Houdini Died in Detroit on Halloween 1926. The Séances Continue.

By Daniel Okafor

This Halloween marks 100 years since Harry Houdini died in Detroit, on Oct. 31, 1926, and Michigan has not quite let him go. The magician performed in Detroit 19 times between 1894 and his final show. The city got the last one.

How did Houdini build the legend?

He escaped obscurity by declaring that no handcuffs or jail cell could hold him. He dangled upside down from office buildings in a straitjacket (a restraint garment buckled behind the wearer's back), shedding it in full view of crowds below. Sometimes the building housed a local newspaper, guaranteeing free publicity.

In 1906 he jumped roughly two dozen feet from Detroit's Belle Isle Bridge into the frigid river, bound in two sets of police handcuffs. He surfaced unscathed. Reports from the time show the river was not frozen, but later movies froze it anyway, complete with air pockets under the ice.

By 1914 he had unveiled his signature stunt, the Water Torture Cell: a coffin-sized box filled with water, into which Houdini was lowered head first, ankles and lid locked. A curtain hid the method. Even Dorothy Young, a stage assistant who joined the tour at 17, got goosebumps.

"Mrs. [Houdini] always stood in the wings because they had a secret code in case he couldn't get out," Young told NPR in 2004.

What actually killed him?

Not the torture cell, whatever the movies claim. Young, who died in 2011 as the last surviving person to have worked with Houdini, spent years correcting that fiction.

The trouble started in Montreal. Houdini boasted he could withstand any punch to the stomach; a college wrestler took the bet and struck him several times before he could brace.

"And to think those boys didn't give him a chance to get himself protected," Young said.

Doctors told him to rest. He refused to cancel his Detroit dates. Jeremy Dimick, a curator at the Detroit Historical Museum, said Houdini was under financial pressure to honor his contract. He made it through one performance.

"He doesn't have the strength to put his makeup on before the show, and he's kind of collapsing during the intermissions," Dimick said. "And then he has to be literally carried from the Garrick Theater back to his hotel."

At Grace Hospital, doctors found a ruptured appendix. Two surgeries later, on Halloween, he died.

Where are his Detroit haunts now?

Gone, all of them: the Garrick Theater, the hotel, the hospital. The funeral home that embalmed him became a girls' art school, which later closed too. Around 2004, its then-head, Juanita Hammond, led visitors up a creaky staircase to a locked storage room with an indented floor once used to drain fluids from corpses.

"Houdini was laid out here by the Hamilton Funeral Home, in this room here," Hammond said. Students, she added, avoided the kitchen. "Some say, 'I'm not going back to the kitchen because I might see Houdini.'"

Is anyone still trying to contact him?

Yes, professionally. His widow, Bess Houdini, held séance after séance for a decade — odd work for the widow of a man who spent his final years exposing psychics he said preyed on the bereaved. On Halloween 1936, she gave up.

"And you remember what he always said about these things? That it was impossible for the dead to return," she said. "This proves he was right. For if it would have been possible, I would have had some sign from him in the past 10 years."

Others persist. At the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Mich., about 100 miles west of Detroit, John Sherwood keeps an aged metal can from Houdini's workshop — the famous milk can escape, locked with six Mastodon locks and hidden behind a screen while Houdini, already free, read a newspaper backstage until his assistants splashed him wet again for the reveal.

Séance participants now surround the can and other artifacts. Some, Sherwood said, appeal "to Houdini's Jewish heritage by placing a lox and bagel sandwich into the milk can and invited Houdini's spirit to take a bite out of it."

Will the centennial coax him back?

Sherwood runs another séance this Halloween. He concedes the odds but trusts Houdini's instincts for timing.

"I've always said that the greatest publicity stunt that Harry Houdini ever pulled off was dying on Halloween because after that the mythology about him grew by leaps and bounds," he said.

The mythology has grown legs of its own: theories that his death certificate was doctored to land on Halloween, or that the wrestler was a hitman sent by vengeful psychics. None proved. A century on, the man who escaped everything remains the one thing Detroit can't put down.