Harry Houdini

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all A Magician Among the Spirits (1924) and Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920).

A trick is a trick

Houdini's teaching begins from his own trade. Every escape he made was method, practice and nerve, and he said so; he claimed no power. From that comes the test he carried into the séance room: if a conjurer can produce an effect under the same conditions, the effect proves nothing about spirits. The one who claims a wonder must show it, and it is not enough that the sitter cannot explain it.

He held that he could reproduce, in the same conditions, anything the mediums he had sat with presented, and he offered a reward to any medium who would show a phenomenon he could neither explain nor repeat.

Raps and tables

Modern Spiritualism began with raps, and he teaches where they came from. Margaret Fox, one of the two sisters whose rappings began the movement, stood on a stage in New York in 1888 and showed how she made them by cracking the joints of her toes. Tables tilt and turn under the sitters' hands because the hands push, often without their owners knowing it, or because the medium's knee or foot lends help under the cloth.

The cabinet and the rope tie

The Davenport brothers had themselves bound hand and foot in a cabinet; when the doors closed, bells rang, instruments played and hands appeared at the opening, and when the doors opened the brothers sat tied as before. Houdini knew Ira Davenport in Ira's last years, and tells that Ira showed him the rope tie and said the brothers had never in public affirmed a belief in Spiritualism. The tie is made so that the performer can steal slack, slip a hand free, do the work in the dark and slip it back before the doors open.

Slates, photographs and voices

Slate writing, in which a message appears between two slates bound together, he shows to be done by slates written beforehand and covered with a loose flap of the same colour that falls away, by slates exchanged while the sitter's eye is elsewhere, or by a scrap of pencil fixed to the medium's finger and writing under the table. Spirit photographs are made by plates exposed beforehand, by double exposure and by plates exchanged in the dark room; he had himself photographed beside the ghost of Lincoln to show how easily it is done.

In the dark séance a trumpet painted with luminous bands floats about the room, held on a rod or in the medium's own hand, and voices speak through it. The sitters believe the medium's hands are held, but by an old move the two neighbours are brought to hold the same hand, and the other is free. Darkness is the medium's first tool, he teaches, and nothing that needs it has been shown.

The box for Margery

For the committee that tested the Boston medium Margery he built a box in which she sat with only her head and hands outside, so that nothing her body did could reach the bell box and the objects on the table. In earlier sittings he had kept his leg pressed against hers, the calf bandaged through the day so that it grew sensitive, and he felt, he said, the slow movements by which she reached the bell. The method is the lesson: control of hands and feet, light wherever possible, and an observer who knows how tricks are done.

The wonder workers

Miracle Mongers turns the same eye on the stage: the fire eaters, the poison swallowers, the strong men and the human ostriches. Each feat, he shows, is trained skill, preparation or plain deceit, and some are dangerous even to the trained. The house teaches them as he does, so that a wonder is not taken for a power, and never as something to try.

The sitter and the dead

He went to the mediums himself, hoping for a word from his mother, and so he teaches the sitter as well as the trick. Grief is the best witness a medium could wish for: it wants the message to be true and it forgets the misses. His counsel is to go with someone who knows how tricks are done, to ask for light and for control, to accept nothing that happens in the dark as proof, and never to pay for the voice of the dead. He pressed for laws against fortune telling for money because the grieving paid the most.

His last test was set for his own death. A true message, he held, must carry what could not have been learned another way, and so he and his wife agreed a message in a code of their own that no medium could know.