Another of Houdini’s headline-grabbing manacled bridge jumps took place from Pittsburgh’s Seventh Street Bridge, pictured above and below, on March 13, 1908, with a crowd of 40,000 people. The stunt was also performed the year before from the Market Bridge in Philadelphia, according to one source. His jump from a bridge in Passaic, New Jersey, also went well, except that the pollution in the river nearly killed him.

In late 1916 Houdini treated Pittsburgh to another spectacle, escaping from a straitjacket while dangling from a skyscraper at Wood Street and Liberty Avenue. Staff from the city’s Mayview asylum were in charge of securing him for the stunt.

Houdini leapt, handcuffed and chained, from the Harvard Bridge on either April 30 or May 1, 1908 (depending on the source), an event still commemorated by a marker on the span. This is the event that generated the most famous bridge-jump photographs, courtesy of the Boston Globe.

This photo of the plaque comes from Gruebleen’s Flickr page.

Best known of all is the posed shot above of him getting ready to spring, surrounded by a crowd of admirers, including a lady in all her finery who was doubtless getting a good look at his physique in his tight cotton swimsuit. Harry’s not even on the bridge in this picture, but on the riverbank with the bridge in the background.

When he took the plunge, though, the newspaper’s photographer — or more likely a squad of them — was ready to document the event moment by moment.

It was in Boston, too, in 1917, that Sarah Bernhardt watched from her car as Houdini wowed a huge crowd with his straitjacket escape from a tall building. He had won her heart with a stroke of chivalry, covering the cost of a trophy awarded to her after the organisers came up short and actually gave her the bill!

The photo shows Harry and Bess greeting the legendary actress in her automobile. Bernhardt later put Houdini in an ambarrassing spot by asking him to restore the leg she’d lost — she was convinced he could do so with his supernatural powers.

Elsewhere in Massachusetts, there was a bizarre escape from the belly of a “sea monster” in the autumn of 1911. Houdini was handcuffed and sewn inside the creature, caught off Cape Cod, and together they were submerged underwater. The embalming fluid that had been applied to the unidentified fish sickened him, and he rolled it over trying to kick his way free, almost getting crushed in the process.

I would love to know more about this alleged leviathan that was big enough to have swallowed Houdini whole, but the best I’ve come up with is biographer Harold Kellock’s tantalising yet unrewarding “a sort of crossbreed of whale and octopus that had been brought ashore by some Cape Cod fisherman”.

New Bedford at the heel of the cape had of course been the world’s premier whaling centre in the previous century, but this sounds suspiciously like a giant squid. Lacking bone structure, though, squids tend to collapse into goo when beached, so finding a stomach cavity for Jonah Houdini would have been near impossible.

It’s rare to find a theatre still standing that had Houdini treading its boards, but the 803-seat Academy of Music Theatre in Northampton, Massachusetts — built in 1890 — is still around to testify about him and much more. This was America’s first municipally owned theatre and remains its only one.

I haven’t been able to find out when Harry performed here, but Wikipedia seems to think this is another stage where he had a trapdoor installed for his act.

Boris Karloff, Mae West, Ethel Barrymore and John Philip Sousa appeared here too, and in 1965 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton watched movies here between takes on the set of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, one of several films that used Northampton for their location shoots, others being “The Cider House Rules”, “Malice” with Nicole Kidman and “Sylvia” with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Calvin Coolidge was once the mayor of Northampton, and Kurt Vonnegut one of its citizens.