LINK: Skeptics Dictionary and the Arthur Ford hoax

Here's a nice, quick reference summary of the Arthur Ford Houdini message scandal. This is something I've never quite covered in detail here on the blog, so when I find something that can provide the basic story, I'm happy to pass it along. Click the headline or the image below to go.

Related:

• The Margery Files: Inside man
• Bill Rauscher on Arthur Ford and the Houdini Code
• The Magic Detective starts Season 6 with a double dose of Houdini

The Magic Detective starts Season 6 with a double dose of Houdini

Our friend Dean Carnegie kicks off Season 6 of The Magic Detective Podcast with two Houdini-themed episodes.

First up is a look at the infamous Arthur Ford Houdini seances of 1928-29. I've never really tackled the Ford seances and scandal here on my blog, so I'm happy to let Dean tell the story.

Ep 96: The FIRST Houdini Seance

Dean has also posted a reading of the 1981 manuscript The Great Houdini Broadcasts by Val Andrews. Dean gives it an old-time radio feel and plays all the parts himself. It's pretty fun.

Ep 97: The Houdini Broadcasts

Related:

• The Margery Files: Inside man
• Bill Rauscher on Arthur Ford and the Houdini Code
• Houdini's known radio broadcasts

The story behind Hardeen's outdoor Metamorphosis

Today I have a treat to celebrate Hardeen's 147th birthday. Below is the famous film of Hardeen doing Metamorphosis on an open street. If you've not seen this, it's pretty terrific. So let's start with the show!

I've always enjoyed this footage for what it is. But I've also often wondered if this was a typical Hardeen street stunt. Houdini never did Metamorphosis as an outdoor stunt as far as I know. So I decided to do a little digging and discovered the full story!

Turns out this was a one-shot performance in answer to a challenge (of sorts). This is when Hardeen was appearing at the Prospect Theater in Brooklyn during the week of April 21, 1929. The story begins in the pages of The Standard Union:

Click to enlarge.

Hardeen took up the challenge! In fact, if you look closely in the film, you can see a sign that says "Standard Union Challenge." His street performance took place on April 24, 1929. The Standard Union provided coverage the following day:

Click to enlarge.

So there we go. Turns out this footage shows Hardeen not only doing Metamorphosis, but saving magic itself!

Still can't get enough Dash? Click on over to my Patreon and listen to his famous 1939 radio interview on WNYC. As a birthday gift, I'm unlocking this post so anyone can listen for FREE.

Happy birthday Hardeen!

Related:

• Hardeen at the Prospect
• Hardeen: The Man Who Walked Through Walls
• Did Hardeen really discover the full view straitjacket escape?

Conan Doyle did not believe a punch killed Houdini

Today marks the 93rd anniversary of Houdini being punched in the stomach by J. Gordon Whitehead in the dressing room of the Princess Theater in Montreal. Even though Houdini's doctors concluded that his fatal appendicitis was caused by the blows, today many question that diagnosis, thinking Houdini must have been suffering from the disease prior to the incident on October 22. The debate continues.

Recently I was surprised to discover that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle offered up his own medical opinion in a 1929 letter to Houdini biographer Harold Kellock:

"Now, I will take what you say about Houdini's death. So far as the prophecy goes, what the cause of the death was is quite immaterial. My remark about the alleged cause being probably apocryphal is due to the fact that, as a doctor, I should not think it possible that gangrene of the appendix could result from an outside blow of the fist. If so, one would expect many of our boxers to die in that way, since such blows are common. I have no doubt at all that Houdini died as the doctors said, but what the cause of the gangrene was is quite another matter. However, as I say, the cause of the death is immaterial. What is material is that the prophecies were fulfilled."

The prophecies Doyle is referring to were those predictions from mediums who claimed Houdini's denouncement of the supernatural while being supernatural himself (or so Doyle believed) were angering the spirits and would bring about his "doom." So Conan Doyle did believe that.

For more punch talk on this Punch Day, check out the links below.

Related:

• Time to rethink the rethinking on the Houdini punch
• Getting punchy
• The eyewitness - Smiley's sketch

Bill Rauscher on Arthur Ford and the Houdini Code

Today marks the 90th anniversary of the infamous Arthur Ford seance in which he revealed the coded Houdini message before Bess and assembled press at 67 Payson Ave. in New York.

