“According to legend”, says Troy Taylor on his cool website Haunted Decatur, the venerable Lincoln Theater on North Main Street in Decatur, Illinois, has a narrow trap door nicknamed the “Houdini Hole”, commemorating Harry’s appearance there in the late 1910s.

“People believed that the hole had been cut for the magician to escape through during one of his illusions, and that the hooks below had held some sort of safety net,” Taylor writes, but in fact, he says, it was cut for a hose to release the water from his Water Torture Escape apparatus … that is, if Houdini even performed at the Lincoln at all.

Taylor cites sceptics insisting that Harry never played the Lincoln, and that anyone who believes so is probably thinking of Harry Blackstone (who had a very memorable return engagement there in 1942 when a fire broke out in the drugstore next door while the theatre was packed with schoolkids — he “tricked” them into evacuating calmly).

Taylor says a former theatre staffer told him there was no newspaper advertising for Houdini because “he wasn’t famous at the time”. If so, then the website has evidently got its timeframe wrong, because Harry was already a global superstar by the late 1910s. Houdini could have appeared there sometime in the 1890s, before his fame-fulfilling journey to Europe — except that the Lincoln wasn’t built until 1916.

Just the same, in September 2009 Examiner.com published a report from Chicago’s Ghost Research Society saying its “annual investigation” of the Lincoln turned up something.

“No visual phenomenon was recorded this time but a number of EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) were recorded by team members throughout the night. Harry Houdini once performed on stage at the Lincoln Theater and team members … picked up a strange clear Class ‘A’ voice saying, ‘Magic!’”

Regardless, great entertainers like Ethel Barrymore, Al Jolson, Ed Wynn and Jack Dempsey (who put on a sparring exhibition) packed the Lincoln’s 1,300 seats, and in 1926, the year Houdini died, the still-unknown Bob Hope was at the theatre “showing Decatur how to dance the Charleston”. As well, Taylor’s site is about haunted Decatur, so he’s got a great yarn about a stagehand named “Red” who supposedly fell to his death from the catwalk — and yet refused to quit his job.

A “gaudy spectacle of Americana” is one description I’ve seen of Denver’s Colfax Avenue, a thoroughfare that Playboy magazine saw fit to dub the country’s “wickedest street”.

The just-starting-out Bob Dylan and Smothers Brothers worked the avenue, while more recently “South Park” has made its Casa Bonita Mexican restaurant infamous. At the Ogden Theater on East Colfax, seen above, Houdini once performed, probably not long after it was built in 1919.

Harry was here with vaudeville, but here as elsewhere the stage yielded to the movie screen, then closed, and then was reopened, in the Ogden’s case in 1993 — as a popular concert venue, with the likes of Green Day, the Allman Brothers, Smashing Pumpkins and the Goo Goo Dolls making good use once more of the stage.