Closed in 2007, Le Parisien cinema at 480 rue Sainte Catherine in Montreal had begun life 90 years earlier as the 2,300-seat Princess Theatre, and it was backstage here following a performance on October 22, 1926, that Houdini received the infamous punches to his abdomen that precipitated his death.

No, the picture of Harry in a slugfest is not real — I just made it up. The photo of the Princess Theatre at the top comes from JD and Kristian’s Coolopolis, as does the shot at the bottom of this post of the Prince of Wales Hotel, where Houdini was staying while in Montreal at the time of the incident.

The story is well-known: Three students from McGill University, where Houdini had given a lecture the previous week, were granted a backstage audience at the Princess and one of them, Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, asked if it were true that the illusionist could withstand strong blows to the stomach. Houdini invited Whitehead to test the claim, but took several painful punches before he had a chance to brace himself.

Following his death from peritonitis in Detroit nine days later, it was determined that the punches had not ruptured his appendix as initially believed. In their 2006 book “The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero”, however, William Kalush and Larry Sloman extrapolate on the suspicion that Whitehead’s blows and punches landed about the same time by other mysterious figures were deliberate attacks commissioned by the defenders of spiritualism, and possibly by Arthur Conan Doyle himself, whose mediumistic wife Houdini had derided during his McGill lecture. Kalush and Sloman suggest Houdini was more likely poisoned, which led to a 2007 request to exhume his body. Much more on this in a later entry.