Appleton, Wisconsin, in the heart of the Midwest, Midwest,
Speaker 2: the most midwestiest you can be, if that's a word,
Speaker 2: And the medium who was doing the seance brought forth Lincoln,
Speaker 2: because Lincoln was one of the big ones that kind
Speaker 2: of all mediums somehow had access to. And he brought
Speaker 2: forth Lincoln and you know, I'll take questions, and Houdini,
Speaker 2: who was this huge, little young Houdini, was a huge
Speaker 2: deve ote of Lincoln. Knew all these facts and all
Speaker 2: these trivia, and he asked kept asking Lincoln all this stuff.
Speaker 2: You know, what did you do after your mother died
Speaker 2: and so forth, and Lincoln, of course, the spirit Lincoln
Speaker 2: got all the questions wrong, and that's when Houdini knew
Speaker 2: that it was fake. And he was not so concerned
Speaker 2: that it was fake, but he was more concerned that
Speaker 2: it had kind of been presented as truth and it
Speaker 2: had kind of really hurt his feelings. And afterwards he
Speaker 2: kind of hung around and talked to the medium and
Speaker 2: he said, you know, why, why did you do that?
Speaker 3: And he said, that's what we all do.
Speaker 2: And he had this kind of crashing down of all
Speaker 2: his ideas of maybe what magic was and what other
Speaker 2: things were, including the afterlife, and that was I think
Speaker 2: the start of it. And there were other things along
Speaker 2: the way that just made him more resolved to kind
Speaker 2: of really wipe this. They always said they weren't a religion,
Speaker 2: but they really acted like a religion, spiritualism, and he
Speaker 2: wanted to wipe the earth clean of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I remember a story of a little girl from
Speaker 1: this is from the Ghost Club. A little girl who
Speaker 1: begged her father, please don't go. He was going on
Speaker 1: a transatlantic flight from the UK to America. Please don't go,
Speaker 1: Please don't go, And he said, she said, I think
Speaker 1: the ship's going to go down, and he says, no,
Speaker 1: don't be ridiculous and kisses her and gets on the Titanic.
Speaker 1: And so this is one of the many stories you
Speaker 1: know that they talked about in the Ghost Club. But
Speaker 1: talk to me about how spiritualism was born, not specifically
Speaker 1: in the United States, as in you know who came
Speaker 1: up with it? But why why did it spread? Because
Speaker 1: it did spread pretty quickly.
Speaker 2: I'm so glad you asked that, because that's I'm like
Speaker 2: giving you, like all these reasons why I wrote the book.
Speaker 2: This is kind of a big reason. Is this is
Speaker 2: a story about death.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: I mean you can say, like, well, it's a story
Speaker 2: about death, but really, how death is life winning? It's death.
Speaker 2: It starts with death. I mean, you have the Spanish
Speaker 2: flu pandemic, and then you have roughly the same time
Speaker 2: as World War One, and you have millions dead, millions dead.
Speaker 2: And I started, you know, doing this right at the
Speaker 2: end of the COVID pandemic, with the idea of you know,
Speaker 2: there's all these people who have died in such a
Speaker 2: short span of time.
Speaker 3: What are we going to do? How do we deal
Speaker 3: with this?
Speaker 2: I still don't think we've dealt with it at all,
Speaker 2: and when something like this happens, there's this sense of
Speaker 2: death as this kind of existential crime in that this
Speaker 2: isn't cool, right, that this is you know, we can
Speaker 2: kind of accept that we have to accept death right
Speaker 2: on a personal level people we know, and even with ourselves,
Speaker 2: but when it happens like that, it seems to me,
Speaker 2: and this isn't like an official analysis, but it seems
Speaker 2: to me that people kind of fight back a little
Speaker 2: bit more. And then you have the kind of resurgence
Speaker 2: of spiritualism in America certainly where Okay, we're not going
Speaker 2: to deal with all this pain and misery of all
Speaker 2: these people gone. We can talk to them. They're still here.
Speaker 2: We can pierce the veil, and you have, all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, all these believers coming out of everywhere. And
Speaker 2: just like you said before, it's kind of that little
Speaker 2: step from the scientific like kind of stepping up or
Speaker 2: stepping down where you look at it, it gets easier
Speaker 2: to do when there's so much death. And Okay, I
Speaker 2: believe in this because I want to talk to my
Speaker 2: brother who.
Speaker 3: Died in the war, or my father or whoever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's that trauma of not just a death,
Speaker 1: but with war it's not unexpected. But who what parent
Speaker 1: is going to go in and think, you know that
Speaker 1: my kid's going to be one of the ones who
Speaker 1: are going to die. They're praying it doesn't happen. It's
Speaker 1: that ripping that Lincoln felt, can you because I think
Speaker 1: what I had seen too is, you know, it was
Speaker 1: the rise after the Civil War where we hadn't experienced
Speaker 1: for one hundred years that sort of you know, devastation,
Speaker 1: and then Lincoln experienced it sort of directly, and that's
Speaker 1: where we get the stories. Can you tell me about
Speaker 1: Lincoln's experiences and his wife and all of that, just
Speaker 1: a quick little summary.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Lincoln loses his son very famously, and it's
Speaker 2: so tragic, and it's one of those stories that just
Speaker 2: no matter what version you read, it's just it's awful.
Speaker 2: It's true. I think historians agree that his wife, Mary
Speaker 2: Todd Lincoln looked to mediums for help. Again, like you said,
Speaker 2: the trauma, the grief, and she said that she would
Speaker 2: go to bed every night and see Willie at the
Speaker 2: foot of her bed, see his ghost, you know. And
Speaker 2: this is a mother going through trauma and of course
Speaker 2: she has. You know, people have tried to diagnose her
Speaker 2: for decades and decades, but you know, going through going
Speaker 2: through a lot, and so there's definite points that she
Speaker 2: consulted with the medium. There's later on, after her husband dies,
Speaker 2: she takes a famous spirit photograph with the ghost of
Speaker 2: Abe Lincoln. And this is one thing that the spiritualists
Speaker 2: later on in Houdini's time, point to. They say, well,
Speaker 2: you should believe even spiritualism because Abe Lincoln did. As
Speaker 2: for Abe himself, there's no tried and true proof, but
Speaker 2: there are plenty of anecdotes and plenty of stories. You know, mediums.
