Escape artist Harry Houdini made two appearances in Fort Worth. Here’s what he did.

Harry Houdini (1874-1926) was the stage name of Ehrich Weiss, arguably the world’s greatest showman in the early 20th century.

The self-styled magician and escape artist toured the country putting on spectacular demonstrations of his ability to escape from the seemingly inescapable: padlocked chains, handcuffs, straitjackets, bank vaults, and prison cells. Houdini was not as handsome as Tony Curtis who later played him in a movie biopic, but he had a jaunty, daredevil air that was the next best thing to matinee-idol looks — and an adoring fan base that turned out to watch him work his special brand of magic.

By 1916, however, Houdini’s career was going downhill, and he was reduced to touring smaller towns in the heartland where the locals weren’t as jaded as big-city audiences. That brought him to Fort Worth in 1916, a town of roughly 105,000. It was his first appearance in Texas.

“The Great Houdini” was booked by the International Vaudeville Circuit into the Majestic Theater (Commerce Street) for a week, along with comedy and musical acts. But Houdini was the big draw. The climax of his show was to be an escape from what he termed a “Chinese Water Torture Cell,” and he offered a prize of $1,000 to anyone who could detect any trickery in his “miraculous” escape from the sealed water tank.

Houdini’s biggest promotion gimmick was challenging police to confine him in shackles, handcuffs, a straitjacket, or any combination of same well enough that he could not escape in less than five minutes. Houdini issued this challenge in every town, and the local police always took him up on it.

Fort Worth police were no different. To make things more interesting, Houdini would not only be trussed up but also suspended from the roof of the Star-Telegram building at Throckmorton and Eighth. The newspaper gleefully promoted the event as “the skill of the Fort Worth police department matched against the skill of a man who has escaped from everything in the world!” On Thursday afternoon, Jan. 13, before a crowd of 4,000 raucous spectators, Police Chief Cullen Bailey and Detective Tom Blanton put Houdini in a straitjacket and handcuffs then other officers hoisted him upside down 50 feet over the pavement.

Of course, the Great Houdini did it and in less than five minutes. Lowered to the ground, he smiled and bowed and invited the crowd to come see him at the Majestic. That same day he issued a challenge to the packing department of Washer Bros. store to seal him up in one of their packing boxes so well that he couldn’t escape in less than five minutes. And of course, he won that challenge, too. Then it was off to perform in Dallas, where he issued the same challenge to the Dallas Police Department, which he also won.

Houdini was such a hit in Fort Worth he played Cowtown again in 1924, this time, sadly, as the guest of the Ku Klux Klan. The “Man of Mystery” played the Klan Hall on North Main on Saturday night, Oct. 18. The show was a combination of his usual feats plus a lecture “exposing the tricks and devices used by so-called spiritualists” to deceive the public.

Tickets were $1, $1.50, and $2.50 in advance. That night, a famous spiritualist who happened to be in the audience stood up and challenged Houdini to participate in a demonstration of “spirit photography” at a neutral site under strict conditions. The site turned out to be the Hotel Texas, where the next day the spiritualist and the challenger engaged in the greatest test of faith since Elijah challenged the priests of Baal in the Old Testament. Sure enough, as Houdini had predicted, no spirits were revealed on the exposed film, and Houdini said the only thing exposed was another fraud.

Houdini never returned to Fort Worth, and two years later he was dead from abdominal injuries after accepting a man’s challenge to test the vaunted strength of his abdominal muscles by striking him in the stomach with all his might. “The Man of Mystery” should have stuck to exposing spiritualists.

Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.

This story was originally published October 2, 2021 at 6:00 AM.