The Secret Life of Houdini (76 page)

Houdini instinctively knew that his battle against fraud was too big for one man, and he began collecting recruits almost from the beginning. Back in May 1924, he wrote the famous Washington, D.C.-based journalist Betty Ross and enlisted her to make an undercover visit to a D.C.-based spirit photographer named Dr. W. M. Keeler. “Please make careful notes of everything that takes place and what is said, immediately,” he counseled the journalist. Houdini was also acutely aware of how valuable newspapermen were to him in general. In the early twenties, he and Joe Rinn would visit the New York newshounds at their favorite watering hole, Andy Horn’s bar, on Park Row near the Brooklyn Bridge. Although Houdini and Rinn weren’t drinkers, they would buy the rounds and gain either information or cooperation as needed.

Houdini catching his breath while in Paris.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

The idea of creating a network to assist him in his Spiritualist investigations was a natural to a man who had been cooperating with the espionage services of the United States and Britain. His adversaries, the fraudulent mediums, had organized themselves into a tight-knit network that routinely shared information. They did this through what was called the
Blue Book
, a book that contained the names, occupations, addresses, family trees, and other minutiae about potential local marks, information that could disarm them and lead them to believe that the psychic they were consulting had real power.

According to Bernard Ernst, Houdini’s lawyer and confidant, during the course of his investigation into fraudulent mediums, Houdini accumulated a vast “secret archives” into which he had “filed away, details and information, which he had unearthed, regarding the personal life-histories of practically everyone connected with the subjects—and this, not only regarding mediums, but investigators and others as well!”

In these files, the records of these individuals went back at least to the day of their birth. “There are things in those files about me which I could swear no one but God knew!” a prominent magician whose identity Ernst was loath to reveal had said. According to the lawyer, the quantity of these files was “appalling,” filling huge packing cases that were stored in the basement of his town house. “He spared himself neither time, money nor effort in order to secure this material,” Ernst wrote. “He must have spent thousands of dollars in acquiring it, and he employed a regular network of spies to conduct his investigations. Probably no other living man would have either the means or the inclination to prosecute this inquiry as he did, nor would he have had the interest and the specialized knowledge to do so. All this rendered him the formidable antagonist…that he was.”

In 1925, he began to put together this network in earnest. Houdini shrewdly realized that using women, especially women posing as widows, was the best strategy to weed out corrupt mediums. Houdini hired Rose Mackenberg, who ultimately became his chief investigator. In two years, she attended hundreds of séances and filed detailed field reports that described the premises, the audience, and the medium. She was ordained six separate times as a full-fledged spiritualistic reverend with the right to perform marriages, baptize infants, and bury the dead. It took her as little as twenty minutes and five dollars to obtain her certification. Because Rose became the subject of the amorous advances of so many trance mediums like Brooks, Houdini suggested she carry a gun for protection. She refused but, according to some reports, Houdini packed a derringer wherever he went.

In addition to Mackenberg, who would travel to a city ten days in advance of Houdini posing variously as a widow, a jealous wife, a factory worker, or a neurotic schoolteacher, Houdini employed female operatives who worked for him on an ad hoc basis when he came to a town. He used the services of a showgirl named Alberta Chapman who, along with a friend, infiltrated séances in Chicago. Houdini would drive with the girls until they were a block away from their destinations, and they would get out of the car and walk the rest of the way. Chapman was instructed to remember such minutiae as the number of doors and windows in the séance rooms, and what pictures hung on the walls. Sometimes it would take three trips to make a complete accounting. According to Alberta, if she ran into fortune-tellers who really believed in their hearts that they were doing good, she was to jettison the investigation. The ones who were “leading” her on became prime targets. When she left a house, she was to put a chalk mark on the side of the house or by the steps to commemorate her visit. She was laying the groundwork for future court cases.

Along with the women, who included Houdini’s niece Julia Sawyer, a few men worked as secret operatives. Clifford Eddy Jr., a magazine writer who was collaborating with Houdini on a few literary projects, filed many field reports. Houdini even reached out to college students to pose as medium bait. Barkann Rosinoff, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, learned so much from Houdini’s exposés that he was asked to demonstrate them for his fellow students at the college. He later became a magician and a member of the SAM.

Although not a formal member of the investigative team, an Ohio eccentric named Robert H. Gysel provided Houdini with invaluable inside information for his investigations. Gysel first came to Houdini’s attention when he wrote the magician a letter while he was publishing
Conjurer’s Monthly
in January of 1907, inquiring about the handcuff acts that magic dealers were selling. They forged a friendship, especially when Houdini realized that he and Gysel shared such diverse interests as escapes, poison resistance, cryptography, and scaling buildings without equipment.

By the 1920s, Gysel had been a practicing medium and had learned almost every trick in the séance room, including materializing dead wives for well-to-do bankers. In Michigan, he swindled a wealthy old lady out of $1,000. That night he stayed at a cheap hotel and, for the second time in his life, opened up a Bible that was on the dresser. The first words he saw were: “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

“Goodnight I said, I quit reading and it made me think, well whoever wrote that line knew what he was talking about. I quit.”

