Houdini's Final Escape Attempt Ended in Detroit

Harry Houdini performed 19 times in Detroit between 1894 and 1926, and it was there, on Halloween 1926, that the escape artist died at age 52 after his appendix ruptured. A wrestler's punches to the stomach in Montreal had triggered the injury, but Houdini refused to cancel his Detroit engagements. He managed one performance at the Garrick Theater before collapsing; at Grace Hospital, doctors performed two surgeries over several days before he died.

His rise in Detroit tracks his trajectory from a minor billing to global fame. In 1906, he jumped roughly 24 feet from the Belle Isle Bridge into the river while bound in two sets of police handcuffs and surfaced unbound. Accounts from that time confirm the river was not frozen, contradicting later films that depicted him breaking through ice. By 1914, as copycats duplicated his stunts, he introduced the Water Torture Cell, a coffin-sized tank in which he was lowered headfirst with his ankles locked under a curtain.

Dorothy Young, who joined his troupe at age 17, told NPR in 2004 that his wife stood in the wings during the act because the couple had a secret code in case he could not get out. Young, who died in 2011 as the last surviving person to have worked with him, said films misrepresent his death, which did not involve an attempt to escape the torture cell. Jeremy Dimick, a curator at the Detroit Historical Museum, said Houdini faced financial pressure to honor his contract and was "literally carried from the Garrick Theater back to his hotel."

Little of that Detroit remains. The theater, hotel and hospital are gone, and the funeral home that embalmed him became a girls' art school before it too closed. Juanita Hammond, then head of that school, showed visitors in 2004 a storage room with an indented floor that once drained fluids from bodies. Some students avoided the kitchen, she said, fearing his presence.

Bess Houdini held repeated séances seeking contact, despite her husband's years spent exposing psychics who he said preyed on the grieving. She ended the practice at a Halloween séance in 1936, later reenacting it in a film cameo and saying that if a return had been possible, she would have received a sign in the prior 10 years. Others continue the attempt: John Sherwood, who displays a milk can from Houdini's workshop at the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan, plans another séance this Halloween. He has previously placed a lox and bagel sandwich inside as an appeal to Houdini's Jewish heritage, and said, "I've always said that the greatest publicity stunt that Harry Houdini ever pulled off was dying on Halloween." Questions about the death certificate and the wrestler's identity remain unresolved.