Message #4084

[Morrison]

The two men's arguments were long and inconclusive, but good natured. Neither convinced the other to his respective point of view but both of them found their own interest stirred by their meeting and the lengthy correspondences that followed. It would be a series of strange events over the next two years that would bring this unusual friendship to an end and the rift between then started when Doyle began to publicly take the side of Spiritualists who believed that Houdini accomplished some of his greatest magic using supernatural powers. Houdini had long been working to expose fraudulent mediums in private, in print and during his stage shows, which made him a much-hated figure in Spiritualist circles. Some believed they had an explanation for this -- they stated that  Houdini’s exposure of mediums was simply to cover the fact that he was a medium himself! They claimed that many of his extraordinary escapes were actually done by Houdini "dematerializing" from the traps that he had placed himself in. "This ability", Doyle stated publicly, "to unbolt locked doors is undoubtedly due to Houdini’s mediumistic powers and not to any normal operation of the lock. The effort necessary to shoot a bolt from within a lock is drawn from Houdini the medium, but it must not be thought that this is the only means by which he can escape from his prison. For at times, his body can be... dematerialized and withdrawn."

Now, Houdini was placed in the classic magician’s "catch" position, meaning that he could only go so far in denying the Spiritualist claims. By going any further than he had, he would have to expose how his escapes were accomplished, which he could never do. His reply was simply that all of his escapes were managed by purely physical means. He stated that his crusade against Spiritualism was simply a way to protect the general public from charlatans but he, however, was able to keep an open mind on the subject and did not assume that all mediums were frauds.

Spiritualist leaders declared that Houdini’s actions did not agree with his words and so the magician made a pact with a number of friends. The pact promised that whichever of them died first, he should make every attempt to contact the others by way of a secret code. But Houdini still could not escape the claims being made by Doyle, so he devised a plan to make the author realize that all of his tricks were just that -- tricks. He assured Doyle that he would give him proof that magic was accomplished through simple trickery.

Three persons were present at the test, Houdini, Doyle and Bernard Ernst, the president of the American Society of Magicians. A slate was hung in the center of the room by Doyle and he was given five, plain cork balls to examine. He chose one of the balls at random and placed it in a container of white paint. Doyle was then given a piece of paper and was told to walk anywhere that he wanted to and then write a message on the paper. Doyle left the house, walked three blocks away and then turned a corner. He shielded the paper with his hand and wrote down a short message. Meanwhile, Ernst stayed in the room with Houdini to insure that the other magician remained in the room. When he finished writing, Conan Doyle folded the paper carefully and placed it in his pocket. He then returned to the house.

Houdini then told Doyle to pick up the paint-soaked ball and stick it on the suspended slate. The ball then inexplicably began to roll over the surface of the slate and it spelled out the biblical phrase, Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin... the exact words that Doyle had written on the paper!

Houdini claimed that it was all done by simple trickery but Doyle was more convinced than ever of his former friend’s supernatural powers. Ernst begged Houdini to explain how the trick worked, either to himself or Doyle, in the strictest confidence, but Houdini refused. Strangely, he would never use the trick again in any of his shows and no one has ever been able to reproduce it. At that time, Bernard Ernst admitted that the trick reminded him of a certain mind-reading stunt that Houdini had stopped using because, as it explained to Ernst, it was "too spooky".

The relationship between the two men had become tense and it was damaged even more by an event that occurred during Conan Doyle's American lecture tour in May 1922. The tour got off to a rocky start when Doyle landed in New York and gave a press conference that was derided and harshly criticized in the New York Times the following day. He didn't let this bother him though and was delighted with his tour manager, Lee Keedick, and managed to catch up with a number of old friends. His first lecture, at Carnegie Hall, took place during a heat wave and the humidity inside of the packed lecture room was intense. A record-breaking crowd filled the building and they listened attentively as he spoke for more than an hour about the mysteries of the next world. The following day, a much kinder article appeared in the New York World:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made an extraordinary impression last night at Carnegie Hall, in his attempt to prove the existence of life after death and the possibility of communication with the dead. The effectiveness of his talk depended on the fact that in spite of the imagination of his writings, he seems to be a downright person. He does not look a man who could be easily stampeded. His audience was profoundly attentive. Evidently it was a crowd which had its dead.