Speaker 2: There are a couple that would write books that say,
Speaker 2: you know, I sat with the president. I blacked out
Speaker 2: and came to and he said, well, thank you. You've
Speaker 2: just solved the problem of slavery. So that the mediums
Speaker 2: are acting as the president. And this is what causes
Speaker 2: this dangerous kind of thing that that Whodini is worried.
Speaker 3: Is going to happen again.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so there's plenty of this, and a lot
Speaker 2: of people even back then would claim Lincoln talk to
Speaker 2: them or came to them for comfort at the time
Speaker 2: of his greatest grief.
Speaker 1: So tell me Houdini's story. He grows up, he becomes
Speaker 1: this incredible, you know, magician and entertainer. Tell me, you
Speaker 1: know where you want to start with the and what
Speaker 1: his adventure is like. It starts with a curse, is
Speaker 1: what it sounds like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I knew I couldn't do the big comprehensive biography
Speaker 2: of Harry Houdini because that sounded like a lot of
Speaker 2: work now, But I wanted to look at just this
Speaker 2: part of his life where he fights spiritualism. It's kind
Speaker 2: of the last two years of his life more or less.
Speaker 2: Is he gets cursed by this famous there's a famous
Speaker 2: medium in Boston, and he gets cursed and the spirit
Speaker 2: says you're.
Speaker 3: Going to die.
Speaker 2: Houdini, enough is enough, and he doesn't take it seriously
Speaker 2: at all, though there are some points later on he'll write, well,
Speaker 2: if I get hit by a car, you're going to
Speaker 2: say the curse worked. But sure enough, two years later
Speaker 2: he's dead. So it's not that the curse worked, but
Speaker 2: those are the facts. So I wanted to look at
Speaker 2: those two years and see what he did and how
Speaker 2: he did it to, like I said, fight against this
Speaker 2: really powerful and you know, when you said, these are
Speaker 2: powerful people. Spiritualism was a really powerful movement, and he
Speaker 2: had found that they had infiltrated, you know, into kind
Speaker 2: of all aspects, you know, not just the everyday American
Speaker 2: who would go to a seants now and again as
Speaker 2: a kind of this weird kind of spiritual entertainment, but
Speaker 2: also into things like churches and businesses and even government.
Speaker 2: So that's the part I wanted to focus on.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, you know, Houdini, just from my research with
Speaker 1: Ghost Club, had clashed with quite a few people. You
Speaker 1: had people who really believed deeply in spiritualism, and then
Speaker 1: there were quite a lot of skeptics, and then there
Speaker 1: were some in the middle. So do you get very
Speaker 1: much into Houdini's very famous sort of a dissolving relationship
Speaker 1: with Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes, who was an
Speaker 1: incredible devoted spiritualist and you know, believed his wife was
Speaker 1: automatic writing, I think is what his wife did. So
Speaker 1: tell me, you know what about that relationship is before
Speaker 1: the curse happens after that relationship or before it starts
Speaker 1: to crumble.
Speaker 2: Kind of around the same time, and I have a
Speaker 2: great story for that. So Doyle and Houdini are at
Speaker 2: one point great friends because Houdini wants to be the
Speaker 2: perfect American, like really likes being friends with celebrities. He
Speaker 2: thinks it's really cool, and he really respects Sir Arthur
Speaker 2: and so forth. And then, as you alluded to, Sir
Speaker 2: Arthur after World War One has a lot of loss
Speaker 2: in his life and turns completely to spiritualism and becomes
Speaker 2: really the most famous figurehead of the movement and speaks
Speaker 2: really eloquently and goes on lecture tours and has slides
Speaker 2: of just ghosts everywhere and converts people on the.
Speaker 1: Spot and believes everybody. I think, I don't know if
Speaker 1: I remember him criticizing any medium that he ran across.
Speaker 1: He believed everything they said.
Speaker 2: What drives Houdini nuts is that Sir Arthur, who is
Speaker 2: very smart and like you said, it creates homes right,
Speaker 2: the ultimate detective. What drives Houdini nuts is that Doyle
Speaker 2: will find a way to explain every little thing. So
Speaker 2: if a medium makes a mistake, Doyle has a reason why.
Speaker 2: So a great example of this is Doyle invites Houdini
Speaker 2: and his wife Bess to Atlantic City for a small
Speaker 2: vacation with the family, et cetera. And while they're there, Doyle,
Speaker 2: who's constantly trying to convert Houdini, says, you know, sit
Speaker 2: with my wife and she will do a seance for
Speaker 2: your mother. Houdini's mother had died in nineteen thirteen. They're
Speaker 2: famously extremely close, and this really affects Sudini in a
Speaker 2: great way. So they sit for the seance and she does,
Speaker 2: like he says, automatic writing. She becomes possessed, her eyes
Speaker 2: roll back in her head and she just starts writing.
Speaker 2: And she presents these pages to Houdini and they're from
Speaker 2: his mother, and she says, I miss you so much.
Speaker 2: I can't wait till you come join me. It's so
Speaker 2: wonderful here and so on and so forth. And Houdini
Speaker 2: stares at her and he says, this is I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2: He says, this is fine, but he says, my mother
Speaker 2: never spoke a word of English. She was Hungarian, and
Speaker 2: so of course the automatic writing was all in English.
Speaker 2: And Sir Arthur says, well, in the afterlife they have
Speaker 2: spiritual colleges, and she would have learned English by that,
Speaker 2: Oh God. And Houdini's furious. And that's when the fight
Speaker 2: is well and truly on.
