12/29/2023 0 Comments Harrry houdini deathThe cause of Houdini’s death - on this day, Halloween, in 1926 - was officially a combination of appendicitis and peritonitis, an infection of the abdominal lining. He had racked up so much ill will by the time of his mysterious death, in fact, that some people suspected he had been poisoned by psychics whose claims he regularly debunked. "I thought, 'This is really startling, surprising and unsettling, and at bottom, suspicious in nature.In the cutthroat world of magicians and mediums, Harry Houdini made enemies. "My eyebrows went up when I read this book," Starrs said. Details contained in the Houdini biography convinced him otherwise. Starrs said he was long familiar with the story of Houdini's death, and believed the fatal injury was the result of an accident. A team of top-level forensic investigators will conduct new tests on Harry Houdini's body to determine if he was poisoned. And the diagnosis of appendicitis caused by a punch was "very unusual." Legendary escape artist Harry Houdini is shown in chains in this photo circa 1899. Michael Baden, and Starrs, who has studied the disinterred remains of gunslinger Jesse James and "Boston Strangler" Albert DeSalvo.īaden, who chaired panels reinvestigating the deaths of President Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., pointed out a pair of oddities in Houdini's death certificate: It noted his appendix was on the left side, rather than the right. The team working on the exhumation includes internationally known forensic pathologist Dr. "If someone were hell-bent on poisoning Houdini," the authors wrote, "it wouldn't have been very difficult." While Houdini took the Spiritualists' repeated death threats seriously, he traveled without the security trappings now de rigeur for celebrities - no bodyguard, no entourage, often just his wife Bess. The biography additionally detailed the injection of "an experimental serum" into Houdini by one of his doctors at Detroit's Grace Hospital. Kalush and Sloman noted that "the Spiritualist underworld's modus operandi in cases like this was often poisoning" - possibly arsenic. Two years later, Houdini - by all accounts an extraordinary physical specimen - was dead before his 53rd birthday. I think there is a general payday coming soon." In the Houdini biography, authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman detail a November 1924 letter from Doyle that smacks of professor Moriarty-style malevolence: Houdini, it said, would "get his just desserts very exactly meted out. The magician devoted large portions of his stage show to exposing the group's fraudulent seances the movement's devotees included Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle. The likeliest murder suspects were a group known as the Spiritualists, which became Houdini's bete noire in his final years. Within days, a newspaper headline read, "Was Houdini Murdered?" A new biography, "The Secret Life of Houdini," raised the issue again and convinced Hardeen and others that poisoning was a real possibility. 20, 1926, Houdini's body - brought by train from Detroit to Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal - was already buried in Queens, along with any evidence of a possible death plot. When the death certificate was filed on Nov. His death certificate listed him as a victim of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, but no autopsy was performed.
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