A Century On, Houdini's Death Still Hides Questions: Stomach Punches, Insurance, and a Disputed Certificate

Harry Houdini died on Halloween, 100 years ago this week, at the age of 52. The coincidence of the date has only added to the mystique of the man who made a career of cheating death. A new book now argues that the date may be wrong, and that so may much of the familiar account of how he died.

He was born Erik Weisz in Hungary in 1874, and his family moved to Wisconsin when he was four. As a teenager he performed magic in sideshows and beer halls. New Yorker staff writer David Denby describes a skinny kid who built himself into a handsome man with a remarkable physique. He wanted a catchier name, so he borrowed from his idol, the 19th-century French magician Houdin, added an i, and became Houdini.

The early tricks did not make him famous. Roger Dreyer, a Houdini historian who owns one of the largest collections of his artifacts, including the Metamorphosis Trunk, says Houdini would not get past the second round of "America's Got Talent" today. The trunk changed that. Locked inside, he instantly traded places with his new wife, Bess, and theaters began to book him. People still perform that trick. Handcuff escapes made him a sensation. Denby says he would be shackled, nearly naked, in a cell, and emerge 20 minutes later holding the cuffs, after specialists had brought out their most complicated locks. Denby says there is no record of his failing, and that crowds enjoyed the anti-authoritarian streak in his defeats of police forces around the world.

The act kept escalating, from trunk to straitjacket, to straitjacket hanging from a crane, to being upside down in a water tank. Denby recalls the curtain closing for a minute, then two, and Houdini emerging bloodshot and gasping. In 1904, at 30, he bought a townhouse in Harlem and moved in with Bess, his mother, and his brother. Vincent Toms lives there now and gives tours; for fans, he says, it is essentially Graceland.

After World War I, fake spiritualist mediums multiplied. Dreyer says about 90 percent of séance attendees were women hoping to reach loved ones lost in the war. Houdini became a debunker, exposing the tricks mediums used once the lights went out.

The usual account of his death goes like this: college students visited him backstage, and one asked whether he could withstand a blow to the stomach. Houdini said yes, and before he could brace himself, the young man threw a series of punches. Most experts believe the punches did not act alone. Houdini had a preexisting appendicitis, which, Dreyer says, the blows might have aggravated.

Surgeon and medical researcher Larrian Gillespie disagrees in her new book, "Houdini: The Man Who Died Twice." Looking at the death certificate, she says she sees numbers that were copied and then written over, and she calls it a cover-up. In her telling, an intestinal blockage and an unreported last-minute surgery killed him. His team, she says, favored the punch story partly for money: Houdini held a double indemnity policy that paid extra for accidental death, which she puts at about $500,000 in today's money. She also says documents support a strong case that he died on October 30, not the 31st, and that moving the date made Halloween a yearly reminder of him. She does not think any of this diminishes him: he was gifted, she says, and that will never change.

Houdini never fully dismissed the idea of an afterlife. Toms says he made a pact with Bess to try to communicate after his death if at all possible, and for ten years afterward they held a séance in the Harlem house on the anniversary. Fans have tried to reach him every Halloween since. Toms is hosting one this weekend at 1:26 p.m. Gillespie's claims rest on her own reading of documents and have yet to be independently verified.