Speaker 1: Well because he's insulting Doyle's wife. Not just a medium.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is Doyle's wife who he just absolutely
Speaker 1: adored and believe and oh yeah, said she was brilliant,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, that's pretty incredible. That must have been
Speaker 1: very uncomfortable after that happened. So the curse comes up,
Speaker 1: and let's say the medium was fake. What would be
Speaker 1: the motivation do you think for a medium to declare
Speaker 1: that one of the most famous people in the world
Speaker 1: is going to die in the next however many years,
Speaker 1: what's that motivation?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's the question.
Speaker 2: Because the Spiritualists, like I said, were very powerful, and
Speaker 2: they had a governing body called the National Spiritualists Association,
Speaker 2: who's still around today. And they were really awesome. And
Speaker 2: when I dealt with them, they gave me their secret
Speaker 2: file they had on Houdini, which was really cool and
Speaker 2: a lot of other really great stuff. They're super nice,
Speaker 2: they were very powerful, they were making a lot of money.
Speaker 2: Most of them, to a person, hated Houdini because if
Speaker 2: he had his way, they would be out of a job.
Speaker 2: They would be out of a very lucrative job. Mediums
Speaker 2: were like making a lot of money and Houdini ultimately,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the big narratives in the book
Speaker 2: is he testifies before Congress and in support of a
Speaker 2: bill that it's kind of a small bill, it's an
Speaker 2: anti fortune telling bill, but it's one of those bills
Speaker 2: that can be interpreted as you know, kind of putting
Speaker 2: restrictions on spiritualism and spiritualist readings. There would be a
Speaker 2: license fee, there would be all this other sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2: So they were looking, they were making a lot of money,
Speaker 2: and they saw Houdini as a threat. And you could
Speaker 2: see this, and they would have all these conferences like
Speaker 2: all over the world, and they would just shout out
Speaker 2: how terrible Houdini was and he was just the worst
Speaker 2: thing to happen to the movement, and that people must
Speaker 2: shut their eyes to what he was saying and believe
Speaker 2: in the afterlife, believe in what their relatives were telling them.
Speaker 2: So when I started to see that in all these
Speaker 2: speeches that were just too spiritualist, it made me realize
Speaker 2: that they were taking this much more seriously than a
Speaker 2: kind of parlor trick of let's spook Udini and curse them.
Speaker 1: You would think that must dim from complaints or something
Speaker 1: of the way I framed it in Ghost Club is
Speaker 1: picturing a woman who was scraping together all of her
Speaker 1: money because she lost her son in World War One.
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm not talking about these influential men
Speaker 1: who had you know, millions, hundreds of thousands and would
Speaker 1: meet in London like the woman who is saving all
Speaker 1: of her money and maybe not even feeding her kids
Speaker 1: because she wants to connect with her dead soldier son
Speaker 1: one more time. Do you think that was the motivation
Speaker 1: or do you think there was some sort of weird
Speaker 1: competition between the standard religions you know as we know
Speaker 1: it and spiritualism.
Speaker 3: I think yes to all that.
Speaker 2: I think there was definitely this kind of lower middle
Speaker 2: class appeal to spiritualism. Those are the folks that lost
Speaker 2: the most people in both tragedies, and also kind of
Speaker 2: I don't want to say, but more like kind of
Speaker 2: open to this kind of alternative religion. Even though they
Speaker 2: said it was never a religion, it totally was. But
Speaker 2: it was also a competition with Houdini for entertainment dollars,
Speaker 2: you know, because people pointed out and it's hard not
Speaker 2: to see it that way. That is he kind of
Speaker 2: is that the apex of his career and this other
Speaker 2: like movement is in every city in America, you have people,
Speaker 2: you know, what should I pay for? Should I go
Speaker 2: punt down money for the magician or for another kind
Speaker 2: of magician that would let me talk to like you said,
Speaker 2: my dead son.
Speaker 1: So his relationship with Doyle is sort of this integrated.
Speaker 1: He gets this curse and he's also testing mediums. I
Speaker 1: think is from what I remember. Can you tell me
Speaker 1: some of the good stories that you came up with,
Speaker 1: because I remember a pair of brothers who would drag
Speaker 1: a a closet I think, are a cupboard all over
Speaker 1: America and the Davenport brothers, I think, yeah, right, and
Speaker 1: then you would hear Knox, and you would hear a
Speaker 1: piano playing and all kinds of stuff, and the two
Speaker 1: guys were standing there. So there were a lot of
Speaker 1: opportunities to disprove table spinning and the automatic writing, and
Speaker 1: there were physical tools that medium used. So was he
Speaker 1: able to dispel some stuff in a creative way?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I describe parts of this to somebody. They said, well
Speaker 2: is this scary? Is this book scary? And I'm like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: some parts are terrifying, but some parts are like really
Speaker 2: hilarious because some of the stuff that both sides would do,
Speaker 2: that the spiritualists would do to try and convince their
Speaker 2: people who had paid good money, but then the people
Speaker 2: are trying to catch them. It's just really this cat
Speaker 2: and mouse. So Houdini had this group that he called
Speaker 2: the Secret Service because he kind of saw himself as
Speaker 2: this kind of president of magic, which he really was,
Speaker 2: but he had this group called the Secret Service, and
Speaker 2: they would go around the entire country. They would usually
Speaker 2: go ahead of him where he would go on tour
Speaker 2: and kind of stake the place out. And some of
Speaker 2: the best parts of this is that they were mostly women.
Speaker 2: His best agents were women.
Speaker 1: Do you think mediums that's their number one client when
Speaker 1: they think it's women mostly? Yeah, interesting, Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: the reason.
Speaker 2: And it was because people, you know, thought the secret
Speaker 2: agent would be the guy, and also that they said
Speaker 2: that the woman agent could disguise herself in a number
Speaker 2: of different ways. So his number one agent, and my
Speaker 2: favorite person in the whole book was this woman named
Speaker 2: Rose Mackenberg and she was from Brooklyn and she just
Speaker 2: got hooked up with Houdini in kind of a really
Speaker 2: weird way. She goes to a seance and she just
Speaker 2: totally debunks it because she's just this no nonsense, you know,
Speaker 2: don't tell me this is a ghost when it's really this.
