Houdini's Last Show Went On With a Burst Appendix

Harry Houdini died on October 31, 1926, at age 52, at Grace Hospital in Detroit. This Halloween marks 100 years since the world's most famous escape artist took his final breath.

The popular story blames a punch. A McGill student, J. Gordon Whitehead, asked to test Houdini's boast that he could absorb any blow to the body above the waist, then struck him in the stomach.

Sources disagree on the exact day of the punch, so the date is murky. What's clearer is what came next: Houdini arrived in Detroit on October 24 and a doctor diagnosed acute appendicitis in his dressing room.

Houdini refused to go to the hospital. He took the stage at the Garrick Theater with a fever the Smithsonian puts at 104 degrees, and he told the manager the show would go on.

He was finally operated on October 25, and the surgeon found the appendix had already burst. Before antibiotics, the resulting peritonitis was close to a death sentence.

One Yale Press author argues the punch did not cause the appendicitis at all. Medical opinion today holds that Houdini likely had it already, and that the pain from the blows may have masked how serious it was.

The legend still stuck, partly because of money. One dealer's listing says his life insurer paid his wife Bess a double indemnity for accidental death, a check of $50,000 in June 1927. Some Houdini enthusiasts theorize the family leaned on the accident story for that reason, though it remains only a theory.