The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  The young magician was sworn to absolute secrecy. No one was ever to know of the relationship between the two men. They never spoke to each other in public or even showed the slightest sign of recognition when they were in the same room. When Vacca was at any of Houdini’s public appearances, he seemed to be just another spectator, but in reality he was there as an undercover operative. Before Houdini would come to a town to play an engagement, Vacca would make a preliminary visit, examine the facility closely, and install highly secret apparatuses. When they had to meet, Houdini came up with a novel solution. He bought a barbershop two blocks from his Harlem house and sent Vacca to night school for a crash course on the barbering trade. Under the cover of getting a trim, Houdini could plot strategy with Vacca.

  “Now I have placed myself, my entire life and salvation, in your hands,” Houdini told Vacca. It wasn’t hyperbole. Houdini was about to begin what would seem to the press as a one-man crusade against phony mediums. He was about to risk his entire reputation, which to him was his life, in this pursuit. In reality, he would be supported by a whole combat division—what he later called “my own secret service”—that consisted of a brilliant mechanist in Vacca, beautiful young female showgirls/undercover agents, private detectives, an eccentric medium/escape artist/poison resister, and even his own niece. The Margery exposure had been just the opening skirmish. Now Houdini was going to war.

  Florence B. Rush arrived at Henry Brooks’s house promptly at eleven A.M. Sunday morning. Mr. Brooks was still in the middle of a healing session, so Mrs. Brooks showed her to a seat in the makeshift waiting room of their two-story house. Florence told her that she was very interested in mediumistic work and that she wanted to start her own church. She also related that she was a widow, even at her young age, but that her husband had left her quite well off. The two women chatted amiably until Mr. Brooks finally came into the room.

  Brooks was nearly sixty, at least a decade older than his redheaded wife. He was wearing a torn gray sweater and his personal hygiene was on a par with his wardrobe. He smiled at Florence and revealed less than a complete set of teeth. Before meeting his new client, he pulled his wife out of the room and into the kitchen for a short conference. A few minutes later he returned and took a seat next to Florence.

  “Let me tell you a little bit about myself,” he began. “I’ve been doing spiritualistic work for thirty years now. I am what you call a trance medium. Now some people who come to me for treatments might say I was fresh, but that’s because they don’t understand how magnetic I am and what power comes from the spirits through these hands.”

  He held up his hands for Florence to examine.

  Without any further ado, Brooks leaned back in his chair. He started breathing heavily, then his head suddenly relaxed and he began to snore. Suddenly his body convulsed a few times.

  “Good morning,” he said to the spirits.

  “Do you see my husband?” Florence asked.

  “Yes, he is right near you,” he answered. “He loves you so.”

  “Is he sorry for what he’s done?” she asked.

  “Yes, and he asks your forgiveness,” he said. “And there is a little girl right near him. She has beautiful curls. She’s about five years old. Your little girl.”

  Florence leaned in to hear him better.

  “Your little girl says, ‘Mother, I love you so,’ but she’s not with your husband. She died sooner than him, didn’t she?”

  Florence nodded.

  “I see someone who speaks a foreign tongue. It sounds to me like Arabic.”

  “Yes, that was my grandmother,” Florence said.

  He told her that her grandmother was bringing her little girl to her.

  “Your husband tells me to tell you to go into this work—you’ll be quite successful,” he said. “How many children have you?”

  “Two,” Florence said.

  “I was just coming to that,” he said. “You have a beautiful body, but you should not repress your passions. You have a choked feeling in your chest. I can cure that for you for I have healing power. You have to be purified before you can go into this work, you know.”

  “Can you ask my husband where I could find someone to assist me in starting my church? I do have all this money that he left me, and I’m anxious to invest it,” she said.

  Suddenly it seemed like the spirits themselves were speaking through Brooks.

  “Ask the Medium after you get through, and he will tell you. The Medium is very good, he can give you a charter for your church. The Medium can cure you physically, and you have to be purified before you can do this work.”

  Then the words stopped. Brooks began to breathe heavy and snored and shuddered and suddenly he started rubbing his eyes. He was out of the trance.

  “What did I say?” he asked her.

  She repeated everything the spirits told her.

  “Yes, that can be done,” he said. “I get the vibration that you would be very successful as a public worker and do good work.”

  Then he got up and walked into an adjoining room. It was supposed to be a bedroom, but it was devoid of all furniture except for a trunk piled up with papers and a gallon jug filled with a red fluid that was probably wine. He closed the door and after two minutes returned to the room with a framed charter for the First Church of the Divine Light.

  “Now this charter cannot be granted to you until you do some spiritual work,” he told her. “And before anything can be granted you still have to be purified. Can you come back tomorrow night?”

  “Can I be purified right now?” Florence asked. “I really want to start having séances by Wednesday night.”

  Brooks acted reluctant but then he agreed.

  “All right, I will purify you now, but have you any corsets on?” he asked. “The steel will interfere in the purification process.”

  Florence shook her head. Brooks stared lasciviously at her.

  “All right, now fix your dress as I will have to see more of your body and touch your skin. I must get close to the body.”

  He put his hands on her neck.

  “Can you remove your hat and your wrap?” he asked.

  Florence complied. Then she adjusted her underwear, lowering her brassiere so he could see part of her chest.

  Brooks began to make several mystic passes over her head, then made the sign of the cross over her face. He ran his hands up and down her spine over her dress and then slowly rubbed the small of her back.

  “Lord, please help me to show this new worker the light. Please allow me to remove this congestion so that she may be cured and purified.”

  During the prayer, Brooks was touching her all over her body, and then he inserted two fingers inside her dress and touched her left breast. He squeezed it. Florence didn’t resist. He then took his other hand and placed it right on her other breast and squeezed hard, breathing heavily and gasping the whole time. He then made several more crosses over her whole body, running his hands over her thighs and down to her ankles and then returning them to her thighs.

  “Dear God, bring this worker closer to me,” he prayed and drew her toward him.

  Florence held herself rigid. Brooks tried to pull her to him several more times, but she resisted.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “I see beautiful children who look like little fairies dancing around,” she said. “Now I see a draped figure beckoning me to him.”

  Florence got up from the chair and Brooks came up off his knees.

  “I feel much better,” she said. “You are very magnetic.”

  “We have to try this again as you still have that congestion of the chest,” he said. Florence gave him a ten-dollar bill and he gave her $8 back. She tipped him an extra dollar. She got her ordination papers and paid him an additional five dollars for that. She made sure to get a receipt. He insisted that she undergo some more healing before her first séance and she promised to come back later that night, after she had tended to her ch
ildren.

  Then the new Reverend Florence B. Rush, who was sometimes known as Rev. F. Raud, but whose real name was Rose Mackenberg, left the house and headed straight back to the hotel where Houdini was anxiously awaiting.

  On February 7, 1925, The New York Herald Tribune made Houdini the subject of their editorial page, titled “Showman and Scientist.” They wrote: “Those of us belonging to that portion of humanity which does not subscribe to belief in the existence of spooks should be grateful to Houdini, the handcuff king…. But the thing that Houdini is fighting is too big for one man. The dragon with which he is engaged dwells in the slough of human ignorance. That is a swamp that is not to be drained and reclaimed for many centuries; yet the extent of the task does not lessen the obligation of this and coming generations to keep working at the job. In the meantime Houdini has invaded the morass and annoyed the monster that feeds there.

  “There are in New York, as there are in every other city in the United States, spirit mediums who make a fat living out of the mental insufficiencies of a part of the people. It is, usually, that part which is unattached to a church and lacks the philosophy to find comfort in the thought of a short, conscious existence. That there are such people may serve as a reminder that Jew and Gentile in their churches have for centuries been fighting this battle that Houdini, the son of a rabbi, now wages in his shrewd, dogged manner. This sort of spirit medium is a type of ghoul that seeks profit from the dead outside of graveyards. The victim is the bereaved person whom the affliction of death has caught unprepared by religion or philosophy.

  “The claims of ‘Margery’ that she is able to receive at will the spirit of her dead brother are the latest example of the more pretentious medium who seeks scientific indorsement [sic]. The fact that her husband, Dr. L. R. G. Crandon, has some connection with Harvard University gave her séances an extra touch of distinction. In exposing the falseness of ‘Margery’s’ claims Houdini has shown himself far more than a handcuff king. He is a good citizen and a convenient neighbor.”

  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.