Speaker 2: And he hires her and she goes on this solo crusade,
Speaker 2: even away from Houdini but working for him, of just
Speaker 2: shutting down all these mediums. And she has a million stories,
Speaker 2: like there's one like you said, where instruments would play
Speaker 2: and there was a drum playing and a trumpet was
Speaker 2: playing and this is all and everyone can see this,
Speaker 2: and the idea is that, oh, it must be the
Speaker 2: spirits who are doing right, and Rose just refused to
Speaker 2: believe it. So she comes back the next night. She
Speaker 2: disguises herself as this old lady, and once the lights
Speaker 2: go out and they start doing it again, she gets
Speaker 2: off her seat and crawls around the room and she
Speaker 2: goes behind the drum, the bass drum, and looks inside
Speaker 2: and she's like, will I touch ectoplayism? And she writes
Speaker 2: all these great like diaries and stuff, so we have
Speaker 2: this awesome first person view of it all, and she
Speaker 2: finds there's a guy in there, a little person who's
Speaker 2: just banging the drum, and there's this great moment where
Speaker 2: they both just stare at each other because they're terrified
Speaker 2: that one's gonna tell on the other, and they just
Speaker 2: back off and she later, you know, busts the medium
Speaker 2: and it's all over. But there's there's just so many
Speaker 2: stories like this of these people who weren't Houdini but
Speaker 2: believed in his crusade that would go and break down
Speaker 2: even you know, from the simplest local spirit medium too.
Speaker 2: There's another there's a journalist named Virginia Swain who gets
Speaker 2: sent to He sends to a spiritualist camp in Illinois
Speaker 2: called Chesterfield. It's still there today, and she's there for
Speaker 2: a couple weeks and the stuff that happens is just
Speaker 2: completely bananas. But at the end they discover who she
Speaker 2: is and they try to lyncher, but she gets out
Speaker 2: in time and reports it to the newspapers and it
Speaker 2: runs in syndication.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. And you know the stories of debunking these mediums,
Speaker 1: I mean, they've range from what I found, They ranged
Speaker 1: to really simple spotting. So you know, we can talk
Speaker 1: about One of my favorite things is the spiritual photography.
Speaker 1: I can't remember if there's a is there a phrase
Speaker 1: for that or is that what it is?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Spirit photos?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and you know the idea of the double exposure,
Speaker 1: and people didn't really understand that, So did Whodini. Do
Speaker 1: you think, like, how would he know or how were
Speaker 1: these people know what to look for? And how would
Speaker 1: they not get exposed to the medium world? You know,
Speaker 1: as well, somebody's out there looking at you. Be careful
Speaker 1: and this is how you might change yourself so that
Speaker 1: you don't get caught or something like that.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's such a great question. Yeah.
Speaker 2: They were terrified of that. They were terrified that he
Speaker 2: would come to town. They were terrified that he was
Speaker 2: in the room disguised. He was their worst nightmare. And
Speaker 2: the cool thing I found about Whodini is that he
Speaker 2: would kind of he just assumed it was all fake.
Speaker 2: And the way he would know for sure is if
Speaker 2: he could replicate it, because that's how he did his
Speaker 2: magic tricks. He would see a magic trick and say,
Speaker 2: well I can do that, and they'd figure it out.
Speaker 2: So with the Spirit photos, he just got a camera
Speaker 2: and just messed around with it at his house in Harlem,
Speaker 2: and they just there's stories of him and his brother,
Speaker 2: just like you know, messing around with this camera for hours,
Speaker 2: and he eventually produces a series of photos and he
Speaker 2: produces one a very famous one where he's talking to Lincoln,
Speaker 2: and he releases this one and some of the New
Speaker 2: York papers pick it up, like Whodini sees the light,
Speaker 2: Whodini speaks to Lincoln. And then he comes around, you know,
Speaker 2: after all this and says, you know, you're all morons.
Speaker 3: I did this in my basement.
Speaker 2: And then he shows how he does it like he
Speaker 2: does like a newspaper or magazine article where he goes
Speaker 2: step by step how he made the spirit photo. So
Speaker 2: he tries to debunk it and make it as practical
Speaker 2: as possible.
Speaker 1: Do you think that convinced people? And the press is
Speaker 1: covering it right? Does this get through to the people?
Speaker 1: And it was an extraordinary number. I can't remember how
Speaker 1: many Americans it was, one hundred thousand or something associated
Speaker 1: themselves with spiritualism in the twenties a lot. Did you
Speaker 1: have a better number than that?
Speaker 2: I did not have a number, and I think it
Speaker 2: was a ton more. Yeah, because just looking at like
Speaker 2: every city in the newspaper they would advertise, so even
Speaker 2: if they didn't have a church like New York and
Speaker 2: DC and all the big cities would have a church
Speaker 2: or many church, but there were always people coming around
Speaker 2: or that were just camped out there as like your
Speaker 2: local media, right, I've heard one hundred the same for
Speaker 2: people that were kind of card carrying members. But there
Speaker 2: were so many that were just doing it, going to
Speaker 2: the seances, talking these people, paying to these people. So
Speaker 2: it's hard to think. But your first question is the
Speaker 2: best one, is like did this work? Did he convince anybody?
Speaker 2: Because that's the one I really wanted to know, because
Speaker 2: I think that resonates today a little bit. You know,
Speaker 2: here's all this overwhelming evidence. Can I convince you? No? Okay,
Speaker 2: So I don't know if it convinced as many people.
Speaker 2: I know it didn't convince as many people as he
Speaker 2: wanted it to.
