The immigrant born as Ehrich Weiss became more than a star.  Throughout his career, Harry Houdini continuously upended public perceptions of magic and reality with daring escapes, feats of mentalism and, toward the end of his life, debunking the claims of spiritualists.  As committed as he was to furthering magic, he was equally devoted to the pursuit of truth and spent much of his last years exposing fraudulent mediums, spirit photographers and others who claimed to communicate with the dead. 

Spiritualism began as a religious awakening movement in 1848, when two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, stated that they had been able to contact the spirit of a deceased peddler, “Mr. Splitfoot”, and began to hold séances in their home for $1 per person.  Although the séances themselves were revealed to be fraudulent, the movement the Fox sisters inspired continued for almost a century, acquiring famous advocates and believers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimke sisters and, later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

It would make perfect sense on the surface that Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, and Houdini, the great skeptic, would be good friends.  A casual observer might think that both of them were committed to understanding and explaining how the impossible was indeed possible.  Houdini authored a number of books about magic secrets, and Sherlock Holmes remains one of the finest detectives in literary history.  However, Conan Doyle had suffered the loss of his first wife in 1910 after a long illness and the death of his son in World War I.  These tragedies led him to seek contact with their spirits and turned to spiritualism.  Ironically, Houdini and his wife, Bess, had worked as mediums early in their stage careers and were fully aware of the tricks involved in fooling people into thinking they were making contact with their beloved departed.  After the passing of Houdini’s mother in 1913, he began exposing mediums, who sometimes offered to connect him with his mother’s spirit.

Conan Doyle’s second wife, also a self-proclaimed medium, held a séance with the Houdinis and Conan Doyle, whereby she took dictation of a 15 page letter ostensibly from Houdini’s mother.  The letter was clearly a fake because it was composed in English, a language his mother never spoke or wrote in.  While this more or less broke the friendship apart, Conan Doyle’s faith in spiritualism never wavered, even as Houdini joined a challenge proposed by Scientific American to demonstrate proof, once and for all, of the power of mediums.

Conan Doyle was the first to suggest a scientific test to prove the veracity of spiritualism, and in 1924 Scientific American Magazine put forth a $2500 prize for proof of true mediumship.  Houdini matched the amount, allowing for a $5000 jackpot to anyone who could pass the tests of the panel of judges assigned to the case, Houdini being among them.  One by one, all sorts of clairvoyants, spectral communicators and other spiritualists were deemed fraudulent, including the woman who became America’s most talked about medium, Margery.  An upper class woman married to a doctor in Massachusetts, she was considered more respectable due to her unwillingness to accept money for her work.  Houdini, however, was skeptical from the beginning, and although one of the Scientific American judges was convinced that she was real, it was Houdini’s opinion that prevailed, and verified by Harvard only a few months later, in February 1926.

Houdini himself would only live a few months longer.  After suffering a blow to the stomach in St. Louis, in October 1926, Houdini died in Detroit of peritonitis caused by a burst appendix on Halloween.  He was 52 years old.  While numerous mediums attempted to contact his spirit after his death, and Bess herself participated in a series of séances for ten years following his passing, nobody was able to reveal the private code that the two of them had worked out while he was still alive.  “Rosabelle Believe” was used in their earliest fake spiritualist shows, and they agreed to continue to use that code should Houdini be able to contact Bess from the afterlife. 

Bess passed away of a heart attack in 1943, still unable to contact her late husband – and proving what he had stood up for his entire life: that spiritualism was fraudulent.  By applying scientific tests to mediums and demonstrating both through print and stage shows the tricks of mediums, Houdini became an early proponent of evidence-based debunking.  He did not ask for audiences to take his word on faith.  Instead, he provided proof of trickery and fakery, which fact checkers strive for today when performing fact checks on false claims.  One of the differences between real and fake news is the preponderance of high quality information backing statements in articles, videos and other materials.  Houdini demonstrated that proof is necessary, even from someone who made his fame through illusion. 

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