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Harry Houdini

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Harry Houdini Empty Harry Houdini

Post  eddie Fri May 04, 2012 1:38 pm

Was Houdini murdered by vengeful spiritualists angry at his debunking of their claims to be able to contact the dead?
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Will Houdini be there? Remains to be seen

Agencies

guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 March 2007 12.16 GMT

Harry Houdini 383px-HarryHoudini1899
Houdini's latest escape ... the great escapologist is to be exhumed to examine his remains for poisoning

The family of the legendary escapologist Harry Houdini today announced plans to exhume his body in a bid to discover whether he was murdered.
Houdini's great nephew George Hardeen said the family wanted to determine whether he was poisoned by spiritualists in revenge for his debunking of their claims of contact with the dead.

Rumours that the escape artist and magician was murdered have persisted ever since his death on Halloween 1926.

Mr Hardeen, whose grandfather was Houdini's brother, said a team of senior forensic investigators would conduct new tests on the escapologist's body. He said: "It needs to be looked at. His death shocked the entire nation, if not the world. Now maybe it's time to take a second look."

It is generally accepted that Houdini died after a punch to the stomach ruptured his appendix, leading to a fatal inflammation of the abdominal cavity, known as peritonitis.

But no autopsy was performed on the 52-year-old, who was reputed to be in extraordinarily good physical shape. When the death certificate was filed, on November 20 1926, his body had already been buried in Queens, New York, along with any evidence of a possible murder plot. Within days, a newspaper headline wondered, "Was Houdini murdered?"

A 2006 biography, The Secret Life of Houdini, renewed interest in the theory that he was poisoned by a group known as The Spiritualists, whose members included Arthur Conan Doyle. The illusionist used his stage shows to expose the group's fraudulent seances, which he regularly attended in disguise, accompanied by a reporter and a police officer.

The authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman detail a letter by Conan Doyle from November 1924 in which he says Houdini will "get his just desserts very exactly meted out ... I think there is a general payday coming soon." Two years later, Houdini was dead.

Mr Kalush and Mr Sloman say that "the spiritualist underworld's modus operandi in cases like this was often poisoning" - possibly by arsenic, which could still be detected decades later.

The authors also suggest Houdini might have been poisoned by "an experimental serum" injected by one of his doctors at Grace hospital, in Detroit.

Houdini took The Spiritualists' death threats seriously, but he travelled without security, often accompanied only by his wife, Bess. "If someone were hell bent on poisoning Houdini, it wouldn't have been very difficult," the authors write.

The team working on the exhumation includes two forensic pathologists, Dr Michael Baden and Professor James Starrs, the latter having studied the disinterred remains of the outlaw Jesse James and Albert DeSalvo, the "Boston Strangler".

Mr Baden, who led panels reinvestigating the deaths of President John Kennedy and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, noted two incongruities in Houdini's death certificate. The certificate recorded that his appendix was on the left side, rather than the right as is normal. And the diagnosis of appendicitis caused by a punch was "very unusual".

Prof Starrs said he was long familiar with the story of Houdini's death, and believed the fatal injury was the result of an accident until he read the Houdini biography. He said: "My eyebrows went up when I read this book. This is really startling, surprising and unsettling, and at bottom, suspicious in nature."'

The proposed exhumation has also won the backing of Anna Thurlow, the great-granddaughter of the Boston medium Mina Crandon, known as Margery, whose husband Dr Le Roi Crandon was a prominent spiritualist - and a noted enemy of Houdini.

During a 1924 seance, Mrs Crandon supposedly channelled a spirit named Walter who greeted Houdini with a threat: "I put a curse on you now that will follow you every day for the rest of your short life."

"With people that delusional, you have to question what they're capable of," Ms Thurlow said. "If there's any circumstantial evidence that Houdini was poisoned, we have to explore that."
eddie
eddie
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