Speaker 1: And he never expressed doubts in any way. I mean
Speaker 1: with the loss of his mother. So William Yates, the poet,
Speaker 1: the famous poet, was also in the ghost Club. He
Speaker 1: had lost his mother also, and that is what tipped
Speaker 1: him into spiritualism. Was this just awful loss. So it's
Speaker 1: interesting when one one way goes, you know, one person
Speaker 1: goes one way and one goes the other. And it
Speaker 1: seems like Houdini was angry about being lied to about
Speaker 1: his mother, and that's kind of what at least the
Speaker 1: emotional part of it. What about his wife, What did
Speaker 1: his wife believe?
Speaker 3: Was it best best?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Houdini did try to reach his mother through mediums,
Speaker 2: and it was almost I think it was doomed to
Speaker 2: fail because he kind of knew it wasn't going to work.
Speaker 2: But there's lots of stories and lots of anecdotes that
Speaker 2: he did try and he was kept trying, and that
Speaker 2: one of the main reasons he went after this, just
Speaker 2: like you said went after the spiritualist, is because they
Speaker 2: let him down. It was also because there he had
Speaker 2: all these scrap books that he collected of all these
Speaker 2: evil things that spiritualism had done to people who like
Speaker 2: driving them to suicide or kill their parents. But Bess
Speaker 2: is the real enigma because no one knows what she was.
Speaker 2: His constant companion. She was more than you know, just
Speaker 2: the kind of magician's wife. She was his assistant on
Speaker 2: stage forever in the beginning, and then kind of you know,
Speaker 2: did some more behind the scenes stuff as to what
Speaker 2: she believed nobody knows. There's very little left behind. After
Speaker 2: Houdini died, she started doing a seance for him to
Speaker 2: contact him. But it's hard to tell, like how much
Speaker 2: of that was heartfelt and how much of that was
Speaker 2: a kind of promotional stunt, right, yeahmative, But during the
Speaker 2: mix of it, when it's when Houdini's cursed and you know,
Speaker 2: in his crusade, it's really hard to see what she thought.
Speaker 2: She was a real enigma to me, and I found
Speaker 2: something about her. I think about her in the book
Speaker 2: that I put in an epilogue that might be kind
Speaker 2: of like the missing key to all of it.
Speaker 1: Does Houdini throughout all of this, is he ever stumped?
Speaker 1: Do you think by a medium or you know, somebody
Speaker 1: who is you know, claiming to be I mean they
Speaker 1: called him a lot of different things. It was like
Speaker 1: mystic mediums. Yeah, the people who were kind of the conductors.
Speaker 1: Did he find anybody who stumped him or that you
Speaker 1: know of, or where he came close to saying.
Speaker 3: Maybe, I don't know, Yeah, there was one, and there's
Speaker 3: only one.
Speaker 2: Because you get this feeling that he Whodini was kind
Speaker 2: of I mean, he fascinates me. I don't claim to
Speaker 2: know him at all. He's one of those subjects where
Speaker 2: you just kind of have to write all the way
Speaker 2: around him and then you get kind of kind of
Speaker 2: get a sense of it. But a lot of times
Speaker 2: I think he was kind of a jerk. Like people
Speaker 2: would say, here's my medium act you mean, he would
Speaker 2: just say, no, that's bunk, that's you know, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: There was one that stumped him that he didn't know
Speaker 2: how they did it. There was some woman who had
Speaker 2: died in Los Angeles. They took a picture of her
Speaker 2: casket because it's you know, that's what people did, and
Speaker 2: there was this weird light around it, like by her head.
Speaker 2: And for some reason he always would come back and say,
Speaker 2: this is the one I couldn't explain. And I don't
Speaker 2: know why, because it seems like that would be like
Speaker 2: the most easiest thing to do. But for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: he said, and he would said this a bunch of times,
Speaker 2: this is the one I cannot explain.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I wonder what people think with spirit photography.
Speaker 1: I think it was William Hope was the big one,
Speaker 1: the big spirit. He was the one who had Doyle
Speaker 1: with Lincoln and you know, some really famous photos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder what the explanation was for why still film
Speaker 1: would be able to pick up on a spirit or
Speaker 1: a light associated with the spirit with that the human
Speaker 1: eye wouldn't come up with. And I always just thought
Speaker 1: I wish somebody could explain what they were thinking with that.
Speaker 2: That's a great question, because I think we take that
Speaker 2: for ranted. And it's not like photography was new, but
Speaker 2: it was still I think photography was mysterious, yeah right,
Speaker 2: not like not the average person knew how to do it.
Speaker 2: And it seemed like if there was something with anything
Speaker 2: visual that if you saw it, it was like that
Speaker 2: kind of took the place of I don't want to
Speaker 2: say it took the place of science because science is
Speaker 2: seen two. But it was so easy to believe what
Speaker 2: you would see. And this like Doyle's famous He makes
Speaker 2: his film The Lost World with the dinosaurs, and he
Speaker 2: shows it in New York and people are like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, these are real, and if you've seen them,
Speaker 2: they look like gumby, right, But it's if you see it,
Speaker 2: you believe it. And I don't want to say that, well,
Speaker 2: you know, people were just naive in the twenties, but
Speaker 2: I think it's just the scope of experience, of historical
Speaker 2: experience of what you see.
Speaker 1: Well, of course Doyle hints at his beliefs in Christmas Carol,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite stories, but that Beneezer Scrooge and
Speaker 1: all of that. So the opposite just having faith, the
Speaker 1: opposite of the very clinical and scientific Sherlock Holmes. So
Speaker 1: there's this two year period right where Houdini's going on
Speaker 1: this crusade. What is he thinking the endgame is going
Speaker 1: to be? Because he cannot debunk everybody in America, and
Speaker 1: of course there were just plenty in the UK, and
Speaker 1: he would come to the UK often. Did you get
Speaker 1: a sense for was it going to Congress and getting
Speaker 1: some kind of legislation all the books to stop these people?
Speaker 2: He really wanted that bill to pass. It's this just
Speaker 2: really outrageous. All these scenes of him in front of
Speaker 2: the Congressional committee, like doing magic tricks to try and
Speaker 2: convince him.
Speaker 3: It's just it's priceless.
Speaker 2: But I think the answer is he really wanted that
Speaker 2: to pass, but he really thought he could wipe it out.
Speaker 2: I mean, he had that kind of ego. He was Houdini.
Speaker 2: He thought everything was possible. And of course you can't
Speaker 2: wipe out, you know that kind of phenomenon. It kind
Speaker 2: of ends eventually, kind of naturally on its own, and
Speaker 2: plenty of people believe in it today.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he thought he could, he could really
Speaker 2: do it. He was that kind of manic.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I think about, and what
Speaker 1: I was thinking about in the book, and I knew
Speaker 1: you would too, is is that idea of having that
Speaker 1: faith versus the scientific whatever the evidence is, and having
Speaker 1: somebody go through and debunking, and how upsetting that must
Speaker 1: have been to the true believers. And then sometimes I
Speaker 1: think does it do any harm? Like? What is the harm?
Speaker 1: So you've got the woman that I made up. She's
Speaker 1: saved up her money, she's lost a son, she's in
Speaker 1: a lot of pain, and she has a medium. The
Speaker 1: medium says, your son is standing over your right shoulder,
Speaker 1: and he is telling me I love you, mom, Everything
Speaker 1: is fine. I will see you when I'm meant to
Speaker 1: see you, and you know, God be with you or
Speaker 1: whatever he says. So I was thinking about that, and
Speaker 1: I had wondered if Hodini had thought about that two way.
Speaker 1: Is there harm actually harm in that?
Speaker 2: I don't think there is. I think it's kind of wonderful.
Speaker 2: I think Houdini though there was no either or, and
Speaker 2: he would say I know exactly what he would say.
Speaker 2: He would tell the story of the Robbins family. Husband
Speaker 2: and wife in Iowa live on a farm trying to
Speaker 2: have a child. They finally succeed. They have this beautiful
Speaker 2: daughter named Constance Vivian. She dies five hours later, you know.
Speaker 2: Wrecked with grief, the mother goes on a trip a
Speaker 2: few months later to Chicago, meets with her sister, so
Speaker 2: and so forth, meets a medium and the medium says,
Speaker 2: I can bring her back to you. And she says,
Speaker 2: talk like, you know, so I can see her. She's like, no,
Speaker 2: I can bring her back to you. She gives her
Speaker 2: an elaborate series of instructions. They have to go back
Speaker 2: to their house and wait to be given the sign,
Speaker 2: and they have to wear all white. And on the
Speaker 2: night in the night she gives her put flowers all
Speaker 2: through the child's room and they're wearing all white and
Speaker 2: they sit there in the dark and wait and there's
Speaker 2: no sound. It's just pure silence and nothing happens. And
Speaker 2: this is kind of I think this is the best
Speaker 2: part of the story. The husband goes, well, I'm going
Speaker 2: to bed, So he gets up and he doesn't want
Speaker 2: to wait anymore. He goes to bed, and the wife
Speaker 2: is still sitting there and she hears steps on the
Speaker 2: staircase and the door opens and there's a shape. She says,
Speaker 2: it's not a person, it's a shape, and it's holding
Speaker 2: a baby, and she gives the baby to her and
Speaker 2: it's her daughter, she says, down to the two birthmarks,
Speaker 2: it's her. She goes to the press. She says it's
Speaker 2: a miracle. The husband comes around eventually and says believes
Speaker 2: in it too, how do you explain it? Soon after,
Speaker 2: the woman says, I'm moving to California to be with
Speaker 2: this medium who did all this to work in her
Speaker 2: spiritual center and spread the good word and the hood days.
Speaker 2: Separate with the husband and that's that. A couple of
Speaker 2: years later, the spiritual center kind of breaks down for
Speaker 2: fraud and all this other stuff, and the woman is
Speaker 2: interviewed by the press missus Robinson. She says, I know
Speaker 2: this isn't my daughter anymore, but I really want to
Speaker 2: keep her. My only fear is that she will disappear
Speaker 2: through a window someday, like she's a ghost. So Houdini
Speaker 2: loved that story because that story is the worst, right,
Speaker 2: instead of the comforting aspect, you have the medium who
Speaker 2: prays on and this really happened. This wasn't just some
Speaker 2: like plenty of these things are just stories, but this
Speaker 2: happened and gives her a child, and then it extracts
Speaker 2: money from her, you know, over a period of five years.
Speaker 2: And where the child came from. You know, all these
Speaker 2: reporters try to find and no one's figured it out.
Speaker 2: So that would be his answer that for all the
Speaker 2: small comforts it can give someone, there were people who
Speaker 2: were really preying on people who were grieving.
Speaker 1: I think that the stories have been so interesting for me.
Speaker 1: The interesting also part is the mechanics of the mediums
Speaker 1: in this time period. I looked it up because you
Speaker 1: and I didn't know the definite numbers, and I looked
Speaker 1: it up and it was at its heyday around the
Speaker 1: you know, late eighteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 1: before it kind of turned into fringe religion more than
Speaker 1: anything else. Eight million people in the United States and
Speaker 1: Europe combined identified as spiritualists. Well million, that's incredible. It
Speaker 1: was such a big deal and then it sort of
Speaker 1: faded and faded into oblivion. And then what a lot
Speaker 1: of people now associate that with is like miss Cleo.
Speaker 1: Do you remember Miss Cleo?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, from the TV commercials. So I had wrestled with
Speaker 1: it in my book. But what do you think do
Speaker 1: you think we can talk to you know, the people
Speaker 1: in a different realm? Is there a different realm?
Speaker 2: So I wrote this book from Whodini's, you know, kind
Speaker 2: of like his point of view that it's all not real,
Speaker 2: because I knew if I separated that it would be
Speaker 2: too difficult to navigate, and I don't think it would work.
