On October 18, 1916, it was the turn of Canadians to witness Houdini suspended upside-down in a straitjacket from a tall building. The stunt took place from an upper floor of a commercial building in downtown Toronto (perhaps Timothy Eaton’s venerable department store), in a fund-raiser for the British Red Cross Fund.

The straitjacket spectacle had, in a way, come home. Harry got the idea of being bound up in one onstage after visiting an insane asylum in New Brunswick in June 1896 — as a curious guest on a brief tour, that is, not as a patient — and seeing an inmate struggling to get out of the contraption. He was performing in St John at the time. (The following month he was at a theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.)

The photo here is from a 1910 show. Onstage Harry originally climbed inside a cabinet before freeing himself, but his brother Theo-known-as-Dash-performing-as-Hardeen “discovered” in his own magic act that the stunt packed a far bigger punch if it was done in full view. You’d have thought the audience’s scoffing would have been the tip-off. At any rate, both Houdini and Hardeen scrapped the cabinets and shed their straitjackets in the open, and it did indeed involve considerable effort, as Harry demonstrated, without trickery, in one of his films.

The secret, he said, was to jam the elbow of the arm that’s enclosed in the jacket’s longer sleeve against a solid surface and, by sheer strength, force it toward your head. Then you get your head under that arm and start pushing the jacket up, until you’ve got a lock within arm’s reach. Simple! Try it at home! So simple that in April 1916 he decided he needed something flashier and took the straitjacket escape aloft for the first time.

Following the 1916 Toronto show, the grand illusion rolled on to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he repeated the aerial stratjacket escape on November 19, strung from the fifth floor of the Grand Rapids Savings Bank at the corner of Monroe and Ionia Avenues. He shed a police straitjacket and handcuffs in one minute, 55 seconds, impressive enough to whet the appetites of the locals and turn them into paying audiences for his stage show.

Between 1897 and 1926 Houdini performed at both Smith’s Opera House and the Empress Theater in the Midwest city. The photo below from the Grand Rapids Public Library shows him, “circa 1920″, being restrained by the cops on a small stage in front of what may be a paddywagon, or perhaps it’s a packing crate on a flatbed truck.

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.