Houdini, according to this 2008 Associated Press story carred in the San Jose Mercury, was one of many, many famous guests of the Mission Inn in Riverside, California, where Bette Davis and Richard Nixon were married (not to each other, of course) and Ronald and Nancy Reagan spent their wedding night.

The hotel’s website is a little less specific, listing Harry only among the dozens of guests “or” visitors. Its museum is evidently quite an attraction in itself.

The inn is now a National Historic Landmark and draws tens of thousands of visitors each Yule season with its Festival of Lights.

What began as a 12-room adobe boarding house in the 1870s grew into a 239-room hotel sprawling across a city block, with courtyards, a bell tower, a clock tower, a rotunda, chapels, fountains, restaurants and a spa.

Original owner Frank Miller, who greeted guests in a monk’s habit and let his pet macaws flit about, stocked the place with artefacts he collected on his world travels, including a gold-leafed altar from Mexico, a two-metre-tall Buddha and, in its Mexican restaurant, an array of historic bells including a large temple bell Miller scooped up in Nanking following the 1912 Boxer Rebellion.

Also on the sprawling celebrity guest list: Humphrey Bogart, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, WC Fields, Clark Gable, Booker T Washington, Albert Einstein and 10 US presidents, past, present or future.

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.