Speaker 2: So I knew I had to do it through Houdini's way.
Speaker 2: And then you can, you know, see how he dismantles
Speaker 2: all of it and gets to what I think he
Speaker 2: thought was more than that. I think what his version
Speaker 2: of magic was that being set. I have a ghost story.
Speaker 2: So I do believe it, and I had it in
Speaker 2: the book as like the last chapter, and they said
Speaker 2: cut that what I kind of at first I was mad,
Speaker 2: but I agree because you have to stay on Houdini's
Speaker 2: you know that this was was to him, it was
Speaker 2: all fake, and nobody would talk him out of it,
Speaker 2: just like Doyle. Doyle's the counterpoint, Like you said, he
Speaker 2: could not be talked out of it. And I really
Speaker 2: wanted to get that because of you know, things going
Speaker 2: on today, of being so focused that you kind of
Speaker 2: you can can miss things, you can miss the truth.
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, I do think and my version of
Speaker 2: it is kind of Whodini's version. Hohodini thought the greatest
Speaker 2: thing that can happen to you in life is coincidence.
Speaker 2: He thought coincidence was just pure magic, more so than
Speaker 2: any kind of sign or card trick. He said, when
Speaker 2: there's good coincidence, he's like, that is the best thing there.
Speaker 2: I totally agree with that. I think that can be
Speaker 2: better than a ghost story, if that makes sense. But yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I do think there's something right. I mean, you made
Speaker 2: me answer it.
Speaker 3: What do you think.
Speaker 1: I grew up myself in what was always told was
Speaker 1: a haunted farmhouse. I say it in the book. You
Speaker 1: know that it was owned by the county's first undertaker,
Speaker 1: and have we had original floors And I looked under
Speaker 1: the trapdoor in the closet one time and there was
Speaker 1: no insulation. I mean it was woodplanks. These were legit
Speaker 1: floors from eighteen ninety, I think is when it was built.
Speaker 1: And I've always just thought, what is it in those
Speaker 1: floors because it was before and then during embalming when
Speaker 1: he worked. So if you just think about all of that,
Speaker 1: I just I'm not convinced that having that many bodies
Speaker 1: in a house, many of them were murder victims or
Speaker 1: domestic violence or whatever, that there isn't some residue literal,
Speaker 1: literal and figurative residue that's there. But you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: living in a house from eighteen hundreds, there's creeks and
Speaker 1: it scared me to death growing up. But what's your
Speaker 1: ghost story?
Speaker 2: My mom broke her wrist many many years ago, and
Speaker 2: she fell down the stairs and she had to go
Speaker 2: to the hospital get it like set in eight places.
Speaker 2: You know, it's really bad. And she kept saying, I
Speaker 2: was pushed, I was pushed, and she you know, ended
Speaker 2: up like in the adjacent room. So something happened. So whatever,
Speaker 2: you know, she's recovering. I don't want to say it's funny,
Speaker 2: but she had to like elevate her her arm. So
Speaker 2: my dad, like you know, goes up and screws this
Speaker 2: giant metal hook in the ceiling and then you know,
Speaker 2: wheels her arm up. So the whole time she's like,
Speaker 2: looks like she's answering a question in a classroom. She's
Speaker 2: a teacher, so anyway, she keeps saying, you know, I
Speaker 2: was pushed, and then she said, someone's poking me.
Speaker 3: Someone's poking me. Like, what are you talking about? Mom?
Speaker 2: Then she sees someone on TV, a kind of local
Speaker 2: medium called the Ghost Lady. I live in Cleveland. She's
Speaker 2: still around, and she was saying for Halloween, you could
Speaker 2: like go to some bar and she would tell you
Speaker 2: about ghosts.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: So my mom wants to bring her to the house,
Speaker 2: and you know, she's in a lot of pain. She's
Speaker 2: not that kind of person, but we're like, okay, we'll
Speaker 2: do it. And somebody came and she said, you have
Speaker 2: a ghost. You have a child, a girl. She followed
Speaker 2: you home from school. And we're sitting in the room
Speaker 2: and I'm not really buying this, and my dad's next
Speaker 2: to me, he's not really buying it. And she's like, oh,
Speaker 2: but she has a dog with her, And all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, I'm like, okay, let's go. Let's tell me
Speaker 2: more about the ghost stop because that's the coolest part, right.
Speaker 2: She's like, well, she's a golden labrador, so apparently she
Speaker 2: didn't mean to knock my mom down the stairs or
Speaker 2: so forth, but she did, and she doesn't want to leave.
Speaker 2: I have a younger brother and sister. And she's like,
Speaker 2: she likes her sister's room. It's very pink, creepy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and well it gets worse. She goes she likes the pony,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, okay, this is all you know, you
Speaker 2: can come up with this. The pony's name is Princess,
Speaker 2: and my sister turns white and she's like, it is princess.
Speaker 2: Now at this point, I'm like, that's a gamble to
Speaker 2: say princess. It's not like the worst gamble, right, but
Speaker 2: it's still a gamble.
Speaker 3: It was it was a little impressive, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so she's like, okay, now I'm going to like
Speaker 2: tell them to go home. This is like the Poltergeist moment.
Speaker 2: This is the part that I never understand. But you know,
Speaker 2: people claim they can do it, so that's great.
Speaker 1: So is this an exorcism? Is this like is that
Speaker 1: what she's saying? She's going to do an exorcism?
Speaker 3: It's Poultergeys go to the light.
Speaker 1: Oh and I think exorcism is taking the devil out
Speaker 1: of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, they're not evil. But so here I step
Speaker 2: in because I'm kind of a freak. I said, hold on,
Speaker 2: I want to take a picture. So I have like
Speaker 2: four cameras, I have like digital camera, a little camera,
Speaker 2: and I take pictures of the staircase where they're on
Speaker 2: and okay, okay, now you can do your thing.
Speaker 3: And she's like, she does not like me the medium.