I've never really tackled the Houdini Code and its controversy here on WILD ABOUT HARRY, but I wanted to put up something for this anniversary, so below is a full lecture by William V. Rauscher who wrote the book The Houdini Code Mystery and knew Arthur Ford personally. What he has to say about Ford and events of 1929 is pretty interesting. Enjoy.

Related:

• LINK: The Day Houdini (Almost) Came Back from the Dead
• Bess goes Beyond and Back
• August MAGIC believes in Rosabelle

R.D. Adams exposed

Here's a photo I recently found of the infamous "R.D. Adams" who claimed to have been Houdini's mechanic and privy to all the magician's secrets. In 1929 Adams offered up a series of wildly inaccurate "exposures" of Houdini's feats in Modern Mechanics magazine.

It interesting that this happened in the same year (1929) as the Arthur Ford seances. Houdini seems to have been a target for fraudsters this year. Adams' exposures included the Water Torture Cell, Walking Through a Brick Wall, and the Vanishing Elephant. Below is an ad for the series.

Curiously, even though today we can see that Adams' explanations are clearly bogus, both Leonard Hicks and Joseph Rinn claimed Adams did indeed reveal the correct methods. Even to this day Adams explanations still sometimes appear in print and online as legitimate.

So what is the real story of R.D. Adams? Was he simply an opportunist peddling fake secrets to a gullible publication? But if that was the case, why was he not debunked by the many vigilant Houdini friends and supporters out there, such as Dunninger, Hardeen, Bernard Ernst or even Bess herself? And why no action by the S.A.M.? Is it possible Adams was actually a front man for the Houdini estate? Could this have been a scheme to make some money for Bess in her time of need after the Ford scandal? As the methods were bogus, there was no real betrayal of Houdini's secrets, and this explains the silence and even support for Adams' explanations. Something to think about.

If one is interested in learning Houdini's real secrets (some of them, at least), two excellent books are Houdini's Fabulous Magic by Morris N. Young & Walter B. Gibson and Houdini The Key by Patrick Culliton.

Related:

• How Houdini didn't vanish an elephant
• German Houdini booklet and the brick wall exposure
• Houdini's secrets brought to you by Camel cigarettes

Bess goes Beyond and Back

In the 1970s, Utah-based Sunn Classics Pictures produced a series of feature documentaries that investigated subjects such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster (The Mysterious Monsters), Biblical mysteries (In Search of Noah's Ark), and even The Lincoln Conspiracy. As a kid, I loved these, and the pseudoscience documentaries that today populate the History and Discovery channels own a debt to Sunn's productions.

In 1978, Sunn released Beyond and Back, which "dared to investigate" the question of life after death. While on-screen host Brad Crandall promised "one of the most extraordinary films of our times", Beyond and Back is more well-known today for making critic Roger Ebert's list of all-time "Most Hated" films.

But Beyond and Back contains a nice surprise for Houdini buffs. It includes a three and a half minute segment about Houdini with real footage, a reenactment of the Arthur Ford séance, and actress Beverly Rowland as Bess (she later appeared in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers). Oddly, they add the words "learn" and "idea" to the end of the Houdini Message Code. For the record, the real code was: Answer (B), tell (E), pray-answer (L), look (I), tell (E), answer-answer (V), tell (E).

The full film is available on YouTube, but I've excerpted just the Houdini sequence below.

Beyond and Back was released on VHS, but I don't believe it ever made it to DVD. As with all their documentaries, Beyond and Back was released as a tie-in paperback. For a review of film, check out one of my favorite blogs, Every 70s Movie.

Related:

• LINK: The Day Houdini (Almost) Came Back from the Dead
• The Margery Files: Inside man
• The Houdini Code
• The women who have played Bess

LINK: The Day Houdini (Almost) Came Back from the Dead

I realize I don't yet have anything on this blog that covers the infamous Arthur Ford seances of 1928-29 in which the "Houdini Code" was revealed. So I'm linking to this well-researched article by Massimo Polidoro, author of Final Séance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle, that lays out all the details. This first appeared in the March/April 2012 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

Of course, this remains controversial as the Ford seances are still used today by pro-spiritualists as "proof" that Houdini made good on his death bed promise to return from the grave. The story behind the story is that Bess provided Ford with the code in a moment of romantic and alcoholic weakness, but that's a story we'll save for another time.

