“WHEN WE DIE, ONLY OUR PHYSICAL BODY DIES. THE SPIRIT SURVIVES.”
What?!
“DEATH IS NOT THE END OF LIFE. IT IS JUST A CHANGE IN LIFE. LIKE A CATERPILLAR TURNING INTO A BUTTERFLY.”
Wow. This was a pretty elaborate prank somebody was pulling on me. Whoever was behind it had put some thought and effort into it.
“So you’re claiming,” I tapped, “that the dead can communicate with the living. And you’re dead?”
“CORRECT,” was the reply. “WE EXIST IN PARALLEL WORLDS.”
Oh yeah, spiritualism—the belief that the dead can communicate with the living. All the books I’ve read about Houdini talk about spiritualism. It was an up-and-coming religion in Houdini’s day. Spiritualists believed that the world was made of two substances, matter and spirit. We can see and feel matter, but spirit is invisible. It can’t be perceived through our senses.
It all began in 1848 with three sisters named Fox. They claimed to hear mysterious knocking noises made by spirits who haunted their home in Hydesville, New York. Word got around, and soon the Fox sisters were celebrities, giving demonstrations before big crowds and making lots of money. They confessed they were faking it all in 1888, but by then hundreds of spiritualists had popped up all over the country, claiming to be able to reunite grieving people with their dead relatives.
Spiritualism was really popular around 1920, after so many soldiers had been killed in World War I and millions of people had died in a flu epidemic. In Houdini’s day, it was the phony mediums and fortune-tellers who served as “voices from the spirit world.” Now it looked like those same kinds of fakers were doing it with cell phones. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The thing is, Houdini hated spiritualism. He saw how fake mediums—using tricks just like those used by magicians—would take money from grief-stricken people. He actually spent the last few years of his life trying to expose fraudulent spiritualists.
“You can’t be Houdini,” I tapped. “He didn’t believe in spiritualism.”
“LET’S JUST SAY THAT BEING DEAD HAS A WAY OF CHANGING ONE’S MIND.”
I will admit one thing. If anybody could come back from the grave and communicate with the living, it would be Harry Houdini. He said so himself before he died. He used to make arrangements with his friends saying that whichever one of them “punctured the veil of death” first would try to contact the other. Houdini called it “the great mystery.”
“I AM ON THE OTHER SIDE NOW,” it said on my screen.
Look, I’m no dummy. There are a lot of scammers out there, and I wasn’t going to fall for this one. It was only a matter of time before this “Houdini” character—whoever he was—would ask me to send money. Scam artists are always trying to rip you off.
“I don’t believe you,” I tapped.
There was a long pause. I thought I had heard the last of him. He would just hang up and move on to the next number on his list, hoping to find a sucker. But then another torrent of words scrolled up my screen.…
“I WAS BORN ON MARCH 24TH, 1874. IN BUDAPEST, HUNGARY. ONE OF SEVEN BROTHERS & SISTERS. CAME TO U.S. AND SETTLED IN WISCONSIN. I RAN AWAY FROM HOME AT 12. MARRIED BESS RAYMOND. STARTED DOING HANDCUFF ESCAPES IN 1895.”
The phantom texter was rattling off Houdini’s biography, as if I didn’t already know it. He said he was known as “The King of Handcuffs” by 1899, and a couple of years later he had become one of the most famous men in the world. He claimed to have escaped from drowning two thousand times. He got out of 12,500 straitjackets and opened 8,300 padlocks. Along the way, he singlehandedly created an entire form of entertainment—the escape artist.
“WHAT MORE CAN I TELL YOU?” he texted. “I AM HOUDINI!”
I still wasn’t impressed.
“You could have learned all that stuff from Wikipedia,” I tapped.
“WIKI WHAT?” came back. “IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, ASK ME SOMETHING THAT ONLY THE REAL HARRY HOUDINI WOULD KNOW.”
Hmmmm. Well, he asked for it. I know a lot about Houdini.
“What did you have in your hand your whole life?” I tapped.
“A BULLET,” he texted back right away. “I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH SOME GAMBLERS WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, AND ONE OF THEM SHOT ME. THE DOCTORS COULDN’T REMOVE THE BULLET.”
That was an easy one. I tried to think of something that hardly anybody knows about Houdini.
“After the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, you became a pilot,” I tapped. “What was your biggest accomplishment in that area?
“I WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO FLY A PLANE IN AUSTRALIA,” he texted back.
Wow, that was right! But I still wasn’t convinced. Far from it. Anybody could claim to be anybody in a text. That’s why we’re told to be careful when we communicate with people online. Zeke didn’t know all that stuff about Houdini. So it couldn’t be him. But maybe it was some Houdini expert who was pranking me. Maybe it was one of those guys who wrote a book about Houdini. We had a whole shelf of them in the living room downstairs.
Or maybe it was some magician who is obsessed with Houdini. Magicians are in the business of deception. Their job is to mislead people. Maybe he’s misleading me. I wasn’t going to fall for it. It could be anybody.
“Those questions are all easily Googleable,” I tapped.
“GOOGLEABLE?”
Oh sure, it made perfect sense for him to pretend he never heard of Google. The real Houdini wouldn’t know anything about stuff that took place after 1926.
Then it hit me. I would ask him about something that’s not on Google. Information that isn’t available anywhere. I would ask him the secrets of his magic.
“How did you do the East Indian Needle Trick?” I tapped.
The East Indian Needle Trick was one of Houdini’s strangest and most amazing stunts. He would take a hundred needles and put them in his mouth. Then he would put twenty yards of thread in his mouth. Then