Speaker 2: And she does her thing, and I go check the
Speaker 2: you know, later on, I checked the cameras, all the
Speaker 2: digital cameras and so forth.
Speaker 3: Absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2: I take one photo with one of those like plastic
Speaker 2: cameras with the real film, and I took a bunch
Speaker 2: like around the house. Those all developed great. The one
Speaker 2: of the staircase pure white, and I don't have a flash.
Speaker 2: So this happens, and I'm like, so I don't know.
Speaker 2: But then my sister she had said the girl had
Speaker 2: died in a sledding accident. And my sister, who's like
Speaker 2: kind of annoying about this, like looked it up, like
Speaker 2: researched it, and she says, I found out who the
Speaker 2: girl was, and I said, I never want to know
Speaker 2: that because if she used some real I'm like that.
Speaker 2: And I felt like Kudini, like this is where the
Speaker 2: rage comes from.
Speaker 3: You know, why would you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the deposite of what you're talking about, like
Speaker 2: for comfort, like use this this girl's tragedy to just
Speaker 2: get like a couple hundred bucks. So I didn't really
Speaker 2: buy the ghost story, but it could have been a
Speaker 2: ghost story.
Speaker 1: I want your sister to email me.
Speaker 3: My sister's a huge fan of you, so yeah, and.
Speaker 1: Then we'll confront the medium together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's a good it's a good story. Now.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's pretty public knowledge how Houdini dies. I
Speaker 1: did not realize it until I looked it up. But
Speaker 1: can we put a conclusion on this, because you know,
Speaker 1: my hope was that he just sort of went to
Speaker 1: sleep and just didn't wake up and then you know,
Speaker 1: a curse whatever. And Bess's like, well, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but he had a pretty painful death, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It was Halloween ninety nine years ago this year. He
Speaker 2: had ruptured appendix infection. The story is that right before
Speaker 2: he was going to give a lecture at McGill university,
Speaker 2: a student kind of walked into his dressing room, and
Speaker 2: there's different versions of what happened, but basically just started
Speaker 2: punching him in the stomach. The general anecdote of the
Speaker 2: stories that Houdini dared him to do so because he
Speaker 2: had he could like make his stomach like super ripped
Speaker 2: and nobody could touch him, which sounds a lot like Houdini, right.
Speaker 2: The problem with the story is that there's no evidence
Speaker 2: of Houdini ever doing this before, because when he would
Speaker 2: do something, he would do it a billion times, like
Speaker 2: his famous taking his thumb off trick or all this
Speaker 2: kind of stuff. So what I found in the book
Speaker 2: is I knew I couldn't and a lot of people
Speaker 2: have looked at like, you know, what happened when he
Speaker 2: was in the hospital and what happened in the punching.
Speaker 2: I looked more at the background of his assailant, who
Speaker 2: was a guy named Gordon Whitehead who grew up in
Speaker 2: this really small town in British Columbia. All these Houdini
Speaker 2: characters just go through history and they don't say anything.
Speaker 2: He says very little in the historical record. But I
Speaker 2: found that he had a very radicalizing childhood, a possibly
Speaker 2: radicalizing childhood with spiritualism, very anti immigrant, very right wing.
Speaker 2: Houdini was an immigrant but tried to disguise it his
Speaker 2: entire life. You always said, I'm from Appleton, Wisconsin, And
Speaker 2: only after he died was it revealed that he was
Speaker 2: born in Hungary. So I kind of put this portrait
Speaker 2: of him together where there could be reasons of him
Speaker 2: going And I want people to think if there reasons
Speaker 2: for him going after Houdini and not just hey buddy,
Speaker 2: let me punch you in the stomach and see if
Speaker 2: it hurts.
Speaker 3: It was a vicious attack.
Speaker 2: There were two eyewitnesses, and there's some weird connections where
Speaker 2: he says some strange things. But maybe there doesn't need
Speaker 2: to be an exact connection to think of that. Maybe
Speaker 2: he was one of these people, like you said earlier,
Speaker 2: a believer who once they're seeing Houdini kind of wreck
Speaker 2: their belief system, just got angry. I mean, I don't
Speaker 2: know that for sure at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, do you think that Whodini would have been
Speaker 1: pleased with the demise of Spiritualism, which I think I
Speaker 1: don't even know. Spiritualism as a major movement made it
Speaker 1: out of the nineteen twenties, but I'm not sure. It
Speaker 1: seems like it would be ripe for a resurgence around
Speaker 1: the Great Depression, but I'm just not sure it lasted
Speaker 1: much longer than Hudini.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's still If you go to Lilydale
Speaker 2: in New York once a year, they have a huge
Speaker 2: festival and they're really nice and really cool, and lily
Speaker 2: Dale is a spiritualist community. You can go there and
Speaker 2: get your you know, get a reading or whatever, and
Speaker 2: they have a lot of really important artifacts there. You know,
Speaker 2: I wondered if it would after COVID. I think it has.
Speaker 2: I have this kind of weird theory that spiritualism, the
Speaker 2: new spiritualism is Facebook. That Facebook has become this kind
Speaker 2: of afterlife that you know, once a year, I'll get
Speaker 2: a happy birthday for someone that I, you know, was
Speaker 2: friends with who's died, and people will just shower with
Speaker 2: happy Birthday, Happy heavenly bird, which is, like you said,
Speaker 2: I think that's comforting, and that's I mean, who am
Speaker 2: I to to judge that, But I think Facebook has
Speaker 2: become that kind of space, and now with AI, like
Speaker 2: everyone's kind of hosting pictures of themselves, like doing something
Speaker 2: in Ai. It's like this idealized heavenly image. Yeah, that
Speaker 2: facebooks where everything's perfect, everything, everybody's happy, everybody's I mean
Speaker 2: I'm not happy at all at Facebook, but just people
Speaker 2: like they live on I mean, some part of that
Speaker 2: is cool, but to me, some part of that is
Speaker 2: really it feels like spiritualism in a way.
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