Gysel’s knowledge was invaluable to Houdini, as was the extensive list of mediums that he generated. Using the name Joseph R. Johnson, he infiltrated the inner circles of the summer camps where fraudulent mediums fleeced their credulous marks, who were derisively called “shut-eyes.” At one point, he was one of the chief suppliers of magic effects to mediums who became too wise to buy their phosphorescent paint and other séance room supplies from conventional magic dealers.

Houdini’s niece Julia Sawyer (left) infiltrated séances when she wasn’t performing onstage.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

By 1924, Gysel was busting up the work of other fraudulent mediums. He threw sneezing powder into the room at a séance by the Reverend Nina Challen. In the confusion, he caught her speaking through a spirit trumpet. When Houdini was unable to sit with Ada Besinnet, one of Doyle’s favorite mediums, Gysel threw a brick into the séance room. He was so disruptive to the orderly business of Midwest mediums that the secretary of the Indiana Spiritualist Association wrote a friend that she’d like to “put poison” in his coffee. Gysel’s expertise was invaluable during Houdini’s investigation of Margery.

Mrs. Cecil Cook, the pastor of the W. T. Snead Memorial Center, was sitting in the middle of the basement room of the town house on West Eighty-eighth Street in Manhattan, and her audience, thirty-five in all, surrounded her in a circle. To her left, on a table, was a pan of water that contained two small tin trumpets.

After her attractive young assistant had circulated around the room and collected the $1 “donation,” Mrs. Cook began her lecture.

“I am a trumpet medium,” Cook began. “Through a power given me by the Lord, I am able to converse with dead spirits who manifest themselves through these trumpets.”

She talked about the spirits for a few more minutes and then they dimmed the lights. The assemblage sang a hymn and shortly after, the first spirit came through. It was a Mr. Sten.

An old black woman in the audience perked up.

“Ask him about my operation,” she said.

“
No, you don’t have to take it,
” Mr. Sten replied.

“I have already been operated on once,” the woman said.

“
You don’t need it,
” Mr. Sten decided.

More spirits came and went. Some of the women were so moved after conversing with their dead husbands and children that they broke down in hysterical sobs.

A visitor named Mrs. Michaels spoke up next. “I’ve had some problems with my throat. What should I do?”

“
Why, you have tuberculosis,
” a spirit answered.

Mr. Sten suddenly interrupted. “
We have another spirit here. It is a young man named Alfred.
”

The old man sitting near Mrs. Michaels seemed startled.

“What did he say?” he asked his young attendant.

“Alfred,” she repeated.

“Alfred?”

“Yes, your son.”

“Your son, Alfred,” Mrs. Cook spoke up.

“Is that Alfred, my son?” the old man said.

“
Is that you, Dad?
” Alfred said, speaking louder for the old man’s benefit.

“Yes, yes, my son,” the old man said.

“
Dad, you have had a very, very hard time but it is all over and I will take care of you and brighten up everything for you and make things comfortable,
” Alfred promised.

As Alfred was talking, the old man had gotten down on his knees and, aided by touching the knees of the people around him, was crawling toward the medium in the center of the circle, carrying a large electric flashlight. Just as he got within a few feet of Cook, the flashlight struck a pan of water, spilling some of its contents.

“What was that?” the medium suddenly said.

The old man quickly retreated back to his seat.

Mrs. Cook then turned toward Mrs. Michaels.

“Your brother Frank is calling you,” she said, but when she got no response, she said, “No, it is your father.”

“Ask Frank if I should go west,” Mrs. Michaels said.

“
No, you need not make the journey,
” Frank told her. “
Drink plenty of milk and stay out in the fresh air.
”

Just then, the old man stood up and turned on his electric flashlight, shining it right at the medium’s face. The women in the audience shrieked at the sight of the light, especially when it revealed that the medium was holding the trumpet up to her own mouth. Cook froze. Then she screamed so loudly that passersby on the street ran in to offer help. It was too late.

Mrs. Michaels leaped to her feet and turned on the overhead electric lights.

“You have the trumpet in your mouth,” the old man shouted. “I thought the spirits were speaking.”

Mrs. Cook threw her tin megaphone to the floor and then pitched over to one side, chair and all.

“You killed the medium!” one of Cook’s admirers screamed at the old man and Mrs. Michaels as she rushed to her side.

“I’m killed! I’m killed!” Mrs. Cook shrieked, lying on her side with her eyes closed.

One of Mrs. Cook’s male aides started advancing on the old man, who suddenly threw down his cane, jettisoned his thick eyeglasses, and pulled off his white wig.

“I am Houdini!” he shouted.

Now several of Cook’s followers lunged at the magician but a large man intervened.

“I am Detective Joseph Greene and this is Policewoman Elizabeth Michaels. Nobody make a move.”

All hell broke loose. Mrs. Cook, who had been helped to a chair by some of her followers, suddenly revived herself.

“You rascal,” she shouted at Houdini.

“Rascal? You are getting money under religious disguise,” Houdini shouted. “You spoke through the trumpet and these police officers are witnesses.”

“I did not!” Cook said indignantly.

“You’re a liar! She didn’t have the trumpet,” her assistant screamed.