According to witness Sam Smilovitz, when Houdini said the rumors were true, Whitehead abruptly delivered “four or five terribly forcible, deliberate, well-directed blows” to his stomach. Gordon Whitehead arrived and asked Houdini if it was true that he could resist hard punches to his abdomen-a claim the magician had supposedly made in public. The magician’s sore ankle was still bothering him, so he plopped down on a couch while the group chatted. Just a few days later on October 22, he invited some McGill students to visit him in his dressing room at the Princess Theater.

He hobbled his way through the rest of the show, but was later found to have sustained a fractured left ankle.Īgainst doctors’ orders, Houdini continued his tour and traveled to Montreal, where he gave a lecture at McGill University. While being shackled into his Chinese Water Torture Cell during a performance in Albany, New York, the conjurer was struck on the leg by a piece of faulty equipment. The strange series of events that led to Houdini’s demise had kicked off several weeks earlier on October 11, 1926. An obituary in the New York Times expressed shock at the sudden passing of the man “who so often had seemed to thousands to be cheating the very jaws of death.” Houdini's Final Performance He died just a week later on Halloween, leaving his legions of admirers bewildered. The 52-year-old performed before a packed house in Detroit on October 24, but was rushed to the hospital afterwards with an apparent case of appendicitis. Houdini had made a career out of surviving the impossible, which only made the circumstances of his 1926 death all the more mysterious. In 1915, Houdini nearly suffocated during a stunt in which he was shackled and buried under six feet of dirt.

The heart-pounding getaways usually involved a healthy dose of trickery and sleight-of-hand, but they were also fraught with genuine risk. The Hungarian-born escape artist jumped off bridges while handcuffed and wearing leg irons, slithered out of sealed milk cans filled with water, and devised a “Chinese Water Torture Cell” in which he was submerged and suspended upside down by his ankles. For over 30 years, Harry Houdini dazzled audiences with his bravura stunts and superhuman endurance.

Houdini torture cell