by Sarah Cedeño
When Marie Blood was young, her Uncle Harry and Aunt Bess doted on her. “We have a very special guest with us today,” Marie’s Uncle Harry would say, calling her up on stage where he would dazzle the audience with daring escapes or magic tricks.
This Halloween marks 100 years since Harry Houdini’s death. Greece couple Jeff and Debbie Blood are grandnephew and grandniece to the Houdinis through marriage.
Whenever Bess and Harry were in Harlem, Jeff’s mother, Marie, would live with the couple, whom she adored, at West 113th Street. Harry Houdini met his wife Bess in 1893 at Coney Island, where the two performed in separate acts. Two weeks later, they were married. The couple couldn’t have children, so they doted on Marie, their niece.
Marie told Jeff and Debbie this story about when she was six years old and visiting Harry and Bess: Her mother was to pick her up the next day, so Marie asked for money to buy her mother a gift. While Harry and Bess prepared for an event that evening, Marie put on her Sunday socks and patent leather shoes and went shopping a block away.
“When it started to rain, she worried about her shoes, so she went barefoot. She remembered a great time at the Five and Ten store,” the couple shares. “She bought perfume for her mother.”
When Uncle Harry realized Marie wasn’t there, he called the police in a panic. Then everyone remembered Marie had asked for money to go to the store.
“As [Marie] was leaving the store, a policeman approached her, asked her name, and if she had an Uncle Harry. She told him her name and that she did have an Uncle Harry. The policeman picked her up and put her on his horse. Marie loved riding the horse. It was the first time she ever rode a horse.”
Jeff occasionally performs as an amateur magician, following in his Great Uncle Harry’s footsteps. He says, “Most people are amazed and thrilled to meet a relative of Houdini.” He gives some insight into the mind of a magician and Houdini in particular: “Magicians almost always keep magic thoughts going on, wondering how this or that could be a magical effect or illusion.”
Beyond the act of illusion, Jeff says, Houdini didn’t believe in superpowers. “Houdini testified before Congress that mediums were a farce and did all he could to expose them. He was honest and stated that everything he did was planned, rehearsed, and physical.”
Debbie says, “He believed in the magic of entertainment. With a good magician, whether you know the trick or not, there are moments of magic and surprise throughout the performance.”
Houdini performed in Rochester on May 7, 1907, jumping from the Weighlock Bridge into the Erie Canal wearing two pairs of handcuffs with Bess, his mother Cecelia, and an estimated 10,000 others watching. Within 15 seconds, he was swimming to shore.
“Houdini was such a visionary. He was a master at marketing. He was brilliant and so involved in every direction; he made movies with his own company, first to fly a plane in Australia. His extensive library on Magic and Spiritualism, more than 4000 items, was donated to the Library of Congress,” Debbie shares. “Their life was more like a movie: a rags-to-riches story filled with ‘love at first sight’ romance and humanity.”
During WWI, Houdini, a supporter of Woodrow Wilson, put his escape tactics to use, teaching American troops how to escape German capture by rope and handcuff.
In The Jewish Ledger, a year before Houdini’s death, Charles Joseph discusses Houdini’s rebuke of spiritualism: “[Houdini] can himself reproduce by trickery any telepathic phenomena of which he has ever heard: the Hindu miracles…legends reaching us from the East—the Indian Rope Trick, the stopping of the pulse, and the Yogis who allow themselves to be buried alive are either tricks long understood by magicians, or travelers’ stories that have never been authenticated…”
“There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that if spirits return from the dead, Houdini would return to his beloved Bess. He wrote her love notes all the time,” Debbie says.
On October 21, 1926, while on tour in Michigan, Houdini experienced high fever and stomach pain and was diagnosed with acute appendicitis but refused to go to the hospital. On the 22nd, according to Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead’s affidavit, Whitehead punched Houdini in the stomach three times as a test of abdominal strength, which early doctors speculated injured his appendix.
Some rumors circulated that angry spiritualists had poisoned Houdini or sent Whitehead to harm him. Houdini had an appendectomy on October 25 and died on Halloween. Harry’s official cause of death was “diffuse peritonitis,” an infection spread through the bacteria from a burst appendix.
Houdini had promised to contact Bess from the afterlife with the phrase, “Believe, Rosabelle.” Bess held séances every year on Halloween for ten years following Houdini’s death, at which point she famously quoted, “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man.” The magic community still holds séances in honor of Houdini and often invites Jeff and Debbie.
“The truth is we do not expect Houdini to appear, but we have family secrets only Houdini would know that would validate if anyone claims Houdini appeared to them.”