Click here or on the headline to have a read at the CSI-Center for Skeptical Inquiry website. Next week I will share a unique little something that relates to the Ford seances.

Illustration from Ghost Stories: Houdini's Great Escape.

Related:

• Houdini article in Skeptical Inquirer
• The Margery Files: Inside man
• August MAGIC believes in Rosabelle

The Margery Files: Inside man

This week WILD ABOUT HARRY is showcasing rarities from the private Libbet Crandon de Malamud Collection, courtesy of Anna Thurlow, the great granddaughter of "Margery" the Medium.

While know Margery and Dr. Crandon enlisted J. Malcolm Bird and Heward Carrighton as informants during their seances with Houdini in 1924. But is it possible that they also had an "inside man" at the infamous 1929 Arthur Ford seance in which Houdini's spirit was said to have returned and delivered the coded message to Bess? Apparently they did indeed. The evidence comes from a remarkable find in The Margery Files.

This is an original photostat of the letter Beatrice Houdini signed after the seance affirming that Ford had delivered the correct coded message. This letter was sent to press outlets and has appeared in print before. But what makes this copy especially interesting is that it was sent the day after the seance to "Dr. & Mrs. Crandon" by Francis R. Fast, who was part of the inner circle. This is the first evidence I've ever seen that shows Margery was looped into the Ford seances by someone on the inside.

Busted!

So who was Francis R. Fast? Fast was a wealthy patron and close friend of Arthur Ford. He and Ford actually shared an apartment. It was Fast, along with John W. Stafford, Associate Editor of the Scientific American, who travelled to Bessie's home on January 6, 1929, to tell the widow (recovering from her famous fall) that Ford had contacted Houdini via his spirit guide "Fletcher." After this, Bess agreed to sit with Ford. Even though he was a stranger to Bess, Fast was at each of the Ford sittings.

Fast also appears to have been an acquaintance of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After Ford claimed to have made contact with Houdini's mother during a Feb 8, 1928 seance, Fast sent a coded message to Conan Doyle informing him of the event. Doyle passed the information onto Margery, referring to Fast and Ford as "our people."

Fast went on to pen The Houdini Messages in 1929, a detailed account of the Arthur Ford seances. In it he reproduces Bess's letter as the frontispiece. In regards to Margery, Fast tips his hat on the final page in his one and only mention of the medium:

Enough has happened in these latter years in the way of outstanding demonstrations of psychic phenomena to give anyone ample reason to alter any preconceived notions about these things, what with the clear-cut and as yet unassailable results in the "Margery" case alone, on which the whole argument for the survival and communication may rest secure for all of time.

The letter Bess signed on that fateful day in 1929 was used against her (and Houdini by extension) by pro-spiritualist forces for years. Of course, Bessie isn't really saying that Houdini delivered the code from beyond. She's just saying that the correct code was delivered by Ford. How he got the code is another story.

In 1934 Bess would issue a new statement firmly renouncing the Houdini messages.

Bessie's retraction.

Tomorrow we'll move out of the paper archives for something a little different, as we build to our grand finale on Friday. You'll want to be sitting down for this one...

Francis Fast background from The Houdini Code Mystery by William V. Rauscher and The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush and Larry Sloman. Bess retraction letter from Houdini His Legend and His Magic by Doug Henning and Charles Reynods.

Revealing Bess photo from 1929

Click to enlarge

This photo, recently offered for auction on eBay, shows a convalescing Bessie Houdini in January 1929 during the time of the infamous Arthur Ford seances.

Now, I love Bessie. I wish there was a book written just about her. And while I realize this isn’t the most flattering picture, it does capture an intriguing moment in time.

First off, we see her head is wrapped due to her “nasty fall.” In the 1976 TV movie The Great Houdinis, we see Bessie fall down the stairs at 278 after being startled by mysterious happenings on Halloween night. A less romantic version claims that the fall took place while she was out drinking with Arthur Ford.

We also see Bessie’s right wrist is wrapped. The Secret Life of Houdini claims Bessie tried to kill herself on the night of January 4, 1929, but it doesn’t specify how. Pills seems likely, but could the wrist wrap offer another possibility?

Finally, and this is what I really like about this photo, and why I’m posting it here, this is the only photo I can recall that gives us a very nice look at her famous wedding band which contains the message from Houdini; "Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle."